Upsetting the Balance (10 page)

Sirens screaming, airplanes roaring overhead, bombs crashing down, antiaircraft guns pounding maniacally—Moishe Russie had been through that in Warsaw in 1939, when the
Luftwaffe
methodically pounded the Polish capital to pieces. But this was London almost four years later, with the Lizards trying to finish the job the Germans had started here, too.

“Make it stop!” his son Reuven cried, one more wail lost in the many that filled the Soho shelter.

“We can’t make it stop, darling,” Rivka Russie answered. “It will be all right.” She turned to Moishe. She didn’t speak again, but her face held two words:
I hope.

He nodded back, sure he bore an identical expression. Having to admit your powerlessness to your child was awful, and being afraid you were lying when you reassured him even worse. But what else could you do when you had no power and were dreadfully afraid things wouldn’t be all right?

More bombs hit, somewhere close by. The mattresses strewn across the floor of the shelter jumped with the impact. The outcry inside the shelter rose to a new pitch of polylingual panic. Along with English and the Russies’ Yiddish, Moishe heard Catalan, Hindustani, Greek, and several languages he couldn’t identify. Soho held immigrants and refugees from all over the world.

Reuven squealed. At first, Moishe was afraid he’d hurt himself. Then he realized the flickering candlelight had been enough to let his son spot the Stephanopoulos twins, who lived in the flat across the hall from his own. Reuven had no more than a handful of words in common with Demetrios and Constantine, but that didn’t keep them from being friends. They started wrestling with one another. When the next flight of Lizard planes dropped another load of death, they paid hardly any attention.

Moishe glanced over at Rivka. “I wish I could be so easily distracted.”

“So do I,” she said wearily. “You at least don’t look like you’re worried.”

“No?” he said, surprised. “The beard must hide it, because I am.” His hand went to his whiskery chin. A lot of men were sporting whiskers in London these days, what with shaving soap, razor blades, and hot water all in short supply. He’d worn a beard in Warsaw, though, and felt naked when he shaved it off to escape to Lodz one step ahead of the Lizards after he refused to be their radio mouthpiece any more.

They’d captured him anyhow, a few months later. Growing the beard again had been the one good thing about the prison into which they’d clapped him. He shook his head. No, there had been one other good thing about that prison—the commando raid that got him out of it. The trip to England by submarine had followed immediately.

He peered around the shelter. Amazingly, some people managed to sleep despite the chaos. The stink of fear and stale piss was the same as he’d known back in Warsaw.

Rivka said, “Maybe that was the last wave of them.”

“Alevai omayn,”
Moishe answered fervently: “May it be so—amen!” The vigor of his reply made Rivka smile. Wishing didn’t make things so, worse luck, but he didn’t hear any more explosions, either nearby or off in the distance. Maybe Rivka was right.

The all-clear sounded half an hour later. Friends and neighbors woke the men and women who’d slept in spite of everything. People slowly went back above ground to head back to their homes—and to discover whether they had homes to head back to. It was about as dark on the street as it had been inside the shelter. The sky was overcast; the only light came from fires flickering here and there. Moishe had seen that in Warsaw, too.

Fire engines screamed through the streets toward the worst of the blazes. “I hope the Lizards didn’t wreck too many mains,” Moishe said. “They’ll need all the water pressure they can get.”

“I just hope our block of flats is still standing,” Rivka said. They turned the corner. “Oh, thank God, it is.” Her voice changed timbre: “Get away from there, Reuven! That’s broken glass—you could cut yourself.”

A woman lay groaning in front of the apartment building. Moishe hurried over to her. He’d been a medical student when the war started, and used what he’d learned in the Warsaw ghetto—not that all the medical training in the world did any good when people were starving to death.

“My leg, my leg,” the woman moaned. Russie was just starting to learn English, so that didn’t mean much to him. But the way she clutched at the injured part, and the way the shin bent where it had no business bending, told him everything he needed to know.

“Doctor,” he said; he’d made sure he learned that word. He pointed to himself. It wasn’t quite true, but he was the closest thing to a doctor the poor woman would see for a while, and thinking he was the genuine article might give her more confidence in him. He wanted that; he knew how to set a broken leg, but he also knew how much the process hurt.

The woman sighed, he hoped with relief. A small crowd had gathered around her and Moishe. He looked up to the people and said, “Fetch me a couple of flat boards and some rags to tie them to her leg.”

Nobody moved. Russie wondered what was wrong until Rivka said gently, “Dear, they don’t understand Yiddish.”

He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, feeling seventeen different kinds of idiot. He tried again, this time in the clear German he’d learned in school. Every time he had to use it, irony rose up to choke him. Here, in the heart of Germany’s most important enemy, the irony was doubled.

