Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  He got out of the Lizard personnel carrier with nothing but relief; not only was the seat wrong for his backside, it was even hotter in there than on the street. Strukss led him and Yakov Donskoi to the meeting room, where the other human representatives sat sweltering as they waited for Atvar to condescend to appear. George Marshall drank from a glass of iced tea and fanned himself with a palm-frond fan he’d probably brought from home. Molotov wished he’d thought to bring or acquire such a convenience himself. Marshall’s uniform remained crisp, starchy.

  Through Donskoi, Molotov asked the Egyptian servant hovering in the corner of the room for iced tea for himself. The servant, not surprisingly, was fluent in English. With a bow to Molotov—who kept his face still despite despising such self-abnegation—he hurried away, soon to return with a tall, sweating glass. Molotov longed to press it to his cheek before he drank, but refrained. A fan was suitably decorous; that was not.

  Atvar came in a few minutes later, accompanied by a Lizard in far less elaborate body paint: his interpreter. The human delegates rose and bowed. The Lizard interpreter spoke to them in English that seemed more fluent than that which Strukss used. Yakov Donskoi translated for Molotov: “The fleetlord recognizes the courtesy and thanks us for it.”

  Von Ribbentrop muttered something in German, a language Donskoi also understood. “He says they should show us more courtesy now, and they should have shown us more courtesy from the beginning.”

  Like a lot of the things the Nazi foreign minister said, that was both true and useless. Von Ribbentrop was on the heavyset side and, with his tight collar and fair skin, looked rather like a boiled ham with blue eyes. As far as Molotov was concerned, he had the wits of a boiled ham, too, but the interests of the popular front kept him from saying so.

  Donskoi translated word for word as Eden asked Atvar, “Am I to construe that my presence means the Race extends the same cease-fire to Great Britain as to my cobelligerents who sit at this table with me?”

  The handsome Englishman—Churchill’s alter ego—had asked that question before, without getting a straight answer for it. Now Atvar spoke. The Lizard interpreter, having already translated Eden’s question, turned the fleetlord’s reply into English: “The fleetlord says in his generosity the truce applies to you in your island. It does not apply to any of the other lands of your empire across the seas from you and this island.”

  Anthony Eden, though not bad at keeping his face straight, was not in Molotov’s class. The Soviet foreign minister had no trouble seeing his anguish. As Stalin had predicted, the British Empire was dead, having been pronounced so by a child-sized green-brown creature with sharp teeth and swiveling eye turrets. In spite of your heroics, the dialectic consigns you to the ash-heap of history, Molotov thought. Even absent the Lizards, it would have happened soon.

  George Marshall said, “For us, Fleetlord, the cease-fire is not enough. We want you off our soil, and we are prepared to hurt your people more if you don’t leave of your own free will and be quick about it.”

  “The German Reich expresses this same demand,” von Ribbentrop declared, sounding pompous even when Molotov did not understand his words till they were translated. Sweating and blustering, he went on, “The Führer insists on the full restoration of all territory under the benevolent dominion of the Reich and its allied states, including Italy, at the time of your people’s arrival from the depths of space.”

  As far as Molotov was concerned, no territory had been under the benevolent dominion of the Reich. That, however, was not his primary concern. Before Atvar could reply to von Ribbentrop, he spoke up sharply: “Much of the territory claimed by the Germans was illegally seized from the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, to whom, as Comrade Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, rightly requires, it must be restored.”

  “If you Tosevites cannot settle where the boundaries of your empires and not-empires lie, why do you expect us to do it for you?” Atvar demanded.

  Von Ribbentrop turned to glare at Molotov, who looked back stonily. The two of them might have been allied against the Lizards, but were not and would never be friends.

  “Perhaps,” Shigenori Togo said, “this situation being so irregular, both human states might agree to allow the Race to continue to possess some territory between them, serving as a buffer and aiding in the establishment and maintenance of peace all over our world.”

