In the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  The hotshot said, “I gather you’re a panzer soldier and that you’ve stolen something important to the Lizards. What I’ve heard from Yossel here is interesting, but it’s also secondhand. Tell it to me yourself, Jäger.”

  “Just a minute,” Jäger said. Yossel bristled, but Mordechai only grunted, waiting for him to go on. He did: “You Jews cooperate with the Lizards, yet now you seem ready to betray them. Show me I can trust you not to hand me straight over to them.”

  “If we wanted to do that, we could have done it already,” Mordechai pointed out. “As for how and why we work with the Lizards—hmm. Think of it like this. Back three winters ago, Russia swamped the Finns. When you Nazis invaded Russia, Finland was happy enough to ride on your coattails and take back its own. But do you think the Finns go around yelling ‘Heil Hitler!’ all day long?”

  “Mmm—maybe not,” Jäger admitted. “And so?”

  “And so we helped the Lizards against you Nazis, but for our own reasons—survival, for instance—not theirs. We don’t have to love them. Now I’ve told my story, and more than you deserve. You tell yours.”

  Jäger did. Mordechai interrupted every so often with sharp, probing questions. The German’s respect for him grew at every one. He’d figured the Jew would know something of war and especially partisan operations—he had him pegged for a high military official. But he hadn’t figured Mordechai would know so much about the loot he carried in his saddlebags; he soon realized the Jew, though he’d never seen the mud-encrusted chunks of metal; understood them better than he did himself.

  When Jäger was through (he felt squeezed dry), Mordechai steepled his fingers and stared up at the ceiling. “You know, before this war started, I worried more about what Marx thought than about God,” he remarked. His speech grew more guttural; his vowels shifted so Jäger had to think to follow him—he’d fallen out of German into Yiddish. He went on, “Ever since you Nazis shut me up in the ghetto and tried to starve me to death, I’ve had my doubts about the choice I made. Now I’m sure I was wrong.”

  “Why now in particular?” Jäger asked.

  “Because I would need to be the wisest rabbi who ever lived to decide whether I ought to help you Germans fight the Lizards with their own filthy weapons.”

  Yossel nodded vehemently. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said.

  Mordechai waved him to silence. “I wish this choice fell on someone besides me. All I wanted to be before the war was an engineer.” His gaze and Jäger’s clashed, swordlike. “All I am now, thanks to you Germans, is a fighting man.”

  “That’s all I’ve ever been,” Jäger said. Once, before another war, he’d had hopes of studying biblical archaeology. But he’d learned in the trenches of France what he was good at—and how much the fatherland needed folk with talents like his. Set against that knowledge, biblical archaeology was small beer.

  “And so on us the future turns,” Mordechai mused. “I don’t know about you, Jäger”—it was the first time he’d used the German’s name—“but I wish my own shoulders were wider.”

  “Yes,” Jäger said.

  Mordechai eyed him again, this time with a soldier’s calculation. “Simplest would be to shoot you and dump your body into the Vistula. So many have gone in that no one would notice one more. Toss your saddlebags in after you and I’d never have to wake up sweating in the night for fear of what you damned Nazis were going to do with this stuff you’ve stolen.”

  “No—instead you’d wake up sweating in the night that no one could do anything to fight the Lizards.” Jäger tried to keep his voice and manner calm. He’d hazarded his life often enough on the battlefield, but never like this—it felt more like poker than war. He tossed another chip into the pot: “And no matter what you do to me, Stalin already has his share of the loot. Will you also sweat for what the Bolsheviks do with it?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” Mordechai sighed, a sound that seemed to flow out from his whole body, not just his chest. “Better this choice should have fallen to Solomon the Wise than a poor fool like me. Then we would have some hope of a decision rightly taken.”

  He started to sigh again, but the noise turned into a sudden, sharp inhalation halfway through. When he looked at Jäger now, his eyes blazed. Yes, the German thought, an officer indeed, one men would follow into hell.

  “Maybe Solomon shows the way after all,” Mordechai said softly.

