Worldwar: Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “I am glad you think so,” Bagnall said, though he wasn’t particularly glad. If Vasiliev thought them useful here, Aleksandr German probably did, too. And if Aleksandr German thought them useful here, would he help them get back to England, as he’d hinted he might?

  Lieutenant General Chill looked disgusted with the world. “I still maintain that expending your strategic reserve will sooner or later leave you without necessary resources for a crisis, but we shall hope this particular use does not create that difficulty.” His glance flicked to Bagnall and Embry. “You are dismissed, gentlemen.”

  He’d added that last word, no doubt, to irk the partisan brigadiers, to whom gentlemen should have been comrades. Bagnall refused to concern himself with fine points of language. He got up from his seat and quickly headed for the door. Any chance to get out of the gloom of the Krom was worth taking. Ken Embry followed him without hesitation.

  Outside, the bright sunshine made Bagnall blink. During the winter, the sun seemed to have gone away for good. Now it stayed in the sky more and more, until, when summer came, it would hardly seem to leave. The Pskova River had running water in it again. The ice was all melted. The land burgeoned—for a little while.

  In the marketplace not far from the Krom, the babushkas sat and gossiped among themselves and displayed for sale or trade eggs and pork and matches and paper and all sorts of things that should by rights long since have vanished from Pskov. Bagnall wondered how they came by them. He’d even asked, a couple of times, but the women’s faces grew closed and impassive and they pretended not to understand him. None of your business, they said without saying a word.

  Over on the edge of the city, a few scattered gunshots broke out. All through the marketplace, heads came up in alarm. “Oh, bloody hell,” Bagnall exclaimed. “Are the Nazis and Bolshies hammering at each other again?” That had happened too often already in Pskov.

  Gunshots came closer to the marketplace. So did a low roar that put Bagnall in mind of one of the Lizards’ jet fighters, but seemed only a few feet off the ground. A long, lean, white-painted shape darted through the market square, dodged around the church of the Archangel Michael and the cathedral of the Trinity, and slammed into the Krom. The explosion knocked Bagnall off his feet, but not before he saw another white dart follow the course of its predecessor and hit the Krom. The second blast knocked Embry down beside him.

  “Flying bombs!” the pilot bawled in his ear. He heard Embry as if from very far away. After the two blasts, his ears seemed wrapped in thick cotton batting. Embry went on, “They haven’t bothered with the Krom in a long time. They must have found a traitor to let them know our headquarters was there.”

  A Russian, angry at having to serve alongside the Nazis? A Wehrmacht man, captured when trying to help Red Army troops he hated worse than any Lizard? Bagnall didn’t know; he knew he never would know. In the end, it didn’t matter. However it had happened, the damage was done.

  He staggered to his feet and ran back toward the fortress that had been the core around which the town of Pskov grew. The great gray stones had been proof against arrows and muskets. Against high explosives precisely aimed, they were useless, or maybe worse than useless: when they toppled, they crushed those whom blast alone might have spared. During the Blitz—and how long ago that seemed!—unreinforced brick buildings in London had been death traps for the same reason.

  Smoke began rising from the wreckage. The walls of the Krom were stone, but so much inside was wood . . . and every lamp in there was a fire that would spread given fuel. The lamps had been given fuel, all right.

  The screams and groans of the wounded reached Bagnall’s ears, stunned though they were. He saw a hand sticking up between two blocks of stone. Grunting, he and Embry shoved one of those stones aside. Blood clung to the base of it and dripped. The German soldier who’d been crushed under there would never need help again.

  Men and women, Russians and Germans, came running to rescue their comrades. A few, more alert than the rest, carried stout timbers to lever heavy stones off injured men. Bagnall lent the strength of his back and arms to one such gang. A stone went over with a crash. The fellow groaning beneath it had a ruined leg, but might live.

  They found Aleksandr German. His left hand was crushed between two stones, but past that he hardly seemed hurt. A red smear beneath a nearby stone the size of a motorcar was all that was left of Kurt Chill and Nikolai Vasiliev.

