Striking the Balance (62 page)

“It shall be done,” Rivka said in the aliens’ hissing language. Anyone who was around them long learned that phrase. She dropped back into Yiddish: “That’s the way they think. It’s about the only way they think.”

“I know,” Moishe answered. He made as if to pound his head against the wall.
“Oy,
do I know.”

Through loudspeakers, the muezzins called the faithful to prayer. Cairo slowed down for a little while. Another bright yellow airplane flew low over the city, making for the airport. “That is a Dakota,” Rivka said, coming up to stand by Moishe. “So—Marshall?—is here, too, now.”

“So he is,” Moishe answered. He felt as if he were setting up a game of chess with a friend back in Warsaw, and had just put the last couple of pieces where they belonged. “Now we see what happens next.”

“What will you tell Atvar if he summons you to ask what you think of these people?” Rivka asked.

Moishe used a few clicks and pops himself. “The exalted fleetlord? You mean, besides
geh in drerd?”
Rivka gave him a dangerous look, one that meant,
Stop trying to be funny.
He sighed and went on, “I don’t know. I’m not even sure why he keeps bringing me in to question me. I wasn’t—”

Rivka made urgent shushing motions. Moishe shut up. He’d started to say something like,
I wasn’t anywhere near the caliber of those people.
Rivka was right. The Lizards surely monitored everything he said. If they hadn’t figured out for themselves how small a fish he was, no point telling them. Being thought more important than he was might improve both his treatment and his life expectancy.

And sure enough, a couple of hours later Zolraag walked into the hotel room and announced, “You are summoned to the quarters of the exalted fleetlord Atvar. You will come immediately.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Moishe answered. The Lizards certainly hadn’t bothered learning to negotiate with him as an equal. They told him where to go and what to do, and he perforce did it.

The guards didn’t seem quite so eager to shoot him if he so much as stumbled as they had when the Lizards first brought him to Cairo. They still turned out for him full force, though, and transported him from hither to yon and back again in one of their armored personnel carriers, as uncomfortable a mode of travel for a human being as any ever invented.

While they were on their way to Atvar’s headquarters, Zolraag remarked, “Your insights into the political strategies likely to be utilized are of interest to the exalted fleetlord. Having headed a not-empire yourself, you will be prepared to empathize with these other Tosevite males.”

“That’s certainly better than being shot,” Moishe said gravely. He was glad he’d had practice holding his face straight. Yes, he’d headed up the Jews of Poland for a little while after the Lizards came, till he found he could no longer stand to obey them. To imagine that that put him in the same class as Hitler and Hull and Stalin—well, if you could imagine that, you had a vivid and well-stocked imagination. From what he’d gathered, anything smaller than the entire surface of a planet was too small for the Lizards to bother making what they reckoned subtle distinctions in size. The distinctions were anything but subtle to him, but he—thank God!—was not a Lizard.

Atvar rounded on him as soon as he came into the machine-strewn suite the fleetlord occupied. “If we make an agreement with these males, is it your judgment they will abide by it?” he demanded, using Zolraag to translate his words into Polish and German.

This to a man who’d watched Poland carved up between Germany and the USSR after they’d made their secret agreement, and then watched them go to war against each other less than two years later in spite of the agreement still formally in force. Picking his words with care, Moishe answered, “They will—so long as they see keeping the agreement as being in their interest.”

The fleetlord made more mostly unintelligible noises. Again, Zolraag interpreted for him: “You are saying, then, that these Tosevite males are altogether unreliable?”

By any standard with which the Lizard was familiar, the answer to that had to be
yes.
Moishe didn’t think putting it so baldly would help end the fighting. He said, “You have much to offer that would be in their interest to accept. If you and they can agree upon terms for your males’ leaving their countries, for instance, they would probably keep any agreements that would prevent the Race from coming back.”

As he’d seen with Zolraag’s efforts in Warsaw, the Lizards had only the vaguest notions of diplomacy. Things that seemed obvious even to a human being who had no governmental experience—to Moishe himself, for instance—sometimes struck the aliens with the force of revelation when they got the point. And sometimes, despite genuine effort, they didn’t get it.

As now: Atvar said, “But if we yield to the demands of these importunate Tosevites, we encourage them to believe they are our equals.” After a moment, he added, “And if they believe themselves equal to us, soon they will come to think they are superior.”

That last comment reminded Moishe the Lizards weren’t fools; they might be ignorant of the way one nation treated with another, but they weren’t stupid. Ignoring the difference could be deadly dangerous. Carefully, Moishe said, “What you have already done should make it plain to them that they are not your superiors. And what they have done to you should show you that you are not so much superior to them as you thought you were when you came to this world. When neither side is superior, isn’t talking better than fighting?”

