In the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “You have spoken truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Straha agreed. “Let me ask the question another way: do the Big Uglies know enough about the inner workings of the atom to envision nuclear weapons?”

  “After our initial bombardment to disrupt their communications, and especially after we smashed the capital of Deutschland, they need not envision nuclear weapons,” Kirel said. “They have seen them.”

  “They have seen them, yes.” Straha would not let his rival distract him from the point he was trying to make. “But can they understand what they have seen?”

  Atvar hadn’t thought of the question in quite those terms. Finding out just what the Tosevites knew wasn’t easy. Even if they were reticent on the radio, their books surely revealed a great deal. But in only half a year (half of half a year, by Tosevite reckoning), who among the Race had had the chance to find and translate the relevant texts? The fleetlord knew the answer perfectly well: no one. The war of conquest left no leisure for such fripperies as translation.

  Except that now it was not a frippery. Straha had a point: finding out exactly what the Big Uglies knew about the inner workings of the atom could prove as important as anything else in this campaign. With hope, but without too much, Atvar put a hushmike to his mouth and asked the bannership’s computer what it knew.

  He’d expected it to report back that it had no information. Instead, though, it gave him a translated radio intercept of a news item from the United States. “X-rays reveal the Cincinnati Reds outfielder Mike McCormick suffered a fractured leg in yesterday’s contest. He is expected to be out for the season.”

  Like a lot of translated intercepts, this one didn’t tell Atvar everything he might have wanted to know. He wondered what sort of contest an outfielder (whatever an outfielder was) took part in, and for what season he was lost. Spring? Summer? Harvest? The fleetlord also wondered whether Cincinnati (whose name he did recognize) had Greens and Blues and Yellows to go with its Reds.

  But all that was by the bye. The important thing about the intercept was that it showed this Mike McCormick’s leg fracture had been diagnosed by X-rays. Atvar presumed that meant X-rays were in common use down on Tosev 3: if they weren’t, then the Big Uglies wouldn’t have freely talked about them on the radio during wartime. And if X-rays were in common use …

  “They know something about the inner workings of the atom,” he said, and explained his reasoning. Dismay spread through the ranks of the shiplords.

  Straha spelled out the reason for that dismay: “Then they may indeed be covertly seeking a means of producing nuclear weapons.”

  “So they may,” Atvar admitted. Oddly, the notion appalled him less than he would have guessed. He’d been appalled so many times already by the Tosevites and the unexpected things they did that he was getting hard to shock. He just let out a long, hissing sigh and said, “One more thing to worry about.”

  The White Horse Inn smelled of beer and sweat and the tobacco smoke that made the air nearly as thick as a London peasoup fog. The barmaid named Daphne set pints of what was misleadingly called best bitter in front of David Goldfarb and Jerome Jones. She scooped up the shillings they’d laid on the bar, slapped Jones’s wrist when he tried to slip an arm around her waist, and spun away, laughing. Her skirt swirled high on her shapely legs.

  Sighing, Jones followed her with his eyes. “It’s no use, old man,” Goldfarb said. “I told you that weeks ago—she only goes with fliers.”

  “Can’t shoot a man for trying,” Jones answered. He tried every time they came to the White Horse Inn, and as consistently crashed in flames. He took a moody pull at his beer. “I do wish she wouldn’t giggle that way, though. Under other circumstances, it might discourage me.”

  Goldfarb drank, too, then made a face. “This beer discourages me. Bloody war.” Thin and sour, the yellow liquid in his glass bore only the faintest resemblance to what he fondly recalled from the days before rationing. He sipped again. “Pah! I wonder if it’s saltpeter they’re putting in it, the way they do in schools to keep the boys from getting randy.”

  “No, I know that taste, by God.”

  “That’s right, you went to a public school.”

  “So what? Back before the Lizards smashed our radar, you were better with it than I ever was.”

  To cover his thoughts, Goldfarb drained his glass, raised a finger for another. Eventually, even bad beer numbed the tongue. Jerome could say So what? sincerely enough, but after the war was done—if it ever ended—he’d go back to Cambridge and end up a barrister or a professor or a business executive. Goldfarb would go back, too, back to repairing ireless sets behind the counter of a dingy little store on a dingy little street. To him, his friend’s egalitarianism rang hollow.

