Upsetting the Balance

“Mankind has employed one of these bombs, against a purely military target. The Lizards have now incinerated three historic cities, seeking to terrify humanity into surrender. London, from which I am broadcasting, has already been bombarded by both Hitler and the Lizards, yet still endures. Even if, in their madness, the Lizards treat it as they did Tokyo, the British Isles and the British Empire will continue not only to endure but also to resist. We hope and expect that all of you who are unfortunate enough to live in territory overrun by the aliens, yet can hear my voice, will continue to resist, too. In the end, we shall prevail.”

He came to the end of the script just as the engineer drew a finger across his throat. Beaming at the good timing, Nathan Jacobi took over, in English rather than Yiddish: “I shall translate Moishe Russie’s remarks momentarily. First, though, I should like to note that no one is better qualified to judge the perfidy in the Lizards’ promises than Mr. Russie, for he watched them turn what he’d thought to be liberation into the enslavement and wholesale murder they bring to the entire world. As he said…”

Moishe listened to the introduction with half an ear. He was picking up more English day by day, but remained far from fluent: by the time he figured out what most of one sentence meant, two others would go by.

Jacobi went through an English version of Russie’s speech for Eastern European listeners who had no Yiddish. Since Moishe already knew what he’d said, he did better at following that than he had with the introduction. When the engineer signaled that they were off the air, he leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh.

Switching from English to Yiddish for Moishe’s benefit, the newsreader said, “I do wonder at times whether any of this does the least bit of good.”

“It does,” Moishe assured him. “When the Lizards had me locked up in Lodz, it wasn’t just my English cousin who helped me get out, but plenty of Jewish fighters from Poland. They need encouragement, and to be reminded they’re not the only people left in the whole world who want to stand up to the Lizards.”

“No doubt you’re right,” Jacobi said. “You would know better than I, having been on the spot. I just seem to have spent almost all of the last four years broadcasting messages of hope into occupied Europe-first Nazi-occupied Europe, now Lizard-occupied Europe-with what looks like very little return for the effort. I do want to feel I’m actually contributing to the war effort.”

“The Lizards don’t like truth any better than the Germans did,” Russie answered. “Next to what the Nazis were doing in Poland, they looked good for a moment, but that was all. They may not be out to exterminate anyone, but they are aiming to enslave everyone all over the world, and the more people realize that, the harder they’ll fight back.”

“All over the world,” Jacobi repeated. “That takes thinking about. We called it a world war before the Lizards came, but the Americans, Africa, India, much of the Near East-they were hardly touched. Now the whole world really is in play. Rather hard to imagine.”

Moishe nodded. It was harder for him than for the British Jew. Jacobi had grown up in London, the center of the greatest empire the world had ever known and also closely linked to the United States. Thinking of the world as a whole had to come easy for him. Moishe’s mental horizons hadn’t really reached beyond Poland-indeed, seldom beyond Warsaw-until the day von Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet friendship pact and guaranteed that war would not only come but would be disastrous when it came.

Through the glass, the engineer motioned Russie and Jacobi out of the studio. They got up quickly; another broadcaster or team would soon be taking over the facility.

Sure enough, out in the hall stood a tall, skinny, craggy-faced man with a thick shock of dark hair just beginning to go gray. He was looking at his wristwatch and holding a sheaf of typewritten pages like the ones Jacobi carried. “Good morning, Mr. Blair,” Russie said, trotting out his halting English.

“Good morning, Russie,” Eric Blair answered. He slid off his dark herringbone jacket. “Warm work closed up in the coffin there. I’d sooner be in my shirtsleeves.”

“Yes, warm,” Moishe said, responding to the part he’d understood. Blair broadcast for the Indian Section of the BBC. He’d lived in Burma for a time, and had also fought and been badly wounded fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Somewhere there, or perhaps back in England, he’d picked up a wet cough that was probably tubercular.

He pulled out a handkerchief to stifle it, then said, “Excuse me, gentlemen, I’m going to take some tea to get the scaling out of the pipes.”

“He’s astonishing,” Jacobi murmured in Yiddish as Blair walked away. “I’ve known him to bring up bloody phlegm after a broadcast, but you’d never imagine anything was the matter if you listened to him over the air.”