But no one in the crowd followed German any better than Yiddish. In desperation, Moishe tried Polish. “Here, I’ll get what you need,” somebody said in the same language. Better yet, he translated Russie’s request into English. Several people hurried away. In the rubble from years of bombings, boards and rags were easy to come by.

Moishe said to the fellow who spoke Polish, “Tell her I’m going to set her leg and splint it. Tell her it will hurt.” The man spoke in English. The injured woman nodded. “Maybe you and a couple of other men should hold her while I work,” Moishe went on. “If she thrashes around, she’s liable to make things worse.”

The woman tried to thrash. Moishe didn’t blame her; he admired the way she did her best to keep gasps from turning into shrieks. He got the broken bones aligned and tied the splint tight to keep them from shifting again. When he was through, the woman whispered, “Thank you, Doctor.”

He understood that. It warmed him. When he stood up, his own knees clicked. The sky was growing light. He sighed. No point in going to bed. He had an early broadcast scheduled at the BBC Overseas Services. Yawning, he said to Rivka, “I may as well just get my script and go on in.”

“Oh, dear,” she said sympathetically, but nodded. He and his family went upstairs together. He found the manila folder with the papers inside, then realized he was wearing only a greatcoat over pyjamas. He threw on a white shirt and a pair of trousers and headed out to face the world. A stretcher party had taken away the woman with the broken leg. Moishe hoped she’d do well. He wouldn’t sleep, but he thought his wife and son might.

The building that housed the BBC Overseas Services was at 200 Oxford Street, not far west of his Soho flat and a few blocks east of Hyde Park. As he walked to work, London came to life around him. Pigeons cooed and sparrows chirped—lucky creatures, they knew nothing of war, save that it made the air sharp with smoke. Bicycles, men and women afoot, and horse-drawn wagons and even buggies taken out of sheds where they’d moldered for a generation clogged the streets. Petrol was in as desperately short supply here as in Warsaw or Lodz; only fire engines had all they needed.

Nathan Jacobi approached the building that housed the studios from the other direction at the same time as Moishe reached it. The two men waved to each other. Moishe broadcast in Yiddish and German; Jacobi translated his words into English. His Yiddish was polished and elegant. If his English came close to it—Russie wasn’t qualified to judge, but doubted the BBC would have hired him if it didn’t—he made a very effective newsreader indeed.

Now he surveyed Moishe with a sympathetic eye. “Bad for you last night? You look done in.”

“I
am
done in,” Russie said. “I hope the tea in there has a jolt to it this morning. If it doesn’t, I’m apt to fall asleep in front of the microphone.”

“It’ll be hot, anyhow,” Jacobi said, which was true. “As for the jolt, you never can tell from day to day, not with these messes of leaves and roots and rose hips we get instead of the proper stuff.” He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of vintage Darjeeling—Bloody war.”

The last two words were in English. Moishe knew what they meant, but took the adjective literally. “Bloody war is right. And the worst of it is, we can’t make the Lizards out to be as black as we would otherwise, because they haven’t done much worse to us than we were already doing to ourselves.”

“You would know best about that. Anyone who was in Poland—” Jacobi shook his head. “But still, if we hadn’t been geared up to a fever pitch to fight each other, could we have put up such a battle against the Lizards?”

“I suppose not, but it’s no credit to us that we were,” Russie answered. “It’s not as if we knew they were coming. We’d have gone right on slaughtering ourselves if they hadn’t come, too. Still, I admit that’s neither here nor there at the moment. They are here, and we have to make life miserable for them.” He waved the pages of his script, then fished out his pass and showed it to the guard at the door. The guard nodded. Russie and Jacobi went in to get ready to broadcast.

3

“Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I have an emergency call for you from the
206th Emperor Yower
,” Atvar’s adjutant said. In the vision screen, the younger male looked as worried as he sounded.

“Very well, Pshing, patch it through,” Atvar said, setting aside for a moment the war against the Big Uglies for his private conflict with the shiplord Straha. After Straha failed to topple him from command of the conquest fleet, the shiplord should have known revenge was on its way. Atvar wondered what sort of lying nonsense Straha would come up with to justify himself.

Pshing’s face disappeared from the vision screen. It was not, however, replaced by that of Straha. Instead, Atvar’s chief security officer, a male named Diffal, turned his eye turrets toward the fleetlord. Diffal was earnest and capable. All the same, Atvar yearned for the cunning deviousness Drefsab had brought to the job. Even as a ginger taster, he’d been the best in the fleet. But now he was dead, and Atvar had to make do. “Do you have the shiplord Straha in your custody?” he demanded.

“Exalted Fleetlord, I do not.” Diffal also sounded worried. “I am informed that, shortly before the arrival of my team aboard the
206th Emperor Yower,
the shiplord Straha left this vessel and traveled down from orbit to confer with Horrep, shiplord of the
29th Emperor Jevon,
whose ship has landed in the central region of the northern portion of the lesser continental mass, near the city called St. Louis.”

