Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

“Some of us are going to die before we get to Denver,” he said. The prospect upset him much less than it would have before he got wounded. He’d had a dress rehearsal for meeting the Grim Reaper; really doing it couldn’t be a whole lot worse.

Penny pointed up to the sky. The wheeling black specks up there weren’t Lizard airplanes, or even Piper Cubs. They were buzzards, waiting with the patient optimism of their kind. Penny didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Rance wondered if one of those buzzards would gnaw his bones.

He needed two days to get to the Horse. Had its bed been dry, he knew he wouldn’t have got much farther. But people crowded the bank, down where the river passed under Highway 71. The water was warm and muddy, and there, not twenty feet away, some idiot was pissing into the stream. Auerbach didn’t care about any of it. He drank till he was full, he splashed his face, he soaked his head, and then he took off his shirt and soaked that, too. As it dried, it would help keep him cool.

Penny splashed water on her blouse. The wet cotton molded itself to her shape. Auerbach would have appreciated that more had he not been so deadly weary. As things were, he nodded and said, “Good idea. Let’s get going.”

They headed north up Highway 71, and reached Punkin Center early the next morning. They got more water there. A sad-eyed local said, “Wish we could give you some eats, folks-you look like you could use ’em. But the ones ahead o’ you done et us out of what we had. Good luck to you.”

“I told you to go on without me,” Auerbach said. Penny ignored him. One foot and two crutches at a time, he wearily plodded north.

By the end of that afternoon, he figured the buzzards were out tying napkins around their necks, getting ready for a delicious supper of sunbaked cavalry captain. If he fell over and died, he figured Penny could speed up and might make it to Limon before the heat and the dry and the hunger got her.

“I love you,” he croaked, not wanting to die with things left unspoken.

“I love you, too,” she answered. “That’s why I’m gonna get you through.”

He laughed, but, before he could tell her how big a joke that was, he heard cheering up ahead. He pointed, balancing for a moment on one foot and one crutch. “That’s an Army wagon,” he said in glad disbelief. The horses were the most beautiful animals he’d ever seen.

The wagon was already full, but the soldiers gave him and Penny canteens and crackers and scooted people around to make room in back. “We’ll get you up to the resettlement center,” one of them promised, “and they’ll take care of you there.”

That took another couple of days, but there were supply depots all the way. Auerbach spent his time wondering what the resettlement center would be like; the soldiers didn’t talk much about it. When they finally got there, he found out why: it was just another name for a refugee camp, one dwarfing the squalid, miserable place outside Karval.

“How long will we have to stay here?” he asked a harried clerk who was handing Penny bedding for two and directing her to an enormous olive-drab communal tent, one of many all in a row.

“God knows, buddy,” the corporal answered. “The war may be stopped, but this ain’t no Easy Street. Ain’t gonna be for a long time, neither. Welcome to the United States, new and not so improved model. With luck, you won’t starve.”

“We’ll take that,” Penny said, and Auerbach had to nod. Together, they set off to acquaint themselves with the new United States.

In his green undershirt and black panzer man’s trousers, Heinrich Jager didn’t look badly out of place on the streets of Lodz. Lots of men wore odds and ends of German uniform, and, if his was in better shape than most, that meant little. His colonel’s blouse, on the other hand, he’d ditched as soon as he jumped out of the Storch. A Wehrmacht officer was not a popular thing to be, not here.

Ludmila strode along beside him. Her clothes-a peasant tunic and a pair of trousers that had probably once belonged to a Polish soldier-were mannish, but no one save a particularly nearsighted Lizard could have mistaken her for the male of the species, even with an automatic pistol on her hip. Neither pants nor sidearm drew any special notice. A lot of women wore trousers instead of skirts or dresses, and a surprising number-most but not all of them Jewish-looking-carried or wore firearms.

“Do you know Lodz at all?” Ludmila asked. “Do you know how to find-the person we’re looking for?” She was too sensible to name Mordechai Anielewicz where anyone might overbear his name.

Jager shook his head. “No and no, respectively.” He kept his voice low; nobody who spoke German, Wehrmacht officer or not, was likely to be popular in Lodz these days, not with Jews, not with Poles, and not with Lizards, either. “I expect we’ll find him, though. In his own way, he’s a big man here.”

He thought about asking a policeman. He had a couple of different brands from which to choose: Poles in dark blue uniforms and Jews with armbands left over from German administration and with kepis that made them look absurdly like French flics. That didn’t strike him as a healthy idea, though. Instead, he and Ludmila kept walking north up Stodolniana Street till they came to what had to have been the Jewish quarter. Even now, it was brutally crowded. What it had been like under the Reich was something Jager would sooner not have contemplated.

Many more of those comic-opera Jewish policemen were on the street in that part of town. Jager kept right on ignoring them and hoping they would extend him the same courtesy. He nodded to a fellow with a wild mop of hair and a big, curly reddish beard who carried a Mauser, had another slung over his shoulder, and wore crisscross bandoliers full of brass cartridges: a Jewish bandit if ever there was one, and as such a man likely to know where Anielewicz could be found. “I’m looking for Mordechai,” he said. The Jew’s eyes widened slightly at his clear German. “Nu? Are you?” he said, using Yiddish, perhaps to see if Jager could follow.

Jager nodded again to show he could. The Jewish fighter went on, “So you’re looking for Mordechai. So what? Is he looking for you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Jager answered. “Does the name Skorzeny mean anything to you?”

It did. The fighter stiffened. “You’re him?” he demanded, and made as if to point the rifle he carried at Jager. Then he checked himself. “No. You can’t be. He’s supposed to be taller than I am, and you’re not.”

“You’re right” Jager pointed to Ludmila. “She’s really Skorzeny.”

“Ha,” the Jew said. “A funny man. All right, funny man, you can come with me. We’ll see if Mordechai wants to see you. See both of you,” he amended, seeing how close Ludmila stuck to Jager.

As it happened, they didn’t have to go far. Jager recognized the brick building they approached as a fire station. His escort spoke in Polish to a gray-bearded man tinkering with the fire engine. The fellow answered in the same language; Jager caught Anielewicz’s name but no more. Ludmila said, “I think they said he’s upstairs, but I’m not sure.”

She proved right. The Jew made his companions precede him, a sensible precaution Jager would also have taken. They went down the hall to a small room. Mordechai Anielewicz sat at a table there with a plain woman. He was scribbling something, but stopped when the newcomers arrived. “Jager!” he exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“You know him?” The ginger-bearded Jew sounded disappointed. “He knows something about Skorzeny, he says.”