Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

“Will they?” David Nussboym asked. “Colonel Skriabin tells me many of you males here are mutineers who murdered your own officers. Even those who did not, have surely given secrets of the Race to the Soviet Union. Why would the Emperors want anything to do with your spirits?”

  Appalled silence crashed down inside the rebellious barracks. Then the Lizards started talking among themselves in low voices, mostly too fast for Nussboym to follow. He got the drift, though: that was something the Lizards might have thought privately but bad never dared speak aloud. He gave Skriabin credit for understanding the way the aliens’ minds worked.

  At last, Ussmak said, “You Big Uglies go straight for the killing shot, don’t you? I have not abandoned the Empire, not in my spirit, but the Emperors may have abandoned me. This is truth. Dare I take the chance of finding out? Dare we take the chance of finding out?” He turned to the prisoners and put the question to them.

  In Poland, the Lizards had derisively called democracy snoutcounting. Here they were using something uncommonly like it to hash the matter out for themselves. Nussboym didn’t say anything about that. He stood waiting till they were done arguing, and tried to follow the debate as best he could.

  “We will work,” Ussmak said. He sounded dull and defeated. “We do need more food, though. And—” He hesitated, then decided to go on: “If you can get us the herb ginger, it would help us through these long, boring days.”

  “I will put your requests to Colonel Skriabin,” Nussboym promised. He didn’t think the Lizards were likely to get more food. Nobody except the NKVD men, their trusties, and the cooks got enough to eat. Ginger was another story. If it drugged them effectively, they might get it.

  He walked out of the barracks. “Well?” Captain Marchenko barked at him.

  “The strike is over,” he answered in Polish, then added a German word to make sure the NKVD man got it: “Kaputt.” Marchenko nodded. He still looked unhappy with the world, but he didn’t look like a man about to hose down the neighborhood with his submachine gun, as he often did. He waved Nussboym back toward the original camp.

  As he returned, he saw Ivan Fyodorov limping back into camp, accompanied by a guard. The right leg of Fyodorov’s trousers was red with blood; his axe must have slipped, out there in the woods.

  “Ivan, are you all right?” Nussboym called.

  Fyodorov looked at him, shrugged, then looked away. Nussboym’s cheeks flamed. This wasn’t the first time since he’d become interpreter for the Lizards that he’d got the cold shoulder from the men of his former work gang. They made it all too clear he wasn’t one of them any more. He hadn’t been asked to rat on them or anything of the sort, but they treated him with the same mistrustful respect they gave any of the other zeks who went out of their way to work with the camp administration.

  I’m just being realistic, he told himself. In Poland, the Lizards had been the power to propitiate, and he’d propitiated them. Only a fool would have thought the Germans a better choice. Well, God had never been shy about turning out fools in carload lots. That was how he’d ended up here, after all. No matter where a man was, he had to land on his feet. He was even serving mankind by helping the NKVD get the most from the Lizards. He reported what they wanted to Colonel Skriabin. Skriabin only grunted.

  Nussboym wondered why he felt so lonely.

  For the first time since George Bagnall had had the displeasure of making his acquaintance, Georg Schultz had kitted himself out in full German uniform rather than the motley mix of Nazi and Bolshevik gear he usually wore. Standing in the doorway of the house Bagnall, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones shared, he looked large and mean and menacing.

  He sounded menacing, too. “You damned Englishmen, you had better clear out of Pleskau while you have the chance.” He gave the German version of the name of the Russian town. “You don’t clear out now, don’t bet anyone will let you next week. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Embry and Jones came up behind Bagnall. As if by chance, the pilot casually held a Mauser, while the radarman bore a Soviet PPSh 41 submachine gun. “We understand you,” Bagnall said. “Do you understand us?”

  Schultz spat in the mud by the doorway. “Try and do some people a favor and this is the thanks I get.”

  Bagnall looked at Embry. Embry looked at Jones. Jones looked at Bagnall. They all started to laugh. “Why the devil would you want to do us a favor?” Bagnall demanded. “Far as I can tell, you want to see us dead.”

  “Me especially,” Jones added. “I am not responsible for the fair Tatiana’s affections, or for the shifts thereof.” He spoke as he might have of blizzards or earthquakes or other ineluctable forces of nature.

