Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance Read online

  Switching from English to Yiddish for Moishe’s benefit, the newsreader said, “I do wonder at times whether any of this does the least bit of good.”

  “It does,” Moishe assured him. “When the Lizards had me locked up in Lodz, it wasn’t just my English cousin who helped me get out, but plenty of Jewish fighters from Poland. They need encouragement, and to be reminded they’re not the only people left in the whole world who want to stand up to the Lizards.”

  “No doubt you’re right,” Jacobi said. “You would know better than I, having been on the spot. I just seem to have spent almost all of the last four years broadcasting messages of hope into occupied Europe—first Nazi-occupied Europe, now Lizard-occupied Europe—with what looks like very little return for the effort. I do want to feel I’m actually contributing to the war effort.”

  “The Lizards don’t like truth any better than the Germans did,” Russie answered. “Next to what the Nazis were doing in Poland, they looked good for a moment, but that was all. They may not be out to exterminate anyone, but they are aiming to enslave everyone all over the world, and the more people realize that, the harder they’ll fight back.”

  “All over the world,” Jacobi repeated. “That takes thinking about. We called it a world war before the Lizards came, but the Americans, Africa, India, much of the Near East—they were hardly touched. Now the whole world really is in play. Rather hard to imagine.”

  Moishe nodded. It was harder for him than for the British Jew. Jacobi had grown up in London, the center of the greatest empire the world had ever known and also closely linked to the United States. Thinking of the world as a whole had to come easy for him. Moishe’s mental horizons hadn’t really reached beyond Poland—indeed, seldom beyond Warsaw—until the day von Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet friendship pact and guaranteed that war would not only come but would be disastrous when it came.

  Through the glass, the engineer motioned Russie and Jacobi out of the studio. They got up quickly; another broadcaster or team would soon be taking over the facility.

  Sure enough, out in the hall stood a tall, skinny, craggy-faced man with a thick shock of dark hair just beginning to go gray. He was looking at his wristwatch and holding a sheaf of typewritten pages like the ones Jacobi carried. “Good morning, Mr. Blair,” Russie said, trotting out his halting English.

  “Good morning, Russie,” Eric Blair answered. He slid off his dark herringbone jacket. “Warm work closed up in the coffin there. I’d sooner be in my shirtsleeves.”

  “Yes, warm,” Moishe said, responding to the part he’d understood. Blair broadcast for the Indian Section of the BBC. He’d lived in Burma for a time, and had also fought and been badly wounded fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Somewhere there, or perhaps back in England, he’d picked up a wet cough that was probably tubercular.

  He pulled out a handkerchief to stifle it, then said, “Excuse me, gentlemen, I’m going to take some tea to get the scaling out of the pipes.”

  “He’s astonishing,” Jacobi murmured in Yiddish as Blair walked away. “I’ve known him to bring up bloody phlegm after a broadcast, but you’d never imagine anything was the matter if you listened to him over the air.”

  Blair returned in a moment with a thick, white china cup. He gulped down the not-quite-tea, made a wry face, and hurried into the studio. No sooner had he gone inside than the air-raid sirens began to wail. Russie blinked in surprise; he heard no Lizard jets screaming overhead. “Shall we go down to the shelter in the cellar?” he asked.

  To his surprise, Jacobi said, “No. Wait—listen.”

  Moishe obediently listened. Along with the howling sirens came another sound—a brazen clangor he needed a moment to identify. “Why are the church bells ringing?” he asked. “They’ve never done that before.”

  “In 1940, that was going to be a signal,” Jacobi answered. “Thank God, it was one we never had to use.”

  “What do you mean?” Russie asked. “What was it for?”

  “After the Luftwaffe began to bomb us, they silenced all the bells,” Jacobi said. “If they ever started ringing again, it meant—invasion.”

  The church bells rang and rang and rang, a wild carillon that raised the hair on Moishe’s arms and at the back of his neck. “The Germans aren’t going to invade now,” he said. However much it grated on him, relations between England and German-occupied northern France and the Low Countries had been correct, even sometimes approaching cordial, since the Lizards landed. The Lizards—”Oy!”

