Striking the Balance (59 page)

“Sir?” The radioman’s voice came back thin and tiny over a hundred fifty yards of ground.

“We got a cease-lire with these Lizards?”

“Yes, sir. I was trying to tell you, sir, I just got the word when—”

Mutt turned back to Chook. The Lizard had already given him the word. He spoke formally to Chook, to make sure the alien knew he had it straight: “I hear you, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook. I understand you, too. We got us a cease-fire in place here, just like all over the U.S. of A, no time limit.”

“Truth,” Chook said. “This what we have. This cease-fire not only for you. Is also for SSSR”—Mutt needed a second to figure out he meant Russia—“and for Deutschland.” After going Over There, Daniels got that one fast.

“Lordy,” Mutt said in an awed voice. “You pile that all together, it’s half the world, pretty much.” He noticed something else, too. “You made truces with the countries that bombed you back when you bombed ’em.”

“Truth,” Chook said again. “Are we fools, to waste cease-fire on empires we have beaten?”

“Look at things from your end o’ the stick and I guess maybe you got a point,” Mutt admitted. He wondered what was going to happen to England. Chook hadn’t said a thing about the limeys, and Mutt had admired them ever since he’d seen them in action in France in the war that was supposed to end war. Well, the Lizards had tried invading them once, and got a clout in the snout for their trouble. Maybe they’d learned a lesson.

Chook said, “You are good fighters, you Big Uglies. I tell you that much. It is truth. We come to Tosev 3—this planet, this world—we think we will win and win fast. We not win fast. You fight good.”

“You’re no slouches your own selves.” Mutt half turned. “One of your boys, he shot me right there.” He indicated his left nether cheek.

“I am lucky. I am not shot. Many males who are my friends, they are shot,” Chook said. Mutt nodded. He knew about that. Every front-line soldier knew about that. Chook said, “We are fighters, you and I.” Mutt nodded again. Chook let loose with a hissing sigh, then went on, “I think now one time, now another time, fighters of Race, fighters at the tips of the tongue of the fight, these males more like Big Uglies at tips of tongue of fight than like other males far away. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?” He made a funny coughing noise after each question.

“Small-Unit Group Leader Chook, I hear you real good,” Mutt said. “I understand you real good, too. What do you say when something is just right? You say ‘truth,’ don’t you? That there’s truth, Chook.”

“Truth,” Chook agreed. He spoke into something not much bigger than a paperback book. Back at his line, Lizards started standing up and poking their noses out of cover.
He’s got a radio right there with him,
Mutt realized,
and so do all his troops. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Wish we could do the like.

He turned around and waved to his own men. One by one, they stood up, too. Of them all, Herman Muldoon was the last fellow to show himself. Mutt didn’t blame him a bit. He’d been shot at so many times by now, he probably had trouble believing this wasn’t some sort of trick Mutt would have, too, if he hadn’t already been standing out here all vulnerable in case the Lizards did aim to pull off something sneaky.

Warily, still holding weapons, humans and Lizards approached each other. Some of them tried to talk back and forth, though Chook’s males knew a lot less English than he did, and few Americans had much in the way of Lizard lingo. That was okay. You didn’t need a whole lot of talking to get across the idea that you weren’t trying to kill anybody right now, even if you had been a few minutes before. Mutt had seen that on truces in no-man’s-land in France in 1918. Only a few of his buddies had been able to talk with the
Boches,
but they’d got on well enough.

Of course, back then the Yanks (Daniels remembered how irate he’d been to find the French considering him a Yankee) and
Boches
had swapped smokes and rations when they met. He’d traded rations only once; as far as he was concerned, it was a miracle the Germans fought so damn hard on the slop they got to eat.

He didn’t figure he’d see anything like that here now. The Lizards didn’t smoke, and their rations were nastier than anything the
Boches
had had. But when he looked around, he saw some of his guys trading something with the aliens. What the devil did they nave that the Lizards wanted?

Chook was watching that, too, his eye turrets twisting every which way while his head hardly moved. Mutt wondered if he’d stop this unofficial commerce. Instead, after a minute or so, he said, “You, Second Lieutenant Daniels, have any of the fruit or small cakes with what you Big Uglies call
ginger
in them?”

