Striking the Balance (47 page)

Something Zolraag had said got through to Moishe slower than it should have. “Australia, superior sir? What happened in Australia?”

“We destroyed two cities to secure our conquests there,” the former Polish provincelord answered with chilling indifference before returning to a previous question: “How? We do not know that, either. We detected no airplanes, no missiles, no boats moving over the water. We do not believe the bomb could have been smuggled in by land, either; we would have found it in our searches of cargo.”

“Not over water, not by air, not on land?” Moishe said. “That doesn’t leave much. Did someone dig a tunnel and set the bomb
under
Alexandria?”

Zolraag made more horrified-teakettle noises, then burst out, “You Tosevites have not the technology to accomplish this!” That was when he figured out Russie had been offering a jest, however feeble. “Not funny,
Reb
Moishe,” he said, and used an emphatic cough to show how unfunny it was.

Nobody had called Moishe
Reb
since he’d left Warsaw. Then he’d thought the Lizards had come in answer to his prayer to make the Nazis leave off persecuting the Jews in the ghetto they’d established. People had gained hope from that. Now he saw that the Lizards, while they didn’t hate Jews in particular, were more dangerous for the rest of the world than the Nazis had dreamt of being. Two Australian cities, destroyed without provocation? No matter how sweltering the air inside the armored fighting vehicle, he shivered.

Heinrich Jäger peered down into the Panther’s engine compartment. “Fuel-pump gasket again?” he growled. “God in heaven, how long does it take for them to get the fabrication right?”

Gunther Grillparzer pointed to the lot number stenciled in white paint on the black rubber gasket. “This is an old one, sir,” he said. “Probably dates back to the first couple of months’ production run.”

That did little to console Jäger. “We’re damned lucky the engine didn’t catch fire when it failed. Whoever shipped it out to us ought to be horsewhipped.”

“Ahh, give the dumb bastard a noodle and put somebody else in his job,” Grillparzer said, using SS slang for a bullet in the back of the neck. He’d probably picked that up from Otto Skorzeny. He probably wasn’t joking, either. Jäger knew how things worked in German factories these days. With so many German men at the front, a lot of people doing production work were Jews, Russians, Frenchmen, and other slave laborers subject to just that kind of punishment if they made the slightest mistake.

“Is the replacement a new one?” Jäger demanded.

Grillparzer checked the lot number. “Yes, sir,” he answered. “We slap that in there, it shouldn’t give us any trouble till—the next time, anyhow.” On that optimistic note, he grabbed a screwdriver and attacked the fuel pump.

Off in the distance, a flight of rockets screamed away toward the Lizard lines. Jäger winced at the horrible noise. He’d been on the receiving end of Stalin-organ concertos when the Red Army lobbed
Katyushas
at the
Wehrmacht
before the Lizards came. If you wanted to tear up a whole lot of ground in a hurry, rockets were the way to do it.

They didn’t bother Skorzeny at all. “Someone will be catching hell,” he said cheerfully. Then, lowering his voice so only Jäger could hear, he went on, “Almost as good as the pasting we gave Alexandria.”

“Ah, that was us, was it?” Jäger said, just as softly. Skorzeny—heard things. “The radio hasn’t claimed it for the
Reich.”

“The radio bloody well isn’t going to claim it for the
Reich,
either,” the SS man answered. “If we take credit for it, one of our towns goes right off the map. Cologne, maybe, or Frankfurt, or Vienna. May happen anyway, but we’re not going to brag and help it along, not when we can keep quiet and smile mysteriously. If you know what I mean.” Maybe his smile was intended to be mysterious, but it ended up looking raffish.

Jäger asked, “Do you know how we did it? That’s a mystery to me.”

“As a matter of fact, I do, but I’m not supposed to tell,” Skorzeny said. Jäger picked a branch up off the ground and made as if to hit him with it. Skorzeny chuckled. “Shit, I never have been any good at doing what I’m supposed to. You know you can’t fit one of those bombs on a plane or a rocket, right?”

“Oh, yes,” Jäger said. “Remember, I got involved in that project deeper than I wanted to. You mad bastard, that was your fault, too. If I hadn’t been on that raid with you that snatched the explosive mend from the Lizards—”

“—You’d have stayed a Soviet puppet and you’d probably be dead by now,” Skorzeny broke in. “If the Lizards didn’t get you, the Bolsheviks would have. But that’s neither here nor there. We didn’t put it on a freighter, either, the way we did when we blasted Rome. Hard to fool the Lizards the same way twice.”

