Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “It’s not that I don’t like her, you understand,” he told Dr. Judah Ussishkin over the chessboard one night.

  “No, it wouldn’t be that, would it?” Ussishkin’s voice was dry. He moved a knight. “She’s fond of you, too.”

  Anielewicz’s face flamed as he studied the move. Zofia would have been more fond of him in direct proportion to any increased stamina he showed. He’d never imagined an affair with a woman who was more lecherous than he was; up till now, he’d always had to do the persuading. But Zofia would drop anything to get between the sheets-or under a wagon, or into the backseat of Dr. Ussishkin’s moribund Fiat.

  Trying to keep his mind on the game, Mordechai pushed a pawn one square ahead. That kept the knight from taking a position in which, with one more move, it could fork his queen and a rook.

  A beatific smile wreathed Ussishkin’s tired face. “Ah, my boy, you are learning,” he said. “Your defense has made good progress since we began to play. Soon, now, you will learn to put together an effective attack, and then you will be a player to be reckoned with.”

  “Coming from you, Doctor, that’s a compliment.” Anielewicz wanted to be a player to be reckoned with, and he wanted to mount an effective attack. He hadn’t got to be head of the Jewish fighters in Lizard-occupied Poland by sitting back and waiting for things to happen; his instinct was to try to make them happen. Against Ussishkin, he hadn’t been able to, not yet.

  He did his best; the midgame might have seen a machine gun rake the chessboard, so fast and furious did pieces fall. But when the exchanges were done, he found himself down a bishop and a pawn and facing another losing position. He tipped over his king.

  “You make me work harder all the time,” Ussishkin said. “I got some plum brandy for stitching up a farmer’s cut hand yesterday. Will you take a glass with me?”

  “Yes, thank you, but don’t ask me for another game of chess afterwards,” Mordechai said. “If I can’t beat you sober, I’m sure I can’t beat you shikker.”

  Ussishkin smiled as he poured. “Chess and brandy do not mix.” The brandy came from a bottle that had once, by its label, held vodka. People still had vodka these days, but it was homemade. For that matter, the plum brandy had to be homemade, too. Ussishkin lifted his glass in salute. “L’chaym.”

  “L’chaym.” Anielewicz drank. The raw brandy charred all the way down; sweat sprang out on his face. “Phew! If that were any stronger, you wouldn’t need gasoline for your automobile.”

  “Ah but if I got it running, think how disappointed you and Zofia would be,” Ussishkin said. Mordechai blushed again. In the candlelight, the doctor didn’t notice, or pretended he didn’t. He turned serious. “I know telling a young man to be careful is more often than not a waste of time, but I will try with you. Do be careful. If you make her pregnant, her father will not be pleased, which means the rest of the Poles here will not be pleased, either. We and they have gotten on as well as could be expected, all things considered. I would not like that to change.”

  “No, neither would I,” Mordechai said. For one thing, Leczna held a good many more Poles than Jews; strife would not be to the minority’s advantage. For another, strife among the locals was liable to draw the Lizards’ unwelcome attention to the town. They already had more interest than Anielewicz liked, for they drew their food locally. He preferred staying in obscurity.

  “You seem sensible, for one so young.” Ussishkin sipped his brandy again. He didn’t cough or flush or give any other sign he wasn’t drinking water. An aspiring engineer till the war, Anielewicz guessed he’d had his gullet plated with stainless steel. The doctor went on, “You should also remember-if she does conceive, the child would be raised a Catholic. And she might try to insist on your marrying her. I doubt”-now Ussishkin coughed, not from the plum brandy but to show he did more than doubt-“she would convert. Would you?”

  “No.” Mordechai answered without hesitation. Before the Germans invaded, he hadn’t been pious; he’d lived in the secular world, not that of the shtetl and the yeshiva. But the Nazis didn’t care whether you were secular or not. They wanted to be rid of you any which way. More and more, he’d decided that if he was a Jew, he’d be a Jew. Turning Christian was not an option.

  “Marriages of mixed religion are sometimes happy, but more often battlegrounds,” Ussishkin observed.

