Tilting The Balance (17 page)

“He can do what he wants in here,” the potato seller said. “But he can’t make anybody outside think Rumkies are good for anything but wiping your behind.” The merchant’s shrug was eloquent.

Russie started back to his flat with the potatoes. It was on the corner of Zgierska and Lekarska, just a couple of blocks from the barbed wire that had sealed off the ghetto of Lodz – Litzmannstad. the Nazis had renamed it when they annexed western Poland to the Reich – from the rest of the city.

Much of the barbed wire remained in place, though paths had been cut through it here and there. In Warsaw, Lizard bombs had knocked down the wall the Germans made. Of course, that barrier had looked like a fortification and most of this one didn’t. But something else went on here, too. The potato seller had said that Rumkowski could do what he wanted inside the ghetto. He’d meant it scornfully, but Moishe thought his words held a truth he hadn’t intended. He had the feeling Rumkowski liked being a big fish, no matter how small his pond was.

At least there were enough potatoes to go around these days. The Lodz ghetto had been as hungry as Warsaw’s, maybe hungrier. The Jews inside remained gaunt and ragged, especially compared to the Poles and Germans who made up the rest of the townsfolk. They weren’t actively starving any more, though. From where they’d been a year before, that wasn’t just progress. It felt like a miracle.

A horse-drawn wagon clattered up behind Russie. He stepped aside to let it pass. It was piled high with curious-looking objects woven out of straw. “What are those things, anyway?” Russie called to the driver.

“You must be new in town.” The fellow pulled back on the reins, slowed his team to an amble so he could talk for a while. “They’re boots, so the Lizards won’t freeze their little chicken feet every time they go out in the snow.”

“Chicken feet – I like that,” Russie said.

The driver grinned. “Every time I see two or three Lizards together, I think of the front window of a butcher’s shop. I want to go down the street yelling, ‘Soup! Get your soup fixings here!’” He sobered. “We were making straw boots for the Nazis before the Lizards came. All we had to do was make ‘em smaller and change the shape.”

“Wouldn’t it be fine to make what we wanted just for ourselves, not for one set of masters or another?” Russie said wistfully. His hands remembered the motions they’d made sewing seams on field-gray trousers.

“Fine, yes. Should you hold your breath? No.” The drive coughed wetly. Tuberculosis, said the medical student Russie had once been. The driver went on, “It’ll probably happen about the time the Messiah comes. These days, stranger, I’ll take small things – my wife’s not embroidering little eagles for Luftwaffe men, a kholereye on them, to wear on their shoulders. You ask me, that’s fine.”

“It is fine,” Russie agreed. “But it shouldn’t be enough.”

“If God had asked me when He was making the world, I’m sure I could have done much better for His people. Unfortunately, He seems to have been otherwise engaged.” Coughing again, the driver flicked the reins and sent the wagon rattling on down the street. Now at least he could go outside the ghetto.

More posters of Rumkowski were plastered on the front of Russie’s block of flats. Under his lined face was one word –
WORK
– in Yiddish, Polish, and German. His hope had been to make the industrious Jews of Lodz so valuable to the Nazis that they would not want to ship them to extermination camps. It hadn’t worked; the Germans were running trains to Chelmno and other camps until the day the Lizards drove them away. Russie wondered how much Rumkowski had known about that.

He also wondered why Rumkowski fawned so on the Lizards when only horror had come from his efforts at accommodating the Nazis. Maybe he didn’t want to lose the shadowy power he enjoyed as Jewish Eldest. Or maybe he just didn’t know any other way to deal with overlords so much mightier than he. For the Eldest’s sake, Russie hoped the latter was true.

Shlepping the potatoes up three flights of stairs as he walked down the hallway to his flat, years of bad nutrition and weeks of being cooped up inside the cramped bunker had taken their toll on his wind and on his strength generally. He tried the door. It was locked. He rapped on it. Rivka let him in.

A small tornado in a cloth cap tackled him just above the knees. “Father, Father!” Reuven squealed. “You’re back!” Ever since they’d come out of the bunker – where they’d been together every moment, awake and asleep – Reuven had been nervous about his going away for any reason. He was, however, starting to get over that, for he asked, “Did you bring me anything?”

