Worldwar: Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “No, Comrade Foreign Commissar. He is outspoken”—Kurchatov coughed behind his hand; Kagan was a lot more, a lot worse, than outspoken—“but he is also dedicated. He will continue to work with us.”

  “Very well. I rely on you to see that he does.” Your head will go on the block if he doesn’t, Molotov meant, and Kurchatov, unlike Kagan, was not so naive as to be able to misunderstand. The foreign commissar continued, “This center holds the future of the USSR in its hands. If we can detonate one of these bombs soon and then produce more in short order, we shall demonstrate to the alien imperialist aggressors that we can match their weapons and deal them such blows as would in the long run prove deadly to them.”

  “Certainly they can deliver such blows to us,” Kurchatov replied. “Our only hope for preservation is to be able to match them, as you say.”

  “This is the Great Stalin’s policy,” Molotov agreed, which also meant it was how things were going to be. “He is certain that, once we have shown the Lizards our capacity; they will become more amenable to negotiations designed to facilitate their withdrawal from the rodina.”

  The foreign commissar and the Soviet physicist looked at each other, while Max Kagan stared at the two of them in frustrated incomprehension. Molotov saw one thought behind Kurchatov’s eyes, and suspected the physicist saw the same one behind his, despite his reputation for wearing a mask of stone. It was not the sort of thing even Molotov could say. The Great Stalin had better be right.

  Ttomalss’ hiss carried a curious mixture of annoyance and enjoyment. The air in this Canton place was decently warm, at least during Tosev 3’s long summers, but so moist that the researcher felt as if he were swimming in it. “How do you keep fungus from forming in the cracks between your scales?” he asked his guide, a junior psychological researcher named Saltta.

  “Superior sir, sometimes you can’t,” Saltta answered. “If it’s one of our fungi, the usual creams and aerosols do well enough in knocking it down. But, just as we can consume Tosevite foods, some Tosevite fungi can consume us. The Big Uglies are too ignorant to have any fungicides worthy of the name, and our medications have not proved completely effective. Some of the afflicted males had to be transported—in quarantine conditions, of course—to hospital ships for further treatment.”

  Ttomalss’ tongue flicked out and wiggled in a gesture of disgust. A great deal of Tosev 3 disgusted him. He almost wished he could have been an infantrymale so he could have slaughtered Big Uglies instead of studying them. He didn’t like traveling through Tosevite cities on foot. He felt lost and tiny in the crowd of Tosevites who surged through the streets all around him. No matter how much the Race learned about these noisy, obnoxious creatures, would they ever be able to civilize them and integrate them into the structure of the Empire, as they’d succeeded in doing with the Rabotevs and Hallessi? He had his doubts.

  If the Race was going to succeed, though, they’d have to start with new-hatched Tosevites, ones that weren’t set in their ways, to learn the means by which Big Uglies might be controlled. That was what he’d been doing with the hatching that had come out of the female Liu Han’s body . . . until Ppevel shortsightedly made him return it to her.

  He hoped Ppevel would come down with an incurable Tosevite fungus infection. So much time wasted! So much data that would not be gathered. Now he was going to have to start all over with a new hatching. It would be years before he learned anything worth having, and for much of the first part of this experiment, he would merely be repeating work he’d already done.

  He would also be repeating a pattern of sleep deprivation he would just as soon have avoided. Big Ugly hatchlings emerged from the bodies of females in such a wretchedly undeveloped state that they hadn’t the slightest idea about the difference between day and night, and made a horrendous racket whenever they felt like it. Why that trait hadn’t caused the species to become extinct in short order was beyond him.

  “Here,” Saltta said as they turned a corner. “We are coming to one of the main market squares of Canton.”

  If the streets of the city were noisy, the market was cacophony compounded. Chinese Tosevites screamed out the virtues of their wares at hideous volume. Others, potential customers, screamed just as loud or maybe louder, ridiculing the quality of the merchants’ stock in trade. When they weren’t screaming, and sometimes when they were, they entertained themselves by belching, spitting, picking their teeth, picking their snouts, and digging fingers into the flesh-flapped holes that served them for hearing diaphragms.