  “If you’re dead, she can’t yank your trousers down—that’s so,” Schultz said. “But if you’re gone, she can’t yank your trousers down, either. One way or another, you aren’t going to be around long. I already told you that. You can clear out or you can end up dead—and you’d better figure out quick which one you aim to do.”

  “Who’s going to kill us?” Bagnall said. “You?” He let his eyes flick back to his companions. “Good luck.”

  “Don’t be a Dummkopf,” Schultz advised him. “In real fighting, you three would just be—what do they say?—collateral damage, that’s it. Nobody would know you were dead till you started to stink. And there’s going to be real fighting, sure as hell. We’re going to set this town to rights, is what we’re going to do.”

  “Colonel Schindler says—” Bagnall began, and then stopped. Lieutenant General Chill’s second-in-command made most of the right noises about maintaining Soviet-German cooperation, but Bagnall had got the impression he was just making noise. Chill had thought working with the Russians the best way to defend Pskov against the Lizards. If Schindler didn’t—

  “Ah, see, you’re not so stupid after all,” Schultz said, nodding in sardonic approval. “If somebody draws you a picture, you can tell what’s on it. Very good.” He clicked his heels, as if to an officer of his own forces.

  “Why shouldn’t we go off to Brigadier German with news like this?” Ken Embry demanded. “You couldn’t stop us.” He made as if to point his rifle at Schultz.

  “What, you think the Russians are blind and deaf and dumb like you?” Schultz threw back his head and laughed. “We fooled ’em good in ‘41. They won’t ever let us do that again. Doesn’t matter.” He rocked back on his heels, the picture of arrogant confidence. “We would have whipped ’em if the Lizards hadn’t come, and we’ll whip ’em here in Pleskau, too.”

  The first part of that claim was inherently unprovable. However much he didn’t care for it, Bagnall thought the second part likely to be true. The Soviet forces in and around Pskov were ex-partisans. They had rifles, machine guns, grenades, a few mortars. The Nazis had all that plus real artillery and some armor, though Bagnall wasn’t sure how much petrol they had for it. If it came to open war, the Wehrmacht would win.

  Bagnall didn’t say anything about that. Instead, he asked, “Do you think you’re going to be able to keep the fair Tatiana”—die schone Tatiana; it was almost a Homeric epithet for the sniper—“as a pet? I wouldn’t want to fall asleep beside her afterwards, let me tell you.”

  A frown settled on Schultz’s face like a rain cloud. Plainly, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. In action, he probably let his officers do his thinking for him. After a moment, though, the cloud blew away. “She knows strength, Tatiana. When the forces of the Reich have shown themselves stronger than the Bolsheviks, when I have shown myself stronger than she is—” He puffed out his chest and looked manly and imposing.

  The three RAF men looked at one another again. By their expressions, Embry and Jones were having as much trouble holding in laughter as Bagnall was. Tatiana Pirogova had been fighting the Germans since the war started, and only reluctantly went over to fighting the Lizards after they landed. If Schultz thought a Nazi win in Pskov would awe her into thinking him a German Übermensch, he was in for disappointment—probably painful, p
ossibly lethal, disappointment.

  But how could you tell him that? The answer was simple: you couldn’t. Before Bagnall even started to figure out what to say, Schultz spoke first: “You have your warning. Do with it what you will. Guten Tag.” He did a smart about-turn and clumped away. Now that spring was truly here, he wore German infantry boots in place of the Russian felt ones everyone, regardless of politics, used during the winter.

  Bagnall shut the door, then turned to his fellow Englishmen. “Well, what the devil are we supposed to do about that?”

  “I think the first thing we do, no matter what Schultz said, is to go pay a visit to Aleksandr German,” Jerome Jones said. “Knowing the Germans don’t love you is rather different from knowing they aim to kick you in the ballocks one day soon.”

  “Yes, but after that?” Embry said. “I don’t much care to scuttle out of here, but I’m damned if I’ll fight for the Nazis and I’m not dead keen on laying my life on the line for the Bolshies, either.”

