“I didn’t ask. One doesn’t, these days, but she had enough of them that she didn’t gouge me.”
“Good. Do we have any of that cheese left?” Moishe asked.
“Yes—plenty for today, with some left over for tomorrow, too.”
“That’s very good,” Moishe said. Food came first. The ghetto had taught him that. He sometimes thought that if he ever got rich (not likely) and if the war ever ended (which seemed even less likely), he’d buy himself a huge house, live in half of it, and fill the other half with meat and butter (in separate rooms, of course) and pastries and all manner of wonderful things to eat. Maybe he’d open a delicatessen. Even in wartime, people who sold food didn’t go as hungry as those who had to buy it.
The part of him that had studied human nutrition said cheese and potatoes and onions could keep body and soul together a long time. Protein, fat, vitamins (he wished for something green, but that would have been hard to come by in Poland in late winter even before the war), minerals. Unexciting food, yes, but food.
Rivka carried the sack of potatoes into the kitchen. Moishe trailed after her. The apartment was scantily furnished—just the leftovers of the people who had lived, and probably died, here before his family came. One thing it did boast, though, was a hot plate, and Lodz, unlike Warsaw even now, had reliable electricity.
Rivka peeled and chopped up a couple of onions. Moishe drew back a few paces. Even so, the onions were strong enough to make tears start in his eyes. The onions went into the stew pot. So did half a dozen potatoes. Rivka didn’t peel them. She glanced over to her husband. “Nutrients,” she said seriously.
“Nutrients,” he agreed. Potatoes in their jackets had more than potatoes without. When potatoes were most of what you ate, you didn’t want to waste anything.
“Supper in—a while,” Rivka said. The hot plate was feeble. It would take a long time to boil water. Even after it did, the potatoes would take a while to cook. When your stomach was none too full, waiting came hard.
Without warning, a huge bang! rattled the windows. Reuven started crying. As Rivka rushed to comfort him, sirens began to wail.
Moishe followed his wife out to the front room. “It frightened me,” Reuven said.
“It frightened me, too,” his father answered. He’d tried to forget how terrifying an explosion out of the blue could be. Hearing just one took him back to the summer before, when the Lizards had forced the Germans out of Warsaw, and to 1939, when the Nazis had pounded a city that couldn’t fight back.
“I didn’t think the Germans could hurt us any more,” Rivka said.
“I didn’t, either. They must have gotten lucky.” Moishe spoke as much to reassure himself as to hearten his wife. Believing they were safe from the Nazis was as vital to them as to every other Jew in Poland.
Bang! This one was louder and closer. The whole block of flats shook. Glass tinkled down on the floor as two windows blew in. Faint in the distance, Moishe heard screams. The rising bay of the sirens soon drowned them out.
“Lucky?” Rivka asked bitterly. Moishe shrugged with as much nonchalance as he could find. If it wasn’t just luck—He didn’t want to think about that.
“The Deutsche got lucky,” Kirel said. “They launched their missiles when our antimissile system was down for periodic maintenance. The warheads did only relatively minor damage to our facilities.”
Atvar glowered at the shiplord, though it was only natural that he try to put the best face on things. “Our facilities may not be badly damaged, but what of our prestige?” the fleetlord snapped. “Shall we give the Big Uglies the impression they can lob these things at us whenever it strikes their fancy?”
“Exalted Fleetlord, the situation is not so bad as that,” Kirel said.
“No, eh?” Atvar was not ready to be appeased. “How not?”
“They fired three more at our installations the next days and we knocked all of those down,” Kirel said.
“This is less wonderful than it might be,” Atvar said. “I presume we expended three antimissile missiles in the process?”
“Four, actually,” Kirel said. “One went wild and had to be destroyed in flight.”
“Which leaves us how many such missiles in our inventory?”
“Exalted Fleetlord, I would have to run a computer check to give you the precise number,” Kirel said.