  Flames started peeping out between stones. The little crackling noise they made was in and of itself a jolly sound, but one that brought horror with it. Soldiers trapped in the rubble shrieked as fire found them before rescuers could. Smoke grew ever thicker, choking Bagnall, making his eyes run and his lungs burn as if they’d caught fire themselves. It was as if he was working inside a wood-burning stove. Every so often, too, he smelled roasting meat. Sickened—for he knew what meat that was—he struggled harder than ever to save as much, as many, as he could.

  Not enough, not enough. Hand pumps brought water from the river onto the fire, but could not hold it at bay. The flames drove the rescuers away from those they would save, drove them back in defeat.

  Bagnall stared at Ken Embry in exhausted dismay. The pilot’s face was haggard and black with soot save for a few clean tracks carved by sweat. He had a burn on one cheek and a cut under the other eye. Bagnall was sure he looked no better himself.

  “What the devil do we do now?” he said. His mouth was full of smoke, as if he’d had three packs of cigarettes all at once. When he spat to get rid of some of it, his saliva came out dark, dark brown. “The German commandant dead, one of the Russian brigadiers with him, the other one wounded—”

  Embry wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Since one was as filthy as the other, neither changed color. Wearily, the pilot answered, “Damned if I know. Pick up the pieces and go on as best we can, I suppose. What else is there to do?”

  “Nothing I can think of,” Bagnall said. “But oh, to be in England in the springtime—” That dream was gone, smashed as terribly as Aleksandr German’s hand. What was left was the ruins of Pskov. Embry’ s answer was the best choice they had. It was still pretty lousy.

  Air raid sirens screamed like the souls in the hell Polish Catholic priests took such delight in describing. Moishe Russie hadn’t believed in eternal punishments of that sort. Now, after enduring air raids in Warsaw and London and wherever in Palestine this was, he wondered if hell wasn’t real after all.

  The door to his cell opened. The hard-faced guard he’d learned to loathe stood in the doorway. The fellow had a Sten gun in each hand. Even for him, that much weaponry struck Moishe as excessive. Then, to Russie’s amazement, the guard handed him one of the weapons. “Here, take it,” he said impatiently. “You’re being liberated.” As if to emphasize the point, he pulled a couple of magazines from his belt and gave them to Russie, too. By their weight, they were full. “Treat ’em like you would a woman,” the guard advised. “They get bent up, especially at the top, and they won’t feed right.”

  “What do you mean, I’m being liberated?” Moishe demanded, almost indignantly. Events had got ahead of him. Even with a weapon in his hands, he felt anything but safe. Would they let him out of his cell, let him walk round the corner, and then riddle him with bullets? The Nazis had played tricks like that.

  The guard exhaled in exasperation. “Don’t be stupid, Russie. The Lizards invaded Palestine without cutting any deals with us. Looks like they’re going to win here, too, so we’re making sure they see we’re on the right side—we’re giving the British all the trouble they want, all the trouble we can. But we don’t have a deal over you with the Lizards, either. If they ask for you when the fighting’s done, we don’t want to be in a place where we have to say yes or no. You aren’t ours, we don’t have to. You get it now?”

  In a crazy sort of way, Moishe did get it. The Jewish underground could have kept him while denying to the Lizards they were doing so, but that exposed them to th
e risk of being found out. “My family?” he asked.

  “I’d have taken you to them by now. If you hadn’t started banging your gums,” the guard told him. He squawked indignant protest, which the other Jew ignored, turning his back and giving Moishe the choice of following or staying where he was. He followed.

  He went down hallways he’d never seen before. Up till now, they’d always brought Rivka or Reuven to him, not the other way around. Turning a corner, he almost ran into Menachem Begin. The underground leader said, “Nu, you were right, Russie. The Lizards aren’t to be trusted. We’ll deal with them as best we can, and then we’ll make their lives miserable. How does that sound?”

  “I’ve heard worse,” Moishe said, “but I’ve also heard better. You should have stood with the British against the Lizards from the beginning.”

  “And gone down with them? For they will go down. No, thank you.”

  Begin started to head down the hall. “Wait,” Moishe called after him. “Before you turn me loose, at least tell me where I am.”

