Tilting the Balance

“If we don’t root out the ones who keep shooting at us, we may never rule them at all,” Ssamraff said.

To Liu Han’s way of thinking, he had a point, but the other little scaly devils recoiled as if he’d just said something much worse than suggesting that they torture her to find out what she knew of Lo and the Communists. Ttomalss said, “Will you add that to your report? I hope you do; it will show you up as the shortsighted male you are. I shall certainly make a note of your statement when I file my own protest. You were rash to be so foolish in front of a witness.” His eye turrets swung toward the little devil who’d yelled at Liu Han.

Ssamraff looked at that little devil, too. He must not have liked what he saw, for he said, “I shall make no protest in this matter. By the Emperor I pledge it.” He flicked his glance down at the floor for a moment.

So did the other little scaly devils. Then Ttomalss said, “I knew you were a male of sense, Ssamraff. No one wants to have a charge of shortsightedness down on his record, not if he hopes to improve the design of his body paint.”

“That is so,” Ssamraff admitted. “But this I also tell you: to view in the long term on Tosev 3 is also dangerous. The Big Uglies change too fast to make projections reliable-or else we would have conquered them long since.” He turned and skittered out of Liu Han’s hut. Had he been a man instead of a scaly devil, she thought he would have stomped away.

Ttomalss and the devil who’d shouted at her both laughed as If he’d been funny. Liu Han didn’t see the joke.

XII

Sometimes, in the Warsaw ghetto, Moishe Russie had developed a feeling that something was wrong, that trouble (worse trouble, he amended to himself: just being in the ghetto was tsuris aplenty) would land on him if he didn’t do something right away. He’d learned to act on that feeling. He was still alive, so he supposed following it had done him some good. Now, here in Lodz, he had it again.

It wasn’t the usual fears he’d known, not the heart-clutching spasm of alarm he’d had, for instance, when he’d seen his face on the wall in the Balut Market square with warnings that he raped and murdered little girls. You’d have to be meshuggeh, he thought, not to be frightened over something like that.

But what he felt now was different, smaller-just a tickling at the back of his neck and the skin over his spine that something wasn’t quite right somewhere. The first day it was there, he tried to make believe he didn’t notice it. The second day, he knew it was there, but he didn’t tell Rivka. I could be wrong, he thought.

The third day-or rather the evening, after Reuven had gone to bed-he said out of the blue, “I think we should move someplace else.”

Rivka looked up from the sock she was darning. “Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong here?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe nothing. But maybe something, too.”

“If you were a woman, they’d call that the vapors,” Rivka said. But instead of laughing at him as she had every right to do, she grew serious. “Someplace else where? A different flat in Lodz? A different town? A different country?”

“I’d say a different planet, but the Lizards seem to be using the others, too.” Now he laughed, but it wasn’t funny.

“Nu, if you think we should go, we’ll go,” Rivka said. “Better we should move and not need to than need to and not move. Why don’t you start looking for a new flat tomorrow, if you think that will be good enough.”

“I just don’t know,” he said. “I wish I could tune the feeling like a wireless set, but it doesn’t work that way.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed gravely. “What do you want to do? Do you want to go to Zgierz, for instance? That’s not far, but it would probably mean leaving things behind. Still, we’ve left enough things behind by now that a few more won’t matter. So long as the three of us are together, nothing else counts. If the war has taught us anything, that’s it.”

“You’re right.” Russie got up from his battered chair, walked over to the bare light bulb by which Rivka sat. He let his hand rest on her shoulder. “But we shouldn’t need a war to remind us of that.”

She set down the sock and put her hand on top of his. “We don’t, not really. But it has shown us we don’t need things to get by in the world, just people we love.”

“A good thing, too, because we don’t have many things.” Moishe stopped, afraid his attempt at a joke had wounded his wife. Not only had they left things behind, they’d left people as well a little daughter, other loved ones dead in the ghetto. And unlike things, you could not get a new set of people.

If she noticed the catch in Moishe s voice, Rivka gave no sign. She stayed resolutely practical, saying, “You never did answer me. Do you want to get out of Lodz, or shall we stay here?”