Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Okay,” Donovan repeated. “By now, you’re probably wondering what the hell is going on and why I dragged you in here. That right?” No answer seemed necessary. Donovan charged ahead: “Reason’s real simple—we just got one of these atomic bombs delivered here, and I want to know as much about it as I can find out.”

  “Here, sir?” Sam stared.

  “That’s what I told you. It set out from Denver before the cease-fire was announced, and after that it just kept going. Makes sense when you think about it, hey? Thing must have come on one devil of a roundabout route to get here at all. They weren’t about to stop it halfway, leave it somewhere in no-man’s-land for the Lizards to find if they got lucky. It’s our baby now.”

  “Okay, sir, I see that, I guess,” Yeager answered. “But didn’t some people from Denver come with it, people who know all about it?”

  “They did like hell,” Donovan said. “Security again—you don’t want people like that captured. Thing came with typed instructions on how to arm it, a timer, and a radio transmitter. That’s it. Orders boiled down to get it to a target, back away, run like hell, and fire when ready, Gridley.”

  Donovan would have been just about starting to shave when that Spanish-American War slang entered the language; Sam hadn’t heard anybody use it for years. He said, “I’ll tell you whatever I can, sir, but like I said before—uh, as I said before” (which was what he got for being married to Barbara) “I don’t know everything there is to know.”

  “And as I told you, Sergeant, that’s my job, not yours. So talk.” Donovan leaned forward in his chair, ready to listen intently.

  Sam told him everything he knew about the theory and practice of atomic bombs. Some of that was gleaned from science articles in the regretted Astounding from the days before the Lizards came; more came from what he remembered of interpreting for Enrico Fermi and the other Metallurgical Laboratory physicists and from what he’d picked up while they talked among themselves.

  Donovan took no notes. At first, that irked Yeager. Then he realized the general didn’t want to put anything in writing anywhere. That told him how seriously Donovan was taking the whole business.

  When he ran down, Donovan nodded thoughtfully and said, “Okay, Sergeant, thanks very much. That clears up one of my major worries: I don’t have to worry about the damn thing going off under my feet, any more than I do with any other piece of ordnance. I didn’t think so, but with a weapon that new and that powerful, I wasn’t what you’d call eager to risk my neck on what might have been my own misunderstanding.”

  “That makes sense to me, sir,” Yeager agreed.

  “Okay. Next question: you’re in the rocket business, too, with Goddard. Can we load this thing on a rocket and shoot it where we want it to go? It weighs ten tons, give or take a little.”

  “No, sir,” Sam answered at once. “Next rocket we make that’ll throw one ton’ll be the first. Dr. Goddard’s working on ways to scale up what we’ve got, but . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “But he’s sick, and who knows how long he’ll last?” Donovan finished for him. “And who knows how long it’ll take to build a big rocket even if it gets designed, hey? Okay. Any chance of making atomic bombs small enough to go on the rockets we have? That’d be the other way to solve the problem.”

  “I plain don’t know, sir. If it can be done, I bet they’re working on it back in Denver. But I have no idea whether they can do it or not.”

  “Okay, Sergeant That’s a good answer,” Donovan said. “If I told you how many people try to make like bigshots and pretend they know more than they do—Well, hell, I don’t need to burden you with that. You’re dismissed. If I need to pick your brain some more about this miserable infernal device, I’ll call you again. I hope I don’t”

  “I hope you don’t, too,” Sam said. “That’d mean the cease-fire broke down.” He saluted and left Donovan’s office. The major general hadn’t gigged him about his uniform after all. Pretty good fellow, he thought.

  The German major at the port of Kristiansand shuffled through an enormous box of file cards. “Bagnall, George,” he said, pulling one out. “Your pay number, please.”

  Bagnall rattled it off in English, then repeated it more slowly in German.

  “Danke,” said the major—his name was Kapellmeister, though he had a singularly unmusical voice. “Now, Flight Engineer Bagnall, have you violated in any way the parole you furnished to Lieutenant-Colonel Höcker in Paris year before last? Have you, that is, taken up arms against the German Reich in pursuance of the war existing between Germany and England prior to the coming of the Lizards? Speak only the truth; I have the answer before me.”