A lighthulb went on in Mutt’s head. He’d heard the Lizards had a hell of a yen for the stuff. “ ‘Fraid I don’t, Small-Unit Group Leader,” he said, and it
was
too bad—no telling what sort of interesting stuff a Lizard might have to trade. “Looks like some of my boys do, though.”

As he spoke, he wondered why some of his boys were carrying around stuff with ginger in it. The only answer that came to mind was that they’d already been doing some trading with the Lizards on the sly. Any other time, that would have made him furious. When you looked at it after a cease-fire, though, how could you get excited about it?

“Yess. Truth,” Chook said. With an eager spring in his skittering stride, he hurried off to find out what the Americans did have for sale. Behind his back, Mutt Daniels smiled.

Fluffy white clouds floated lazily across a blue sky. The sun was high and, if not hot, pleasantly warm. It was a fine day for walking hand in hand with the girl you—loved? David Goldfarb hadn’t used the word with Naomi Kaplan, not out loud, but he thought it more and more often these days.

Naomi’s thoughts, on the other hand, seemed focused on politics and war, not love. “But you are in the RAF,” she said indignantly. “How could you not know whether we have got a cease-fire with the Lizards or have not got any such thing?”

He laughed. “How could I not know? Nothing simpler: they don’t tell rue. I don’t need to know to do my job, which is a good enough reason for not telling. All I know is what I want to know: I’ve not heard any Lizard aircraft—nor heard
of
any Lizard aircraft—over England since the cease-fire with the Yanks, the Russians, and the Nazis.”

“Then it is a cease-fire,” Naomi insisted. “It must be a cease-fire.”

Goldfarb shrugged. “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not. I admit, I don’t know of any of our planes heading off to bomb the Continent, either, but we’ve not done much of that lately anyhow; the loss rate got too beastly high to bear. Maybe it’s one of those informal arrangements: you don’t hurt me and I shan’t hurt you, but we’ll not put anything in writing for fear of admitting we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing—or not doing.”

Naomi frowned. “This is not right This is not proper. This is not orderly.” At that moment, she sounded very German. Goldfarb would sooner have bitten through his tongue than said so out loud. She went on, “The Lizards’ agreements with the other nations are formal and binding. Why not with us?”

“I told you I don’t know anything for certain,” Goldfarb said. “Will you listen to my guess?” When she nodded, he went on, “The Americans, the Russians, and the Nazis have all used super-bombs of the same type the Lizards have. We’ve not done that. In their eyes, maybe we don’t deserve a truce because we’ve not done it. But when they tried invading us, they found we weren’t a walkover. And so they leave us alone without saying they’re doing it.”

“This is possible, I suppose,” Naomi admitted after some serious thought. “But it is still not orderly.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “No matter what it is, though, I’m glad not to hear the air-raid sirens go off every day, or twice a day, or every hour on the hour.”

He waited to see if Naomi would say such an irregular schedule of raids was disorderly, too. Instead, she pointed to the bright red breast of a robin streaking through the air after a dragonfly.

“That’s the only kind of aircraft I want to see in the sky.”

“Hmm,” Goldfarb said. “I am partial to a nice flight of Meteors, but I’d be stretching things if I didn’t say you had a point.”

They walked on for a while, not talking, glad of each other’s company. It was very quiet. A bee buzzed from flower to flower in a field by the side of the road. Goldfarb noticed both the sound and the field without any vegetables growing in it: it had to be one of the few such so close to Dover.

Apparently apropos of nothing in particular, Naomi remarked, “My father and mother like you, David.”

“I’m glad,” he answered, which was true enough. Had Isaac and Leah Kaplan not liked him, he wouldn’t be out walking with their daughter now. “I like them, too.” That was also true to a large degree: he liked them about as well as a young man could like the parents of the girl he was courting.

“They think you have a serious mind,” Naomi went on.

“Do they?” Goldfarb said, a little more cautiously now. If by serious-minded they meant he wouldn’t try to seduce their daughter, they didn’t know him as well as they thought they did. He’d already tried that. Maybe they knew Naomi, though, because it hadn’t worked. And yet he hadn’t gone off in a huff because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Did that make him serious-minded? Maybe it did. He realized he had to say something more. “I think it’s good they don’t worry about where I’m from—or where my mother and father are from, I should say.”