Atvar had run that computer check. “The precise number, Shiplord, is 357. With them, we can reasonably expect to shoot down something over three hundred of the Big Uglies’ missiles. After that, we become as vulnerable to them as they are to us.”
“Not really,” Kirel protested. “The guidance systems on their missiles are laughable. They can strike militarily significant targets only by accident. The missiles themselves are—”
“Junk,” Atvar finished for him. “I know this.” He poked a claw into a computer control on his desk. The holographic image of a wrecked Tosevite missile sprang into being above the projector off to one side. “Junk,” he repeated. “Sheet-metal body, glass-wool insulation, no electronics worthy of the name—”
“It scarcely makes a pretense of being accurate,” Kirel said.
“I understand that,” Atvar said. “And to knock it out of the sky, we have to use weapons full of sophisticated electronics we cannot hope to replace on this world. Even at one for one, the exchange is scarcely fair.”
“We cannot show the Big Uglies how to manufacture integrated circuits,” Kirel said. “Their technology is too primitive to let them produce such sophisticated components for us. And even if it weren’t, I would hesitate to acquaint them with such an art, lest we find ourselves on the receiving end of it in a year’s time.”
“Always a question of considerable import on Tosev 3,” Atvar said. “I thank the forethoughtful spirits of Emperors past”—he cast his eyes down to the floor, as did Kirel—“that we stocked any antimissiles at all. We did not expect to have to deal with technologically advanced opponents.”
“The same applies to our ground armor and many other armaments,” Kirel agreed. “Without them, our difficulties would be greater still.”
“I understand this,” Atvar said. “What galls me still more is that, despite our air of superiority, we have not been able to shut down the Big Uglies’ industrial capacity. Their weapons are primitive, but continue to be produced.”
He had once more the uneasy vision of a new Tosevite landcruiser rumbling around a pile of ruins just after the Race’s last one had been lost in battle. Or maybe it would be a new missile flying off its launcher with a trail of fire, and no hope of knocking it down before it hit.
Kirel said, “Our strategy of targeting the Tosevites’ petroleum facilities has not yet yielded the full range of desired results.”
“I am painfully aware of this,” Atvar replied. “The Big Uglies are better at effecting makeshift repairs than any rational being could have imagined. And while their vehicles and aircraft are petroleum-fueled, the same is not true of a large proportion of their heavy manufacturing capacity. This also makes matters more difficult.”
“We are beginning to get significant amounts of small-arms ammunition from Tosevite factories in the areas under our control,” Kirel said, resolutely looking at the bright side of things. “The level of sabotage in production is acceptably low.”
“That’s something, anyhow. Up till now, these Tosevite facilities have produced nothing but frustration for us,” Atvar said. “The munitions they turn out are good enough to damage us, but not of sufficient quality or precision to be useful to us in and of themselves. We cannot merely match them bullet for bullet or shell for shell, as they have more of each. Ours, then, must have the greater effect.”
“Indeed so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “To that end, we have recently converted a munitions factory we captured from the Français to producing artillery ammunition in our calibers. The Tosevites manufacture the casings and the explosive charges; our only contribution to the process is the electronics for te
rminal guidance.”
Something Atvar said again. “But when our supply of seeker heads runs out—” In his mind that ugly smoke-belching landcruiser came out from behind the pile of ruins again.
“Such stocks are still fairly large,” Kirel said. “Again, we now have factories in Italia, France, and captured areas of the U S A and the SSSR beginning to turn out brakes and other mechanical parts for our vehicles.”
“This is progress,” Atvar admitted. “Whether it proves sufficient progress remains to be seen. The Big Uglies, unfortunately, also progress. Worse still, they progress qualitatively, where we are lucky to be able to hold our ground. I still worry about what the colonization fleet will find here when it arrives.”
“Surely the conquest will be complete by then,” Kirel exclaimed.
“Will it?” The more Atvar looked ahead, the less he liked what he saw. “Try as we will, Shiplord, I fear we shall not be able to prevent the Big Uglies from acquiring nuclear weapons. And if they do, I fear for Tosev 3.”
