In the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  For the moment, though, what would spread was scandal. Before people started gathering around and pointing fingers, he and Leah and David left the market and strolled, not too fast and not too slow, back toward his home. The Lizard guards moving along in front and behind them were in a way a blessing, because they kept most folk from coming too close and puncturing the masquerade.

  Russie’s conscience twinged again when he closed the door to his flat behind him. Bringing a woman—a young, attractive woman—here … shameful was the mildest word he thought of. But Leah remained utterly prosaic. She took off the fur hat, handed it back to him, smiled without saying anything: she must have been warned the Lizards might be listening. She pointed to the hat, then to herself, and shrugged as if to ask how anyone, even a Lizard, could imagine she was Rivka if she didn’t have it on her head. Then she walked out the door and was gone.

  The simplicity of the escape took Moishe’s breath away. The Lizards hadn’t posted guards right outside the flat, only at the entrance to the building. Maybe they didn’t want to act as if they were intimidating him, even though they were. Or maybe, as Anielewicz had said, they were just naive about how tricky human beings could be. Whichever was true, Leah, now that she was no longer disguised as Rivka, plainly intended to stroll right past them and off to freedom.

  The boy David sat on the floor and played with Reuven’s toys for a little while. Then he got up and stood by the door. Moishe opened it for him. He nodded again with that surprising gravity, then went out into the hall. Russie closed the door.

  The flat seemed achingly huge and achingly empty now that he was here alone. He walked into the bedroom, shook his head, came out again in a hurry. Then he went into the kitchen and shook his head for a different reason—he was no cook, and now he’d have to feed himself for a while. He found some black bread and a slab of cheese on the counter. He picked a knife from the dairy service, made himself a sandwich. if he wanted anything fancier than that, he’d need to get someone else to fix it for him.

  Of course, the Lizards might fix things so he wouldn’t have to worry about food any more. He tried not to dwell on that. He went back into the main room, pulled out an old medical text on diseases of the large intestine. His eyes went back and forth, he turned pages, but he remembered nothing of what he read.

  He slept badly that night. Rivka’s bed next to his, Reuven’s little cot, painfully reminded him his loved ones were not here. He was used to soft breathing and occasional snores in the bedroom with him. The silence their absence imposed on him somehow was more disturbing than a dreadful racket; he felt smothered in thick wool batting.

  He ate more bread and cheese the next morning. He was still puttering around afterward, trying to figure out what to do next, when something clicked against the front door. Lizard claws tapping the wood in the quick little drum-rattle the aliens used in place of a knock.

  Russie’s mouth went dry. He’d hoped he’d have a full day in which to pretend to be making up his mind. But no. He opened the door. To his surprise, Zolraag himself stood in the hall, along with a large contingent of guards. “Excellency,” Russie stammered. “I am honored. W-won’t you come in?”

  “There is no need,” Zolraag answered. “I ask you one question, Herr Russie: will you speak over the radio as we desire and require of you?”

  “No, Excellency, I shall not.” Moishe waited for the sky to fall.

  The Lizard governor remained businesslike. “Then we shall persuade you.” His eyes swiveled toward one of the guards. “Your males shall now seize the Tosevite female and hatchling.” He spoke, of course, in his own language, but Russie followed him well enough.

  “It shall be done.” The guard—officer?—hissed orders to the Lizards with him. One of them pointed his rifle at Russie, who stood very still.

  “You will not interfere, Herr Russie,” Zolraag said.

  “I will not interfere,” Moishe agreed.

  Some guards went into the kitchen, Others into the bedroom. All returned in short order. “The other Big Uglies are not here, superior sir, Provincelord,” one of them reported. Had he been a man, Russie would have said he sounded worried.

  “What?” the guard leader and Zolraag said together. The Lizard governor’s eyes drilled into Russie. “Where are they?”

  “Excellency, I do not know.” Russie wished he could be as brave as Anielewicz’s fighters, who seemed to go into combat without a trace of worry. If Zolraag had been angry at him before, he’d be furious now—but at least he could no longer vent that fury on the innocent. Russie went on, “As your male said, they are not here.”

