Striking the Balance (40 page)

The next day, he was too busy to worry about it. A Lizard counterattack drove the German forces west six or eight kilometers. Panzers in the regiment went from machinery to burnt and twisted scrap metal, a couple from the fire of Lizard panzer cannon, the rest because of the antipanzer rockets the Lizard infantry carried. The only Lizard panzer killed was taken out by a
Wehrmacht
private in a tree who dropped a Molotov cocktail down into the turret through the open cupola when the panzer clattered by below him. That happened toward sunset, and seemed to halt the Lizards’ push all by itself. They didn’t like losing panzers these days.

“We have to do better,” he told his men as they ate black bread and sausage that night. “We got flank targets, but we weren’t hitting them. Can’t make many mistakes like that, not unless we want to get buried here.”

“But,
Herr Oberst,”
somebody said, “when they move, they can move so damned fast, they’re by us before we have a chance to react.”

“Good thing we had defense in depth, or they would have cracked us wide open,” somebody else said. Jäger nodded, pleased at the way the troops were hashing things out for themselves. That was how German soldiers were supposed to operate. They weren’t just ignorant peasants who followed orders without thinking about them, as Red Army men did. They had brains and imaginations, and used them.

He was about to curl up in his bedroll under his Panther when Skorzeny showed up in camp. The SS man was toting a jug of vodka he’d found God only knew where, and passed it around so everybody got a nip. It wasn’t good vodka—the taste put Jäger in mind of stale kerosene—but it was better than no vodka.

“Think they’re going to hit us again in the morning?” Skorzeny asked.

“Won’t know for certain till then,” Jäger answered, “but if I had to guess, I’d say no. They’d have kept pressing harder after it got dark if that was what they had in mind. These days, they push when they think they’ve found a weakness, but they ease up when we show strength.”

“They can’t afford the kind of losses they get when they go up against a strongpoint,” Skorzeny said shrewdly.

“I think you’re right.” Jäger glanced over at the SS man in the darkness. “We could have used that nerve gas here at the front.”

“Ahh, you’d say that even if things were quiet,” Skorzeny retorted. “It’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, right where it is.” He grunted. “I want your wireless people to be alert for any intercepts they pick up about that, too. If the Lizards don’t burn up the airwaves, I’ll eat my hat.”

“That’s fine.” Jäger yawned enormously. “Right now, I’m alert for sleep. You want to crawl in under here? Safest place you can be if they start shelling again. I know damn well you snore, but I suppose I can live with it.”

Skorzeny laughed. Gunther Grillparzer said, “He’s not the only one who snores—sir.” Betrayed by his own gunner, Jäger settled in for the night.

Spatters of small-arms fire woke him a couple of times. They picked up at dawn, but, as he’d predicted, the Lizards were more interested in consolidating what they’d gained the day before than in pushing on against stiffening resistance.

Otto Skorzeny hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted the wireless men to stay alert. He made sure they did, hanging around them and regaling them with what seemed like an endless stream of dirty stories. Most of them were good dirty stories, too, and some were even new to Jäger, who’d thought he’d heard every story of that sort ever invented.

As morning gave way to afternoon, Skorzeny’s temper began to wear thin. He paced through the camp, kicking up dirt and sending spring flowers flying. “Damn it, we should have intercepted something from the Jews or the Lizards in Lodz by now!” he stormed.

“Maybe they’re all dead,” Jäger suggested. The notion horrflied him, but might ease Skorzeny’s mind.

But the big SS man shook his head. “Too much to hope for. Somebody always lives through these things by one kind of fool luck or another.” Jäger thought of Max, the foulmouthed Jew who’d lived through Babi Yar. Skorzeny was right. He went on with a muttered, “No, something’s gone south somewhere.”

“You think the timer didn’t work the way it should have?” Jäger asked.

“I suppose it is possible,” Skorzeny allowed, “but fry me for a
schnitzel
if I ever heard of one of them failing before. They aren’t just foolproof, they’re idiotproof, and the gadget had a backup. We send out a goody like that, we want to make sure it works as advertised.” He chuckled. “That’s what people who don’t like us so well call German efficiency, eh? No, the only way that bomb could have failed would have been—”

“What?” Jäger said, though he had an idea as to what. “As you say. If it had a backup timer, it was going to go off.”

