Upsetting the Balance (81 page)

“They tried pushing east into Croatia last year, and got their snouts bloodied for them,” Mavrogordato said. “But you’re right. Anybody who looks at a map can tell you as much. Hold Italy down and you’re halfway toward holding down the whole Mediterranean.”

“Mussolini didn’t have much luck with the whole Mediterranean,” Moishe said, “but we can’t count on the Lizards’ being as incompetent as he was.”

Captain Mavrogordato slapped him on the back, hard enough to stagger him. He spoke a couple of sentences in Greek before he remembered Russie didn’t know what he was talking about and shifted back to German: “We kicked the Italians right out of our country when they invaded us. The Nazis beat us, yes, but not those clowns.”

The difference between the Italians and the Germans was that between inept tyrants and effective ones. Inept tyrants roused only contempt. No one was contemptuous of the Germans, the Russians, or the Lizards. You could hate them, but you had to fear them, too.

Moishe said, “Ginger is the worst weakness the Lizards have, I think. A Lizard who gets a taste for ginger will—”

He broke off, a flash of light from the north distracting him. He wondered what it could be—it was as bright as the sun. And no, it wasn’t just a flash—it went from white to orange to red, a fireball swelling fantastically with each moment he stood there watching.

“Meter theou!”
Panagiotis Mavrogordato exclaimed, and crossed himself. The gesture didn’t bother Russie; he wished he had one to match it. The captain of the
Naxos
went on, “Did they hit an oil tanker between us and Rome? You’d think we would have heard the airplanes, or something.”

They did hear something just then, a roar that rocked Moishe harder than Mavrogordato’s slap on the back had a few minutes earlier. A great column of smoke, shot through with crimson flames, rose into the air. Moishe craned his neck to watch it climb.

Slowly, softly, he said, “I don’t think that was anything between us and Rome, Captain. I think that
was
Rome.”

For a moment, the Greek stared at him, blank incomprehension on his face. Then Mavrogordato crossed himself again, more violently than he had before. “Is it one of those terrible bombs?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

“I don’t know,” Moishe said. “I’ve never seen one before. But I don’t know what else it could be, either. Only the one blast and—that.” He nodded toward the glowing, growing cloud of dust and fire. “If God is kind, I’ll never see such a thing again.”

Captain Mavrogordato pointed out over the water. A large wave was approaching the
Naxos
at unnatural speed, as if flying through the air rather than being part of the sea. The freighter’s bow rose sharply, then plunged into the trough behind. The wave sped past them, out toward Corsica and Sardinia and Sicily. Moishe wondered if it would wash up against distant Gibraltar.

Mavrogordato shouted orders in Greek. The
Naxos’
engine began to work harder, the deck thrummed under Moishe’s feet and thick clouds of black smoke rose from the stack. Those clouds, though, were misshapen dwarfs when set alongside the one still swelling above Rome. Moishe could not tear his eyes away from that terrible beauty. He wondered how many people—and how many Lizards—had perished in the blast.

“There goes the Pope,” Mavrogordato said, one step ahead of him. “I’m no Catholic, but that’s a hell of a thing to do to him.”

How the Poles would wail when the news reached them! And, if they could find a way, they’d blame it on the Jews. This time, though, the Lizards and the Nazis looked to be much more likely candidates. Now, too, the Jews had guns (Moishe wondered briefly bow Mordechai Anielewicz fared these days). If the Poles started trouble, they’d get trouble back.

The bow of the
Naxos
began swinging away from what had been its destination. Russie glanced toward Mavrogordato, a question in his eyes. The merchant captain said, “Nobody’s going to take delivery of what we were bringing, not here, not now. I want to get as far away as I can, as fast as I can. If the Lizards were hunting ships before, what will they do after this?”

“Gevalt!”
Moishe said; he hadn’t thought of that.

Maybe the Greek had heard that bit of Yiddish before, or maybe tone and context let him figure out what it meant. He said, “It’ll be better once we get away from Italy; Lizard planes don’t range quite so widely in the eastern half of the Mediterranean as they do here. Only trouble is, I’m going to have to coal once before we make Athens. I would have done it at Rome, but now—”

“Will they let you go into an Italian port after this?” Moishe asked.