  “You want?” one of them yelled in the language of the Race, almost poking Ttomalss in an eye turret with a length of leafy green vegetable.

  “No!” Ttomalss said with an angry emphatic cough. “Go away!” Not in the least abashed, the vegetable seller let out a series of the yipping barks the Big Uglies used for laughter.

  Along with vegetables, the merchants in the market sold all sorts of Tosevite life forms for food. Because refrigeration hereabouts ranged from rudimentary to nonexistent, some of the creatures were still alive in jugs or glass jars full of seawater. Ttomalss stared at gelatinous things with a great many sucker-covered legs. The creatures stared back out of oddly wise-looking eyes. Other Tosevite life forms had jointed shells and clawed legs; Ttomalss had eaten those, and found them tasty. And still others looked a lot like the swimming creatures in Home’s small seas.

  One fellow had a box containing a great many legless, scaly creatures that reminded Ttomalss of the animals of his native world far more than did the hairy, thin-skinned life forms that dominated Tosev 3. After the usual loud haggling, a Big Ugly bought one of those creatures. The seller seized it with a pair of tongs and lifted it out, then used a cleaver to chop off its head. While the body was still writhing, the merchant slit open the animal’s belly and scooped out the offal inside. Then he cut the body into finger-long lengths, dripped fat into a conical iron pan that sat above a charcoal-burning brazier, and began frying the meat for the customer.

  All the while, instead of watching what he was doing, he kept his eyes on the two males of the Race. Nervously, Ttomalss said to Saltta, “He would sooner be doing that to us than to the animal that shares some of our attributes.”

  “Truth,” Saltta said. “Troth, no doubt. But these Big Uglies are still wild and ignorant. Only with the passage of generations will they come to see us as their proper overlords and the Emperor”—he lowered his eyes, as did Ttomalss—“as their sovereign and the solace of their spirits.”

  Ttomalss wondered if the conquest of Tosev 3 could be accomplished. Even if it was accomplished, he wondered if the Tosevites could be civilized, as the Rabotevs and Hallessi had been before them. It was refreshing to hear a male still convinced of the Race’s power and the rightness of the cause.

  North of the market, the streets were narrow and jumbled. Ttomalss wondered how Saltta found his way through them. The comfortable warmth was a little less here; the Big Uglies, for whom it was less comfortable, built the upper stories of their homes and shops so close together that they kept most of Tosev’ s light from reaching the street itself.

  One building had armed males of the Race standing guard around it. Ttomalss was glad to see them; walking through these streets never failed to worry him. The Big Uglies were so—unpredictable was the kindest word that crossed his mind.

  Inside the building, a Tosevite female held a newly emerged hatching to one of the glands on her upper torso so it could ingest the nutrient fluid she secreted for it. The arrangement revolted Ttomalss; it smacked of parasitism. He needed all his scientific detachment to regard it with equanimity.

  Saltta said, “The female is being well compensated to yield up the hatching to us, superior sir. This should prevent any difficulties springing from the pair bonding that appears to develop between generations of Tosevites.”

  “Good,” Ttomalss said. Now he could get on with his experimental program in peace—and if snivelers like Tessrek did not care for it, too b
ad. He switched to Chinese to speak to the Big Ugly female: “Nothing bad will happen to your hatching. It will be well fed, well cared for. All its needs will be met. Do you understand? Do you agree?” He was getting ever more fluent; he even remembered not to use interrogative coughs.

  “I understand,” the female said softly. “I agree.” But as she held out the hatching to Ttomalss, water dripped from the corners of her small, immobile eyes. Ttomalss recognized that as a sign of insincerity. He dismissed it as unimportant. Compensation was the medicine to heal that wound.

  The hatchling wiggled almost bonelessly in Ttomalss’ grasp and let out an annoying squawk. The female turned her head away. “Well done,” Ttomalss said to Saltta. “Let us take the hatching back to our own establishment here. Then I shall remove it to my laboratory, and then the research shall begin. I may have been thwarted once, but I shall not be thwarted twice.”

