Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Halfway down the block he stopped in his tracks “Gevalt!” he exclaimed, deeply shocked. “Am I turning into a soldier?”

The prospect was anything but appetizing. As a medical student, he knew too well how easy a human being was to damage, how hard to repair. In the German siege of Warsaw and since, he’d seen that proved too many times, too many horrible ways. And now he wanted to become a destroyer himself?

He did.

His feet figured it out before the rest of him knew. He found himself on the way to the headquarters of Mordechai Anielewicz before he consciously realized where he was going.

A light snowfall swirled through the air. Not many people were on the streets. Every so often, one of them would nod to him from beneath a black felt fedora like his own or a Russian-style fur cap. He braced himself for shouts of hatred, but none came. If only the rest of the world paid as little attention to his broadcast as the Jews of Warsaw!

Here came someone striding briskly toward him. Who? His spectacles didn’t help enough to let him be sure. His eyes had grown weaker lately; what had suited them in 1939 wasn’t good enough any more. He scowled. He’d been shortsighted a lot of different ways.

Whoever it was, the fellow waved vigorously at him. He recognized the motion if not the man. Fear flooded through him. While he’d gone looking for Mordechai Anielewicz, Anielewicz was lookmg for him too. Which meant Anielewicz if no one else hereabouts, had heard him on the radio. Which meant the fighting leader without a doubt had blood in his eye.

Which he did. “Reb Moishe, are you meshuggeh? ” he yelled. “I thought you weren’t going to turn into the Lizards’ tukhus-lekher. ”

The Lizards’ tukhus-lekher. That was what it had come to. Mortification almost gagged Moishe. “I haven’t. As God is my witness, I haven’t,” he choked out.

“What do you mean, you haven’t?” Anielewicz said, still loudly. “With my own ears I heard you.” He looked to right and left, lowered his voice. “Was it for this we made your wife and little boy disappear? So you could say what the Lizards wanted you to say?”

“But I didn’t!” Russie wailed. Anielewicz’s face was full of flinty disbelief. Stammering, almost sobbing, Russie told how he had gone into the Lizards’ broadcast studio expecting to die, how he’d hoped and intended to give one last cri de coeur before he did, and how Zolraag and the Lizards’ engineers cheated him out of a death that had meaning. “Do you think I want to be alive, to have my friends call me filthy names on the street?” He took a clumsy, unpracticed swing at Anielewicz.

The Jewish fighting leader easily blocked the blow. He caught Russie’s arm, twisted a little. Russie’s shoulder creaked like a dead branch about to fall off a tree; fire shot through the joint. He bit back a gasp.

“Sorry.” Anielewicz let go at once. “Didn’t mean to jerk it quite so hard there. Force of habit. You all right?”

Russie gingerly tested the injured member. “For that, yes. Otherwise-”

“And I’m sorry about that, too,” Anielewicz said quickly. “But I heard you with my own ears-how could I not trust my ears? Of course I believe you, Reb Moishe; don’t even think you need to ask me. You couldn’t have guessed the Lizards would do things to a recording. They outfoxed you; it happens. The next question is, how do we get our revenge?”

“Revenge.” Moishe tasted the word. Yes, it was right. He hadn’t found a name for it himself. “That’s what I want.”

“I’ll tell you something.” Mordechai Anielewicz laid a finger alongside his nose., “It may just be taken care of. You haven’t played a direct part, but all us Jews owe you a lot of what freedom we have. And if we hadn’t been free to move through Poland, none of what I’m talking about would have happened.”

“What are you talking about?” Russie demanded. “You haven’t really said anything.”

“No, and I don’t intend to, either,” Anielewicz answered. “What you don’t know, you can’t tell, and the Lizards may find better-more painful-ways of asking questions than that verkakte drug of theirs. But one fine day before too long, the Lizards may have cause to notice something for which you’ll be partly responsible. And if they do, you’ll have your revenge, I promise you.”

That all sounded very good, and Anielewicz was not in the habit of talking about what he couldn’t deliver. Nonetheless… “I want more,” Russie said. “I want to hurt the Lizards myself.”

“Reb Moishe, a soldier you’re not,” Anielewicz said, not unkindly but very firmly.

“I could learn-”

“No.” Now the Jewish fighting leader’s voice turned hard. “If you want to fight them, there are ways you can be more valuable than with a gun in your hand. You’d be wasted as a common soldier.”

“What, then?”

“You’re serious about this.” To Moishe’s relief, it was not a question. Anielewicz studied him as if trying to figure out how to field-strip some new kind of rifle. “Well, what could you do?” The fighting leader rubbed his chin. “How’s this? How would you like to tell the world how much of a liar the Lizards have made you out to be?”

“You could arrange for me a broadcast?” Russie asked eagerly.

“A broadcast, no. Too dangerous.” Anielewicz shook his head. “A recording, though, just possibly. Then we might smuggle it out for others to broadcast. That would make the Lizards blush-if they knew how to blush, that is. Only one trouble-well, more than one, but this you have to think about especially hard: once you make this recording, if you make it, you have to disappear.”

“Yes, I see that. Zolraag would not be pleased with me, would he? But I’d sooner have him angry than laughing as he surely is now.” Russie let his mouth hang open in an imitation of a Lizard chuckle. Then, in a sudden, completely human gesture, he stabbed a fmger out at Anielewicz. “Could you arrange for me to vanish into the same place where Rivka and Reuven have gone?”

“I don’t even know where that place is,” Anielewicz reminded him.

“But that’s more of your not knowing so you can’t talk in case you’re interrogated. Don’t tell me you can’t arrange to have me sent there without ever learning directly about that place, because I won’t believe you.”

“Maybe you should disappear. You’re getting too cynical and suspicious to make a proper reb any more.” But amusement glinted in Anielewicz’s pale eyes. “I won’t say yes to that and I won’t say no.” He waggled his hand back and forth. “For that matter, I don’t even know for certain if I can arrange for you to make this recording, but if you want me to, I’ll try.”

“Try,” Russie said at once. He cocked his head, peered sidelong at the Jewish fighting leader. “I notice you don’t say you’re worried about smuggling the recording out of Warsaw once it’s made.”

“Oh, no.” Anielewicz looked like a cat blowing canary feathers off its nose. “If we make the recording, we’ll get it out. That we can manage. We’ve had practice.”

Ludmila Gorbunova stared at her CO. “But, Comrade Colonel,” she exclaimed, her voice rising to a startled squeak, “why me ?”

“Because your aircraft is suited to the task, and you are suited to be its pilot,” Colonel Feofan Karpov replied. “The Lizards hack all sorts of aircraft out of the sky in large numbers, but fewer Kukuruzniks than any other type. And you, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova, have flown combat missions against the Lizards since they came, and against the Germans before that. Do you question your own ability?”