Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“I think some of the decoys just drew them away from us,” Jager said.

“It might be a Jew saving your neck, Nazi. How does that make you feel?” Max said. After a moment, though, he added in wondering tones, “Or it might be a fucking Nazi saving mine. How does that make me feel? You know the word verkakte, Nazi? This is a verkakte mess, and no mistake.”

A village-maybe even a small town-loomed out of the rain ahead. In instant unspoken agreement, both men swerved wide around it. “What’s the name of that place?” Jager asked.

“Chernobyl, I think,” Max said. “The Lizards drove the people out after their ship blew up, but they might keep a little garrison there.”

“Let’s hope they don’t,” Jager said. The Jewish partisan nodded.

If the village held a garrison, it didn’t come forth to search for the raiders… or maybe it did, and simply missed Jager and Max in the downpour. Once past the clump of ugly wooden buildings and even uglier concrete ones, Jager glanced down at his compass to get back onto the proper course.

Max watched him put it back in his pocket “How are we going to find the fucking panje wagon?”

“We keep on this heading until-”

“-we walk past them in the rain,” the Jew put in.

“If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it,” Jager said icily.

“I don’t. I was hoping you did.”

They pushed on, skirting another small patch of woods and then returning to the course the compass dictated. Jager had a piece of black bread and some sausage in his pack. Getting them out one-handed was awkward, but he managed. He broke the bread, bit the sausage in half; and passed Max his share. The Jew hesitated but ate. After a while, he pulled a little tin flask from his hip pocket. He yanked out the cork, gave the flask to Jager for the first swig. Vodka ran down his throat like fire.

“Thanks,” he said. “That’s good.” He put his thumb over the opening so the rain couldn’t get in, passed the flask back to Max.

Off to one side, somebody spoke up in Russian. Jager started, then dropped the chest that had become like an unwelcome part of him and grabbed for the rifle slung on his back. Then a German voice added, “Ja, we could use something good about now.”

“You found them,” Max said to Jager as the panje wagon came up through the muck. “That’s fucking amazing.” Instead of hatred, he looked at Jager with something like respect. Jager, who was at least as surprised as the Jewish partisan, did his best not to show it.

The horse that pulled the panje wagon had seen better days. The light wooden wagon itself rode on large wheels; it was low, wide, and flat-bottomed, so it could float almost boatlike across the surface of even the deepest mud. It looked as if its design hadn’t changed for centuries, which was probably true; no vehicle was better adapted to coping with Russia’s twice-yearly rasputitsa.

The driver and the fellow beside him both wore Red Army greatcoats, but instead of a shelm, a Russian cloth helmet rather like a balaclava, the man who wasn’t holding the reins had on the long-brimmed cap of a German tropical-weight uniform. The weather was anything but tropical, but the cap kept the rain out of his eyes.

He said, “You have the cabbages?”

“Yes, by God, we do,” Jager said. Max nodded. Together, they lifted the lead-lined chest into the wagon. Jager had grown so used to the burden that his shoulder ached when he was relieved of it. Max handed the flask of vodka to the driver, then clambered up over the side of the wagon. Jager followed him. Between them, they almost filled the wagon bed.

The fellow with the shelm spoke in Russian. Max turned it into Yiddish for Jager. “He says we won’t bother with roads. We’ll head straight across country. The Lizards aren’t likely to find us that way.”

“And if they do?” Jager asked.

“Nichevo,” the Russian answered when Max put the question to him: “It can’t be helped.” Since that was manifestly true, Jager just nodded. The driver twitched the reins, clucked to the horse. The panje wagon began to roll.

“It’s true,” Yi Min declared. “I floated through the air light as a dandelion seed in the little scaly devils’ airplane, and it flew so high that I looked down on the whole world.” The apothecary conveniently forgot to mention-in fact, he’d just about made himself forget altogether-how sick he’d been while he floated light as a dandelion seed.

“And what did the world look like when you looked down on it?” one of his listeners asked.

“The foreign devils are right, believe it or not-the world is round, like a ball,” Yi Min answered. “I have seen it with my own eyes, so I know it is so.”

“Ahh,” some of the men said who sat crosslegged in front of him, either impressed at his eyewitness account or astonished that Europeans could be right about anything. Others shook their heads, disbelieving every word he said. Foolish turtles, he thought. He’d had a lot of lies taken for granted in his time; now that he was telling nothing but the truth, half the people in the scaly devils’ prisoner compound made him out to be a liar.

In any case, his audience hadn’t gathered to hear him talk about the shape of the world. A man in a blue cotton tunic said, “Tell us more about the women the little scaly devils gave to you.” Everyone, believers and skeptics alike, spoke up in favor of that; even if Yi Min were to lie about it, he’d still be amusing.

The best part was, he didn’t need to lie. “I had a woman whose skin was black as charcoal all over, save only the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. And I had another who was pale as milk, even her nipples only pink, with eyes of fine jade and hair and bush the color of a fox’s fur.”

“Ahh,” the men said again, imagining it One of them asked, “Did their strangeness make them better on the mat?”

“Neither of those two was particularly skilled,” Yi Min said, and his audience sighed with disappointment. He quickly added, “Still, their being so different to look at was piquant, like pickle after sweet. If you ask me, the gods first made the black folk, but left them in the oven too long. Then they tried again, but took the white folk-the foreign devils most of us had seen-out too soon. Finally they made us Chinese, and cooked us to perfection.”

The men who listened to him laughed; some of them clapped their hands. Then the fellow in the blue tunic said, “From what oven did the gods take the little scaly devils?”

Nervous silence fell. Yi Min said, “To know that for certain, you would have to ask the little devils themselves. If you want to know what I think, my guess is that a whole different set of gods made them. Why, do you know they have a mating season like, cattle or songbirds, and are impotent all the rest of the year?”

“Poor devils,” several men chorused, the first sympathy Yi Min had heard for the Lizards.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “That’s why they took me up into their airplane that never lands in the first place: to see for themselves that real human beings could mate at any season of the year.”

His smile was very nearly a leer. “I proved it to their satisfaction-and to mine.”

He smiled again, this time happily, at the grins and laughter his words won. Being back among people with whom he could speak, back among people who appreciated his undoubted cleverness, was the greatest joy in returning to the ground after so long aloft.

Then a bald old fellow who sold eggs said, “Didn’t the little devils also kidnap that pretty girl who was living in your tent? Why didn’t she come back with you?”