Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

That probably meant just what Goldfarb thought it did. He didn’t want to know for sure. Goldfarb left the pack on the floor and walked out of the flat after Leon.

Franciszkanska Street was about ten minutes away. Again crowds and sights and smells buffeted Goldfarb. Again he reminded himself that this was how things were long after the Nazis had been driven away.

He stuck to Leon like a pair of socks; even though he’d memorized the local map, he didn’t want to do much navigating on his own. Leon presently remarked, “We’ll just walk by, casual as you please. Nobody will think anything about us looking as long as we don’t stop and stare. The first rule is not to make yourself conspicuous.”

Goldfarb looked, turning his head as if to carry on a conversation with Leon. At first glance, the prison was a tough nut to crack: two machine guns on the roof, barred windows, razor wire around the perimeter. At second glance, he said quietly, “It’s too close to everything else and it doesn’t have enough guards.”

“They didn’t send a blind man over,” Leon said, beaming. “Right both times. That gives us our chance.”

“And what do we do to take it?” Goldfarb asked as they left Prison One behind.

“For now, you don’t do anything,” Leon said. “You sit tight and wait for the right time. Me, I have to go see some people and find out what I need to do to incite myself a riot.”

Bobby Fiore paced along a dirt track somewhere in China. His comrades said they weren’t far from Shanghai. That meant little to him, because he couldn’t have put Shanghai on the map to keep himself out of the electric chair. His guess was that it wasn’t too far from the ocean: the air had the vaguely salty tang he’d known when he played in places like Washington State and Louisiana, anyhow.

The weight of the pistol on his hip was comforting, like an old friend. His baggy tunic hid the little gun. He’d acquired a new straw hat. If you ignored his nose and the five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, he made a pretty fair imitation peasant He still didn’t know what to make of the rest of the band. Some of the men who trudged along in the loose column were Chinese Reds like Lo and the rest of the gang who had gotten him into this mess in the first place. They too looked like peasants, which was fair enough, because he gathered most of them were.

But the others… He glanced over at the fellow nearest him, who carried a rifle and wore a ragged khaki uniform. “Hey, Yosh!” he called, and mimed pivoting at second base to turn a double play.

Yoshi Fukuoka grinned, exposing a couple of gold teeth. He dropped the rifle and went into a first baseman’s stretch, scissoring himself into a split and reaching out with an imaginary mitt to snag the equally imaginary ball. “Out!” he yelled, the word perfectly comprehensible to Fiore, who lifted a clenched fist in the air, thumb pointing up.

The Reds looked from one of them to the other. They didn’t get it. To them, Fukuoka was an eastern devil and Fiore a foreign devil, and the only reason they were tagging along with the Japs was that they all hated the Lizards worse than they hated each other.

Fiore hadn’t even counted on that much. When he stumbled into the Japanese camp-and when he figured out the soldiers there were Japs and not Chinamen, which took him a while-he wished he could find himself a priest for last rites, because roasting over a slow fire was the best he’d expected from them. They’d bombed Pearl Harbor, they’d butchered Liu Han’s husband-what was he supposed to expect?

The Japs had taken a little while to figure out he was an American, too. Their Chinese-the only language they had in common with him-was almost as bad as his, and a good-sized honker and round eyes had counted for less at first than his outfit. When they did realize what he was, they’d seemed more alarmed than hostile.

“Doolittle?” Fukuoka had asked, flying bombers over the ground with his hand.

Even though he thought he’d get killed in the next couple of minutes, that had sent Bobby into laughter which, looking back on it, was probably close to hysterical. He knew a lot of the men from Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo had landed in China, but getting mistaken for one by a jittery Jap was too much.

“I ain’t no bomber pilot,” he’d said in English. “I’m just a second baseman, and a lousy one, to boot.”

He hadn’t expected that to mean a thing to his interrogator, but the Jap’s eyes had widened as much as they could. “Second base?” he’d echoed, pointing at Fiore. “Beisoboru?”

When Fiore still didn’t get it, Fukuoka had gone into an unmistakable hitting stance. The light went on in Fiore’s head. “Baseball!” he yelled. “Son of a bitch, I don’t believe it. You play ball, too?”

It hadn’t been enough for him to win friends and influence people right off, but it had kept him from getting shot or bayoneted or suffering any of the other interesting things that could have happened to him. His questioning stayed questions, not torture. When, haltingly, he explained how he’d been part of the attack on the prison camp guard station that got him promoted from prisoner to fellow fighter.

“You want kill…?”One of the Japs had said a word in his own language. When he saw Fiore didn’t get it, he’d amended it to, “Little scaly devils?”

“Yeah!” Bobby had said savagely. The Japanese might not have known English, but they understood that just fine.

And so he’d started marching with them. That still drove him crazy. They were the enemy, they’d kicked the U.S.A. in the balls at Pearl Harbor, jumped on the Philippines and Singapore and Burma and eight zillion little islands God knows where in the Pacific, and here he was eating rice out of the same bowl with them. It felt like treason. He had uneasy visions of standing trial for treason if he ever got back to the States, But the Japs hated Lizards more than they hated Americans, and, he’d discovered, he hated Lizards worse than he hated Japs. He’d stayed.

The Reds had joined the band a couple of days after he did. They and the Japs hadn’t seemed to have any trouble getting along. That puzzled Bobby-they’d been shooting at each other right up to the day the Lizards came, and probably for a while afterwards, too.

The leader of the Red detachment was a man of about his own age named Nieh Ho-T’ing. Fiore spent more time talking with the Chinese than he did with any of the Japs except Pukuoka the ballplayer, he had more words in common with them. When he asked why they didn’t have any trouble making common cause with their recent foes, Nieh had looked at him as if he were a moron and replied, “The enemy of my enemy is a friend.”

It seemed as simple as that to the Japs, too. They were looking for fighters, they knew The Reds could fight, and that was all she wrote. If they thought about anything else, they sure didn’t show it.

Shanghai was in Lizard hands. The closer the band got to it, the more Bobby began to jitter. “What do we do if we see a Lizard tank?” he demanded of Nieh.

The Chinese officer shrugged, which infuriated Fiore.

“Run,” he answered placidly. “If we cannot run, we fight. If we must, we die. We hope to hurt the enemy as they kill us.”

“Thanks a hell of a lot,” Fiore muttered in English. He had no doubt Nieh Ho-T’ing meant just what he said, too. He had had that do-or-die look Fiore had sometimes seen in the eyes of starting pitchers before a big game. It hadn’t always meant victory, but it generally did mean a hell of an effort.

The Japs had that look, too. In his dreadful Chinese, Fukuoka told stories about pilots who’d flown their bombers right at landed Lizard spaceships, accepting the loss of their own lives as long as they could hurt the foe, too. Fiore shivered. Martyrs were all very well in church, but disconcerting when encountered in real life. He couldn’t decide whether they were insanely brave not just plain insane.