  To make sure he was not thwarted twice, four guards accompanied him and Saltta back toward the Race’s base in the little island in the Pearl River. From there, a helicopter would take him and the hatching to the shuttlecraft launch site not far away—and from there, he would return to his starship.

  Saltta retraced in every particular the route by which he had come to the female Big Ugly’s residence. Just before he, Ttomalss, and the guards reached the marketplace with the strange creatures in it, they found their way forward blocked by an animal-drawn wagon as wide as the lane down which they were coming.

  “Go back!” Saltta shouted in Chinese to the Big Ugly driving the wagon.

  “Can’t,” the Big Ugly shouted back. “Too narrow to turn around. You go back to the corner, turn off, and let me go by.”

  What the Tosevite said was obviously true: he couldn’t turn around. One of Ttomalss’ eye turrets swiveled back to see how far he and his companions would have to retrace their steps. It wasn’t far. “We shall go back,” he said resignedly.

  As they turned around, gunfire opened up from two of the buildings that faced the street. Big Uglies started screaming. Caught by surprise, the guards crumpled in pools of blood. One of them squeezed off an answering burst, but then more bullets found him and he lay still.

  Several Tosevites in ragged cloth wrappings burst out of the buildings. They still carried the light automatic weapons with which they’d felled the guards. Some pointed those weapons at Ttomalss, others at Saltta. “You come with us right now or you die!” one of them screamed.

  “We come,” Ttomalss said, not giving Saltta any chance to disagree with him. As soon as he got close enough to the Big Uglies, one of them tore the Tosevite hatching from his arms. Another shoved him into one of the buildings from which the raiders had emerged. In the back, it opened onto another of Canton’s narrow streets. He was hustled along through so many of them so fast, he soon lost any notion of where he was.

  Before long, the Big Uglies split into two groups, one with him, the other with Saltta. They separated. Ttomalss was alone among the Tosevites. “What will you do with me?” he asked, fear making the words have to fight to come forth.

  One of his captors twisted his mouth in the way Tosevites did when they were amused. Because he was a student of the Big Uglies, Ttomalss recognized the smile as an unpleasant one—not that his current situation made pleasant smiles likely. “We’ve liberated the baby you kidnapped, and now we’re going to give you to Liu Han,” the fellow answered.

  Ttomalss had only thought he was afraid before.

  Ignacy pointed to the barrel of the Fieseler Storch’s machine gun. “This is of no use to you,” he said.

  “Of course it’s not,” Ludmila Gorbunova snapped, irritated at the indirect way the Polish partisan leader had of approaching things. “If I’m flying the aircraft by myself, I can’t fire it, not unless my arms start stretching like an octopus’. It’s for the observer, not the pilot.”

  “Not what I meant,” the piano-teacher-turned-guerrilla-chief replied. “Even if you carried an observer, you could, not fire it. We removed the ammunition from it some time ago. We’re very low on 7.92mm rounds, which is a pity, because we have a great many German weapons.”

  “Even if you had ammunition for it, it wouldn’t do you much good,” Ludmila told him. “Machine-gun bullets won’t bring down a Lizard helicopter unless you’re very lucky, and the gun is wrongly placed for ground attack.”

  “Again, not what I meant,” Ignacy said. “We need more of this ammunition. We have a little through the stores the Lizards dole out to their puppets, but only a little is redistributed. So—we have made contact with the Wehrmacht to the west. If, tomorrow night, you can fly this plane to their lines, they will put some hundreds of kilograms of cartridges into it. When you return here, you will be a great help in our continued resistance to the Lizards.”

  What Ludmila wanted to do with the Storch was hop into it and fly east till she came to Soviet-held territory. If she somehow got it back to Pskov, Georg Schultz could surely keep it running. Nazi though he was, he knew machinery the way a jockey knew horses.

  Schultz’s technical talents aside, Ludmila wanted little to do with the Wehrmacht, or with heading west. Comrades in aims though the Germans were against the Lizards, her mind still shouted enemies! barbarians! whenever she had to deal with them. All of which, unfortunately, had nothing to do with military necessity.

