Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, sir,” replied the flying officer who’d raised his hand. “These new munitions are all very well, sir, but if we’re flying against the Lizards, how do we approach the target closely enough to have some hope of destroying it? Their weapons can strike us at much greater range than that at which we can respond. Believe me, sir, I know that.” He was one of the men who had scar tissue slagging half his face.

  “It is a difficulty,” Jordan admitted. “We are also seeking to copy the guided rockets with which the Lizards have shot down so many of our aircraft, but that’s proving slower work, even with the assistance of Lizard prisoners.”

  “We’d best not fight another war with them any time soon, is all I can say,” McBride answered, “or we’ll come out of it with no pilots left at all. Without rockets to match theirs, we’re hors d’oeuvres, nothing better.”

  Bagnall had never thought of himself as a canapé, but the description fit all too well. He wished he could have gone up against the Luftwaffe with a Lancaster armed with skelkwank bombs and rockets to swat down the Messerschmitts before they bored in for the kill. After a moment, he realized he might fly with those weapons against the Germans one day. But if he did, the Germans were liable to have them, too.

  Flight Lieutenant Jordan kept lecturing for several minutes after the noon bells rang. Again, that was habit. At last, he dismissed his pupils with the warning, “Tomorrow you’ll be quizzed on what we’ve covered this past week. Those with poor marks will be turned into toads and sent hopping after blackbeetles. Amazing what technology can do these days, is it not? See you after lunch.”

  When Bagnall and Embry went out into the corridor to head to the cafeteria for an uninspiring but free meal, Jerome Jones called to them, “Care to dine with my chum here?”

  His chum was a Lizard who introduced himself in hissing English as Mzepps. When Bagnall found out he’d been a radar technician before his capture, he willingly let him join the group. Talking civilly with a Lizard felt odd, even odder than his first tense meeting with that German lieutenant-colonel in Paris, barely days after the RAF had stopped going after the Nazis.

  Despite Mzepps’ appearance, though, the Lizard soon struck him as a typical noncommissioned officer: worried about his job, but not much about how it fit into the bigger picture. “You Big Uglies, you all the time go why, why, why,” he complained. “Who cares why? Just do. Why not important. Is word? Yes, important.”

  “It never has occurred to him,” Jones remarked, “that if we didn’t go why, why, why all the time, we should have been in no position to fight back when he and his scaly cohorts got here.”

  Bagnall chewed on that as he and Ken Embry headed back toward Flight Lieutenant Jordan’s class. He thought about the theory Jordan was teaching along with the practical applications of what the RAF was learning from the Lizards. By everything Mzepps had said, the Lizards seldom operated that way themselves. What mattered more to them than why.

  “I wonder why that is,” he murmured.

  “Why what is?” Embry asked, which made Bagnall realize he’d spoken aloud.

  “Nothing, really,” he answered. “Just being—human.”

  “Is that a fact?” Embry said. “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

  The RAF men in the lecture hall stared at them as they walked through the doors. As far as Bagnall knew, no one had ever done that laughing before.

  A sunbeam sneaking through the slats of a Venetian blind found Ludmila Gorbunova’s face and woke her. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up in bed. She wasn’t used to sleeping in a bed, not any more. After blankets on the ground, a real mattress felt decadently soft.

  She looked around the flat Mordechai Anielewicz had given her and Jäger. The plumbing wasn’t all it might have been, the wallpaper was peeling after years of neglect—Anielewicz had apologized for that. People in Lodz, it seemed, were always apologizing to outsiders for how bad things were. They didn’t seem that bad to Ludmila. She was slowly starting to think the problem was different standards of comparison. They were used to the way things here had been before the war. She was used to Kiev. What that said—

  She stopped worrying about what that said, because her motion woke Jäger up. He came awake quickly and completely. She’d seen that, the last couple of nights. She had the same trick. She hadn’t had it before the war started. She wondered if Jäger had.

  He reached up and set a hand on her bare shoulder. Then he surprised her by chuckling. “What is funny?” she asked, a little indignantly.

