Upsetting the Balance

“Nyet anglichani,”thebabushka said, pointing at him.“Zhid.”

Bagnall remembered an old, beautifully dressed Jewish man he’d seen walking slowly along a Paris street with a six-pointed yellow star with the wordJuif on it sewn to his jacket pocket. The expression of dignified misery that man had worn would go with him to his grave. But the sneer in thebabushka’s voice told him something of how others had thought it a good idea to make the old Jew wear a yellow star.

“Zhid?”Bagnall said quietly.“Spasebo. Thank you.” Thebabushka’s gray eyes went blank and empty as a couple of stones. Bagnall took the eggs and headed for the house he shared with Ken Embry and Jerome Jones. He hoped he wouldn’t run into Tatiana the sniper.

A buzz in the sky made him turn as he walked past a grassy park on whose greensward sheep grazed under the watchful eyes of Red Army andWehrmacht guards. After a moment, he spotted an approaching plane: not a Lizard fighter, lean and graceful as a shark and a millionfold more deadly, but a human-built machine that hardly looked as if it belonged in the same sky as Lizard aircraft or even those of the RAF.

It was, nonetheless, the first human-built airplane-and, not coincidentally, the first plane not loaded with ordnance intended to punch his ticket-he’d seen in a long time. That alone sent his spirits soaring. The Red Army guards raised a cheer when they spied the red stars painted on the wings and fuselage and tailplane.

The Russian aircraft was coming into Pskov at treetop height. At first Bagnall thought that was just because it skimmed the ground to give the Lizards a harder time spotting it. Then, as it lowered its flaps, he realized the pilot intended to bring it down right in the park.

“He’s out of his bloody mind,” Bagnall muttered. But the pilot wasn’t. The biplane wasn’t going very fast and wasn’t very heavy; it rolled to a stop with better than a hundred yards of meadow to spare. It even managed to avoid running over a sheep or butchering one with its prop as it taxied. Bagnall trotted toward it with the vague notion of congratulating whoever had done the flying.

First out of the aircraft was a tall, skinny fellow with a thick red beard. He wore a field-gray tunic, but Bagnall would have guessed him for a German even without it-his face was too long and beaky to belong to most Russians.

Sure enough, he started yelling in German: “Come on, you dumb-heads, let’s get this stinking airplane under cover before the Lizards spot it and blow it to hell and gone.”

The pilot stood up and shouted support for the Nazi. Bagnall didn’t follow all of it, but he knewmaskirovka meant camouflage. That wasn’t what made him stop and stare, though. He’d heard the Reds used female pilots, but he hadn’t more than half believed it till now.

Yet there she was. She took off her leather flying helmet, and hair the color of ripe wheat spilled down almost to her shoulders. Her face was wide and rather flat, her skin fair but tanned except around the eyes, where her goggles shielded it from the sun. The eyes themselves were intensely blue.

She saw him and the officer’s cap he was wearing, climbed down out of the biplane, and walked up to him. Saluting, she said, “Comrade, I am Senior Lieutenant Ludmila Gorbunova, reporting to Pskov as ordered with the German sergeant Georg Schultz, a tank gunner and highly capable mechanic.”

Fumblingly, Bagnall explained he wasn’t really a Red Army officer, and who he really was. Without much hope, he added,“Vuy gavoritye po-angliski?”

“No, I don’t speak English,” she replied in Russian, but then she did switch languages:“Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich kann Deutsch ein wenig sprechen.”

“I speak a little German also. Perhaps more than a little now,” he answered in the same tongue.

Hearing German, Georg Schultz came up and greeted Bagnall with a stiff-arm salute and a loud,“Heil Hitler.”

Bugger Hitler,was the first thought that came to Bagnall’s mind. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, he and Schultz-and, for that matter, Schultz and Ludmila Gorbunova-would have been at each other’s throats. The Germans made even more uncomfortable allies than the Russians.

Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova looked pained. “He is a dedicated fascist, as you hear. But he has also done very good work for the Red Air Force. With tools in his hand, he is a genius.”

Bagnall studied Schultz. “He must be,” he said slowly. If the Nazi hadn’t been bloody good, the Communists would have got rid of him on general principles. That they hadn’t was probably a measure of their own desperate situation.

Men came running up to drag the biplane as far in among the trees over to one side of the park as its wings would permit. Others draped it with camouflage netting. Before long, it had all but disappeared.