Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Some of us are going to die before we get to Denver,” he said. The prospect upset him much less than it would have before he got wounded. He’d had a dress rehearsal for meeting the Grim Reaper; really doing it couldn’t be a whole lot worse.

  Penny pointed up to the sky. The wheeling black specks up there weren’t Lizard airplanes, or even Piper Cubs. They were buzzards, waiting with the patient optimism of their kind. Penny didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Rance wondered if one of those buzzards would gnaw his bones.

  He needed two days to get to the Horse. Had its bed been dry, he knew he wouldn’t have got much farther. But people crowded the bank, down where the river passed under Highway 71. The water was warm and muddy, and there, not twenty feet away, some idiot was pissing into the stream. Auerbach didn’t care about any of it. He drank till he was full, he splashed his face, he soaked his head, and then he took off his shirt and soaked that, too. As it dried, it would help keep him cool.

  Penny splashed water on her blouse. The wet cotton molded itself to her shape. Auerbach would have appreciated that more had he not been so deadly weary. As things were, he nodded and said, “Good idea. Let’s get going.”

  They headed north up Highway 71, and reached Punkin Center early the next morning. They got more water there. A sad-eyed local said, “Wish we could give you some eats, folks—you look like you could use ’em. But the ones ahead o’ you done et us out of what we had. Good luck to you.”

  “I told you to go on without me,” Auerbach said. Penny ignored him. One foot and two crutches at a time, he wearily plodded north.

  By the end of that afternoon, he figured the buzzards were out tying napkins around their necks, getting ready for a delicious supper of sunbaked cavalry captain. If he fell over and died, he figured Penny could speed up and might make it to Limon before the heat and the dry and the hunger got her.

  “I love you,” he croaked, not wanting to die with things left unspoken.

  “I love you, too,” she answered. “That’s why I’m gonna get you through.”

  He laughed, but, before he could tell her how big a joke that was, he heard cheering up ahead. He pointed, balancing for a moment on one foot and one crutch. “That’s an Army wagon,” he said in glad disbelief. The horses were the most beautiful animals he’d ever seen.

  The wagon was already full, but the soldiers gave him and Penny canteens and crackers and scooted people around to make room in back. “We’ll get you up to the resettlement center,” one of them promised, “and they’ll take care of you there.”

  That took another couple of days, but there were supply depots all the way. Auerbach spent his time wondering what the resettlement center would be like; the soldiers didn’t talk much about it. When they finally got there, he found out why: it was just another name for a refugee camp, one dwarfing the squalid, miserable place outside Karval.

  “How long will we have to stay here?” he asked a harried clerk who was handing Penny bedding for two and directing her to an enormous olive-drab communal tent, one of many all in a row.

  “God knows, buddy,” the corporal answered. “The war may be stopped, but this ain’t no Easy Street. Ain’t gonna be for a long time, neither. Welcome to the United States, new and not so improved model. With luck, you won’t starve.”

  “We’ll take that,” Penny said, and Auerbach had to nod. Together, they set off to acquaint themselves with the new United States.

  In his green undershirt and black panzer man’s trousers, Heinrich Jäger didn’t look badly out of place on the streets of Lodz. Lots of men wore odds and ends of German uniform, and, if his was in better shape than most, that meant little. His colonel’s blouse, on the other hand, he’d ditched as soon as he jumped out of the Storch. A Wehrmacht officer was not a popular thing to be, not here.

  Ludmila strode along beside him. Her clothes—a peasant tunic and a pair of trousers that had probably once belonged to a Polish soldier—were mannish, but no one save a particularly nearsighted Lizard could have mistaken her for the male of the species, even with an automatic pistol on her hip. Neither pants nor sidearm drew any special notice. A lot of women wore trousers instead of skirts or dresses, and a surprising number—most but not all of them Jewish-looking—carried or wore firearms.

  “Do you know Lodz at all?” Ludmila asked. “Do you know how to find—the person we’re looking for?” She was too sensible to name Mordechai Anielewicz where anyone might overbear his name.