  “Subject to negotiation of the precise territory to be retained, this may in principle be acceptable to the Soviet Union,” Molotov said. Given the Germans’ prowess not merely with explosive-metal bombs but also with nerve gas and long-range guided rockets, Stalin wanted a buffer between the Soviet border and fascist Germany. “Since the Race is already in Poland—”

  “No!” von Ribbentrop interrupted angrily. “This is not acceptable to the Reich. We insist on a complete withdrawal, and we will go back to war before we accept anything less. So the Führer has declared.”

  “The Führer has declared a great many things,” Anthony Eden said with relish. “ ‘The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe,’ for instance. That a declaration is made does not necessarily test its veracity.”

  “When the Führer promises war, he delivers,” von Ribbentrop replied, a better comeback than Molotov had looked for from him.

  George Marshall coughed, then said, “If we are throwing quotations around, gentlemen, let me give you one from Ben Franklin that fits the present circumstances: ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ ”

  To Molotov, Yakov Donskoi murmured the translation, then added, “The pun in English I cannot reproduce in Russian.”

  “Never mind the pun,” Molotov answered. “Tell them for me that Franklin is right, and that Marshall is right as well. If we are to be a popular front against the Lizards, a popular front we must be which removes the pleasure of sniping at one another.” He waited till Donskoi had rendered that into English, then went on, for the interpreter’s ears alone, “If I am to be deprived of the pleasure of telling von Ribbentrop what I think of him, I want no one else to enjoy it—but you need not translate that”

  “Yes, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the interpreter said dutifully. Then he stared at the foreign commissar. Had Molotov made a joke? His face denied it. But then, Molotov’s face always denied everything.

  Ussmak lifted the axe, swung it, and felt the jar as the blade bit into the tree trunk. Hissing with effort, he pulled it free, then swung again. At this rate, felling the tree would take about forever, and he would end up starving for no better reason than that he could not satisfy the quotas the Big Uglies of the SSSR insisted on setting for males of the Race.

  Those quotas were the same ones they set for their own kind. Before this ignominious captivity, when Ussmak had thought of the Big Uglies, the ugly part was uppermost in his mind. Now he realized how much the big mattered. All the tools the guards gave him and his fellow males were designed for their kind, not his. They were large and heavy and clumsy in his hands. The males of the SSSR did not care. Unending toil on not enough food was making prisoners die off one after another. The guards did not care about that, either.

  A brief moment’s fury made Ussmak take a savage hack at the tree. “We should have kept on refusing to work and made them kill us that way,” he said. “They mean for us to die anyhow.”

  “Truth,” said another male nearby. “You were our headmale. Why did you give in to the Russkis? If we had hung together, we might have got them to do what we wanted. More food for less work sounds good to me.” Like Ussmak, he had lost so much flesh, his skin hung loose on his bones.

  “I feared for our spirits,” Ussmak said. “I was a fool. Our spirits will be lost here soon enough no matter what we do.”

  The other male paused a moment in his own work—and a guard raised a submachine gun and growled a warning at him. The guards didn’t bother learning the language of the Race—they
expected you to understand them, and woe betide you if you didn’t The male picked up his axe again. As he swung it, he said, “We could try another work stoppage.”

  “We could, yes,” Ussmak said, but his voice sounded hollow even to himself. The males of Barracks Three had tried once and failed. They would never come together as a group enough to try again. Ussmak was morbidly certain of it

  This was what he had bought for mutiny against his superiors. No matter how addled he had thought them, even their worst was a hundred, a thousand, a million times better than the superiors for whom he now toiled. Had he known then what he knew now—His mouth dropped open in a bitter laugh. That was what old males always told young ones just embarking on their lives. Ussmak wasn’t old, not even counting the time he’d spent in cold sleep traveling to Tosev 3. But he had a hard-won store of bitter knowledge acquired too late.

  “Work!” the guard snapped in his own language. He didn’t add an emphatic cough; it was as if he’d only made a suggestion. Ignoring that suggestion, though, might cost you your life.

