Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “I understand. This, however”—Nussboym looked back over his shoulder to make certain the desk out there remained unoccupied—“concerns your secretary, Apfelbaum.”

  “Does it?” Skriabin kept his voice neutral. “All right. Go on. You have my attention. What about Apfelbaum?”

  “Day before yesterday, Comrade Colonel, Apfelbaum and I were walking outside Barracks Three with Oyyag, discussing ways the Lizard prisoners could meet their norms.” Nussboym picked his words with great care. “And Apfelbaum said everyone’s life would be easier if the Great Stalin—he used the title sarcastically, I must say—if the Great Stalin worried as much about how much the Soviet people ate as he did about how hard they worked for him. That is exactly what he said. He was speaking Russian, not Yiddish, so Oyyag could understand, and I had trouble following him, so I had to ask him to repeat himself. He did, and was even more sarcastic the second time than the first.”

  “Is that so?” Skriabin said. Nussboym nodded. Skriabin scratched his head. “And the Lizard heard it, too, you say, and understood it?” Nussboym nodded again. The NKVD colonel looked up to the boards of the ceiling. “He will, I suppose, make a statement to this effect?”

  “If it is required of him, Comrade Colonel, I think he would,” Nussboym replied. “Would it be? Perhaps I should not have mentioned it, but—”

  “But indeed,” Skriabin said heavily. “I suppose you now think it necessary to file a formal written denunciation against Apfelbaum.”

  Nussboym feigned reluctance. “I would really rather not. As you recall when I denounced one of the zeks with whom I formerly worked, this is not something I care to do. It strikes me as—”

  “Useful?” Skriabin suggested. Nussboym looked back at him with wide eyes, glad the NKVD man could not see his thoughts. No, they hadn’t put him in charge of this camp by accident. He reached into his desk and pulled out a fresh form headed with incomprehensible Cyrillic instructions. “Write out what he said—Polish or Yiddish will do. That way, we will have it on file. I suppose the Lizard would talk about this to all and sundry. You would never do such a thing yourself, of course.”

  “Comrade Colonel, the idea would never enter my mind.”

  Nussboym put shocked innocence into his voice. He knew he was lying, as did Colonel Skriabin. But, like any game, this one had rules. He accepted a pen and wrote rapidly. After scrawling his signature at the bottom of the denunciation, he handed the paper back to Skriabin.

  He supposed Apfelbaum would come back with a denunciation of his own. But he’d picked his target carefully. Skriabin’s clerk would have a hard time getting his fellow politicals to back any accusations he made: they disliked him because of the way he sucked up to the commandant and the privileges he got because he was Skriabin’s aide. The ordinary zeks despised him—they despised all politicals. And he didn’t know any Lizards.

  Skriabin said, “From another man, I might think this denunciation made because he wanted Apfelbaum’s position.”

  “You could not possibly say that of me,” Nussboym answered. “I could not fill his position, and would never claim I could. If the camp functioned in Polish or Yiddish, then yes, you might say that about me. But I do not have enough Russian to do his job. All I want is to let the truth be known.”

  “You are the soul of virtue,” Skriabin said dryly. “I note, however, that virtue is not necessarily an asset on the road to success.”

  “Indeed, Comrade Colonel,” Nussboym said. Be careful, the NKVD man was telling him. He intended to be careful if he could shake Apfelbaum loose from his job, get him sent off to some harder camp in disgrace, everyone here would move up. His own place would improve. Now that he’d acknowledged he was in effect a political and cast his lot with the camp administration, he thought he might as well take as much advantage of the situation as he could.

  After all, if you didn’t look out for yourself, who was going to look out for you? He’d felt miserable after Skriabin had made him sign the first denunciation, the one against Ivan Fyodorov. This one, though, this one didn’t bother him at all.

  Offhandedly, Skriabin said, “A train bringing in new prisoners will arrive tomorrow. A couple of cars’ worth, I am given to understand, will be women.”

  “That is most interesting,” Nussboym said. “Thank you for telling me.” Women who knew what was good for them accommodated themselves to the powerful people in the camp: first to the NKVD men, then to the prisoners who could help make their lives tolerable . . . or otherwise. The ones who didn’t know what was good for them went out and cut trees and dug ditches like any other zeks.

