Upsetting the Balance

Blair returned in a moment with a thick, white china cup. He gulped down the not-quite-tea, made a wry face, and hurried into the studio. No sooner had he gone inside than the air-raid sirens began to wail. Russie blinked in surprise; he heard no Lizard jets screaming overhead. “Shall we go down to the shelter in the cellar?” he asked.

To his surprise, Jacobi said, “No. Wait-listen.”

Moishe obediently listened. Along with the howling sirens came another sound-a brazen clangor he needed a moment to identify. “Why are the church bells ringing?” he asked. “They’ve never done that before.”

“In 1940, that was going to be a signal,” Jacobi answered. “Thank God, it was one we never had to use.”

“What do you mean?” Russie asked. “What was it for?”

“After theLuftwaffe began to bomb us, they silenced all the bells,” Jacobi said. “If they ever started ringing again, it meant-invasion.”

The church bells rang and rang and rang, a wild carillon that raised the hair on Moishe’s arms and at the back of his neck. “The Germans aren’t going to invade now,” he said. However much it grated on him, relations between England and German-occupied northern France and the Low Countries had been correct, even sometimes approaching cordial, since the Lizards landed. The Lizards-”Oy!”

“Oy!is right,” Jacobi agreed. He cocked his head to one side, listening to the bells and the sirens. “I don’t hear any Lizard airplanes, and I don’t hear any antiaircraft guns, either. If they are invading, they aren’t coming down on London.”

“Where are they, then?” Moishe asked, as if the newsreader had some way of learning that to which he himself was not allowed access.

“How should I know?” Jacobi answered testily. Then he answered his own question: “We’re in a BBC studio. If we can’t find out here, where can we?”

Russie thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, feeling very foolish. “Next thing I’ll do, I’ll ask a librarian where to find books.” He hesitated again; he still didn’t know the overall layout of the BBC Overseas Section all that well, being primarily concerned with his own broadcasting duties.

Jacobi saw his confusion. “Come on; we’ll go to the news monitoring service. They’ll know as much as anyone does.”

A row of wireless sets sat on several tables placed side by side. The resultant dinning mix of languages and occasional squeals and bursts of static would swiftly have driven any unprepared person mad. The mostly female monitors, though, wore earphones, so each one of them gave heed only to her assigned transmission.

One phrase came through the Babel again and again: “They’re here.” A women took off her earphones and got up from her set for a moment, probably for a trip to the loo. She nodded to Jacobi, whom she obviously knew. “I can guess why you’re hanging about here, dearie,” she said. “The buggers have gone and done it. Parachutists and I don’t know what all else in the south, and up in the Midlands, too. That’s about all anyone knows right now.”

“Thank you, Norma,” the newsreader said. “That’s more than we knew before.” He translated it for Moishe Russie, who had understood some of it but not all.

“The south and the Midlands?” Russie said, visualizing a map. “That’s doesn’t sound good. It sounds as if-”

“-They’re heading for London from north and south both,” Jacobi interrupted. He looked seriously at Moishe. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be broadcasting here. For one thing, God may know how they’ll supply a city of seven million with invaders on both sides of it, but I don’t.”

“I’ve been hungry before,” Moishe said. The Germans would have had no logistic problem in keeping the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto fed; they simply hadn’t bothered.

“I know that,” Jacobi answered. “But there’s something else, too. We would have fought the Germans with every man we had. I don’t expect Churchill will do anything less against the Lizards. Before long, they’ll come for us, put rifles in our hands, give us as many bullets as they happen to have for them, and send us up to the front line.”

That had the ring of truth to it. It was what Russie would have done had he been running the country. All the same, he shook his head. “To you, they’ll give a rifle. To me, they’ll give a medical bag, probably with rags for bandages and not much else.” He surprised himself by laughing.

“What’s funny?” Jacobi asked.

“I don’t know if it’s funny or justmeshuggeh,” Moishe said, “but here I’ll be a Jew going to war with a red cross on my arm.”

“I don’t know which, either,” Jacobi said, “but you haven’t gone to war. The war’s come to you.”