  “I take it this means you have petrol for the engine?” she asked, grasping at straws. When Ignacy nodded, she sighed and said, “Very well, I will pick up your ammunition for you. The Germans will have some sort of landing strip prepared?” The Fieseler-156 wouldn’t need much, but putting down in the middle of nowhere at night wasn’t something to anticipate cheerfully.

  The dim light of the lantern Ignacy held showed his nod. “You are to fly along a course of 292 for about fifty kilometers. A landing field will be shown by four red lamps. You know what it means, this flying a course of 292?”

  “I know what it means, yes,” Ludmila assured him. “Remember. If you want your ammunition back, you’ll also have to mark off a landing strip for my return.” And you’ll have to hope the Lizards don’t knock me down while I’m in the air over their territory, but that’s not something you can do anything about—it’s my worry.

  Ignacy nodded again. “We will mark the field with four white lamps. I presume you will be flying back the same night?”

  “Unless something goes wrong, yes,” Ludmila answered. That was a hair-raising business, but easier on the life expectancy than going airborne in broad daylight and letting any Lizard who spotted you take his potshots.

  “Good enough,” Igancy said. “The Wehrmacht will expect you to arrive about 2330 tomorrow night, then.”

  She glared at him. He’d made all the arrangements with the Nazis, then come to her. Better he should have had her permission before he went off and talked with the Germans. Well, too late to worry about that now. She also realized she was getting very used to operating on her own, as opposed to being merely a part of a larger military machine. She never would have had such resentments about obeying a superior in the Red Air Force: she would have done as she was told, and never thought twice about it.

  Maybe it was that the Polish partisans didn’t strike her as being military enough to deserve her unquestioned obedience. Maybe it was that she felt she didn’t really belong here—if her U-2 hadn’t cracked up; if the idiot guerrillas near Lublin hadn’t forgotten an extremely basic rule about landing strips—

  “Make sure there aren’t any trees in the middle of what’s going to be my runway,” she warned Ignacy. He blinked, then nodded for a third time.

  She spent most of the next day making as sure as she could that the Storch was mechanically sound. She was uneasily aware she’d never be a mechanic of Schultz’ class, and also uneasily aware of how unfamiliar the aircraft was. She tried to make up for ignorance and unfamiliarity with thoroughness and repetition. Before long, she’d learn how well she’d done.

  After dark, the pa
rtisans took the netting away from one side of the enclosure concealing the light German plane. They pushed the Storch out into the open. Ludmila knew she didn’t have much room in which to take off. The Fieseler wasn’t supposed to need much. She hoped all the things she’d heard about it were true.

  She climbed up into the cockpit. When her finger stabbed the starter button, the Argus engine came to life at once. The prop spun, blurred, and seemed to disappear. The guerrillas scattered. Ludmila released the brake, gave the Storch full throttle, and bounced toward two men holding candles who showed her where the trees started. They grew closer alarmingly fast, but when she pulled back on the stick, the Storch hopped into the air as readily as one of its feathered namesakes.

  Her first reaction was relief at flying again at last. Then she realized that, compared to what she was used to, she had a hot plane on her hands now. That Argus engine generated more than twice the horsepower of a U-2’s Shvetsov radial, and the Storch didn’t weigh anywhere near twice as much as a Kukuruznik. She felt like a fighter pilot.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she muttered to herself, good advice for a pilot under any circumstances. In the Fieseler’s enclosed cabin, she could hear herself talk, which had been all but impossible while she was flying Kukuruzniks. She wasn’t used to being airborne without having the slipstream blast her in the face, either.

  She stayed as low to the ground as she dared; human-built aircraft that got up much above a hundred meters had a way of reaching zero altitude much more rapidly than their pilots had intended. Flying behind the lines, that worked well. Flying over them, as she discovered now, was another matter. Several Lizards opened up on the Storch with automatic weapons. The noise bullets made hitting aluminum was different from that which came when they penetrated fabric. But when the Storch didn’t tumble out of the sky, she took fresh hope that its designers had known what they were doing.