  “Where did they go?” Zolraag demanded.

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “You cannot deceive me as easily as you would hope,” Zolraag said. “The female and hatchling were observed to return to this dwelling with you yesterday. They were not seen to leave. Therefore they must be in the building somewhere.” He turned to the guard officer with whom he’d spoken before. “Summon more males. We shall peel this hovel as if it were a kleggfruit.”

  “Provincelord, it shall be done.” The guard spoke into one of the incredibly small, incredibly light radiotelephones the Lizards carried.

  Watching him, Russie tried not to show the jubilation he felt. Whatever happened to him, Rivka and Reuven were out of Zolraag’s clawed, scaly hands. The Lizards were welcome to search the block of flats from now until the Messiah came. They wouldn’t find what wasn’t there.

  They made a good game try of it, though. Moishe didn’t hear their lorries pull up, as he had too many times when the Nazis rumbled into the ghetto on a sweep. But the noises that came through his open doorway after the Lizards swarmed into the building were all too familiar—rifle butts hammering on doors, frightened Jews wailing as they were herded into hallways, overturned furniture crashing to the ground.

  “Excellency, out of all the people in the world, we hailed you as rescuers when you came to Warsaw, and fought on your side against other men,” Russie said. “Now you are doing your best to turn us into foes.”

  “You turn yourselves into foes by failing to obey,” Zolraag answered.

  “We were happy to be your allies. I told you before that being your slaves, obeying because we have to rather than because we think you are in the right, is something else again.”

  Zolraag made his unhappy-samovar noise. “Your effrontery is intolerable.”

  Time dragged on. Every so often, a Lizard would come in and report to the governor. Not surprisingly, the searchers had no luck. Zolraag kept right on sounding like a teakettle with something wrong with it. Russie wondered if he could have hidden his wife and son in plain sight. Maybe so. The Lizards had already shown they weren’t any good at telling one human from another. What they were probably doing now was looking for anyone in hiding.

  They did bring one little old man with a white beard up in front of Zolraag, but the governor knew enough to dismiss him as a likely spouse for Moishe. By late afternoon, the Lizards confessed failure. Zolraag glared at Russie. “You think you have won a victory, do you, Big Ugly?” He hardly ever hurled the Lizards’ offensive nickname for humanity into Moishe’s face. That he did so now was a measure of his wrath. “Let me tell you, you shall not prove the happier for it.”

  “Do what you like with me, Excellency,” Russie said. “From your point of view, I suppose you have that right. But I think no one has any business taking hostages and enforcing his will through fear.”

  “When I seek your opinions, be assured I shall request them of you,” the governor replied. “Until that time, keep them to yourself.”

  Russie tried to figure out what he would do in Zolraag’s position. Probably stick a gun to the recalcitrant human’s head, hand him a script, and tell him to read it or else. And what would he do himself in the face of a threat like that? He hoped for defiance, but was far from sure he could come up with it. Few men had within them the stuff of martyrs.

  Zolra
ag was not quite so peremptory as he’d feared. The Lizard said, “I shall consult with my superiors, Herr Russie, over the proper steps to take in response to this unprecedented act of defiance on your part.” He strode away, his retinue trailing after him.

  Limp as a wet blotter, Russie sank down onto the sofa. Unprecedented, he decided, was the word that had saved him. The Lizards were not good at thinking on their feet, at knowing what to do when something failed to go according to plan. That didn’t mean he was out of danger, though, only that it was deferred for the moment. Somewhere higher in the Lizards’ hierarchy was a male who could tell Zolraag what to do. And Zolraag, Russie knew, would do it, whatever it was.

  He went into the kitchen, ate more bread and cheese. Then he opened the door—the bathroom was down at the end of the hall. Two armed Lizard guards stood outside; they’d been so quiet, he’d had no clue they were there.

  They marched to the toilet with him. Despite his indignant protest, one went inside and kept watch on him while he made water. Then they marched him back to the apartment. He wondered if they’d come in with him, but they didn’t.

