Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  He picked it up, slung it over his shoulder—it didn’t weigh anything to speak of—and carried it back toward the camp. Off to one side was a trench in which to toss the ones who starved or worked themselves to death this week. In went the latest body, on top of a lot of others.

  “We’re liable to fill this one up before it’s time to dig next week’s,” Palchinsky muttered. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. The work gang was. He turned his back on the mass grave and headed out to the woods.

  “We have shown we can be merciful,” Liu Han declared. “We have let one little scaly devil go back to his kind in spite of his crimes against the workers and peasants.” I have let him go in spite of his crimes against me, she added to herself. Let no one say now that I cannot put the interests of the Party, the interests of the People’s Liberation Army, above my own. “In a few days, the truce to which we agreed with the scaly devils expires. They still refuse to make us party to the larger cease-fire. We shall show them we can be strong as dragons, too. They will become sorry enough to make concessions.”

  She sat down. The men of the Peking central committee put their heads together, discussing what she had said and how she said it. Nieh Ho-T’ing murmured something to a newcomer, a handsome, plump-cheeked man whose name she hadn’t caught. The man nodded. He sent Liu Han an admiring glance. She wondered if he was admiring her words or her body. She stared back steadily, measuring him with her eyes. Country bumpkin, she decided, forgetting for a moment how recently she had been a peasant with no politics whatever.

  Sitting on Nieh’s other side was Hsia Shou-Tao. He got to his feet. Liu Han had been sure he would. If she said the Yangtze flowed from west to east, he would disagree because she had said it.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing raised a warning finger, but Hsia plunged ahead anyhow: “Zeal is important to the revolutionary cause, but so is caution. Through too much aggressiveness, we are liable to force the little devils into strong responses against us. A campaign of low-level harassment strikes me as a better plan, one more likely to yield the results we desire, than going at once from truce to all-out war.”

  Hsia looked around the room to see what sort of reaction he’d received. Several men were nodding, but others, among them four or five upon whom he’d counted, sat silent and stony. Liu Han smiled inside while keeping her own features impassive. As was her way, she’d prepared this ground before she began to fight on it. Had Hsia Shou-Tao an ounce of sense, he would have realized that beforehand. Learning of it now, the hard way, made his face take on almost the rictus of agony it had worn when Liu Han kneed him in the private parts.

  To her surprise, the bumpkinish fellow by Nieh Ho-T’ing spoke up: “While war and politics cannot be divorced for a single instant, still it is sometimes necessary to remind the foe that power springs ultimately from the barrel of a gun. The little scaly devils, in my view, must be forcibly shown that their occupation is temporary and shall in the end surely fail. Thus, as Comrade Liu has so ably stated, we shall strike them a series of hard blows the instant the truce expires, gauging our subsequent actions on their response.”

  He didn’t talk like a bumpkin; be talked like an educated man, perhaps even a poet. And now, up and down the table, heads bobbed in approval of his words. Liu Han saw more was involved there than how well he’d spoken: he had authority here, authority everyone acknowledged without question. She wished she’d learned what his name was.

  “As usual, Mao Tse-Tung analyzes clearly,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “His viewpoint is most reasonable, and we shall carry out our program against the little scaly devils as he directs.”

  Again, the members of the Peking central committee nodded as if a single puppeteer controlled all their heads. Liu Han nodded along with everyone else. Her eyes were wide with amazement, though, as she stared at the man who headed the revolutionary cause throughout China. Mao Tse-Tung had thought well of something she said?

  He looked back at her, beaming like Ho Tei, the fat little god of luck in whom proper Communists did not believe but whom Liu Han had trouble dismissing from her mind. Yes, he’d approved of her words. His face said that clearly. And yes, he was looking at her as a man looks at a woman: not crudely, as Hsia Shou-Tao did when he all but spread her legs with his eyes, but unmistakably all the same.

  She wondered what she ought to do about that. She’d already had doubts about her attachment to Nieh Ho-T’ing, doubts both ideological and personal. She was a little surprised to note Mao’s interest; a lot of the central committee members, probably most of them, lusted after revolution more than after women. Hsia was a horrible example of why that rule worked well. But Mao was surely a special case.

