Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Let’s go,” he said. Jäger nodded, quickly finished the bandaging job, and grabbed the Schmeisser. The Russian girl—the Russian pilot—Ludmila—drew her pistol. Anielewicz nodded. They started off. Mordechai looked back toward Bertha, but she’d slumped down onto the pavement again. He wished he had her along, too, but she didn’t look able to keep up, and he didn’t dare wait. The next blast wouldn’t be a fire station. It wouldn’t be whatever building had gone up in the latest explosion. It would be Lodz.

  Nothing was left of the fire station. Petrol flames leaped high through the wreckage—the fire engine was burning. Mordechai kicked a quarter of a brick as hard as he could, sending it spinning away. Solomon Gruver had been in there. Later on—if he lived—he’d grieve.

  The Mauser thumped against his shoulder as he trotted along. It didn’t bother him; he noticed it only at odd moments. What did bother him was how little ammunition jingled in his pockets. The rifle bore a full five-round clip, but he didn’t have enough cartridges to refill that clip more than once or twice. He hadn’t expected to fight today.

  “How are you fixed for ammunition?” he asked Jäger.

  “Full magazine in the weapon, one more full one here.” The German pointed to his belt. “Sixty rounds altogether.”

  That was better, but it wasn’t as good as Mordechai had hoped.

  You could go through the magazine of a submachine gun in a matter of seconds. He reminded himself Jäger was a panzer colonel. If a German soldier—a German officer, no less—didn’t maintain fire discipline, who would?

  Maybe nobody. When bullets started cracking past your head, maintaining discipline of any sort came hard.

  “And I, I have only the rounds in my pistol,” Ludmila said. Anielewicz nodded. She was coming along. Jäger seemed to think she had every right to come along, but Jäger was sleeping with her, too, so how much was his opinion worth? Enough that Anielewicz didn’t feel like bucking it, not when anybody who wouldn’t run away at the sound of a gunshot was an asset. She’d been in the Red Air Force and she’d been a partisan here in Poland, so maybe she’d be useful after all. His own fighters had shown him some women could do the job—and some men couldn’t.

  He passed a good many of his own fighters as he hurried with Jäger and Ludmila toward the ruined factory. Several shouted questions at him. He gave only vague answers, and did not ask any of the men or women to join. None of them was privy to the secret of the explosive-metal bomb, and he wanted to keep the circle of those who were as small as possible. If he stopped Skorzeny, he didn’t want to have to risk playing a game of Samson in the temple with the Lizards afterwards. Besides, troops who didn’t know what they were getting into were liable to cause more problems than they solved.

  A couple of Order Service policemen also recognized him and asked him where he was going. Them he ignored. He was used to ignoring the Order Service. They were used to being ignored, too. Men who carried truncheons were polite to men with rifles and submachine guns: either they were polite, or their loved ones (assuming Order Service police had any loved ones, a dubious proposition) said Kaddish over new graves in the cemetery.

  Jäger was starting to pant “How far is it?” he asked on the exhale. Sweat streamed down his face and darkened his shirt at the back and under the arms.

  Anielewicz was shvitzing, too. The day was hot and bright and clear, pleasant if you were just lounging around but not for running through the streets of Lodz. This couldn’t have happened, say, in fall? he thought. Aloud, though, he answered, “Not much farther. Nothing in the ghetto is very far from anything else. You Nazis didn’t leave us much room here, you know.”

  Jäger’s mouth tightened. “Can’t you leave that alone when you talk to me? If I hadn’t got through to you, you’d have been dead twice by now.”

  “That’s true,” Mordechai admitted. “But it only goes so far. How many thousands of Jews died here before anyone said anything?” He gave Jäger credit. The German visibly chewed on that for a few strides before nodding.

  A cloud of smoke was rising. As Mordechai had thought from the sound, it was close to the place where the bomb lay concealed. Somebody shouted to him, “Where’s the fire engine?”

  “It’s on fire itself by now,” he answered. “The other explosion you heard was the fire station.” His questioner stared at him in horror. When he had time, he figured he would be horrified, too. What would the ghetto do for a fire engine from now on? He grunted. If they didn’t stop Skorzeny, from now on would be a phrase without meaning.