  Ussmak hammered away at the tree trunk Chips flew, but the tree refused to fall. If he didn’t chop it down, they were liable to leave him out here all day. The star Tosev stayed in the sky almost all the time here at this season of the Tosevite year, but still could not warm the air much past cool.

  He hit two more solid strokes. The tree tottered, then toppled with a crash. Ussmak felt like cheering. If the males quickly sawed the trunk into the sections the guards required, they might yet gain—almost—enough to eat.

  Emboldened, he used his halting Russki to ask the guard, “Cease-fire truth is?” The rumor had reached the camp with a fresh batch of Big Ugly prisoners. Maybe the guard would feel well enough inclined to him for having cut down the tree to give him a straight answer.

  And so it proved: the Big Ugly said, “Da.” He took some crumbled leaves from a pouch he wore on his belt, rolled them in apiece of paper, lighted one end, and sucked in smoke at the other. The practice struck Ussmak as corrosive to the lung. It couldn’t possibly have been so pleasant, so enjoyable, as, say, tasting ginger.

  “We go free?” Ussmak asked. The Tosevite prisoners said that could happen as part of a cease-fire. They knew far more about such things than Ussmak did. All he could do was hope.

  “Chto?” the guard said: “What? You go free?” He paused to suck more smoke and to blow it out in a harsh white cloud. Then he paused again, this time to make the barking noises Big Uglies used for laughter. “Free? You? Gavno!” Ussmak knew that meant some sort of bodily waste, but not how it applied to his question. The guard proceeded to make it perfectly, brutally, clear: “You go free? Nyet! Never!” He laughed louder, the Tosevite equivalent of laughing wider. As if to reject the very idea, he leveled his submachine gun at Ussmak. “Now work!”

  Ussmak worked. When at last the guards suffered the males of the Race to return to their barracks, he trudged back with dragging stride: half exhaustion, half despair. He knew that was dangerous. He’d already seen males who’d lost hope give up and die in short order. But knowing something was dangerous was different from being able to keep from doing it.

  They had made their work norm for the day. The ration of bread and salted sea creature the Big Uglies doled out was not enough to keep them going through another day of grinding toil, but it was what they got.

  Ussmak toppled into his hard, comfortless bunk as soon as he had eaten. Sleep dropped over him like a thick, smothering black curtain. He knew he would not be fully recovered when the males were routed out come morning. Tomorrow would be just the same as today had been, maybe a little worse, not likely to be any better.

  So would the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that. Free? Once more, the guard’s barking laughter seemed to reverberate from his heating diaphragms. As sleep overcame him, he thought how sweet never waking up would be.

  Ludmila Gorbunova looked to the west, not in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the evening star (in any case, Venus was lost in the skirts of the sun) but longingly nonetheless.

  From right beside her elbow, a voice said, “You would fly another mission into the Wehrmacht lines in a moment, wouldn’t you?”

  She jumped; she hadn’t heard Ignacy come up. She also felt no small anger and embarrassment. Wearing her heart on her sleeve was the last thing she wanted to do, especially when it was given to a Nazi panzer colonel. A German panzer colonel, she thought, correcting herself. That sounded better to her—and besides, could any man who called a medal he’d won “Hitler’s fried egg” be a dedicated fascist? She doubted it, though she knew her objectivity was suspect.

  “You do not answer me,” Ignacy said.

  She wanted to pretend the guerrilla leader hadn’t spoken, but she couldn’t very well do that. Besides, since his Russian was better than anyone else’s hereabouts, ignoring him would cut her off from the person to whom she could most readily speak. So she replied with something that was true but not responsive: “What I want does not much matter. With the cease-fire in place between the Germans and the Lizards, I will have no occasion to fly over there, will I? If the Germans have any sense, they will not do anything to make the Lizards lose patience with them and start fighting again.”

  “If the Germans had any sense, would they be Germans?” Ignacy returned. Ludmila would not have cared to take piano lessons from such a cynical man; perhaps the war had revealed to him his true calling. After pausing a moment to let the jab sink in, he went on, ‘The Germans will, I think, encourage unrest in the parts of Poland they do not control.”