  She’d heard he was married. Even if he did want her, even if he did bed her, she was certain he wouldn’t leave his wife for her: some sort of actress, if she remembered rightly. How much influence could she gain as a mistress, and was that enough to make the offer of her body worthwhile? Had she felt no spark, she wouldn’t have considered the notion for an instant; thanks to the scaly devils, she’d had far too much of coupling with men she did not want. But she’d thought Mao attractive before she had any idea who he was.

  She smiled at him, just a little. He smiled, too, politely. Nieh Ho-T’ing noticed nothing. He tended to be blind that way; she sometimes thought she was more a convenience for him than a proper lover. The foreign devil Bobby Fiore had shown far more consideration for her as a person.

  What to do, then? Part of that, of course, depended on Mao. But Liu Han, with a woman’s ancient wisdom, knew that. If she showed herself to be interested, he would probably lie down beside her.

  Did she want to do that? Hard to be sure. Would the benefits outweigh the risks and annoyances? She didn’t have to decide right away. The Communists thought in terms of years, five-year plans, decades of struggle. The little scaly devils, she’d learned, thought in decades, centuries, millennia. She hated the little devils, but they were too powerful to be dismissed as stupid. Viewed from their perspective, or even that of the Party, leaping ahead with a seduction before you worked out the consequences was foolish, nothing else but.

  She smiled at Mao again. It might well not matter, anyhow, not today. Who could guess how long he’d be here? She’d never seen him in Peking before, and might not see him again any time soon. But he likely would come back: that only stood to reason. When he did, she wanted him to remember her. By then, whenever then was, she would have made up her mind. She had plenty of time. And, whichever way she decided, the choice would be hers.

  Mordechai Anielewicz had played a lot of cat-and-mouse games since the Nazis invaded Poland to open the Second World War. In every one of them, though, against the Germans, against the Lizards, against what Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski thought of as the legitimate Jewish administration of Lodz, playing the Germans and Lizards off against each other, he’d been the mouse, operating against larger, more powerful foes.

  Now he was the cat, and finding he didn’t much care for the role. Somewhere out there, Otto Skorzeny was lurking. He didn’t know where. He didn’t know how much Skorzeny knew. He didn’t know what the SS man was planning. He didn’t like the feeling one bit.

  “If you were Skorzeny, what would you do?” he asked Heinrich Jäger. Jäger was, after all, not only a German but a man who’d worked closely with the commando extraordinaire. Asking a German felt odd, anyhow. Intellectually, he knew Jäger was no Jew-butcher. Emotionally . . .

  The panzer colonel scratched his head, “If I were in charge instead of Skorzeny, I’d lie low till I knew enough to strike, then hit quick and hard.” He chuckled wryly. “But whether that’s what he’ll do, I couldn’t begin to tell you. He has his own way of getting things done. Sometimes I think he’s daft—till he brings it off.”

  “Nobody’s set eyes on him since I did,” Anielewicz said, frowning. “He might have fallen off the face of the earth—though that’d be too much to ask for, wouldn’t it? Maybe be is lying low.”

  “He can
’t do that for too long, though,” Jäger pointed out. “If he finds out where the bomb is, he’ll try to set it off. It’s late already, of course, and a major attack hinges on it. He won’t wait.”

  “We’ve taken out the detonator,” Mordechai said. “It’s not in the bomb any more, though we can get it to the bomb in a hurry if we have to.”

  Jäger shrugged. “That shouldn’t matter. If Skorzeny didn’t bring another one, he’s a fool—and a fool he’s not. Besides which, he’s an engineer; he’d know how to install it.” An engineering student himself, Anielewicz grimaced. He wanted nothing in common with the SS man.

  Ludmila Gorbunova asked, “Will he have men he can recruit here in Lodz, or is he all alone in this city?”

  Anielewicz looked to Jäger. Jäger shrugged again. “This town was under the rule of the Reich for some time before the Lizards came. Are there still Germans here?”

