Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“You understand you offer me no easy choice,” he said.

“Your lack of cooperation has forced me to this step,” Zolraag answered.

“You ask me to betray so much of what I believe in,” Russie said. That was nothing but truth. He tried to put a whine in his voice: “Please give me a couple of days in which to think on what I must do.” Getting sick wouldn’t be enough this time. He was already sure of that.

“I ask you only to go on working with us and for our cause as you have in the past.” Just as Russie was getting more cautious in what he said to Zolraag, so Zolraag was getting more suspicious about what he heard from Russie. “Why do you need time in which to contemplate this?” The governor spoke in his own language to the machine on the desk in front of him. It was no telephone, but it answered anyway; sometimes Moishe thought it did Zolraag’s thinking for him. The Lizard resumed: “Our research demonstrates that a threat against a Tosevite’s family is likely to be the most effective way to ensure his obedience.”

Something in the way he phrased that made Russie notice it. “Is the same not true among the Race?” he asked, hoping to distract Zolraag from wondering why he needed extra time to think.

The ploy worked, at least for a little while. The governor emitted a most human-sounding snort; his mouth fell open in amusement. “Hardly, Herr Russie. Among our kind, matings are but for a season, driven by the scent females exude then. Females brood and raise our young-that is their role in life-but we do not have these permanent families you Tosevites know. How could we, when parentage is less certain among us?”

The Lizards were all bastards, then, in the most literal sense of the word. Moishe liked that notion, especially with what Zolraag was putting him through now. He asked, “This is so even with your Emperor?”

Zolraag cast down his eyes at the mention of his ruler’s title. “Of course not, foolish Tosevite,” he said. “The Emperor has females reserved for him alone, so his line may be sure to continue. So it has been for a thousand generations and more; so shall it ever be.”

A harem, Russie thought. That should have made him all the more scornful of the Lizards, but somehow it did not. Zolraag spoke of his Emperor with the reverence a Jew would have given to his God. A thousand generations. With a past of that depth upon which to draw, no wonder Zolraag saw the future as merely a continuation of what had already been.

The governor returned to the question he’d asked before: “With your family as security for your obedience, why do you still hesitate? This appears contrary to the results of our research on your kind.”

What sort of research? Russie wondered. He didn’t really want to know; the bloodless word too likely concealed more suffering than he could think about with equanimity. In doing as they pleased to people without worrying about the consequences of their actions, the Lizards weren’t too different from the Nazis after all. But all of mankind was for them as Jews were for the Germans.

I should have seen that sooner, Russie thought. Yet he could not blame himself for what he’d done before. His own people were dying then, and he’d helped save them. As so often happened, though, the short-term solution was proving part of a long-term problem.

“Please answer me, Herr Russie,” Zolraag said sharply.

“How can I answer now?” Russie pleaded. “You put me between impossible choices. I must have time to think.”

“I will give you one day,” the governor said with the air of one making a great concession. “Past that time, I shall have no more patience with these delaying tactics.”

“Yes, Your Excellency; thank you, Your Excellency.” Russie scurried out of Zolraag’s office before the Lizard got the bright idea of attaching a couple of guards to him. Whatever invidious comparisons he’d drawn, he had to recognize that the invaders were less efficient occupiers than the Nazis had been.

What do I do now? he wondered as he went back out into the cold. If I praise the Lizards for bombing Washington, I deserve an assassin’s bullet. If I don’t…

He thought of killing himself to escape Zolraag’s demands. That would save his wife and son. But he did not want to die; he’d survived too much to throw away his life, if any other way was open, he would seize it.

He was not surprised to find his feet taking him toward Mordechai Anielewicz’s headquarters. If anyone could help him, the Jewish fighting leader was the man. Trouble was, he didn’t know if anyone could help him.

The armed guards outside the headquarters came, if not to attention, then at least to respectful alertness as he approached. He had no trouble getting in to see Anielewicz. The fighter took one look at his face and said, “What’s the Lizard said he’s going to do to you?”

“Not to me, to my family.” Russie told the story in a few words.

Anielewicz swore. “Let’s go for a walk, Reb Moishe. I have the feeling they can listen to whatever we say in here.”

“All right” Russie went out into the street again. Warsaw this winter, even outside the former ghetto, was depressingly drab. Smoke from soft-coal and wood fires hung over the city, tinting both clouds and scattered snow a dingy brown. Trees that would be green and lovely in summer now reached toward the sky bare branches that reminded Russie of skeletons’ arms and fmgers. Piles of rubble were everywhere, swarmed over by antlike Poles and Jews out to take away what they could.

“So,” Anielewicz said abruptly. “What did you have in mind to do?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. We expected this would happen, and now it has. But I thought they would strike only at me, not at Rivka and Reuven.” Russie rocked back and forth on his heels, as if mourning lost chances.

Anielewicz’s eyes were hooded. “They’re learning. They aren’t stupid by any means, just naive. All right, here’s what it comes down to: do you want to disappear, do you want your family to disappear, or should you all vanish at the same time? I’ve set up plans for each case, but I need to know which to run.”

“What I would like,” Russie said, “is for the Lizards to disappear.”

“Ha.” Anielewicz gave that exactly as much laughter as it deserved. “A wolf was devouring us, so we called in a tiger. The tiger isn’t eating us right now, but we are still made of meat, so he’s not a good neighbor to have, either.”

“Neighbor? Landlord, you mean,” Russie said. “And he will eat my family if I don’t throw myself into his mouth.”

“I asked you once already how you want to keep from doing that?”

“I can’t afford to disappear,” Russie said reluctantly; he would have liked nothing better. “Zolraag would just pick someone else from among us to mouth his words. He may decide to do that anyhow. But if I’m here, I serve as a reproach to whoever might want to take such a course-and to Zolraag himself, not that he cares much about reproaches from human beings. But if you can get Rivka and Reuven away…”

“I think I can. I have something in mind, anyhow.” Anielewicz frowned, thinking through whatever his scheme was. In what seemed a non sequitur, he asked, “Your wife reads, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. Write a note to tell her whatever you need to say about escaping: I’d bet the Lizards can hear what goes on at your flat, too. I’d be able to do that, if I were wearing their shoes.”

Russie looked at the Jewish fighting leader in sharp surprise. Sometimes Anielewicz was amazingly matter-of-fact about his own deviousness. Maybe only accident of birth separated him from a Gestapo man. The thought was depressing. Even more depressing that in times like these the Jews desperately needed such men.