Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Of course, back then the Yanks (Daniels remembered how irate he’d been to find the French considering him a Yankee) and Boches had swapped smokes and rations when they met. He’d traded rations only once; as far as he was concerned, it was a miracle the Germans fought so damn hard on the slop they got to eat.

  He didn’t figure he’d see anything like that here now. The Lizards didn’t smoke, and their rations were nastier than anything the Boches had had. But when he looked around, he saw some of his guys trading something with the aliens. What the devil did they nave that the Lizards wanted?

  Chook was watching that, too, his eye turrets twisting every which way while his head hardly moved. Mutt wondered if he’d stop this unofficial commerce. Instead, after a minute or so, he said, “You, Second Lieutenant Daniels, have any of the fruit or small cakes with what you Big Uglies call ginger in them?”

  A lighthulb went on in Mutt’s head. He’d heard the Lizards had a hell of a yen for the stuff. “ ‘Fraid I don’t, Small-Unit Group Leader,” he said, and it was too bad—no telling what sort of interesting stuff a Lizard might have to trade. “Looks like some of my boys do, though.”

  As he spoke, he wondered why some of his boys were carrying around stuff with ginger in it. The only answer that came to mind was that they’d already been doing some trading with the Lizards on the sly. Any other time, that would have made him furious. When you looked at it after a cease-fire, though, how could you get excited about it?

  “Yess. Truth,” Chook said. With an eager spring in his skittering stride, he hurried off to find out what the Americans did have for sale. Behind his back, Mutt Daniels smiled.

  Fluffy white clouds floated lazily across a blue sky. The sun was high and, if not hot, pleasantly warm. It was a fine day for walking hand in hand with the girl you—loved? David Goldfarb hadn’t used the word with Naomi Kaplan, not out loud, but he thought it more and more often these days.

  Naomi’s thoughts, on the other hand, seemed focused on politics and war, not love. “But you are in the RAF,” she said indignantly. “How could you not know whether we have got a cease-fire with the Lizards or have not got any such thing?”

  He laughed. “How could I not know? Nothing simpler: they don’t tell rue. I don’t need to know to do my job, which is a good enough reason for not telling. All I know is what I want to know: I’ve not heard any Lizard aircraft—nor heard of any Lizard aircraft—over England since the cease-fire with the Yanks, the Russians, and the Nazis.”

  “Then it is a cease-fire,” Naomi insisted. “It must be a cease-fire.”

  Goldfarb shrugged. “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not. I admit, I don’t know of any of our planes heading off to bomb the Continent, either, but we’ve not done much of that lately anyhow; the loss rate got too beastly high to bear. Maybe it’s one of those informal arrangements: you don’t hurt me and I shan’t hurt you, but we’ll not put anything in writing for fear of admitting we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing—or not doing.”

  Naomi frowned. “This is not right This is not proper. This is not orderly.” At that moment, she sounded very German. Goldfarb would sooner have bitten through his tongue than said so out loud. She went on, “The Lizards’ agreements with the other nations are formal and binding. Why not with us?”

  “I told you I don’t know anything for certain,” Goldfarb said. “Will you listen to my guess?” When she nodded, he went on, “The Americans, the Russians, and the Nazis have all used super-bombs of the same type the Lizards have. We’ve not done that. In their eyes, maybe we don’t deserve a truce because we’ve not done it. But when they tried invading us, they found we weren’t a walkover. And so they leave us alone without saying they’re doing it.”

  “This is possible, I suppose,” Naomi admitted after some serious thought. “But it is still not orderly.”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “No matter what it is, though, I’m glad not to hear the air-raid sirens go off every day, or twice a day, or every hour on the hour.”

  He waited to see if Naomi would say such an irregular schedule of raids was disorderly, too. Instead, she pointed to the bright red breast of a robin streaking through the air after a dragonfly.

  “That’s the only kind of aircraft I want to see in the sky.”

  “Hmm,” Goldfarb said. “I am partial to a nice flight of Meteors, but I’d be stretching things if I didn’t say you had a point.”