  Jäger shook his head. “No and no, respectively.” He kept his voice low; nobody who spoke German, Wehrmacht officer or not, was likely to be popular in Lodz these days, not with Jews, not with Poles, and not with Lizards, either. “I expect we’ll find him, though. In his own way, he’s a big man here.”

  He thought about asking a policeman. He had a couple of different brands from which to choose: Poles in dark blue uniforms and Jews with armbands left over from German administration and with kepis that made them look absurdly like French flics. That didn’t strike him as a healthy idea, though. Instead, he and Ludmila kept walking north up Stodolniana Street till they came to what had to have been the Jewish quarter. Even now, it was brutally crowded. What it had been like under the Reich was something Jäger would sooner not have contemplated.

  Many more of those comic-opera Jewish policemen were on the street in that part of town. Jäger kept right on ignoring them and hoping they would extend him the same courtesy. He nodded to a fellow with a wild mop of hair and a big, curly reddish beard who carried a Mauser, had another slung over his shoulder, and wore crisscross bandoliers full of brass cartridges: a Jewish bandit if ever there was one, and as such a man likely to know where Anielewicz could be found. “I’m looking for Mordechai,” he said. The Jew’s eyes widened slightly at his clear German. “Nu? Are you?” he said, using Yiddish, perhaps to see if Jäger could follow.

  Jäger nodded again to show he could. The Jewish fighter went on, “So you’re looking for Mordechai. So what? Is he looking for you?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” Jäger answered. “Does the name Skorzeny mean anything to you?”

  It did. The fighter stiffened. “You’re him?” he demanded, and made as if to point the rifle he carried at Jäger. Then he checked himself. “No. You can’t be. He’s supposed to be taller than I am, and you’re not.”

  “You’re right” Jäger pointed to Ludmila. “She’s really Skorzeny.”

  “Ha,” the Jew said. “A funny man. All right, funny man, you can come with me. We’ll see if Mordechai wants to see you. See both of you,” he amended, seeing how close Ludmila stuck to Jäger.

  As it happened, they didn’t have to go far. Jäger recognized the brick building they approached as a fire station. His escort spoke in Polish to a gray-bearded man tinkering with the fire engine. The fellow answered in the same language; Jäger caught Anielewicz’s name but no more. Ludmila said, “I think they said he’s upstairs, but I’m not sure.”

  She proved right. The Jew made his companions precede him, a sensible precaution Jäger would also have taken. They went down the hall to a small room. Mordechai Anielewicz sat at a table there with a plain woman. He was scribbling something, but stopped when the newcomers arrived. “Jäger!” he exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here?”

  “You know him?” The ginger-bearded Jew sounded disappointed. “He knows something about Skorzeny, he says.”

  “I’ll listen to him.” Anielewicz glanced at Ludmila. “Who’s your friend?”

  She answered for herself, with manifest pride: “Ludmila Vadimovna Gorbunova, Senior Lieutenant, Red Air Force.”

  “Red Air Force?” Anielewicz’s lips silently shaped the words. “You have the oddest friends, Jäger—her and me, for instance. What would Hitler say if he knew?”

  “He’d say I was dead meat,” Jäger answered. “Of course, since I was already under arrest for treason, he’s already said that, or his bully boys have. Right now, I want to keep him from blow
ing up Lodz, and maybe keep the Lizards from blowing up Germany to pay him back. For better or worse, it still is my fatherland. Skorzeny doesn’t care what happens next. He’ll touch that thing off for no better reason than because someone told him to.”

  “You were right,” the woman beside Anielewicz said. “You did see him, then. I thought you were worrying over every little thing.”

  “I wish I had been, Bertha,” he replied, worry and affection warring in his voice. He turned his attention back to Jäger. “I didn’t think . . . anybody”—he’d probably been about to say something like even you damned Nazis, but forbore—“would explode the bomb in the middle of truce talks. Shows what I know, doesn’t it?” His gaze sharpened. “You were arrested for treason, you say? Gevalt! They found you were passing things to us?”

