Striking the Balance (27 page)

This from a man who’d blown up a Lizard panzer by jumping onto it and throwing a satchel charge between turret and hull. Maybe Skorzeny called that a necessary sort of risk; Jäger had no way of knowing. He said, “You touch off a nerve-gas bomb in there, you’re going to kill a lot of people who don’t have thing one to do with the war.”

This time, Skorzeny’s laugh was rude. “You fought in Russia, same as I did. So what?” He thumped Jäger in the chest with a forefinger. “Listen and listen good. I’m going to do this with you or without you. It’d make my life easier if it was with you. But my life has been tough before. If it’s tough again, believe me, I’ll cope. So what do you say?”

“I don’t say anything right now,” Jäger answered. “I’m going to have to think this one over.”

“Sure. Go ahead.” Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down in a parody of sweet reason. “Think all you want. Just don’t take too long doing it.”

The guard pointed a Sten gun at Moishe Russie’s middle. “Come on, get moving,” he said, his voice harsh and merciless.

Russie rose from the cot in his cell. “The Nazis put me in the ghetto, the Lizards put me in gaol,” he said. “I never thought Jews would treat me the same way.”

If he’d hoped to wound the guard, he was disappointed. “Life’s tough all over,” the fellow answered indifferently. He gestured with the submachine gun. “Now put it in gear.”

He might have been an SS man. Moishe wondered if he’d learned his military manner from the genuine article. He’d seen that in Poland, after the Jews and Poles helped the Lizards chase out the Germans. Quite a few Jews, suddenly become soldiers, imitated the most impressive, most ferocious human warriors they’d known. If you tried pointing that out to them, though, you were liable to get yourself killed. Moishe maintained a prudent silence here.

He didn’t know exactly where
here
was. Somewhere in Palestine, of course, but he and his family had been brought in tied and blindfolded and concealed under straw. The outer walls of the compound were too high for him to see over them. He could tell he was in a town from the noises that came through the golden sandstone: smiths pounding on metal, wagons rattling by, the distant babel of a marketplace. Wherever he was, he was surely walking on soil mentioned in the Torah. Whenever he remembered that, awe prickled through him.

Most of the time, other things were on his mind. Chief among them was how to keep the Lizards from walking on this holy soil. He’d quoted the Bible at the Jewish underground leaders:
Thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed.
Isaiah had been talking about the Egyptians, and the Lizards were in Egypt now. Russie didn’t want them to follow Moses across the Sinai and into Palestine.

Very few people cared about what he wanted, worse luck. The local Jews, fools that they were, reckoned the British here as oppressive as the Nazis in Poland—or so they said, anyhow. Some of them had escaped from Poland after the Nazis conquered it, so they should have known better.

“Turn,” the guard said: unnecessarily, for Moishe knew the way to the interrogation chamber as well as a rat knew how to run through a familiar maze. He never got rewarded with a piece of cheese for doing it right, though; maybe his handlers hadn’t heard of Pavlov.

When he got to the right doorway, the guard stood back and motioned for him to work the latch. That never failed to amuse him: his captors took him for a dangerous man who would seize a weapon and wreak havoc with it if he got the slightest chance. If
only it were so,
he thought wryly. Give him a swatter and he might be dangerous to a fly. Past that . . . past that, the members of the underground were letting their imaginations run away with them.

He opened the door, took one step into the room, and stopped in surprised dismay. There at the table, along with Begin and Stern and the other usual questioners, sat a Lizard. The alien swung an eye turret toward him. “This is the one? I have a hard time being sure,” he said in fair German.

Moishe stared at him. The body paint he wore was far drabber than that which Moishe remembered, but no denying the voice was familiar “Zolraag!”

“He knows me,” the former Lizard governor of Poland said. “Either you have coached him well or he is indeed the male who gave the Race such a difficult time in Poland.”

“He’s Russie, all right,” Stern said. He was a big, dark fellow, a fighter rather than a thinker if looks mattered, which wasn’t always so. “He says we should steer clear of you, no matter what.” He spoke German, too, with a Polish accent.