  The underground leader and the tough-looking guard both started to laugh. “That’s right, you never did find out,” Menachem Begin said. “Now it doesn’t hurt us for you to know. You’re in Jerusalem, Russie, not far from the one wall of the Temple that’s still left standing.” After an awkward half wave, he hurried away on whatever his own mission was.

  Jerusalem? Moishe stood staring for a moment. The guard vanished round a corner before he noticed his charge wasn’t coming after him. He stuck his head and upper body back into sight and waved impatiently. As if awakening from a dream, Moishe started moving again.

  The guard took a key from his belt and used it to unlock a door like any other door. “What do you want?” Rivka exclaimed, her voice sharp with alarm. Then she saw Moishe behind the guard, who was both taller and broader than he. “What’s going on?” she asked in an entirely different tone of voice.

  She got a condensed version of the story the guard had given Moishe. He didn’t know how much of it she believed. He didn’t know how much of it he believed himself, although the submachine gun he carried was a potent argument for there being some truth to it. “Come on,” the guard said. “You’re getting out of here right now.”

  “Give us some money,” Rivka said. Moishe shook his head in chagrin. He hadn’t even thought of that. Evidently the guard had. He reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out a roll of bills that would have made a man rich before the war and now might keep him eating till he found work. Moishe handed the roll to Rivka. As the guard snorted, he bent to hug Reuven.

  “Do you know where we are?” he asked his son.

  “Palestine, of course,” Reuven answered scornfully, as if wondering what was wrong with him.

  “Not just Palestine—Jerusalem,” Moishe said.

  The guard snorted again, this time at Reuven’s wide-eyed wonder. He said, “Out you go now, the lot of you.” The strides with which he led them toward the street had made no concessions to the boy’s short legs. Moishe grabbed Reuven’s hand to help his son keep up.

  How strange, he thought, to be holding Reuven with one hand and a Sten gun in the other. He’d wanted to fight the Lizards ever since they twisted his words in Poland. He had fought them, with medic’s kit and with wireless broadcasts. Now he had a gun. Mordechai Anielewicz had convinced him that was not his best weapon, but it was better than nothing.

  “Here.” The guard slid back a bar from the front doors. The doors and the bar looked as if they could withstand anything short of a tank running into them. The guard grunted as he pushed the stout portals open wide enough for Moishe and his family to squeeze through. As soon as they were out on the street, he said, “Good luck,” and closed the doors behind them. The scrape of the bar sliding back into place behind them sounded very final.

  Moishe looked around. To be in Jerusalem without looking around—that seemed a sin. What he saw was chaos. He’d seen that before, in Warsaw. London hadn’t shown him as much; the British had been under attack from the sky long before he got there, and had learned to cope as best they could . . . and, in any case, they were far more phlegmatic than Poles or Jews or Arabs.

  The Russies walked a couple of blocks. Then someone shouted at them: “Get off the street, you fools!” Not until he was running for a doorway did Moishe realize the yell had been in English, not Yiddish or Hebrew. A khaki-clad soldier, ignoring his own advice, fired at the Lizard planes overhead.

  “He can’t knock them down, Papa,” Reuven said seriously; his brief life had made him an expert on air raids. “Doesn’t he know that?”

  “He knows it,” Moishe answered. “He’s trying anyhow, because he is brave.”

  Bombs crashed down, not too close: the war had honed Moishe’s ears, too. He heard sharp whistling in the sky, then more explosions. The wall against which he was leaning shook. “Those aren’t bombs, Papa,” Reuven exclaimed—yes, he was a connoisseur of such things. “That’s artillery.”

  “You’re right again,” Moishe said. If the Lizards were landing artillery in Jerusalem, they couldn’t be far away. He wanted to flee the city, but how? And where would he go?

  A new set of shells landed, these nearer to him. Fragments hissed through the air. What had been a house was suddenly transformed into a pile of rubble. An Arab woman with veil and head-cloth and robes covering her down to her toes emerged from the building next door to it, running for new shelter like a beetle when the stone under which it huddles is disturbed. A shell landed in the street, only a few meters from her. After that, she didn’t run. She lay and writhed and screamed.

