Striking the Balance полностью

Ignacy shook his head. “The Lizards have been patrolling rear areas much more aggressively than they did when they fought major battles along the front. Also, the Nazis do not want anyone capturing antitank rockets that could be shown to have entered Poland after the cease-fire began. That might give the Lizards the excuse they need to end the truce. But if you flew the rockets back here without having them noticed on the ground, we could use them as we like: who could prove when we acquired them?”

“I see,” Ludmila said slowly, and she did. The Nazis had an interest in playing it close to the vest, while Ignacy, she suspected, didn’t know how to play it any other way. “And what happens if I am shot down trying to deliver the rockets to you?”

“I shall miss both you and the aircraft,” the guerrilla leader answered. She gave him a dirty look. He stared back, his face bland and blank. She got the idea he wouldn’t miss her much, even if she did give him an air force of sorts. She wondered if he wanted to get her airborne to be rid of her, but soon decided that was foolish. He could pick many more direct ways of disposing of her, ones that didn’t involve the precious FieselerStorch.

The nod he gave her was almost a bow: a bourgeois affectation he’d preserved even here in a setting most emphatically proletarian. “Be assured I shall let you know the instant I have word that this plan goes forward, that I have persuaded the German authorities here there is no danger to it. And now I leave you to enjoy the beauties of the sunset.”

Itwas beautiful, even if she bridled at the way he said that. Crimson and orange and brilliant gold filled the sky; drifting clouds seemed to be aflame. And yet, though the colors were those of fire and blood, they didn’t make her think of war. Instead, she wondered what she ought to be doing when, in a few short hours, the sun rose again. Where was her life going, tomorrow and next month and next year?

She felt torn in two. Part of her wanted to go back to the Soviet Union in any way she could. The pull of therodina was strong. But she also wondered what would become of her if she returned. Her dossier already had to be suspect, because she was known to have associated with Heinrich Jager. Could she justify going off to a foreign country-a country under occupation by the Lizards and the Nazis-at the behest of a German general? She’d been in Poland for months, too, without making any effort to come back till now. If the NKVD happened to be in a suspicious mood, as the NKVD so often happened to be (the nasty, skinny face of Colonel Boris Lidov flashed in front of her mind), they’d ship her to agulag without a second thought.

The other half of her wanted to run to Jager, not away from him. She recognized the impracticalities there, too. The Nazis had theGestapo instead of the NKVD. They wouldn’t just be looking at Jager through a magnifying glass, either. They’d rake her over the coals, too, maybe more savagely than the People’s Commissariat for the Interior would. She tried to imagine what happened to Nazis who fell into the NKVD’s hands. That same sort of shuddersome treatment had to await Soviet citizens in the grip of theGestapo.

Realistically, she couldn’t go east. As realistically, she couldn’t go west, either. That left staying where she was, also an unpalatable choice. