Striking the Balance

The British soldier darted forward to grab the submachine gun. “On your feet!” he said. When Moishe rose, the soldier plucked the spare magazines from the waistband of his trousers. “Hands high! Those hands come down, you’re dead-you, the skirt, the brat, anybody.” Moishe said that in Yiddish so he was sure his wife and son got it. “March!” the Englishman barked.

They marched. The soldier led them into what looked as if it had been a market square. Now barbed wire and machine-gun positions all around turned it into a prisoner camp. To one side was a tall wall of large stones that looked to have been in place forever. Atop that wall stood a mosque whose golden dome was marred by a shell hole.

Moishe realized what that wall had to be just as the British soldier herded him and his family into the barbed-wire cage. There they stayed. The only sanitary arrangements were slop buckets by the barbed wire. Some people had blankets; most didn’t. Toward noon, the guards distributed bread and cheese. The portions were bigger than those he’d known in the Warsaw ghetto, but not much. Water barrels had a common dipper. He scowled at that; it would make disease spread faster.

He and his family spent two miserable, chilly nights, sleeping huddled together on bare ground. Artillery shells fell all around, some alarmingly close. Had any landed inside the barbed-wire perimeter, the slaughter would have been gruesome.

On the morning of the third day, bigger explosions rocked Jerusalem. “The British are pulling out!” exclaimed someone who sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. “They’re blowing up what they can’t take with them.” Moishe didn’t know whether the fellow was right, not then, but before long the guards deserted their posts, taking machine guns with them.

They hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes before other men carrying guns entered the square: fighters from the Jewish underground. The prisoners cheered themselves hoarse as their comrades released them from confinement.

But with the Jews came Lizards. Moishe stiffened: wasn’t that one there by the gate Zolraag? And, at the same time as he recognized the Lizard, Zolraag recognized him. Zolraag hissed in excitement. “We want this one,” he said, and added an emphatic cough.

“Progress at last!” Atvar said. A pleasant breeze blew off the sea toward him. He walked along the northern shore of the little triangular peninsula that separated Egypt from Palestine. The warmth, the sand, the stones put him in mind of Home. It was very pleasant country-and yet he’d had to come here by helicopter, for the Big Uglies didn’t bother with roads leading away from their railroad.

Kirel paced beside him for a while without speaking: perhaps the shiplord was also thinking of the world he’d left behind for the sake of the greater glory of the Emperor. A couple of feathered flying creatures glided past the two males. They were nothing like the leather-winged fliers with which Atvar had been familiar before coming to Tosev 3, and reminded him this was an alien world. Males and females hatched here after the colonization fleet arrived would find these Tosevite animals normal, unexceptional. He didn’t think he would ever grow used to them.

He didn’t think he would ever grow used to Big Uglies, either. That didn’t keep him from hoping to conquer their world in spite of everything. “Progress!” he repeated. “The most important centers of Palestine are in our hands, the drive against Denver advances most satisfactorily on the whole… and we may yet triumph.”

For Kirel not to respond then would have implied he thought the fleetlord mistaken. A male implied that at his peril these days. And so Kirel said, “Truth. In those areas, we do advance.”

That, unfortunately, reminded Atvar of the many areas where the Race still did not advance: of Poland, where the Deutsche were being troublesome in the extreme; of China, where holding the cities and roads left the countryside a sea of rebellion-and where even control over the cities sometimes proved illusory; of the SSSR, where gains in the west were counterbalanced by Soviet advances in Siberia; of the central United States, where missiles were making starships vulnerable; of India, where Big Uglies weren’t fighting much, but showed a willingness to die rather than yielding to the commands of the Race.

He hadn’t come here to think about places like those, and resolutely shoved them to the back of his mind. Even with the ugly flying creatures to remind him it wasn’t quite Home, it was a place to relax, enjoy decent-better than decent-weather, and make the best of things.

Resolutely sticking to that best, he said, “We also have the agitator Moishe Russie in custody at last, and his mate and their hatchling. We can either control him through them or take vengeance upon him for the manifold troubles he has caused us. This is also progress.”