“Only one way to find out,” Mavrogordato answered, “and that’s to try it. I know some people—and some Lizards—in Naples. I could unload the ginger there,
theou thelontos,
and take on the fuel I need to get you to where you’re going. All we have to worry about is getting sunk before we make it that far. Well, friend, did you want life to be dull?”

“What difference does it make?” Moishe said. “Life hasn’t cared what I want ever since the war started.” After a moment’s thought, the Greek solemnly nodded.

Like all the other landcruiser drivers at the Siberian base, Ussmak had installed grids of electrically heated wire over his vision slits. They melted the frozen water that accumulated on the slits and let him see what he was doing. Nejas had mounted similar grids over the panoramic periscopes in the cupola. The local mechanics had slapped white paint on the landcruiser, too, to make it less visible as it ranged across the icy landscape.

Ussmak let his mouth fall slightly open in a bitter laugh. Making the landcruiser less visible was a long way from making it invisible. The Big Uglies might not realize it was there quite so soon as they would have otherwise, but they’d get the idea too quickly to suit him any which way.

“Steer a couple of hundredths closer to due south, driver,” Nejas said.

“It shall be done.” Ussmak adjusted his course. Along with two others, his landcruiser was rumbling down to smash a Soviet convoy trying to cross from one end of the break in their railroad to the other. The Russkis had probably hoped to get away with it while camouflaged by the usual Siberian blizzards, but a spell of good weather had betrayed them. Now they would pay.

Clear weather,
Ussmak corrected himself.
Not
good
weather
. From what the males unlucky enough to be longtimers at the base said, good weather in Siberia was measured in moments each long Tosevite year.

“Let’s slaughter them and get back to the barracks,” Ussmak said. “The faster we do that, the happier I’ll be.” He was warm enough inside the landcruiser, but the machine was buttoned up at the moment, too. If the action got heavy, Nejas, good landcruiser commander that he was, would open up the cupola and look around—and all that lovely heat would get sucked right out All the crewmales had on their cold-weather gear in case of that dreadful eventuality.

Wham!
Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the side of the head. The round from the Soviet landcruiser hadn’t penetrated the side armor of his own machine, but it did make the inside of the land-cruiser ring like a bell.

“Turn toward it!” Nejas shouted, flipping the cupola lid. Ussmak was already steering his landcruiser to the left—you wanted to meet enemy fire head on, to present your thickest armor to the gun. He knew they’d been lucky. Soviet landcruiser cannon could pierce some spots in the side armor.

He peered through his defrosted vision slits. It was already getting cold inside the landcruiser. Where among the dark, snow-draped trees and drifts of frozen water was the enemy lurking? He couldn’t spot the Big Uglies, not till they fired again. This time the round hit one of the other landcruisers, but did no damage Ussmak saw.

“Front!” Nejas sang out.

“Identified,” Skoob answered.

But instead of smoothly going on with the target-identifying routine, Nejas made a strange, wet noise. “Superior sir!” Skoob cried, and then, in anguish, “Sniper! A sniper killed the commander!”

“No,” Ussmak whispered. Votal, his first landcruiser commander, had died that way. A good commander kept standing up in the cupola, which let him see much more than he could through periscopes and made his landcruiser a far more effective fighting machine—but which also left him vulnerable to small-arms fire he could have ignored if he’d stayed snug inside the turret.

As if the snow and ice themselves had come to malignant life, a figure all clad in white stood up not far from the landcruiser and ran toward it “Bandit!” Ussmak shouted to Skoob, and snatched for his personal weapon.

Skoob fired, but by then the camouflaged Big Ugly was too close to the landcruiser for its turret-mounted machine gun to bear on him. He tossed a grenade up and through the open cupola. It exploded inside the turret Ussmak thought he was dead. Fragments of the grenade ricocheted off the inside of the fighting compartment. One scraped his side; another tore a long, shallow cut across his right forearm. Only as he felt those small wounds did he realize the grenade somehow hadn’t touched off the ammunition inside the turret. If it had, he never would have had the chance to worry about cuts and scrapes.