  Mordechai didn’t want to marry Zofia Klopotowski. He wouldn’t have wanted to marry her if she were Jewish. He did, however, want to keep on making love with her, if not quite as often as she had in mind. If he did, she’d probably catch sooner or later, which would lead to the unpleasant consequences the doctor had outlined. He knocked back the rest of his brandy, wheezed, and said, “Life is never simple.”

  “There I cannot argue with you. Death is simple; I have seen so much death these past few years that it seems very simple to me.” Ussishkin exhaled, a long, gusty breath that made candle flames flutter. Then he poured fresh plum brandy into his glass. “And if I start talking like a philosopher instead of a tired doctor, I must need to be more sober or more drunk.” He sipped. “You see my choice.”

  “Oh, yes.” Mordechai put an edge of irony in his voice. He wondered how many years had rolled past since Judah Ussishkin last got truly drunk. Probably more than I’ve been alive, he thought.

  Far off in the distance, he heard airplane engines, at first like gnats with deep voices but rapidly swelling to full-throated roars. Then roars, these harsh and abrupt, rose from the rocket battery the Lizards had stationed out beyond the beet fields.

  Ussishkin’s face grew sad. “More death tonight, this time in the air.”

  “Yes.” Anielewicz wondered how many German or Russian planes, how many young Germans or Russians, were falling out of the sky. Almost as many as the Lizards had shot at-their rockets were ungodly accurate. Flying a mission knowing you were likely to run into such took courage. Even if you were a Nazi, it took courage.

  Somewhere not far away, a thunderclap announced a bomber’s return to earth. Dr. Ussishkin gulped down the second glass of brandy, then got himself a third. Anielewicz raised an eyebrow; maybe he did mean to get drunk. The physician said, “A pity the Lizards can slay with impunity.”

  “Not with impunity. We-” Anielewicz shut up. One glass of brandy had led him to say one word too many. He didn’t know how much Ussishkin knew about his role as Jewish fighting leader, he’d carefully refrained from asking the doctor, for fear of giving away more than he learned. But Ussishkin had to be aware he was part of the resistance, for Anielewicz was not the first man who’d taken refuge here.

  In a musing voice, as if speculating about an obscure and much disputed biblical text, Ussishkin said, “I wonder if anything could be done about those rockets without endangering the townsfolk.”

  “Something could probably be done,” Anielewicz said; he’d studied the site with professional interest while the Lizards prepared it “What would happen to the town afterwards is a different question.”

  “The Lizards are not the hostage takers the Nazis were,” Ussishkin said, still musingly.

  “I have the feeling they knew war only from books before they got here,” Mordechai answered. “A lot of the filthy stuff, no matter how well it works, doesn’t get into that kind of book.” He glanced sharply over at Ussishkin. “Or are you saying I should do something about that rocket installation?”

  The doctor hesitated; he knew they were treading dangerous ground. At last he said, “I thought you might perhaps have some experience in such things. Was I wrong?”

  “Yes-and no,” Anielewicz said. Sometimes you had to know when to drop your cover, too. “Playing games with the Lizards here is a lot different from what it’s like in a place like Warsaw. A lot more buildings to hide among there-a lot more people to hide among, too. Here their rocket launchers and everything they use are set up right out in the open-hard to get at without being spotted.”

  “I don’t suppose the razor-wire circles around t
hem make matters any easier, either,” Ussishkin murmured.

  “They certainly don’t.” Anielewicz thought about going off in the night and trying to pot a few Lizards from long range with his Mauser. But the Lizards had gadgets that let them see in the dark the way cats wished they could. Even without those gadgets, sniping wouldn’t really hurt the effectiveness of the battery: the Lizards would just replace whatever males he managed to wound or kill.

  Then, all of a sudden, he laughed out loud. “And what amuses you?” Judah Ussishkin asked. “Somehow I doubt its razor wire.”

  “No, not razor wire,” Anielewicz, admitted. “But I think I know how to get through it.” He explained. It didn’t take long.

  By the time he was done, Ussishkin’s eyes were wide and staring. “This will work?” he demanded.

  “They had enough trouble with it in Warsaw,” Mordechai said. “I don’t know just what it will do here, but it ought to do something.”

