Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yeah,” Daniels agreed. “Mebbe six weeks.” Muldoon laughed, just as if Mutt had been kidding.

  XIII

  Liu Han turned and saw Liu Mei pickup a bayonet Nieh Ho-T’ing had been careless enough to leave on the floor. “No!” Liu Han shouted. “Put it down!” She hurried across the room to take the edged weapon away from her little daughter.

  Before she got there, Liu Mei had dropped the bayonet. The baby stared up at her with wide eyes. She started to scold Liu Mei, then stopped. Her daughter had obeyed her when she yelled in Chinese. She hadn’t had to speak the little scaly devils’ language or use an emphatic cough to make the baby understand her.

  She scooped up Liu Mei and squeezed her tight. Liu Mei didn’t scream and squawk and try to get away, as she had when Liu Han first got her back from Ttomalss. Little by little, her daughter was becoming used to being a human being among other human beings, not a counterfeit little devil.

  Liu Mei pointed to the bayonet. “This?” she asked in the little devils’ tongue, complete with interrogative cough.

  “This is a bayonet,” Liu Han answered in Chinese. She repeated the key word: “Bayonet.”

  Liu Mei made a noise that might have been intended for bayonet, though it also sounded like a noise a scaly devil might have made. The baby pointed in the general direction of the bayonet again, let out another interrogative cough, and said, “This?” once more.

  Liu Han needed a moment to realize that, in spite of the cough, the question itself had been in Chinese. “This is a bayonet,” she said again. Then she hugged Liu Mei and gave her a big kiss on the forehead. Liu Mei hadn’t known what to make of kisses when Liu Han got her back, which struck Liu Han as desperately sad. Her daughter was getting the idea now: a kiss meant you’d done something pleasing.

  The baby laughed in reply. Liu Mei laughed, but seldom smiled. No one had smiled at her when she was tiny; the scaly devils’ faces didn’t work that way. That saddened Liu Han, too. She wondered if she would ever be able to make it up to Liu Mei.

  She paused and sniffed, then, despite the baby’s protests—Liu Mei, whatever else you could say about her, wasn’t shy about squawking—put a fresh cloth around her loins after cleaning the night soil from them.

  “Something goes through you,” she told her daughter. “Is it enough? Are you getting enough to eat?”

  The baby made squealing noises that might have meant anything or nothing. Liu Mei was old for a wet nurse now, and Liu Han’s breasts, of course, were empty of milk because her child had been stolen from her so young. But Liu Mei did not approve of the rice powder and overcooked noodles and soups and bits of pork and chicken Liu Han tried to feed her.

  “Ttomalss must have been feeding you from tins,” Liu Han said darkly. Her mood only got angrier when Liu Mei looked alert and happy at hearing the familiar name of the little scaly devil.

  Liu Han had eaten food from tins, too, when the little devils kept her prisoner aboard the airplane that never came down. Most of those tins had been stolen from Bobby Fiore’s America or other countries that ate similar kinds of foods. She had loathed them, almost without exception. They were preferable to starving to death, but not, as far as she was concerned, greatly preferable.

  But they were what Liu Mei had known, just as the scaly devils were the company she had known. The baby thought the food of China, which seemed only right and proper to Liu Han, tasted and smelled peculiar, and ate it with the same reluctance Liu Han had felt in eating canned hash and other horrors.

  Foreign-devil food could still be found in Peking, though most of it was under the control of rich followers of the Kuomintang’s counterrevolutionary clique or those who served as the scaly devils’ running dogs—not that those two groups were inseparable.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing had offered to get some by hook or by crook so Liu Mei could have what she was used to.

  Liu Han had declined when he first made the offer and every time since. She suspected—actually, she more than suspected; she was sure—one reason he’d made his proposal was to help keep the baby quiet through the night. She had a certain amount of sympathy with that, and certainly had nothing against a full night’s sleep, but she was dedicated to the idea of turning Liu Mei back into a proper Chinese child as fast as she could.

