Striking the Balance (46 page)

Fsseffel resumed: “Males of the Race, you are here to labor for the males of the SSSR. This will henceforth be your sole function.” He paused to let that sink in, and for translation, then went on, “How well you work, how much you produce, will determine how well you are fed.”

“That’s barbarous,” Oyyag whispered to Ussmak.

“You expect Big Uglies to behave like civilized beings?” Ussmak whispered back. Then he waved Oyyag to silence; Fsseffel was still talking—

“You will now choose for yourselves a headmale for this, Race Barracks Three. This male will be your interface with the Russki males of the People’s Commissariat for the Interior, the Tosevite organization responsible for administration of this camp.” He paused again to let the interpreter speak to the Big Ugly from the NKVD. “Choose wisely, I urge you.” He tacked an emphatic cough onto that. “If you do not make a selection, one will be made for you, more or less at random. Race Barracks Two had this happen. Results have been unsatisfactory. I urge against such a course.”

Ussmak wondered what sort of unsatisfactory results Fsseffel had in mind. All sorts of nasty possibilities occurred to him: starvation, torture, executions. He hadn’t thought in terms like those before the mutiny. His frame of reference had changed since then, and not for the better.

Oyyag startled him by shouting, “Ussmak!” A moment later, half the males in the barracks were calling his name. They wanted him for headmale, he realized with something less than delight. That would bring him into constant contact with the Big Uglies, which was the last thing he wanted. He saw no good way to escape, though.

The Big Ugly with the hairy face said, “Let the male called Ussmak come forward and be recognized.” He was as fluent in the language of the Race as any Tosevite Ussmak had heard. When Ussmak got down from his bunk and walked over to the door, the Big Ugly said, “I greet you, Ussmak. We will be working with each other in days to come. I am David Nussboym.”

“I greet you, David Nussboym,” Ussmak said, although he would rather not have made the Tosevite’s acquaintance.

The breeze still brought the alien stink of Cairo to the scent receptors on Atvar’s tongue. But it was a fine mild breeze, and the fleetlord was more prepared to tolerate Tosevite stinks now that he had succeeded in dealing the Big Uglies a heavy blow.

He called up the Florida situation map on one of the computers installed in his Tosevite lodging. “We’ve broken the Americans here,” he told Kirel, pointing to the map. “The bomb created a gap, and we’ve poured through it. Now they flee before us, as they did in the early days of the conquest. Our possession of the peninsula seems assured.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, but then tempered that by adding, “A pity the conquest does not proceed elsewhere as it did in the early days.”

Atvar did not care to dwell on that unless forcibly reminded of it. After the Americans exploded their own nuclear device outside Denver, the Race’s attack there had bogged down. It had already proved more expensive than calculations predicted, as attacks against Big Ugly strongpoints had a way of doing. The bomb had broken the southern prong of the attack, and weakened the center and north as well, because the local commander had shifted forces southward to help exploit what had looked like an opening. An opening it had been—the opening of a trap.

Kirel said, “Exalted Fleetlord, what are we to make of this latest communication from the SSSR? Its leadership is certainly arrogant enough, demanding that we quit its territory as a precondition for peace.”

“That is—that must be—a loud bluff,” Atvar replied. “The only nuclear weapon the SSSR was able to fabricate came from plutonium stolen from us. That the not-empire has failed to produce another indicates to our technical analysts its inability to do so. Inform the Big Ugly called Molotov and his master the Great Stalin—great compared to what?” the fleetlord added with a derisive snort, “—that the SSSR is in no position to make demands of us that it cannot enforce on the battlefield.”

“It shall be done,” Kirel said.

Atvar warmed to the subject: “In fact, the success of our retaliatory bomb once more makes me wonder if we should not employ these weapons more widely than we have in the past.”

“Not in the SSSR, surely, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said in some alarm. “The broad expanse of land there is vulnerable to widespread radioactive pollution, and would otherwise be highly satisfactory for agriculture and herding for our colonists.”

“In purely military terms, this would be a much more highly satisfactory campaign if we could ignore the requirements of the colonization fleet,” Atvar answered resentfully. He sighed. “Unfortunately, we cannot. Were it not for the colonization fleet, this conquest fleet would have no point. The analysts agree with you: large-scale nuclear bombing of the SSSR, however tempting it would be to rid this planet of the Emperor-murdering clique now governing that not-empire, would create more long-term damage than the military advantage we would gain could offset.”

“I have also studied these analyses,” Kirel said, which raised Atvar’s suspicions: was Kirel trying to prepare himself to wear a fleetlord’s body paint? But he hadn’t done anything about which Atvar could take exception, so the fleetlord waited for him to go on. He did: “They state that there are certain areas where nuclear weapons may successfully be employed in an offensive role without undue damage to the planet.”