Atvar hissed. Horrep was a member of Straha’s faction. Pshing, who must have been monitoring the conversation from his outer office, came onto the screen for a moment. “Exalted Fleetlord, the
206th Emperor Yower
did not report this departure to us.”

Diffal said, “I have been in communication with the
29th Emperor Jevon.
Straha is not aboard that ship, nor has his shuttlecraft landed nearby. I examined the radar records of the trajectory of the shuttlecraft. Computer analysis of the course they indicate gives a landing point relatively close to the
29th Emperor Jevon,
but not so close as would be expected if Straha truly intended to confer with Horrep. The shiplord Horrep, I should inform you, vehemently denies that Straha sent messages announcing a visit, as custom and courtesy would have required.”

“Ever since we came to Tosev 3, custom and courtesy have been corroding,” Atvar said. Diffal stared back at him, not replying. One couldn’t expect a male in security to be concerned with philosophy as well. Atvar dragged himself back to the matter at hand: “Well, where is the shiplord Straha, then?”

“Exalted Fleetlord,” Diffal said, “I don’t know.”

Jens Larssen was sick and tired of bicycles. He was sick and tired of pedaling all over creation on missions he shouldn’t have had to take on and knew he wouldn’t get thanked for, and, of all the things he never would have expected before he set out from Denver, he was sick to death of pine trees.

“First the Arapaho goddamn National Forest, now the Payette goddamn National Forest—or is it the Nez Perce goddamn National Forest yet?” he asked as he worked his way up US 95 toward Lewiston, Idaho. He was used to talking to himself on the road; days often went by when he didn’t talk to anybody else. The longer he spent on his bike, the better he liked being alone.

He wiped sweat off his forehead with a sleeve. The day was hot, but he wore long sleeves and a long-brimmed cap anyway—he was so fair that he worried more about burning in the sun than baking in his clothes. His ears, which the cap didn’t protect, were a permanently raw red peeling mess.

“Not that anybody gives a damn what I look like these days,” he said. Self-pity notwithstanding, he wasn’t a bad-looking fellow: a skinny blond Viking, just past thirty, with bright blue eyes. A sour twist to his mouth marred his features, but since he couldn’t see it, he didn’t know it was there.

A Lizard jet screamed by, high overhead, flying west. The Lizards held the Snake River valley from Idaho Falls to Twin Falls, and used it as an air base against the Pacific Northwest. Outside of their airfields, though, they didn’t seem to give a damn about the area—a sentiment with which Jens heartily concurred. He’d gone through several towns—even what passed for cities hereabouts—without seeing a one of the little scaly bastards.

“Maybe I should have stopped and gone looking for them,” he said to the trees. He knew enough to make the Lizards have kittens. What better way to pay back Barbara for dumping him, to pay back Colonel Hexham for helping him lose his wife, to pay back Oscar the guard for slugging him when he grabbed her to try to get her back, to pay back the Metallurgical Laboratory and the whole stinking human race on general principles? Denver might not earn an atomic bomb all on its own, but it would sure as hell get leveled.

A mountain stream chuckled by, close to the road. Jens ran his sleeve over his forehead again, then decided he’d earned a break. He pulled the bike over to the shoulder, let down the kickstand, and climbed off. He pulled a tin cup out of the pack tied behind the bike saddle and headed for the stream. He had to think about walking the first few steps; his legs kept wanting to go round and round.

The water, undoubtedly snowmelt, was very sweet, but so cold it gave him a savage headache for a few seconds after his first long swig. He swore as he waited for the pain to subside. A gray and blue jay scolded him from the branches of one of those pines.

“Oh, shut up,” he told it. “You’d say the same thing if it happened to you.”

He unslung the Springfield he carried on his back and looked around. He wasn’t much of a hunter, but if a deer came down for a drink, he wouldn’t say no to trying for some venison. The jay screeched again. He swung the rifle its way, then laughed at himself. He’d probably miss, and even if he didn’t, nailing a jay with a .30-caliber slug was about like smashing a roach by dropping an anvil on it. You might have a few feathers left, floating on the breeze, but that was it.

Since he was sitting by the stream, he drank another cup of water. If Bambi didn’t show up, he’d be gnawing on beef jerky for lunch. He’d traded a few rounds of rifle ammo for it just outside of a tiny town incongruously called Cambridge; the more he thought about the deal he’d made, the more he figured he’d been snookered.

The water had its usual effect. He got up and walked over to a tree—not the one in which the jay still perched. He undid his fly and, setting his teeth, took a leak against the tree trunk. It didn’t hurt as much as it had just after he came down with the clap; for a while there, he’d been wishing his joint would drop off every time he used it. But it still wasn’t what anybody in his right mind would call fun.