  Still, they made sure he wasn’t going anywhere they didn’t want him to go. As Mordechai had said, they weren’t stupid. He looked around the flat. He was trapped, awaiting sentence.

  15

  An hour outside Chicago. Crouched behind an overturned drill press in a shattered factory building in Aurora, Illinois, Mutt Daniels reflected that this was about as close to the Windy City as he’d come since he fell out of the big leagues thirty years before.

  The noise he made was half laugh, half cough. Steam swirled from his mouth, thick as cigarette smoke. Even in a sheepskin coat he shivered. Snow dnfted down on him through holes in the roof. He kept his hands jammed in his pockets. If he happened to brush them against the frozen bare metal of the drill press, he knew it would strip off his skin like a scaling knife getting a bluegill ready for the frying pan.

  Clanking outside in the rubble-strewn street. A few feet away, sprawled in back of a lathe lay Sergeant Schneider. “That there’s a Lizard tank,” Daniels whispered, hoping Schneider would tell him he was wrong. But the veteran noncom just nodded. Daniels swore. We didn’t have to worry about these god damn things when we were Over There in the last war.”

  “Too goddamn right we didn’t,” Schneider said. “And all the time then I thought things couldn’t get any worse.” He spat on the floor. “Shows what I know, don’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Daniels’ shiver had only a little to do with the cold that snuck into his very bones. He’d read about tanks since the new war began, seen them in newsreels. But until, the Lizards turned the whole world upside down, he hadn’t really undertood what they did to fighting. It wasn’t just that they picked up big guns and put them on tracks. Worse still, behind their thick armor, the crews that served those guns were almost invulnerable to infantry.

  Almost. Mutt scuttled forward on hands and knees. If that tank—if any Lizard tank—forced its way to the eastern bank of the Fox River, the job of defending Chicago would take another step on the road to impossibility.

  The tank’s machine gun chattered, firing at one of the Americans defending Aurora or else at random to make humans keep their heads down. Combat here was house-to-house, concentrated; in fact, it reminded Daniels of the trench warfare he’d known in France. Aurora marked the western edge of the factory belt that spread out across the prairie from Chicago.

  Fighting all the way into the big city would be like this—if anyone lived to retreat all the way into the big city. Mutt had his doubts about that. He’d had his doubts in 1918, too, but then he’d been on the side with more men and bigger guns. Now he was getting a taste of how the poor damned Boches must have felt as everything rained down on them.

  The Germans had kept fighting like bastards right up till the Armistice. Mutt felt a similar obligation to keep going as long as he could. The front wall of the factory had been bombed not long before he holed up in it; its bricks were part of the rubble through which the Lizard tank was forcing its way. He crawled toward what had been a window opening and was now just a hole a little squarer than most. Knife-sharp shards of glass tore his pants and his knees.

  Ever so cautiously, he peered out. The tank was about thirty yards east of him. It had slowed to shove aside some burned-out trucks the Americans were using as a roadblock. The commander had nerve. In spite of rattling small-arms fire, he stood head and shoulders out of his cupola so he could see what was going on around him.

  His back was to Daniels. Mutt had grown up hunting squirrels and possums for the pot. He swung the rifle up to his shoulder, exhaled, saw the front of the Lizard’s head explode in a red mist a split second before he threw himself away from his firing position.

  “Nailed the son of a bitch!” he shouted through the din of gunfire and explosions. The other Americans sheltering in the ruined factory raised a cheer. Such a clear-cut cry of victory came their way too seldom. Had the Lizards had the numbers to match the might of their marvelous machines, Daniels knew the fight would have been long since lost.

  Nor did he get more than a moment to exult in his successful piece of sniping. Bullets from the tank’s machine gun lashed the factory building. He huddled in back of another broken power tool, grateful for the heavy chunk of iron and steel that shielded him from flying death.

  “Good job, Mutt,” Sergeant Schneider bawled. “You diverted him from the advance he was making. Taking us out doesn’t mean a thing strategically.”