Jäger walked along, thinking hard. He scratched the side of his jaw. He needed a shave. He had a straight razor, but scraping his face without shaving soap hurt more than it was worth. At length, he said, “We couldn’t have sent it in overland. Insane even to think about it. That leaves—nothing I can see.”

“Nothing the Lizards can see, either.” Skorzeny grinned an evil grin. “They’d be tearing their hair if they had any. But I know something they don’t know.” He almost chanted the words, as if he were a little boy taunting the other children on the schoolyard. He thumped his finger off Jäger’s chest. “I know something you don’t know, too.”

“That’s all right,” Jäger said. “I know I’m going to boot you in the arse if you don’t spill it. How did we burn the library at Alexandria?”

Like most classical allusions, that one sailed past Skorzeny. He answered the main question, though: “I know we have a new kind of U-boat, that’s what I know. Damned if I know how, but it can do 450 kilometers submerged every centimeter of the way.”

“God in heaven,” Jäger said in genuine awe. “If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d have swept the Atlantic clean with boats like that.” He scratched his jaw again, visualizing a map of the eastern Mediterranean. “It must have sailed from—Crete?”

Skorzeny’s blunt features registered a curious blend of respect and disappointment. “Aren’t you the clever chap?” he said. “Yes, from Crete to Alexandria you can sail underwater—as long as you understand you won’t sail back.”

“Mm, yes, there is that.” Jäger did some more muffing. “You couldn’t tell the whole crew—there’d be a mutiny. But you could find a man you could rely on to press the button or flip the switch or whatever he had to do.” He took off his black service cap in respect for the courage of that man.

“Has to be how they did it, all right,” Skorzeny agreed. “One thing—he’d never know what hit him.”

Jäger thought of the fireball he’d seen going up east of Breslau, the one that had stalled the Lizards’ attack on the town. He tried to imagine being at the center of that fireball. “You’re right,” he said. “You might as well drop a man into the sun.”

“That’s what it would be like, sure enough,” the SS man said. He walked along beside Jäger, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. After half a dozen paces or so, he asked, ever so casually, “Your Jewish chums down in Lodz send any messages back to you? They gloating that they got the better of me?”

“I haven’t heard a word from them,” Jäger answered truthfully. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d stopped trusting Germans altogether after that bill of goods you tried selling them.” And there, he thought, was a fine euphemism for a nerve-gas bomb. If you couldn’t speak straight out about the things you did, maybe you shouldn’t have done them. In pointed tones, he went on, “They are still keeping the Lizards from using Lodz as a staging point against us, in spite of everything.”

“Goody for them,” Skorzeny said with a fine sardonic sneer. He thumped Jäger on the back, hard enough that he almost went headlong into the trunk of a birch tree. “Not so long from now, that won’t matter, either.”

“No?” Apprehension trickled down Jäger’s spine. Skorzeny
did
hear things. “Are they going to order us to try to reduce the town? I’m not sure we can do it—and even if we manage, street fighting’ll play hob with our armor.”

Skorzeny laughed, loud and long. From up in that birch tree, a squirrel chattered indignantly. “No, they’re not going to stick your dick in the sausage machine, Jäger,” he said. “How do I put it? If we can give the Lizards a present in Alexandria, we can give them and the Jews one in Lodz.”

Jäger was a Lutheran. He wished he’d grown up Catholic. Crossing himself would have been a comfort. There could be no mistaking what Skorzeny meant. “How will you get it into Lodz?” he asked, genuinely curious. “The Jews will never trust you—trust us—again. They’re liable to have warned the Poles, too. God. If they know what’s in that bomb of yours, they’re liable to have warned the Lizards.”

“Fuck the Lizards. Fuck the Poles. And fuck the Jews, too,” Skorzeny said. “I won’t take anybody’s help with this one. When the package gets here, I’ll deliver it personally.”

“You have to work,” David Nussboym said in the language of the Lizards. He used an emphatic cough. “If you don’t work, they’ll starve you or they’ll just kill you.” As if to underscore his words, men with submachine guns surrounded Alien Prisoner Barracks Number 3.

