Tilting The Balance (16 page)

The machine just in front of Ussmak’s rolled over a mine and lost a track. As soon as it slewed to a stop, a concealed Tosevite machine gun opened up. The landcruisers again returned fire with cannon and machine guns.

The column was very late reaching its assigned destination.

Heinrich Jager paced through the cobblestoned streets of Hechingen. Up on a spur of the Schwa’bische Alb stood Burg Hohenzollern. Its turrets, seen mistily through fog, made Jager think of medieval epic, of maidens with long golden tresses and of the dragons that coveted them for their own dragonish reasons.

The trouble these days, however, was Lizards, not dragons. Jager wished he were back at the front so he could do something useful about them. Instead, he was stuck here with the best scientific minds of the Reich.

He had nothing against them: on the contrary. They were far more likely to save Germany – to save mankind – than he was. But they thought they needed him to help them do it, and in that, as far as he could see, they were badly mistaken.

He’d watched soldiers make the same kind of mistake. If a detachment from the quartermaster’s office brought a new model field telephone to the frontline soldiers, they were automatically seen as experts on the gadget, even if the only thing they knew about it was how to get it out of its crate.

So with him now. He’d helped steal the explosive metal from the Lizards, he’d hauled it across the Ukraine and Poland. Therefore, the presumption ran, he had to know all about it. Like a lot of presumptions, that one presumed too much.

Coming up the street toward him, munching on a chunk of black bread, was Werner Heisenberg. In spite of the bread, Heisenberg looked very much the academic: he was tall and serious-looking, with bushy hair combed straight back, fluffy eyebrows, and an expression mostly, as now,

abstracted.

“Herr Doktor Professor.” Jager said, touching the brim of his service cap. No matter how bored he was, he remained polite.

“Ah; Colonel Jager, good day. I did not see you.” Heisenberg chuckled uneasily. Being taken for the traditional absentminded professor had to embarrass him, not least because he really wasn’t that way. Up till now, he’d always seemed plenty sharp – and not just brilliant, which went without saying – to Jager. He went on, “I am glad to find you, though I must thank you again for the material you have given us to work with.”

“To serve the Reich is my pleasure and my duty,” Jager answered, politely still. If Heisenberg had ever seen combat, he didn’t show it. He could thank Jager for bringing the explosive metal, but he didn’t really know what that meant, or how much blood had been spilled to get him his experimental material.

He proceeded to prove that, saying, “A pity you could not have fetched us a bit more. Theoretical calculations indicate the amount we have is marginal for the production of a uranium explosive. Another three or four kilos would have been most beneficial.”

That did it. Jager’s boredom boiled away in fury. “Dr. Diebner had the courtesy to be grateful for what was provided rather than to complain about it. He also had the sense, sir” – Jager loaded the title with scorn-”to remember how, many lives were lost obtaining it.”

He’d hoped to make Heisenberg ashamed. Instead, he flicked him on his vanity. “Diebner? Ha! He has not even his Habilitation. He is, if you ask me, more tinkerer than physicist.”

“He knows what war entails, which is more than you seem to. And, by all accounts, he and his group are further along than yours in setting up the apparatus to produce more of this explosive metal for ourselves after we expend what we procured from the Lizards.”

“By no means is his work theoretically sound,” Heisenberg said, as if he were accusing the other physicist of embezzlement.

“I don’t care about theory. I care about results.” Jager automatically reacted like a soldier. “Without results, theory is irrelevant.”

“Without theory, results are impossible,” Heisenberg retorted. The two men glared at each other. Jager wished he hadn’t bothered to greet the physicist. By the expression on his face, Heisenberg wished the same thing.

Jager shouted, “The metal is more real to you than the men who fell getting it.” He wanted to clout Heisenberg down from his cloud, make him glimpse, however distantly, the world beyond equations. He also wanted to kick him in the teeth.

“I tried to express to you a civil good day, Colonel J a’ger,” Heisenberg said in tones of ice. “That you’return it to me with such, such recriminations I can take only as the mark of an unbalanced mind. Believe me, Colonel, I shall trouble you no further.” The physicist stalked off.

