Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Daphne came back with Jerome Jones’ new pint. He leered at her. “David’s been using his field glasses to peer in your window.”

“Really?” she said coolly, setting the pint down. “And all the time I thought it was you.”

Jones’ fair English skin made his flush visible even by the light of the, fireplace. Goldfarb and the aircrew howled laughter. Even Douglas Bell untangled himself from Sylvia long enough to say, “There’s a fair hit, by God!” Jones buried his nose in the pint.

“Do you know what I hear has worked well, though?” Goldfarb valiantly tried to get back to George Bagnall’s question. “Barrage balloons have cost the Lizards some of their aircraft. They fly so low and so fast they haven’t a prayer of evading if the balloon’s wire happens to lie in their path.”

“Nice to know something does a bit of good,” Bagnall said. “But that wasn’t quite what I meant-not the war, I mean. Just-life.”

“Radarmen don’t have lives,” Jones said. “It’s against His Majesty’s articles of war, or something like that.” He shoved his reemptied pint toward Daphne. “Try not to put so much arsenic in this one, my darling.”

“Why? You’d likely thrive on it.” But the barmaid went to fill the pint again.

“She’s sweet, Daphne is. I can tell that already,” Bagnall said.

“Ah, but you got her on your knee,” Goldfarb said morosely. “Do you know how many months Jerome and I have been trying to do that?”

“Quite a few, by your long face. Aren’t there any other women in Dover?”

“I expect there may be. Have we looked, Jerome?”

“Under every flat stone we could find,” Jones answered. He was watching Douglas Bell and Sylvia. If he’d had a pad in front of him, he’d have taken notes, too.

“I’m going to pour this over your head, dearie,” Daphne told him.

“They say it makes a good hair-set,” he said, adding, “Not that I’d know,” just in time to keep the barmaid from making good on her threat.

Goldfarb finished his second pint, but wasn’t quite in his friend’s hurry to get another one. Everything the Lancaster aircrew had told him about life for the Jews in France made him worry more about what had been happening to them in Warsaw, where traditions of persecution ran, back centuries and where the Nazis had no one within hundreds of miles to keep an eye on what they did. German radio could scream all it liked about “traitors to mankind”; he feared the Jews in Warsaw had been so desperate that even alien invaders looked better to them than the benign and humane rule of Hans Frank.

He wondered how his uncles and aunts and cousins were doing in Poland. Thinking about the broadcasts in Yiddish and German over the Warsaw shortwave station the Lizards had set up, he wondered how many-or how few-of his uncles and aunts and cousins were still alive.

He stared down at his empty pint. Would another help him forget his fears or bring them more strongly to the surface? The latter, he suspected. He held out the glass to Daphne anyhow. “Since you’re still on your feet, dear, would you bring me one more?” Enough bitter and he’d stop caring about anything at all-if not this pint, then the next one or the one after that.

Then Jerome asked the aircrew, “And what happens to you lads next?”

Ken Embry said, “I expect we’ll be going up again in another day or two. By all they’ve said, experienced aircrew are getting rather thin on the ground, if you’ll forgive something of a mixed metaphor.”

“How can you be so bloody calm about it?” Jones burst out. “Flying against the Jerries was one thing, but against the Lizards…”

Embry shrugged. “It’s what we do. It’s what we have to do. What else is there for anyone to do, but do what he has to do the best he can for as long as he can do it?”

Goldfarb studied the pilot and the rest of the aircrew. While he worried about his relatives-and from all he’d heard, with reason-they carried on in the face of their own nearly certain deaths. He looked at Sylvia, who might have been trying to squeeze Douglas Bell to death, and suddenly understood, on a level deeper than words, why she and Daphne would sleep with fliers but not with men who stayed on the ground. He remained rueful about that, but his jealousy disappeared.

When Daphne came back with his bitter, he stood up, dug in his pocket, came out with a handful of silver. “Fetch these lads a round, would you?”

Jerome Jones stared at him. “Such largess! Did your rich grandfather just cork off, or have you forgotten you’re a Jew?”

He would have gone for anyone else’s throat, especially with a couple of pints in him. Bagnall and a couple of the other members of the aircrew shifted in their seats to get ready to grab him if he tried. Instead, he started to laugh. “Bloody hell, Daphne, I’ll buy one for this big-mouthed sod, too.”

The aircrew relaxed. Jones’ eyes got even bigger than they had been. “If I’d known calling you names was the way to pry beer out of you, I’d’ve tried it long ago.”

“ Geh kak afen yam,” Goldfarb said, and then disgusted everybody by refusing to translate.

Moishe Russie felt his heart pound in his chest. Meeting the Lizard governor whose forces had driven the Nazis out of Warsaw always frightened him, though Zolraag had treated him well enough-certainly better than he would have fared had he fallen under the eye of Hans Frank. He did not know whether Frank was dead or fled. Hoping him dead was sinful. Russie knew that He was willing to make the wish even so.

Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, the leader of the Home Army, came out of Zolraag’s office. He did not look happy. He looked even less happy on seeing Russie. “What are you going to pry out of him now, Jew?” he growled. “They will give you anything you like, it seems.”

“That is not so,” Russie said. Bor-Komorowski frightened him, too. He hated Germans, yes, but he also hated Jews. The Germans were gone now. That left him only one target.

Scowling still, Bor-Komorowski stamped out, his boot heels ringing on the marble floor. Russie hurried into Zolraag’s office; keeping his people’s protector waiting would not do.

“Your Excellency,” he said in German. He could speak to a Lizard easily enough now. A couple of weeks before, when the Nazis fled, beset from within and attacked from without at the same time, the first of the little, scampering creatures had seemed like demons to him. Though they were allies, they were weird almost beyond his power to take in. There the German propaganda had not lied.

But dealing with Zolraag day by day had begun to make strangeness familiar-and also brought the suspicion that the Lizard found him in particular and humanity in general at least as peculiar as he thought the governor.

“Herr Russie.” Zolraag spoke slowly and with an accent that almost swallowed r’s and turned the middle sound in Russie’s name into a long hiss. “You are well, I hope?”

“Yes, Your Excellency, thank you.” Russie hissed himself, and made a gargling sound: he’d learned how to say “thank you” in Zolraag’s language. He was doing his best to pick up words of the Lizards’ speech; as he was already fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Polish, acquiring a new tongue held no terror for him. He got the idea that Zolraag found the idea of there being many languages as alien as anything else about the Earth.

The Lizard was working hard with German, though. While his accent remained (Russie thought part of it due to the shape of his mouth), he’d picked up new words every time he spoke with the Jew, and his grammar, if less than good, was better than it had been. Now he said, “The German prisoners, Herr Russie, what do you think we do with them?”