“The only way that bomb could have failed—” Skorzeny repeated musingly. His gray eyes went very wide. “The only way that bomb could have failed would have been for that stinking little kike to pull the wool over my eyes, and dip me in shit if he didn’t do it!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “The bastard! The fucker! The nerve of him! Next time I see him, I’ll cut off his balls one at a time.” Then, to Jäger’s amazement, he started to laugh. “He played me for a sucker. I didn’t think any man alive could do that. I’d like to shake his hand—
after
he’s castrated, not before. You think
stupid kike
and you take it for granted, and this is what it gets you. Jesus Christ!”

Also a Jew,
Jäger thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he asked, “What now? If the Jews in Lodz know what it is”—
and if they do, or guess, it’s thanks to me, and how do I feel about that?
—“they’ve got their hands on something they can use against us.”

“Don’t I know it.” Skorzeny sounded disgusted, maybe with the Jews, maybe with himself. He wasn’t used to failing. Then he brightened. For a moment, he looked like his old, devilish self. “Maybe we can plaster the place with rockets and long-range artillery, hope to blow up the damned thing that way, at least deny the Jews the use of it.” He made an unhappy clucking noise. “It’s bloody long odds, though.”

“Too true,” Jäger said, as if sympathetically. “Those rockets pack a decent punch, but you can’t tell for sure whether they’ll hit the right town, let alone the right street.”

“I wish we had some of the toys the Lizards know how to make,” Skorzeny said, still discontented with the world. “They don’t just hit the right street. They’ll pick a room for you. Hell, they’ll fly into a closet if that’s what you want.” He scratched at his chin. “Well, one way or another, those Jews are going to pay. And when they do, I’ll be the one who collects.” He sounded very sure of himself.

Off in the next room at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, there were so many car batteries that they’d had to reinforce the floor to take the weight. Among the Lizard gadgets they powered was the radio set taken from the shuttlecraft that had brought Straha down to Earth when he defected to the United States.

Now he and Sam Yeager sat in front of that radio, flipping from one frequency to another in an effort to monitor the Lizards’ signals and find out what the Race was up to. Right now, they weren’t picking up much anywhere. Straha had the leisure to turn to Yeager and ask, “How many of our males do you have engaged in the practice of espionage and signal gathering?”

“Numbers? Who knows?” Sam answered. If he had known, he wouldn’t have told Straha. One of the things he’d had drilled into him was that you didn’t tell anybody, human or Lizard, anything he didn’t have to know. “But a lot of them, a lot of the time. Not many of us Big Uglies”—he used the Lizards’ nickname for mankind unselfconsciously—“speak your language well enough to follow without help from one of you.”

“You, Sam Yeager, I think you could succeed at this,” Straha said, which made Sam feel damn good. He thought he could have gained even more fluency in the Lizards’ language if he hadn’t also had to spend time with Robert Goddard. On the other hand, he would have learned more about rockets if he hadn’t had to spend time with Straha and the other Lizard POWs.

And he would have learned more about his baby son if he hadn’t been in the Army. That would have kept Barbara happier, too; he worried about not seeing her enough. There weren’t enough hours in a day, in a year, in a lifetime, to do all the things he wanted to do. That was true all the time, but trying to keep up during a war rubbed your nose in it.

Straha touched the frequency-advance toggle. The Lizard numbers in the display showed that the radio was now monitoring a frequency a tenth of a megacycle higher (or rather, something that worked out to be about an eighth of a megacycle—the Lizards naturally used their own units rather than those of mankind). A male’s voice came out of the speaker.

Yeager leaned forward and listened intently. The Lizard was apparently in a rear area, and complaining about rockets falling nearby and disrupting resupply efforts for the troops pushing toward Denver. “That’s good news,” Sam said, scribbling notes.

“Truth,” Straha agreed. “Your ventures into uncharted technology are paying a handsome profit for your species. If the Race were so innovative, Tosev 3 would long since have been conquered—provided the Race had not blown itself to radioactive dust in innovative frenzy.”

“You think that’s what we would have done if you hadn’t invaded?” Sam asked.