Still steaming, Jager stalked, too, in the opposite direction. He jumped and almost grabbed for his sidearm when someone said, “Well, Colonel, what was that in aid of?”

“Dr. Diebner!” Jager said. “You startled me.” He took his hand away from the flap of his holster.

“I shall try not to do that again,” Kurt Diebner said. “I can see it might not be healthy for me.” Where Heisenberg looked like a professor, Diebner at first glance seemed more likely to be a farmer. He was in his thirties, with a broad, fleshy face and a receding hairline which he emphasized by slicking down his dark hair with grease and combing it straight back. He wore his baggy suit as if he’d been out walking the fields in it. Only the thick glasses that showed how nearsighted he was argued for a different interpretation of his character.

Jager said, “I had a – disagreement with your colleague.”

“I saw that, yes.” Behind the glasses, amusement glinted in Diebner’s eyes. “I don’t believe I have ever seen Dr. Heisenberg so provoked; he normally cultivates an Olympian imperturbability. I came round the corner only for the tail end of the – disagreement, you said? – and was wondering what touched it off.”

The panzer colonel hesitated, since his compliments for Diebner had helped set Heisenberg off. At last he said, “I was concerned that Professor Heisenberg did not, ah, fully realize the difficulties in getting this metal to you nuclear physicists so you could exploit it.”

“Ah.” Diebner turned his head, peered this way and that; unlike Jager and Heisenberg, he was careful about who heard him speak. His big thick spectacles and their dark rims gave him the air of a curious owl. “Sometimes, Colonel Jager,” he said when he was sure the coast was clear, “from the top of the ivory tower it is hard to see the men struggling down in the mud.”

“This may be so.” Jager studied Diebner. “And yet – forgive me, Herr Doktor Professor – it seems to me, a colonel of panzers admittedly ignorant of all matter pertaining to nuclear physics, that you, too, dwell in this ivory tower.”

“Oh, I do, without a doubt.” Diebner laughed; his plump cheeks shook. “But I do not dwell on the topmost floor. Before the war, before uranium and its behavior became so important to us all, Professor Heisenberg concerned himself almost exclusively with the mathematical analysis of matter and its behavior. You have perhaps heard of the Uncertainty Principle which bears his name?”

“I’m sorry, but no,” Jager said.

“Ah, well.” Diebner shrugged. “Put me in charge of a panzer and I would be quickly killed. We all have our areas of expertise. My gift is in physics, too, but in experimenting to see what the properties of matter actually are. Then the theoreticians, of whom Professor Heisenberg is among the best, use these data to develop their abstruse conclusions over what it all means?”

“Thank you. You have clarified that for me.” Jager meant it – now he understood why Heisenberg had sneeringly called Diebner a tinkerer. The difference was something like the one between himself and a colonel of the General Staff. Jager knew he didn’t have the broad strategic vision he’d need to succeed as a man with the Lampassen – the broad red stripes that marked a General Staff officer – on his trousers. On the other hand, a General Staff officer wasn’t likely to have acquired the nuts-and-bolts knowledge (often in the literal sense of the words) to run a panzer regiment.

Diebner said, “Do try to bear with us, Colonel. The difficulties we face are formidable, not least because we are under such desperate pressure of time and strategy.”

“I follow,” Jager said. “I wish I were back with my unit, so I could use what I have learned to help hold the Lizards out of the Reich and let you complete your work. I am badly out of place here.”

“If you advance our building of the uranium bomb, you will have done more for the Reich than you could possibly accomplish in the field. Believe me when I say this.” Now Diebner looked earnest, like a farmer solemnly explaining how excellent his beets were.

“If.” Jager remained unconvinced that he could do anything useful here at Hechingen: he was about as valuable as oars on a bicycle. He came up with a plan, though, one that made him smile. Diebner smiled back; he seemed a very decent fellow. Jager felt a little guilty at going against him, but only a little.

When he got back to his quarters, he drafted a request to be returned to active duty. On the space in the form that asked his reason for seeking the transfer, he wrote, I am of no use to the physicists here. If confirmation is required please inquire of Professor Heisenberg.

He sent the request off with a messenger and awaited results. They were not long in coming – the application got approved faster than he had thought possible. Diebner and a couple of the other physicists expressed regret that he was leaving. Professor Heisenberg said not a word. He’d no doubt had his say to the office who’d called or telegraphed about Jager.