  That summed up Bagnall’s feelings so well, he nodded instead of adding a comment of his own along those lines. What he did say was, “Jones is right. We’d best learn what German”—he put the hard G in there—“knows about what the Germans”—soft G—“are up to.”

  He got a rifle of his own before going out on the streets of Pskov. Embry and Jones carried their weapons. So did most of the men and a lot of the women in town: Nazis and Red Russians put him in mind of cowboys and Red Indians. This game, though, was liable to be bloodier.

  They went through the marketplace to the east of the ruins of the Krom. Bagnall didn’t like what he saw there. Only a handful of babushkas sat behind the tables, not the joking, gossiping throngs that had filled the square even through the winter. The goods the old women set out for sale were shabby, too, as if they didn’t want to show anything too fine for fear of having it stolen.

  Aleksandr German made his headquarters across the street from the church of Sts. Peter and Paul at the Buoy, on Ulitsa Vorovskogo north of the Krom. The Red Army soldiers who guarded the building gave the Englishmen suspicious looks, but let them through to see the commander.

  The fierce red mustache German wore had given him the appearance of a pirate. Now, with his face thin and pale and drawn, the mustache seemed pasted on, like misplaced theatrical makeup. An enormous bandage still padded his crushed hand. Bagnall was amazed the surgeons hadn’t simply amputated it; he couldn’t imagine the ruined member ever giving the partisan brigadier as much use as he could have got from a hook.

  He and Jerome Jones took turns telling German of Georg Schultz’s warning. When they were through, the Soviet partisan officer held up his good hand. “Yes, I do know about this,” he said in the Yiddish that came more naturally to him than did Russian. “The Nazi is probably right—the fascists and we will be fighting again before long.”

  “Which does no one but the Lizards any good,” Bagnall observed.

  Aleksandr German shrugged. “It doesn’t even do them much good,” he said. “They aren’t going to come north and take Pskov, not now they’re not. They’ve pulled most of their forces off this front to fight the Germans in Poland. We were fighting the fascists before the Lizards came, and we’ll be fighting them after the Lizards go. No reason we shouldn’t fight them while the Lizards are here, too.”

  “I don’t think you’ll win,” Bagnall said.

  German shrugged again. “Then we fade back into the woods and become the Forest Republic once more. We may not hold the town, but the Nazis will not hold the countryside.” He sounded very sure of himself.

  “Doesn’t seem to leave much place for us,” Jerome Jones said in Russian. Thanks to his university studies, he preferred that language to German; with Bagnall, it was the other way around.

  “It does not leave much place for you,” Aleksandr German agreed. He sighed. “I had thought to try to get you out of here. Now I shall not have the chance. But I urge you to leave before we and the Nazis start fighting among ourselves again. You did all you could to keep that from happening up until now, but Colonel Schindler is a less reasonable man than his late predecessor—and, as I say, the threat from the Lizards is less now, so we have not got that to distract us from each other. Make for the Baltic while you still can.”

  “Will you write us a safe-conduct?” Ken Embry asked him.

  “Yes, certainly,” the partisan brigadier said at once. “You should get one from Schindler, too.” His face twisted. “You are Englishmen, after all, and so deserve fair treatment under the laws of war. If you were Russians—” He shook his head. “The other thing you need to remember is how little good a safe-conduct, ours or Schindler’s, may do for you. If someone shoots at you from five hundred meters, you will not be able to present it to him.”

  Though that was true, it was not a topic on which Bagnall cared to dwell. Aleksandr German found a scrap of paper, dipped a pen into a bottle that smelled more of berry juice than of ink, and scribbled rapidly. He handed the document to Bagnall, who still read Cyrillic script only haltingly. Bagnall passed it to Jerome Jones. Jones skimmed through it and nodded.

  “Good luck,” Aleksandr German said. “I wish I had something more than that to offer you, but even it is in short supply here these days.”

  The three Englishmen were somber when they left the partisan brigadier. “Do you think we ought to get a laissez-passer from Schindler?” Embry asked.

  “My guess is that we needn’t bother,” Bagnall answered. “The Germans around here are all soldiers, and all know who we are. That isn’t true of the Russians, not by a long chalk. Our piece of paper may keep some peasants from slitting our throats one night while we’re asleep in their haystack”

  “Or, of course, it may not,” Embry said, not wanting his reputation for cynicism to suffer. “Still, I suppose we’re better off with it.”