  “This,” he answered, waving at the flat “Everything. Here we are, two people who for love of each other have run away from all the things we used to think important. We can’t go back to them, ever again. We are—what do the diplomats say?—stateless persons, that’s what we are. It’s like something out of a cheap novel.” As he had a way of doing, he quickly sobered. “Or it would be, if it weren’t for the small detail of the explosive-metal bomb cluttering up our lives.”

  “Yes, if it weren’t.” Ludmila didn’t want to get out of bed and get dressed. Here, naked between the sheets with Jäger, she too could pretend love had been the only thing that brought them to Lodz, and that treason and fear not only for the city but for the whole world had had nothing to do with it.

  With a sigh, she did get up and start to dress. With a matching sigh an octave deeper, Jäger joined her. They’d only just finished putting on their clothes when somebody knocked on the door. Jäger chuckled again; maybe he’d had amorous thoughts, too, and also set them aside. They would have had to answer the door anyhow. Now, at least, they weren’t interrupted.

  Jäger opened it, as warily as if he expected to find Otto Skorzeny waiting in the hallway. Ludmila didn’t see how that was possible, but she hadn’t seen how a lot of Skorzeny’s exploits Jäger talked about were possible, either.

  Skorzeny wasn’t out there. Mordechai Anielewicz was, a Mauser slung over his shoulder. He let it slide down his arm and leaned it against the wall. “Do you know what I wish we could do?” he said. “I wish we could get word to the Lizards—just as a rumor, mind you—that Skorzeny was in town. If they and their puppets were looking for him, too, it would hold his feet to the fire and make him do something instead of lying back and letting us do all the running around.”

  “You haven’t done that, have you?” Jäger said sharply.

  “I said I wished I could,” Anielewicz answered. “No. If the Lizards find out Skorzeny’s here, they’re going to start wondering what he’s doing here—and they’ll start looking all over for him. We can’t afford that, which leaves first move up to him: he has the white pieces, sure enough.”

  “You play chess?” Ludmila asked. Outside the Soviet Union, she’d found, not so many people did. She had to use the Russian word; she didn’t know how to say it in German.

  Anielewicz understood. “Yes, I play,” he answered. “Not as well as I’d like, but everyone says that.”

  Jäger kept his mind on the business at hand: “What are you doing—as opposed to the things you’re reluctantly not doing, I mean?”

  “I understood you,” Anielewicz answered with a wry grin. “I’ve got as many men with guns on the street as I can afford to put there, and I’m checking with every landlord who won’t run straight to the Lizards to find out if he’s putting up Skorzeny. So far—” He snapped his fingers to show what he had so far.

  “Have you checked the whorehouses?” Jäger asked. That was another German word Ludmila didn’t know. When she asked about it and he explained, she thought at first he’d made a joke. Then she realized he was deadly serious.

  Mordechai Anielewicz snapped his fingers again, this time in annoyance. “No, and I should have,” he said, sounding angry at himself. “One of those would make a good hideout for him, wouldn’t it?” He nodded to Jäger. “Thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of that myself.”

  Ludmila wouldn’t have thought of it, either. The world outside the Soviet Union had corruptions new to her, along with
its luxuries. Decadent, she thought again. She shook her head. She’d have to get used to it. No going back to the rodina, not now, not ever, not unless she wanted endless years in the gulag or, perhaps more likely, a quick end with a bullet in the back of the head. She’d thrown away her old life as irrevocably as Jäger had his. The question remained: could they build a new one together here, this being the sole remaining choice?

  If they didn’t stop Skorzeny, that answer was depressingly obvious, too.

  Anielewicz said, “I’m going back to the fire station: I have to ask some questions. I haven’t worried much about the nafkehs—the whores,” he amplified when he saw Ludmila and Jäger didn’t catch the Yiddish word, “but somebody will know all about ’em. Men are men—even Jews.” He looked a challenge at Jäger.

  The German, to Ludmila’s relief, didn’t rise to it. “Men are men,” he agreed mildly. “Would I be here if I didn’t think so?”

  “No,” Anielewicz said. “Men are men—even Germans, maybe.” He touched a finger to the brim of the cloth cap he wore, reslung his rifle, and hurried away.