“Goddamn bitch,” he ground out between his teeth as he fastened himself up again. The first time he’d got laid after Barbara left, and that was the present the stinking waitress had given him. Better he should have stayed a monk.

No sign of any deer. No sign of any bears, either, but Larssen, at the moment, was not inclined to look on the bright side of things. Cursing that slut of a waitress all over again (and conveniently forgetting how much he’d enjoyed having her while she lay in his arms), he got up, went back over to the bicycle, and used his belt knife to carve off a lunch-sized slab of jerky.

Chewing on the stuff was about like gnawing well-salted shoe leather. “Good thing I’ve got a decent set of choppers,” Jens said, and the jay, as if carrying on a bad-tempered conversation with him, peevishly screeched back. “I told you once to shut up,” Larssen reminded it. It took no more notice of him than anybody else had lately.

He gulped down a mouthful of the jerky. Even after he’d been chewing on it, little sharp edges scraped his throat. His laugh wasn’t a friendly sound. “I’d like to see Mr. Sam fucking Yeager eat this stuff with his store-bought teeth,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more he figured that if Barbara could go for a guy like that, she wasn’t such a bargain after all.

But even figuring he was well rid of her didn’t make the burn of being thrown over go away. She shouldn’t have decided he was dead, not anywhere near so soon. Even if she had, even if she’d ended up in bed with that Yeager son of a bitch a time or two, she shouldn’t have married him, and she sure as hell shouldn’t have let him knock her up. That had put the kibosh on any hope she’d come to her senses, all right.

“Security,” Larssen snarled, making it into a curse word fouler than any of the others he’d been throwing around. If that stinking Colonel Hexham had just let him write to her as the Met Lab wagon train made its slow way across the northern Great Plains, everything would have been fine. But he’d literally had to go on strike in Denver to get Hexham to let him send a letter. By the time it got to her, it was too late. She was already married and already pregnant.

In peacetime, some lawyer probably would have been able to buy himself a new Packard from the fees he’d have made trying to sort out the whole mess. With the Lizards giving the whole world hell, nobody bothered with much in the way of legal niceties any more. Barbara decided she wanted to stay with Mr. Dentures, so she damn well did.

“And I’m the one who gets screwed—or rather, who doesn’t get screwed any more,” Larssen said. “Isn’t that a hell of a note?”

It was, in more ways than one. Not only did his wife up and leave him but, just because he was too burned up about it to let her go quietly, he’d been all but booted off the Met Lab team. And so, instead of the nuclear physics he loved and for which he’d spent a lifetime training, he got to play Natty Bumppo in the wilderness instead.

If he hadn’t refused to admit he was beaten, he never would have managed to make it back from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Chicago. He never would have found out where the Met Lab crew had gone, nor managed to beat them there on his own (of course, if he hadn’t been quite so efficient there, he might have had a better chance of hanging on to Barbara).

Well, he owed the Lizards a good deal, for fouling up his life beyond all recognition. So he’d go on to Hanford and see if it made a good place for building an atomic pile to blow them to hell and gone. So much seemed only fair.

“But after I do that, I’ll get even with all the people who fouled me up, too,” he said softly. “You just bet I will.” He got up from the streamside rock he’d been sitting on, walked over to the bicycle, climbed aboard, and started rolling north again.

Ludmila Gorbunova had seen more bomb craters, from closer range, than she’d ever imagined before the war began. But she’d never seen, never dreamt of, a crater like the one over which her little U-2 biplane skimmed now.

The burned area was most of a kilometer across, maybe more than a kilometer. The ground near the center had been baked into something that looked like glass, and gave back dazzling reflections of the sun. Well beyond that, trees, houses—essentially everything—had been knocked flat. It was as if God had decided to step on the land a few kilometers northeast of Kaluga.

Ludmila did not believe in God, not in the top part of her mind. She was a child of the Revolution, born in Kiev in the midst of civil war. But sometimes, in moments of stress, reactionary patterns of speech and thought emerged.

“We’ve not yet built true socialism,” she reminded herself. “Even with the German invasion, the generation born after the war might have lived to see it. Now—”

The air blowing in over the windscreen flung her words away. Having confessed her imperfection, if only to herself, she was willing to admit that stopping the Lizards’ drive on Moscow had taken something that looked very much like divine intervention.

She’d been flying back from a harassment mission against the Lizards when the bomb went off. Then she’d thought at first that the Lizards were visiting on the Soviet Union the same kind of destruction they’d meted out to Berlin and Washington. Only gradually had she realized her own country had matched the invaders at their murderous game.

The
Kukuruznik
—Wheatcutter—buzzed over the hulks of three Lizard tanks. Their guns slumped limply, as if they’d been made not of steel but of wax and left too close to the fire. Measuring the revenge the Soviet Union had finally taken on its tormentors filled her with fierce joy.