  “Pity we didn’t bring all our food and ammunition along,” Bagnall said. “We could have started off straightaway instead of having to go back to the house.”

  “It’s not that far back,” Jones said. “And after we recover the gear, I suggest we stay not upon the honor of our going. When both sides tell you you’d better hop it, you’re a fool if you don’t listen. And, except where the fair Tatiana is concerned”—he grinned ruefully—“Mrs. Jones raised no fools.”

  “You’ll be free of her at last,” Bagnall reminded him.

  “So will I,” he said, and then, “dammit.”

  A captain with a set of decorations as impressive as Basil Roundbush’s rapped on the door frame of David Goldfarb’s laboratory at Dover College. “Hullo,” he said. “I have a present for you chaps.” He turned and let out some grunts and hisses that sounded rather as if he were doing his best to choke to death. More funny noises came back at him. Then a Lizard walked into the room, its turreted eyes going every which way.

  Goldfarb’s first reaction was to grab for a pistol. Unfortunately, he wasn’t wearing one. Roundbush was, and had it out with commendable speed. “No need for that,” the much-decorated captain said. “Mzepps is quite tame, and so am I: Donald Mather, at your service.”

  After his first instant of surprise, Basil Roundbush had taken a good look at Mather’s uniform. The pistol went back into its holster. “He’s SAS, David,” he said. “I expect he can protect us from a Lizard or two . . . dozen.” He sounded more serious than he normally would have while making such a crack.

  Goldfarb took a second look at Mather and concluded Roundbush was serious. The captain was a handsome chap in a blond, chisel-featured way, and seemed affable enough, but something about his eyes warned that getting on his wrong side would be a mistake—quite likely a fatal mistake. And he hadn’t won those medals for keeping the barracks clean and tidy, either.

  “Sir, what will we do with—Mzepps, did you say?” he asked.

  “Mzepps, yes,” Mather answered, pronouncing each p separately. “I expect he might be useful to you: he’s a radar technician, you see. I’ll stay a
round to interpret till the two of you understand each other well enough, then I’ll be on my merry way. He does speak a little English now, but he’s far from fluent.”

  “A radar technician?” Basil Roundbush said softly. “Oh, David, you are a lucky sod. You know that, don’t you? That peach of a girl, now a Lizard of your very own to play with.” He rounded on Mather. “You don’t happen to have a jet-engine specialist concealed anywhere about your person, do you? We have this lovely video platter here on how to service their bloody engines, and knowing what the words mean would help us understand the pictures.”

  Captain Mather actually did look up his sleeve. “Nothing here, I’m afraid.” The dispassionate tone of the reply only made it more absurd. Mzepps spoke up in the Lizards’ hissing language. Mather listened to him, then said, “He tells me he was kept with a couple of jet-engine men, er, Lizards, back in—well, you don’t need to know that. Where he was before. They like it where they are, he says. Why was that, Mzepps?” He repeated the question in the Lizards’ speech, listened to the answer, laughed, and reported back: “They like it because the bloke they’re working with is hardly bigger than they are . . . Hullo! What’s got into you two?”

  Goldfarb and Roundbush had both let out yelps of delight. Goldfarb explained: “That has to be Group Captain Hipple. We both thought he’d bought his plot when the Lizards jumped on Bruntingthorpe with both feet. First word we’ve had he’s alive.”

  “Ah. That is a good show,” Mather said. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Goldfarb. “Something I was supposed to tell you, and I nearly forgot.” He looked angry at himself: he wasn’t supposed to forget things. “You’re cousin to that Russie chap, aren’t you?” Without waiting for Goldfarb’s startled nod, he went on, “Yes, of course you are. I ought to let you know that, not so very long ago, I put him and his family on a boat bound for Palestine, on orders of my superiors.”

  “Did you?” Goldfarb said tonelessly. “Thank you for telling me, sir. Other than that—” He shook his head. “I got them out of Poland so the Lizards wouldn’t do their worst to him, and now he’s back in another country they’ve overrun. Have you heard any word of him since he got there?”