  They walked on for a while, not talking, glad of each other’s company. It was very quiet. A bee buzzed from flower to flower in a field by the side of the road. Goldfarb noticed both the sound and the field without any vegetables growing in it: it had to be one of the few such so close to Dover.

  Apparently apropos of nothing in particular, Naomi remarked, “My father and mother like you, David.”

  “I’m glad,” he answered, which was true enough. Had Isaac and Leah Kaplan not liked him, he wouldn’t be out walking with their daughter now. “I like them, too.” That was also true to a large degree: he liked them about as well as a young man could like the parents of the girl he was courting.

  “They think you have a serious mind,” Naomi went on.

  “Do they?” Goldfarb said, a little more cautiously now. If by serious-minded they meant he wouldn’t try to seduce their daughter, they didn’t know him as well as they thought they did. He’d already tried that. Maybe they knew Naomi, though, because it hadn’t worked. And yet he hadn’t gone off in a huff because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Did that make him serious-minded? Maybe it did. He realized he had to say something more. “I think it’s good they don’t worry about where I’m from—or where my mother and father are from, I should say.”

  “They think of you as an English Jew,” Naomi answered. “So do I, as a matter of fact.”

  “I suppose so. I was born here,” Goldfarb said. He didn’t think of himself as an English Jew, though, not when his parents had fled here from Warsaw on account of pogroms before the First World War. German Jews had a way of looking down their noses at their Eastern European cousins. If Naomi met his parents, it would be quite plain they weren’t what she thought of as English Jews. If—Thoughtfully, he went on, “My father and mother would like you, too. If I get leave and you can get a day off from the pub, would you like to go up to London and meet them?”

  “I would like that very much,” she replied. Then she cocked her head to one side and looked over at him. “How would you introduce me?”

  “How would you like me to introduce you?” he asked. But Naomi shook her head; that one wasn’t for her to answer. Fair enough, he thought. He went on for another couple of paces before trying a slightly different question: “How would you like me to introduce you as my fiancée?”

  Naomi stopped in her tracks. Her eyes went very wide. “You mean this?” she asked slowly. Goldfarb nodded, though his stomach felt as it sometimes had up in a Lancaster taking violent evasive action. Naomi said, “I would like this very much,” and stepped into his arms.

  The kiss she gave him nailed his stomach firmly back in place, though it made his head spin. When one hand of his closed softly on her breast, she didn’t pull away. Instead, she sighed and held him tighter. Emboldened, he slid his other down from the small of her back to her right buttock—and, with a twirl as neat as a jitterbug dancer’s, she twisted away from him.

  “Soon,” she said. “Not yet. Soon. We tell my parents. I meet your mother and father—and my mother and father will want to do the same. We find a rabbi to marry us. Then.” Her eyes glittered. “And I tell you this—you will not be the only one who is impatient.”

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go tell your father and mother now.” He turned and started toward Dover. The faster he cleared obstacles out of the way, the sooner she wouldn’t use that little twirl His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground all the way back to the city.

  Mordechai Anielewicz’s voice came out flat as the Polish plain, hard as stone: “I don’t believe
you. You’re lying.”

  “Fine. Whatever you say.” The Polish farmer had been milking a cow when Anielewicz found him. He turned away from the Jewish fighting leader and back to the business at hand. Siss! Siss! Siss! Jets of milk landed in the dented tin pail. The cow tried to walk off. “Stay here, you stupid bitch,” the Pole growled.

  “But see here, Mieczyslaw,” Mordechai protested. “It’s impossible, I tell you. How could the Nazis have smuggled an explosive-metal bomb into Lodz without us or the Lizards or the Polish Home Army knowing about it?”

  “I don’t know anything about how,” Mieczyslaw answered. “I hear tell they’ve done it. I’m supposed to tell you somebody stayed at Lejb’s house in Hrubieszów. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” Anielewicz said with as much equanimity as he could muster. He didn’t want the Pole to know how shaken he was. Heinrich Jäger had stayed with a Jew named Lejb, all right, back when he was carrying explosive metal from the Soviet Union to Germany. The message had to be authentic, then; who else would know about that? It wasn’t even the sort of thing he’d have been likely to mention in a report. Cautiously, Mordechai asked, “What else have you heard?”