“And I say to you that we will give you quite a lot to have him in our claws again,” Zolraag answered. “He betrayed us—he betrayed me—and he should pay for this betrayal.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but Moishe didn’t like the way Zolraag looked or sounded. He hadn’t thought the Race worried about such things as revenge, either. If he was wrong there, he would have been happier not knowing it.

“Nobody said anything about turning him over to you,” Menachem Begin said in Yiddish. “That was not why we brought you here.” He was short and slight, not a whole lot bigger than a Lizard himself. He was nothing much to look at, but when he spoke you had to take him seriously. He shook a finger at Zolraag. “We hear what you have to say, we hear what he has to say, and then we decide what to do.”

“You would be well advised to take the Race and its desires more seriously,” Zolraag answered, his voice cold. As he had back in Poland, he assumed his concerns were more important than mankind’s simply because they were his. Had he been blond and blue-eyed instead of green—brown and scaly, he would have made a good SS man himself: the Race certainly had the notion of the
Herrenvolk
down solid.

He did not succeed in impressing Begin. “You would be well advised to remember where you are,” the underground leader replied imperturbably. “We can always sell you to the British, and maybe get more from them for you than your people would give us for Russie here.”

“I took this risk when I let you bring me up to this part of the continental mass,” Zolraag said; he had courage, whatever you thought of him and his kind. “I still have hopes, though, of persuading you that aligning with the Race, the inevitable victors in this conflict, will serve you best in the long run.”

Moishe spoke for the first time: “What he really hopes is to get back his old rank. His body paint is very plain these days.”

“Yes, and that is your fault,” Zolraag said with an angry hiss like that of a venomous serpent “It was through you that the province of Poland passed from being peaceful to becoming restive, and you turned on us and blamed us for policies of similar nature to those you had previously praised.”

“Bombing Washington was not the same as bombing Berlin,” Moishe answered, picking up the old argument. “And now you cannot hold a rifle to my head to try to make me sing your praises and then use your machines to twist my words when I refuse. I was ready to die to tell the truth, and you would not let me. Of course I exposed you when I got the chance.”

“Ready to die to tell the truth,” Zolraag echoed. He swung his eye turrets toward the Jews who might lead Palestine into rebellion for his people and against the British. “You are sensible, rational Tosevites, sirs. You must see the fanaticism, the futility of this attitude.”

Moishe started to laugh. He didn’t intend to, but couldn’t help himself. The degree to which Zolraag misunderstood people in general and Jews in particular was breathtaking. The folk who had given the world Masada, who had stubbornly stayed Jews when slaughtered for sport or for refusing to convert to Christianity . . .  and he expected them to choose the path of expedience? No, Russie couldn’t help but laugh.

Then Menachem Begin laughed, too, and then Stern, and then all the underground leaders. Even the guard with the Sten gun, at first glance as humorless a
mamzer
as was ever spawned, chuckled under his breath. The idea of Jews choosing rationality over martyrdom was too deliciously absurd to resist.

Now the underground leaders glanced at one another. How could you explain Zolraag’s unintentional irony? Nobody tried. Maybe you couldn’t explain it, not so it made sense to him. Didn’t that show the essential difference between Lizards and human beings? Moishe thought so.

Before he could drive the point home, Stern said, “We will not turn Russie over to you, Zolraag. Get used to that idea. We take care of our own.”

“Very well,” the Lizard answered. “We also do this. Here I think your behavior may be more stubborn than necessary, but I comprehend it. Your mirth, however, I find beyond understanding.”

“You would have to know more of our history for it to make sense to you,” Moishe told him.

That set Zolraag to making unhappy-teakettle noises again. Russie hid a grin. He’d said that with malice aforethought The Lizards had a history that reached far back into the depths of time, to the days when men still lived in caves and fire was the great new invention of the age. As far as they were concerned, mankind had no history to speak of. The idea that they should concern themselves with human ephemera hit a nerve.

Menachem Begin spoke to Zolraag: “Suppose we do rise against the British. Suppose you help us in the fight. Suppose that helps you come into Palestine afterwards. What do we get from it besides a new master to lord it over us in place of the master we have now?”

“Are you now as free as any Tosevites on this planet?” Zolraag asked, adding an interrogative cough to the end of the sentence.

