Striking the Balance

“We are not talking about the Germans now,” Moishe said. “We’re talking about the British, who have treated Jews well on the whole, on the one hand, and your chances for conquering the world, which do not look as good as they might, on the other.”

“Of course we shall conquer Tosev 3,” Zolraag said. “The Emperor has ordered it”-he looked down at the floor for a moment-“and it shall be done.”

He didn’t sound particularly sensible or rational himself there. What he sounded like was an ultrapious Jew who got everything he knew from the Torah and the Talmud and rejected all secular learning: his faith sustained him in the face of all obstacles. Sometimes that kept you going through bad times. Sometimes it blinded you to things you should see.

Moishe studied his captors. Would they see Zolraag’s blind spot, or would their own blind them to it? He picked a different argument: “If you choose to deal with the Lizards, you’ll always be a little fish next to them. They may think you’re useful now, but what happens after they have Palestine and they don’t need you any more?”

Menachem Begin showed his teeth in what was not a grin of amusement. “Then we start giving them a hard time, the same as we do the British now.”

“This I believe,” Zolraag said. “It would certainly follow the Polish pattern.” Did he sound bitter? Hard to tell with a Lizard, but that would have been Moishe’s guess.

“If the Race conquers the whole world, though, who will back you against us?” he asked Begin. “What can you hope to gain?”

Now Begin started to laugh. “We are Jews. No one will back us. We will gain nothing. And we will fight anyway. Do you doubt it?”

“Not even slightly,” Moishe said. For a moment, captive and captor understood each other perfectly. Moishe had been Zolraag’s captive, too. They had stared at each other across a gap of incomprehension wide as the black gulf of space that separated the Lizards’ world from Earth.

Zolraag did not fully follow what was going on now, either. He said, “What is your answer, Tosevites? If you must. If there is fire for him in your innards because he is of your clutch of eggs, keep this Russie. But what do you say about the bigger question? Will you fight alongside us when we move forward here and punish the British?”

“Do you Lizards decide things on the spur of the moment?” Stern demanded.

“No, but we are not Tosevites, either,” Zolraag answered with evident relish. “You do everything quickly, do you not?”

“Not everything,” Stern said, chuckling a little. “This we have to talk about. We’ll send you back safe-”

“I was hoping to bring an answer with me,” Zolraag said. “This would not only help the Race but improve my own status.”

“But we don’t care about either of those, except insofar as they help us,” Stern said. He nodded to Russie’s guard. “Take him back to his room.” He didn’t call it a cell; even Jews used euphemisms to sugar-coat the things they did. Stern went on, “You can let his wife and son visit, or just his wife. If he’d rather. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“Right. Come on, you,” the guard said to Moishe, as usual punctuating his orders with a jerk of the Sten gun’s barrel. As they walked down the corridor toward the chamber-however you wanted to describe it-in which Russie was confined, the fellow added, “No, you aren’t going anywhere-not alive, you’re not.”

“Thank you so much. You do reassure my mind,” Moishe replied. For one of the rare times since the Jewish underground had stolen him from the British, he heard that hard-nosed guard laugh out loud.

Ice was still floating in the Moscow River. A big chunk banged into the bow of the rowboat in which Vyacheslav Molotov sat, knocking the boat sideways. “Sorry, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the fellow at the oars said, and put the rowboat back on its proper course upstream.

“It’s all right,” Molotov answered absently. Of course, the oarsman belonged to the NKVD. But he had such a heavy, bovineokane- a Gorky accent that turned a’s into o’s until he sounded as if he himself had been turned out to pasture-that no one, hearing him for the first time, could possibly take him seriously. A nice bit ofmaskirovka,

that’s what it was.

A couple of minutes later, another piece of ice ran into the boat. The NKVD man chuckled. “Bet you wish you’d taken apanje wagon to thekolkhoz now, eh, Comrade?”

“No,” Molotov answered coldly. He waved a gloved hand over to the riverbank to illustrate why he said what he said. Apanje wagon pulled by atroika of horses slowly struggled along. Even the Russian wagons, with their tall wheels and boatlike bottoms, had a tough time getting through the mud of the springrasputitsa. The muddy season would vary in the fall, depending on how heavy the rains were. In spring, when a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted, the mud was always thick enough to seem bottomless.