  “Do you really?” Ludmila embarrassed herself all over again by how eager she sounded.

  Ignacy smiled. It was not altogether pleasant, that curl of lips, not in a plump face in a land full of thin ones, not when it didn’t quite light up his eyes. She hadn’t told him anything of her meeting with Jäger; as far as she was concerned, that was her business and nobody else’s. But whether she’d told him or not, he seemed to have drawn his own conclusions, most of them disconcertingly accurate. He said, “As a matter of fact, I am trying to arrange—ever so discreetly, of course—to get my hands on some German antitank rockets. Would you be interested in transporting those if I succeed?”

  “I will do whatever is required to bring victory to the workers and peasants of Poland against the alien imperialists,” Ludmila answered. Sometimes taking refuge in the rhetoric she’d learned from childhood was comforting. Using it also gave her more chance to think. She said, “Are you certain flying those rockets in would be the best way to get them? Moving them along back roads and paths might be easier and safer.”

  Ignacy shook his head. “The Lizards have been patrolling rear areas much more aggressively than they did when they fought major battles along the front. Also, the Nazis do not want anyone capturing antitank rockets that could be shown to have entered Poland after the cease-fire began. That might give the Lizards the excuse they need to end the truce. But if you flew the rockets back here without having them noticed on the ground, we could use them as we like: who could prove when we acquired them?”

  “I see,” Ludmila said slowly, and she did. The Nazis had an interest in playing it close to the vest, while Ignacy, she suspected, didn’t know how to play it any other way. “And what happens if I am shot down trying to deliver the rockets to you?”

  “I shall miss both you and the aircraft,” the guerrilla leader answered. She gave him a dirty look. He stared back, his face bland and blank. She got the idea he wouldn’t miss her much, even if she did give him an air force of sorts. She wondered if he wanted to get her airborne to be rid of her, but soon decided that was foolish. He could pick many more direct ways of disposing of her, ones that didn’t involve the precious Fieseler Storch.

  The nod he gave her was almost a bow: a bourgeois affectation he’d preserved even here in a setting most emphatically proletarian. “Be assured I shall let you know the instant I have word that this plan goes f
orward, that I have persuaded the German authorities here there is no danger to it. And now I leave you to enjoy the beauties of the sunset.”

  It was beautiful, even if she bridled at the way he said that. Crimson and orange and brilliant gold filled the sky; drifting clouds seemed to be aflame. And yet, though the colors were those of fire and blood, they didn’t make her think of war. Instead, she wondered what she ought to be doing when, in a few short hours, the sun rose again. Where was her life going, tomorrow and next month and next year?

  She felt torn in two. Part of her wanted to go back to the Soviet Union in any way she could. The pull of the rodina was strong. But she also wondered what would become of her if she returned. Her dossier already had to be suspect, because she was known to have associated with Heinrich Jäger. Could she justify going off to a foreign country—a country under occupation by the Lizards and the Nazis—at the behest of a German general? She’d been in Poland for months, too, without making any effort to come back till now. If the NKVD happened to be in a suspicious mood, as the NKVD so often happened to be (the nasty, skinny face of Colonel Boris Lidov flashed in front of her mind), they’d ship her to a gulag without a second thought.

  The other half of her wanted to run to Jäger, not away from him. She recognized the impracticalities there, too. The Nazis had the Gestapo instead of the NKVD. They wouldn’t just be looking at Jäger through a magnifying glass, either. They’d rake her over the coals, too, maybe more savagely than the People’s Commissariat for the Interior would. She tried to imagine what happened to Nazis who fell into the NKVD’s hands. That same sort of shuddersome treatment had to await Soviet citizens in the grip of the Gestapo.

  Realistically, she couldn’t go east. As realistically, she couldn’t go west, either. That left staying where she was, also an unpalatable choice. Ignacy was hardly the sort of leader she’d follow into battle with a song on her ups (though if she did, she thought wryly, she’d better sing in tune).