  “From the days when it was Litzmannstadt, you mean?” Mordechai asked, and shook his head without waiting for an answer. “No, after the Lizards came, we made most of the Aryan colonists pack up and go. The Poles did the same thing with them. And do you know what? We don’t miss the Germans a bit, either.”

  Jäger looked at him steadily. Anielewicz felt himself flushing. If any man alive was entitled to score points off a German soldier, he was. A German soldier, yes, but not this German soldier. If it hadn’t been for this German soldier, he wouldn’t be here to score points. He had to remember that, no matter how hard it was.

  “Not many Germans, eh?” Jäger said matter-of-factly. “If any are left, Skorzeny will find them. And he’ll probably have connections among the Poles. They don’t like you Jews, either.”

  Was he trying to score points, too? Mordechai couldn’t be sure. Even if he was, that didn’t make him wrong. Ludmila said, “But the Poles. If they help Skorzeny, they’ll be blowing themselves up, too.”

  “You know that,” Jäger said. “I know that. But the Poles don’t necessarily know it. If Skorzeny says, ‘Here, I have a big bomb hidden that will blow up all the Jews but not you,’ they’re liable to believe him.”

  “He’s a good liar?” Anielewicz asked, trying to get more of a feel for his opponent than he could from the unending propaganda the Reich pumped out about Skorzeny.

  But Jäger might have been part of Göbbels’ propaganda mill. “He’s good at everything that has to do with being a raider,” he answered with no trace of irony, then proceeded to give an example: “He went into Besançon, for instance, with a sack of ginger to bribe the Lizards, and he came out driving one of their panzers.”

  “I do not believe this,” Ludmila said, before Anielewicz could. “I heard it reported on German shortwave wireless, but I do not believe it.”

  “It’s true whether you believe it or not,” Jäger said. “I was there. I saw his head sticking up out of the driver’s hatch. I didn’t believe he could do it, either, I thought he was going in there to commit suicide, nothing more. I was wrong. I have never underestimated him since.”

  Anielewicz took that evaluation, which he found almost too depressing to contemplate, to Solomon Gruver and Bertha Fleishman. Gruver’s mouth turned down at the corners, making him look even gloomier than he usually did. “He can’t be that good,” the former sergeant said. “If he were that good, he’d be God, and he isn’t. He’s just a man.”

  “We have to put our ears to the ground among the Poles,” Bertha said. “If anything is going on with them, we need to hear about it fast as we can.”

  Mordechai sent her a grateful look. She took this whole business as seriously as he did. Given the levelheadedness she usually displayed, that was a sign it needed to be taken seriously.

  “So we listen. So what?” Gruver said. “If he’s that good, we won’t hear anything. We won’t spot him unless he wants to be spotted, and we won’t know what he’s up to till he decides to hit us.”

  “All of which is true, and none of which means we can stop trying,” Anielewicz said. He slammed his open hand into the side of the fire engine. That hurt his hand more than the engine. “If only I’d been certain I recognized him! If only I’d come out of—where I came out of—a few seconds earlier, so I could have seen his face. If, If, if—” It ate at him.

  “Even thinking he was in Lodz put us on alert,” Bertha said. “Who knows what he might have done if he’d got here without our knowing it?”

  “He turned a corner,” Anielewicz said, running it through his mind again like a piece of film from the cinema. “He turned a corner, and then another one, very quickly. The second time, I had to guess which way he’d gone, and I guessed wrong.”

  “Don’t keep beating yourself over the head with it, Mordechai,” Bertha said. “It can’t be helped now, and you did everything you could.”

  “That’s so,” Gruver rumbled. “No doubt about it”

  Anielewicz hardly heard him. He was looking at Bertha Fleishman. She’d never called him by his first name before, not that he remembered. He would have remembered, too; he was certain of that.

  She was looking at him, too. She flushed a little when their eyes met, but she didn’t look away. He’d known she liked him well enough. He liked her well enough, too. Except when she smiled, she was plain and mousy. He’d been to bed with women far prettier. He suddenly seemed to hear Solomon Gruver’s deep voice again, going, So what? Gruver-that-wasn’t had a point. He’d bedded those women and enjoyed himself doing it, but he hadn’t for an instant thought of spending his life with any of them. Bertha, though . . .