  Daniels wondered whether he’d be any less dead if he got killed in an action strategically meaningless. He didn’t think so. “Damn shame,” he muttered. He also marveled that Schneider could still think and talk like a professional soldier while being hosed down by machine-gun slugs.

  Then there was a sudden hot yellow glare outside, as if the sun had come on in the middle of the street. The roar that accompanied it was loud, the wham-crash! of the shell from the tank’s big gun even louder. Chunks of brick rained down on Daniels; a timber that would have smashed him like a bug was instead smashed itself against the machine behind which he cowered.

  The tank gave the factory two more rounds: flash, boom crash; flash, boom, crash. Mutt screamed for all he was worth, but couldn’t hear himself or anyone else. He wondered if he’d ever hear anything again. At the moment, it was the least of his worries. He realized he’d wet his pants, but he didn’t care about that, either.

  When he tried to scramble away, his arms and legs shook so much he could hardly move. “Shell shock,” he said, feeling the words on his lips but not hearing them at all. He’d seen men like this in the trenches after a good German barrage. Other soldiers would jeer at them, but not too hard—it wasn’t as if the poor bastards could help themselves. He marveled at being alive.

  “Hey, Schneider,” he called, “you think them Lizards are flicking diverted enough for now?”

  He didn’t hear Schneider answer, but that was all right—he hadn’t heard himself ask the question. He glanced over to where the sergeant had been hiding. Any further jokes stuck in his throat. The veteran was nothing but splashed blood and raw meat ground not too fine.

  Daniels gulped. “Jesus,” he whispered. Schneider was the best soldier he’d ever known—by a wide margin in this crazy war and, he thought, also better than any of the top sergeants he’d served under in France. One way you told good soldiers from bad was that the good ones lived to learn new things while the bad ones bought their farms in a hurry. Seeing a good soldier dead reminded you that you could end up the same way yourself. Mutt didn’t want reminders like that.

  He smelled smoke, sharp and fresh. It was a reminder, too, a reminder there were nastier ways to die than getting chewed to pieces by a storm of shell splinters. Schneider, at least, never knew what hit him. If you roasted, you’d have plenty of time to regret it. All at once, Daniels’ shaky limbs worked, if not perfectly, then well enough.

  He looked around the gloo
my inside of the factory building—considerably less gloomy now that the Lizards had done some fresh ventilation work on the front—for the rest of the Americans who’d been in here with him. A couple of them weren’t going anywhere: they lay dead as gruesomely as Schneider. Three or four others, as lucky as he’d been himself, were getting away from the fire as fast as they could. And a couple of wounded men flopped on the floor like fresh-landed fish in the bottom of a boat.

  Both Mutt’s grandfathers had fought in the War Between the States, and both, as old men will, told stories to the wide-eyed boy he’d been. He remembered Pappy Daniels, long white beard stained with tobacco juice, talking about the Battle of the Wilderness and how wounded men there had shot themselves before any of the little blazes all the musketry had started could wash over them.

  That memory—one he hadn’t called to mind in years—told him what he had to do. He hurried forward, grabbed one of the injured soldiers, and dragged him away from the spreading flames over to a tumbledown wall that might shelter him for a little while.

  “Thanks,” the fellow gasped.

  “It’s okay.” Daniels quickly bandaged the worst of the man’s wounds, then went back to pick up his comrade. He had to sling his rifle; the other fellow had passed out, and was a two-hand carry. He’d just taken him onto his shoulders when a Lizard infantryman skittered into the factory.

  He was sure he was dead. After what seemed an age but had to have been only a heartbeat, the Lizard pointed the muzzle of its rifle to the floor, gestured with its free hand: get your wounded buddy out of here.

  Sometimes—far from always—the Germans had extended that courtesy in France; sometimes—just as far from always—the Americans returned it. Daniels never expected to encounter it from a thing that looked like one of the monsters in the serials his ballplayers liked to watch.

  “Obliged,” he told the Lizard, though he knew it couldn’t understand. Then he raised his voice to the men hiding somewhere in the ruins: “Don’t shoot this one, fellas! He’s all right.”