  Nussboym smiled to himself. Surely a man as . . . practical as he could find some equally . . . practical woman for himself—maybe even one who spoke Yiddish. Wherever you were, you did what you could to get by.

  A Lizard with a flashlight approached the campfire around which Mutt Daniels and Herman Muldoon sat swapping lies. “That is you, Second Lieutenant Daniels?” he called in pretty good English.

  “This here’s me,” Mutt agreed. “Come on over, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook. Set yourself down. You boys are gonna be pullin’ out tomorrow mornin’—did I hear that right?”

  “It is truth,” Chook said. “We are to be no more in the Illinois place. We are to move out, first back to main base in Kentucky, then out of this not-empire of the United States. I tell you two things, Second Lieutenant Daniels. The first thing is, I am not sorry to go. The second thing is, I come here to say good-bye.”

  “That’s mighty nice of you,” Mutt said. “Good-bye to you, too.”

  “A sentimental Lizard,” Muldoon said, snorting. “Who woulda thunk it?”

  “Chook here ain’t a bad guy,” Daniels answered. “Like he said when we got the truce the first time, him and the Lizards he’s in charge of got more in common with us than we do with the brass hats way back of the line.”

  “Yeah, that’s right enough,” Muldoon answered, at the same time as Chook was saying, “Truth,” again. Muldoon went on, “It was like that Over There, wasn’t it? Us and the Germans in the trenches, we was more like each other than us and the fancy Dans back in Gay Paree, that’s for damn sure. Show those boys a louse and they’d faint dead away.”

  “I have also for you a question, Second Lieutenant Daniels,” Chook said. “Does it molest you to have me ask you this?”

  “Does it what?” Mutt said. Then he figured out what the Lizard was talking about. Chook’s English was pretty good, but it wasn’t perfect “No, go ahead and ask, whatever the hell it is. You and me, we’ve got on pretty good since we stopped tryin’ to blow each other’s heads off. Your troubles, they look a lot like my troubles, ‘cept in a mirror.”

  “This is what I ask, then,” Chook said. “Now that this war, this fighting, this is done, what do you do?”

  Herman Muldoon whistled softly between his teeth. So did Mutt. “That’s the question, okay,” he said. “First thing I do, I reckon, is see how long the Army wants to keep me. I ain’t what you’d call a young man.” He rubbed his bristly chin. Most of those bristles were white, not brown.

  “What do you do if you are not a soldier?” the Lizard asked. Mutt explained about being a baseball manager. He wondered if he would have to explain about baseball, too, but he didn’t. Chook said, “I have seen Tosevites, some almost hatchlings, some larger, playing this game. You were paid for guiding a team of them?” He added an interrogative cough. When Mutt agreed that he was, the Lizard said, “You must be highly skilled, to be able to do this for pay. Will you again, in time of peace?”

  “Damfino,” Daniels answered. “Who can guess what baseball’s gonna look like when things straighten out? I guess maybe the first thing I do, I ever get out of the Army, I go home to Mississippi, see if I got me any family left.”

  Chook made a puzzled noise. He pointed west, toward the great river flowing by. “You live in a boat? Your home is on the Mississippi?” Mutt had to explain about the difference between the Missis
sippi River and the state of Mississippi. When he was through, the Lizard said, “You Big Uglies, sometimes you have more than one name for one place, sometimes you have more than one place for one name. It is confused. I tell no great secret to say once or twice attacks go wrong on account of this.”

  “Maybe we’ll just have to call every town in the country Jonesville,” Herman Muldoon said. He laughed, happy with his joke.

  Chook laughed, too, letting his mouth fall open so the firelight shone on his teeth and on his snaky tongue. “You do not surprise me, you Tosevites, if you do this very thing.” He pointed to Daniels. “Before you become a soldier, then, you command baseball men. You are a leader from hatching?”

  Again, Mutt needed a moment to understand the Lizard. “A born leader, you mean?” Now he laughed, loud and long. “I grew up on a Mississippi farm my own self. There was nigger sharecroppers workin’ bigger plots o’ land than the one my pappy had. I got to be a manager on account of I didn’t want to keep walkin’ behind the ass end of a mule forever, so I ran off an’ played ball instead. I was never great, but I was pretty damn good.”

