Striking the Balance

“If you’re anything like me, it makes you want to go back to our house and drink yourself blind on that clear potato spirit the Russians brew,” Embry said.

“You’ve hit it in one,” Bagnall said. He hefted another story disk and watched the shimmering rainbows shift. “What worries me most about having all these go to the Nazis and the Reds is that. If they do manage to decipher them better than we can in this one-horse town, they’ll learn things we won’t know in England.”

“This thought has crossed my mind,” Embry admitted. “Do recall, though, the Lizards must have left all sorts of rubbish behind when their invasion failed. If we don’t have a goodly number of theseskelkwank readers and the disks that go with them, I’ll be very much surprised.”

“You have a point,” Bagnall said. “The trouble is, of course, it’s rather like-no, it’s exactly like-having a library scattered at random across the landscape. You never can tell beforehand which book will have the pretty picture you’ve been looking for all along.”

“I’ll tell you what I’d like.” Embry lowered his voice; some Red Army men and a fair number from theWehrmacht could follow English. “I’d like to see the Germans and the Russians-to say nothing of the bloody Lizards-scattered at random across the landscape. You couldn’t make me much happier than that.”

“Nor me.” Bagnall looked around at the map-lined chamber where they regularly kept the Nazis and Bolsheviks from going for each other’s throats. The readers and disks were stored there not least because it was tenuously neutral ground, with neither side likely to try to steal everything for itself from it. He sighed. “I wonder if we’ll ever see England again. Not likely, I’m afraid.”

“I fear you’re right.” Embry sighed, too. “We’re doomed to grow old and to die in Pskov-or, more likely, doomed not to grow old and to die in Pskov. Only blind luck’s kept us intact thus far.”

“Blind luck and not getting infatuated with any snipers of the female persuasion, unlike poor Jones,” Bagnall said. He and Embry both laughed, though it wasn’t funny, not really. Bagnall added, “Being around the fair Tatiana is likelier to make certain you don’t grow old and die in Pskov than any other single thing I can think of offhand.”

“How right you are,” Embry said feelingly. He would have gone on in that vein for some time, but Aleksandr German chose that moment to walk into the chamber. He went from English to halting Russian: “Good day, Comrade Brigadier.”

“Hello.” German did not look like a brigadier. With his red mustache, long, unkempt hair, and blazing black eyes, he looked half like a bandit, half like an Old Testament prophet (which occasionally made Bagnall wonder how much distinction there was between those two). Now he looked over at the Lizards’ reading machines. “Marvelous devices.” He said it first in Russian, then in Yiddish, which Bagnall followed better.

“That they are,” Bagnall answered in German, which German the partisan leader also understood.

The brigadier tugged at his beard. He continued in Yiddish, in musing tones: “Before the war, you know, I was not a hunter or a trapper or anything of the sort. I was a chemist here in Pskov, making medicines that did not so much good.” Bagnall hadn’t known that; Aleksandr German usually said but little of himself. His eyes still on the reader, he went on, “I was a boy when the first airplane came to Pskov. I remember the cinema coming, and the wireless, and the talking cinema. How could anything be more modern than the talking cinema? And then the Lizards come and show us we are children, playing with children’s toys.”

“I had this same thought not long ago,” Bagnall said. “I also had it when the first Lizard fighter plane flew past my Lancaster. It was worse then.”

Aleksandr German stroked his beard again. “That is right; you are a flier.” His laugh showed bad teeth and missing ones. “Very often I forget this. You and your comrades”-he nodded to Embry, and with the plural included Jones, too-“have done such good work here keeping us and the Nazis more angry at the Lizards than at each other that I do not recall it is not why you came to Pskov.”

“Sometimes we have trouble remembering that ourselves,” Bagnall said. Embry nodded emphatically.

“They have never tried to involve you with the Red Air Force?” German said. Before either Englishman could speak, he answered his own question: “No, of course not. The only aircraft we’ve had around these parts areKukuruzniks, and they wouldn’t bother foreign experts over such small and simple things.”

“I suppose not,” Bagnall said, and sighed. The biplanes looked as if they flew themselves, and as if anyone with a spanner and a screwdriver could repair them. Having him work on one would have been like calling out the head of the Royal College of Surgeons for a hangnail, but he wouldn’t have minded fiddling about with any kind of aircraft.