The Lizards in the barracks hissed and squeaked and muttered among themselves. Their spokesman, the male called Ussmak, answered, “So what? For what they feed us, the work is impossibly hard. We starve anyhow. If they kill us quickly, it will all be over. Our spirits will join those of Emperors departed, and we will be at peace.” He cast down his eyes. So did the rest of the Lizards who listened to the talk.

Nussboym had seen Lizards in Lodz do likewise when they spoke of their sovereign. They believed in the spirits of Emperors past as passionately as ultraorthodox Jews in God or good Communists in the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were also right about the rations they got. None of that mattered much to Nussboym. If he didn’t get these Lizards working again, out he’d go to the timber-cutting detail he’d escaped when they arrived. The rations human woodchoppers got were made for slow starvation, too.

“What can the camp administrators do that would put you back to work?” he asked Ussmak. He was ready to make extravagant promises. Whether the NKVD men who ran the camp would keep them was another matter. But once the Lizards again got into the habit of working, they’d keep at it.

At lot of Lizards were naive and trusting by human standards. Ussmak proved he wasn’t one of those. “They can leave. They can die,” he answered, his mouth dropping open in a laugh surely sardonic.

“Truth,” several males echoed from their crowded bunks.

“Fsseffel’s gang is working as ordered,” Nussboym said, trying another tack. “They are meeting norms in all areas.” He didn’t know whether that last bit was true or not, but Ussmak had no way to contest it: contact between his barracks hall and the one where Fsseffel was headman had been cut off as soon as the males here began their strike.

“Because Fsseffel is a fool, do not think I am a fool, too,” Ussmak replied. “We will not be worked to death. We will not be starved to death. Until we believe we will not be overworked or underfed, we will not do anything.”

Nussboym glanced out toward the NKVD guards. “They could come in here, drag a few of you outside, and shoot you,” he warned.

“Yes, they could,” Ussmak agreed. “They would not get much work from the males they shot, though.” He laughed again.

“I shall take your words to the commandant,” Nussboym said. He meant that for a warning, too, but did not think Ussmak was impressed. The Lizard seemed to him to have more depths of bitterness than any male of the Race Nussboym had known in Poland. He might almost have been a human being. In Poland, of course, the Race had kept prisoners. Males had not been prisoners there.

When Ussmak declined to answer, Nussboym left the barracks. “Any luck?” one of the guards called to him in Russian. He shook his head. He did not like the scowl on the guard’s face. He also did not like going back to the hodgepodge of Polish, Russian, and Yiddish he used to communicate with his fellow humans here in the camp. Making himself understood was sometimes easier in the Lizards’ language.

The leader of the guards who surrounded the barracks was a gloomy captain named Marchenko. “Comrade Captain, I need to speak with Colonel Skriabin,” Nussboym said.

“Maybe you do.” Marchenko had some kind of accent—Ukrainian, Nussboym thought—that made him even harder to understand than most Russians. “But does he need to speak to you?” From him, that passed for wit. After a moment, scowling still, he nodded. “All right. Pass back into the old camp.”

The camp administrative offices were better built, better heated, and far less crowded than the
zeks’
barracks. Half the people working there were
zeks,
though: clerks and orderlies and what have you. It was far softer work than knocking down pines and birches in the woods, that was certain. His fellow prisoners eyed Nussboym with glances half conspiratorial, half suspicious: in a way, he was one of them, but his precise status wasn’t yet clear and might prove too high to suit a lot of them. The speed with which he won access to Skriabin prompted mutters among the file cabinets.

“What news, Nussboym?” the NKVD colonel asked. Nussboym was not important enough to rate first name and patronymic from the short, dapper little man. On the other hand, Skriabin understood Polish, which meant Nussboym didn’t have to mumble along in his ugly makeshift jargon.

“Comrade Colonel, the Lizards remain stubborn,” he said in Polish. As long as Skriabin called him by his surname, he couldn’t address the colonel as Gleb Nikolaievich. “May I state an opinion as to why this is so?”

“Go ahead,” Skriabin said. Nussboym wasn’t sure just how smart he was. Shrewd, yes; of that there could be no doubt. But how much real Intelligence underlay that mental agility was a different question. Now he leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and gave Nussboym either his complete attention or a good facsimile of it.

“Their reasons, I think, are essentially religious and irrational,” Nussboym said, “and for that reason all the more likely to be deeply and sincerely held.” He explained about the Emperor-worship that suffused the Race, finishing, “They may be willing to martyr themselves to join with Emperors gone by.”