Striking the Balance

“Nobody will put the detonator in this bomb any time soon,” Anielewicz said. “Nobody will be able to get close to it and keep living, not for a while, not without the antidote, whatever that is. How long does the gas persist, Jager? You know more about it than anyone else around here.”

“It’s not exposed to bright sun. What’s left of the roof will keep rain off. It should last a good while. Days, certainly. Weeks, maybe,” Jager answered. He still felt keyed up, ready to fight. Maybe that was the aftermath of battle. Maybe, too, it was the antidote driving him. Anything that made his heart thump like that probably scrambled his brains, too.

“Can we go out of here now?” Ludmila asked. She looked frightened; the antidote might have been turning her to flight, not fight.

“We’d better get out of here, I’d say,” Anielewicz added. “God only knows how much of that gas we’re taking in every time we breathe. If there’s more of it than the antidote can handle-”

“Yes,” Jager said, starting toward the street. “And when we do get out, we have to burn these clothes. We have to do it ourselves, and we have to bathe and bathe and bathe. You don’t need to breathe this gas for it to kill you. If it touches your skin, that will do the job-slower than breathing it, but just about as sure. We’re dangerous to anyone around us till we decontaminate.”

“Lovely stuff you Germans turn out,” Anielewicz said from behind him.

“The Lizards didn’t like it,” Jager answered. The Jewish fighting leader grunted and shut up.

The closer Jager got to the street, the brighter the glare became, till he squeezed his eyes almost shut and peered through a tiny crack between upper and lower lids. He wondered how long his pupils would stay dilated and then, relentlessly pragmatic, wondered where in Lodz he could come up with a pair of sunglasses.

He strode past the outermost dead Jewish sentry, then out onto the street, which seemed to him awash in as much brilliance as if the explosive-metal bomb had gone off. The Jews probably would have to cordon off a couple of blocks around the wrecked factory on one pretext or another, just to keep people from inadvertently poisoning themselves as they walked by.

Ludmila emerged and stood beside him. Through his half-blind squint, he saw hers. He didn’t know what was going to happen next He didn’t even know whether, as Anielewicz had suggested, they’d ended up breathing more nerve gas than their antidote could handle. If the day started going dim instead of brilliant, he still had two syringes left in his aid kit. For three people, that made two-thirds of a shot apiece. Would he need it? If he did, would it be enough?

He did know what wouldn’t happen next. Lodz wouldn’t go up in a fireball like a new sun. The Lizards wouldn’t aim their concentrated wrath at Germany-not on account of that, anyhow. He wouldn’t go back to theWehrmacht, nor Ludmila to the Red Air Force. Whatever future they had, whether hours or decades, was here.

He smiled at her. Her eyes were almost closed, but she saw him and smiled back. He saw that, very clearly.

Atvar had heard the buzzing racket of Tosevite aircraft a great many times through sound recordings, but only rarely in person. He turned one eye turret toward the window of his suite. Sure enough, he could see the clumsy, yellow-painted machine climbing slowly into the sky. “That is the last of them, is it not?” he said.

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord, that one bears away Marshall, the negotiator from the not-empire of the United States,” Zolraag replied.

“The talks are complete,” Atvar said, sounding disbelieving even to himself. “We are at peace with large portions of Tosev 3.”No wonder I sound disbelieving, he thought.We have peace here, but peace without conquest. Who would have imagined that when we set out from Home?

“Now we await the arrival of the colonization fleet, Exalted Fleetlord,” Zolraag said. “With its coming, with the permanent establishment of the Race on Tosev 3, begins the incorporation of this whole world into the Empire. It will be slower and more difficult than we anticipated before we came here, but it shall be done.”

“That is also my view, and why I agreed to halt large-scale hostilities for the time being,” Atvar said. He turned one eye turret toward Moishe Russie, who still stood watching the Big Ugly aircraft shrink in the distance. To Zolraag, he went on, “Translate for him what you just said, and ask his opinion on the matter.”

“It shall be done,” Zolraag said before shifting from the language of the Race to the ugly, guttural grunts he used when speaking to the Tosevite.