Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

His chum was a Lizard who introduced himself in hissing English as Mzepps. When Bagnall found out he’d been a radar technician before his capture, he willingly let him join the group. Talking civilly with a Lizard felt odd, even odder than his first tense meeting with that German lieutenant-colonel in Paris, barely days after the RAF had stopped going after the Nazis.

Despite Mzepps’ appearance, though, the Lizard soon struck him as a typical noncommissioned officer: worried about his job, but not much about how it fit into the bigger picture. “You Big Uglies, you all the time go why, why, why,” he complained. “Who cares why? Just do. Why not important. Is word? Yes, important.”

“It never has occurred to him,” Jones remarked, “that if we didn’t go why, why, why all the time, we should have been in no position to fight back when he and his scaly cohorts got here.”

Bagnall chewed on that as he and Ken Embry headed back toward Flight Lieutenant Jordan’s class. He thought about the theory Jordan was teaching along with the practical applications of what the RAF was learning from the Lizards. By everything Mzepps had said, the Lizards seldom operated that way themselves. What mattered more to them than why.

“I wonder why that is,” he murmured.

“Why what is?” Embry asked, which made Bagnall realize he’d spoken aloud.

“Nothing, really,” he answered. “Just being-human.”

“Is that a fact?” Embry said. “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

The RAF men in the lecture hall stared at them as they walked through the doors. As far as Bagnall knew, no one had ever done that laughing before.

A sunbeam sneaking through the slats of a Venetian blind found Ludmila Gorbunova’s face and woke her. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up in bed. She wasn’t used to sleeping in a bed, not any more. After blankets on the ground, a real mattress felt decadently soft.

She looked around the flat Mordechai Anielewicz had given her and Jager. The plumbing wasn’t all it might have been, the wallpaper was peeling after years of neglect-Anielewicz had apologized for that. People in Lodz, it seemed, were always apologizing to outsiders for how bad things were. They didn’t seem that bad to Ludmila. She was slowly starting to think the problem was different standards of comparison. They were used to the way things here had been before the war. She was used to Kiev. What that said-

She stopped worrying about what that said, because her motion woke Jager up. He came awake quickly and completely. She’d seen that, the last couple of nights. She had the same trick. She hadn’t had it before the war started. She wondered if Jager had.

He reached up and set a hand on her bare shoulder. Then he surprised her by chuckling. “What is funny?” she asked, a little indignantly.

“This,” he answered, waving at the flat “Everything. Here we are, two people who for love of each other have run away from all the things we used to think important. We can’t go back to them, ever again. We are-what do the diplomats say? — stateless persons, that’s what we are. It’s like something out of a cheap novel.” As he had a way of doing, he quickly sobered. “Or it would be, if it weren’t for the small detail of the explosive-metal bomb cluttering up our lives.”

“Yes, if it weren’t.” Ludmila didn’t want to get out of bed and get dressed. Here, naked between the sheets with Jager, she too could pretend love had been the only thing that brought them to Lodz, and that treason and fear not only for the city but for the whole world had had nothing to do with it.

With a sigh, she did get up and start to dress. With a matching sigh an octave deeper, Jager joined her. They’d only just finished putting on their clothes when somebody knocked on the door. Jager chuckled again; maybe he’d had amorous thoughts, too, and also set them aside. They would have had to answer the door anyhow. Now, at least, they weren’t interrupted.

Jager opened it, as warily as if he expected to find Otto Skorzeny waiting in the hallway. Ludmila didn’t see how that was possible, but she hadn’t seen how a lot of Skorzeny’s exploits Jager talked about were possible, either.

Skorzeny wasn’t out there. Mordechai Anielewicz was, a Mauser slung over his shoulder. He let it slide down his arm and leaned it against the wall. “Do you know what I wish we could do?” he said. “I wish we could get word to the Lizards-just as a rumor, mind you-that Skorzeny was in town. If they and their puppets were looking for him, too, it would hold his feet to the fire and make him do something instead of lying back and letting us do all the running around.”

“You haven’t done that, have you?” Jager said sharply.

“I said I wished I could,” Anielewicz answered. “No. If the Lizards find out Skorzeny’s here, they’re going to start wondering what he’s doing here-and they’ll start looking all over for him. We can’t afford that, which leaves first move up to him: he has the white pieces, sure enough.”

“You play chess?” Ludmila asked. Outside the Soviet Union, she’d found, not so many people did. She had to use the Russian word; she didn’t know how to say it in German.

Anielewicz understood. “Yes, I play,” he answered. “Not as well as I’d like, but everyone says that.”

Jager kept his mind on the business at hand: “What are you doing-as opposed to the things you’re reluctantly not doing, I mean?”

“I understood you,” Anielewicz answered with a wry grin. “I’ve got as many men with guns on the street as I can afford to put there, and I’m checking with every landlord who won’t run straight to the Lizards to find out if he’s putting up Skorzeny. So far-” He snapped his fingers to show what he had so far.

“Have you checked the whorehouses?” Jager asked. That was another German word Ludmila didn’t know. When she asked about it and he explained, she thought at first he’d made a joke. Then she realized he was deadly serious.

Mordechai Anielewicz snapped his fingers again, this time in annoyance. “No, and I should have,” he said, sounding angry at himself. “One of those would make a good hideout for him, wouldn’t it?” He nodded to Jager. “Thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of that myself.”

Ludmila wouldn’t have thought of it, either. The world outside the Soviet Union had corruptions new to her, along with its luxuries. Decadent, she thought again. She shook her head. She’d have to get used to it. No going back to the rodina, not now, not ever, not unless she wanted endless years in the gulag or, perhaps more likely, a quick end with a bullet in the back of the head. She’d thrown away her old life as irrevocably as Jager had his. The question remained: could they build a new one together here, this being the sole remaining choice?

If they didn’t stop Skorzeny, that answer was depressingly obvious, too.

Anielewicz said, “I’m going back to the fire station: I have to ask some questions. I haven’t worried much about the nafkehs- the whores,” he amplified when he saw Ludmila and Jager didn’t catch the Yiddish word, “but somebody will know all about ’em. Men are men-even Jews.” He looked a challenge at Jager.

The German, to Ludmila’s relief, didn’t rise to it. “Men are men,” he agreed mildly. “Would I be here if I didn’t think so?”

“No,” Anielewicz said. “Men are men-even Germans, maybe.” He touched a finger to the brim of the cloth cap he wore, reslung his rifle, and hurried away.

Jager sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy, however much we wish it would. Even if we stop Skorzeny, we’re exiles here.” He laughed. “We’d be a lot worse off than exiles, though, if the SS got its hooks in me again.”