Upsetting the Balance (62 page)

Captain Mather answered the second question first: “You in particular, sir, because of your experience in Poland.” He left English, too, for German. Moishe’s hackles did not rise so much as they might have: Mather made an effort, and not a bad one, to pronounce it with a Yiddish intonation. He was plainly a capable man, and in some not-so-obvious ways.

“I had lots of experience in Poland,” Moishe said. “Most of it, I didn’t like at all, not even a little bit. Why does anyone think I would want to do something that draws on it?”

“You’re already doing something that draws on it, sir, in your BBC broadcasts,” Mather replied. Moishe grimaced; that was true. The Englishman continued, making his German sound more Yiddish with every sentence: “I will admit, though, we have rather more in mind for you than sitting in front of a microphone and reading from a prepared script.”

“What do you have in mind?” Moishe said. “You still haven’t answered what I asked you.”

“I was coming round to it, sir; by easy stages,” Donald Mather said. “One thing you learned in Poland was that cooperating with the Lizards isn’t always the best of notions, if you’ll forgive your understatement.”

“No, not always, but if I hadn’t cooperated with them at first, I wouldn’t be here arguing with you now,” Moishe said.

“Saving yourself and your family—” Mather began.

“—And my people,” Russie put in “Without the Lizards, the Nazis would have slaughtered us all.”

“And your people,” Captain Mather conceded. “No one will say you didn’t do what you had to do when you joined the Lizards against the Nazis. But afterwards, you saw that mankind as a whole was your people, too, and you turned against the Lizards.”

“Yes to all of this,” Moishe said, beginning to grow impatient. “But what does it have to do with whatever you want from me?”

“I am coming to that,” Mather answered calmly. No matter how well he spoke, that external calm would have marked him as an Englishman; in his place, a Jew or a Pole would have been shouting and gesticulating. He went on, “Would you agree that in His Majesty’s mandate of Palestine, no effort to exterminate the Jews is now under way, but rather the reverse?”

“In Palestine?” Moishe echoed. The mention of the name was enough to make Rivka sharply catch her breath. Moishe shook his head. “No, you aren’t doing anything like that.
Nu?”
Here, the multifarious Yiddish word meant
come to the point.

He would have explained that to Mather, but the captain understood it on his own. Mather said, “The nub of it is, Mr. Russie, that there are Jews in Palestine who are not content with British administration there and have been intriguing with the Lizards in Egypt to aid any advance they might make into the Holy Land. His Majesty’s government would like to send you to Palestine to talk to the Jewish fighting leaders and convince them to stay loyal to the crown, to show them that, unlike yours, their situation is not so bad as to require intervention by the aliens to liberate them from it.”

“You want to send me to Palestine?” Moishe asked. He knew he sounded incredulous, but couldn’t help it. Beside him, Rivka made an indignant noise. He corrected himself at once: “You want to send us—me and my family—to Palestine?” He couldn’t believe what he was saying. Occasionally, in Poland, he’d thought of emigrating, of making
aliyah,
to the Holy Land. But he’d never taken the notion seriously, no matter how hard the Poles made life for a Jew. And, once the Nazis came, it was too late.

Now this Englishman he’d known for five minutes was nodding, telling him the long-hopeless dream of his exiled people could come true for him. “That’s just what we want to do. We can’t think of a righter man for the job.”

With a woman’s practicality, Rivka asked the next question: “How do we get there?”

“By ship,” Donald Mather answered. “We can get you down to Lisbon without any trouble. Outbound from Lisbon, your freighter will meet a submarine to take you through the Straits of Gibraltar. From the submarine, you’ll board another freighter for the journey to Haifa. How soon can you be ready to leave?”

“It wouldn’t be long,” Moishe said. “It’s not as if we have a lot to pack.” That was, if anything, an understatement. They’d come to England with only the clothes on their backs. They had more than that now, thanks to the kindness of the British and of their relatives here. But a lot of what they had wouldn’t come with them—why bring pots and pans to the Holy Land?

“If I came for you day after tomorrow this same time, you’d be ready, then?” Captain Mather asked.

Moishe almost laughed at him. If they had to leave, he and Rivka could have been ready in half an hour—assuming they found Reuven and dragged him away from whatever game he was playing or watching. A couple of days’ notice struck him as riches like those the Rothschilds were said to enjoy. “We’ll be ready,” he said firmly.

“Good. Until then—” Mather turned to go.

“Wait,” Rivka said, and the Englishman stopped. She went on, “For how long would we be going to—to Palestine?” She had to fight to say the incredible word. “How would you bring us back, and when?”

“As for how long you’d stay,
Frau
Russie, it would be at least until your husband completed his mission, however long that might take,” Mather answered. “Once that’s done, if you want to return to England, we’ll arrange that, and if you want to stay in Palestine, we can arrange that, too. We do remember those who help us, I promise you that. Have you any other questions? No?” He saluted, did a smart about-turn, and headed for the stairwell.

