Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “Indeed, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said. Stalin, for once, had been guilty of understatement. Molotov had gone to Cairo expecting to have nothing but trouble because of the intransigent stand Stalin required him to take. But if Stalin had disastrously misread Hitler’s intentions, he’d gauged the Lizards aright.

  “The Lizards have adhered in every particular to the agreement you forged with them,” Stalin said: displays of martial might such as the one just past made him happy as a boy playing with lead soldiers. “They have everywhere removed themselves from Soviet soil: with the exception of the formerly Polish territory they elected to retain. And there, Comrade Foreign Commissar, I have no fault to find with you.”

  “For which I thank you, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov answered. “Better to have borders with those who keep agreements than with those who break them.”

  “Exactly so,” Stalin said. “And our mopping up of German remnants on Soviet soil continues most satisfactorily. Some areas in the southern Ukraine and near the Finnish border remain troublesome, but, on the whole, the Hitlerite invasion, like that of the Lizards, can be reckoned a thing of the past. We move forward once more, toward true socialism.”

  He dug in a trouser pocket and took out his pipe, a box of matches, and a leather tobacco pouch. Opening the pouch, he filled the pipe from it, then lighted a match and held it to the bowl of the pipe. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in breath to get the pipe going. Smoke rose from the bowl; more leaked from his nostrils and one corner of his mouth.

  Molotov’s nose twitched. He’d expected the acrid reek ofmakhorka, which, as far as he was concerned, was to good tobacco what diesel fumes were to good air. What Stalin was smoking, though, had an aroma rich and flavorful enough to slice and serve on a plate for supper.

  “A Turkish blend?” he asked.

  “As a matter of fact, no,” Stalin answered. “An American one: a gift from President Hull. Milder than I quite care for, but good of its kind. And there will be Turkish again, in short order. Once we have the northern coast of the Black Sea fully under our control, sea traffic will resume, and we can also begin rail shipments by way of Armenia and Georgia.” As he usually did when he mentioned his homeland, he gave Molotov a sly look, as if daring him to make something of his ancestry. Never one for foolhardy action, Molotov knew much better than that. Stalin took another puff, then went on, “And we shall have to work out arrangements for trade with the Lizards, too, of course.”

  “Comrade General Secretary?” Molotov said. Stalin’s leaps of thought often left logic far behind. Sometimes that brought great benefits to the Soviet state: his relentless industrialization, much of it beyond the range of Nazi bombers, might have saved the USSR when the Germans invaded. Of course, the invasion, when it came, would have been better handled had Stalin’s intuition not convinced him that everyone who warned him of it was lying. You couldn’t tell in advance what the intuition was worth. You had to sit back and await results. When the Soviet state was on the line, that grew nerve-racking.

  “Trade with the Lizards,” Stalin repeated, as if to a backwards child. “The regions they occupy will not produce everything they need. We shall supply them with raw materials they may lack. Being socialists, we shall not be good capitalists, and we shall lose greatly on the exchanges-so long as we obtain their manufactured goods in return.”

  “Ah.” Molotov began to see. This time, he thought, Stalin’s intuition was working well. “You want us to begin copying their methods and adapting them for our own purposes.”

  “That is right,” Stalin said. “We had to do the same thing with the West after the Revolution. We had a generation in which to catch up, or they would destroy us. The Nazis struck us a hard blow, but we held. Now, with the Lizards, we have-mankind has-paid half the world in exchange for most of another generation.”

  “Until the colonization fleet comes,” Molotov said. Yes, logic backed intuition to give Stalin solid reasons for trading with the Lizards.

  “Until the colonization fleet comes,” Stalin agreed. “We need more bombs of our own, we need rockets of our own, we need calculating machines that almost think, we need ships that fly in space so they cannot look down upon us without our looking down upon them as well. The Lizards have these things. The capitalists and fascists are on their way to them. If we are left behind, they will bury us.”

  “Iosef Vissarionovich, I think you are right,” Molotov said. He would have said it whether he thought Stalin right or wrong. Had he actually thought him wrong, he would have started looking for ways and means to ensure that the latest pronunciamento was diluted before it took effect. That was dangerous, but sometimes necessary: where would the Soviet Union be now had Stalin liquidated everyone in the country who knew anything about nuclear physics?Under the Lizards’ thumb, Molotov thought.