  “You’re still lying low, aren’t you?” Ussishkin said, then answered his own question: “Yes, of course you are. And even if you weren’t, I’d be a better choice to approach Tadeusz Sobieski, anyhow. He’s known me all his life; when he was born, my Sarah delivered him. I’ll talk with him first thing in the morning. We’ll see if he can be as generous to the Lizards as you have in mind.”

  With that, Anielewicz had to be content. He stayed inside Dr. Ussishkin’s house. Sarah wouldn’t let him help with the cooking or cleaning, so he read books and studied the chessboard. Every day, a horse-drawn wagon rattled down the street, carrying supplies from Sobieski the grocer to the Lizards at their rocket battery.

  For several days, nothing happened. Then one bright, sunny afternoon, a time when neither the Luftwaffe nor the Red Air Force would be insane enough to put planes in the air over Poland, the battery launched all its rockets, one after another, roar! roar! roar! into the sky.

  Farmworkers came running in from the fields. Mordechai felt like hugging himself with glee as he listened to scraps of their excited conversation: “The things have gone crazy!” “Shot off their rockets, then started shooting at each other!” “Never seen fireworks like them in all my born days!”

  Dr. Ussishkin came into the house a few minutes later. “You were right, it seems,” he said to Anielewicz. “This was the day Tadeusz laced all the supplies with as much ginger as he had. They do have a strong reaction to the stuff, don’t they?”

  “It’s more than a drunk for them; more like a drug,” Mordechai answered. “It makes them fast and nervous-hair-trigger, I guess you might say. Somebody must have imagined he heard engines or thought he saw something in one of their instruments, and that would have been plenty to touch them off.”

  “I wonder what they’ll do now,” Ussishkin said. “Not the ones who went berserk out there today, but the higher ranking ones who ordered the battery placed where it was.”

  They didn’t have long to wait for their answer. At least one of the Lizards must have survived and radioed Lublin, for in side the hour several Lizard lorries from the urban center rolled through the streets of Leczna. When they left the next day, they took the rocket launchers with them. If the battery went up again, it went up somewhere else.

  With the Lizards out of the neighborhood, Anielewicz had no more excuse for staying indoors all the time. Zofia Klopotowski waylaid him and dragged him into the bushes, or as near as made no difference. After his spell of celibacy, he kept up with her for a while, but then his ardor began to flag.

  Just as he’d never imagined he’d have been relieved to see the Lizards erect their rocket battery in his own back yard, so to speak, he found equally surprising his halfhearted wish that they’d come back.

  A disheveled soldier shouted frantically in Russian. When George Bagnall didn’t understand fast enough to suit him, he started to point his submachine gun at the grounded aviator.

  By then, Bagnall had had a bellyful of frantic Russians. He’d even had a bellyful of frantic Germans, a species that did not exist in stereotype but proved quite common under the stress of combat. He got to his feet, knocked the gun barrel aside with a contemptuous swipe, and growled, “Why don’t you shove that thing up your arse-or would you rather I did it for you?”

  He spoke in English, but the tone got across. So did his manner. The Red Army man stopped treating him like a servant and started treating him like an officer. The old saw about the Hun being either at your throat or at your feet seemed to apply even more to Russians than it did to Germans. If you gave in to them, they rode roughshod over you, but if you showed a little bulge, they figured you had to be the boss and started tugging at their forelocks.

  Bagnall turned to Jerome Jones. “What’s this bloody goon babbling about? I have more Russian than I did when we got stuck here-not hard, that, since I had none-but I can’t make head nor tail of it when he goes on so blinking fast.”

  “I’ll see if I can find out, sir,” Jones answered. The radar man had spoken a little Russian before he landed in Pskov; after several months-and no doubt a good deal of intimate practice with the fair Tatiana, Bagnall thought enviously-he was pretty fluent. He said something to the Russian soldier, who shouted and pointed to the map on the wall.

  “The usual?” Bagnall asked.

  “The usual,” Jones agreed tiredly: “wanting to know if his unit should conform to General Chill’s orders and pull back from the second line to the third one.” He switched back to Russian, calmed down the soldier, and sent him on his way. “They’ll obey, even if he is a Nazi. They probably should have obeyed two hours ago, before Ivan there came looking for us, but, God willing, they won’t have taken too many extra casualties for being stubborn.”

