Striking the Balance Read online

  He went back to the cabin he shared with Reuven and his wife Rivka, to make sure he’d not been telling fables to Mavrogordato. Sure enough, their meager belongings were neatly bundled, and Rivka was making sure Reuven stayed in one place by reading to him from a book of Polish fairy tales that had somehow made the trip first from Warsaw to London and then from London almost to the Holy Land. If you read to Reuven, or if he latched onto a book for himself, he’d hold still; otherwise, he seemed a perpetual motion machine incarnated in the shape of a small boy—and Moishe could think of no more fitting shape for a perpetual-motion machine to have.

  Rivka put up the book and looked a question at him. “We land in a couple of hours,” he said. She nodded. She was the glue that held their family together, and he—well, he was smart enough to know it.

  “I don’t want to get off the Naxos,” Reuven said. “I like it here. I want to be a sailor when I grow up.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Rivka told him. “This is Palestine we’re going to, the Holy Land. Do you understand that? There haven’t been many Jews here for hundreds and hundreds of years, and now we’re going back. We may even go to Jerusalem. ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ people say during the High Holy Days. That will really come true for us now, do you see?”

  Reuven nodded, his eyes big and round. Despite their travels and travails, they were bringing him up to understand what being a Jew meant, and Jerusalem was a name to conjure with. It was a name to conjure with for Moishe, too. He’d never imagined ending up in Palestine, even if he was being brought here to help the British rather than for any religious reason.

  Rivka went back to reading. Moishe walked up to the bow of the Naxos and watched Haifa draw near. The town rose up from the sea along the slopes of Mount Carmel. Even in winter, even in cold, the Mediterranean sun shed a clearer, brighter light than he was used to seeing in Warsaw or London. Many of the houses and other buildings he saw were whitewashed; in that penetrating sunlight, they sparkled as if washed with silver.

  Mixed among the buildings were groves of low, spreading trees with gray-green leaves. He’d never seen their like. When Captain Mavrogordato came up for a moment, he asked him what they were. The Greek stared in amazement. “You don’t know olives?” he exclaimed.

  “No olive trees in Poland,” Moishe said apologetically. “Not in England, either.”

  The harbor drew near. A lot of the men on the piers wore long robes—some white, others bright with stripes—and headcloths. Arabs, Moishe realized after a moment. The reality of being far, far away from everything he’d grown up with hit him like a club.

  Other men wore work clothes of the kind with which he was more familiar: baggy pants, long-sleeved shirts, a few in overalls, cloth caps or battered fedoras taking the place of the Arabs’ kerchiefs. And off by themselves stood a knot of men in the khaki with which Moishe had grown so familiar in England: British military men.

  Mavrogordato must have seen them, too, for he steered the Naxos toward the pier where they stood. The black plume of coal smoke that poured from the old freighter’s stacks shrank, then stopped as the ship nestled smoothly against the dockside. Sailors and dockworkers made the Naxos fast with lines. Others dropped the gangplank into place. With that thump, Moishe knew he could walk down to the land of Israel, the land from which his forefathers had been expelled almost two thousand years before. The hair at the back of his neck prickled up in awe.

  Rivka and Reuven came out on deck. Moishe’s wife was carrying one duffel bag; a sailor had another slung over his shoulder. Moishe took it from the man, saying, “Evkharisto poly—thanks very much.” It was almost the only Greek he’d picked up on the long, nervous voyage across the Mediterranean, but a useful phrase to have.

  “Parakalo,” the sailor answered with a smile: “You’re welcome.”

  The uniformed Englishmen walked toward the Naxos. “May I—may we—go to them?” Moishe asked Mavrogordato.

  “Go ahead,” the captain said. “I’m coming, too, to make sure I get paid.”

  Moishe’s feet thudded on the gangplank. Rivka and Reuven followed closely, with Mavrogordato right behind them. Moishe took one last step. Then he was off the ship and onto the soil—well, the docks—of the Holy Land. He wanted to kneel down and kiss the dirty, creosote-stained wood.