  “What do you mean?” But even if he hadn’t thought of archaeology in years, Jäger knew his Bible well enough. Of themselves, his eyes went to the saddlebags leaning against the wall. “You want to cut the baby in half, do you?”

  “That’s just what I want to do, Jäger,” Mordechai said. “Just exactly. All right, keep some of what you have. You Nazi bastards are smart, I give you that; maybe you’ll figure out what to do with it. But someone besides you and the Russians ought to have a chance with it, too.”

  “Whom did you have in mind? You?” Jäger asked. The idea of Polish Jews with such horror weapons alarmed him as much as the prospect of the Germans with them appalled Mordechai. These Jews had too good a reason to want to use it on Germany.

  But Mordechai shook his head. “No, not us. We haven’t the men, we haven’t the research facilities we’d need to figure out what we’d have to do, and there’d be too many Lizards underfoot for us to keep the work secret.”

  “Who, then?” Jäger said.

  “I was thinking the Americans,” Mordechai answered. “They’ve lost Washington, so they know in their bellies this thing is real. For all we know, they were working on it already. They have enough scientists there—plenty who fled to America away from you fascists, by all accounts. And it’s big, like Russia; they’d have plenty of places to hide from the Lizards while they figured things out.”

  Jäger thought about that. He had an instinctive reluctance to hand over strategic material to the enemy—but compared to the Lizards, the Americans were allies. And even in terms of purely human politics, the more counterbalances to Moscow, the better. But one large question remained: “How do you propose to get this stuff across the Atlantic?”

  He’d expected Mordechai to blanch, but the Jew was unperturbed. “That we can manage easier than you’d think the Lizards don’t trust us as far as they used to, but we can still move pretty freely through the countryside—and we can get to the sea.”

  “Then what?” Jäger said. “Put your saddlebag on a freighter and sail for New York?”

  “You say it as a joke, but I think we could do it,” Mordechal answered. “There’s a surpnsing lot of water traffic going on; the Lizards don’t automatically attack it the way they do trains and lorries. But no, I hadn’t intended to put it on a freighter. We have ways of getting a submarine here without the Lizards’ noticing. We’ve done it a couple of times already, and it ought to be good for one more run.”

  “A submarine?” American? Jäger thought. No, more likely British. The Baltic had been a German lake; a few months earlier, a British U-boat captain would have been suicidal to poke his periscope into it. Now, though, Germany had more urgent worries than British subs. “A submarine.” This time, Jäger made it a statement. “You know, that might be crazy enough to work.”

  “Oh, we’re crazy, all right,” Mordechai said. “If we weren’t crazy before the war, you Nazis made us that way.” His laugh was full of self-mockery. “And now I must be crazier than ever, dickering to help Nazis make something that might be the end of the world. Only some ends are worse than others, eh?”

  “Yes.” Jäger felt just as strange, dickering with Communists and now Jews. Now that he was close to Germany again, he suddenly wondered how his superiors—and the Gestapo—would view his dealings since the Lizards blew his Panzer III out from under him. But unless the world had turned completely insane, what was in the lead-lined saddlebag would redeem almost any amount of ideological contamination. Almost.

  “We are agreed?” Mordechai asked.

  “We are agre
ed,” Jäger said. Afterward, he was never sure which of them first stuck out a hand. They both squeezed, hard.

  Atvar was busy checking the latest reports on how the Race was coping with the insane winter weather of Tosev 3 when a musical note from his computer reminded him of an appointment. He spoke into the intercom mike: “Drefsab, are you there?”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, I am,” came the reply from an antechamber. Of course no one would presume to make the commander of the Race’s force wait, but formality persisted nonetheless.

  “Enter, Drefsab,” Atvar declared, and pressed a button on his desk that made it possible for the operative to enter.

  The fleetlord hissed in shocked dismay when Drefsab came into the office. The investigator had been one of his brightest males, infiltrating Straha’s staff to try to learn how the shiplord was spying on him and also dueling with Big Ugly intelligence agents who lacked his tools but made up for that with deceit unmatched even around the Emperor’s court. He’d always been dapper and crisp. Now his body paint was smeared, his scales dull, his pupils dilated.