  Blithely oblivious, Jones went on, “Besides, if there is saltpeter in this bitter, it’s not working worth a damn. I’d really fancy a go right now—but it’s the sods with wings on their shirtfronts who’ll get one. Look at that, will you?” He pointed. “Disgraceful, I call it.”

  Now you know what it’s like, down in the lower classes, Goldfarb thought. But Jerome didn’t, not really. Just seeing Daphne perched on a flight engineer’s knee over by the electric fire wasn’t enough to take away his ingrained advantages in society. All it did was make him jealous.

  It made Goldfarb jealous, too, especially when Sylvia, the other barmaid, also went over to the table full of aircrew. She quickly ended up in the bomb-aimer’s lap. It wasn’t fair. Goldfarb tried to remember the pithy phrase he’d heard in an American film not long before. Them as has, gits, that was it. No grammar there, but a lot of truth.

  As for himself, he didn’t even seem able to git his pint refilled. That struck him as excessive. He got up, started over to the table where the fliers were monopolizing the barmaids. Jerome Jones put a hand on his arm. “Are you bloody daft, David? There’s seven of them there; they’ll wipe the floor with you.”

  “What?” Goldfarb stared, then realized what Jones was talking about. “Oh. I don’t want a fight, I just want a fresh pint. Maybe they’ll stop feeling up the girls long enough to let one of them draw me another.”

  “Maybe they won’t, too,” Jerome said. But Goldfarb ignored him and walked across the pub to the aircrew and the barmaids.

  Nobody there took any notice of him for a few seconds. The fellow who had Daphne on his knee was saying, “… worst thing I saw there, or at least the nastiest, was that old fellow walking down the street with a yellow Star of David on his chest.” He looked up from his comrades, saw Goldfarb standing there. “You want something, friend?” His tone was neither hostile nor the reverse; he waited to hear what Goldfarb had to say.

  “I came over to see if I could borrow Daphne just for a moment.” Goldfarb held up his empty pint glass. “But what you were just talking about—I hope I’m not prying, but you’re newly back from France?”

  “That’s right. Who wants to know?” The flight engineer was a pint or two ahead of Goldfarb, but still alert enough. One of his eyebrows rose. “I hope I’m not prying in turn, radarman, but are you by any chance of the Jewish faith?”

  “Yes, I am.” Goldfarb knew he didn’t look quite English; his hair was too wavy, and the wrong color brown, while no AngloSaxon—or even Celt—wore a nose like his. “I have relatives in Warsaw, you see, and I thought I’d ask someone who’d seen with his own eyes how Jews are faring under the Germans. If I’m interrupting your party, I do apologize. Perhaps if I gave you my name, you could look me up at the station when it’s convenient for you.”

  “No, that’s all right. Pull up a chair,” the flight engineer said after a quick eyecheck of the rest of the aircrew. He straightened his leg, so Daphne started to slide down it. She squeaked indignantly as she sprang to her feet. The flight engineer said, “Hush, love. Bring this lad his new pint, will you?”

  Pert nose in the air, Daphne snatched Goldfarb’s glass out of his hand and marched behind the bar. “That’s very kind of you,” Goldfarb said. He poin
ted back at Jerome Jones. “May my friend join you as well?” On receiving a nod, he waved Jones over.

  “I suppose he’ll want another pint, too,” Daphne said darkly as she returned with the filled glass. “The one he has is empty now, that’s bloody sure.” Without waiting for an answer, she carried Jones’ dead soldier away to be revivified.

  The newly enlarged group exchanged names. The pilot of the aircrew, Ken Embry, said, “You have to remember two things, Goldfarb: Warsaw isn’t likely to be just like Paris by any means, and it isn’t under the Germans any more.”

  “I understand all that,” Goldfarb said. “But anything I can find out will be of value to me.”

  “Fair enough,” said the flight engineer, whose name was George Bagnall. “Aside from the six-pointed stars, I saw shops and even telephone booths with signs saying things like ‘No Jews allowed’ and ‘Patronage by Jews prohibited.’ Other shops had special late-afternoon hours for Jews, so they could only pick over what other people had left.”