“If we were, the British wouldn’t be our masters,” Stern answered.

“Just so,” the Lizard said. “After the conquest of Tosev 3 is over, though, you will be raised to the same status as any other nation under us. You will have the highest degree of—what is the word?—autonomy, yes.”

“Which is not much,” Moishe put in.

“You be silent!” Zolraag said with an emphatic cough.

“Why?” Russie jeered when none of the Jewish underground leaders chose to back the Lizard. “I’m just being truthful, which is sensible and rational, isn’t it? Besides, who knows if the conquest of Tosev 3 will ever be over? You haven’t beaten us yet, and we’ve hurt you badly.”

“Truth,” Zolraag admitted, which disconcerted Moishe for a moment. The Lizard went on, “And among the Tosevite not-empires that has hurt us worst is Deutschland, which also hurt you Jews worst. Do you cheer on the Deutsche now where you fought them before?”

Russie tried not to show his wince. Zolraag might have had no notion of what the history of the Jews was like, but he knew mentioning the Nazis to Jews was like waving a red flag before a bull: he did it to take away their power of rational thought. Reckoning him a fool did not do.

“We are not talking about the Germans now,” Moishe said. “We’re talking about the British, who have treated Jews well on the whole, on the one hand, and your chances for conquering the world, which do not look as good as they might, on the other.”

“Of course we shall conquer Tosev 3,” Zolraag said. “The Emperor has ordered it”—he looked down at the floor for a moment—“and it shall be done.”

He didn’t sound particularly sensible or rational himself there. What he sounded like was an ultrapious Jew who got everything he knew from the Torah and the Talmud and rejected all secular learning: his faith sustained him in the face of all obstacles. Sometimes that kept you going through bad times. Sometimes it blinded you to things you should see.

Moishe studied his captors. Would they see Zolraag’s blind spot, or would their own blind them to it? He picked a different argument: “If you choose to deal with the Lizards, you’ll always be a little fish next to them. They may think you’re useful now, but what happens after they have Palestine and they don’t need you any more?”

Menachem Begin showed his teeth in what was not a grin of amusement. “Then we start giving them a hard time, the same as we do the British now.”

“This I believe,” Zolraag said. “It would certainly follow the Polish pattern.” Did he sound bitter? Hard to tell with a Lizard, but that would have been Moishe’s guess.

“If the Race conquers the whole world, though, who will back you against us?” he asked Begin. “What can you hope to gain?”

Now Begin started to laugh. “We are Jews. No one will back us. We will gain nothing. And we will fight anyway. Do you doubt it?”

“Not even slightly,” Moishe said. For a moment, captive and captor understood each other perfectly. Moishe had been Zolraag’s captive, too. They had stared at each other across a gap of incomprehension wide as the black gulf of space that separated the Lizards’ world from Earth.

Zolraag did not fully follow what was going on now, either. He said, “What is your answer, Tosevites? If you must. If there is fire for him in your innards because he is of your clutch of eggs, keep this Russie. But what do you say about the bigger question? Will you fight alongside us when we move forward here and punish the British?”

“Do you Lizards decide things on the spur of the moment?” Stern demanded.

“No, but we are not Tosevites, either,” Zolraag answered with evident relish. “You do everything quickly, do you not?”

“Not everything,” Stern said, chuckling a little. “This we have to talk about. We’ll send you back safe—”

“I was hoping to bring an answer with me,” Zolraag said. “This would not only help the Race but improve my own status.”

“But we don’t care about either of those, except insofar as they help us,” Stern said. He nodded to Russie’s guard. “Take him back to his room.” He didn’t call it a cell; even Jews used euphemisms to sugar-coat the things they did. Stern went on, “You can let his wife and son visit, or just his wife. If he’d rather. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“Right. Come on, you,” the guard said to Moishe, as usual punctuating his orders with a jerk of the Sten gun’s barrel. As they walked down the corridor toward the chamber—however you wanted to describe it—in which Russie was confined, the fellow added, “No, you aren’t going anywhere—not alive, you’re not.”

“Thank you so much. You do reassure my mind,” Moishe replied. For one of the rare times since the Jewish underground had stolen him from the British, he heard that hard-nosed guard laugh out loud.