Striking the Balance

“That’s certainly better than being shot,” Moishe said gravely. He was glad he’d had practice holding his face straight. Yes, he’d headed up the Jews of Poland for a little while after the Lizards came, till he found he could no longer stand to obey them. To imagine that that put him in the same class as Hitler and Hull and Stalin-well, if you could imagine that, you had a vivid and well-stocked imagination. From what he’d gathered, anything smaller than the entire surface of a planet was too small for the Lizards to bother making what they reckoned subtle distinctions in size. The distinctions were anything but subtle to him, but he-thank God! — was not a Lizard.

Atvar rounded on him as soon as he came into the machine-strewn suite the fleetlord occupied. “If we make an agreement with these males, is it your judgment they will abide by it?” he demanded, using Zolraag to translate his words into Polish and German.

This to a man who’d watched Poland carved up between Germany and the USSR after they’d made their secret agreement, and then watched them go to war against each other less than two years later in spite of the agreement still formally in force. Picking his words with care, Moishe answered, “They will-so long as they see keeping the agreement as being in their interest.”

The fleetlord made more mostly unintelligible noises. Again, Zolraag interpreted for him: “You are saying, then, that these Tosevite males are altogether unreliable?”

By any standard with which the Lizard was familiar, the answer to that had to beyes.

Moishe didn’t think putting it so baldly would help end the fighting. He said, “You have much to offer that would be in their interest to accept. If you and they can agree upon terms for your males’ leaving their countries, for instance, they would probably keep any agreements that would prevent the Race from coming back.”

As he’d seen with Zolraag’s efforts in Warsaw, the Lizards had only the vaguest notions of diplomacy. Things that seemed obvious even to a human being who had no governmental experience-to Moishe himself, for instance-sometimes struck the aliens with the force of revelation when they got the point. And sometimes, despite genuine effort, they didn’t get it.

As now: Atvar said, “But if we yield to the demands of these importunate Tosevites, we encourage them to believe they are our equals.” After a moment, he added, “And if they believe themselves equal to us, soon they will come to think they are superior.”

That last comment reminded Moishe the Lizards weren’t fools; they might be ignorant of the way one nation treated with another, but they weren’t stupid. Ignoring the difference could be deadly dangerous. Carefully, Moishe said, “What you have already done should make it plain to them that they are not your superiors. And what they have done to you should show you that you are not so much superior to them as you thought you were when you came to this world. When neither side is superior, isn’t talking better than fighting?”

After Zolraag had translated what he’d said, Atvar fixed Russie with what certainly looked like a baleful stare. The fleetlord said, “When we came to Tosev 3, we thought you Big Uglies would still be the spear-flinging barbarians our probes of this planet had shown you to be. We discovered very soon we were not so superior as we had thought we would be when we went into cold sleep. It is the most unpleasant discovery the Race has ever known.” He added an emphatic cough.

“Nothing stays the same here, not for long,” Moishe said. Some of the Polish Jews had tried to pretend time had stopped, to live their lives as they had before the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution blew across Europe. They’d even thought they were succeeding-till the Nazis brought all the worst parts of the modern world to bear against them.

Moishe had spoken with more than a little pride. That wasn’t what he touched off in the fleetlord. Atvar replied in considerable agitation: “This is what is wrong with you Tosevites.You are too changeable. Maybe we can make peace with you as you are now. But will you be as you are now when the colonization fleet reaches this world? It is to be doubted. What will you be? What will you want? What will you know?”

“I have no answers to these questions, Exalted Fleetlord,” Moishe said quietly. He thought of Poland, which had had a large army, well trained to fight the sort of war fought on that frontier a generation before. Against theWehrmacht, the Poles had fought with utmost bravery and utmost futility-and had gone down to ignominious defeat in a couple of weeks. While they weren’t looking, the rules had changed.