  “It’s somewhere in the ghetto,” Mieczyslaw told him. “Don’t have any idea where, so don’t waste time asking. Hadn’t been for the cease-fire, all you kikes’d probably be toasting your toes in hell by now.”

  “I love you, too, Mieczyslaw,” Anielewicz said. The Pole chuckled, not in the least put out. Mordechai kicked at the dirt. “Gottenyu! That man has balls the size of an elephant. The chutzpah it takes to try something like that—and the luck you need to get away with it . . . ”

  “What man is that?” Mieczyslaw asked. Mordechai didn’t answer him. He hardly heard him. How had Skorzeny sneaked an explosive-metal bomb past everybody and into Lodz? How had he got it into the Jewish quarter? How had he got out again afterwards? All good questions, the only trouble being that Mordechai had answers for none of them.

  One other question, of course, overrode all of those. Where was the bomb?

  He worried at it every step of the way back to Lodz, like a man worrying with his tongue at a piece of gristle stuck between two molars. The gristle was still stuck when he strode into the fire station of Lutomierska Street. Solomon Gruver was fiddling with the fire engine’s motor. “Why the long face?” he asked, looking up -from his work.

  He wasn’t the only man in earshot. The last thing Anielewicz wanted to do was spread panic through the ghetto. “Come on upstairs with me,” he said, as casually as he could.

  Gruver’s long face turned somber. With his bushy eyebrows, harsh features, and thick, graying beard, he generally looked grim. When he felt grim, he looked as if his best friend had just died. He put down his wrench and followed Mordechai up to the room where the leaders of the Jewish fighters commonly met.

  On the stairwell, he said quietly, “Bertha’s up there. She picked up something interesting—what it is, I don’t know—and she’s passing it along. Is whatever you’ve got something she can know about?”

  “It’s something she’d better know about,” Anielewicz answered. “If we can’t deal with it ourselves, we may have to let Rumkowski’s gang of tukhus-lekhers know it, too, and maybe even the Lizards, though that’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “Oy!” Those eyebrows of Gruver’s twitched. “Whatever it is, it must be bad.”

  “No, not bad,” Mordechai said. Gruver gave him a quizzical look. “Worse,” he explained as they got to the top of the stairs. Gruver grunted. Every time Anielewicz lifted his foot off the worn linoleum of the floor, he wondered if he would live to set it down again. That was not in his hands, not any more. If Otto Skorzeny pushed a button or flicked a switch on a wireless transmitter, he would cease to be, probably so fast he wouldn’t realize he was dead.

  He laughed. Solomon Gruver stared at him. “You’re carrying news like this and you find something funny?”

  “Maybe,” Anielewicz answered. Skorzeny had to be one frustrated SS man right this minute. He’d risked his life getting that bomb into Lodz (Anielewicz who’d despised him on sight, knew how much courage that had taken), but his timing was bad. He couldn’t touch it off now, not without destroying the shiny new cease-fire between the Lizards and the Reich.

  A couple of serious-looking Jewish men came out of the meeting room. “We’ll take care of it,” one of them promised Bertha Fleishman.

  “Thank you, Michael,” she said, and started to follow them out. She almost ran into Anielewicz and Gruver. “Hello! I didn’t expect to see you two here.”

  “Mordechai ran into something interesting,” Solomon Gruver said. “What it is, God knows, because he’s not talking.” He glanced over to Mordechai. “Not talking yet, anyhow.”

  “Now I am,” Anielewicz said. He walked into the meeting room. When Gruver and Bertha Fleishman had followed him inside, he closed the door and, with a melodramatic touch, locked it. That made Bertha’s eyebrows fly up, as Gruver’s had before.

  Mordechai spoke for about ten minutes, relaying as much as Mieczyslaw had told him. As he passed it on, he realized how little it was. When he was finished, Gruver looked at him and said, “I don’t believe a word of it. It’s just the damned Nazis trying to pull our chains and make us run around like chickens in the fannyard.” He shook his head, repeating, “I don’t believe a word.”