  “Oy! is right,” Jacobi agreed. He cocked his head to one side, listening to the bells and the sirens. “I don’t hear any Lizard airplanes, and I don’t hear any antiaircraft guns, either. If they are invading, they aren’t coming down on London.”

  “Where are they, then?” Moishe asked, as if the newsreader had some way of learning that to which he himself was not allowed access.

  “How should I know?” Jacobi answered testily. Then he answered his own question: “We’re in a BBC studio. If we can’t find out here, where can we?”

  Russie thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, feeling very foolish. “Next thing I’ll do, I’ll ask a librarian where to find books.” He hesitated again; he still didn’t know the overall layout of the BBC Overseas Section all that well, being primarily concerned with his own broadcasting duties.

  Jacobi saw his confusion. “Come on; we’ll go to the news monitoring service. They’ll know as much as anyone does.”

  A row of wireless sets sat on several tables placed side by side. The resultant dinning mix of languages and occasional squeals and bursts of static would swiftly have driven any unprepared person mad. The mostly female monitors, though, wore earphones, so each one of them gave heed only to her assigned transmission.

  One phrase came through the Babel again and again: “They’re here.” A women took off her earphones and got up from her set for a moment, probably for a trip to the loo. She nodded to Jacobi, whom she obviously knew. “I can guess why you’re hanging about here, dearie,” she said. “The buggers have gone and done it. Parachutists and I don’t know what all else in the south, and up in the Midlands, too. That’s about all anyone knows right now.”

  “Thank you, Norma,” the newsreader said. “That’s more than we knew before.” He translated it for Moishe Russie, who had understood some of it but not all

  “The south and the Midlands?” Russie said, visualizing a map. “That’s doesn’t sound good. It sounds as if—”

  “—They’re heading for London from north and south both,” Jacobi interrupted. He looked seriously at Moishe. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be broadcasting here. For one thing, God may know how they’ll supply a city of seven million with invaders on both sides of it, but I don’t.”

  “I’ve been hungry before,” Moishe said. The Germans would have had no logistic problem in keeping the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto fed; they simply hadn’t bothered.

  “I know that,” Jacobi answered. “But there’s something else, too. We would have fought the Germans with every man we had. I don’t expect Churchill will do anything less against the Lizards. Before long, they’ll come for us, put rifles in our hands, give us as many bullets as they happen to have for them, and send us up to the front line.”

  That had the ring of truth to it. It was what Russie would have done had he been running the country. All the same, he shook his head. “To you, they’ll give a rifle. To me, they’ll give a medical bag, probably with rags for bandages and not much else.” He surprised himself by laughing.

  “What’s funny?” Jacobi asked.

  “I don’t know if it’s funny or just meshuggeh,” Moishe said, “but here I’ll be a Jew going to war with a red cross on my arm.”

  “I don’t know which, either,” Jacobi said, “but you haven’t gone to war. The war’s come to you.”

  Ussmak was afraid. The lumbering transport in which his landcruiser rode was big and powerful en
ough to haul two of the heavy machines at a time, but it wasn’t much faster than the killercraft the Big Uglies flew. Killercraft of the Race were supposed to be flying cover missions and making sure no Tosevite aircraft got through, but Ussmak had seen enough war on Tosev 3 to know that the Race’s neat, carefully developed plans often turned to chaos and disaster when they ran up against real, live, perfidious Big Uglies.

  He wondered if this plan had turned to chaos and disaster even before it ran up against the Big Uglies. Into the intercom microphone, he said, “I don’t see why we were ordered away from fighting the Deutsche just when we’d finally starting making good progress against them.”

  “We are males of the Race,” Nejas replied. “The duty of our superiors is to prepare the plans. Our duty is to carry them out, and that shall be done.”

  Ussmak liked Nejas. More to the point, he knew Nejas was a good landcruiser commander. Somehow, though, Nejas had managed to come through all the hard fighting he’d seen with his confidence in the wisdom of his superiors unimpaired. Not even when Ussmak was happy almost to the point of imbecility with three quick tastes of ginger could he sound so certain everything would be all right. And Nejas didn’t even taste.