  Before he could, one of the Englishmen said, “You would be Mr. Russie? I’m Colonel Easter, your liaison here. We’ll get you in contact with your coreligionists as soon as may be. Things have been rather dicey lately, so your assistance will be most welcome. Having everyone pulling in the same direction will help the war effort, don’t you know?”

  “I will do what I can,” Moishe answered in his slow, accented English. He studied Easter without much liking: the man plainly saw him as a tool, nothing more. That was how the Lizards had seen him, too. He liked the British cause better than he had that of the aliens, but he was sick of being anyone’s tool.

  Off to one side, a British officer handed Panagiotis Mavrogordato several neat rolls of gold sovereigns. The Greek beamed from ear to ear. He didn’t think of Moishe as a tool: he thought of him as a meal ticket, and made no bones about it. That struck Moishe as a more honest approach than the one Easter showed.

  The Englishman said, “If you’ll come with me, Mr. Russie, you and your family, we have a buggy waiting down past the end of the dock. Sorry we can’t lay on a motorcar for you, but petrol is in rather short supply these days.”

  Petrol was in short supply all over the world. Colonel Easter hardly needed to be polite in mentioning its absence. He ignored politeness at a much more basic level: neither he nor any of his men made any move to take the duffel bags from Moishe and Rivka. You worried about whether guests were comfortable. Tools—who cared about tools?

  The buggy was a black-painted English brougham, and might have been preserved in cotton wool and tinfoil for the past two generations. “We’ll take you to the barracks,” Easter said, getting aboard with the Russies and an enlisted man who picked up the reins. The rest of the officers climbed into another, almost identical carriage. Easter went on, “We’ll get you something to eat and drink there, and then see what sort of quarters we can arrange for the lot of you.”

  If they’d cared about anything more than using him, they would have had quarters ready and waiting. At least they did remember that he and his family needed food and water. He wondered if they’d remember not to offer him ham, too. The driver flicked the reins and clucked to the horses. The wagon rattled away from the harbor district. Whatever the British had in mind for him, he’d soon find out about it.

  He stared wide-eyed at the palm trees like huge feather dusters, at the whitewashed buildings of mud brick, at the mosque the buggy rolled past. Arab men in the long robes he’d already seen and Arab women covered so that only their eyes, hands, and feet showed watched the wagons as they clattered through the narrow, winding streets. Moishe felt very much an interloper, though his own folk had sprung from this place. If Colonel Easter had the slightest clue that God had not anointed him to rule this land, he gave no sign of it.

  Suddenly, the buildings opened out onto a marketplace. All at once, Moishe stopped feeling like an alien and decided he was at home after all. None of the details was like what he’d known back in Warsaw: not the dress of the merchants and the customers, not the language they used, not the fruits and vegetables and trinkets they bought and sold. But the tone, the way they haggled—he might have been back in Poland.

  Rivka was smiling, too; the resemblance must also have struck her. And not all the men and women in the marketplace were Arabs, Moishe saw when he got a closer look. Some were Jews, dressed for the most part in work clothes or in dresses that, while long, displayed a great deal of flesh when compared to the clothes in which the Arab women shrouded themselves.

  A couple of Jewish men carrying brass candlesticks walked by close to the wagon. They were talking loudly and animatedly. Rivka’s smile disappeared. “I don’t understand
them,” she said.

  “That’s Hebrew they’re speaking, not Yiddish,” Moishe answered, and shivered a little. He’d caught only a few words himself. Learning Hebrew so you could use it in prayer and actually speaking it were two different things. He’d have a lot to pick up here. He wondered how fast he could do it.

  They passed the market by. Houses and shops closed in around them again. At bigger streetcorners, British soldiers directed traffic, or tried to: the Arabs and Jews of Haifa weren’t as inclined to obey their commands as the orderly folk of London might have been.

  A couple of blocks past one thoroughfare, the road all but doubled back on itself. A short young fellow in a short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers stepped out in front of the wagon that held the Russies. He pointed a pistol at the driver’s face. “You will stop now,” he said in accented English.