  “No, I have not,” Bagnall answered. He almost believed Kapellmeister; that a Nazi officer in an out-of-the-way Norwegian town could, at the pull of a card, come up with the name of the man to whom he’d given that parole, or even the fact that he’d given such a parole, struck him as Teutonic efficiency run mad.

  Apparently satisfied, the German scribbled something on the card and stuck it back in the file. Then he went through the same rigmarole with Ken Embry. Having done that, he pulled out several more cards and rattled off the names on them—the names of the Lancaster crewmen with whom Embry and Bagnall had formerly served—at Jerome Jones before asking, “Which of the above are you?”

  “None of the above, sir,” Jones replied, and gave his own name and pay number.

  Major Kapellmeister went through his file. “Every third Englishman is named Jones,” he muttered. After a couple of minutes, he looked up. “I do not find a Jones to match you, however. Very well. Before you may proceed to England, you must sign a parole agreeing not to oppose the German Reich in arms at any further time. If you are captured while you violate or after you have violated the terms of the parole, it will go hard for you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand what you said,” Jones answered. “I don’t understand why you said it. Aren’t we allies against the Lizards?”

  “There is at present a cease-fire between the Reich and the Lizards,” Kapellmeister answered. His smile was unpleasant. “There may eventually be a peace. At that time, our relations with your country will have to be defined, would you not agree?”

  The three Englishmen looked at one another. Bagnall hadn’t thought about what the cease-fire might mean in purely human terms. By their expressions, neither had Embry or Jones. The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. Jones asked, “If I don’t sign the parole, what happens?”

  “You will be treated as a prisoner of war, with all courtesies and privileges extended to such prisoners,” the German major said.

  Jones looked unhappier yet. Those courtesies and privileges were mighty thin on the ground. “Give me the bloody pen,” he said, and scrawled his name on the card Kapellmeister handed him.

  “Danke schön,” Major Kapellmeister said when he returned card and pen. “For now, as you rightly point out, we are allies, and you have been treated as such thus far. Is this not so?” Jones had to nod, as did Bagnall and Embry. The journey across German ally Finland, Sweden (neutral but ever so polite to German wishes), and German-held Norway had been fast, efficient, and as pleasant as such a journey could be in times of hardship.

  As Kapellmeister disposed of the card, Bagnall had a vision of copies of it making journeys of their own, to every hamlet where Nazi soldiers and Nazi bureaucrats stood guard. If Jerome Jones ever stepped off the straight and narrow anywhere the Reich held sway, he was in trouble.

  Once the parole was in his hands and in his precious file box, though, the major went from testy to affable. “You are free now to board the freighter Harald Hardrada. You are fortunate, in fact. Loading of the ship is nearly complete, and soon it will sail for Dover.”

  “Been a long time since we’ve seen Dover,” Bagnall said. Then he asked, “Do the Lizards make a habit of shooting up ships bound for England? They haven’t got a formal cease-fire with us, after all.”
/>   Kapellmeister shook his head. “It is not so. The informal truce they have with England appears to prevent them from doing this.”

  The three Englishmen left his office and walked down to the dock where the Harald Hardrada lay berthed. The docks smelled of salt and fish and coal smoke. German guards stood at the base of the gangplank. One of them ran back to Kapellmeister to check whether the RAF men were to be allowed aboard. He came back waving his hand, and the rest of the guards stood aside. The inefficiency the Germans showed there made Bagnall feel better about the world.

  He had to share with his comrades a cabin so small it lacked only a coat of red paint to double as a telephone box, but that didn’t bother him. After so long away from England, he would cheerfully have hung himself on a hatrack to get home.

  That didn’t mean he wanted to spend much time in the cabin, though. He went back out on deck as soon as he’d pitched his meager belongings on a bunk. Uniformed Germans were rolling small, sealed metal drums up the gangplank. When the first one got to the Harald Hardrada, one of the soldiers tipped it onto its flat end. It was neatly stenciled, NORSK HYDRO, VEMORK.