“Sorry, son; not this time. I just went out for food,”

Moishe said. Reuven groaned in disappointment. His father pulled his cap down over his eyes. He thought that was funny enough to make up for the lack of trinkets.

People sold toys in the market square. How many of them, though, used to belong to children who’d died in the ghetto or been taken away to Chelmno or some other camp? When even something that should have been joyous, like buying a toy, saddened and frightened you because you wondered why it was for sale, you began to feel in your belly what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Poland.

Rivka took the sack of potatoes. “What did you have to pay?” she asked.

“Four hundred and fifty Rumkies,” he answered.

She stopped in dismay. “This is only ten kilos, right? Last week ten kilos only cost me 320. Didn’t you haggle?” When he shook his head, she rolled her eyes toward the heavens. “Men! See if I let you go shopping again.”

“The Rumkie’s worth less every day,” he said defensively. “In fact, it’s almost worthless, period.”

As if she were explaining a lesson to Reuven, she said, “Last week, the potato seller’s first price for me was 430 Rumkies. I just laughed at him. You should have done the same.”

“I suppose so,” he admitted. “It didn’t seem to matter, not when we have so many Rumkies.”

“They won’t last forever,” Rivka said sharply. “Do you want us to have to go to work in the Lizards’ factories to make enough to keep from starving?”

“God forbid,” he answered, remembering the wagon full of straw boots. Making things for the Germans had been bad enough; making boots and coats for the aliens who aimed to conquer all mankind had to be worse, although the wagon driver hadn’t seemed to think so.

Rivka laughed at him. “It’s all right. I got us some nice onions from Mrs. Jakubowicz downstairs for next to nothing. That should cancel out your foolishness.”

“How does Mrs. Jakubowicz come by onions?”

“I didn’t ask. One doesn’t, these days, but she had enough of them that she didn’t gouge me.”

“Good. Do we have any of that cheese left?” Moishe asked.

“Yes – plenty for today, with some left over for tomorrow, too.”

“That’s very good,” Moishe said. Food came first. The ghetto had taught him that. He sometimes thought that if he ever got rich (not likely) and if the war ever ended (which seemed even less likely), he’d buy himself a huge house, live in half of it,

and fill the other half with meat and butter (in separate rooms, of course) and pastries and all manner of wonderful things to eat. Maybe he’d open a delicatessen. Even in wartime, people who sold food didn’t go as hungry as those who had to buy it.

The part of him that had studied human nutrition said cheese and potatoes and onions could keep body and soul together a long time. Protein, fat, vitamins (he wished for something green, but that would have been hard to come by in Poland in late winter even before the war), minerals. Unexciting food, yes, but food.

Rivka carried the sack of potatoes into the kitchen. Moishe trailed after her. The apartment was scantily furnished-just the leftovers of the people who had lived, and probably died, here before his family came. One thing it did boast, though, was a hot plate, and Lodz, unlike Warsaw even now, had reliable electricity.

Rivka peeled and chopped up a couple of onions. Moishe drew back a few paces. Even so, the onions were strong enough to make tears start in his eyes. The onions went into the stew pot. So did half a dozen potatoes. Rivka didn’t peel them. She glanced over to her husband. “Nutrients,” she said seriously.

“Nutrients,” he agreed. Potatoes in their jackets had more than potatoes without. When potatoes were most of what you ate, you didn’t want to waste anything.

“Supper in – a while,” Rivka said. The hot plate was feeble. It would take a long time to boil water. Even after it did, the potatoes would take a while to cook. When your stomach was none too full, waiting came hard.

Without warning, a huge bang! rattled the windows. Reuven started crying. As Rivka rushed to comfort him, sirens began to wail.

Moishe followed his wife out to the front room. “It frightened me,” Reuven said.

“It frightened me, too,” his father answered. He’d tried to forget how terrifying an explosion out of the blue could be. Hearing just one took him back to the summer before, when the Lizards had forced the Germans out of Warsaw, and to 1939, when the Nazis had pounded a city that couldn’t fight back.

“I didn’t think the Germans could hurt us any more,” Rivka said.

“I didn’t, either. They must have gotten lucky.” Moishe spoke as much to reassure himself as to hearten his wife. Believing they were safe from the Nazis was as vital to them as to every other Jew in Poland.

