Upsetting the Balance (79 page)

“No. I understand this,” Moishe said. “Can you sail back to Gibraltar all under the sea?”

“We’ll use the diesels to charge the batteries,” the Royal Navy man answered. After a moment, Russie realized that wasn’t a fully responsive reply. The
Seanymph
had sailed into danger to take him and his family where they were supposed to go.

Stansfield was getting out the sextant when a sailor came down from the conning tower and said, “Sir, we’ve spotted a ship maybe half a mile to port. No sign she knows we’re anywhere about. Is that the one we want?”

“It’s not likely to be anybody else,” Stansfield said. “And if it happens to be, he won’t go telling tales out of school. We’ll make certain of that.” Moishe hadn’t heard the idiom before, and needed a moment to figure out what it meant. Yes, Stansfield was a military man—he talked with complete equanimity of killing people.

The
Seanymph
glided quietly toward the waiting ship. Moishe wished he could go up on deck to help, but realized he would be as much underfoot there as Reuven was down below. He hated waiting for others to decide his fate. That had happened too often in his life, and here it was again.

Shoes clattered on the rungs of the iron ladder that led up to the conning tower. “Captain’s compliments, sir, ma’am,” a sailor said, “and please to get your things and come along with me.” He actually said
fings
and
wiv,
but that didn’t bother Moishe, who had trouble with the
th
sound himself. He and Rivka grabbed their meager bundles of belongings and, shooing Reuven ahead of them, climbed up to the top of the conning tower.

Moishe peered out into the darkness. A tramp steamer bobbed alongside the
Seanymph.
Even in the darkness, even to Moishe’s inexperienced eye, it looked old and dingy and battered. Commander Stansfield came over and pointed. “There she is,” he said. “That’s the
Naxos.
She’ll take you the rest of the way to the Holy Land. Good luck to you.” He held out a hand. Moishe shook it

With a rattling of chains, the
Naxos
lowered a boat. Moishe helped his wife and son into it, then put in what they’d brought with them, and last of all climbed in himself. One of the sailors at the oars said something in a language he didn’t understand. To his amazement, Reuven answered in what sounded like the same language. The sailor leaned forward in surprise, then threw back his head and shouted loud laughter.

“What language are you speaking? Where did you learn it?” Moishe asked his son in Yiddish.

“What do you mean, what language?” Reuven answered, also in Yiddish. “He uses the same words the Stephanopoulos twins did, so I used some of those words, too. I liked playing with them, even if they were
goyim
.”

To Rivka, Moishe said, “He learned Greek.” He sounded almost accusing. Then he started to laugh. “I wonder if the Stephanopoulos boys speak Yiddish and surprise their mother.”

“They were using some of my words, too, Papa,” Reuven said. “It’s all right, isn’t it?” He seemed anxious, perhaps afraid he’d revealed too much to his friends. In the ghetto, you quickly learned giving yourself away was dangerous.

“It’s all right,” Moishe assured him. “It’s better than all right, in fact I’m proud of you for learning.” He scratched his head. “I just hope you won’t be the only one who can talk with these sailors.”

When they got up onto the
Naxos’
deck, the captain tried several languages with Moishe before discovering they had German in common. “Panagiotis Mavrogordato, that’s me,” he said, thumping his chest with a theatrical gesture. “They’re your enemies, they’re my enemies, and we have to use their tongue to talk with each other.” He spat on the deck to show what he thought of that.

“Now the Lizards are everyone’s enemies,” Moishe said. The Greek rubbed his chin, dipped his head in agreement, and spat again.

The
Seanymph
slid beneath the surface of the Mediterranean. That made the
Naxos
rock slightly in the water. Otherwise, there was no trace the submarine had ever been there. Moishe felt alone and very helpless. He’d trusted the British sailors. Who could say anything about the crew of a rusty Greek freighter? If they wanted to throw him over the side, they could. If they wanted to hand him to the first Lizards they saw, they could do that, too.

As casually as he could, he asked, “Where do we go from here?”

Mavrogordato started ticking off destinations on his fingers: “Rome, Athens, Tarsus, Haifa. At Haifa, you get off.”

“But  . . . ?” Was Mavrogordato trying to bluff him? “Rome is in the Lizards’ hands. Most of Italy is.”