  “What’s in there?” Bagnall asked, pointing. By now, his German was fluent enough that, for a few words or a few sentences at a time, he could be mistaken for a native speaker, though not one from his listener’s home region, whatever that happened to be.

  The fellow in the coal-scuttle helmet grinned at him. “Water,” he answered.

  “If you don’t want to tell me, then just don’t say,” Bagnall grumbled. The German laughed at him and set the next barrel, identically stenciled, on its end beside the first. Irked, Bagnall stomped away, his feet clanging on the steel plates of the deck. The Nazi, damn him, laughed louder.

  He and his comrades stowed away the barrels somewhere down in the cargo hold, where Bagnall didn’t have to look at them. He told the story to Embry and Jones, both of whom chaffed him without mercy for letting a German get the better of him.

  Thick, black coal smoke poured from the stack of the Harald Hardrada as it pulled out of Kristiansand harbor for the journey across the North Sea to England. Even if Bagnall was going home, it was a voyage he could have done without. He’d never been airsick, not in the worst evasive maneuvers, but the continual pounding of big waves against the freighter’s hull sent him springing for the rail more than once. His comrades didn’t twit him for that. They were right there beside him. So were some of the sailors. That made him feel. If not better, at least more resigned to his fate: misery loves company had a lot of truth to it.

  Lizard jets flew over the freighter a couple of times, so high that their vapor trails were easier to see than the aircraft themselves. The Harald Hardrada had ack-ack guns mounted at bow and stern. Along with everyone else aboard, Bagnall knew they were essentially useless against Lizard planes. But the Lizards did not come down for a closer look or on a strafing run. Cease-fires, formal and otherwise, held.

  Bagnall had spied several cloudbanks off to the west, identifying each in turn as England: he was seeing with a landlubber’s eye, and one half blinded by hope. Before long, the clouds would shift and destroy his illusion. Then at last he caught sight of something out there that did not move or dissolve.

  “Yes, that is the English coast,” a sailor answered when he asked.

  “It’s beautiful,” Bagnall said. The Estonian coast had gained beauty because he was sailing away from it. This one did so because he was approaching. Actually, the two landscapes looked pretty much alike: low, flat land slowly rising up from a sullen sea.

  Then, off in the distance, he spotted the towers of Dover Castle, right down by the ocean. That made the homecoming feel real in a way it hadn’t before. He turned to Embry and Jones, who stood beside him. “I wonder if Daphne and Sylvia are still at the White Horse Inn.”

  “Can but hope,” Ken Embry said.

  “Amen,” Jones echoed. “Would be nice to have a lady friend who wouldn’t just as soon shoot you down as look at you, let alone sleep with you.” His sigh was full of nostalgia. “I remember there are women like that, though it’s been so long I’m beginning to forget”

  A tug came out to help nudge the Harald Hardrada up against a pier in a surprisingly crowded harbor. As soon as she’d been made fast in her berth with lines fore and aft, as soon as the gangplank snaked across to the dock, a horde of tweedy Englishmen with the unmistakable look of boffins swarmed aboard at a dead run and besieged every uniformed German they could find with a single question, sometimes in English, sometimes in German:

  “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?” Bagnall asked one of the men.

  Hearing an undoubtedly British voice, the fellow answered without hesitation: “Why, the water, of course.”

  Bagnall scratched his head.

  One of the cooks ladled soup into David Nussboym’s bowl. He sank the ladle all the way down to the bottom of the big iron pot. It came out full of cabbage leaves and bits of fish. The ration loaf he handed Nussboym was full weight or even a trifle over. It was still black bread, coarse and hard to chew, but it was warm from the oven and smelled good. His tea was made from local roots and leaves and berries, but the glass the cook gave him had plenty of sugar, so it was palatable enough.

  And he had plenty of room in which to eat. Clerks and interpreters and other politicals got fed ahead of the common run of zek. Nussboym recalled with distaste the mob scenes in which he’d had to defend with his elbows the space in which he was sitting, and recalled a couple of times when he’d been elbowed off a bench and onto the planks of the floor.