After Zolraag had translated what he’d said, Atvar fixed Russie with what certainly looked like a baleful stare. The fleetlord said, “When we came to Tosev 3, we thought you Big Uglies would still be the spear-flinging barbarians our probes of this planet had shown you to be. We discovered very soon we were not so superior as we had thought we would be when we went into cold sleep. It is the most unpleasant discovery the Race has ever known.” He added an emphatic cough.

“Nothing stays the same here, not for long,” Moishe said. Some of the Polish Jews had tried to pretend time had stopped, to live their lives as they had before the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution blew across Europe. They’d even thought they were succeeding—till the Nazis brought all the worst parts of the modern world to bear against them.

Moishe had spoken with more than a little pride. That wasn’t what he touched off in the fleetlord. Atvar replied in considerable agitation: “This is what is wrong with you Tosevites.
You are too changeable.
Maybe we can make peace with you as you are now. But will you be as you are now when the colonization fleet reaches this world? It is to be doubted. What will you be? What will you want? What will you know?”

“I have no answers to these questions, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said quietly. He thought of Poland, which had had a large army, well trained to fight the sort of war fought on that frontier a generation before. Against the
Wehrmacht,
the Poles had fought with utmost bravery and utmost futility—and had gone down to ignominious defeat in a couple of weeks. While they weren’t looking, the rules had changed.

“I have no answers to these questions, either,” Atvar said. Unlike the Polish army, he at least sensed the possibility of change. It frightened him even more than it had frightened the pious Jews who tried to turn their backs on Voltaire and Darwin and Marx, Edison and Krupp and the Wright brothers. The fleetlord went on, “I have to be certain this world will be intact and ready for settlement by the males and females of the colonization fleet.”

“The question you must ask yourself, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said, “is whether you would sooner have part of the world ready for settlement than all of it in ruins.”

“Truth,” Atvar said. “But there is also another question: if we let you Tosevites retain part of the land surface of this world on your own terms now, for what will you use that base between now and the arrival of the colonization fleet? Do we end one war now but lay the eggs for another, larger one later? You are a Tosevite yourself; your people have done little but fight one war after another. How do you view this?”

Moishe supposed he should have been grateful the fleetlord was using him for a sounding board rather than simply disposing of him. He
was
grateful, but Atvar had given him another essentially unanswerable question. He said, “Sometimes war does lead to war. The last great war we fought, thirty years ago now it started, sowed the seeds for this one. But a different peace might have kept the new war from happening.”

“Might,” the fleetlord echoed unhappily. “I cannot afford
might.
I must have certainty, and there is none on this world. Even you Big Uglies cannot come into concord here. Take this Poland where you lived, where Zolraag was provincelord. The Deutsche claim it because they had it when the Race came to Tosev 3. The SSSR claims half of it because of an agreement they say the Deutsche violated. And the local Tosevites claim it belongs to neither of these not-empires, but to them alone. If we leave this Poland place, to whom shall we in justice restore it?”

“Poland, Exalted Fleetlord, is a place I hope you do not leave,” Moishe said.

“Even though you did everything you could to undermine our presence there?” Atvar said. “You may have the egg, Moishe Russie, or you may have the hatchling. You may not have both.”

“I understand that,” Moishe said, “but Poland is a special case.”

“All cases on Tosev 3 are special—just ask the Big Uglies involved in them,” Atvar answered. “One more reason to hate this world.”

XVI

Vyacheslav Molotov gulped down yet another glass of iced tea, pausing halfway through to swallow a couple of salt tablets. The heat of Cairo was unbelievable, enervating, even deadly dangerous: one of his aides, an NKVD colonel named Serov, who spoke the Lizards’ language as fluently as any human being in the Soviet Union, had collapsed of heatstroke, and was now recovering in an air-conditioned hospital suite the English had set up to treat similarly afflicted folk of their own nation.

Neither the Semiramis Hotel, in which the Soviet delegation and other human diplomats were staying, nor Shepheard’s, in which the negotiations were being conducted, enjoyed the benefits of air-conditioning. Here, the Soviets kept enough fans going at all times to make paperweights mandatory to prevent a blizzard of documents from blowing around the suite. Even if it did move, the air the fans blew remained hot.

No fans blew during the negotiations. The Lizards, as Molotov had discovered to his dismay when he was first flown up to one of their spaceships to discuss the war with their fleetlord, reveled in heat. Before Colonel Serov was rendered
hors de combat,
he’d reported that the Lizards here continually talked about how fine the weather was—almost like their home, they said.