  He rounded another corner, Jäger and Ludmila beside him. Almost, then, he stopped dead in his tracks. The burning building housed the stable that held the heavy draft horses he’d gathered to move the bomb in case of need. Fire trapped the horses in their stalls. Their terrified screams, more dreadful than those of wounded women, dinned in his ears.

  He wanted to go help the animals, and had to make himself trot past them. People who didn’t know what he did were trying to get the horses out of the stable. He looked to make sure none of the bomb guards were there. To his relief, he didn’t see any, but he knew he might well have. When that thought crossed his mind, he was suddenly certain Skorzeny hadn’t bombed the building at random. He’d tried to create a distraction, to lure the guards away from their proper posts.

  “That SS pal of yours, he’s a real mamzer, isn’t he?” he said to Jäger.

  “A what?” the panzer man asked.

  “A bastard,” Anielewicz said, substituting a German word for a Yiddish one.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Jäger said. “Christ, Anielewicz, you don’t know a tenth part of it.”

  “I’m finding out,” Mordechai answered. “Come on, we go round this last corner and then we’re there.” He yanked the rifle from his shoulder, flipped off the safety, and chambered the first round from the clip. Jäger nodded grimly. He also had his Schmeisser ready to fire. And Ludmila had been carrying her little automatic in her hand all along. It wasn’t much, but better than nothing.

  At the last corner, they held up. If they went charging around it, they were liable to be walking straight into a buzz saw. Ever so cautiously, Mordechai looked down the street toward the dead factory. He didn’t see anyone, not with a quick glance, and he knew where to look. In the end, though, whether he saw anyone didn’t matter. They had to go forward. If Skorzeny was ahead of them . . . With luck, he’d be busy at the bomb. Without luck—

  He glanced over to Jäger. “Any better idea of how many little friends Skorzeny is liable to have with him?”

  The panzer colonel’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a mirthless grin. “Only one way to find out, isn’t there? I’ll go first, then you, then Ludmila. We’ll leapfrog till we get to where we’re going.”

  Mordechai resented his taking over like that, even if the tactic did make good sense. “No, I’ll go first,” he said, and then, to prove to himself and Jäger both that it wasn’t bravado, he added, “You’ve got the weapon with the most firepower. Cover me as I move up.”

  Jäger frowned, but nodded after a moment. He slapped Anielewicz lightly on the shoulder. “Go on, then.” Anielewicz dashed forward, ready to dive behind a pile of rubble if anyone started shooting from inside the factory. No one did. He hurled himself into a doorway that gave him some cover. No sooner had he done so than Jäger ran past him, bent double and dodging back and forth. He might have been a panzer man, but he’d learned somewhere to fight on foot, Anielewicz scratched his head. The German was old enough to have fought in the last war. And who but he could say what all he’d done in this one?

  Ludmila ran by both of them. She chose a doorway on the opposite side of the street in which to shelter. While she paused there, she shifted the pistol to her left hand so she could shoot from that position without exposing much of her body to return fire. She knew her business, too, then.

  Anielewicz sprinted past her, up to within ten or twelve meters of the hole in the wall that led into t
he ruined factory. He peered in, trying to pierce the gloom. Was that someone lying still, not far inside? He couldn’t be certain, but it looked that way.

  Behind him, booted feet thumped on the pavement. He hissed and waved; Heinrich Jäger saw him and ducked into the doorway where he was standing. “What’s wrong?” the German asked, breathing hard.

  Anielewicz pointed. Jäger narrowed his eyes, squinting ahead.

  The lines that came out when he did that said he was indeed old enough to have fought in the First World War. “That’s a body,” he said, just as Ludmila came up to crowd the narrow niche in front of the door. “I’d bet anything you care to name it isn’t Skorzeny’ s body, either.”

  “No, thanks,” Mordechai said. “I don’t have much, but what I’ve got, I’ll keep.” He drew in a deep breath. That took some effort. Nerves, he thought; he hadn’t run that far. He pointed again. “If we can make it up to that wall, we go in there and then head for the bomb along the clear path that leads into the middle of the building. Once we’re at the wall, nobody can shoot at us without giving us a clear shot back at him.”