  “She’s hurt bad,” Reuven said in that alarmingly knowing way of his.

  Moishe ran out to do what he could for her. Without medicines, without instruments, he knew how little that would be. “Be careful!” Rivka called after him. He nodded, but laughed a little under his breath, As if he could be careful now! That was up to the shells, not to him.

  Blood pooled under the woman. She wailed in Arabic, which Moishe didn’t understand. He told her he was a doctor—“medical student” didn’t pack enough punch—using German, Yiddish, Polish, and English. She didn’t follow any of them. When he tried to tear her robe to bandage a wound high up in her leg, she fought him as if she thought he was going to rape her right there. Maybe she did think that.

  An Arab man came up. “What you do, Jew?” he asked in bad Hebrew, then in worse English.

  “I’m a doctor. I try to help her.” Moishe also spoke in both languages.

  The man turned his words into rapid-fire Arabic. Halfway through, the woman stopped struggling. It wasn’t because she acquiesced. Moishe grabbed for her wrist. He found no pulse. When he let her arm drop, the Arab man knew what that meant. “lnshallah,” he said, and then, in English, “The will of God. Good you try to help, Jew doctor.” With a nod, he walked away.

  Shaking his head, Russie went back to his family. Now, too late for the poor woman, the Lizard bombardment was easing. Staying close to the sides of buildings in case it picked up again, Moishe led his wife and son through the streets of Jerusalem. He didn’t know just what he was looking for. He would have taken a way out of the city, a good shelter, or a glimpse of the Wailing Wall.

  Before he got any of those, a spatter of small-arms fire broke out, no more than a few hundred meters away. “Are the Lizards here?” Rivka exclaimed.

  “I don’t think so,” Moishe answered. “I think it’s the Jewish underground rising against the British.”

  “Oy!” Rivka and Reuven said it together. Moishe nodded mournfully. The shooting—rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, the occasional pop! of a mortar—spread like wildfire, fanning out in every direction. Inside a couple of minutes, the Russies were flat on their bellies in another doorway as bullets pinged and ricocheted all around.

  Several British soldiers in tin hats and khaki tunics and shorts dashed up the street. One of them spotted Moishe and his family. He pointed his rifle at them and scr
eamed, “Don’t move or you’re dead, you Jew bastards!”

  That was when Moishe remembered the submachine gun that lay on the ground beside him. So much for taking up arms, he thought. “Take the gun,” he told the Englishman. “You have us.”

  The soldier called, “Permission to take prisoners, sir?” That didn’t mean anything to Russie for a moment. Then it sank in: if the man didn’t get that permission, he was going to shoot them and go on about his business. Moishe got ready to reach for the Sten gun. If he was going to go down, he’d go down fighting.

  But a fellow with a second lieutenant’s single pips on his shoulder boards said, “Yes, take them back to the detention center. If we start murdering theirs, they’ll slaughter ours, the buggers.” He sounded weary and bitter beyond measure. Moishe hoped Rivka hadn’t followed what he said.

  The British soldier darted forward to grab the submachine gun. “On your feet!” he said. When Moishe rose, the soldier plucked the spare magazines from the waistband of his trousers. “Hands high! Those hands come down, you’re dead—you, the skirt, the brat, anybody.” Moishe said that in Yiddish so he was sure his wife and son got it. “March!” the Englishman barked.

  They marched. The soldier led them into what looked as if it had been a market square. Now barbed wire and machine-gun positions all around turned it into a prisoner camp. To one side was a tall wall of large stones that looked to have been in place forever. Atop that wall stood a mosque whose golden dome was marred by a shell hole.

  Moishe realized what that wall had to be just as the British soldier herded him and his family into the barbed-wire cage. There they stayed. The only sanitary arrangements were slop buckets by the barbed wire. Some people had blankets; most didn’t. Toward noon, the guards distributed bread and cheese. The portions were bigger than those he’d known in the Warsaw ghetto, but not much. Water barrels had a common dipper. He scowled at that; it would make disease spread faster.