Upsetting the Balance (16 page)

Down the road, swiftly drawing nearer, came a rising cloud of dust. Its speed meant motor vehicles were kicking it up, and motor vehicles, in these days, meant little scaly devils. Nieh did not break his stride. His submachine gun was hidden in the blanket roll he carried slung over one shoulder. He could get at it in a hurry if he had to, but hoped the occasion would not arise. Motor vehicles were usually armored against weapons like his.

Hsia walked along as nonchalantly as he did. They stepped off the road into the field beside it when the vehicle—a troop carrier—sped past. Had they not moved, Nieh thought, the driver would have run them down: what were peasants to an imperialist aggressor, especially one of alien race?

“What we ought to have,” Hsia said thoughtfully, “is more land mines. The little devils would lose some of their arrogance if they had to worry about blowing up as they barreled down the road.”

“We have people manufacturing some of them,” Nieh answered. “If we want to get them fast and in quantity, though, we’d do best to dicker with the Japanese. They don’t have many vehicles of their own left in this part of China, so they shouldn’t mind trading us some mines. I wonder what we’d have to give in exchange. Food, probably. They’re always hungry.”

“As if we aren’t.” But Hsia nodded. After a few seconds, he nodded again, for a different reason: “You’re right, Comrade—this
is
a complicated war.”

Heinrich Jäger felt like a soccer ball, with the continent of Europe his pitch. Since the war started in 1939, he’d been to just about every corner of it: Poland, France, the Soviet Union, France again, back to Germany, Croatia, France one more time . . . and now Germany again.

He turned to Kurt Diebner, who stood beside him on the walls of Schloss Hohentübingen. “Professor, I tell you again that I am not needed for this recovery operation. I would be of far more use to the
Vaterland
leading panzer troops against the Lizards.”

Diebner shook his head. “It has to be you, Colonel,” the physicist said, running a hand through his greasy, dark brown hair. “We need someone with a military background to supervise those engaged in recovering the material from the failed pile down in Hechingen, and you also have the required security clearances. We prefer you to anyone from the
Schutzstaffel,
and the SS itself has no objection to your employment. So you see—” He beamed at Jäger through thick, black-rimmed spectacles and spread his hands, as if he’d just proved some abstruse piece of math relating to quantum mechanics.

The explanation made sense to Jäger, which did not mean he liked it. He wondered how he’d got a good character from the SS: Otto Skorzeny’s doing, most likely. Skorzeny no doubt thought he was doing him a favor. Jäger supposed it
was
a favor, but having Himmler’s approval, however useful it might be, was also slightly chilling.

Jäger also noted the bloodless language Diebner used: the “failed pile” twenty kilometers south in Hechingen had poisoned a good stretch of the local landscape, and would have poisoned Tübingen, too, had the wind been blowing out of the south rather than from the north and west after the accident. Soldiers talked the same way; they spoke of “maintaining fire discipline” when they meant not shooting until the enemy was right on top of you.

A Geiger counter sat on the wall between Jäger and Diebner. It rattled away, a good deal more quickly than it would have had everything gone right in Hechingen. Diebner insisted the level of radiation they were getting wasn’t dangerous. Jäger hoped he knew what he was talking about. Of course, nobody had thought the pile would go berserk before it did, either.

Diebner glanced down at the Geiger counter. “It’s good enough,” he said. Maybe he needed to reassure himself every so often, too.

“Good enough for us, yes,” Jäger said. “What about the poor devils who’re getting that stuff out of there?” Getting pulled away from the front line was one reason he hated the assignment here. Having to deal with the men who went into Hechingen to recover uranium from the pile was another.

Kurt Diebner shrugged. “They are condemned by the state,” he said, as if he were Pilate washing his hands. “If this did not happen to them, something else would.”

Nothing like this,
Jäger started to say, but the words did not cross his lips. Some of the men who went into the underground chamber with shovels and lead boxes wore pink triangles on their striped uniforms; others wore six-pointed yellow stars. In the
Reich,
anything was liable to happen to Jews and homosexuals.

“You have of course told them the sickness from which they are suffering is only temporary, and that they will make a full recovery,” Diebner said.

