Upsetting the Balance

Liu Han said, “If he likes the notion well enough, it will only make him want me more, because he will think someone who comes up with a good idea is desirable just on account of that.”

She laughed. After a moment, so did Nieh Ho-T’ing. He found an excuse to leave very soon after that. Liu Han wondered if he was angry at her in spite of what he’d said. Had he done what she’d said Hsia would do: decided he wanted her not so much because of the woman she was as in admiration of her ideas for the struggle against the little scaly devils?

Once the idea occurred to her, it would not go away. It fit in too well with what she’d seen of how Nieh Ho-T’ing’s mind worked. She went back to writing her demand on strip after strip of paper. All the while, she wondered whether she should consider Nieh’s ideologically oriented advances a compliment or an insult.

Even after she set aside pen and paper and scissors, she couldn’t make up her mind.

Behind the glass partition, the engineer pointed to Moishe Russie: you’re on! Russie looked down at his script and began to read: “Good day, ladies and gentlemen, this is Moishe Russie speaking to you from London, still the capital of the British Empire and still free of Lizards. Some of you have no idea how glad I am to be able to say that. Others have the misfortune of suffering under the Lizards’ tyranny and know for themselves whereof I speak.”

He glanced over at Nathan Jacobi, who nodded encouragement for him to go on. It was good to be working with Jacobi again; it felt like better days, the days before the invasion. Moishe took a deep breath and continued: “The Lizards sought to bring Great Britain under their direct control. I can tell you now that they have failed, and failed decisively. No Lizards in arms remain on British soil; all are either fled, captured, or dead. The last Lizard airstrip on the island, that at Tangmere in the south, has fallen.”

He hadn’t seen that with his own eyes. When it became clear the Lizards were abandoning their British toehold, he’d been recalled to London to resume broadcasting. He checked his script to see where he’d resume. It was Yiddish, of course, for broadcast to Jews and others in eastern Europe. All the same, it sounded very much like what a BBC newsreader would have used for an English version. That pleased him; he was getting a handle on the BBC style.

“We have now proved decisively what others began to demonstrate last year: the Lizards are not invulnerable. They can be defeated and driven back. Moreover, just as their weapons have on occasion discomfited us, we too have devised means of fighting for which they have as yet developed no countermeasures. This bodes well for future campaigns against them.”

How it boded for the soul of mankind was another question, one he felt less confident about answering. Everyone was using gas against the Lizards now, and praising it to the skies because it killed them in carload lots. But if they vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow, how long till earthly nations remembered their old quarrels and started using gas on one another? How long till the Germans started using it on the Jews they still ruled? For that matter, how did he know they weren’t using it on the Jews they still ruled? Nothing came out of Germany but what little Hitler and Gobbels wanted known.

Even as he thought about what mankind would do after the Lizards were vanquished, he realized beating them came first. And so he read on: “Wherever you who hear my voice may be, you, too, can join the fight against the alien invaders. You need not even take up a gun. You can also contribute to the war against them by sabotaging goods you produce if you work in a factory, by not paying, paying late, or underpaying the exactions they seek to impose on you, by obstructing them in any way possible, and by informing their foes of what they are about to do. With your help, we can make Earth so unpleasant for them that they will be glad to pack up and leave.”

He finished the last line of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat to show time was up. In the soundproof control room, the engineer clapped his hands, then pointed to Nathan Jacobi, who began reading the English version of Russie’s talk.

Jacobi was a consummate professional; the engineer took for granted his finishing spot on. What struck Moishe about his colleague’s reading was how much of it he understood. When he’d first begun broadcasting for the BBC, he’d had next to no English. Now he could follow it pretty well, and speak enough to get by. He felt less alien in London than he sometimes had in purely Polish sections of Warsaw.

“There, that’s done it,” Jacobi said when they were off the air. He clapped Moishe on the back. “Jolly good to be working with you again. For a while there, I doubted we should ever have the chance.”

“So did I,” Moishe said. “I have to remind myself that this is warfare, too. I’ve seen altogether too much of the real thing lately.”