Vyacheslav Molotov detested flying. That gave him a personal reason for hating the Lizards to go along with reasons of patriotism and ideology. Ideology came first, of course. He hated the Lizards for their imperialism, for the efforts to cast all of mankind—and the Soviet Union in particular—back into the ancient economic system, with the aliens taking the role of masters and reducing mankind to slaves.
But beneath the imperatives of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic, Molotov also despised the Lizards for making him fly here to London. This trip wasn’t as ghastly as his last one, when he had flown in the open cockpit of a biplane from just outside Moscow to Berchtesgaden to beard Hitler in his den. He’d been in a closed cabin all the way—but he’d been no less nervous.
True, the Pe-2 fighter-bomber that had brought him across the North Sea was more comfortable than the little U-2 he’d used before. But it was also more vulnerable. The U-2 seemed too small for the Lizards to notice. Not so the machine he’d flown in yesterday. If he’d gone down into the cold, choppy gray water below, he knew he wouldn’t have lasted long.
But here he was, at the heart of the British Empire. For the five major powers still resisting the Lizards—the five major powers which, before the Lizards came, had been at war with one another—London remained the most accessible common ground. Large parts of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Germany and its European conquests lay under the aliens’ thumb, while Japan, though like England free of invaders, was next to impossible for British, German, and Soviet representatives to reach.
Winston Churchill strode into the Foreign Office conference room. He nodded first to Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State, then to Molotov, and then to Joachim von Ribbentrop and Shigenori Togo. As former enemies, they stood lower on his scale of approval than did the nations that had banded together against fascism.
But Churchill’s greeting included all impartially: “I welcome you, gentlemen, in the cause of freedom and in the name of His Majesty the King.”
Molotov’s interpreter murmured the Russian translation for him. Big Five conferences got along on three languages: America and Britain shared English, while Ribbentrop, a former German ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, was also fluent in that tongue. That left Molotov and Togo linguistically isolated, but Molotov, at least, was used to isolation—serving as foreign commissar for the only Marxist-Leninist state in a capitalist world was good pariah training.
The envoys delivered their replies. When Molotov’s turn came, he said, “The peasants and workers of the Soviet Union express through me their solidarity with the peasants and workers of worldwide humanity against our common foe.”
Ribbentrop gave him a dirty look. Getting the Nazi’s goat, though, was no great accomplishment; Molotov thought of him as nothing more than a champagne salesman jumped up beyond his position and his abilities. Churchill’s round pink face, on the contrary, remained utterly imperturbable. For the British Prime Minister, Molotov had a grudging respect. No doubt he was a class enemy, but he was an able and resolute man. Without him, England might have yielded to the Nazis in 1940, and he had unhesitatingly gone to the support of the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded a year later. Had he thrown his weight behind Hitler then in the crusade against Bolshevism he’d once preached, the USSR might have fallen.
Cordell Hull said, “It’s a good idea that we get together when we can so we can plan together the best way of ridding ourselves of the damned Lizards.” As he had been at previous meetings, Molotov’s interpreter was a little slower in translating for Hull than he had been for Churchill: the American’s dialect differed from the British English he’d learned.
“Ridding ourselves of the Lizards now is not our only concern,” Shigenori Togo said.
“What could possibly be of greater concern to us?” Ribbentrop demanded. He might have been a posturing, popeyed fool, but for once Molotov could not disagree with his question.
But Togo said, “We also have now a future concern. Surely you all hold captives from among the Lizards. Have you not observed they are all males?”
“Of what other gender could warriors properly be?” Churchill said.
Molotov lacked the Englishman’s Victorian preconceptions on that score: female pilots and snipers had gone into battle—and done well—against both the Germans and the Lizards. But even Molotov reckoned that a tactic of desperation. “What are you implying?” he asked of the Japanese foreign minister.
“Under interrogation, a captive Lizard pilot has informed us that this enormous invasion force is but the precursor to a still larger fleet now traveling toward our planet,” Togo replied. “The second fleet is termed, if we understand correctly, the colonization fleet. The Lizards intend not merely conquest but also occupation.”