  “They found out I was, yes,” Jäger answered with a weary nod. Since his rescue, things had happened too fast for him to take them all in at once. For now, he was trying to roll with each one as it hit. Later, if there was a later and it wasn’t frantic, he’d do his best to figure out what everything meant. “Karol is dead.” One more memory he wished he didn’t have. “They didn’t really have any idea how much I was passing on to you. If they’d known a tenth part of it, I’d have been in pieces on the floor when my boys came to break me out—and if my boys knew a tenth part of it, they never would have come.”

  Anielewicz studied him. Quietly, the younger man said, “If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t have known about the bomb, it would have gone off, and God only knows what would have happened next.” He offered the words as in consolation for Jäger’s having been rescued by his men when they didn’t know what he’d truly done; he understood, with a good officer’s instinctive grasp, how hard that was to accept.

  “You say you saw Skorzeny?” Jäger asked, and Anielewicz nodded. Jäger grimaced. “You must have found the bomb, too. He said it was in a graveyard. Did you move it after you found it?”

  “Yes, and that wasn’t easy, either,” Anielewicz said, wiping his forehead with a sleeve to show how hard it was. “We pulled the detonator, too—not just the wireless switch, but the manual device—so Skorzeny can’t set it off even if he finds it and even if he gets to it.”

  Jäger held up a warning hand. “Don’t bet your life on that. He may come up with the detonator you yanked, or he may have one of his own. You never want to underestimate what he can do. Don’t forget: I’ve helped him do it”

  “If he has only a detonator for use by the hand,” Ludmila said in her slow German, “would he not be blowing himself up along with everything else? If he had to, would he do that?”

  “Good question.” Anielewicz looked from her to Jäger. “You know him best.” He made that an accusation. “Nu? Would he?”

  “I know two things,” Jäger answered. “First one is, he’s liable to have some sort of scheme for setting it off by hand and escaping anyhow—no, I have no idea what, but he may. Second one is, you didn’t just make him angry, you made him furious when his nerve-gas bomb didn’t go off. He owes you one for that. And he has his orders. And, whatever else you can say about him, he’s a brave man. If the only way he can set it off is to blow himself up with it, he’s liable to be willing to do that.”

  Mordechai Anielewicz nodded, looking unhappy. “I was afraid you were going to say that. People who will martyr themselves for their cause are much harder to deal with than the ones who just want to live for it.” His chuckle held little humor. “The Lizards complain too many people are willing to become martyrs. Now I know how they feel.”

  “What will you do with us now that we are here?” Ludmila asked.

  “That is another good question,” said the woman—Bertha—sitting by Anielewicz. She turned to him, fondly; Jäger wondered if they were married. She wore no ring, whatever that meant. “What shall we do with them?”

  “Jäger is a soldier, and a good one, and he knows Skorzeny and the way his mind works,” the Jewish fighting leader said. “If he had not been reliable before, he would not be here now. Him we will give a weapon and let him help us guard the bomb.”

  “And what of me?” Ludmila demanded indignantly; Jäger could have guessed she was going to do that. Her hand came to rest on the butt of her automatic pistol. “I am a soldier. Ask Heinrich. Ask the Nazis. Ask the Lizards.”

  Anielewicz held up a placatory hand. “I believe all this,” he answered, “but first things first.” Yes, he was a good officer, not that Jäger found that news. He knew how to set priorities. He also knew how to laugh, which he did now. “And you will probably shoot me if I try to separate you from Colonel Jäger here. So. All right Wehrmacht, Red Air Force, a bunch of crazy Jews—we are all in this together, right?”

  “Together,” Jäger agreed. “Together we save Lodz, or together we go up in smoke. That’s about how it is.”

  A male shook Ussmak. “Get up, headmale! You must get up,” Oyyag said urgently, adding an emphatic cough. “That is the signal for rousing. If you do not present yourself, you will be punished. The whole barracks will be punished because of your failing.”

  Ever so slowly, Ussmak began to move. Among the Race, superiors were supposed to be responsible for inferiors and to look out for their interests. So it had been for millennia uncounted. So, on Home, it no doubt continued to be. Here on Tosev 3, Ussmak was an outlaw. That weakened his bonds of cohesion to the group, though some of them were mutineers, too. Even more to the point, he was a starved, exhausted outlaw. When you were less than convinced your own life would long continue—when you were less than convinced you wanted it to continue—group solidarity came hard.