  “I have heard before these stories of defiance of authority from Tosevites,” Chook said. “They are to me very strange. We have not any like them among the Race.”

  Mutt thought about that: a whole planet full of Lizards, all doing their jobs and going on about their lives for no better reason than that somebody above them told them that was what they were supposed to do. When you looked at it that way, it was like what the Reds and the Nazis wanted to do to people, only more so. But to Chook, it seemed like water to a fish. He didn’t think about the bad parts, just about how it gave his life order and meaning.

  “How about you, Small-Unit Group Leader?” Daniels asked Chook. “After you Lizards pull out of the U.S. of A, what do you do next?”

  “I go on being a soldier,” the Lizard answered. “After this cease-fire with your not-empire, I go on to some part of Tosev 3 where no truce is, I fight more Big Uglies, till, soon or late, the Race wins there. Then I go to a new place again and do the same. All this for years, till colonization fleet comes.”

  “So you were a soldier from the git-go, then?” Mutt said. “You weren’t doin’ somethin’ else when your big bosses decided to invade Earth and just happened to scoop you up so as you could help?”

  “That would be madness,” Chook exclaimed. Maybe he was taking Mutt too literally—and maybe he wasn’t. He went on, “A hundred and five tens of years ago, the 63rd Emperor Fatuz, who reigned then and now helps watch spirits of our dead, he set forth a Soldier’s Time.”

  Mutt could hear the capital letters thudding into place, but didn’t know what exactly they meant. “A Soldier’s Time?” he echoed.

  “Yes, a Soldier’s Time,” the Lizard said. “A time when the Race needed soldiers, at first to train the males who would go with the conquest fleet, and then, in my own age group and that just before mine, the males who would make up the fleet.”

  “Wait a minute.” Mutt held up a stubby, bent forefinger. “Are you tryin’ to tell me that when it’s not a Soldier’s Time, you Lizards, you don’t have any soldiers?”

  “If we are not building a conquest fleet to bring a new world into the Empire, what need do we have for soldiers?” Chook returned. “We do not fight among us. The Rabotevs and Hallessi are sensible subjects. They are not Tosevites, to revolt whenever they like. We have the data to make males into soldiers when the Emperor”—he looked down at the ground—“decides we need them. For thousands of years at a time, we do not need. Is it different with you Big Uglies? You fought your own war when we came. Did you have soldiers in a time between wars?”

  He sounded as if he were asking whether they picked their noses and then wiped their hands on their pants. Mutt looked at Muldoon. Muldoon was already looking at him. “Yeah, we’ve been known to keep a soldier or two around while we’re not fightin’,” Mutt said.

  “Just in case we might need ’em,” Muldoon added, his voice dry.

  “This is wasteful of resources,” Chook said.

  “It’s even more wasteful not to keep soldiers around,” Mutt said, “on account of if you don’t and the country next door does, they’re gonna whale the stuffing out of you, take what used to be yours, an’ use it for their own selves.”

  The Lizard’s tongue flicked out, wiggled around, and flipped back into his mouth. “Ah,” he said. “Now I have understanding. You are always in possession of an enemy next door. With us of the Race, it is a thing of difference. After the Emperors”—he looked down again—“made all Home one under their rule, what need had we of soldiers? We had need only in conquest time. Then the reigning Emperor”—and again—“declared a Soldier’s Time. After the ending of the conquest, we needed soldiers no more. We pensioned them, let them die, and trained no new ones till the next time of need.”

  Mutt let out a low, soft, wondering whistle. In a surprisingly good Cockney accent, Herman Muldoon sang out, “Old soldiers never die. They only fade away.” He turned to Chook, explaining, “With us, that’s just a song. I heard it Over There during the last big war. You Lizards, though, sounds like you really mean it. Ain’t that a hell of a thing?”

  “We mean it on Home. We mean it on Rabotev 2. We mean it on Halless 1,” Chook said. “Here on Tosev 3, who knows what we mean? Here on Tosev 3, who knows what anything means? Maybe one day, Second Lieutenant Daniels, we fight again.”