Moishe and Rivka stared at each other. “Next year in Jerusalem,” Moishe whispered. Jews had been making that prayer since the Romans sacked the Second Temple almost nineteen hundred years before. For almost all of them, it expressed nothing more than a wish that would never be fulfilled. Now—

Now Moishe seized Rivka. Together, they danced around the inside of the flat. It was more than exuberance; he felt as if he could dance on the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. Rivka slowed sooner than he did. She kept a firm grasp on the essentials of the situation, saying, “They are not doing this for you, Moishe—they’re doing it for themselves. Who are these Jews conniving with the Lizards, anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” Moishe admitted. “What could I know of what goes on in Palestine? But I know this much: if they want to play games with the Lizards, they’re making a mistake. The British aren’t starving them and killing them for sport, and that would be the only possible excuse for choosing the Lizards.”

“You’ve seen that for yourself,” Rivka agreed, and then turned practical once more: “We’ll have to leave a lot of these clothes behind. The Holy Land is a warmer country than England.”

“So it is.” Moishe hadn’t been thinking about such mundane things. “To pray at the Wailing Wall—” He shook his head in wonder. The idea was just starting to sink down from the front of his mind to the place where his feelings lived: he’d gone from stunned to joyful, and the joy kept growing. It was the first thing he’d ever imagined that might improve on being in love.

It had seized Rivka, too. “To live the rest of our lives in Palestine,” she murmured. “England here, this is not bad—next to Poland even before the Nazis came, it’s a paradise. But to live in a land with plenty of Jews and no one to hate us—that would really be paradise.”

“Who else lives in Palestine?” Moishe said, once again realizing his ignorance of the wider world was both broad and deep. “Arabs, I suppose. After Poles and Germans, they can’t be anything but good neighbors. If Reuven grows up in a country where no one hates him—” He paused. To a Polish Jew, that was like wishing for the moon. But here, even though he hadn’t wished for the moon, Captain Mather had just handed it to him.

“They speak Hebrew in Palestine along with Yiddish, don’t they?” Rivka said. “I’ll have to learn.”

“I’ll have a lot of learning to do myself,” Moishe said. Men read the Torah and the Talmud, so he’d learned Hebrew while Rivka hadn’t. But there was a difference between using a language to talk to God and using it to talk with your fellow men.
When I get to Jerusalem, I’ll find out what the difference is,
he thought, and shivered with excitement.

It occurred to him then that he owed his chance of going to the Holy Land to the Lizards. Before they came, he’d been one more Jew among tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of others starving in the Warsaw ghetto. He’d been out on the streets in dead of night, trying to cadge some food to stay alive and praying to God to grant him a sign that He had not forsaken His people. He’d taken the sun-like glow of the explosive-metal bomb the Lizards had set off high above the city as an answer to that prayer.

A lot of other people had taken it the same way. Almost willy-nilly, they’d made him into their leader, though becoming one had been the last thing in his mind. Because he’d looked like a leader to his people, he’d looked like one to the Lizards, too, when they drove Hitler’s thugs out of Warsaw. Had it not been for them, he would have stayed ordinary till the day he died—and he’d probably be dead by now.

Haltingly, he spoke that thought aloud. Rivka heard him out, then shook her head. “Whatever you think you owe them, you paid it off long ago,” she said. “Yes, they saved us from the Nazis, but they did it for themselves, not for us. They just used us for their own purposes—and if it suits them to start killing us the way the Nazis did, they will.”

“You’re right, I think,” Moishe said.

“Of course I am,” she answered.

He smiled, but soon sobered. Rivka had repeatedly shown she was better at dealing with the real world than he was. If she made a pronouncement like that, he would be wise to take it seriously. Then, all at once, he started to laugh: who would have thought that going to the Holy Land was part of the real world?

16

Inside the landcruiser, which was inside the heavy transporter, Ussmak was thoroughly shielded from the outside world. What he was not shielded from was fear. After all he and his crewmales had endured in Britain, he knew he would never again be shielded from fear.

He spoke into the intercom microphone: “How does your wound feel today, superior sir?”

“Getting better all the time,” Nejas answered. “High time I was back on duty.” He hesitated, perhaps making sure the crew of the transporter could not hear the next thing he had to say. Once he was sure they were out of the circuit, he went on, his words all at once quick and breathy: “Do you by any chance happen to have another—taste of ginger, landcruiser driver?”

“I’m sorry, superior sir, but I don’t have any even for myself,” Ussmak answered. He wished he hadn’t had to start his commander tasting. If he hadn’t, though, he and Skoob would have had to leave Nejas behind. The landcruiser commander would never have made it to Tangmere and evacuation. Maybe none of them would have made it out of Britain alive.