  “Bastards,” Goldfarb muttered.

  “Who, the Jerries? Too right they are,” Embry said. “We didn’t see anything, though, like the photos the Lizards have released from Warsaw, or like what the people who live there talk about on the Lizards’ wireless programs. If even a tenth part of that’s true, by God, I’m damned if I blame those poor devils for rising up against the Nazis, not a bit of it.”

  The rest of the aircrew spoke up in agreement, all save Douglas Bell; the bomb-aimer and Sylvia were so wrapped up in each other that Goldfarb half expected them to consummate their friendship on the table or the floor. If Bell aimed his bombs as well as he did his hands, he’d done some useful work.

  Embry said, “Even with pictures, I have trouble believing the Jerries built a slaughterhouse for people at whatever the name of that place was.”

  “Treblinka,” Goldfarb said. He had trouble believing it, too, but less trouble, he guessed, than Embry. To a young Englishman whose accent said he came from the comfortable classes, organized murder like that might really be unthinkable. To Goldfarb, whose father had fled less organized but no less sincere persecution, the notion of a place like Treblinka was merely dreadful. Where Embry couldn’t imagine it, Goldfarb could, and had to hope he was wrong.

  “How has it been back here, day by day?” Bagnall asked. “Until Jerry shipped us home from Calais, we’ve been in the air so much all we did on the ground was sleep and eat.”

  Goldfarb and Jones looked at each other. “It’s not been the push-button war we had during the Blitz,” Goldfarb said at last. “The Lizards are smarter than Jerry; they took out our radar straightaway and send more rockets after it whenever we try to light it up again. So we’ve been reduced to field glasses and telephones, like in the old days.”

  Daphne came back with Jerome Jones’ new pint. He leered at her. “David’s been using his field glasses to peer in your window.”

  “Really?” she said coolly, setting the pint down. “And all the time I thought it was you.”

  Jones’ fair English skin made his flush visible even by the light of the, fireplace. Goldfarb and the aircrew howled laughter. Even Douglas Bell untangled himself from Sylvia long enough to say, “There’s a fair hit, by God!” Jones buried his nose in the pint.

  “Do you know what I hear has worked well, though?” Goldfarb valiantly tried to get back to George Bagnall’s question. “Barrage balloons have cost the Lizards some of their aircraft. They fly so low and so fast they haven’t a prayer of evading if the balloon’s wire happens to lie in their path.”

  “Nice to know something does a bit of good,” Bagnall said. “But that wasn’t quite what I meant—not the war, I mean. Just—life.”

  “Radarmen don’t have lives,” Jones said. “It’s against His Majesty’s articles of war, or something like that.” He shoved his reemptied pint toward Daphne. “Try not to put so much arsenic in this one, my darling.”

  “Why? You’d likely thrive on it.” But the barmaid went to fill the pint again.

  “She’s sweet, Daphne is. I can tell that already,” Bagnall said.

  “Ah, but you got her on your knee,” Goldfarb said morosely. “Do you know how many months Jerome and I have been trying to do that?”

  “Quite a few, by your long face. Aren’t there any other women in Dover?”

  “I expect there may be. Have we looked, Jerome?”

  “Under every flat stone we could find,” Jones answered. He was watching Douglas Bell and Sylvia. If he’d had a pad in front of him, he’d have taken notes, too.

  “I’m going to pour this over your head, dearie,” Daphne told him.

  “They say it makes a good hair-set,” he said, adding, “Not that I’d know,” just in time to keep the barmaid from making good on her threat.

  Goldfarb finished his second pint, but wasn’t quite in his friend’s hurry to get another one. Everything the Lancaster aircrew had told him about life for the Jews in France made him worry more about what had been happening to them in Warsaw, where traditions of persecution ran, back centuries and where the Nazis had no one within hundreds of miles to keep an eye on what they did. German radio could scream all it liked about “traitors to mankind”; he feared the Jews in Warsaw had been so desperate that even alien invaders looked better to them than the benign and humane rule of Hans Frank.