  “We go, then,” Ludmila said, and ran for the wall. She made it. Muttering under his breath, Jäger followed. So did Anielewicz. Ever so cautiously, he peered into the factory. Yes, that was a sentry lying there—his rifle lay beside him. His chest wasn’t moving.

  Mordechai tried to take another deep breath himself. His lungs didn’t seem to want to work. Inside his chest, his heart stumbled. He turned back toward Jäger and Ludmila. It had been shadowy inside the wrecked factory. He’d expected that. But here, too, on a bright, sunny day, he saw his comrades only dimly. He looked up at the sun. Staring at it didn’t hurt his eyes. He looked back to Ludmila. Her eyes were very blue, he thought, and then realized why: her pupils had contracted so much, he could barely see them at all.

  He fought for another hitching breath. “Something’s—wrong,” he gasped.

  Heinrich Jäger had watched the day go dark around him without thinking much of it till Anielewicz spoke. Then he swore loudly and foully, while fear raced through him. He was liable to have killed himself and the woman he loved and all of Lodz out of sheer stupidity. You couldn’t see nerve gas. You couldn’t smell it. You couldn’t taste it. It would kill you just the same.

  He yanked open the aid kit he’d used to bandage the wounded old Jew. He had—he thought he had—five syringes, one for himself and each man in his panzer crew. If the SS had taken those out when they’d arrested him—If they’d done that, he was dead, and he wouldn’t be the only one.

  But the blackshirts hadn’t They hadn’t thought to paw through the kit and see what was inside. He blessed them for their inefficiency.

  He took out the syringes. “Antidote,” he told Ludmila. “Hold still.” All at once, speaking was an effort for him, too: the nerve gas was having its way. A few more minutes and he would have quietly keeled over and died, without ever figuring out why he was dead.

  Ludmila, for a wonder, didn’t argue. Maybe she was having trouble talking and breathing, too. He jabbed the syringe into the meat other thigh, as he’d been trained, and pressed down on the plunger.

  He grabbed another syringe. “You,” he told Anielewicz as he yanked off its protective cap. The Jewish fighting leader nodded. Jäger hurried to inject him; he was starting to turn blue. If your lungs didn’t work and your heart didn’t work, that was what happened to you.

  Jäger threw down the second syringe. Its glass body shattered on the pavement He heard that, but had trouble seeing it. Working as much by touch as by sight, he got out another syringe and stabbed himself in the leg.

  He felt as if he’d held a live electrical wire against his flesh. It wasn’t well-being that rushed through him; instead, he was being poisoned in a different way, one that fought the action of the nerve gas. His mouth went dry. His heart pounded so loud, he had no trouble hearing it. And the street, which had gone dim and faint as the nerve gas squeezed his pupils shut, all at once seemed blindingly bright. He blinked. Tears filled his eyes.

  To escape the hideous glare, he ducked inside the factory. There, in real shadows, the light seemed more tolerable. Mordechai Anielewicz and Ludmila followed. “What was that stuff you shot us with?” the Jew asked, his voice a whisper.

  “The antidote for nerve gas—that’s all I know,” Jäger answered. “They issued it to us in case we had to cross areas we’d already saturated while we were fighting the Lizards—or in case the wind shifted when we didn’t expect it to. Skorzeny must have brought along gas grenades, or maybe just bottles full of gas, for all I know. Throw one in, let it break, give yourself a shot while you’re waiting, and then go in and do what you were going to do.”

  Anielewicz looked down at the dead body of the sentry. “We have nerve gas now, too, you know,” he said. Jäger nodded. Anielewicz scowled. “We’re going to have to be even more careful with it than we have been—and we’ve taken casualties from it.” Jäger nodded again. With nerve gas, you couldn’t be too careful.

  “Enough of this,” Ludmila said. “Where is the bomb, and how do we get to it and stop Skorzeny without getting killed ourselves?”

  Those were good questions. Jäger couldn’t have come up with better if he’d thought for a week, and he didn’t have a week to waste thinking. He glanced over to Anielewicz. If anybody had the answers, the Jewish fighting leader did.