  She’d had that thought many times since she got her baby back. Now, though, she stared down at Liu Mei in a new way, almost as if she’d never seen the child before. Her program was the opposite of the one Ttomalss had had in mind: he’d been as intent on making Liu Mei into a scaly devil as Liu Han was on turning her daughter back into an ordinary, proper person. But both the little devil and Liu Han herself were treating Liu Mei as if she were nothing more than a blank banner on which they could draw characters of their own choosing. Wasn’t a baby supposed to be something besides that?

  Nieh wouldn’t have thought so. As far as Nieh was concerned, babies were small vessels to be filled with revolutionary spirit. Liu Han snorted. Nieh was probably annoyed that Liu Mei wasn’t yet planning bombings of her own and didn’t wear a little red star on the front of her overalls. Well, that was Nieh’s problem, not Liu Han’s or the baby’s.

  Over a brazier in a corner of the room, Liu Han had a pot of kao kan mien-erh, dry cake powder. Liu Mei liked that better than the other common variety of powdered rice, lao mi mien-erh or old rice flour. She didn’t like either one of them very much, though.

  Liu Han went over and took the lid off the pot. She stuck in her forefinger and took it out smeared with a warm, sticky glob of the dry cake powder. When she brought the stuff over to Liu Mei, the baby opened her mouth and sucked the powdered rice off the finger.

  Maybe Liu Mei was getting used to proper sorts of food after all. Maybe she was just so hungry that anything even vaguely edible tasted good to her right now. Liu Han understood how that might be from her own desperate times aboard the airplane that never came down. She’d eaten grayish-green tinned peas that reminded her of nothing so much as boiled dust. Perhaps in the same spirit of resignation, Liu Mei now took several blobs of kao kan mien-erh from Liu Han’s finger and didn’t fuss once.

  “Isn’t that good?” Liu Han crooned. She thought the dry cake powder had very little flavor of any sort, but babies didn’t like strongly flavored food. So grandmothers said, anyhow, and if they didn’t know, who did?

  Liu Mei looked up at Liu Han and let out an emphatic cough. Liu Han stared at her daughter. Was she really saying she liked the dry cake powder today? Liu Han couldn’t think of anything else that cough might mean. Although her daughter had still expressed herself in the fashion of a little scaly devil, she’d done it to approve of something not only earthly but Chinese.

  “Mama,” Liu Mei said, and then used another emphatic cough. Liu Han thought she would melt into a little puddle of dry-cake-flour mush, right there on the floor of her room. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been right: little by little, she was winning her daughter back from the scaly devils.

  Mordechai Anielewicz looked at his companions in the room above the fire station on Lutomierska Street. “Well, now we have it,” he said. “What do we do with it?”

  “We ought to give it back to the Nazis,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “They tried to kill us with it; only fair we should return the favor.”

  “David Nussboym would have said we should give it to the Lizards,” Bertha Fleishman said, “and not the way Solomon meant, but as a true gift.”

  “Yes, and because he kept saying things like that, we said goodbye to him,” Gruver answered. “We don’t need any more of such foolishness.”

  “Just a miracle we managed to get that hideous stuff out of the casing and into our own sealed bottles without killing anybody doing it,” Anielewicz said: “a miracle, and a couple of those antidote kits the Wehrmacht men sold us, for when their own people started feeling the gas in spite of the masks and the protective clothes they were wearing.” He shook his head. “The Nazis are much too good at making things like that.”
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  “They’re much too good at giving them to us, too,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Before, their rockets would send over a few kilos of nerve gas at a time, with a big bursting charge to spread it around. But this . . . we salvaged more than a tonne from that bomb. And they were going to have us place it so it hurt us worst. The rockets could come down almost anywhere.”

  Solomon Gruver’s laugh was anything but pleasant. “I bet that Skorzeny pitched a fit when he found out he couldn’t play us for suckers the way he thought he could.”

  “He probably did,” Mordechai agreed. “But don’t think he’s done for good because we fooled him once. I never thought the mamzer would live up to the nonsense Göbbels puts out on the wireless, but he does. That is a man to be taken seriously no matter what. If we don’t keep an eye on him all the time, he’ll do something dreadful to us. Even if we do, he may yet.”

  “Thank God for your friend, the other German,” Bertha said.

