Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

Goldfarb considered that. “You have to remember, the Nazis had been out of Lodz for a year, more or less, before I went in there.” She nodded. He went on, “Keeping that in mind, I think about what I saw there and I try to imagine how it was when the Germans were there.”

“Nu?” Naomi prodded.

He sighed. His breath smoked in the chilly air. “From everything I saw, from everything I heard, there might not be any Jews left alive there by now if the Lizards hadn’t come. I didn’t see all of Poland, of course, only Lodz and the road to and from the sea, but there might not be any Jews left in the whole country if the Lizards hadn’t come. When the Germans said Judenfrei, they weren’t joking.”

Naomi bit her lip. “This is what I have heard on the wireless. Hearing it from someone I know who has seen it with his own eyes makes it more real.” Her frown deepened. “And the Germans, the wireless says, are pushing deeper into Poland again.”

“I know. I’ve heard that, too. My friends-my goyishe friends-cheer when they hear news like that. When I hear it, I don’t know what to think. The Lizards can’t win the war, but the bloody Nazis can’t, either.”

“Shouldn’t,” Naomi said with the precision of one who had learned English from the outside instead of growing up with it. “They can. The Lizards can. The Germans can. They shouldn’t.” She laughed bitterly. “When I was a little girl going to school, before Hitler came to power, they taught me I was a German. I believed it, too. Isn’t that peculiar, thinking about it now?”

“It’s more than peculiar. It’s-” Goldfarb groped for the word he wanted. “What do they call those strange paintings where it’s raining loaves of bread or you see a watch dribbling down a block as if it were made of ice and melting?”

“Surreal,” Naomi said at once. “Yes, that is it. That is it exactly. Me-a German?” She laughed again, then stood to attention, her right arm rigidly outstretched. “Ein Volk ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!” she thundered in what wasn’t the worst imitation of Hitler he’d ever heard.

He thought it was meant for a joke. Maybe she’d thought the same thing when she started it. But as her arm fell limp to her side, she stared at it as if it had betrayed her. Her whole body sagged. Her face twisted. She began to cry.

Goldfarb took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. It wasn’t all right. They both knew it wasn’t all right. But if you let yourself think too much about the way it was, how could you go on doing what needed doing? With that thought, David realized he was closer to understanding the British stiff upper lip than he’d imagined.

Naomi clung to him as if he were a life preserver and she a sailor on a ship that had just taken a torpedo from a U-boat. He held her with something of the same desperation. When he tilted her face up to kiss her, he found her mouth waiting. She moaned deeply in her throat and put her hand on the back of his head, pulling him to her.

It might have been the oddest kiss he’d ever known. It didn’t stir him to lust, as so many less emphatic kisses with girls about whom he cared less had done. Yet he was glad to have it and sorry when it was over. “I ought to walk you back to your digs,” he said.

“Yes, maybe you should,” Naomi answered. “You can meet my mother and father. If you like.”

He’d fought the Lizards gun to gun. Would he quail from such an invitation now? By the slimmest of margins, he didn’t. “Capital,” he said, doing his best to sound casual. Naomi slipped her arm in his and smiled up at him, as if he’d just passed a test. Maybe he had.

A large group of dark-skinned Big Uglies formed ragged lines on a grassy meadow next to the Florida air base. Teerts watched another Tosevite of the same color stomp his way out in front of them. The pilot shivered. In his no-nonsense stride and fierce features, the Big Ugly with three stripes on each sleeve of his upper-body covering reminded him of Major Okamoto, who’d been his interpreter and keeper while the Nipponese held him captive.

The male with the stripes on his sleeve shouted something in his own language. “Tenn- hut !” was what it sounded like to Teerts. The rest of the Tosevites sprang to stiff verticality, their arms pressed tight against their sides. Given Teerts’ forward-slung posture, that only made them seem more ridiculous to him, but it seemed to satisfy, or at least to mollify, the Big Ugly with the striped upper-body covering.

That male shouted again, a whole string of gibberish this time. Teerts had picked up a good deal of Nipponese in captivity, but it didn’t help him understand the Florida locals. The Empire’s three worlds all used the same language; encountering a planet where tens of different tongues were spoken required a distinct mental leap for males of the Race.

The dark-skinned Big Uglies marched this way and that across the grassy field, obeying the commands the male with the stripes gave them. Even their feet went back and forth in the same rhythm. When that didn’t happen, the male in command screamed abuse at those who were derelict. Teerts did not have to be a savant of other-species psychology to figure out that the commanding male was imperfectly pleased.

He turned to another male of the Race who was also watching the Tosevites at their evolutions. The fellow wore the body paint of an Intelligence specialist. His equivalent rank was about the same as Teerts’. The pilot asked, “Can we truly trust these Big Uglies to fight on our behalf?”

“Our analysis is that they will fight bravely,” the male from Intelligence said. “The other local Tosevites so mistreated them that they will see us as a superior alternative to the continued authority of the lighter-skinned Big Uglies.”

Teerts tried to place the other male’s voice. “You are Aaatos, not so?” he asked hesitantly.

“Truth,” the male answered. “And you are Teerts.” Unlike Teerts’, his voice held no doubts. If he didn’t know who was who around the base, he wouldn’t be earning his keep-or preserving Intelligence’s reputation for omniscience.

That reputation had taken a beating since the Race came to Tosev 3. A lot of reputations had taken a beating since the Race came to Tosev 3. Teerts said, “I hope you will forgive me, but I will always be nervous in the presence of armed Big Uglies. We have given arms to the natives of other parts of this planet and, from what I have heard, the results have often left much to be desired.” He could think of no politer way to say that the Big Uglies had the habit of turning their guns against the Race.

Aaatos said, “Truth,” again, but went on, “We are improving control procedures, and will not permit these Tosevites to travel independently in large numbers while under arms: we shall always use signflicant cadres of males of the Race with them. They are intended to supplement our security details, not to supplant them. Thus we shall not be troubled by embarrassments such as the ones you mention-the case of Poland springs prominently to mind.”

“Poland-yes, that is one of the names I have heard,” Teerts said. He would have had trouble placing it on a map; but for Manchukuo and Nippon, which he knew in detail more intimate than he had ever wanted to acquire, his familiarity with Tosevite geography was limited.

“Nothing like that can happen here,” Aaatos said, and gave an emphatic cough to show he meant it.

“May you be proved correct.” Teerts let it go at that. What he had seen on Tosev 3 left him convinced of two things: that the Big Uglies were more devious than most males of the Race could grasp till they got their snouts rubbed in the fact, and that trying to convince those males of that fact before their snouts were rubbed in it was a losing proposition from the start.