  Anielewicz pointed into the bowels of the building. “The bomb is there, less than a hundred meters away. See the opening there, behind the overturned desk? The path isn’t straight, but it’s clear. One of you, maybe both of you, should go down it. It’s the only way you’ll get there fast enough to be useful. Me, I set this place up. There’s another way to get to the bomb. I’ll take that—and we see what happens then.”

  Jäger was used to sending others out to create distractions for him to exploit. Now he and Ludmila were the distraction. He couldn’t argue with that, not when Anielewicz knew the ground and he didn’t. But he knew the people who created distractions were the ones likely to get expended when the shooting started. If his mouth hadn’t already been dry from the antidote, it would have gone that way.

  Anielewicz didn’t wait for him and Ludmila to argue. Like any good commander, he took being obeyed for granted. Pointing one last time to the upside-down desk, he slipped away behind a pile of rubble.

  “Stay in back of me,” Jäger whispered to Ludmila.

  “Chivalry is reactionary,” she said. “You have the better weapon. I should lead and draw fire.” In strictly military terms, she was right He’d never thought strictly military terms would apply to the woman he loved. But if he failed here out of love or chivalry or whatever you wanted to call it, he failed altogether. Reluctantly, he waved Ludmila ahead.

  She didn’t see the motion, because she’d already started moving forward. He followed, close as he could. As Anielewicz had said, the path wound but was easy enough to use. With his pupils dilated by the nerve gas antidote, he could see exactly where to place each foot to make the least possible noise.

  What he thought was about halfway to the bomb, Ludmila stopped in her tracks. She pointed round the corner. Jäger came up far enough to see. A Jewish guard lay dead there, one hand still on his rifle. Ever so carefully, Jäger and Ludmila stepped over him and moved on.

  Up ahead, Jäger heard tools clinking on metal, a sound with which he’d become intimately familiar while serving on panzers. Normally, that was a good sound, promising that something broken would soon be fixed. Something broken would soon be fixed now, too. Here, though, the sound of ongoing repair raised the hair at the back of his neck.

  He made a mistake then—brushing against some rubble, he knocked over a brick. It fell to the ground with a crash that seemed hideously loud. Jäger froze, cursing himself. That’s why you didn’t stay in the infantry, you clumsy son of a whore.

  He prayed Skorzeny hadn’t heard the brick. God wasn’t listening. The handicraft noises stopped
. A burst of submachine gun fire came in their place. Skorzeny couldn’t see him, but didn’t care. He was hoping ricochets would do the job for him. They almost did. A couple of bouncing bullets came wickedly close to Jäger as he threw himself flat.

  “Give up, Skorzeny!” he shouted, wriggling forward with Ludmila beside him. “You’re surrounded!”

  “Jäger?” For one of the rare times in their acquaintance, he heard Skorzeny astonished. “What are you doing here, you kikeloving motherfucker? I thought I put paid to you for good. They should have hanged you from a noose made of piano wire by now. Well, they will. One day they will.” He fired another long burst. He wasn’t worried about spending ammunition. Bullets whined around Jäger, striking sparks as they caromed off bricks and wrecked machines.

  Jäger scuttled toward him anyhow. If he made it to the next heap of bricks, he could pop up over it and get a decent shot. “Give up!” he yelled again. “We’ll let you go if you do.”

  “You’ll be too dead to worry about it, whether I give up or not,” the SS man answered. Then he paused again. “No, maybe not. You should be dead already, as a matter of fact. Why the hell aren’t you?” Now he sounded friendly, interested, as if they were hashing it out over a couple of shots of schnapps.

  “Antidote,” Jäger told him.

  “Isn’t that a kick in the balls?” Skorzeny said. “Well, I’d hoped I’d get out of here in one piece, but—” The but was punctuated by a potato-masher hand grenade that spun hissing through the air and landed five or six meters behind Jäger and Ludmila.

  He grabbed her and folded both of them into a tight ball an instant before the grenade exploded. The blast was deafening. Hot fragments of casing bit into his back and legs. He grabbed for his Schmeisser, sure Skorzeny would be following hard on the heels of the grenade.

  A rifle shot rang out, then another one. Skorzeny’s submachine gun chattered in reply. The bullets weren’t aimed at Jäger. He and Ludmila untangled themselves from each other and both rushed to that pile of bricks.