  Jäger sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy, however much we wish it would. Even if we stop Skorzeny, we’re exiles here.” He laughed. “We’d be a lot worse off than exiles, though, if the SS got its hooks in me again.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Ludmila said. “Not about the SS, but about the NKVD, I mean.” She smiled happily. If two people thought the same thing at the same time, that had to mean they were well matched. But for herself, Jäger was all she had left in the world; not believing the two of them were well matched would have left her desolately lonesome. Her eyes slipped to the bed. Her smile changed, ever so slightly. They were well matched there, that was certain.

  Then Jäger said, “Well, not surprising. We haven’t got much else to think about here, have we? There’s us—and Skorzeny.”

  “Da,” Ludmila said, disappointed out of the German she’d mostly been speaking and back into Russian. What she’d taken as a good sign was to Jäger merely a commonplace. How sad that made her showed how giddy she was feeling.

  On the table lay a chunk of black bread. Jäger went into the kitchen, came back with a bone-handled knife, and cut the chunk in two. He handed Ludmila half of it. Without the slightest trace of irony, he said, “German service at its finest.”

  Was he joking? Did he expect her to take him literally? She wondered as she ate her breakfast. That she didn’t know and couldn’t guess with any real confidence of being right bothered her. It reminded her how little she truly knew of the man she’d helped rescue and whose fate she’d linked with her own. She didn’t want to be reminded of that—very much the contrary.

  When she’d flown away with him, he’d come straight out of the hands of the SS. He hadn’t had a weapon then, of course. Anielewicz had given him a Schmeisser after he got to Lodz, a sign the Jewish fighting leader trusted him perhaps further than he was willing to admit to himself. Jäger had spent a lot of time since with oil and brushes and cloth, getting the submachine gun into what he reckoned proper fighting condition.

  Now he started to check it yet again. Watching how intent his face grew as he worked made Ludmila snort, half in annoyance, half in fascination. When he didn’t look up, she snorted again, louder. That distracted him enough to make him remember she was there. She said, “Sometimes I think you Germans ought to marry machines, not people. Schultz, your sergeant—you act the same way he did.”

  “If you take care of your tools, as you should, they take proper care of you when you need them.” Jäger spoke as automatically as if he were reciting the multiplication table. “If what you need them for is keeping yourself alive, you’d better take care of them, or you’ll be too dead to kick yourself for not doing it.”

  “It’s not that you do it. It’s how you do it, like there is nothing in the world but you and the machine, whatever it is, and you are listening to it. I have never seen Russians do this,” Ludmila said. “Schultz was the same way. He thought well of you. Perhaps he was trying to be like you.”

  That seemed to amuse Jäger, who checked the action of the cocking handle, nodded to himself, and slung the Schmeisser over his shoulder. “Didn’t you tell me he’d found a Russian lady, too?”

  “Yes. I don’t think they got on as well as we do, but yes.” Ludmila hadn’t told him how much time Schultz had spent trying to get her trousers down as well as Tatiana’s. She didn’t intend to tell him that. Schultz hadn’t done it, and she hadn’t—quite—had to smash him across the face with the barrel of her pistol to get him to take his hands off her.

  Jäger said, “Let’s go to the fire station ourselves. I want to tell Anielewicz something. It’s not just whorehouses—Skorzeny might be taking shelter in a church, too. He’s an Austrian, so he’s a Catholic—or he was probably raised as one, anyhow; he’s about the least godly man I know. But that’s one more place, or set of places, to look for him.”

  “You have all sorts of ideas.” Ludmila would not have thought of anything that had to do with religion. Here, though, that outmoded notion proved strategically relevant. “It is worth checking, I think, yes. The part of Lodz that is not Jewish is Catholic.”

  “Yes.” Jäger headed for the door. Ludmila followed. They walked downstairs hand in hand. The fire station was only a few blocks away—go down the street, turn onto Lutomierska, and you were there.