  “If it hadn’t been this Jäger who sent us the message, I wouldn’t believe it, either,” Anielewicz said. “If it hadn’t been for him, you know, the nerve-gas bomb would have done us in.” He turned to Bertha. “What do you think?”

  “As far as I can see, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter,” she answered. “We have to act as if it is, don’t we? We can’t really afford to ignore it.”

  “Feh!” Gruver said in disgust. “We’ll waste all sorts of time and effort, and what will we come up with? Nothing, I tell you.”

  “Alevai omayn you’re right and there’s nothing to find,” Mordechai said. “But suppose—just suppose—you’re wrong and there is a bomb. Then what? Maybe we find it. That would be good; with a bomb of our own, we could tell the Lizards and Nazis both where to head in. Maybe the Lizards find it, and use it as an excuse to blow up some city somewhere—look what happened to Copenhagen. Or maybe we don’t find it and the Lizards don’t find it. Suppose the truce talks break down? All Skorzeny has to do is get on the wireless and—”

  Solomon Gruver grimaced. “All right. You made your point, damn you. Now all we have to do is try to find the verkakte thing—if, like I say, it’s there to be found in the first place.”

  “It’s somewhere here, in our part of the city,” Anielewicz said, as he had before. “How could the SS man have got it here? Where would he have hidden it if he did?”

  “How big is it?” Bertha asked. “That will make a difference in where he might have put it.”

  “It can’t be small; it can’t be light,” Anielewicz answered. “If it were, the Germans would load these bombs into airplanes or onto their rockets. Since they don’t do that, the bombs can’t be something they’d leave behind a kettle in your kitchen.”

  “That makes sense,” Gruver admitted. “It’s one of the few things about this miserable business that does. Like you say, it narrows down the places where the bomb is liable to be . . . if there is a bomb.” He stubbornly refused to acknowledge that was anything more than an if.

  “Around the factories,” Bertha Fleishman said. “That’s one place to start.”

  “One place, yes,” Gruver said. “A big one place. Dozens of factories here, all through the ghetto. Straw boots, cartridge casings, rucksacks—we were making all sorts of things for the Nazis, and we’re still making most of them for the Lizards. So where around the factories would you have us start?”

  “I’d sooner not start with them,” Anielewicz said. “As you say, Solomon, they’re too big to know where to begin. We may not have mu
ch time; it probably depends on how soon the Lizards and the Nazis quarrel. So where’s the likeliest place that SS mamzer would have hidden a big bomb?”

  “From what you say about him, would he have picked the likeliest place?” Solomon Gruver asked.

  “If he didn’t, we’re going to be in even more trouble than I already think we are,” Mordechai answered. “But I think, I hope, I pray this time he didn’t. He couldn’t have spent much time in Lodz. He’d have wanted to hide this thing for a little while, escape, and then set it off. It wouldn’t have needed to stay hidden very long or be hidden very well. But then the cease-fire came along and complicated his life—and maybe saved ours.”

  “If this isn’t all a load of dreck to make us spin our wheels,” Gruver said.

  “If,” Anielewicz admitted.

  “I know one other place we ought to check,” Bertha Fleishman said: “the cemetery and the ghetto field south of it.”

  Gruver and Anielewicz both looked at her. The words hung in the air of the dingy meeting room. “If I were doing the job, that’s just where I’d put it,” Mordechai exclaimed. “Can’t think of a better place—quiet at night, already plenty of holes in the ground—”

  “Especially in the ghetto field,” Bertha said, catching fire at a suggestion she had first made casually. “That’s where so many mass graves are, from when the sickness and starvation were so bad. Who would pay any special attention to one more hole in the ground there?”

  “Who would notice anybody coming to dig one more hole in the ground in the middle of the night?” Solomon Gruver’s big head bobbed up and down. “Yes. If it’s anywhere, that’s where we need to start looking.”

  “I agree,” Mordechai said. “Bertha, that’s wonderful. If you’re not right, you deserve to be.” He frowned after he said that, working it through to make sure he’d really given her the compliment he’d intended. To his relief, he decided he had.