Читаем Upsetting the Balance полностью

He spied a fuel specialist and stepped out into the male’s path. “How may I help you, superior sir?” the specialist asked. His words were all they should have been, but his tone was knowing, cynical.

“My engines could use a cleaning additive, I think,” Teerts answered. The code was clumsy, but worked well enough that, by all accounts, no one here had got in trouble for using ginger. There were horror stories of whole bases closed down and personnel sent to punishment. When ginger-users got caught, those who caught them were disinclined to mercy.

“Think you’ve got some contaminants in your hydrogen line, do you, superior sir?” the specialist asked. “Well, computer analysis should be able to tell whether you’re right or wrong. Come with me; we’ll check it out.”

The terminal to which the fuel specialist led Teerts was networked to all the others at the air base, and to a mainframe in one of the starships that had landed in southern France. The code the specialist punched into it had nothing to do with fuel analysis. It went somewhere into the accounting section of the mainframe.

“How far out of spec are your engines performing?” the male asked.

“At least thirty percent,” Teerts answered. He keyed the figure into the computer. It unobtrusively arranged for him to transfer thirty percent of his last pay period’s income to the fuel specialist’s account. No one had ever asked questions about such transactions, not at this air base. Teerts suspected that meant a real live male in the accounting department was suppressing fund transfer data to make sure no one asked questions. He wondered whether the male got paid off in money or in ginger. He knew which he would rather have had.

“There you are, superior sir. See? Analysis shows your problem’s not too serious,” the fuel specialist said, continuing the charade. “But here’s your additive, just in case.” He shut down the terminal, reached into a pouch on his belt, and passed Teerts several small plastic vials filled with brownish powder.

“Ah. Thank you very much.” Teerts stowed them in one of his own pouches. As soon as he got some privacy, this cold, wet mudball of a planet would have the chance to redeem itself.

Walking with Friedrich through the streets of Lodz made Mordechai Anielewicz feel he was walking alongside a beast of prey that had developed a taste for human flesh and might turn on him at any moment The comparison wasn’t altogether accurate, but it wasn’t altogether wrong, either. He didn’t know what Friedrich had done in the war, or in the time between the German conquest of Poland and the invasion of the Lizards.

Whatever he’d done, Friedrich had sense enough to keep his mouth shut now, even with Jews swarming all about him. The Lodz ghetto wasn’t as large as Warsaw’s, but it was just as crowded and just as hungry. Next to what the ghettos had endured in Nazi times, what they had now was abundance; next to abundance, what they had now wasn’t much.

Anielewicz scowled at the posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski that stared down from every blank wall in the ghetto. Some of the posters were old and faded and peeling; others looked to have been put up yesterday. Rumkowski had run things here under the Nazis, and by all appearances was still running them under the Lizards. Mordechai wondered how exactly he’d managed that.

Friedrich noticed the posters, too. “Give that old bastard hair and a little mustache and he could be Hitler,” he remarked, glancing slyly over at Anielewicz. “How does that make you feel, Shmuel?”

Even now, surrounded by Jews, he didn’t leave off his baiting. Neither did Anielewicz. It wasn’t particularly vicious; it was the sort of teasing two workmen who favored rival football clubs might have exchanged. “Sick,” Mordechai answered. That was true, for before the war he’d never imagined the Jews could produce their own vest-pocket Hitlers. But he wouldn’t give Friedrich the pleasure of knowing he was irked, so he added, “Hitler’s a much uglier man.” As far as he was concerned, that was so both literally and metaphorically.

“Ah, rubbish,” Friedrich said, planting a playful elbow in his ribs. One of these days, the Nazi would do that once too often, and then something dramatic would happen. He hadn’t done it quite often enough for that, not yet.

Something dramatic happened anyhow. A Jew in a cloth cap and a long black coat stopped in the middle of Lutomierska Street and stared at Friedrich. The Jew had a wide, ugly scar across the right side of his face, as if a bullet had creased him there.

He walked up to Anielewicz, waggled a forefinger in front of his nose. “Are you a Jew?” he demanded in Yiddish.

“Yes, I’m a Jew,” Mordechai answered in the same language. He understood why the newcomer sounded a little uncertain. Even with the light brown beard on his cheeks, he looked more like a Pole than the swarthy, hook-nosed stereotype of a Jew.