Tilting The Balance (45 page)

He pointed to show Anielewicz where that was.

Mordechai was not surprised to discover it lay right outside the doorway to a bedroom that would surely be Wladyslaw’s. You’d have to be crazy to try to screw there.

He said, “Thank you, sir. That will be excellent.” Sawatski might figure he was lying, but he meant every word of it. Maria had to nod – after all, her father had given her just what she’d said she wanted. Anielewicz hadn’t expected to find rabbinic wisdom in a Polish farmer, but there it was.

The meat on his plate smelled delicious. Then Ewa Sawatski asked, “Don’t you want any butter on your potatoes?”

He stared at her. Mixing meat and dairy products in the same meal-? Then he remembered the meat was pork. If he was eating pork, how could another violation of dietary law matter? “Thank you,” he said, and took some butter.

Wladyslaw filled his mug when it got empty. The farmer gave himself a refill, too. His cheeks were red as if he’d rouged them, but that was all the brandy did to him. Mordechai’s head was starting to swim, but he didn’t think he could decline the drink. Poles poured it down till they couldn’t see, didn’t they?

The women went into the kitchen to clean up. Wladyslaw sent Jozef off to bed, saying, “We have plenty of work tomorrow.” But he still lingered at the table, politely ready to talk as long as Anielewicz felt like it.

That wasn’t long. When Mordechai yawned and couldn’t stop, Sawatski got him a pillow and a blanket and settled him on the sofa. It was hard and lumpy, but he’d slept on worse in the ghetto and during the fighting afterwards. No sooner had he taken off his boots and stretched himself out at full length than he was asleep. If Maria sneaked out bent on seduction in the night, he didn’t wake up for her.

Breakfast the next morning was an enormous bowl of oatmeal flavored with butter and coarse salt. Emilia Sawatski waved away Mordechai’s thanks and wouldn’t even take the turnips he tried to give her. “We have enough here, and you may need them in your travel,” she said. “God keep you as you go.”

Wladyslaw walked out to the road with Anielewicz. He too said, “God keep you,” then added quietly, “Friend Janusz, you do a good job of pretending to be a Pole rather than a Jew, but not always good enough. You’re awkward when you cross yourself, for instance” – in a single swift motion, the farmer showed how it should be done-”and you don’t always do it at quite the right time. At another man’s house, you might put yourself in danger.”

Mordechai stared at him. Finally, he managed, “You knew, yet you took me in anyway?”

“You looked like a man who needed taking in.” Sawatski slapped Anielewicz on the back. “Now go on. I hope you stay safe to wherever you’re headed.”

He asked no questions about that; Anielewicz noticed so much. Still dazed (no man, and especially no young man, cares to be shown he is not as clever as he thought he was), he started down the road away from Warsaw. He’d had so much bitter experience with anti-Semitic Poles that he’d come to think the whole nation hated its Jews. Being reminded that wasn’t so made him feel good all the rest of the day.

Landcruisers, after all, were supposed to go forward, pounding the enemy into submission and paving the way for new advances. Instead, after the debacle against the Deutsche, his crew and the others who survived were pulled back here so officers could investigate what had gone wrong.

Hessef and Tvenkel had only two concerns: to keep the investigators from learning they had a ginger habit, and to do as much tasting as they could. Those concerns were in Ussmak’s mind, too, but not, as intensely; he’d done a better job of coming to terms with ginger than his commander or gunner.

But if the investigating officers didn’t figure out ginger had played a big part in the landcruisers’ lackluster performance, what was their report good for? Wastepaper, Ussmak thought.

A new male with a sack full of gear came into the barracks. His toeclaws clicked on the hard tile floor. Ussmak idly turned one eye turret toward the fellow, but gave him both eyes when he’d read his body paint. “By the Emperor, you’re a driver, too.”

The newcomer cast down his eyes. So did Ussmak. The new male said, “Good to see someone who shares my specialization.” He tossed his stuff onto a vacant cot. “What are you called, friend?”

“Ussmak. And you?”

“Drefsab.” The new driver swiveled both eye turrets. “What a dismal, ugly hole this is.”

“Too right,” Ussmak said. “Even for the Big Uglies who used to live here, it was nothing to boast about. For properly civilized males-” He let that hang. “Where did they transfer you from?”

