Page 23 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

“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.”

Ussmak was afraid. The lumbering transport in which his landcruiser rode was big and powerful enough to haul two of the heavy machines at a time, but it wasn’t much faster than the killercraft the Big Uglies flew. Killercraft of the Race were supposed to be flying cover missions and making sure no Tosevite aircraft got through, but Ussmak had seen enough war on Tosev 3 to know that the Race’s neat, carefully developed plans often turned to chaos and disaster when they ran up against real, live, perfidious Big Uglies.

He wondered if this plan had turned to chaos and disaster even before it ran up against the Big Uglies. Into the intercom microphone, he said, “I don’t see why we were ordered away from fighting the Deutsche just when we’d finally starting making good progress against them.”

“We are males of the Race,” Nejas replied. “The duty of our superiors is to prepare the plans. Our duty is to carry them out, and that shall be done.”

Ussmak liked Nejas. More to the point, he knew Nejas was a good landcruiser commander. Somehow, though, Nejas had managed to come through all the hard fighting he’d seen with his confidence in the wisdom of his superiors unimpaired. Not even when Ussmak was happy almost to the point of imbecility with three quick tastes of ginger could he sound so certain everything would be all right. And Nejas didn’t even taste.

Neither did Skoob, the gunner. He and Nejas had been together ever since the conquest fleet touched down on Tosev 3, and he was every bit as enamored of the straight and narrow as his commander. Now, though, he said, “Superior sir, I believe the driver has a point. Dividing and shifting effort in combat creates risks, some of which may be serious. While we and our equipment are transferred to attack the British, we grant the Deutsche time to recover, even to counterattack.”

“The Deutsche are staggering, ready to fall on the tailstumps they don’t have,” Nejas insisted. “The British have seen little of the war till now. Their miserable little island has been a base for endless mischief against us. Because it is an island, we can conquer it completely, remove this threat, and then resume our campaign against the Deutsche secure in the knowledge that Britain can no longer threaten our rear.”

He sounded like the dapper officers who had briefed the landcruiser units as they pulled them out of line against the Deutsche. Those officers had exuded wholesome confidence, too, so much confidence that Ussmak was certain they’d never led males in combat against the Big Uglies.

He said, “I don’t think military needs have all that much to do with it, or not in the usual way. I think more of it comes down to politics.”

“How do you mean, driver?” Nejas asked. The interrogative cough with which he punctuated his question was so loud and explosive, Ussmak knew he didn’t follow at all: a good commander, yes, but a natural-hatched innocent.

“Superior sir, when Straha fled to the Big Uglies, the Emperor only knows how many of our plans he took with him. They probably know just what we intend to try for the next two years. To keep them confused, we have to do different things now.”

“Curse Straha. May the Emperor turn his eye turrets away from him forever, now and in the world to come,” Nejas answered fiercely. After a moment, though, he said, “Yes, some truth may hatch from that eggshell. We-”

Before he could finish what he was saying, the transport, without warning, dropped like a stone. The chains that held the landcruiser secure in the fuselage groaned and creaked, but held. Ussmak’s seat belt held, too, to his relief, so he didn’t bounce all over the driver’s compartment as the aircraft dove.

As landcruiser commander, Nejas had a communications link with the pilot of the transport. He said, “We had to take evasive action against a Tosevite killercraft there. The machine guns stitched us up a bit, but no serious damage. We should land without trouble.”

“A good place not to have trouble, superior sir,” Ussmak agreed, and tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

“What happened to the Big Ugly aircraft?” Skoob demanded. He had the proper attitude for a gunner: he wanted to be sure the foe was gone.

Unfortunately, this time the foe wasn’t gone. Nejas said, “I am told that the Tosevite male escaped. The British apparently had more aircraft available than we anticipated, and are throwing them all into the battle against our forces. Here and there, sheer numbers let some of them get through.”

“We’ve seen that before, superior sir,” Ussmak said. Individually, a landcruiser or killercraft of the Race was worth some large number of the machines the Big Uglies manufactured. But the Tosevites, after they’d lost that large number, proceeded to manufacture several more. When the Race lost a machin

e, it and the male or males who crewed it were gone for good.

Nejas might have picked the thought from his head. “With luck, our conquest of this island of British or whatever its name is will make it harder for the Big Uglies, at least in this part of Tosev 3, to continue building the weapons with which they oppose us.”

“Yes, superior sir, with luck,” Ussmak said. He’d given up on the idea that the Race would get much luck in its struggle with the Big Uglies. Maybe, along with their aircraft and landcruisers, the Tosevites manufactured luck in some hidden underground factory…

Nejas broke into his reverie, saying, “We are on the point of landing. Prepare yourselves.”

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