  Colonel Easter started to reach for his sidearm. The young man glanced up to the rooftops on either side of the road. Close to a dozen men armed with rifles and submachine guns, most of them wearing kerchiefs to hide their faces, covered both wagons heading back to the British barracks. Very slowly and carefully, Easter moved his right hand away from his weapon.

  The cocky young fellow in the street smiled, as if this were a social occasion rather than—whatever it was. “Ah, that’s good, that’s very good,” he said. “You are a sensible man, Colonel.”

  “What is the point of this—this damned impudence?” Easter demanded in tones that said he would have fought had he seen the remotest chance for success.

  “We are relieving you of your guests,” the hijacker answered. He looked away from the Englishman and toward Moishe, dropping into Yiddish to say, “You and your family, you will get out of the buggy and come with me.”

  “Why?” Moishe said in the same language. “If you are who I think you are, I would have been talking with you anyhow.”

  “Yes, and telling us what the British want us to hear,” the fellow with the pistol said. “Now get out—I haven’t got all day to argue with you.”

  Moishe climbed down from the buggy. He helped his wife and son down, too. Gesturing with the pistol, the hijacker on the street led him through a nearby gate and into a courtyard where a couple of other men with guns waited. One of them set down his rifle and efficiently blindfolded the Russies.

  As he tied a cloth over Moishe’s eyes, he spoke in Hebrew—a short sentence that, after a moment, made sense to Moishe. It was, in fact, much the same sort of thing he might have said had he been blindfolder rather than blindfoldee: “Nice job, Menachem.”

  “Thanks, but no chatter,” the man who’d been on the street said in Yiddish. He was Menachem, then. He shoved Russie lightly in the back; someone else grabbed his elbow. “Get moving.” Having no choice, Russie got.

  Big Uglies pushed munitions carts toward Teerts’ killercraft. Most of them were of the dark brown variety of Tosevite, not the pinkish-tan type. The dark brown ones on this part of the lesser continental mass were more inclined to cooperate with the Race than the lighter ones; from what the flight leader had gathered, the lighter ones had treated them so badly, rule by the Race looked good in comparison.

  His mouth fell open in amusement. As far as he was concerned, a Big Ugly was a Big Ugly, and no more needed to be said. The Tosevites themselves, though, evidently saw things differently.

  These Tosevites had stripped off the tunics that covered the upper parts of their bodies. The metabolic water they used for bodily cooling glistened on their hides. As far as they were concerned, it was hot.

  To Teerts, the temperature was comfortable, though he found the air far too moist to suit him. Still, the humidity in this Florida place was the only thing about its weather he didn’t care for. He’d spent winters in Manchuria and Nippon. Next to them, Florida seemed wonderful.

  A couple of armorers began loading the munitions onto Teerts’ klllercraft. He looked at the load. “Only two air-to-air missiles?” he said unhappily.

  The senior armorer said, “Be thankful you’ve got two, superior sir.” He was a solid fellow named Ummfac. Though he was nominally subordinate to the killercraft pilots, wise ones treated him and his ilk as equals—and often got better loads because of it. Now he went on, “Pretty soon it’ll be nothing but cannon fire, we and the Big Uglies hammering away at each other from short range.”

  “There’s a nasty thought,” Teerts said. He sighed. “You’re probably right, though. That’s the way the war seems to be going these days.” He patted the skin of the killercraft’s fuselage. “The Emperor be praised that we still fly superior aircraft.”

  “Truth,” Ummfac said. “There’s the question of spares even with them . . . “

  Teerts climbed up into the cockpit and snuggled down in the armored, padded seat as if he were a hatchling curling up inside the eggshell from which he’d just emerged. He didn’t want to think about problems with spares. Already, the Big Uglies were flying aircraft far more dangerous to his machine than they had been when the Race first came to Tosev 3.

  He laughed again, bitterly. The Big Uglies weren’t supposed to have been flying any aircraft. They were supposed to have been pretechnological barbarians. As far as he was concerned, barbarians they were: no one who’d ever been in Nipponese captivity could possibly argue with that. Pretechnological, however, had turned out to be another matter.

