Striking the Balance

Like most classical allusions, that one sailed past Skorzeny. He answered the main question, though: “I know we have a new kind of U-boat, that’s what I know. Damned if I know how, but it can do 450 kilometers submerged every centimeter of the way.”

“God in heaven,” Jager said in genuine awe. “If the Lizards hadn’t come, we’d have swept the Atlantic clean with boats like that.” He scratched his jaw again, visualizing a map of the eastern Mediterranean. “It must have sailed from-Crete?”

Skorzeny’s blunt features registered a curious blend of respect and disappointment. “Aren’t you the clever chap?” he said. “Yes, from Crete to Alexandria you can sail underwater-as long as you understand you won’t sail back.”

“Mm, yes, there is that.” Jager did some more muffing. “You couldn’t tell the whole crew-there’d be a mutiny. But you could find a man you could rely on to press the button or flip the switch or whatever he had to do.” He took off his black service cap in respect for the courage of that man.

“Has to be how they did it, all right,” Skorzeny agreed. “One thing-he’d never know what hit him.”

Jager thought of the fireball he’d seen going up east of Breslau, the one that had stalled the Lizards’ attack on the town. He tried to imagine being at the center of that fireball. “You’re right,” he said. “You might as well drop a man into the sun.”

“That’s what it would be like, sure enough,” the SS man said. He walked along beside Jager, whistling tunelessly between his teeth. After half a dozen paces or so, he asked, ever so casually, “Your Jewish chums down in Lodz send any messages back to you? They gloating that they got the better of me?”

“I haven’t heard a word from them,” Jager answered truthfully. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d stopped trusting Germans altogether after that bill of goods you tried selling them.” And there, he thought, was a fine euphemism for a nerve-gas bomb. If you couldn’t speak straight out about the things you did, maybe you shouldn’t have done them. In pointed tones, he went on, “They are still keeping the Lizards from using Lodz as a staging point against us, in spite of everything.”

“Goody for them,” Skorzeny said with a fine sardonic sneer. He thumped Jager on the back, hard enough that he almost went headlong into the trunk of a birch tree. “Not so long from now, that won’t matter, either.”

“No?” Apprehension trickled down Jager’s spine. Skorzenydid hear things. “Are they going to order us to try to reduce the town? I’m not sure we can do it-and even if we manage, street fighting’ll play hob with our armor.”

Skorzeny laughed, loud and long. From up in that birch tree, a squirrel chattered indignantly. “No, they’re not going to stick your dick in the sausage machine, Jager,” he said. “How do I put it? If we can give the Lizards a present in Alexandria, we can give them and the Jews one in Lodz.”

Jager was a Lutheran. He wished he’d grown up Catholic. Crossing himself would have been a comfort. There could be no mistaking what Skorzeny meant. “How will you get it into Lodz?” he asked, genuinely curious. “The Jews will never trust you-trust us-again. They’re liable to have warned the Poles, too. God. If they know what’s in that bomb of yours, they’re liable to have warned the Lizards.”

“Fuck the Lizards. Fuck the Poles. And fuck the Jews, too,” Skorzeny said. “I won’t take anybody’s help with this one. When the package gets here, I’ll deliver it personally.”

“You have to work,” David Nussboym said in the language of the Lizards. He used an emphatic cough. “If you don’t work, they’ll starve you or they’ll just kill you.” As if to underscore his words, men with submachine guns surrounded Alien Prisoner Barracks Number 3.

The Lizards in the barracks hissed and squeaked and muttered among themselves. Their spokesman, the male called Ussmak, answered, “So what? For what they feed us, the work is impossibly hard. We starve anyhow. If they kill us quickly, it will all be over. Our spirits will join those of Emperors departed, and we will be at peace.” He cast down his eyes. So did the rest of the Lizards who listened to the talk.

Nussboym had seen Lizards in Lodz do likewise when they spoke of their sovereign. They believed in the spirits of Emperors past as passionately as ultraorthodox Jews in God or good Communists in the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were also right about the rations they got. None of that mattered much to Nussboym. If he didn’t get these Lizards working again, out he’d go to the timber-cutting detail he’d escaped when they arrived. The rations human woodchoppers got were made for slow starvation, too.

“What can the camp administrators do that would put you back to work?” he asked Ussmak. He was ready to make extravagant promises. Whether the NKVD men who ran the camp would keep them was another matter. But once the Lizards again got into the habit of working, they’d keep at it.