“I’ve been serving in the far east of this continent, against the Chinese and Nipponese,” Drefsab answered.

“You must have come out of your eggshell lucky,” Ussmak said enviously. “That’s easy duty, from all I’ve heard.”

“The Chinese don’t have much in the way of landcruisers at all,” Drefsab agreed. “The Nipponese have some, but they aren’t very tough. Hit them and they’re guaranteed to brew up – one-shot firestarters, we call them.” The new male let his mouth fall open at the joke.

Ussmak laughed, too, but said, “Don’t get overconfident here or you’ll pay for it. I was in the
SSSR
just after the invasion, and the Soviets,

while their landcruisers weren’t too bad, didn’t have the faintest idea how to use them. Then I got hurt, and then I came here. I didn’t believe what the males told me about the Deutsche, but I’ve been in action against them now, and it’s true.”

“I listen,” Drefsab said. “Tell me more.”

“Their new landcruisers have guns heavy enough to hurt us with a side or rear deck shot, and front armor thick enough to turn a glancing shot from one of our guns. You can forget about the one-shot firestarter business here. And they use their machines well: reverse slopes, ambushes, any trick you can think of and too many you’ve never imagined in your worst nightmares.”

Drefsab looked thoughtful. “As bad as that? I’ve heard of some of the things you’re talking about, but I figured half of that, maybe more, was males shooting off steam to haze the new fellow.”

“Listen, my friend, we were rolling north from here not long ago when we got our eye turrets handed to us.” Ussmak told Drefsab about the push that had started for Belfort and ended up back here at the Besangon barracks.

“We were held – by Big Uglies?” The new driver sounded as If he couldn’t believe it Ussmak didn’t blame him. When the Race tried to go somewhere on Tosev 3, it generally got there. In lower tones, Drefsab went on, “What happened? Were all the landcruisers tongue-deep in the ginger jar?”

Although Drefsab had spoken quietly, Ussmak scanned the barracks before he answered. No one was paying any particular attention. Good. Almost whispering, Ussmak said, “As a matter of fact, that might have had something to do with it. Have you been assigned to a landcruiser crew yet?”

“No,” Drefsab said.

“I’ll give you a few names to try to stay away from, then.”

“Thank you, superior sir.” By their paint, Drefsab and Ussmak were of virtually identical rank, but Drefsab honored him not only for the favor but also because of his longer service at this post. Now the new male glanced around the barracks. He too whispered: “Not that I have anything against a taste now and again, you understand – but not in combat, by the Emperor.”

After he’d raised his eyes from the ritual gesture of respect for the sovereign, Ussmak said cautiously, “No, that’s not so bad.” It was what he tried to do himself. But If Drefsab had asked him for a taste, he would have denied keeping any ginger. He had no reason to trust the other male.

Instead, though, Drefsab produced a tiny glass vial from one of the pockets of his equipment bag. “Want some of the herb?” he murmured. “We’re not in combat now.”

Ussmak’s suspicions flickered and blew out. When Drefsab poured a little ginger into his hand,

Ussmak bent his head down and flicked it off the scales with his tongue. The new driver tasted, too. They sat companionably together, enjoying the surge of pleasure the powdered herb gave them.

“Very fine,” Ussmak said. “It makes me want to go out and kill all the Deutsche I can find – or maybe Hessef instead.” He had to explain that: “Hessef is my landcruiser commander. If ginger truly made you as smart as it makes you think you are, Hessef would be the greatest genius the Race ever produced. Barracks, battle, it’s all the same to him: a good enough time for a taste. And Tvenkel the gunner tastes enough to make him shoot before he takes proper aim. I’ve seen him do it.”

“That doesn’t strike me as smart, not if the Deutsche are as good as you make them out to be,” Drefsab said.

“They are,” Ussmak answered. “When we got to this miserable iceball of a planet, we had equipment and training simulations. The Deutsche had experience in real combat, and their equipment keeps getting better, while ours doesn’t. Let them choose the terms of the fight and they can be a handful.”

Drefsab made the vial disappear. “You don’t taste before you’re going into action?”

“I try not to.” Ussmak moved his eye turrets in a way that said he was ashamed of his own weakness. “When the hunger for ginger comes on a male – but you know about that.”