  They went down the street. They were about to turn onto Lutomierska when a great thunderclap, a noise like the end of the world, smote the air. For a dreadful moment, Ludmila thought Skorzeny had touched off his bomb in spite of everything they’d done to stop him.

  But then, as glass blew out of windows that had held it, she realized she was wrong. This explosion had been close by. She’d seen an explosive-metal bomb go off. Had she been so near one of those blasts, she would have been dead before she realized anything had happened.

  People were screaming. Some ran away from the place where the bomb had gone off, others toward it to help the wounded. She and Jäger were among the latter, pushing past men and women trying to flee.

  Through stunned ears, she caught snatches of horrified comments in Yiddish and Polish: “—horsecart in front—” “—just stopped there—” “—man went away—” “—blew up in front of—”

  By then, she’d come close enough to see the building in front of which the bomb had blown up. The fire station on Lutomierska Street was a pile of rubble, through which flames were beginning to creep. “Bozhemoi,” she said softly.

  Jäger was looking at the dazed and bleeding victims, grim purpose on his face. “Where’s Anielewicz?” he demanded, as if willing the Jewish fighting leader to emerge from the wreckage. Then he spoke another word: “Skorzeny.”

  XX

  The Lizard named Oyyag dipped his head in a gesture of submission he’d learned from the NKVD. “It shall be done, superior sir,” he said. “We shall meet all norms required of us.”

  “That is good, headmale,” David Nussboym answered in the language of the Race. “If you do, your rations will be restored to the normal daily allotment.” After Ussmak died, the Lizards of Alien Prisoner Barracks Three had fallen far below their required labor quotas, and had gone hungry—or rather, hungrier—on account of it. Now, at last, the new headmale, though he’d had no great status before his capture, was starting to whip them back into shape.

  Oyyag, Nussboym thought, would make a better headmale for the barracks than Ussmak had. The other Lizard, perhaps because he’d been a mutineer, had tried to make waves in camp, too. If Colonel Skriabin hadn’t found a way to break the hunger strike he’d started, no telling how much mischief and disruption in routine he might have caused.

  Oyyag swiveled his eye turrets rapidly in all directions, making sure none of the other males in the barracks was paying undue attention to his conversation with Nussboym. He lowered his voice and spoke such Russian as he had: “This other thing, I do. I do it, you do like you
say.”

  “Da,” Nussboym said, wishing he were as sure he could deliver on his promise as he sounded.

  Only one way to find out whether he could or not. He left the barracks hall and headed for the camp headquarters. Luck was with him. When he approached Colonel Skriabin’s office, the commandant’s secretary was not guarding the way in. Nussboym stood in the doorway and waited to be noticed.

  Eventually, Skriabin looked up from the report he’d been writing. Trains were reaching the camp more reliably now that the cease-fire was in place. With paper no longer in short supply, Skriabin was busy catching up on all the bureaucratic minutiae he’d had to delay simply because he couldn’t record the relevant information.

  “Come in, Nussboym,” he said in Polish, putting down his pen. The smudges of ink on his fingers told how busy he’d been. He seemed glad of the chance for a break. Nussboym nodded to himself. He’d hoped to catch the colonel in a receptive mood, and here his hope was coming true. Skriabin pointed to the hard chair in front of his desk. “Sit down. You have come to see me for a reason, of course?” You’d better not be wasting my time, was what he meant.

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel.” Nussboym sat gratefully. Skriabin was in a good mood; he didn’t offer the chair at every visit, nor did he always speak Polish instead of making Nussboym work through his Russian. “I can report that the new Lizard headmale is cooperative in every way. We should have far less trouble from Barracks Three than we’ve known in the past.”

  “This is good.” Skriabin steepled his inky fingers. “Is it the only thing you have to report?”

  Nussboym made haste to reply: “No, Comrade Colonel.”

  Skriabin nodded—had he been interrupted just for that, he would have made Nussboym regret it. The interpreter went on, “The other matter, though, is so delicate, I hesitate to bring it to your attention.” He was glad he was able to use Polish with Skriabin; he could never have been subtle enough in Russian.

  “Delicate?” The camp commandant raised an eyebrow. “We seldom hear such a word in this place.”