Maybe he thought he’d had his revenge. As far as J ager was concerned, the distinguished professor had done him a favor.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Lodz constantly put Moishe Russie in mind of the Twenty-third Psalm, and of that valley. Lodz, though, had only walked into the valley, not through it. The shadow of death still lay over the town.

In Warsaw, thousands in the ghetto had died of starvation and disease before the Lizards came. Starvation and disease had walked the streets of Lodz, too. But the Nazis hadn’t let them work alone here. They’d started shipping Jews off to their murder factories. Maybe the memory of those death transports was what made Lodz still seem caught in the grip of a nightmare.

Russie walked southeast down Zgierska Street toward the Balut Market square to buy some potatoes for his family. Up the street toward him came a Jewish policeman of the Order Service. His red-and-white armband bore a six-pointed black star with a white circle in the center, marking him as an underofficer. He had a truncheon on his belt and a rifle across his back. He looked like a tough customer.

But when Russie tugged at the brim of his hat in salute, the Order Service man returned the gesture and kept on walking. Emboldened, Russie turned and called after him: “How are the potatoes today?”

The policeman stopped. “They’re not wonderful, but I’ve seen worse,” he answered. Pausing to spit in the gutter, he added, “We all saw worse last year.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Russie said. He headed on down to the market while the Order Service man resumed his beat.

More policemen roamed the Balut Market square, to keep down thievery, maintain order – and cadge what they could. Like the underofficer, they still wore the emblems of rank they’d got from the Nazis.

That helped make Lodz feel haunted to Russie. In Warsaw the Judenrat – the Jewish council that had administered the ghetto under German authority – collapsed even before the Lizards drove out the Nazis. Its police force had fallen with it. Jewish fighters, not the hated and discredited police, kept order there now. The same held true in most Polish towns.

Not in Lodz. Here, the walls of the buildings that fronted the market square were plastered with posters of balding, white-haired Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. Rumkowski had been Eldest – puppet ruler – of Lodz’s Jews under the Nazis. Somehow, he was still Eldest of the Jews under the Lizards.

Russie wondered how he’d managed that. He must have jumped from the departing train to the arriving one at just the right instant. In Warsaw, there were stories that he’d collaborated with the Nazis. Russie had asked no questions of that sort since he got into Lodz. He didn’t want to draw Rumkowski’s attention toward him and his family. For all he knew, the Eldest would turn him over to Zolraag, the local Lizard governor.

He got into line for potatoes. The lines moved fast; the Order Service men saw to that. They were fierce and fussy at the same time, a manner they must have learned from the Germans. Some of them still wore German-style jackboots, too. As with the ghetto stars on their armbands, the boots raised Russie’s hackles.

When he reached the front of the line, such worries fell away. Food was more important. He held out a burlap bag and said, “Ten kilos of potatoes, please.”

The man behind the table took the bag, filled it from a bin, plopped it onto a scale. He’d had endless practice; it weighed ten kilos on the dot. He didn’t hand it back to Russie. Instead, he asked, “How are you going to pay? Lizard coupons, marks, zlotys, Rumkies?”

“Rumkies.” Russie pulled a wad of them out of his pocket. The fighter who’d driven him into Lodz had given him what seemed like enough to stuff a mattress. He’d imagined himself rich until he discovered that the Lodz ghetto currency was almost worthless.

The potato seller made a sour face. “If it’s Rumkies, you owe me 450.” The potatoes would have cost only a third as many Polish zlotys, the next weakest currency.

Russie started peeling off dark blue twenty-mark notes and blue-green tens, each printed with a Star of David in the upper left-hand corner and a cross-hatching of background lines that spiderwebbed the bills with more Magen Davids. Each note bore Rumkowski’s signature, which gave the money its sardonic nickname.

The potato seller made his own count after Moishe gave him the bills. Even though it came out right, he still looked unhappy. “Next time you come, bring real money,” he advised. “I don’t think we’re going to take Rumkies a whole lot longer.”

“But-” Russie waved to the ubiquitous portraits of the Jewish Eldest.