  He dug in. With every mouthful of soup, well-being flowed through him. It was almost as if he could feel himself being nourished. He sipped at his tea, savoring every morsel of dissolved sugar that flowed over his tongue. When your belly was full, life looked good—for a while.

  “Nu, David Aronovich, how do you like talking with the Lizards?” asked Moisei Apfelbaum, Colonel Skriabin’s chief clerk. He spoke in Yiddish to Nussboym but used his name and patronymic anyhow, which would have been an affectation anywhere in the USSR but seemed particularly absurd in the gulag, where patronymics fell by the wayside even in Russian.

  Nevertheless, Nussboym imitated his style: “Compared to freedom, Moisei Solomonovich, it is not so much. Compared to chopping logs in the woods—” He did not go on. He did not have to go on.

  Apfelbaum nodded. He was a skinny little middle-aged fellow, with eyes that looked enormous behind steel-rimmed spectacles. “Freedom you do not need to worry about, not here. The gulag has worse things than logging, believe me. A man could be unlucky enough to dig a canal. One can be unlucky, as I say, or one can be clever. Good to be clever, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so,” Nussboym answered. The clerks and cooks and trusties who made the gulag function—for the whole system would have fallen apart in days if not hours had the NKVD had to do all the work—were better company in many ways than the zeks of the labor gang to which he’d formerly been attached. Even if a lot of them were dedicated Communists (plus royaliste que le roi ran through his mind, for they upheld the principles of Marx and Engels and Lenin after other men espousing those same principles had sent them here), they were for the most part educated men, men with whom he had far more in common than the common criminals who were the dominant force in his work gang.

  He did easier work now. He got more food for it. He should have been—well, not happy; you’d have to be meshuggeh to be happy here—as contented as he could be in the context of the gulag. He’d always been a man who believed in getting along with authority, whatever authority happened to be: the Polish government, the Nazis, the Lizards, now the NKVD.

  But when the zeks with whom he’d formerly worked were shambling out to the forest for another day of toil, the looks they gave him chilled his blood. Mene, mene, tekel upharsin floated up from his days at the cheder—thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting. He felt guilty for having it easier
than his former comrades, although he knew intellectually that interpreting for the Lizards made a far greater contribution to the war effort than knocking down yet another pine or birch.

  “You are not a Communist,” Apfelbaum said, studying him through those greatly magnified eyes. Nussboym shook his head, admitting it. The clerk said, “Yet you remain an idealist.”

  “Maybe I do,” Nussboym said. He wanted to add, What business is it of yours? He kept his mouth shut, though; he was not such a fool as to insult a man who had such easy, intimate access to the camp commandant. The calluses on his hands were starting to soften, but he knew how easily he could once more grow accustomed to the feel of axehandle and saw grip.

  “This will not necessarily work to your advantage,” Apfelbaum said.

  Nussboym shrugged. “If everything worked to my advantage, would I be here?”

  Apfelbaum paused to sip at his glass of ersatz tea, then smiled. His smile was charming, so much so that Nussboym distrusted it at sight. The clerk said, “Again, I remind you that there are worse things than what you have now. You have not even been required to denounce any of the men of your old gang, have you?”

  “No, thank God,” Nussboym said. He hurriedly added, “Not that I ever heard any of them say anything that deserved denunciation.” After that, he devoted himself to his bowl of soup. To his relief, Apfelbaum did not press him further.

  But he was not altogether surprised when, two days later, Colonel Skriabin summoned him to his office and said, “Nussboym, we have heard a rumor that concerns us. I wonder if you can tell me whether there is any truth to it.”

  “If it concerns the Lizards, Comrade Colonel, I will do everything in my power,” Nussboym said, hoping to deflect the evil moment.

  He had no luck. Perhaps he had not really expected to have any Luck. Skriabin said, “Unfortunately, it does not. It is reported to us that the prisoner Ivan Fyodorov has on more than one occasion uttered anti-Soviet and seditious sentiments since coming to this camp. You knew this man Fyodorov, I believe?” He waited for Nussboym to nod before going on, “Can there be any truth to this rumor?”