  “By the Emperor, what’s happened to you?” Atvar exclaimed.

  “By the Emperor, Exalted Fleetlord, I find I must report myself unfit for duty,” Drefsab answered, casting down his eyes. Even his voice sounded as if he had rust in the works somewhere.

  “I can see that,” Atvar said. “But what’s wrong? How have you become unfit?”

  “I took it in my mind, Exalted Fleetlord, to investigate how traffic in the Tosevite herb called ginger was affecting our males. I realize I did so without orders, but I judged the problem to be of sufficient importance to justify the breach in conduct.”

  “Go on,” Atvar said. Males who did things without orders were vanishingly. rare in the Race, though that kind of initiative seemed all too common among the Big Uglies. If this was what happened when the Race tried to match the Tosevites for sheer energy, the fleetlord wished his starships had never left Home.

  Drefsab said, “Exalted Fleetlord, to evaluate both the traffic in ginger and the reasons for its spreading use, I deemed it necessary to seek out and sample the herb for myself. I regret to have to inform the fleetlord that I myself have fallen victim to its addictive properties.”

  Males of the Race’s primitive ancestors had been hunters, carnivores. Atvar bent his fingers into the position that gave his claws the best opportunity to rend and tear. He did not need more bad news, not now. Tosev 3, and especially winter on Tosev 3’s northern hemisphere, were giving him plenty of bad news by themselves.

  He had to say something. He didn’t know what. At last he tried, “How could you do such a stupid thing, knowing your value to the Race?”

  Drefsab hung his head in shame. “Exalted Fleetlord, in my arrogance I assumed I could investigate, could even sample the illicit herb, with no ill effects. I was, unfortunately, mistaken. Even now the craving burns in me.”

  “What is it like, to be under the influence of this ginger substance?” The fleetlord had read reports, but his confidence in reports was not what it had been back Home. The report on Tosev 3, for instance, had made it sound like an easy conquest.

  “I feel—bigger than myself, better than myself, as if I am capable of undertaking anything,” Drefsab said. “When I don’t have that feeling, I long for it with every scale of my skin.”

  “Does this drug-induced feeling have any basis in reality?” Atvar asked. “That is, viewed objectively, do you in fact perform better while taking ginger than without it?” He had a moment of hope. If the noxious powder turned out to be a valuable pharmaceutical, some good might yet spring from Drefsab’s initiative.

  But the agent only let out a long, whistling sigh. “I fear not, Exalted Fleetlord. I have examined work I produced shortly after tasting ginger. It contains more errors than I would normally find acceptable. I made them, but simply failed to notice them because of the euphoria the drug induces. And when I have not tasted ginger in some time … Exalted Fleetlord, it is very bad then.”

  “Very bad,” Atvar echoed in a hollow voice. “How do you respond to this craving, Drefsab? Do you indulge it at every opportunity, or do you resist as best you can?”

  “The latter,” Drefsab answered with a certain melancholy pride. “I go as long as I can between tastes, but that period seems to decrease as time passes. And I am also at less than maximum effectiveness in the black interval between tastes.”

  “Yes.” Although with regret, Atvar’s thoughts now turned purely pragmatic: how could he get the best use out of this irrevocably damaged male? Decision came quickly. “If you find yourself more valuable to the Race than without taking it, use it at whatever level you find necessary for your continued function. Ignore all else. I so order you, for the good of the Race.”

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Drefsab whispered.

  Atvar went on, “I further order you to record in diary form all your reactions to this ginger. Physicians’ views of the problem are necessarily external; your analysis from the ginger user’s perspective will furnish them valuable data.”

  “It shall be done,” Drefsab repeated, more heartily now.

  “Further, continue your investigation into the trafficking in this drug. Bring down as many of those involved in the foul trade as you can.”

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Drefsab said for the third time. For a moment, he sounded like the keen young male, the hunting solmek, he had always been for Atvar. But then he wilted before the fleetlord’s eyes, asking piteously, “Exalted Fleetlord, if I bring them all down, whence shall my further supply of ginger come?”