  Stalin accepted Molotov’s agreement as no more than his due. “Of course I am,” he said complacently. “I do not see how we can keep the colonization fleet from landing, but the thing we must remember-this above all else, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich-is that it will bring the Lizards fresh numbers, but nothing fundamentally new.”

  “True enough, Comrade General Secretary,” Molotov said cautiously. Again, Stalin had got ahead of him on the page.

  This time, though, intuition had nothing to do with it While Molotov was dickering with the Lizards, Stalin must have been working through the implications of their social and economic development. He said, “It is inevitable that they would have nothing fundamentally new. Marxist analysis shows this must be so. They are, despite their machines, representatives of the ancient economic model, relying on slaves-with them partly mechanical, partly the other races they have subjugated-to produce for a dependent upper class. Such a society is without exception highly conservative and resistant to innovation of any sort. Thus we can overcome them.”

  “That is nicely argued, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said, his admiration unfeigned. “Mikhail Andreyevich could not reason more trenchantly.”

  “Suslov?” Stalin shrugged. “He made some small contributions to this line of thought, but the main thrust of it, of course, is mine.”

  “Of course,” Molotov agreed, straight-faced as usual. He wondered what the young Party ideologist would say to that, but had no intention of asking. In any case, it did not matter. No matter who had formulated the idea, it supported what Molotov had believed all along. “As the dialectic demonstrates, Comrade General Secretary, history is on our side.”

  Sam Yeager strolled down Central Avenue in Hot Springs, savoring the summer weather. One of the things he savored about it was being able to escape it every now and then. The sign painted on the front window of the Southern Grill said,OUR REFRIDGERATED AIR-CONDITIONING IS WORKING AGAIN. The wheeze and hum of the machinery and fan backed up the claim.

  He turned to Barbara. “Want to stop here for some lunch?”

  She looked at the sign, then took one hand off the grip of Jonathan’s baby carnage. “Twist my arm,” she said. Sam gave it a token twist “Oh, mercy!” she cried, but not very loud, because Jonathan was asleep.

  Sam held the door open for her. “Best mercy I know of.” He followed her into the restaurant.

  That took them out of Hot Springs summer in a hurry. The air-conditioning was refrigerated, all right; Sam felt as if he’d walked into Minnesota November. He wondered if his sweat would start freezing into tiny icicles all over his body.

  A colored waiter in a bow tie appeared as if by magic, menus under his arm. “You jus’ follow me, Sergeant, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll take you to a booth where you can park that buggy right alongside.”

  Sam slid onto the maroon leatherette of the booth with a sigh of contentment. He pointed to the candle on the table, then to the electric lights in the chandelier overhead. “Now the candle is a decoration again,” he said. “You ask me, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Having to use candles for light when we didn’t have anything better-” He shook
his head. “I didn’t like that”

  “No, neither did I.” Barbara opened her menu. She let out a squeak of surprise. “Look at the prices!”

  With some apprehension, Sam did just that. He wondered if he’d suffer the embarrassment of having to walk out of the Southern Grill. He had maybe twenty-five bucks in his wallet; Army pay hadn’t come close to keeping up with jumping prices. The only reason he’d figured he could eat out once in a while was that he got most of his meals for nothing.

  But Barbara hadn’t said which way prices had gone. Everything was down about a third from what he’d expected, and a handwritten addendum boasted of cold Budweiser beer.

  He remarked on that when the waiter returned to take his order and Barbara’s. “Yes, sir, first shipment from St Louis,” the colored man replied. “Just got in yesterday, matter of fact. We’re startin’ to see things now we ain’t seen since the Lizards came. Things is lookin’ up, that they is.”

  Sam glanced at Barbara. When she nodded, he ordered Budweiser for both of them. The red-white-and-blue labels made them smile. The waiter poured the beers with great ceremony. Barbara lifted her glass on high. “Here’s to peace,” she said.