Atvar’s suspicion diminished, not least because Kirel had agreed with him. He said, “If we do employ nuclear weapons on our own behalf rather than as retaliation for Tosevite outrages, we will also make ourselves appear less predictable and more dangerous to the Big Uglies. This may have a political effect out of proportion to the actual military power we employ.”

“Again, Exalted Fleetlord, this is truth,” Kirel said. “Letting the Big Uglies know we, too, can be unpredictable may prove, as you say, a matter of considerable importance for us.”

“That is a vital point,” Atvar agreed. “We cannot predict the actions of the Big Uglies even with all the electronics at our disposal, while they, limited as they are in such matters, often anticipate what we intend to do, with results all too frequently embarrassing for us.”

Finding Kirel in accord with him, Atvar blanked the map of Florida and summoned another from the computer to take its place. “This large island—or perhaps it is a small continent, but let the planetologists have the final say there—lying to the southeast of the main continental mass had huge tracts of land ideally suited for settlement by the Race and little used by the Big Uglies, most of whose habitations cling to the damper eastern coast. Yet from those bases they continually stage annoying raids on us. All conventional efforts to suppress these raids have proved useless. This might prove the ideal site for nuclear intervention.”

“Well said, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “If we do strike those areas with nuclear weapons, most of the radioactive fallout they produce will be blown out to sea, and seas the size of those here on Tosev 3 undoubtedly can accommodate such with far less damage than the land.”

“This planet has altogether too much sea in proportion to its land area,” Atvar agreed. “The planetologists will spend centuries accounting for what makes it so different from Home and the worlds of the Rabotevs and Hallessi.”

“Let them worry about such things,” Kirel said. “Our job is to make certain they have the opportunity
to
worry.”

“Now you have spoken well, Shiplord,” Atvar said, and Kirel stretched out from the rather nervous posture he usually assumed around the fleetlord. Atvar realized he had not given his chief subordinate much in the way of praise lately. That was an error on his part: if they did not work well together, the progress of the conquest would be impeded—and too many things had already impeded the progress of the conquest. Atvar hissed out a sigh. “Had I any conception of the magnitude of the task involved in suppressing resistance on an industrialized world without destroying it in the process, I would have thought long and hard before accepting command.”

Kirel didn’t answer right away. Had Atvar declined the position, he most likely would have been appointed fleetlord. How much did he want to taste the job? Atvar had never been certain of that, which made his dealings with the shiplord of the conquest fleet’s bannership edgier than they might have been. Kirel had never shown himself to be disloyal, but—

When the shiplord did speak, he dealt with the tactical situation under discussion, not with Atvar’s latest remark: “Exalted fleetlord, shall we then prepare to use nuclear weapons against these major Tosevite settlements on the island or continent or whatever it may be?” He leaned forward to read the toponyms on the map so as to avoid any possible mistakes. “Against Sydney and Melbourne, I mean?”

Atvar leaned forward, too, to check the sites for himself. “Yes, those are the ones. Begin preparations as expeditiously as possible.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done.”

XII

As prisons went, the one Moishe Russie and his wife and son now inhabited wasn’t bad. It even outdid the villa where the Jewish underground in Palestine had incarcerated them. Here, in what had been a fine hotel, he and his family got plenty of food and enjoyed both electricity and hot and cold running water. If not for bars on the windows and armed Lizard guards outside the door, the suite would have been luxurious.

Despite bars, the windows drew Moishe. He stared in endless fascination out across Cairo at the Nile and, beyond it, the Pyramids. “I never thought we would be like Joseph and come to Egypt out of Palestine,” he said.

“Who will be our Moses and lead us out again?” Reuven asked.

Moishe felt a burst of pride: the boy was still so young, but already not just learning the great stories of the Torah but applying them to his own life. He wished he had a better answer to give his son than “I don’t know,” but he didn’t want to lie to Reuven, either.

Rivka had a question much more to the point: “What will they do to us now?”

“I don’t know that, either,” Moishe said. He wished Rivka and Reuven hadn’t come with him after Zolraag recognized him in the Jerusalem prison camp. Far too late now to do anything but wish, though. But he was vulnerable through them. Even back in Warsaw, the Lizards had threatened them to try to make him do what they wanted. His family’s convenient disappearance had scotched that there. It wouldn’t here. He’d been ready to let himself be killed rather than obey the Lizards. But letting his wife and son suffer—that was something else again.