“That’s why we go there.” Mavrogordato mimed licking something from the palm of his hand. “The Lizards there will be mighty
gamemeno
glad to see us, too.”

Moishe didn’t know what
gamemeno
meant. Reuven let out a shocked gasp and then a giggle, which told him what sort of word it was likely to be—not that he hadn’t figured that out for himself. Even without the word, he understood what the Greek was talking about. So he was running ginger, was he? In that case, the aliens
would
be glad to see him—and he was less likely to turn over a family of Jews to Lizard officialdom.

Mavrogordato went on, “They give us all kinds of interesting things in exchange for the”—he made that tasting gesture again—“we bring them, yes they do. We would have had a profitable trip already. And when the British paid us to carry you, too—” He bunched his fingertips together and kissed them. Russie had never seen anybody do that before, but he didn’t need a dictionary for it, either.

The captain of the
Naxos
led them to their cabin. It had one narrow bed for him and Rivka, with a pallet on the floor for Reuven. It was cramped and untidy. Next to the accommodations aboard the
Seanymph
they’d just left, it seemed like a country estate.

“Don’t turn on the light at night unless you shut the door and pull the blackout curtain over the porthole first,” Mavrogordato said. “If you make a mistake about that, we will be very unhappy with you, no matter how much the British paid us for you. Do you understand?” Without waiting for an answer, he squatted and spoke in slow, careful Greek to Reuven.

“Nee, nee,”
Reuven said—that’s what it sounded like to Moishe, anyhow. His son was obviously impatient at being talked down to, and added,
“Malakas,”
under his breath.

Mavrogordato’s eyes went wide. He started to laugh. Getting to his feet in a hurry, he said, “This is a fine boy you have here. He will make a fine man if you can keep from strangling him first. We’ll have rolls and bad tea for breakfast in a couple of hours, when the sun rises. Come join us then.” With a last dip of his head, he went out of the cabin.

Rivka shut the door and used the blackout curtain. Then she clicked on the light switch. A ceiling bulb in a cage of iron bars lit up the metal cubicle. The cage was much like the ones aboard the
Seanymph.
The bulb, though, made Moishe squint and his eyes water. It wasn’t—it couldn’t have been—as bright as Gibraltar sunshine, but it seemed that way.

Moishe looked around the cabin. It didn’t take long. But for rivets and peeling paint and a couple of streaks of rust, there wasn’t much to see. In his mind’s eye, though, he looked farther ahead. “Halfway there,” he said.

“Halfway there,” Rivka echoed.

“Mama, Papa, I have to make a
pish
,” Reuven said.

Moishe took his hand. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll find out where you do that here.”

Ussmak was dressed in more clothes than he’d ever worn in his life. Back on Home, he hadn’t worn anything beyond body paint and belts hung with pouches. That was the way you were supposed to go through life. But if he went out that door as if he were on Home, he’d freeze to death before he ever got to his landcruiser.

He turned an eye turret down toward the large, heavy gloves on his hands. “How are we supposed to do any sort of work on the machine in clumsy things like these?” he complained, not for the first time. “My grip has about as much precision as if I were using my tailstump.”

“We have to maintain the landcruiser, no matter how hard it is,” Nejas answered. The landcruiser commander was bundled up as thoroughly as Ussmak. “It has to be perfect in every way—no speck of dirt, no slightest roughness in the engine. If the least little thing goes wrong, the Big Uglies will swoop down and kill us before we even know they’re around.” He paused, then added, “I want a taste of ginger.”

“So do I, superior sir,” Ussmak said. He knew he’d probably saved Nejas’ life by giving him ginger when he was wounded in the invasion of Britain. But ginger fit Nejas’ personality only too well. He’d been a perfectionist before; now the least little flaw sent him into a rage. The herb also exaggerated his tendency to worry about everything and anything, especially after he’d been without it for a while.

A lot of males in this Emperor-forsaken frozen Soviet wasteland were like that. But for going on patrol and servicing their land-cruisers, they had nothing to do but sit around in the barracks and watch video reports on how the conquest of Tosev 3 was going. Even when couched in broadcasters’ cheerily optimistic phrases, those reports were plenty of incitement for any male in his right mind to worry about anything and everything.

