Worldwar: Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “That would be a decision for the central committee, not for me alone,” Liu Han said, frowning.

  “I know.” Nieh watched her more warily than he’d ever expected when they first met. She’d come so far from the peasant woman grieving over her stolen child she’d been then. When class was ignored, when ability was allowed, even encouraged, to rise as in the People’s Liberation Army, astonishing things sometimes happened. Liu Han was one of those astonishments. She hadn’t even known what the central committee was. Now she could manipulate it as well as a Party veteran. He said, “I have not discussed the matter before the committee. I wanted to learn your opinion first”

  “Thank you for thinking of my personal concerns,” she said. She looked through Nieh for a little while as she thought. “I do not know,” she went on. “I suppose I could accept either. If it helped our cause against the little scaly devils.”

  “Spoken like a woman of the Party!” Nieh exclaimed.

  “Perhaps I would like to join,” Liu Han said. “If I am to make myself all I might be here, I should join. Is that not so?”

  “It is so,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “You shall have instruction. If that is what you want. I would be proud to instruct you myself, in fact.” Liu Han nodded. Nieh beamed. Bringing a new member into the Party gave him the feeling a missionary had to have on bringing a new convert into the church. “One day,” he told her, “your place will be to give instruction, not to receive it.”

  “That would be very fine,” Liu Han said. She looked through him again, this time perhaps peering ahead into the future. Seeing her so made Nieh nervous: did she see herself ordering him about?

  He started to smile, then stopped. If she kept progressing at the rate she had thus far, the notion wasn’t so unlikely after all.

  The clop of a horse’s hooves and the rattle of a buggy’s iron tires always took Leslie Groves back in time to the days before the First World War, when those noises had been the normal sound of getting from one place to another. When he remarked on that, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley shook his head. “It’s not quite right, General,” he said. “Back in those days, the roads this far outside of town wouldn’t have been paved.”

  “You’re right, sir,” Groves admitted. He didn’t often yield points to anyone, not even to the nuclear physicists who sometimes made the Metallurgical Laboratory such a delight to administer, but this one he had to concede. “I remember when a little town felt medium-sized and a medium-sized one felt like a big city because they’d paved all the streets downtown.”

  “That’s how it was,” Bradley said. “You didn’t have concrete and asphalt all over the place, not when I was a boy you didn’t. Dirt roads were a lot easier on a horse’s hooves. It was an easier time, a lot of ways.” He sighed, as any man of middle years will when he thinks back on the days of his youth.

  Almost any man. Leslie Groves was an engineer to the core. “Mud,” he said. “Dust Lap robes, so you wouldn’t be filthy by the time you got where you were going. More horse manure than you could shake a stick at. More flies, too. Give me a nice, enclosed Packard with a heater on a good, flat, straight stretch of highway any old time.”

  Bradley chuckled. “You have no respect for the good old days.”

  “To hell with the good old days,” Groves said. “If the Lizards had come in the good old days, they’d have smashed us to bits so fast it wouldn’t even have been funny.”

  “There I can’t argue with you,” Bradley said. “And going out to a two-hole Chick Sale with a half-moon window wasn’t much fun in the middle of winter.” He wrinkled his nose. “Now that I think back on it, it wasn’t much fun in hot weather, either.” He laughed out loud. “Yeah, General, to hell with the good old days. But what we’ve got now isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, either.” He pointed ahead to show what he meant.

  Groves hadn’t been out to the refugee camp before. He knew of such places, of course, but he’d never had occasion to seek them out. He didn’t feel guilty about that; he’d had plenty to do and then some. If he hadn’t done what he’d done, the U.S.A. might well have lost the war by now, instead of sitting down with the Lizards as near equals at the bargaining table.

  That didn’t make the camp any easier to take. He’d been shielded from just how bad war could be for those who got stuck in the gears. Because the Met Lab was so important, he’d always had plenty to eat and a roof over his head. Most people weren’t so lucky.