“It is certainly one of the higher probabilities,” Straha said, and Yeager was hard-pressed to disagree with him. The ex-shiplord flipped to a new frequency. The Lizard talking now sounded angry as all get-out. “He is ordering the dismissal, demotion, and transfer of a local commander in a region called Illinois,” Straha said. Yeager nodded. The Lizard went on, “Where is this Illinois place?”

Sam showed him on a map. He was listening, too. “Something about letting a pack of prisoners escape or get rescued or something. The fellow who’s cursing him is really doing quite a job, isn’t he?”

“If said snout-to-snout, telling a male that someone shit in his egg before it hatched is guaranteed to start a fight,” Straha said.

“I believe it.” Sam listened to the radio some more. “They’re moving that incompetent officer to—upstate New York.” He wrote it down. “That’s worth knowing. With luck, we’ll be able to take advantage of his weaknesses over there, too.”

“Truth,” Straha said again, this time in bemused tones. “You Big Uglies aggressively exploit the intelligence you gather, and you gather great quantities of it. Do you do this in your own conflicts as well?”

“Don’t know,” Yeager answered. “I’ve never been in a war before, and I’m only a little fellow in this one.” He thought back to his ballplaying days, and to all the signs he and his teammates had stolen. Mutt Daniels was a genius at that kind of thing. He wondered how—and if—Mutt was doing these days.

Straha shifted to yet another frequency. An excited-sounding Lizard was relaying a long, involved message. “Ah, that is most interesting,” Straha said when he was done.

“I didn’t follow all of it,” Sam confessed, embarrassed at having to say that after Straha had praised his grasp of the Lizards’ tongue. “Something about ginger and calculator fraud, whatever that is.”

“Not calculator fraud—computer fraud,” Straha said. “I do not blame you for not understanding completely. You Big Uglies, while technically far more advanced than you have any business being, as yet have no real grasp of the potential of computing machines.”

“Maybe not,” Yeager said. “Sounds like we don’t have any grasp of how to commit crimes with them, either.”

Straha’s mouth dropped open in amusement. “Committing the crime is easy. Males in the payroll section diverted payments to ginger purveyors into accounts of which only they and the purveyors—and, of course, the computers—were aware. Since no one else knew these accounts existed, no one not party to the secret could access them. The computers would not announce their presence; it was, in essence, a perfect scheme.”

“We have a saying that there’s no such thing as a perfect crime,” Yeager remarked. “What went wrong with this one?”

Straha laughed again. “Nothing is accident-proof. A male in the accounting section who was not part of the miscreants’ scheme was investigating a legitimate account. But he made a mistake in entering the number of that account and found himself looking at one of the concealed ones. He recognized it at once for what it was and notflied his superiors, who began a larger investigation. Many males will find themselves in difficulties because of it.”

“Hope you won’t be angry if I tell you that doesn’t make me too unhappy,” Sam said. “Who would have thought the Race would turn out to have drug fiends? Makes you seem almost human—no offense.”

“I shall endeavor to take none,” Straha replied with dignity.

Yeager kept his face straight; Straha was getting pretty good at interpreting human expressions, and he didn’t want the Lizard to see how funny he thought that was. He said, “I wonder if we have any way to use the news, maybe make some of your people think males who aren’t ginger tasters really are. Something like that, anyhow.”

“You have an evilly twisted mind, Sam Yeager,” Straha said.

“Thank you,” Sam answered, which made Straha first jerk both eye turrets toward him and then start to laugh as he understood it was a joke. Yeager went on, “You might talk with some of our propaganda people, maybe ask if they want you to broadcast about it. Who knows what kind of trouble you might stir up?”

“Who indeed?” Straha said. “I shall do that.” It wasn’t quite
It shall be done,
the Lizards’ equivalent for
Yes, sir,
but it was more deference than Sam had ever got from Straha before. Little by little, he was earning respect.

When his shift was done, he started to go upstairs to see Barbara and Jonathan, but ran into Ristin and Ullhass in the hospital lobby. Those two Lizard POWs were old buddies; he’d captured them back in the summer of 1942, when the Lizard invasion was new and looked irresistible. By now, they seemed well on the way to becoming Americans, and wore their official U.S. prisoner-of-war red-white-and-blue body paint with considerable pride. They’d also picked up pretty good English over the last couple of years.