Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

Stolid as an old cow, the sentry answered, “Ja,” and then shut up again. They walked past a whitewashed Panther tank in a clearing. A couple of crewmen were guddling about in the Panther’s engine compartment. Looking at them, hearing one grumble when the exposed skin between glove and sleeve stuck to cold metal, you might have thought war no different from any other mechanical trade. Of course, the Germans had industrialized murder, too.

They walked by more tanks, most of them also being worked on. These were bigger, tougher machines than the ones the Nazis had used to conquer Poland four and a half years before. The Nazis had learned a lot since then. Their panzers still didn’t come close to being an even match for the ones the Lizards used, though.

A couple of men were cooking a little pot of stew over an aluminum field stove set on a couple of rocks. The stew had some kind of meat in it-rabbit, maybe, or squirrel, or even dog. Whatever it was, it smelled delicious.

“Sir, the Jewish partisan is here,” the sentry said, absolutely nothing in his voice. That was better than the scorn that might have been there, but not much.

Both men squatting by the field stove looked up. The older one got to his feet. He was obviously the colonel, though he wore a plain service cap and an enlisted man’s uniform. He was in his forties, pinch-faced and clever-looking despite skin weathered from a lifetime spent in the sun and the rain and, as now, the snow.

“You!” Anielewicz’s mouth fell open in surprise. “Jager!” He hadn’t seen this German in more than a year, and then only for an evening, but he wouldn’t forget him.

“Yes, I’m Heinrich Jager. You know me?” The panzer officer’s gray eyes narrowed, deepening the network of wrinkles around their outer corners. Then they went wide. “That voice… You called yourself Mordechai, didn’t you? You were clean-shaven then.” He rubbed his own chin. Gray mixed with the brownish stubble that grew there.

“You two know each other?” That was the moon-faced younger man who’d been waiting for the stew to finish. He sounded disbelieving.

“You might say so, Gunther,” Jager answered with a dry chuckle. “Last time I was traveling through Poland, this fellow decided to let me live.” Those watchful eyes flicked to Mordechai. “I wonder how much he regrets it now.”

The comment cut to the quick. Jager had been carrying explosive metal stolen from the Lizards. Anielewicz had let him travel on to Germany with half of it, diverting the other half to the United States. Now both nations were building nuclear weapons. Mordechai was glad the U.S.A. had them. His delight that the Third Reich had them was considerably more restrained.

Gunther stared. “He let you live? This ragged partisan?” Anielewicz might as well not have been there.

“He did.” Jager studied Mordechai again. “I’d expected more from you than a role like this. You should be commanding a region, maybe the whole area.”

Of all the things Anielewicz hadn’t expected, failing to live up to a Nazi’s expectations of him ranked high on the list. His shrug was embarrassed. “I was, for a while. But then not everything worked out the way I’d hoped it would. These things happen.”

“The Lizards figured out you were playing little games behind their backs, did they?” Jager asked. Back when they’d met in Hrubieszow, Anielewicz had figured he was no one’s fool. He wasn’t saying anything now to make the Jew change his mind. Before the silence got awkward, he waved a hand. “Never mind. It isn’t my business, and the less I know of what isn’t my business, the better for everyone. What do you want with us here and now?”

“You’re advancing on Lodz,” Mordechai said.

As far as he was concerned, that should have been an answer sufficient in and of itself. It wasn’t. Frowning, Jager said, “Damn right we are. We don’t get the chance to advance against the Lizards nearly often enough. Most of the time, they’re advancing on us.”

Anielewicz sighed quietly. He might have known the German wouldn’t understand what he was talking about. He approached it by easy stages: “You’ve gotten good cooperation from the partisans here in western Poland, haven’t you, Colonel?” Jager had been a major the last time Mordechai saw him. Even if he hadn’t come up in the world, the German had.

“Well, yes, so we have,” Jager answered. “Why shouldn’t we? Partisans are human beings, too.”

“A lot of partisans are Jews,” Mordechai said. The easy approach wasn’t going to work. Bluntly, then: “There are still a lot of Jews in Lodz, too, in the ghetto you Nazis set up so you could starve us to death and work us to death and generally slaughter us. If the Wehrmacht goes into Lodz, the SS follows twenty minutes later. The second we see an SS man, we all go over to the Lizards again. We don’t want them conquering you, but we want you conquering us even less.”

“Colonel, why don’t I take this mangy Jew and send him on his way with a good kick in the ass?” the younger man-Gunther-said.

“Corporal Grillparzer, when I want your suggestions, be sure I shall ask for them,” Jager said in a voice colder than the snow all around. When he turned back toward Mordechai, his face was troubled. He knew about some of the things the Germans had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands, knew and did not approve. That made him an unusual Wehrmacht man, and made Anielewicz glad he was the German on the other side of the parley. Still, he had to look out for the affairs of his own side: “You ask us to throw away a move that would bring us advantages. Such a thing is hard to justify.”

“What I’m telling you is that you would lose as much as you gain,” Mordechai answered. “You get intelligence from us about what the Lizards are doing. With Nazis in Lodz, the Lizards would get intelligence from us about you. We got to know you too well. We know what you did to us. We do sabotage back of the Lizards’ lines, too. Instead, we’d be raiding and sniping at you.”

“Kikes,” Gunther Grillparzer muttered under his breath. “Shit, all we gotta do is turn the Poles loose on ’em, and that takes care of that.”

Jager started to bawl out his corporal, but Anielewicz held up a hand. “It’s not that simple any more. Back when the war just started, we didn’t have any guns and we weren’t much good at using them, anyhow. It’s not like that now. We’ve got more guns than the Poles do, and we’ve stopped being shy about shooting when somebody shoots at us. We can hurt you.”

“There’s some truth in this-I’ve seen as much,” Jager said. “But I think we can take Lodz, and it would make immediate military sense for us to do just that. The place is a Lizard forward base, after all. How am I supposed to justify bypassing it?”

“What’s that expression the English have? Penny wise and pound foolish? That’s what you’d be if you started your games with the Jews again,” Mordechai answered. “You need us working with you, not against you. Didn’t you take enough of a propaganda beating when the whole world found out what you were doing here in Poland?”

“Less than you’d think,” Jager said, the ice in his voice now aimed at Anielewicz. “A lot of the people who heard about it didn’t believe it.”

Anielewicz bit his lip. He knew how true that was. “Do you suppose they didn’t believe it because they didn’t trust the Lizards to tell the truth or because they didn’t think human beings could be so vile?”

That made Gunther Grillparzer mutter again, and made the sentry who’d brought Mordechai into camp shift his Gewehr 98 so the muzzle more nearly pointed toward the Jew. Heinrich Jager sighed. “Probably both,” he said, and Mordechai respected his honesty. “But the whys here don’t much matter. The whats do. If we bypass Lodz north and south, say, and the Lizards slice up into one of our columns from out of the city, the Fuhrer would not be very happy with that.” He rolled his eyes to give some idea of how much understatement he was using.