  Now Anielewicz laughed—uncomfortably. “I don’t think he’s my friend, exactly. I don’t think I’m his friend, either. But I let him live and I let him carry that explosive metal back to Germany, and so . . . I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just a stiff-necked sense of honor, and he’s paying back a debt.”

  “There can be decent Germans,” Solomon Gruver said reluctantly. That almost set Mordechai laughing again. If he had started, the laugh would have carried an edge of hysteria. He could imagine some plump, monocled Nazi functionary using that precise tone of voice to admit, There can be decent Jews.

  “I still wonder if I should have killed him,” Mordechai said. “The Nazis would have had a much harder time building their bombs without that metal, and God knows the world would be a better place without them. But the world wouldn’t be a better place with the Lizards overrunning it.”

  “And here we are, still stuck in the middle between them,” Bertha Fleishman said. “If the Lizards win, everyone loses. If the Nazis win, we lose.”

  “We’ll hurt them before we go,” Anielewicz said. “They’ve helped us do it, too. If they should come back, we won’t let them treat us the way they did before. Not now. Never again. What was the last desire of my life before the Lizards came has been fulfilled. Jewish self-defense is a fact.”

  How tenuous a fact it was came to be shown a moment later, when a Jewish fighter named Leon Zelkowitz walked into the room where they were talking and said, “There’s an Order Service district leader down at the entrance who wants to talk with you, Mordechai.”

  Anielewicz made a sour face. “Such an honor.” The Order Service in the Jewish district of Lodz still reported to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had been Eldest of the Jews under the Nazis and was still Eldest of the Jews under the Lizards. Most of the time, the Order Service prudently pretended the Jewish fighters did not exist. That the Lizards’ puppet police came looking for him now—he needed to find out what it meant. He got up and slung a Mauscr over his shoulder.

  The Order Service officer still wore his Nazi-issue trench coat and kepi. He wore his Nazi-issue armband, too: red and white, with a black Magen David on it; the white triangle inside the Star of David showed his rank. He carried a billy club on his belt. Against a rifle, that was nothing much.

  “You wanted me?” Anielewicz was ten or twelve centimeters taller than the district leader, and used his height to stare coldly down at the other man.

  “I—” The Order Service man coughed. He was chunky and pale-faced, with a black mustache that looked as if a moth had landed on his upper lip. He tried again: “I’m Oskar Birkenfeld, Anielewicz. I have orders to take you to Bunim.”

  “Do you?” Anielewicz had expected a meeting with Rumkowski or some of his henchmen. To be summoned instead to meet with the chief Lizard in Lodz . . . something out of the ordinary was going on. He wondered if he should have this Birkenfeld seized and drop out of sight himself. He’d made plans to do that at need. Was the need here? Temporizing, he said, “Does he give me a safe-conduct pledge to and from the meeting?”

  “Yes, yes,” the Order Service man said impatiently.

  Anielewicz nodded, his face thoughtful. The Lizards were perhaps better than human beings about keeping those pledges. “All right. I’ll come.”

  Birkenfeld turned in what looked like glad relief. Maybe he’d expected Mordechai to refuse, and also expected to catch it from his own superiors. He started away with his shoulders back and a spring in his step, for all the world as if he were on a mission of his own rather than a puppet of puppets. Sad and amused at the same time, Anielewicz followed him.

  The Lizards had moved into the former German administrative offices in the Bialut Market Square. Only too fitting, Anielewicz thought. Rumkowski’ s offices were in the next building over; his buggy, with its German-made placard proclaiming him Eldest of the Jews, sat in front of it. But Mordechai got only a glimpse of the buggy, for Lizard guards came forward to take charge of him. District Leader Birkenfeld hastily disappeared.

  “Your rifle,” a Lizard said to Anielewicz in hissing Polish. He handed over the weapon. The Lizard took it. “Come.”

  Bunim’s office reminded Mordechai of Zolraag’s back in Warsaw: it was full of fascinating but often incomprehensible gadgets.