Bang! This one was louder and closer. The whole block of flats shook. Glass tinkled down on the floor as two windows blew in. Faint in the distance,

Moishe heard screams. The rising bay of the sirens soon drowned them out.

“Lucky?” Rivka asked bitterly. Moishe shrugged with as much nonchalance as he could find. If it wasn’t just luck – He didn’t want to think about that.

“The Deutsche got lucky,” Kirel said. “They launched their missiles when our antimissile system was down for periodic maintenance. The warheads did only relatively minor damage to our facilities.”

Atvar glowered at the shiplord, though it was only natural that he try to put the best face on things. “Our facilities may not be badly damaged, but what of our prestige?” the fleetlord snapped. “Shall we give the Big Uglies the impression they can lob these things at us whenever it strikes their fancy?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, the situation is not so bad as that,” Kirel said.

“No, eh?” Atvar was not ready to be appeased. “How not?”

“They fired three more at our installations the next days and we knocked all of those down,” Kirel said.

“This is less wonderful than it might be,” Atvar said. “I presume we expended three antimissile missiles in the process?”

“Four, actually,” Kirel said. “One went wild and had to be destroyed in flight.”

“Which leaves us how many such missiles in our inventory?”

“Exalted Fleetlord, I would have to run a computer check to give you the precise number,” Kirel said.

Atvar had run that computer check. “The precise number, Shiplord, is 357. With them, we can reasonably expect to shoot down something over three hundred of the Big Uglies’ missiles. After that, we become as vulnerable to them as they are to us.”

“Not really,” Kirel protested. “The guidance systems on their missiles are laughable. They can strike militarily significant targets only by accident. The missiles themselves are-”

“Junk,” Atvar finished for him. “I know this.” He poked a claw into a computer control on his desk. The holographic image of a wrecked Tosevite missile sprang into being above the projector off to one side. “Junk,” he repeated. “Sheet-metal body, glass-wool insulation, no electronics worthy of the name-”

“It scarcely makes a pretense of being accurate,” Kirel said.

“I understand that,” Atvar said. “And to knock it out of the sky, we have to use weapons full of sophisticated electronics we cannot hope to replace on this world. Even at one for one, the exchange is scarcely fair.”

“We cannot show the Big Uglies how to manufacture integrated circuits,” Kirel said. “Their technology is too primitive to let them produce such sophisticated components for us. And even if it weren’t, I would hesitate to acquaint them with such an art, lest we find ourselves on the receiving end of it in a year’s time.”

“Always a question of considerable import on Tosev 3,” Atvar said. “I thank the forethoughtful spirits of Emperors past” – he cast his eyes down to the floor, as did Kirel-”that we stocked any antimissiles at all. We did not expect to have to deal with technologically advanced opponents.”

“The same applies to our ground armor and many other armaments,” Kirel agreed. “Without them, our difficulties would be greater still.”

“I understand this,” Atvar said. “What galls me still more is that, despite our air of superiority, we have not been able to shut down the Big Uglies’ industrial capacity. Their weapons are primitive, but continue to be produced.”

He had once more the uneasy vision of a new Tosevite landcruiser rumbling around a pile of ruins just after the Race’s last one had been lost in battle. Or maybe it would be a new missile flying off its launcher with a trail of fire, and no hope of knocking it down before it hit.

Kirel said, “Our strategy of targeting the Tosevites’ petroleum facilities has not yet yielded the full range of desired results.”

“I am painfully aware of this,” Atvar replied. “The Big Uglies are better at effecting makeshift repairs than any rational being could have imagined. And while their vehicles and aircraft are petroleum-fueled, the same is not true of a large proportion of their heavy manufacturing capacity. This also makes matters more difficult.”

“We are beginning to get significant amounts of small-arms ammunition from Tosevite factories in the areas under our control,” Kirel said, resolutely looking at the bright side of things. “The level of sabotage in production is acceptably low.”

“That’s something, anyhow. Up till now, these Tosevite facilities have produced nothing but frustration for us,” Atvar said. “The munitions they turn out are good enough to damage us, but not of sufficient quality or precision to be useful to us in and of themselves. We cannot merely match them bullet for bullet or shell for shell, as they have more of each. Ours, then, must have the greater effect.”