  You saw newsreels of things like this. But newsreels didn’t usually show the worst The people in newsreels were black and white, too. And you didn’t smell them. The breeze was at his back, but the camp smelled like an enormous version of the outhouses Bradley had mentioned all the same.

  People in newsreels didn’t come running at you like a herd of living skeletons, either, eyes enormous in faces with skin stretched drum-tight over bones, begging hands outstretched. “Please!” came the call, again and again and again. “Food, sir?” “Money, sir?” “Anything you’ve got, sir?” The offers the emaciated women made turned Groves’ ears red.

  “Can we do anything more for these people than we’re doing, sir?” he asked.

  “I don’t see what,” Bradley answered. “They’ve got water here. I don’t know how we’re supposed to feed them when we don’t have food to give.”

  Groves looked down at himself. His belly was still ample. What there was went to the Army first, not to refugees and to people from Denver whose jobs weren’t essential to the war effort. That made good, cold, hard logical sense. Rationally, he knew as much. Staying rational wasn’t easy, not here.

  “With the cease-fire in place, how soon can we start bringing in grain from up north?” he asked. “The Lizards won’t be bombing supply trains the way they used to.”

  “That’s so,” Bradley admitted, “but they gave the railroads a hell of a pasting when they made their big push on the city. The engineers are still trying to straighten things out. Even when the trains start rolling, though, the other question is where the grain’ll come from. The Lizards are still holding an awful lot of our bread-basket. Maybe the Canadians’ll have some to spare. The scaly bastards haven’t hit them as hard as they did us, seems like.”

  “They like warm weather,” Groves said. “There are better places to find it than north of Minnesota.”

  “You’re right about that,” Bradley said. “But watching people starve, right here in the middle of the United States, that’s a damned hard thing to do, General. I never thought I’d live to see the day when we had to bring in what little we do have with armed guards to keep it from being stolen. And this is on our side of the line. What’s it like in territory the Lizards have held for the last couple of years? How many people have died for no better reason than that the Lizards didn’t give a damn about trying to feed them?”

  “Too many,” Groves said, wanting to quantify that but unable to with any degree of certainty. “Hundreds of thousands? Has to be. Millions? Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

  Bradley nodded. “Even if the Lizards do pull out of the U.S.A. and leave us alone for a while—and that’s the most we can hope for—what kind of country will we have left? I worry about that, General, quite a lot. Remember Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the Technocrats? A man with nothing in his belly will listen to any sort of damn fool who promises him three square meals a day, and we’ve got a lot of people with nothing in their bellies.”

  As if to underscore his words, three horse-drawn wagons approached the refugee camp. Men in khaki who wore helmets surrounded the supply wagons on all sides. About half of them carried tommy guns; the rest had rifles with fixed bayonets. The surge of hungry people toward the wagons halted at a respectful distance from the troops.

  “Hard to give shoot-to-kill orders to keep starving people from mobbing your food wagons,” Bradley said glumly. “If I hadn’t, though, the fast and the strong would get food, nobody else but. Can’t let that happen.”

  “No, s
ir,” Groves agreed. Under the hard and watchful eyes of the American soldiers, their fellow citizens lined up to get the tiny handfuls of grain and beans the quartermasters had to dole out. By comparison, Depression soup kitchens had been five-star restaurants with blue-plate specials. The food then had been cheap and plain, but there’d always been plenty of it, once you swallowed enough of your pride to take charity.

  Now . . . Watching the line snake forward, Groves realized he’d been so busy working to save the country that General Bradley’s question never once crossed his mind: what sort of country was he saving?

  The more he looked around the refugee camp, the less he liked the answers he came up with.

  For once in his life, Vyacheslav Molotov had to fight with every fiber of his being to maintain his stiff face. No! he wanted to scream at Joachim von Ribbentrop. Let it go, you fool! We have so much of what we came here for. If you push too hard, you’ll be like the greedy dog in the story, that dropped its bone into the river trying to grab the one its reflection was holding.

