Striking the Balance

“Hard to give shoot-to-kill orders to keep starving people from mobbing your food wagons,” Bradley said glumly. “If I hadn’t, though, the fast and the strong would get food, nobody else but. Can’t let that happen.”

“No, sir,” Groves agreed. Under the hard and watchful eyes of the American soldiers, their fellow citizens lined up to get the tiny handfuls of grain and beans the quartermasters had to dole out. By comparison, Depression soup kitchens had been five-star restaurants with blue-plate specials. The food then had been cheap and plain, but there’d always been plenty of it, once you swallowed enough of your pride to take charity.

Now… Watching the line snake forward, Groves realized he’d been so busy working to save the country that General Bradley’s question never once crossed his mind: what sort of country was he saving?

The more he looked around the refugee camp, the less he liked the answers he came up with.

For once in his life, Vyacheslav Molotov had to fight with every fiber of his being to maintain his stiff face.No! he wanted to scream at Joachim von Ribbentrop.Let it go, you fool! We have so much of what we came here for. If you push too hard, you’ll be like the greedy dog in the story, that dropped its bone into the river trying to grab the one its reflection was holding.

But the German foreign minister got up on his hind legs and declared, “Poland was part of the GermanReich before the coming of the Race to this world, and therefore must return to theReich

as part of the Race’s withdrawal from our territory. So theFuhrer has declared.”

Hitler, actually, was quite a lot like the dog in the fable. All he understood was taking; nothing else seemed real to him. Had he only been content to stay at peace with the Soviet Union while he finished Britain, he could have gone on fooling Stalin a while longer and then launched his surprise attack, thereby contending with one foe at a time. He hadn’t waited. He couldn’t wait. He’d paid for it against the USSR. Didn’t he see he’d have to pay far more against the Lizards?

Evidently he didn’t. There was his foreign minister, mouthing phrases that would have been offensive to human opponents. Against the Lizards, who were vastly more powerful than Germany, those phrases struck Molotov as clinically insane.

Through his interpreter, Atvar said, “This proposal is unacceptable to us because it is unacceptable to so many other Tosevites with concerns in the region. It would merely prove a generator of future strife.”

“If you do not immediately cede Poland to us, it will prove a generator of present strife,” von Ribbentrop blustered.

The Lizards’ fleetlord made a noise like a leaking inner tube. “You may tell theFuhrer that the Race is prepared to take the chance.”

“I shall do so,” von Ribbentrop said, and stalked out of the Shepheard’s Hotel meeting room.

Molotov wanted to run after him, to call him back.Wait, you fool!

was the cry that echoed in his mind. Hitler’s megalomania might drag everyone else down along with Germany. Even the nations with explosive-metal bombs and poison gas weren’t much more than large nuisances to the Lizards. Until they could deliver their weapons somewhere other than along the front line with the aliens, they could not threaten them on equal terms.

The Soviet foreign commissar hesitated. Did von Ribbentrop’s arrogance mean the Hitlerites had such a method? He didn’t believe it. Their rockets were better than anyone else’s, but powerful enough to throw ten tonnes across hundreds, maybe thousands, of kilometers? Soviet rocket scientists assured him the Nazis couldn’t be that far ahead of the USSR.

If they were wrong… Molotov didn’t care to think about what might happen if they were wrong. If the Germans could throw explosive-metal bombs hundreds or thousands of kilometers, they were as likely to throw them at Moscow as at the Lizards.

He checked his rising agitation. If the Nazis had such rockets, they would not be so insistent about holding on to Poland. They could launch their bombs from Germany and then scoop up Poland at their leisure. This time, the scientists had to be right.

If they were right… Hitler was reacting from emotion rather than reason. What was Nazi doctrine but perverted romanticism? If you wanted a thing, that meant it should become yours, and that meant you had the right-even the duty-to go out and take itif anyone had the gall to object, you ran roughshod over him. Your will was all that mattered.