Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

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

  But Jager might have been part of Gobbels’ 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 Besancon, 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,” Jager 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 Skorzenymamzer 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 flyinganything.”

  “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, was 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 callskelkwank 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 ofskelkwank 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 withskelkwank light.

  Jordan went on, “What we do is, we illuminate the target with askelkwank 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?”

  “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? Th
eir 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 canape, but the description fit all too well. He wished he could have gone up against theLuftwaffe with a Lancaster armed withskelkwank bombs and rockets to swat down theMesserschmitts 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 thanwhy.

  “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 Jager. 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 Jager 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 Jager 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 Jager, 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, Jager joined her. They’d only just finished putting on their clothes when somebody knocked on the door. Jager 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.

  Jager 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 Jager 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?” Jager 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.”

  Jager kept his mind on the business at hand: “Whatare 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?” Jager 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 Jager. “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 therodina, not now, not ever, not unless she wanted endless years in thegulag or, perhaps more likely, a quick end with a bullet in the back of the head. She’d thrown away her old lif
e as irrevocably as Jager 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 thenafkehs- the whores,” he amplified when he saw Ludmila and Jager didn’t catch the Yiddish word, “but somebody will know all about ’em. Men are men-even Jews.” He looked a challenge at Jager.

  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.

  Jager 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, Jager 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 Jager 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 Jager merely a commonplace. How sad that made her showed how giddy she was feeling.

  On the table lay a chunk of black bread. Jager 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.”