  Bagnall sighed. “When I proposed this scheme, I thought we’d get only the serious business.” He made a face. “I was young and naive-I admit it.”

  “You’d damned well better,” said Ken Embry, who was pouring himself a glass of herb-and-root tea from a battered samovar on the opposite side of the gloomy room in the Pskov Krom. “You must have thought being tsar came with the droit de seigneur attached.”

  “Only for Jones here,” Bagnall retorted, which made the radarman stammer and cough. “At the time, I remember thinking two things. First was to keep the Nazis and Bolshies from bashing each other so the Lizards wouldn’t have themselves a walkover here.”

  “We’ve managed that, for the moment, anyhow,” Embry said. “If the Lizards committed more tanks to this front, we’d have a dry time of it, but they seem to have decided they need them elsewhere. They get no complaints from me on that score, I assure you.”

  “Nor from me,” Bagnall said. “They’re quite enough trouble as is.”

  “There’s fighting on the outskirts of Kaluga, the wireless reports,” Jerome Jones said. “That’s not far southwest of Moscow, and there’s damn all between it and Red Square. Doesn’t sound what you’d call good.”

  “No, that’s bad,” Embry agreed. “Makes me glad so many of the fighters here are partisans-locals-and not regular army types recruited from God knows where. If you’re fighting for your own particular home you’re less likely to want to pack it in if Moscow falls.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but I dare say you’re right,” Bagnall answered, “even if it is a most unsocialist thing to say.”

  “What, that you’re gladder to fight for your own property? Well, I’m a Tory from a long line of Tories, and I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it,” Embry said. “All right, George, you didn’t want the Russians and the Jerries to go at each other. What was the other notion in what passes for your mind as to why we needed this particular headache?”

  “After that raid on the Lizards outpost, I had a serious disinclination toward infantry combat, if you must know,” Bagnall said. “What of you?”

  “Well, I must admit that, given the choice between another stint of it and ending up in the kip with that barmaid in Dover we all knew, I’d be likely to choose Sylvia,” Embry s
aid judiciously. “I do believe, however, that we perform a useful function here. If we didn’t, I’d feel worse about not shouldering my trusty rifle and going out to do or die for Holy Mother Russia.”

  “Oh, quite,” Bagnall agreed. “Keeping the Germans and the Soviets from each other’s throats isn’t the least contribution we could make to the war effort in Pskov.”

  Lizard planes roared low overhead. Antiaircraft guns, mostly German, threw shells into the air at them, adding to the racket that pierced the Krom’s thick stone walls. None of the antiaircraft guns was stationed very close to Pskov’s old citadel. The ack-ack wasn’t good enough to keep the Lizards from hitting just about anything they wanted to hit, and drew their notice to whatever it tried to protect. Bagnall. approved of not having their notice drawn to the Krom: being buried under tons of rock was not the way of shuffling off this mortal coil he had in mind.

  Lieutenant General Kurt Chill stalked into the room, followed by Brigadier Aleksandr German, one of the chiefs of what had been the partisan Forest Republic until the Lizards came. Both men looked furious. They had even more basic reasons than most in Pskov for disliking and distrusting each other: it wasn’t just Wehrmacht against Red Army with them, it was Nazi against Jew.

  “Well, gentlemen, what seems to be the bone of contention now?” Bagnall asked, as if the disagreements in Pskov were over the teams to pick for a football pool rather than moves that would get men killed. Sometimes that detached tone helped calm the excited men who came for arbitration.

  And sometimes it didn’t. Aleksandr German shouted, “This Hitlerite maniac won’t give me the support I need. If he doesn’t send some men, a lot of the left is going to come apart. And does he care? Not even a little bit. As long as he can keep his precious troops intact, who cares what happens to the front?”

  Bagnall could barely follow the partisan brigadier’s fast, guttural Yiddish. It was close enough to German for Chill to have no trouble understanding it, though. He snapped, “The man is a fool. He wants me to commit elements of the 122nd Antitank Battalion to an area where no panzer are opposing his forces. If I send the battalion piecemeal into fights which are not its proper province, none of it will be left when it is most desperately needed, as it will be.”