  But the German foreign minister got up on his hind legs and declared, “Poland was part of the German Reich before the coming of the Race to this world, and therefore must return to the Reich as part of the Race’s withdrawal from our territory. So the Führer has declared.”

  Hitler, actually, was quite a lot like the dog in the fable. All he understood was taking; nothing else seemed real to him. Had he only been content to stay at peace with the Soviet Union while he finished Britain, he could have gone on fooling Stalin a while longer and then launched his surprise attack, thereby contending with one foe at a time. He hadn’t waited. He couldn’t wait. He’d paid for it against the USSR. Didn’t he see he’d have to pay far more against the Lizards?

  Evidently he didn’t. There was his foreign minister, mouthing phrases that would have been offensive to human opponents. Against the Lizards, who were vastly more powerful than Germany, those phrases struck Molotov as clinically insane.

  Through his interpreter, Atvar said, “This proposal is unacceptable to us because it is unacceptable to so many other Tosevites with concerns in the region. It would merely prove a generator of future strife.”

  “If you do not immediately cede Poland to us, it will prove a generator of present strife,” von Ribbentrop blustered.

  The Lizards’ fleetlord made a noise like a leaking inner tube. “You may tell the Führer that the Race is prepared to take the chance.”

  “I shall do so,” von Ribbentrop said, and stalked out of the Shepheard’s Hotel meeting room.

  Molotov wanted to run after him, to call him back. Wait, you fool! was the cry that echoed in his mind. Hitler’s megalomania might drag everyone else down along with Germany. Even the nations with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas weren’t much more than large nuisances to the Lizards. Until they could deliver their weapons somewhere other than along the front line with the aliens, they could not threaten them on equal terms.

  The Soviet foreign commissar hesitated. Did von Ribbentrop’s arrogance mean the Hitlerites had such a method? He didn’t believe it. Their rockets were better than anyone else’s, but powerful enough to throw ten tonnes across hundreds, maybe thousands, of kilometers? Soviet rocket scientists assured him the Nazis couldn’t be that far ahead of the USSR

  If they were wrong . . . Molotov didn’t care to think about what might happen if they were wrong. If the Germans could throw explosive-metal bombs hundreds or thousands of kilometers, they were as likely to throw them at Moscow as at the Lizards.

  He checked his rising agitation. If the Nazis had such rockets, they would not be so insistent about holding on to Poland. They could launch their bombs from Germany and then scoop up Poland at their leisure. This time, the scientists had to be right.

  If they were right . . . Hitler was reacting from emotion rather than reason. What was Nazi doctrine but perverted romanticism? If you wanted a thing, that meant it should become yours, and that meant you had the right—even the duty—to go out and take it if anyone had the gall to object, you ran roughshod over him. Your will was all that mattered.

  But if a man a meter and a half tall who weighed fifty kilos wanted something that belonged to a man two meters tall who weighed a hundred kilos and tried to take it, he’d end up with a bloody nose and broken teeth, no matter how strong his will was. The Hitlerites didn’t see that, though their assault on the USSR should have taught it to them.

  “Note, Comrade Fleetlord,” Molotov said, “that the German foreign minister’s withdrawal does not imply the rest of us refuse to work out our remaining differences with you.” Yakov Donskoi turned his words into English; Uotat translated the interpreter’s comments into the language of the Lizards.

  With a little luck, the aliens would smash the Hitlerites into the ground and save the USSR the trouble.

  “Jäger!” Otto Skorzeny shouted. “Get your scrawny arse over here. We’ve got something we need to talk about”

  “You mean something besides your having the manners of a bear with a toothache?” Jäger retorted. He didn’t get up. He was busy darning a sock, and it was hard work, because he had to hold it farther away from his face than he was used to. These past couple of years, his sight had begun to lengthen. You fell apart even if you didn’t get shot. It just happened.

  “Excuse me, your magnificent Coloneldom, sir, my lord von Jäger,” Skorzeny said, loading his voice with sugar syrup, “would you be so generous and gracious as to honor your most humble and obedient servant with the merest moment of your ever so precious time?”