  Neither did Skoob, the gunner. He and Nejas had been together ever since the conquest fleet touched down on Tosev 3, and he was every bit as enamored of the straight and narrow as his commander. Now, though, he said, “Superior sir, I believe the driver has a point. Dividing and shifting effort in combat creates risks, some of which may be serious. While we and our equipment are transferred to attack the British, we grant the Deutsche time to recover, even to counterattack.”

  “The Deutsche are staggering, ready to fall on the tailstumps they don’t have,” Nejas insisted. “The British have seen little of the war till now. Their miserable little island has been a base for endless mischief against us. Because it is an island, we can conquer it completely, remove this threat, and then resume our campaign against the Deutsche secure in the knowledge that Britain can no longer threaten our rear.”

  He sounded like the dapper officers who had briefed the landcruiser units as they pulled them out of line against the Deutsche. Those officers had exuded wholesome confidence, too, so much confidence that Ussmak was certain they’d never led males in combat against the Big Uglies.

  He said, “I don’t think military needs have all that much to do with it, or not in the usual way. I think more of it comes down to politics.”

  “How do you mean, driver?” Nejas asked. The interrogative cough with which he punctuated his question was so loud and explosive, Ussmak knew he didn’t follow at all: a good commander, yes, but a natural-hatched innocent.

  “Superior sir, when Straha fled to the Big Uglies, the Emperor only knows how many of our plans he took with him. They probably know just what we intend to try for the next two years. To keep them confused, we have to do different things now.”

  “Curse Straha. May the Emperor turn his eye turrets away from him forever, now and in the world to come,” Nejas answered fiercely. After a moment, though, he said, “Yes, some truth may hatch from that eggshell. We—”

  Before he could finish what he was saying, the transport, without warning, dropped like a stone. The chains that held the landcruiser secure in the fuselage groaned and creaked, but held. Ussmak’s seat belt held, too, to his relief, so he didn’t bounce all over the driver’s compartment as the aircraft dove.

  As landcruiser commander, Nejas had a communications link with the pilot of the transport. He said, “We had to take evasive action against a Tosevite killercraft there. The machine guns stitched us up a bit, but no serious damage. We should land without trouble.”

  “A good place not to have trouble, superior sir,” Ussmak agreed, and tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

  “What happened to the Big Ugly aircraft?” Skoob demanded. He had the proper attitude for a gunner: he wanted to be sure the foe was gone.

  Unfortunately, this time the foe wasn’t gone. Nejas said, “I am told that the Tosevite male escaped. The British apparently had more aircraft available than we anticipated, and are throwing them all into the battle against our forces. Here and there, sheer numbers let some of them get through.”

  “We’ve seen that before, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Individually, a landcruiser or killercraft of the Race was worth some large number of the machines the Big Uglies manufactured. But the Tosevites, after they’d lost that large number, proceeded to manufacture several more. When the Race lost a machine, it and the male or males who crewed it were gone for good.

  Nejas might have picked the thought from his head. “With luck, our conquest of this island of British or whatever its name is will make it harder for the Big Uglies, at least in this part of Tosev 3, to continue building the weapons with which they oppose us.”

  “Yes, superior sir, with luck,” Ussmak said. He’d given up on the idea that the Race would get much luck in its struggle with the Big Uglies. Maybe, along with their aircraft and landcruisers, the Tosevites manufactured luck in some hidden underground factory . . .

  Nejas broke into his reverie, saying, “We are on the point of landing. Prepare yourselves.”

  Sealed up in the landcruiser, Ussmak hadn’t noticed maneuvers less violent than the ones the transport had used to escape the Big Ugly raider. Now he braced himself for a jolt as the aircraft touched down. It came, hard enough to make his teeth click together. The airstrip, made by combat engineers in country for which “hostile” was a polite understatement, would be short and rough and probably pocked with shell holes, too. He wondered if any transports—and the males they were transporting—had been caught on the ground.