  He managed to drag himself to his feet and lurch outside for the morning inspection. The Tosevite guards, who probably could not have stated their correct number of thumbs twice running without luck on their side, had to count the males of the Race four times before they were satisfied no one had grown wings and flown away during the night. Then they let them go in to breakfast.

  It was meager, even by the miserable standards of the prison camp. Ussmak did not finish even his own small portion. “Eat,” Oyyag urged him. “How can you get through another day’s work if you do not eat?”

  Ussmak had his own counterquestion. “How can I get through another day’s work even if I do eat? Anyhow, I am not hungry.”

  That set the other male hissing in alarm. “Headmale, you must report to the Big Ugly physicians. Perhaps they can give you something to improve your appetite, to improve your condition.”

  Ussmak’s mouth fell open. “A new body, perhaps? A new spirit?”

  “You cannot eat?” Oyyag said. Ussmak’s weary gesture showed he could not. His companion in misery, who was every bit as thin as he was, hesitated, but not for long. “May I consume your portion, then?” When Ussmak did not at once say no, the other male gulped down the food.

  As if in a dream, Ussmak shambled out to the forest with his work gang. He drew an axe and went slowly to work hacking down a tree with pale bark. He chopped at it with all his strength, but made little progress. “Work harder, you,” the Tosevite guard watching him snapped in the Russki language.

  “It shall be done,” Ussmak answered. He did some more chopping, with results equally unsatisfactory to the guard. When he first came to the camp, that would have left him quivering with fear. Now it rolled off his skinny flanks. They had put him here. Try as they would, how could they do worse?

  He shambled back to camp for lunch. Worn as he was, he could eat little. Again, someone quickly disposed of his leftovers. When, too soon, it was time to return to the forest, he stumbled and fell and had trouble getting up again. Another male aided him, half guiding, half pushing him out toward the Tosevite trees.

  He took up his axe and went back to work on the pale-barked tree. Try as he would, he could not make the blade take more than timid nips at the trunk. He was too weak and too apathetic for anything more. If he did not chop it down, if the work gang did not saw it into the rig
ht lengths of wood, they would fall short of their norm and would get only penalty rations. So what? Ussmak thought. He hadn’t been able to eat a regular ration, so why should he care if he got less?

  All the other males would get less, too, of course. He could not care about that, either. A proper male of the Race would have; he knew as much. But he’d begun to get detached from the rest of the Race when a Tosevite sniper killed Votal, his first landcruiser commander. Ginger had made things worse. Then he’d lost another good landcruiser crew, and then he’d led the mutiny for which he’d had such hope. And the results of that had been . . . this. No, he was no proper male, no longer.

  He was so tired. He set down the axe. I’ll rest for a moment, he thought.

  “Work!” a guard shouted.

  “Gavno?” Ussmak said, adding an interrogative cough. Grudgingly, the Big Ugly swung aside the muzzle of his weapon and bobbed his head up and down to grant permission. The guards let you evacuate your bowels—most of the time. It was one of the few things they did let you do.

  Stumbling slowly away from the tree, Ussmak went behind a screen of bushes. He squatted to relieve himself. Nothing happened—not surprising, not when he was so empty inside. He tried to rise, but instead toppled over onto his side. He took a breath. A little later, he took another. Quite a bit later, he took one more.

  Of themselves, the nictitating membranes slid across his eyes. His eyelids drooped, closed. In those last moments, he wondered if Emperors past would accept his spirit in spite of all he had done. Soon, he found out what he would find out.

  When the Lizard didn’t come out of the bushes after taking a shit, Yuri Andreyevich Palchinsky went in after it. He had to scuffle around to find it, and it would not come out when he called. “Stinking thing will pay,” he muttered.

  Then he did find it, by tripping over it and almost falling on his face. He cursed and drew back his foot to give it a good kick, but didn’t. Why bother? The damn thing was already dead.