“Yes, I’ve told them?the first group, and then the ones who replaced them when they got too sick to work.” No one had argued with Jäger when he spoke what he knew to be a lie. The thin, weary men just stared back at him. They didn’t believe a word he said. He didn’t blame them.

Diebner shifted uncomfortably. Like Jäger, he was a fairly decent man in a nation whose regime did horrible things as a matter of course. If you weren’t directly involved in them, you could pretend they weren’t there. Even if you were directly involved, pretending not to see was one way of preserving in your own mind your sense of personal decency. Very few
Wehrmacht
officers admitted to knowing what the SS had done to Jews in Poland and Russia; Jäger hadn’t admitted it to himself until a Russian Jew rubbed his nose in it.

Diebner said, “If we do not recover the nuclear material, Colonel Jäger, we are all the more likely to lose the war against the Lizards, at which point all ethical arguments become irrelevant. Whatever we must do to get it back, we have to have it.”

Jäger turned his back and walked several paces along the parapet. Arguments from military necessity were hard to refute, and losing the war against the Lizards would be disastrous not just for Germany but for mankind as a whole. And yet—Jäger took the physicist by the arm. “When you say these things, Professor, you should know firsthand whereof you speak. Come along with me.”

Diebner was not a small man, nor a weak one. He hung back, protesting, “This is not my concern; it is why we had you brought here. My business is with the nuclear pile itself.”

Though a couple of centimeters shorter than the nuclear physicist, Jäger was wider through the shoulders and better trained at wrestling. Not only that, his will burned hotter. He frog-marched the reluctant Diebner off the wall and down into the bowels of Schloss Hohentübingen.

The castle’s cellar was a different world from the light and fresh air of the wall. It was dank and gloomy; somewhere out of sight, water dripped continuously. A startled bat dropped from the roof and flew chittering between Jäger and Diebner. The physicist jumped back with a startled oath. Jäger wasn’t dragging him along any more, but he followed nonetheless; officers learned ways to get themselves obeyed.

In happier times, the cellar had contained a monster wine cask that held 300,000 liters of Burgundy. The cask was gone now, probably chopped into firewood. In its place were the miserable cots of the prisoners who got the uranium out of the pile at Hechingen.

“Faugh!” Diebner said, a noise of disgust.

Jäger wrinkled his nose, too; the cellar stank, not least because the only sanitary arrangements were some buckets off in a corner. Not everything went into the buckets, either. Jäger said, “One of the symptoms many of these people seem to have is diarrhea.”

“Yes, I knew of this in principle,” Diebner said in a small voice that suggested he was much more used to dealing with abstract principles than this reeking reality.

“Ah.” Jäger clicked his heels in exquisite irony. “Are you also aware—in principle, of course—of the other symptoms this work brings with it?’

“Which ones do you mean?” the physicist asked. “The burns from actually handling the metal, the loss of hair, the bleeding gums and nausea? I am familiar with these, yes, and also with the cancer that is likely to result some years from now as a result of this exposure. I know these things, Colonel.”

“You know of them,” Jäger said coldly. “Here—see what they do to real people who are not just abstracted principles.”

A man with a pink triangle on the front of his striped shirt was spooning cabbage soup into the mouth of a Jew who lay on a straw pallet, too sick to get up. When the Jew retched and coughed up the soup, the homosexual held his head so he would not foul himself too badly, then got a rag and put it on the patch of vomit. Then he started trying to feed the Jew again.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Jäger insisted. “Maybe we do have to use condemned people, as you call them, for this work, but we don’t have to make their lot worse by treating them like beasts of burden.”

Diebner nodded to the several wooden platforms that had been built around the edges of the cellar—incongruously, they reminded Jäger of the lifeguards’ stands by a lakeshore or along a popular stretch of riverbank. Each held, not a lifeguard in white tank top and colorful trunks, but a uniformed, helmeted guard who cradled a submachine gun. Quietly, the physicist said, “Without coercion, this work would not be done?and it
must
be done. For that matter, neither the guards nor we are entirely safe.”

Jäger looked at him sharply. “How do you mean?”