“Superior sir, will this planet be worth having, once the war of conquest is over?” Ussmak asked. “The way things are going now, there won’t be much left to conquer.”

“Ours is not to question those who set strategy. Ours is to obey and carry out the strategy they set,” Nejas answered; like any proper male of the Race, he was as good a subordinate as a commander.

Maybe it was all the ginger Ussmak had tasted, maybe all the crewmales he’d seen killed, maybe just his sense that the Race’s broadcasters hadn’t the slightest clue about what the war they were describing was really like. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel like a proper male any more. He said, “Meaning no disrespect to the fleetlord and those who advise him, superior sir, but too much of what they’ve tried just hasn’t worked. Look what happened to us in Britain. Look at the poisonous gas and the atomic bombs the Big Uglies are using against us.”

Skoob was also climbing into the gear a male needed to survive in Siberia, the gear that turned quick death into prolonged discomfort. The gunner spoke in reproving tones: “The leaders know better than we what needs doing to finish the conquest of Tosev 3. Isn’t that right, superior sir?” He turned confidently to Nejas.

Skoob had come through the British campaign unwounded; he’d also managed to keep from sticking his tongue in the powdered ginger, though he turned his eye turrets the other way when his crewmales tasted. But for that toleration, though, he still seemed as innocent of the wiles of the Tosevites as all the males of the Race had been when the ships of the conquest fleet first came to Tosev 3. In a way, Ussmak envied him that. He himself had changed, and change for the Race was always unsettling, disorienting.

Nejas had changed, too—not as much as Ussmak, but he’d changed. With a hissing sigh, he said, “Gunner, sometimes I wonder what is in the fleetlord’s mind. I obey—but I wonder.”

Skoob looked at him as if he’d betrayed their base to the Russkis. He sought solace in work: “Well, superior sir, let’s make sure the landcruiser is in proper running order. If it lets us down, we won’t be able to obey our superiors ever again.”

“Truth,” Nejas said. “I don’t want to quarrel with you or upset you, Skoob, but I don’t want to lie to you, either. You’d think I was talking out of a video screen if I tried it.” He didn’t think much of the relentless good news that kept coming from the fighting fronts either, then.

Trying to keep the landcruiser operational was a never-ending nightmare. It would have been a nightmare even had Ussmak himself been warm. Frozen water in all varieties got in between road wheels and tracks and chassis and cemented them to one another. The intense cold made some metals brittle. It also made lubricants less than enthusiastic about doing their proper job. Engine wear had been heavy since the landcruiser was airlifted here, and spare parts were in constantly short supply.

As he thawed out the cupola lid so it would open and close, Ussmak said, “Good thing we have those captured machine tools to make some of our own spares. If it weren’t for that and for cannibalizing our wrecks, we’d never keep enough machines in action.”

“Truth,” Skoob said from back at the engine compartment So Ussmak thought, at any rate. The howling wind blew the gunner’s words away.

Ussmak took tiny, cautious sips of air. Even breathed through several thicknesses of cloth, it still burned his lungs. Little crystals of ice formed on the mask. His eyes, almost the only exposed part of him, kept trying to freeze open. He blinked and blinked and blinked, fighting to keep them working.

“Good enough,” Nejas said some endless time later. “What we really need is a flamethrower under the chassis of the landcruiser. Then we could melt the ice that freezes us to the ground in a hurry.”

The crew started back toward the barracks. Ussmak said, “I’ve been talking with some of the males who’ve been here a long time. They say this is bad, but local spring is a hundred times worse. All the frozen water melts—by the way they make that sound, it happens in the course of a day or two, but I don’t think that can be right—and whatever was on top of the ground sinks down into the mud. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can get it out again.”

“You served in the SSSR before, didn’t you?” Nejas said. “Did you see any of that for yourself?”

“I saw the mud in local fall, before I was hurt,” Ussmak answered. “That was bad. It just comes from rain falling on the ground, though. From all I’ve heard, the mud that comes in spring, when a winter’s worth of frozen water melts, is a lot worse.”

He looked around at the white expanse through which they slogged. A lot of the drifts were higher than a male was tall. Winter had a long way to go, too; all of Tosev 3’s seasons were twice as long as those of Home in any case, and here in Siberia winter seemed to rule most of the local year.