He shoved the muzzle of his personal weapon out through a firing port and sprayed the Big Ugly with bullets before he could chuck another grenade into the landcruiser. Skoob was screaming: terrible cries that grated on Ussmak’s hearing diaphragms. He couldn’t help the gunner, not yet. First he had to get away from the fighting.

With one male in the turret dead and the other disabled, the land-cruiser was no longer a fighting machine. Ussmak could operate the gun or he could drive the vehicle. He couldn’t do both at once. He put it into reverse, moving away from the Soviet landcruisers in the forest.

The audio button taped to a hearing diaphragm yelled at him: “What are you doing?” The cry came from the male who commanded one of the other landcruisers. “Have your brains addled?”

“No, superior sir,” Ussmak said, though he wished for ginger to make the answer yes. In three or four short sentences, he explained what had happened to his landcruiser and its crew.

“Oh,” the other commander said when he was through. “Yes, you have permission to withdraw. Good luck. Return to base; get your gunner to treatment as soon as possible.”

“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, above Skoob’s wails and hisses. He would have withdrawn with or without orders. Had the other commander tried ordering him to stay, he might have gone up into the turret and put a round through his landcruiser. Keeping a crewmale alive counted for more than killing Big Uglies. You could do that any time. If your crewmale died, you’d never get him back.

When he’d withdrawn far enough from the fighting (or so he hoped with all his spirit), he stopped the landcruiser and scrambled back to do what he could for Skoob. By then, the gunner had fallen silent. His blood and Nejas’ had puddled on the floor of the fighting compartment. With the cupola still open—no one had been left to close it—the puddles were starting to freeze.

As soon as he saw the wounds Skoob bore, Ussmak despaired of saving him. He bandaged the gunner all the same, and dragged him down beside the driver’s seat. Then he scrambled past Nejas’ corpse and slammed the lid of the cupola. That gave the landcruiser’s heater some chance against the stunning Siberian winter. Skoob would need every bit of help he could get.

Ussmak radioed back to the base to alert them that he was coming. The male who took the call sounded abstracted, as if he had other things on his mind, things he reckoned more important Ussmak switched off the radio and called him every vile name he could think of.

He took a large taste of ginger. He wasn’t in combat now, and decided he could use the quickened reflexes the herb gave him without endangering himself or the landcruiser. He tried to get Skoob to taste ginger, but the gunner was too far gone to extend his tongue. When Ussmak opened Skoob’s jaws to pour in the stimulant powder, he realized the gunner wasn’t breathing any more. Ussmak laid a hearing diaphragm over the gunner’s chest cavity. He heard nothing. Some time in the last little while, Skoob had quietly died.

The ginger kept Ussmak from feeling the grief that would otherwise have crushed him. What filled him instead was rage—rage at the Big Uglies, rage at the cold, rage at the base commandant for sending males out to fight in these impossible conditions, rage at the Race for establishing a base in Siberia and for coming to Tosev 3 in the first place. As the base drew near, he tasted again. His rage got hotter.

He halted the landcruiser close by the anticold airlock. The crew of mechanics started to protest “What if everybody wanted to park his machine there?” one of them said.

“What if every landcruiser came back with two crewmales dead?” Ussmak snarled. Most of the mechanics fell back from his fury. When one started to argue further, Ussmak pointed his personal weapon at him. The male fled, hissing in fright.

Still carrying the weapon, Ussmak went into the barracks. He looked down at himself as he waited for the inner door to open. The blood of Nejas and Skoob still covered the front of his protective garments. Several males inside exclaimed in startled dismay when he came into the communal chamber. More, though, were watching a televisor screen. One of them turned an eye turret toward Ussmak. “The Big Uglies just hatched another atomic egg,” he said.

Fueled by his rage and loss—and by the ginger—Ussmak shouted, “We never should have come to this stinking world in the first place. Now that we’re here, we ought to quit wasting lives fighting the Big Uglies and figure out how to go Home!”

Some of the males stared at him. Others turned their eye turrets away, as if to say he didn’t even deserve to be stared at. Somebody said, “We have been ordered to bring Tosev 3 under the rule of the Emperor, and it shall be done.”

“Truth,” a couple of males said, agreeing with the fellow.

But others shouted, “Truth!” in a different tone of voice. “Ussmak is right,” one of them added. “What have we got from Tosev 3 but death and misery?”