  He went through his preflight checklist. Everything was as it should have been. He stuck a finger into the space between a loose piece of padding and the inner wall of the cockpit. No one had found his vial of ginger. That was good. The Nipponese had addicted him to the herb while he lay in their hands. After he’d escaped from captivity, he’d discovered how many of his fellow males tasted it of their own accord.

  He called the local flight controller, got permission to take off. The twin turbofans in the killercraft roared to life. The vibration and noise went all through him, a good and familiar feeling.

  He taxied down the runway, then climbed steeply, acceleration shoving him back hard into his seat. His horizon expanded marvelously, as it did whenever he went airborne. He enjoyed that expansion less than he had from other bases, though, for it soon brought into view the ruins of Miami.

  Teerts had been flying down to Florida when that area went up in an appalling cloud. Had he been a little ahead of himself, the fireball might have caught him, or the blast might have wrecked his killercraft or flipped it into a spin from which it never would have recovered.

  Even thinking about that squeezed an alarmed hiss from him. Of itself, his hand started to reach for the little plastic vial of powdered ginger. When he was reassigned to the lesser continental mass, he’d wondered if he would still be able to get the powdered herb he craved. But a good many males on the Florida base used it, and the dark-skinned Big Uglies who labored for the Race seemed to have an unending supply. They hadn’t yet asked him for anything more than trinkets, little electronic gadgets he could easily afford to give up in exchange for the delights ginger brought him.

  But—“I will not taste now,” he said, and made his hand retreat. However good ginger made him feel, he knew it clouded his judgment. Engaging the Big Uglies wasn’t so easy or so safe as it had once been. If you went at them confident you’d have things all your own way no matter what, you were liable to end up with your name on the memorial tablet that celebrated the males who had perished to bring Tosev 3 into the Empire.

  Rabotev 3 and Halless 1 had such tablets at their capitals; he’d seen holograms of them before setting out from Home. The one on Halless 1 had only a few names, the one on Rabotev 2 only a few hundred. Teerts was sure the Race would set up memorial tablets for Tosev 3; if they’d done it on the other worlds they’d conquered, they’d do it here. If you didn’t maintain your traditions, what point to having a civilization?

  But the memorial tablets here would be different from those of the other two habitable worlds the Race had conquered. “We can set up the tablets, then build the capital i
nside them,” Teerts said. In spite of himself, his mouth fell open. The image was macabre, but it was also funny. The memorial tablets to commemorate the heroes who fell in the conquest of Tosev 3 would have a lot of names on them.

  Teerts flew his prescribed sweep, north and west over the lesser continental mass. A lot of the territory over which he passed was still in the hands of the local Big Uglies. Every so often, antiaircraft fire would splotch the air below and behind him with black puffs of smoke. He didn’t worry about that; he was flying too high for the Tosevites’ cannon to reach him.

  He did keep a wary eye turret turned toward the radar presentation in his head-up display. Intelligence said the Americans lagged behind the British and the Deutsche when it came to jet aircraft, and they mostly used their piston-and-airfoil machines for ground attack and harassment duties, but you never could tell . . . and Intelligence wasn’t always as omniscient as its practitioners thought. That was another painful lesson the Race had learned on Tosev 3.

  Here and there, snow dappled the higher ground. As far as Teerts was concerned, that was as good a reason as any to let the Big Uglies keep this part of their world. But if you let them keep all the parts where snow fell, you’d end up with a depressingly small part of the world to call your own.

  He drew nearer the large river that ran from north to south through the heart of the northern half of the lesser continental mass. The Race controlled most of the territory along the river. If his aircraft got into trouble, he had places where he could take refuge.

  The large river marked the westernmost limit of his planned patrol. He was about to swing back toward Florida, which, no matter how humid it was, did at least enjoy a temperate climate, when his forward-looking radar picked up something new and hideous.

  Whatever it was, it took off from the ground and rapidly developed more velocity than his killercraft had. For a moment, he wondered if something inside his radar had gone wrong. If it had, would the base have the components it needed to fix the problem?