Upsetting the Balance

Moishe stared at it in dismay. Everything he’d learned in medical school, everything trained into him as a Jew, made him want to cry “No!” and to flee from the abominable act he’d been asked to perform. One of the things they had warned him about in medical school was that you didn’t learn everything you needed to become a doctor there. He’d seen that in Warsaw from 1939 on; now he saw it again, even more starkly.

“I beg,” the Lizard said.

He looked around. The Lizard must not have been gassed here, for he didn’t see its rifle. He had no weapons himself; medical personnel were supposed to be noncombatants. What was he supposed to do, bash in its head with a rock? He didn’t think he could, no matter how much the Lizard wanted him-neededhim-to do just that.

While he stood there in his own mental torment, yet another coughing fit wracked the Lizard. The coughs subsided to gasps; the gasps stopped. “Oh, thank God!” Moishe exclaimed. Sometimes even death could be a blessing-and he hadn’t had to inflict it.

Since Lizards didn’t wear clothes, they carried what they needed in a pack on their back and in belt pouches. Russie peeled off the pack and undid the pouches. Then, because sitting out in the middle of the orchestra made him feel naked and exposed to artillery and whatever live Lizards might still be in the neighborhood, he took the chattels first up onto the stage, where he could shelter behind the one intact column and the stubs of the others, and then down into a shell hole behind it. He didn’t think he could find better cover than that.

He opened the pack first. In it were several full magazines for the automatic rifles the Lizards used. Those would be useful; a few Englishmen carried captured Lizard weapons, and they were always crying for ammunition.

He also found half a dozen little bricks of what the Lizards reckoned field rations, each one wrapped in stuff that reminded him of cellophane but was thicker, more pliable, and less shiny. Lizard prisoners were welcome to the rations, which struck him as distinctly unappetizing. He wondered more about their wrapping: what it was and how they made it. It wasn’t really like anything mankind turned out.

Something else spilled out of the pack, a case about the size of a ration brick. “Better and better,” Moishe said to no one in particular. The case was a wireless set, though how the Lizards managed to build such a tiny wireless was beyond him-and beyond the best human scientists and engineers in the world, too.

In the same way that the ration wrappers reminded him of cellophane, the material from which the case was made put him in mind of Bakelite. But it wasn’t Bakelite; it was another one of the types of stuff the Lizards could manufacture and people couldn’t.

Along with such practical things as food, ammunition, and communications gear, the Lizard also carried in its pack a whole sheaf of papers, more than Russie would have expected to find on any ten human casualties. One of the papers was a map; Moishe recognized the street grid of St. Albans down in one corner.

The map had notations in the squiggly Lizard script. Moishe did his best to puzzle them out. Back in Warsaw, he’d learned the characters the Lizards used for their written language. It hadn’t taken him long: he already dealt with two versions of one alphabet for Yiddish and Hebrew and two versions of another for Polish and German. The trouble was that, while he could read the words, he mostly didn’t know what they meant. He hadn’t had time to build up anything but the most basic vocabulary.

“Too bad,” he said, and tucked the papers into his medical bag. Somebody would understand what they meant. One thing that had impressed him about the English was the amount of scholarly talent they could bring to bear on almost anything.

He fumbled at one of the belt pouches before he finally got it open: the closure would have been much easier to work if he’d had claws on his fingertips rather than nails. A card a little bigger than a standard business card spilled out onto the ground.

When he picked it up and turned it over, he found himself staring into one of the Lizards’ three-dimensional pictures. It showed the male who had just died in the Roman theater. Letter by letter, he sounded out the Lizard’s name: “Ekretkan.”

He wondered what sort of person Ekretkan had been, how he’d lived before he came to Earth, what he’d thought of the Race’s war before he became one of its victims. The card offered no clue to that. Next to Ekretkan’s photo was a complicated network of golds and greens that reminded Russie of the body paint pattern the Lizard had worn. He supposed it showed the dead male’s rank, seniority, and specialization, but had no idea how to read it.