He could have created no greater consternation if he’d thrown a live grenade onto the gleaming mahogany surface of the table in front of him. Ribbentrop shouted in German; Cordell Hull slammed the palm of his hand down onto the tabletop and shook his head so that the fringe of hair he combed over his bald crown flailed wildly; Churchill choked on his cigar and coughed harshly.
Only Molotov still sat unmoved and unmoving. He waited for the hubbub to die down around him, then said, “Why should we allow this to surprise us, comrades?” He used the last word deliberately, both to remind the other dignitaries that they were in the struggle together and to irk them on account of their capitalist ideology.
Speaking through an interpreter had its advantages. Among them was getting the chance to think while the interpreter performed his office. Ribbentrop started off in German again (a mark of indiscipline, to Molotov’s mind), then switched to spluttering English: “But how are we to defeat these creatures if they throw at us endless waves of attack?”
“This is a question you Germans should have asked yourselves before you invaded the Soviet Union,” Molotov said.
Hull raised a hand. “Enough of that,” he said sharply. “Recriminations have no place at this table, else I would not be sitting here with Minister Togo.”
Molotov dipped his head slightly, acknowledging the Secretary of State’s point. He enjoyed twitting the Nazi, but enjoyment and diplomacy were two separate things.
“The depths of space between the stars are vaster than any man can comfortably imagine, and traveling them, even near the speed of light, takes time, or so the astronomers have led me to believe,” Churchill said. He turned to Togo. “How long have we before the second wave falls on us?”
The Japanese foreign minister answered, “The prisoner states that this colonization fleet will reach earth in something under forty of his kind’s years. That is less than forty of our years, but by how much he does not know.”
The interpreter leaned close to Molotov. “I am given to understand that two of the Lizards’ years are more or less equal to one of ours,” he murmured in Russian.
“Tell them,” Molotov said after a moment’s hesitation. Revealing information of a
ny sort went against his grain, but joint planning required this.
When the interpreter finished speaking, Ribbentrop beamed. “So we have twenty years or so, then,” he said. “This is not so bad.”
Molotov was dismayed to see Hull nod at that. To them, he concluded, twenty years hence was so far distant that it might as well not exist. The Soviet Union’s Five Year Plans forced a concentration on the future, as did continued study of the ineluctable dynamics of the historical dialectic. As far as Molotov was concerned, a state that did not think about where it would be twenty years from now did not deserve to be anywhere.
He saw, intense concentration on Churchill’s face. The Englishman had no dialectic to guide him—how could he, when he represented a class destined for, the ash-heap of history?—but was himself a student of history of the reactionary sort, and thus used to contemplating broad sweeps of time. He could look ahead twenty years without being dizzied at the distance.
“I shall tell you what this means, gentlemen,” Churchill said: “It means that, even after we have defeated the Lizards even now encroaching on the green hills of Earth, we shall have to remain comrades in arms—even if not comrades in Commissar Molotov s sense—and ready ourselves and our world for another great battle.”
“I agree.” Molotov said. He was willing to let Churchill twit him without mercy if that advanced the coalition against the Lizards. Next to them even a fossilized conservative like Churchill was reminted in shiny progressive metal.
Ribbentrop said, “I agree also. I must say, however, that certain countries now preaching the gospel of cooperation would do well to practice it. Germany has noted several instances of new developments transmitted to us incompletely or only with reluctance, while others at this table have shared more equally and openhandedly.”
Churchill’s bland face remained bland. Molotov did not change expression, either—but then he rarely did. He knew Ribbentrop was talking about the Soviet Union, but declined to feel the least bit guilty. He was still sorry that Germany had succeeded in smuggling even half his share of explosive metal back to his homeland. That hadn’t been part of the Soviet plan. And Churchill couldn’t be enthusiastic about sharing British secrets with the power that had all but brought Britain to her knees.
Turtledove: World War Page 82