“Too bad,” Nejas said. “Oh, too bad. How I crave the herb!”

“As well you can’t get it, then, superior sir,” Skoob told him. The gunner and commander had been crewmales since long before Ussmak joined them; Skoob had earned the right to speak bluntly to his chief. “That filthy stuff’s no good for any male, believe you me it’s not.”

He’d said as much back in Britain, but he hadn’t turned Ussmak in to the disciplinarians once they’d escaped the chaos of evacuation and reached the relative safety of southern France—relative safety, because even there the Big Uglies proved themselves able to lob poison gas at males and females of their own kind who labored on behalf of the Race. And Skoob had turned both eye turrets away from Nejas when his commander kept tasting while recovering. Skoob disapproved, but was too loyal to do anything about it.

Shame licked at Ussmak like the flames from a burning landcruiser. Hidden away in the driver’s compartment, he had several—maybe more than several—tastes of ginger. He told himself he’d lied to Nejas because he didn’t want to see the landcruiser commander plunge into degradation as he had done. It was even true—to a degree. But the main reason he’d said he had no more ginger was simple and selfish in the extreme—he didn’t want to share it.

“Attention, landcruiser crews.” The voice of the transporter pilot filled the audio button taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. “Attention, landcruiser crews. We are beginning our descent to the landing. Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft. Thank you.”

“Thank
you
—very much,” Ussmak muttered, having first made sure he was not transmitting even to his crewmales.
Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft,
indeed! He’d flown into Britain in a landcruiser aboard a heavy transporter. He knew too well what that innocent-sounding euphemism meant. Had the pilot wanted to be honest, he would have said something like,
We may have to dodge like maniacs because the stinking Big Uglies are doing everything they can to shoot us down.

What Ussmak didn’t know was how much the local Big Uglies
could
do to shoot him down. Britain had been a dreadful place to fly into or out of. Not only was it a cramped little island, but the locals had a great many killercraft, some of them jet-powered, and radar to help guide those killercraft to their targets. No wonder, then, the transporters had taken such a beating over British skies.

Here in the eastern portion of the SSSR, that part of the mission was supposed to be easier, although Ussmak had grown heartily tired of experts telling him things about the Tosevites that soon turned out not to be so. But he’d fought in the SSSR before, if farther west, and knew that the Soviets, while they made good landcruisers by Big Ugly standards, lagged behind in other areas of the military art and lacked the doctrine to get the best results from the equipment they did have.

Or rather, he knew the Soviets
had lagged
behind in other areas of the military art and
had lacked
proper doctrine. He hadn’t fought them in two of his years, one of Tosev 3’s. Against his own people, or the Rabotevs, or the Hallessi, that wouldn’t have mattered. For the mutable Big Uglies, it was as good as an age. Fearfully, he wondered what new destructive skills the Soviets had learned while he was busy elsewhere on this planet. Suddenly he shuddered. They were the ones who had used atomic weapons.

Nejas said, “Pilot, how bad is the weather in the area to which we’re flying?”

“It’s cold, landcruiser commander,” the pilot answered. “There’s frozen water on the ground already, for instance.”

“That seems to happen a great deal on this planet,” Nejas said, his tone halfway between weary resignation and making the best of things. “I don’t suppose this Siberia place can be too much worse than the rest.”

“Last Tosevite winter, we were on duty in the southwestern part of the great land mass, what the Big Uglies call Africa,” Skoob said. “That would have been downright pleasant if it hadn’t been so damp. It was warm enough, anyhow, which is more than you can say for a lot of Tosev 3.”

Ussmak had spent most of the previous winter in a hospital ship, recovering from radiation poisoning after he’d had to bail out of his landcruiser into plutonium-contaminated muck when the Big Uglies raided the area for metal for their nuclear devices. The climate inside the ship had been salubrious enough. Getting there by way of radioactive mud was not a route he recommended, though.

Even through the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser in which he rode now, Ussmak could hear the roaring whine of the transporter’s turbofans. He listened closely for any abrupt change in their tone, and braced himself in his seat. Especially on its landing descent, the huge, clumsy aircraft wasn’t much faster than a Tosevite killercraft. Instead of feeling safe within the twin eggshells of transporter and landcruiser, he felt doubly trapped.

A swing to the side set his heart pounding. A moment later, the pilot came on to say, “We are experiencing some violent crosswinds, you males in there who can’t see out. Nothing to worry about; radar reports no Tosevite killercraft airborne in our vicinity. We’ll be on the ground shortly.”

“What do you know?” Skoob said. “Good news for a change.”

“The Emperor knows we could use some, after the fiasco in Britain,” Nejas said. He sounded like a male who needed a taste of ginger. When you hadn’t had any for a while, the world seemed a grim place indeed. Ussmak had slowly learned that it was the herb—or rather, the lack of it—talking, not the world itself. Some tasters took a long time to figure that out. Some never did.