As far as Molotov was concerned, they were welcome to it.

He reached in the drawer and pulled out a dark blue necktie. As he fastened the collar button of his shirt, he allowed himself a small, martyred sigh: here in Cairo, he envied the Lizards their body paint. Knotting the tie, he reflected that he still had an advantage over most of his colleagues. His neck was thin, which let air circulate under his shirt. A lot of the Soviets were beefy types, with double chins and rolls of fat at their napes. For them, closed collar and cravat were even worse torment.

Just for a moment, he wondered how the USSR’s Lizard prisoners enjoyed the labor camps northeast of Leningrad and up in the northern reaches of Siberia. He wondered how they would enjoy them come February.

“As much as I enjoy Cairo now,” he murmured, checking in the dresser mirror to make sure the tie was straight. Satisfied, he put on his hat and went downstairs to wait for the Lizard vehicle that would take him to today’s negotiating session.

His interpreter, a birdlike little man named Yakov Donskoi, was pacing about the hotel lobby. He brightened on seeing Molotov arrive. “Good morning, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” he said. With Molotov here, he had a set place to be and set things to do.

“Good morning, Yakov Beniaminovich,” Molotov answered, and looked pointedly at his wristwatch. The Lizards were . . . 

Exactly at the appointed hour, an armored personnel carrier pulled up in front of the hotel. He kept expecting the Lizards to be late, and they never were. Donskoi said, “I have been down for some time. Von Ribbentrop left about forty minutes ago, Marshall about twenty. Before that, I do not know.”

The Lizards did not transport human diplomats together. Molotov supposed that was to keep them from conferring with one another. The tactic had its advantages for them. The humans didn’t dare speak too freely among themselves at the hotel, either. The NKVD had swept Molotov’s room for listening devices. He was sure the
Gestapo,
the OSS, and other intelligence agencies had done likewise for their principals’ quarters. He was equally sure they hadn’t found everything there was to find. The Lizards had too long a lead on humanity in that kind of technology.

He turned to Donskoi. “Tell the Lizards it would be
kulturny
if they provided seats in this machine suitable to the shape of our fundaments.”

Donskoi addressed the Lizard with the fanciest body paint not in his own language but in English, the human tongue in which the talks were being conducted. It was the native tongue of George Marshall and Anthony Eden, while von Ribbentrop and Shigenori Togo were fluent in it. Eden and Togo were not formal conference participants, but the Lizards had let them come and sit in.

The Lizard replied to Donskoi in English that sounded to Molotov not much different from the alien’s native tongue. The interpreter, however, made sense of it: that was his job. He translated for Molotov: “Strukss says no. He says we should be honored they deign to talk with us at all, and that we have no business asking for anything more than they provide.”

“Tell him he is
nye kulturny,”
Molotov said. “Tell him he is an ignorant barbarian, that even the Nazis whom I hate know more of diplomacy than his people, that his superior will hear of his insolence. Tell him in just those words, Yakov Beniaminovich.”

Donskoi spoke in English. The Lizard made horrible spluttering noises, then spoke English himself. Donskoi said, “He says, with the air of one granting a great concession, he will see what arrangements can be made. I take this to mean he will do as you say.”

“Ochen khorosho,”
Molotov said smugly. In some ways, the Lizards were very much like his own people: if you convinced one of them you had superior status, he would grovel, but he would ride roughshod over you if he thought himself of the higher rank.

The armored vehicle—far quieter and less odorous than its human-made equivalent would have been—pulled to a stop in front of Shepheard’s Hotel, where Atvar made his headquarters. Molotov found it amusing and illuminating that the Lizard should choose for his own the hotel that had had the highest status under the British colonialist regime.

He got out of the Lizard personnel carrier with nothing but relief; not only was the seat wrong for his backside, it was even hotter in there than on the street. Strukss led him and Yakov Donskoi to the meeting room, where the other human representatives sat sweltering as they waited for Atvar to condescend to appear. George Marshall drank from a glass of iced tea and fanned himself with a palm-frond fan he’d probably brought from home. Molotov wished he’d thought to bring or acquire such a convenience himself. Marshall’s uniform remained crisp, starchy.

Through Donskoi, Molotov asked the Egyptian servant hovering in the corner of the room for iced tea for himself. The servant, not surprisingly, was fluent in English. With a bow to Molotov—who kept his face still despite despising such self-abnegation—he hurried away, soon to return with a tall, sweating glass. Molotov longed to press it to his cheek before he drank, but refrained. A fan was suitably decorous; that was not.