A key turned in the lock, out in the hall. Moishe’s heart beat faster. It was halfway between breakfast and lunchtime, not a usual hour for the Lizards to bother him. The door opened. Zolraag came in. The former provincelord of Poland was wearing more ornate body paint now than either of the times when Moishe had seen him in Palestine. He hadn’t returned to the almost rococo splendor of his ornamentation back in his Warsaw days, but he was gaining on it.

He stuck out his tongue in Moishe’s direction, then reeled it back in. “You will come with me immediately,” he said in fair German, turning
sofort
into a long, menacing hiss.

“It shall be done,” Moishe answered in the language of the Race. He hugged Rivka and kissed Reuven on the forehead, not knowing whether he would see them again. Zolraag allowed that, but made small, impatient noises, like a thick pot of stew coming to a boil.

When Moishe came over to him, the Lizard rapped on the inner surface of the door: the knob there had been removed. Zolraag used a sequence of knocks different from any the Lizards had employed before, presumably to keep the Russies from learning a code, breaking out, and causing trouble. Not for the first time, Moishe wished he and his family were as dangerous as the Lizards believed they were.

Out in the hallway, four males pointed automatic weapons at his midsection. Zolraag gestured for him to walk toward the stairwell. Two of the Lizard guards followed, both of them too far back to let him whirl and try to seize their rifles—as if he would have been
meshuggeh
enough to try.

Zolraag ordered him into a mechanical combat vehicle. The guards got into it, too. One of them slammed the rear doors shut behind him. The clang of metal striking metal had a dreadfully final sound.

Zolraag spoke a single word into what looked like a microphone at the front of the troop compartment: “Go.”

The combat vehicle clattered through the streets. Moishe got only a limited view through the machine’s firing ports. It was one of the least pleasurable journeys of his life in any number of ways. The seat on which he awkwardly tried to perch was made for a male of the Race, not someone his size; his backside didn’t fit it, while his knees came up under his chin. It was hot in there, too, hotter even than outside. The Lizards basked in the heat. Russie wondered if he’d pass out before they got where they were going.

He glimpsed a marketplace that dwarfed any he’d seen in Palestine. Through the fighting vehicle’s armor plate, he heard people jeering and cursing at the Lizards—that, at least, is what he thought they were doing, though he knew not a word of Arabic. But if anything so gutturally incandescent wasn’t cursing, it should have been. Whatever it was, Zolraag ignored it.

A few minutes later, the vehicle stopped. One of Moishe’s guards opened the doors at the rear.
“Jude heraus,”
Zolraag said, which made the hair stand up on the back of Russie’s neck.

They’d brought him to another hotel. The Lizards had fortified this one like the Maginot Line; when Moishe looked around, he saw enough razor wire, aliens with automatic weapons, and panzers and combat vehicles to hold off Rommel’s
Afrika Korps
and the British who’d fought him . . .  not that the Nazis or the British were going concerns in North Africa these days.

He didn’t get much time for sightseeing. Zolraag said, “Come,” the guards pointed their weapons at him, and he perforce came. The hotel lobby had ceiling fans. They weren’t turning. The electric lights were on, so Moishe decided the fans were off because the Lizards wanted them off.

The lift worked, too. In fact, it purred upward more silently and smoothly than any on which Moishe had ever ridden. He didn’t know whether it had always been like that or the Lizards had improved it after they conquered Cairo. It was, at the moment, the least of his worries.

When the lift doors opened, he found himself on the sixth floor, the topmost one. “Out,” Zolraag said, and Moishe obeyed again. Zolraag led him along the hallway to a suite of rooms that made the one where the Russies were confined seem prisonlike indeed. A Lizard who wore strange body paint—the right side fairly plain, the left fancier than any Moishe had seen till now—spoke with Zolraag at the doorway, then ducked back into the suite.

He returned a moment later. “Bring in the Big Ugly,” he said.

“It shall be done, adjutant to the fleetlord,” Zolraag answered.

They spoke their own language, but Moishe managed to follow it. “The fleetlord?” he said, and was proud that, despite his surprise, he’d remembered to add an interrogative cough. The Lizards ignored him even so. He hadn’t even thought the fleetlord was on the face of the Earth.

Atvar’s body paint was like that of Pshing’s left side, only all over. Other than that, he looked like a Lizard to Russie. He was able to tell one of the aliens from another, but only after he’d known him for a while.

Zolraag said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I present to you the Tosevite Moishe Russie, who is at last returned to our custody.”

“I greet you, superior sir,” Moishe said, as politely as he could: no point in insulting the chief Lizard over anything inconsequential.

He turned out to be wrong even so. “ ‘I greet you,
Exalted Fleetlord,”
Zolraag said sharply. Moishe repeated the phrase, this time with the right honorific. “That is better,” Zolraag told him.