  Atvar hid his disgust. “Seize all you need to ensure your own stock for as long as you wish to continue your habit,” he said, reasoning that Drefsab on ginger was likely to make a better agent than he would pining for the herb, and was also likely to remain a better agent than any male, no matter how sober, he appointed in his place. To salve his conscience, Atvar added, “Our physicians will continue to seek a cure for this Tosevite herb. Spirits of dead Emperors grant they find it soon.”

  “Aye, Exalted Fleetlord. Even now, I crave—” With a shudder, Drefsab broke off in the middle of the sentence. “Have I the Exalted Fleetlord’s gracious leave to depart?”

  “Yes, go on, Drefsab, and may Emperors past look kindly on you.”

  Drefsab’s salute: was ragged, but the male seemed to pull himself together as he left the fleetlord’s office. If nothing else, Atvar had imbued him with fresh purpose. The fleetlord himself was depressed as he returned to his paperwork. I hate this cursed world, he thought. One way or another it is made only for driving the Race mad.

  His treatment of Drefsab left him no happier. Subordinate males owed their superiors obedience; superiors, in turn, were bound to grant those males under them support and consideration. Instead, he’d treated Drefsab exactly as he would have handled a useful but inexpensive tool: he’d seen the cracks, but he’d go on using it till it broke, then worry about acquiring another one.

  Back Home, he’d not have used a male so. Back Home, he had luxuries long forgotten on Tosev 3, not least among them time to think. The Race made it a point never to do anything without due reflection. When you planned in terms of millennia, what was a day—or a year—more or less? But the Big Uglies did not work that way, and forced haste and change on him because they were so cursedly mutable themselves.

  “They’ve corrupted me along with Drefsab,” he said mournfully, and went back to work.

  “What is this thing, anyway?” Sam Yeager asked as he lifted a piece of lab apparatus off a table and stuck it in a cardboard box.

  “A centrifuge,” Enrico Fermi answered, which left Yeager little wiser than he had been before. The Nobel laureate crumpled old newspaper—not much in the way of new newspaper around these days—and padded the box with it.

  “Don’t they have, uh, centrifuges where we’re going?” Yeager said.

  Fermi threw his hands in the air in a ges
ture that reminded Yeager of Bobby Fiore. “Who knows what they have? The more we are able to bring, the less we shall have to rely on that which is and remains uncertain.”

  “That’s true, Professor, but the more we bring, the slower we’re liable to move and the bigger the target we make for the Lizards.”

  “What you say is so, but it is also a chance we must take. If, having relocated, we cannot perform the work required of us, we might as well have stayed here in Chicago. We flee not just as individuals, but as an operating laboratory,” Fermi said.

  “You’re the boss.” Yeager closed the box, sealed it with masking tape, pulled a grease pencil out of his shirt pocket. “How do you spell ‘centrifuge?’” When Fermi told him, he wrote it on the top and two sides of the box in big black letters.

  He ran out of tape while sealing another centrifuge, so he went down the hall to see if he could snag another roll. The supply room had plenty; these days, the Metallurgical Laboratory got the best of whatever was left in Chicago. He was heading back to give Fermi more help when Barbara Larssen came out of a nearby room. The frosted glass window in the door from which she emerged was striped with tape to keep splinters from flying if a bomb hit nearby.

  “Hi, Sam,” Barbara said. “How’s it going?”

  “Not bad,” he answered, pausing for a moment. “Tired. How about you?”

  “About the same.” She looked tired. From somewhere, she’d got hold of some face powder, but it couldn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. The slump in her shoulders had nothing to do with the stack of file folders she carried. It spoke more of not enough sleep, too much work, too much fear.

  Yeager hesitated, then asked, “Any good news?”

  “About Jens, you mean?” Barbara shook her head. “I’ve just about given up. Oh, I still go through the motions: I just now left a note with Andy Reilly—do you know Andy?—saying where we were going to give to Jens in case he ever does come back.”

  “The janitor, you mean? Sure. I know Andy. That’s a good idea; he’s reliable,” Yeager said. “Where are we going? Nobody’s bothered to tell me. Of course, I’m just a cook and bottle-washer around here, so it’s not surprising.”