Atvar came in a few minutes later, accompanied by a Lizard in far less elaborate body paint: his interpreter. The human delegates rose and bowed. The Lizard interpreter spoke to them in English that seemed more fluent than that which Strukss used. Yakov Donskoi translated for Molotov: “The fleetlord recognizes the courtesy and thanks us for it.”

Von Ribbentrop muttered something in German, a language Donskoi also understood. “He says they should show us more courtesy now, and they should have shown us more courtesy from the beginning.”

Like a lot of the things the Nazi foreign minister said, that was both true and useless. Von Ribbentrop was on the heavyset side and, with his tight collar and fair skin, looked rather like a boiled ham with blue eyes. As far as Molotov was concerned, he had the wits of a boiled ham, too, but the interests of the popular front kept him from saying so.

Donskoi translated word for word as Eden asked Atvar, “Am I to construe that my presence means the Race extends the same cease-fire to Great Britain as to my cobelligerents who sit at this table with me?”

The handsome Englishman—Churchill’s alter ego—had asked that question before, without getting a straight answer for it. Now Atvar spoke. The Lizard interpreter, having already translated Eden’s question, turned the fleetlord’s reply into English: “The fleetlord says in his generosity the truce applies to you in your island. It does not apply to any of the other lands of your empire across the seas from you and this island.”

Anthony Eden, though not bad at keeping his face straight, was not in Molotov’s class. The Soviet foreign minister had no trouble seeing his anguish. As Stalin had predicted, the British Empire was dead, having been pronounced so by a child-sized green-brown creature with sharp teeth and swiveling eye turrets.
In spite of your heroics, the dialectic consigns you to the ash-heap of history,
Molotov thought.
Even absent the Lizards, it would have happened soon.

George Marshall said, “For us, Fleetlord, the cease-fire is not enough. We want you off our soil, and we are prepared to hurt your people more if you don’t leave of your own free will and be quick about it.”

“The German
Reich
expresses this same demand,” von Ribbentrop declared, sounding pompous even when Molotov did not understand his words till they were translated. Sweating and blustering, he went on, “The
Führer
insists on the full restoration of all territory under the benevolent dominion of the
Reich
and its allied states, including Italy, at the time of your people’s arrival from the depths of space.”

As far as Molotov was concerned, no territory had been under the
benevolent
dominion of the
Reich.
That, however, was not his primary concern. Before Atvar could reply to von Ribbentrop, he spoke up sharply: “Much of the territory claimed by the Germans was illegally seized from the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, to whom, as Comrade Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, rightly requires, it must be restored.”

“If you Tosevites cannot settle where the boundaries of your empires and not-empires lie, why do you expect us to do it for you?” Atvar demanded.

Von Ribbentrop turned to glare at Molotov, who looked back stonily. The two of them might have been allied against the Lizards, but were not and would never be friends.

“Perhaps,” Shigenori Togo said, “this situation being so irregular, both human states might agree to allow the Race to continue to possess some territory between them, serving as a buffer and aiding in the establishment and maintenance of peace all over our world.”

“Subject to negotiation of the precise territory to be retained, this may in principle be acceptable to the Soviet Union,” Molotov said. Given the Germans’ prowess not merely with explosive-metal bombs but also with nerve gas and long-range guided rockets, Stalin wanted a buffer between the Soviet border and fascist Germany. “Since the Race is already in Poland—”

“No!” von Ribbentrop interrupted angrily. “This is not acceptable to the
Reich.
We insist on a complete withdrawal, and we will go back to war before we accept anything less. So the
Führer
has declared.”

“The
Führer
has declared a great many things,” Anthony Eden said with relish. “ ‘The Sudetenland is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe,’ for instance. That a declaration is made does not necessarily test its veracity.”

“When the
Führer
promises war, he delivers,” von Ribbentrop replied, a better comeback than Molotov had looked for from him.

George Marshall coughed, then said, “If we are throwing quotations around, gentlemen, let me give you one from Ben Franklin that fits the present circumstances: ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ ”

To Molotov, Yakov Donskoi murmured the translation, then added, “The pun in English I cannot reproduce in Russian.”

“Never mind the pun,” Molotov answered. “Tell them for me that Franklin is right, and that Marshall is right as well. If we are to be a popular front against the Lizards, a popular front we must be which removes the pleasure of sniping at one another.” He waited till Donskoi had rendered that into English, then went on, for the interpreter’s ears alone, “If I am to be deprived of the pleasure of telling von Ribbentrop what I think of him, I want no one else to enjoy it—but you need not translate that”

“Yes, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” the interpreter said dutifully. Then he stared at the foreign commissar. Had Molotov made a joke? His face denied it. But then, Molotov’s face always denied everything.