  “I’ll drink to that.” Sam matched action to word. He swallowed the first swig of beer, then thoughtfully smacked his lips. He drank again, and was even more thoughtful. “You know, hon, after drinking mostly home brews and such the last couple of years, I’ll be darned if I don’t like ’em better. More flavor to ’em, you know what I mean?”

  “Oh, good,” Barbara said. “If I were the only one who thought that, I’d figure it was just because I didn’t know anything about beer. It doesn’t mean I can’t drink this, though.” She proved as much. “And it is good to see the Budweiser bottle again-as if an old friend were back from the war.”

  “Yeah.” Yeager wondered how Mutt Daniels was doing, and about all the other Decatur Commodores who’d been riding the train with him when the Lizards strafed it in northern Illinois.

  The waiter set a hamburger in front of him and a roast-beef sandwich before Barbara. Then, with a flourish, he put a full bottle of Heinz catsup on the table between them. “This got here this morning,” he said. “Y’all are the first ones to use it”

  “How about that?” Sam said. He pushed it over toward Barbara so she could have first crack at it. It acted like catsup-it didn’t want to come out of the bottle. When it did pour, too much came out: except, after most of two years without, how could there be too much?

  After he’d anointed the hamburger, Sam took a big bite. His eyes widened. Unlike the Budweiser, he found no disappointment there. “Mm-mm,” he said with his mouth full. “That’s the McCoy.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Barbara agreed, with as much enthusiasm and as few manners.

  Sam disposed of the hamburger in a few bites, then slathered more catsup on the grits that took the place of french fries. He didn’t usually do that. In fact, nobody he knew did that; a proper Southerner who saw him perpetrating such an atrocity would probably ride him out of town on a rail. He didn’t care, not today. He wanted every bite of the sweet-sour tomato tang he could get, and any excuse was a good one. When Barbara did the same thing, he grinned in vindication.

  “Another beer?” the waiter asked as he picked up their plates.

  “Yes,” Sam said after glancing at Barbara again. “But why don’t you make it a local special this time? I’m glad to see the Budweiser, but it’s not as good as I remembered.”

  “You’re about the fo’th person to say that today, sir,” the Negro remarked. “I’ll be right back with the pride of Hot Springs.”

  He had just set the local brews-altogether a deeper, richer amber than Budweiser’s-before Sam and Barbara when Jonathan woke up and started to fuss. Barbara took him out of the carriage and held him, which calmed him down. “You were a good boy-you let us eat lunch,” she told him. She checked. “You’re even dry. Pretty soon I’ll give you lunch, too.” Now she looked over at Sam. “And pretty soon, maybe, I’ll be able to start giving him formula in a bottle. That should be one of the things that come back pretty fast.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sam said. “Way things work, it’ll probably start showing up right about the time he can start drinking regular milk.” He grinned at his son, who was groping for Barbara’s bottle of beer. She pushed it safely out of reach. Jonathan started to cloud up, but Sam made a silly face at him, so he decided to laugh instead. Sam let his features relax. “What a crazy world he’ll grow up in.

  “I only hope it’s a world where hecan grow up,” Barbara said, setting a hand on top of the baby’s head. Jonathan tried to grab it and stuff it into his mouth. Jonathan tried to grab everything and stuff it into his mouth these days. Barbara went on, “What with the bombs and the rockets and the gas-” She shook her head. “And the Lizards’ colonization fleet will get to Earth when he’s only a young man. Who can guess what things will be like then?”

  “Not you, not me, not anybody,” Sam said. “Not the Lizards, either.” The colored waiter set the check on the table. Sam dug his wallet out of his hip pocket and pulled out a ten, a five, and a couple of singles, which left the fellow a nice tip. Barbara put Jonathan back into the buggy. As she started wheeling the baby toward the door, Sam finished his thought: “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, that’s all.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Harry Turtledove was born in Los Angeles in 1949. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. He is also an award-winning full-time writer of science fiction and fantasy. His alternate history works have included several short stories and novels, includingThe Guns of the South,How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel), theGreat War epics: American Front andWalk in Hell, and theColonization books: Second Contact andDown to Earth. His new novel isAmerican Empire: The Center Cannot Hold. He is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

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