“How do you think, Colonel?” Diebner answered. “We, too—and the guards—are exposed to these radioactive materials, at lower levels than the prisoners, yes, but certainly exposed. What the long-term consequences of this may be, I cannot say with certainty, but I doubt they will be good. We have lined the roof of this cellar with lead to keep the Lizards from detecting the radioactivity gathered here; that we are close to Hechingen will help account for a higher level than might otherwise be expected, and gives us some added security.”

“I—see,” Jäger said. He rubbed his chin, remembering the raid in which he, along with Russians and other Germans, had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards, and remembering riding across Poland with the German share of the explosive metal stowed in lead-lined saddle bags. He wondered what he’d done to himself in the service of the
Reich.

The classically trained part of him thought of Prometheus, who’d stolen fire from the gods and brought it down to mankind. Zeus had chained Prometheus to a rock, with a vulture gnawing at his liver. The gods weren’t much in the habit of manifesting themselves these days, but Jäger wondered what might be gnawing at his own entrails.

Despairingly, Teerts turned his eye turrets toward the heavens. Those heavens remained empty, silent if they remained so much longer, he would either starve or be recaptured—or use the one shot he was sure he could fire from his Nipponese rifle.

He counted himself lucky not to have been recaptured already. So much of the train on which he’d been riding had gone up in flames. However savage and backwards they were, though, the Big Uglies were not stupid enough to take his demise for granted. A search would be mounted. Teerts was gloomily certain of that.

A little stream tinkled by the stand of brush where he was holed up; at night he could come out to drink. He’d caught a couple of crawling and scurrying things and eaten them raw, but hunger gained on him regardless. He did his best to remember how used to hunger he’d got while the Nipponese were mistreating him, but it wasn’t easy.

He hungered for ginger, too, all the way down to the depths of his spirit.

Every once in a while, when he saw no Tosevites around, he emerged from the shrubbery during daylight, to show himself for aircraft or satellites that might be passing overhead. If they’d spotted him, they’d certainly given no sign of it.

Now he lay curled up in a nest he’d made of branches and twigs and dry leaves. It was the sort of thing in which an animal might live, not a male of the Race. The Nipponese had done their best to make him into an animal, and failed. Now he was doing it to himself.

A noise in the sky—Teerts’ head came up, but only for a moment. Some of the flying creatures of Tosev 3 were noisy as they made their way through the air. His hearing diaphragms stretched tight with hope, he’d mistaken their wingbeats for the thutter of a rescue helicopter again and again. He couldn’t fool himself any more.

But this sound swelled and swelled. Teerts jumped to his feet, crying the Emperor’s name. From above, in a voice like thunder, came a call in his own language: “Male of the Race, show yourself! This is hostile airspace; we cannot stay long!” The accent was pure and clean—that of Home. Teerts had been listening to the mushy, barking way the Nipponese mangled his speech for so long, he needed a moment to recognize this was how it should be spoken.

He sprang from cover, waved his arms frantically, and did everything but turn backflips in the wild effort to make himself as visible as he could. His swiveling eyes caught sight of the helicopter—and one of the crewmales saw him, too, and the big, ungainly, ever so beautiful machine swung in his direction. Its rotor kicked up gravel and dust; nictitating membranes slid across his eyes to protect them from flying grit.

The helicopter hovered, its landing wheels not quite touching the ground. Its side door came open; a male inside let down a chain-link ladder. Teerts was already running toward the copter. He scrambled aboard. “We’ve got him!” the male shouted to the pilot and weapons officer in their cockpit forward.

The fellow hauled in the ladder, slammed and dogged the door. The helicopter was already gaining altitude and scurrying out toward the sea. “Thank you!” Teerts gasped. “The Emperor grant you bounty. You don’t know—”

“Don’t thank me yet,” the crewmale answered. He hurried to a machine gun that stuck out one of the windows. “We’re a long way from safe. We’ve got a killercraft overhead, but if the Big Uglies send enough aircraft after us, they’re liable to catch up with us and shoot us down. They’re a lot faster than we are.” He turned one eye back toward Teerts. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Teerts, killercraft pilot and flight leader,” Teerts answered. Stating his specialization and rank made him consciously aware for the first time in a very long while that he was without his body paint. That didn’t seem to bother his rescuer, who said, “Good. You know how to handle one of these things, then.” He patted the machine gun. “In case I get hit, keep shooting till we go into the water.”