  Things started happening very fast once the transport landed. The scream of its engines reversing thrust to help slow it made Ussmak’s head ache even through the aircraft fuselage and the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser. Deceleration shoved him forward against his seat belt.

  The instant the transport stopped, Nejas ordered, “Driver, start your engine!”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Ussmak replied, and obeyed. The hydrogen-burning turbine purred smoothly. Ussmak stuck his head out through the driver’s hatch to get a better view. At the moment he did so, the nose door of the transport opened, swinging up and back over the cockpit while the aircraft’s integral ramp rolled down to the ground.

  Air from outside flowed into the fuselage, bringing with it the smells of powder and dirt and alien growing things. It was also cold, cold enough to make Ussmak shiver. The idea of being on an island, entirely surrounded by water, was less than appealing, too; back on Home, land dominated water, and islands on the lakes were small and few and far between.

  A male with a lighted red wand ran up to guide the landcruiser out of the transport. “Forward—dead slow,” Nejas ordered. Ussmak engaged the lowest gear and eased forward. The landcruiser rattled over the metal floor of the fuselage, then nosed down onto the ramp. The male with the wand hadn’t done anything but urge Ussmak straight ahead?he might as well not have been there. The Race, though, took better safe as a general working rule.

  By the way they fought, the Big Uglies had never heard of that rule.

  A buzzing in the air, like the wingdrone of a flying biter immensely magnified . . . Ussmak hadn’t heard that sound often, but knew what it meant. He ducked back into the landcruiser and slammed the hatch shut. The Big Uglies’ killercraft shot by at a height not much greater than the top of the transport’s tail. Machine-gun bullets rattled from the glacis plate of Ussmak’s landcruiser. A couple hit the just-closed hatch. Had his head been sticking out through it, they would have hit him.

  The male who’d been directing him out of the transport reeled away, blood pouring from two or three wounds. “Forward—top speed!” Nejas screamed into the microphone taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. Ussmak’s foot was already mashing the accelerator. If the Tosevite killercraft had poured bullets into the front
end of the transport, what had it done to the rest of the machine?

  “Superior sir, is the other landcruiser following us out?” he asked. With the prisms in the cupola, Nejas could see all around, while Ussmak’s vision was limited to ahead and a bit to the sides.

  “Not quickly enough,” the commander answered. “And oh, he’d better hurry—there’s flame from one wing of the transport, and now from the fuselage, and—” The blast behind him drowned his words. The rear of the heavy landcruiser lifted off the ground. For a terrifying instant, Ussmak thought it was going to flip end over end. But it thudded back down, harder than any of the jolts it had given the crew while the transport took evasive action in the air.

  More explosions followed, one after another, as the ammunition of the landcruiser trapped in the inferno of the fuselage began cooking off. “Emperors past, take the spirits of the crewmales into your hands,” Skoob said.

  “May they take our spirits into their hands, too,” Nejas said. “Until that wreck is cleared, no traffic will be using the runway—and we need all the traffic we can get. More landcruisers, more soldiers, more ammunition, more hydrogen to keep our machines running—”

  Ussmak hadn’t thought of that. When he’d rolled across the plains of the SSSR, he’d thought the conquest of Tosev 3 would be as easy as everyone back on Home had expected before the fleet left. Even though the Big Uglies had opposed him with landcruisers of their own rather than the animal-riding, sword-swinging soldiers he’d been led to expect, he and his fellow males disposed of them easily enough.

  Even then, though, things had gone wrong: the sniper who’d killed his first commander, the raider who’d wrecked his landcruiser—he’d been lucky to get out of that alive, even if he’d had to jump into radioactive mud to do it. He’d picked up his ginger habit recovering in the hospital ship.

  Things had got tougher in France. The terrain was worse, the Deutsche had better landcruisers, and they knew what to do with them. The Français were hostile, too. He hadn’t thought that would matter, but it did. Sabotage, bombings, endless nuisances, all of which caused damage and forced the males of the Race to divert efforts and guard against them.