“Yes, I know about that,” Drefsab agreed soberly. “The way I look on it is this: a male can yield himself up to the herb and let it be all he lives for, or he can taste the herb as it suits him and go on with the rest of his life as best he can. That’s the road I try to follow, and if it has some bumps and rocky places in it – well, what road on Tosev 3 doesn’t?”

Ussmak stared at him in admiration. Here was a philosophy for a ginger taster – no, after hearing such words, he needed to be honest with himself: a ginger addict – who nonetheless tried to remember he was a male of the Race, obedient to orders, attentive to duty. He said to Drefsab, “Superior sir, I envy you your wisdom.”

Drefsab made a gesture of dismissal. “Wisdom? For all I know, I may well be fooling myself, and now you. Whatever it is, the price I paid to win it is much too high. Better by far the herb had never set its claws in me.”

“I don’t know,” Ussmak said. “After I’ve tasted, I feel as if ginger were the only worthwhile thing this miserable world produces.”

“After I’ve tasted, so do I,” Drefsab said. “But before, or when I need a taste badly and there’s none to be had… times like those, Ussmak, I’m certain ginger is worst for the Race, not best.”

Times like those, Ussmak had the same feeling.

He’d heard stories that some males, if they got desperate enough for ginger, traded pieces of the Race’s military hardware for the herb. He’d never done anything like that himself, but he understood the temptation.

Before he found a safe way to tell that to Drefsab (some things you didn’t say directly even to a male who’d given you a taste of ginger, not until you were positive you could trust him with your life as well as with the herb), he heard a brief, shrill whistle in the air, followed by a loud crummp! The glass from a couple of windows in the barracks blew inward in a shower of tinkling shards.

Ussmak sprang to his feet. As he did so, a loudspeaker blared, “Mortars incoming from forest patch grid 27-Red. Pursuit in force-”

Ussmak didn’t wait to hear any more, not with a good taste of ginger running through him. “Come on,” he shouted to Drefsab. “Out to the landcruiser park.” Another mortar bomb hit in the yard in front of the barracks. His words punctuated by the blast, Drefsab said, “But I’ve been assigned to no crew.”

“So what? Some commander and gunner won’t want to wait for their own driver.” Ussmak was as sure of that as of his own name. Ginger ran rampant through the base at Besangon; some commander or other would be feeling more intrepid than patient.

The two males ran side by side down the stairs to the yard. Ussmak almost stumbled; the risers were built for Big Uglies, not the smaller Race. Then he almost stumbled again, this time because a blast from a mortar bomb nearly hurled him off his feet. Fragments whistled by; he knew only luck kept them from carving him into jagged, bloody bits.

Off to one side of the barracks, guns opened up, flinging blast and sharp-edged bits of hot brass back at the Tosevites who were hurling them at the Race’s bastion in Besangon. With luck, artillery would take care of the raiders before landcruisers had to go in after them.

When no more mortar bombs fell for a little while, Ussmak hoped that had happened. But then the bombs started coming in again. The Big Uglies didn’t have antiartillery radar, but they’d learned they had to shift their guns to keep the Race from pounding them to bits. That was the trouble with the Big Uglies: they learned too fast.

Hessef and Tvenkel came dashing up from wherever the investigation team had been questioning them. “Come on!” they shouted together. Ussmak scrambled into his landcruiser the instant he got to it; unless a mortar bomb landed on top of the turret or in the engine compartment, it was the safest place he could be.

The familiar vibration of the big hydrogen-burning engine starting up made him feel this was the purpose for which he’d been hatched. He noted with sober pride that his was the third landcruiser to move out of its revetment. Sometimes the energetic aggression ginger brought wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

With the intercom button taped to one hearing diaphragm, he listened to Hessef telling Tvenkel, “Quick, another taste. I want to be all razor wire when we go after those Deutsche or Frangais or whoever’s trifling with us.”

“Here you go, superior sir,” the gunner answered. “And wouldn’t the egg-addled snoops who were just grilling us pitch a fit if they knew what we were doing now?”

“Who cares about them?” Hessef said. “They’re probably hiding under their desks or else wishing they were back in those addled eggs.” Silence followed – likely the silence of the two males laughing together.