  He wondered how his uncles and aunts and cousins were doing in Poland. Thinking about the broadcasts in Yiddish and German over the Warsaw shortwave station the Lizards had set up, he wondered how many—or how few—of his uncles and aunts and cousins were still alive.

  He stared down at his empty pint. Would another help him forget his fears or bring them more strongly to the surface? The latter, he suspected. He held out the glass to Daphne anyhow. “Since you’re still on your feet, dear, would you bring me one more?” Enough bitter and he’d stop caring about anything at all—if not this pint, then the next one or the one after that.

  Then Jerome asked the aircrew, “And what happens to you lads next?”

  Ken Embry said, “I expect we’ll be going up again in another day or two. By all they’ve said, experienced aircrew are getting rather thin on the ground, if you’ll forgive something of a mixed metaphor.”

  “How can you be so bloody calm about it?” Jones burst out. “Flying against the Jerries was one thing, but against the Lizards …”

  Embry shrugged. “It’s what we do. It’s what we have to do. What else is there for anyone to do, but do what he has to do the best he can for as long as he can do it?”

  Goldfarb studied the pilot and the rest of the aircrew. While he worried about his relatives—and from all he’d heard, with reason—they carried on in the face of their own nearly certain deaths. He looked at Sylvia, who might have been trying to squeeze Douglas Bell to death, and suddenly understood, on a level deeper than words, why she and Daphne would sleep with fliers but not with men who stayed on the ground. He remained rueful about that, but his jealousy disappeared.

  When Daphne came back with his bitter, he stood up, dug in his pocket, came out with a handful of silver. “Fetch these lads a round, would you?”

  Jerome Jones stared at him. “Such largess! Did your rich grandfather just cork off, or have you forgotten you’re a Jew?”

  He would have gone for anyone else’s throat, especially with a couple of pints in him. Bagnall and a couple of the other members of the aircrew shifted in their seats to get ready to grab him if he tried. Instead, he started to laugh. “Bloody hell, Daphne, I’ll buy one for this big-mouthed sod, too.”

  The aircrew relaxed. Jones’ eyes got even bigger than they had been. “If I’d known calling you names was the way to pry beer out of you, I’d’ve tried it long ago.”

  “Geh kak afen yam,” Goldfarb said, and then disgusted everybody by refusing to translate.

  Moishe Russie felt his heart pound in his chest. Meeting the Lizard governor whose forces had driven the Nazis out of Warsaw always frightene
d him, though Zolraag had treated him well enough—certainly better than he would have fared had he fallen under the eye of Hans Frank. He did not know whether Frank was dead or fled. Hoping him dead was sinful. Russie knew that He was willing to make the wish even so.

  Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, the leader of the Home Army, came out of Zolraag’s office. He did not look happy. He looked even less happy on seeing Russie. “What are you going to pry out of him now, Jew?” he growled. “They will give you anything you like, it seems.”

  “That is not so,” Russie said. Bor-Komorowski frightened him, too. He hated Germans, yes, but he also hated Jews. The Germans were gone now. That left him only one target.

  Scowling still, Bor-Komorowski stamped out, his boot heels ringing on the marble floor. Russie hurried into Zolraag’s office; keeping his people’s protector waiting would not do.

  “Your Excellency,” he said in German. He could speak to a Lizard easily enough now. A couple of weeks before, when the Nazis fled, beset from within and attacked from without at the same time, the first of the little, scampering creatures had seemed like demons to him. Though they were allies, they were weird almost beyond his power to take in. There the German propaganda had not lied.

  But dealing with Zolraag day by day had begun to make strangeness familiar—and also brought the suspicion that the Lizard found him in particular and humanity in general at least as peculiar as he thought the governor.

  “Herr Russie.” Zolraag spoke slowly and with an accent that almost swallowed r’s and turned the middle sound in Russie’s name into a long hiss. “You are well, I hope?”

  “Yes, Your Excellency, thank you.” Russie hissed himself, and made a gargling sound: he’d learned how to say “thank you” in Zolraag’s language. He was doing his best to pick up words of the Lizards’ speech; as he was already fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Polish, acquiring a new tongue held no terror for him. He got the idea that Zolraag found the idea of there being many languages as alien as anything else about the Earth.