  “Not with me, you don’t,” Mutt said at once. “They let me out of the Army, they ain’t never gettin’ me back in. An’ if they do, they wouldn’t want what they got. I done had all the fightin’ that’s in me squeezed out. You want to mix it up down line, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook, you got to pick yourself a younger man.”

  “Two younger men,” Sergeant Muldoon agreed.

  “I wish to both of you good fortune,” Chook said. “We fighted each other. Now we do not fight and we are not enemies. Let it stay so.” He turned and skittered out of the circle of yellow light the campfire threw.

  “Ain’t that somethin’?” Muldoon said in wondering tones. “I mean, ain’t that just somethin’?”

  “Yeah,” Mutt answered, understanding exactly what he was talking about. “If they ain’t got a war goin’ on, they don’t have any soldiers, neither. Wish we could be like that, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for Muldoon’s nod, which came as automatically as breathing. Instead, he went on, voice dreamy, “No soldiers a-tall, not for hundreds—shitfire, maybe thousands, all I know—of years at a time.” He let out a long sigh, wishing for a cigarette.

  “Almost makes you wish they won the war, don’t it?” Muldoon said.

  “Yeah,” Mutt said. “Almost.”

  Whatever Mordechai Anielewicz was lying on, it wasn’t a feather bed. He pulled himself to his feet. Something wet was running down his cheek. When he put his hand against it, the palm came away red.

  Bertha Fleishman sprawled in the street, in amongst the tumbled bricks from which he had just arisen. She had a cut on her leg and another one, a nasty one, on the side of her head that left her scalp matted with blood. She moaned: not words, just sound. Her eyes didn’t quite track.

  Fear running through him, Mordechai stooped and hauled her upright. His head was filled with a hissing roar, as if a giant high-pressure air hose had sprung a leak right between his ears. Through that roar, he heard not only Bertha’s moan but the screams and cries and groans of dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of injured people.

  If he’d walked another fifty meters closer to the fire station, he wouldn’t have been injured. He would have been dead. The realization oozed slowly through his stunned brain. “If I hadn’t stopped to chat with you—” he told Bertha.

  She nodded, though her expression was still faraway. “What happened?” Her lips shaped the words, but they had no breath behind them—or maybe Anielewicz was even deafer than he thought.

  “Some kind of explosion,” he said. Then, later than he should ha
ve, he figured out what kind of explosion: “A bomb.” Again, he seemed to be thinking with mud rather than brains, because he needed several more seconds before he burst out, “Skorzeny!”

  The name reached Bertha Fleishman, where nothing had before it “Gottenyu!” she said, loud enough for Anielewicz to hear and understand. “We have to stop him!”

  That was true. They had to stop him—if they could. The Lizards had never managed it. Anielewicz wondered if anyone could. One way or the other, he was going to find out.

  He looked around. There in the chaos, using a bandage from the aid kit he wore on his belt, squatted Heinrich Jäger. The old Jew who held out a mangled hand to him didn’t know he’d been a Wehrmacht panzer colonel, or care. And Jäger, by the practiced, careful way he worked, didn’t worry about the religion of the man he was helping. Beside him, his Russian girlfriend—another story about which Anielewicz knew less than he would have liked—was tying what looked like an old wool sock around a little boy’s bloody knee.

  Anielewicz tapped Jäger on the shoulder. The German whirled around, snatching for the submachine gun he’d set down on the pavement so he could help the old man. “You’re alive,” he said, relaxing a little when he realized who Mordechai was.

  “I think so, anyhow.” Anielewicz waved at the hurly-burly all around. “Your friend plays rough.”

  “This is what I told you,” the German answered. He looked around, too, but only for a moment. “This is probably a diversion—probably not the only one, either. Wherever the bomb is, you’d better believe Skorzeny’s somewhere close by.”

  As if on cue, another explosion rocked Lodz. This one came from the east; gauging the sound, Anielewicz thought it had gone off not far from the ruined factory sheltering the stolen weapon. He hadn’t told Jäger where that factory was, not quite trusting him. Now he had no more choice. If Skorzeny was around there, he’d need all the help he could get.