  “If we live through this—” he said. The five words made a complete sentence. If you knew how to listen to them.

  Bertha Fleishman did. “Yes. If we do,” she replied: a complete answer.

  The real Solomon Gruver seemed less attentive to what was going on around him than the imaginary one inside Anielewicz’s head. “If we live through this,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something better with that thing we have than leaving it where it is. But if we move it now, we just draw attention to it, and that lets this Skorzeny mamzer have his chance.”

  “That’s all true, Solomon—every word of it,” Mordechai agreed solemnly. Then he started to laugh. A moment later, so did Bertha.

  “And what is so funny?” Gruver demanded with ponderous dignity. “Did I make a joke and, God forbid, not know it?”

  “God forbid,” Anielewicz said, and laughed harder.

  As George Bagnall and Ken Embry walked to Dover College, jet engines roared overhead. Bagnall’s automatic reaction was to find the nearest hole in the ground and jump into it. With an effort, he checked himself and looked upward. For once, the thinking, rational part of his brain had got it right: those were Meteors up there, not Lizard fighter-bombers.

  “Bloody hell!” Embry burst out; conditioned reflex must nearly have got the better of him, too. “We’ve only been gone a year and a half, but it feels as though we’ve stepped back into 1994, not 1944.”

  “Doesn’t it just,” Bagnall agreed. “They were flying those things when we left, but not many of them. You don’t see Hurricanes at all any more, and they’re phasing out Spitfires fast as they can. It’s a brave new world, and no mistake.”

  “Still a place for bomber crew—for the next twenty minutes, anyhow,” Embry said. “They haven’t put jets on Lancs, not yet they haven’t. But everything else they have done—” He shook his head. “No wonder they sent us back to school. We’re almost as obsolete as if we’d been flying Sopwith Camels. Trouble is, of course, we haven’t been flying anything.”

  “It’s even worse for Jones,” Bagnall said. “We’re still flying the same buses, even if they have changed the rest of the rules. His radars are starting to come from a different world: literally.”

  “Same with our bomb-aiming techniques,” Embry said as they climbed the poured-concrete steps and strode down the corridor toward their classroom.

  The lecturer there, a flight lieutenant named Constantine Jordan, w
as already scribbling on the blackboard, though it still lacked a couple of minutes of the hour. Bagnall looked around as he took his seat. Most of his classmates had a pale, pasty look to them; some were in obvious if stifled pain. That made sense—besides the rarities like Bagnall and Embry, the people who’d been out of service long enough to require refresher courses were the ones who’d been badly wounded. A couple had dreadful scars on their faces; what lay under their uniforms was anyone’s guess, though not one Bagnall cared to make.

  An instant before the clock in the bell tower chimed eleven, Flight Lieutenant Jordan turned and began: “As I noted at the end of yesterday’s session, what the Lizards call skelkwank bids fair to revolutionize bomb aiming. Skelkwank light, unlike the ordinary sort”—he pointed up to the electric lamps—“is completely organized, you might say. It’s all of the same frequency, the same amplitude, the same phase. The Lizards have several ways of creating such light. We’re busy working on them to see which ones we can most readily make for ourselves. But that’s largely beside the point. We’ve captured enough generators of skelkwank light to have equipped a good many bombers with them, and that’s why you’re here.”

  Bagnall’s pencil scurried across the notebook. Every so often, he’d pause to shake his hand back and forth to wring out writer’s cramp. All this was new to him, and all vital—now he was able to understand the term he’d first met in Pskov. Amazing, all the things you could do with skelkwank light.

  Jordan went on, “What we do is, we illuminate the target with a skelkwank lamp. A sensor head properly attuned to it manipulates the fins on the bomb and guides it to the target. So long as the light stays on the target, the guidance will work. We’ve all seen it used against us more often than we’d fancy. Again, we’re operating with captured sensor heads, which are in limited supply, but we’re also exploring ways and means to manufacture them. Yes, Mr. McBride? You have a question?”