Upsetting the Balance

Kirel crouched down, as if he expected to be bitten. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is merely a matter of bringing in other Tosevites who have this skill: either that or making it plain to the locals that if they do not do this work, they will not eat.”

“Bringing Tosevites into one area from another is far more difficult than it would be on a properly civilized world,” Atvar said, “for they are not simply Tosevites, essentially the same regardless of from which part of the planet they spring. Some are Francais Tosevites, some are English Tosevites, some are Italiano Tosevites, some are Mexicano Tosevites, and so on. They all have their own foods, they all have their own languages, they all have their own customs, and they all think their ways are superior to everyone else’s, which touches off fights whenever groups from two regions come together. We’ve tried; the Emperor knows we’ve tried it.” He cast down his eyes not so much in reverence as in worn resignation. “It does not work.”

“The other approach will, then,” Kirel said. “No matter what foods they eat, all the Big Uglies must eat some foods. If they fail to produce what we require of them, they will also fail to be fed.”

“This has some merit, but, again, not so much as I would wish,” Atvar said. “The sabotage level in Tosevite factories producing goods for us is already unacceptably high. Wherever we try to coerce the workers to produce more or produce under harsher conditions, it goes higher. This is intolerable when the product under discussion is as important as a gas mask.”

“Truth,” Kirel said again, this time wearily. “The Big Uglies’ poison gas has already lowered the morale of fighting males to the point where they have shown reluctance to go into combat in areas bordering the Deutsche. And now the Americans are also beginning to deploy it in large quantities. If males cannot have confidence in their protection, their fighting spirit will plummet further, with unfortunate consequences for our efforts here.”

“Unfortunate consequences indeed,” Atvar said. What if his males simply upped and quit fighting? He’d never imagined such a thing. No commander in the history of the Race (and perhaps not in its prehistory, either) had ever had to imagine such a thing. The Race’s discipline had always proved reliable-but nothing had ever tested it as it was being tested now.

“If the males waver, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “perhaps we can bolster their spirits with the Tosevite herb known as ginger.”

Atvar stared at him.

Kirel crouched again, lower than he had before “It was intended as a joke, Exalted Fleetlord, nothing more.”

“It isnot funny,” Atvar said. It also wasn’t the worst idea he’d ever heard, not in the present circumstances. That frightened him more than anything.

The Lizards’ air-raid alarms went off in Lodz. They weren’t sirens, as they would have been had human beings made them. Instead, they reminded Mordechai Anielewicz of nothing so much as the sound of a cauldron full of sizzling fat-except the cauldron had to be half the size of Poland. They were, he gathered, an enormously amplified version of the noise a Lizard made when something frightened it.

All that ran through his mind in less time than he needed to snatch up a gas mask and stick it on his head. Then, along with the rest of the Jews in the offices above the fire station, he dashed for the sealed room. People got in one another’s way, cursing and stumbling and falling down.

He made it to the sealed room just as a Nazi rocket came down with a crash. He tried to gauge how far away it had landed by the sound of the explosion, but that was tricky these days. The rockets that carried gas didn’t make a bang nearly so big as that from the ones carrying explosives-but they were much more to be feared, even so.

“Shut the door!” four people bawled at once.

With a slam, somebody obeyed. Packed into the middle of the sardinelike crush and turned the wrong way anyhow, Mordechai couldn’t see who. He looked up at the ceiling. Fresh plaster gleamed all around its periphery, covering over the cracks between it and the walls. Similar plaster marred the paint on those walls where they joined one another and also covered the molding that had marked their separation from the floor. Even if a gas-carrying rocket hit close by, the sealed room would-everyone inside hoped-let the people it sheltered survive till the deadly stuff dissipated.

Splashes said people nearest the doorway were soaking cloths in a bucket of water and stuffing them into the cracks between the door and the wall. The German poison gas was insidious stuff. If you left a chink in your armor, the gas would find it.

The Lizards’ alarm kept hissing. Before long, the merely human air-raid siren added its wail to the cacophony. “Does that mean we’re not done, or just that people are too addled to turn those noisy things off?” one of the secretaries asked, her voice muffled by the mask she wore.