“They think of you as an English Jew,” Naomi answered. “So do I, as a matter of fact.”

“I suppose so. I was born here,” Goldfarb said. He didn’t think of himself as an English Jew, though, not when his parents had fled here from Warsaw on account of pogroms before the First World War. German Jews had a way of looking down their noses at their Eastern European cousins. If Naomi met his parents, it would be quite plain they weren’t what she thought of as English Jews. If—Thoughtfully, he went on, “My father and mother would like you, too. If I get leave and you can get a day off from the pub, would you like to go up to London and meet them?”

“I would like that very much,” she replied. Then she cocked her head to one side and looked over at him. “How would you introduce me?”

“How would you like me to introduce you?” he asked. But Naomi shook her head; that one wasn’t for her to answer.
Fair enough,
he thought. He went on for another couple of paces before trying a slightly different question: “How would you like me to introduce you as my fiancée?”

Naomi stopped in her tracks. Her eyes went very wide. “You mean this?” she asked slowly. Goldfarb nodded, though his stomach felt as it sometimes had up in a Lancaster taking violent evasive action. Naomi said, “I would like this very much,” and stepped into his arms.

The kiss she gave him nailed his stomach firmly back in place, though it made his head spin. When one hand of his closed softly on her breast, she didn’t pull away. Instead, she sighed and held him tighter. Emboldened, he slid his other down from the small of her back to her right buttock—and, with a twirl as neat as a jitterbug dancer’s, she twisted away from him.

“Soon,” she said. “Not yet. Soon. We tell my parents. I meet your mother and father—and my mother and father will want to do the same. We find a rabbi to marry us. Then.” Her eyes glittered. “And I tell you this—you will not be the only one who is impatient.”

“All right,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go tell your father and mother now.” He turned and started toward Dover. The faster he cleared obstacles out of the way, the sooner she wouldn’t use that little twirl His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground all the way back to the city.

Mordechai Anielewicz’s voice came out flat as the Polish plain, hard as stone: “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

“Fine. Whatever you say.” The Polish farmer had been milking a cow when Anielewicz found him. He turned away from the Jewish fighting leader and back to the business at hand.
Siss! Siss! Siss!
Jets of milk landed in the dented tin pail. The cow tried to walk off. “Stay here, you stupid bitch,” the Pole growled.

“But see here, Mieczyslaw,” Mordechai protested. “It’s impossible, I tell you. How could the Nazis have smuggled an explosive-metal bomb into Lodz without us or the Lizards or the Polish Home Army knowing about it?”

“I don’t know anything about how,” Mieczyslaw answered. “I hear tell they’ve done it. I’m supposed to tell you somebody stayed at Lejb’s house in Hrubieszów. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t,” Anielewicz said with as much equanimity as he could muster. He didn’t want the Pole to know how shaken he was. Heinrich Jäger had stayed with a Jew named Lejb, all right, back when he was carrying explosive metal from the Soviet Union to Germany. The message had to be authentic, then; who else would know about that? It wasn’t even the sort of thing he’d have been likely to mention in a report. Cautiously, Mordechai asked, “What else have you heard?”

“It’s somewhere in the ghetto,” Mieczyslaw told him. “Don’t have any idea where, so don’t waste time asking. Hadn’t been for the cease-fire, all you kikes’d probably be toasting your toes in hell by now.”

“I love you, too, Mieczyslaw,” Anielewicz said. The Pole chuckled, not in the least put out. Mordechai kicked at the dirt.
“Gottenyu!
That man has balls the size of an elephant. The
chutzpah
it takes to try something like that—and the luck you need to get away with it . . . ”

“What man is that?” Mieczyslaw asked. Mordechai didn’t answer him. He hardly heard him. How had Skorzeny sneaked an explosive-metal bomb past everybody and into Lodz? How had he got it into the Jewish quarter? How had he got out again afterwards? All good questions, the only trouble being that Mordechai had answers for none of them.

One other question, of course, overrode all of those.
Where was the bomb?

He worried at it every step of the way back to Lodz, like a man worrying with his tongue at a piece of gristle stuck between two molars. The gristle was still stuck when he strode into the fire station of Lutomierska Street. Solomon Gruver was fiddling with the fire engine’s motor. “Why the long face?” he asked, looking up -from his work.