  Grunting, Jäger got to his feet “All the same to you, Skorzeny, I like ‘Get your scrawny arse over here’ better.”

  The SS Standartenführer chuckled. “Figured you would. Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

  That meant Skorzeny had news he didn’t feel like letting anyone else hear. And that, presumably, meant all hell was going to break loose somewhere, most likely somewhere right around here. Almost plaintively, Jäger said, “I was enjoying the cease-fire.”

  “Life’s tough,” Skorzeny said, “and it’s our job to make it tougher—for the Lizards. Your regiment’s still the thin end of the wedge, right? How soon can you be ready to hit our scaly chums a good one right in the snout?”

  “We’ve got about half our Panthers back at corps repair center for retrofitting,” Jäger answered. “Fuel lines, new cupolas for the turrets, fuel pump gaskets made the right way, that kind of thing. We took advantage of the cease-fire to do one lot of them, and now that it’s holding, we’re doing the other. Nobody told me—nobody told anybody—it was breaking down.”

  “I’m telling you,” the SS man said. “How long till you’re up to strength again? You need those Panthers, don’t you?”

  “Just a bit, yes,” Jäger said with what he thought was commendable understatement. “They should all be back here in ten days—a week. If somebody with clout goes and leans on the corps repair crews.”

  Skorzeny bit his lip. “Donnerwetter! If I lean on them hard, you think they’d have your panzers up here at the front inside five days? That’s my outer limit, and I haven’t got any discretion about it. If they aren’t here by then, old chum, you just have to go without ’em.”

  “Go where?” Jäger demanded. “Why are you giving me orders? And not my division commander, I mean?”

  “Because I get my orders from the Führer and the Reichsführer-SS, not from some tinpot major general commanding a measly corps,” Skorzeny answered smugly. “Here’s what’s going to happen as soon as you’re ready to motor and the artillery boys are set to do their part, too: I blow Lodz to kingdom come, and you—and everybody else—gets to hit the Lizards while they’re still trying to figure out what’s going on. The war is back, in other words.”

  Jäger wondered if his message to the Jews of Lodz had got through. If it had, he wondered if they’d been able to find the bomb the SS man had hidden there somewhere. And those were the least of his worries: “What
will the Lizards do to us if we blow up Lodz? They took out one of our cities for every bomb we used during the war. How many will they slag if we use one of those bombs to break a cease-fire?”

  “Don’t know,” Skorzeny said. “I do know nobody asked me to worry about it, so I bloody well won’t. I have orders to blast Lodz in the next five days, so a whole raft of big-nosed kikes are going to get themselves fitted for halos along with the Lizards. We have to teach the Lizards and the people who suck up to ’em that we’re too nasty to mess with—and we will.”

  “Blowing up the Jews will teach the Lizards something?” Jäger scratched his head. “Why should the Lizards give a damn what happens to the Jews? And with whom are we at war, the Jews or the Lizards?”

  “We’re sure as hell at war with the Lizards,” Skorzeny answered, “and we’ve always been at war with the Jews, now haven’t we? You know that. You’ve pissed and moaned about it enough. So we’ll blow up a bunch of kikes and a bunch of Lizards, and the Führer will be so happy he’ll dance a little jig, the way he did when the frog-eaters gave up in 1940. So—five days maximum. You’ll be ready to roll by then?”

  “If I have my panzers back from the workshops, yes,” Jäger said. “Like I said, though, somebody will have to lean on the mechanics.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” the SS man promised with a large, evil grin. “You think they won’t hustle with me holding their toes to the fire?” Jäger wouldn’t have bet against his meaning that literally. “Other thing is, I’ll make it real plain that if they don’t make me happy, they’ll tell Himmler why. Would you rather deal with me or with the little schoolmaster in his spectacles?”

  “Good question,” Jäger said. Taken as a man, Skorzeny was a lot more frightening than Himmler. But Skorzeny was just Skorzeny. Himmler personified the organization he led, and that organization invested him with a frightfulness of a different sort.