Atvar, meanwhile, was studying him from head to toe, eye turrets swinging up and down independently of each other in the unnerving way Lizards had. The fleetlord spoke in his own language, too fast for Moishe to stay with him. Seeing that, Zolraag translated his words into German: “The exalted fleetlord wants to know if you are now satisfied as to the overwhelming power of the Race.”

The word he used to translate
Race
into German was
Volk.
That raised Moishe’s hackles all over again: the Nazis had used
Volk
for their own ends. He had to bring himself back under conscious control before answering, “Tell the fleetlord I am not. If the Race had overwhelming power, this war would have been over a long time ago.”

He wondered if that would anger Atvar. He hoped not. He had to be careful about what he said, much less for his own sake than for Rivka’s and Reuven’s. To his relief, Atvar’s mouth fell open. The Lizard’s sharp little teeth and long, forked tongue were not delightful sights in and of themselves, but they meant the fleetlord was amused rather than annoyed.

“Truth,” Atvar said, a word Russie knew. He nodded to show he understood. Atvar went on in the Lizards’ speech, again too quickly for Moishe to keep up. Zolraag translated once more: “The exalted fleetlord has learned, from me among others, that you opposed having the Jews rise on our behalf when we entered Palestine. Why did you do this, when you supported us against the Germans in Poland?”

“Two reasons,” Moishe said. “First, I know better now than I did then that you plan to rule all of mankind forever, and I cannot support that. Second, the Germans in Poland were slaughtering Jews, as you know. The British in Palestine were doing no such thing. Some of the Jews who back you there had escaped from Germany or from Poland. You seem more dangerous to me than the British do.”

Zolraag translated that into the Lizards’ hisses and pops and squeaks. Atvar spoke again, this time slowly, aiming his words directly at Moishe: “These other males who escaped do not think as you do. Why is this?”

Moishe did his best to answer in the language of the Race: “Other males see short. I look for long. In long, Race worse, British better.” To show how strongly he believed that, he ended with an emphatic cough.

“It is good that you think of the long term. Few Big Uglies do,” Atvar said. “It may even be that, from the point of view of a Big Ugly who does not wish to come under the rule of the Race, you are right.” He paused and turned both eye turrets toward Moishe’s face. “This will not help you, though.”

The Lizards had replaced the human-made furniture in the suite with their own gear. It made the room in which Russie stood appear even larger than it really was. One of the many devices with blank glass screens lit up, suddenly showing a Lizard’s face. The Lizard’s voice came out of the machine, too.
A telephone with a cinema attachment,
Moishe thought.

By the way Atvar’s adjutant jerked at whatever the message was, he might have stuck his tongue into a live electrical socket. He turned one eye turret back toward Atvar and said, “Exalted Fleetlord!”

“Not now, Pshing,” Atvar replied with very human impatience.

But the adjutant—Pshing—kept talking. Atvar hissed something Russie didn’t understand and whirled away from him toward the screen. As he did so, the Lizard’s face disappeared from it, to be replaced by a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into the sky. Moishe gasped in horror. He’d seen one of those clouds on his way to Palestine, rising over what had been Rome.

The sound he made seemed to remind Atvar he was there. The fleetlord turned one eye turret toward Zolraag for a moment and snapped, “Get him out of here.”

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said. He turned to Russie. “Go now. The exalted fleetlord has more important things with which to concern himself at the moment than one insignificant Big Ugly.”

Moishe went. He said nothing until the infantry combat vehicle that had brought him to Atvar’s headquarters started back toward the hotel in which he was imprisoned. Then he asked, “Where did that atomic bomb explode?”

Zolraag let out a hiss that made him sound like an unhappy samovar. “So you recognized it, did you? The place is part of this province of Egypt. I gather it has two names, in your sloppy Tosevite fashion. It is called both El Iskandariya and Alexandria. Do you know either of these names?”

“Someone bombed Alexandria?” Moishe exclaimed.
“Vay iz mir!
Who? How? You of the Race control all this country, don’t you?”

“I thought we did,” Zolraag answered. “Evidently not, yes? Who? We do not know. The British, taking revenge for what we did to Australia? We did not—do not—believe them to have weapons of this sort. Could they have borrowed one from the Americans?”

He sounded as if he meant the question seriously. Moishe made haste to reply: “I have no idea, superior sir.”

“No?” Zolraag said. “Yet you broadcast for the British. We must investigate further.” Ice ran up Russie’s back. The Lizard went on, “The Deutsche, fighting us as best they could? We do not know—but when we learn which Big Uglies did this, they will pay a great price.”