The transporter jet jerked in the air. Ussmak jerked in his seat. You didn’t want to try to sit bolt upright; you’d smash your head against the roof of the driver’s compartment. He remembered just in time. The pilot said, “Flaps are down. We’ll be landing momentarily. Landcruiser crews prepare to roll out the cargo bay.”

Another jolt announced the landing gear coming down. Then the transporter hit the runway. Despite its bulk, it bounced back into the air for an instant, then rolled to a stop. The turbofans screamed as they reversed thrust to help slow the enormous aircraft.

Ussmak was eager to escape from the transporter. Tosev 3 had too much water and not enough land, but they’d just flown one of the longest all-overland routes possible on the planet. He wanted to get out, look around at his new duty area (or as much of it as he could see through the vision slits of a landcruiser), and, more important still, meet some of the males here and find out where he could get some more ginger after his present supply ran out.

The nose of the transporter swung up, filling the cargo bay with light other than that of its own fluorescents. The light was white and very cold. “Driver, start your engine,” Nejas said.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak said, and obeyed.

No sooner had he obeyed than Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. “It’s a freezer out there,” he exclaimed. “Worse than a freezer! You’d go into a freezer to warm up.” As if to support him, the landcruiser’s heating elements came on, hissing gently as they blew warm air through the interior of the machine.

When Ussmak saw the male with a light wand who came up to direct the landcruiser out of the aircraft, he believed every word Nejas had said. The poor guide had an electrically heated suit of the sorts pilots used in the chilly air of high altitudes, and over it a hooded coat and boots made from the furry hides of Tosevite animals. In spite of all that, he looked desperately cold as he waved the landcruiser ahead.

Ussmak put the machine in gear and rumbled down the ramp. Snow blowing almost horizontally greeted him. The landcruiser’s heater hummed as it worked harder. He hoped it was made to withstand a challenge like this. Snow also started clogging his vision slits. He flicked the button that sent a stream of cleaning liquid onto them. It got rid of the snow, but froze in place, so it was as if he were trying to see out through a pane of ice.

“Careful!” Nejas shouted. “You almost ran down the guide.”

“Sorry, superior sir,” Ussmak answered. “If you have vision out your cupola, command me.” He explained what had gone wrong with his own optics.

Between them, the male with the light wand and Nejas directed Ussmak to a point in front of a building he saw only as a large, solid lump of snow in the midst of all the swirling stuff. A door opened in the side of the solid lump. The guide gestured. “We’re supposed to bail out and go in there, I think,” Nejas said. “I just hope we don’t freeze to death before we make it”

With a single convulsive motion, Ussmak threw open the hatch above his head and scrambled out. The cold was stunning. His nictitating membranes drew over the surface of his eyes to protect them from the icy blast of the wind, but he had to blink hard to make them return to where they belonged; they had started to freeze in place. His lungs felt as if he were breathing fire. His skin burned for a moment, too, but then went cold and numb.

“This way! This way!” the guide shouted. Stumbling, Ussmak and his crewmales threw themselves at the entrance to the building. It was only a couple of his own bodylengths away, but he wondered if he would freeze into a solid block of ice before he got to it.

As soon as the landcruiser crew was inside, the male who had guided them off the transporter slammed the door and dogged it shut. Then he opened the inner door to the chamber. Delicious warmth flowed out. The chamber between the blizzard outside and the oasis of comfort within might almost have been a spaceship airlock. As far as Ussmak was concerned, the environment from which he’d just escaped was far more hostile than the unchanging vacuum of space.

“New hatchlings!” the guide called as he went into the barracks room that seemed a tiny piece of Home magically transported to Tosev 3. “I’ve got some new hatchlings here—poor fools don’t know they’ve just been stuck up the cloaca of this miserable world.”

Males in the body paint of landcruiser and fighting vehicle crews crowded round Ussmak and his companions. “Welcome to Siberia,” one of them called. “This place is so bad, they say even Big Uglies got exiled here.”

“The ground is frozen half the year,” another male added.

“The atmosphere doesn’t freeze—it just seems that way,” said a third.

Ussmak had never run into such a cynical band of males. They had to be ginger tasters, he decided, and felt better for a moment.

Nejas waved his hands, trying to get a word in edgewise. “Where is this railroad we’re supposed to be interdicting? How can we even move about in this hideous weather, let alone fight?”

“The railroad’s south of here, but not far enough to do us any good,” their guide answered. “We’ve broken it; the trick is to keep the Russkis from hauling anything across the break and shipping it one way or the other. They have all sorts of animals, and sometimes they even use motor transport. When we come on one of their convoys, it’s usually a massacre.”