Upsetting the Balance

“We’ll find out,” Anielewicz said, along with three other men and a woman. Lately, the Nazis had found a new way to keep the Lizards and humans in Lodz from getting anything done: lobbing rockets at the city every so often, making people take shelter and stay there for fear of gas. Not everyone had a sealed room to which to go, and not all sealed rooms were as cramped as this one, but the ploy was good enough to tie Lodz in knots.

“I wish the Lizards would shoot down the rockets, the way they did when the Nazis first started firing them at us,” a woman said.

“The Lizards are almost out of their own rockets,” Mordechai answered. “These days, they only use them when one of the Germans’ happens to head straight for an installation of theirs.” That wasn’t an everyday occurrence; while the Lizards could make rockets that went exactly where they wanted, those of the Nazis were wildly inaccurate. Anielewicz went on, “If a rocket lands in the middle of Lodz, that’s just too bad for the people under it.”

“The Race is doing what it can for us,” David Nussboym declared. Several people nodded emphatically. Mordechai Anielewicz rolled his eyes. He suspected he wasn’t the only one, but with everybody in concealing gas masks, he couldn’t be sure. The Jewish administration and fighters in Lodz were in a delicate position. They had to cooperate with the Lizards, and some-Nussboym among them-still did so sincerely. Others, though, hurt the aliens every chance they got, so long as they could do it without getting discovered. Keeping track of who was in which camp made life more interesting than Anielewicz liked.

Another blast, this one close enough to shake the fire station. Even without a large charge of explosive, several tons of metal falling out of the sky made for a big impact. Anielewicz shivered. Working against the Lizards often meant covertly working with the Nazis, even when their poison gas was killing Jews inside Lodz. Some Jews supported the Lizards simply because they could not stomach working with the Nazis no matter what.

Anielewicz understood that. He sympathized with it, but not enough to feel the same way himself. The Nazis had been gassing Polish Jews before the Lizards arrived, and they’d kept right on doing it even after the Lizards took Poland away from them. They were without a doubt bastards; the only good thing Mordechai could think to say about them was that they were human bastards.

Minutes crawled slowly past Mordechai kept hoping, praying for the all-clear signal. Instead, another rocket landed. The siren and the alarm hiss went on and on. He drew in breath after breath of stagnant air. His feet began to hurt. The only place to sit-or rather, squat-in the sealed room was over a latrine bucket in a tiny curtained corner. Just getting there wasn’t easy.

At last the amplified hiss faded and the sirens changed to a warbling note before ceasing altogether.“Gevalt!” somebody said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Is it safe?” somebody else asked. “Just because the rockets aren’t coming, does that mean the gas has gone away?”

“We can’t stay here forever,” Mordechai said. “I’ll go out and look around, see if anyone close by is down from the gas. If I don’t come back in five minutes… you’ll know I shouldn’t have gone.” With such gallows humor, he elbowed his way toward the door.

When he got outside, he was relieved not to find people lying dead on Lutomierska Street in front of the fire station. He hadn’t expected he would find that; none of the explosions had sounded close enough to produce such a result. But the Germans’ gas was insidious stuff, and sometimes spread more in one direction than another. The minute you stopped assuming it could kill you, it probably would.

He looked around. One column of smoke was rising from the north, from the Polish part of Lodz, the area where Germans who’d called the place Litzmannstadt had settled before the Lizards came. Not many of them were left; the Poles and the Jews had had their revenge. Too bad, in a way. There would have been delicious irony in the Nazis’ gassing the Germans they’d sent out to dwell in a land that wasn’t theirs.

More smoke, though, rose from closer to home. One of the rockets had hit in the Jewish district. That must have been the second one, Mordechai thought, the one that shook the station. He snarled. Even now, fighting the Lizards, the Nazis were killing Jews. He was sure they knew it, too. They probably thought it was a hell of a good joke-and that some of the Jews were cooperating with them against the Lizards an even better one.

He went back inside before the people in the sealed room decided he’d become a casualty, too. He hurried upstairs. “It’s safe to come out,” he said. “We had a hit in the ghetto, though.” Now that the Germans were gone, it wasn’t formally a ghetto any more. It still functioned as one, though, and the name lingered.