  Even the ones whose purpose the Jewish fighting leader could grasp worked on incomprehensible principles. When the guard brought him into the office, for instance, a sheet of paper was silently issuing from a squarish box made of bakelite or something very much like it. The paper was covered with the squiggles of the Lizards’ written language. It had to have been printed inside the box. As he watched, a blank sheet went inside; it came out with printing on it. How, without any sound save the hum of a small electric motor?

  He was curious enough to ask the guard. “It is a skelkwank machine,” the Lizard answered. “Is no word for skelkwank in this speech.” Anielewicz shrugged. Incomprehensible the machine would remain.

  Bunim turned one eye turret toward him. The regional sub-administrator—the Lizards used titles as impressively vague as any the Nazis had invented—spoke fairly fluent German. In that language, he said, “You are the Jew Anielewicz, the Jew leading Jewish fighters?”

  “I am that Jew,” Mordechai said. He wondered how angry the Lizards still were at him for helping Moishe Russie escape their clutches. If that was why Bunim had summoned him, maybe he shouldn’t have admitted his name. But the way he’d been summoned argued against it. The Lizards didn’t seem to want to seize him, but to talk with him.

  Bunim’s other eye turret twisted in its socket till the Lizard looked at him with both eyes, a sign of full attention. “I have a warning to deliver to you and to your fighters.”

  “A warning, superior sir?” Anielewicz asked.

  “We know more than you think,” Bunim said. “We know you Tosevites play ambiguous—is that the word I want?—games with us and with the Deutsche. We know you have interfered with our war efforts here in Lodz. We know these things, I tell you. Do not trouble yourself to deny them. It is of no use.”

  Mordechai did not deny them. He stood silent, waiting to see what the Lizard would say next. Bunim let out a hissing sigh, then went on, “You know also that we are stronger than you.”

  “This I cannot deny,” Anielewicz said with wry amusement.

  “Yes. Truth. We could crush you at any time. But to do this, we would have to divert resources, and resources are scarce. So. We have tolerated you as nuisances—is this the word I want? But no more. Soon we move males and machines again through Lodz. If you are interfering. If you are nuisances, you will pay. This is the warning. Do you understand it?”

  “Oh, yes, I understand it,” Anielewicz said. “Do you understand how much trouble you will have all through Poland, from Jews and Poles both. If you try to suppress us? Do you want nuisances, as you call them, all over the country?”

  “We shall take this risk. You are dismissed,” Bunim said. One eye turret swiveled to look out the window, the other towar
d the sheets of paper that had emerged from the silent printing machine.

  “You come,” the Lizard guard said in his bad Polish. Anielewicz came. When they got outside the building from which the Lizards administered Lodz, the guard returned his rifle.

  Anielewicz went, thoughtfully. By the time he got back to the fire station on Lutomierska Street, he was smiling. The Lizards were not good at reading humans’ expressions. Had they been, they would not have liked his.

  Max Kagan spoke in rapid-fire English. Vyacheslav Molotov had no idea what he was saying, but it sounded hot. Then Igor Kurchatov translated: “The American physicist is upset with the ways we have chosen to extract plutonium from the improved atomic pile he helped us design.”

  Kurchatov’s tone was dry. Molotov got the idea he enjoyed delivering the American’s complaints. Translating for Kagan let him be insubordinate while avoiding responsibility for that insubordination. At the moment, Kagan and Kurchatov were both necessary—indeed, indispensable—to the war effort. Molotov had a long memory, though. One day—

  Not today. He said, “If there is a quicker way to get the plutonium out of the rods than to use prisoners in that extraction process, let him acquaint me with it, and we shall use it. If not, not.”

  Kurchatov spoke in English. So did Kagan, again volubly. Kurchatov turned to Molotov. “He says he never would have designed it that way had he known we would be using prisoners to remove the rods so we could reprocess them for plutonium. He accuses you of several bloodthirsty practices I shall not bother to translate.”

  You enjoy hearing of them, though. Kurchatov was not as good as he should have been at concealing what he thought. “Have him answer my question,” Molotov said. “Is there a quicker way?”

  After more back-and-forth between the two physicists, Kurchatov said, “He says the United States uses machines and remote-control arms for these processes.”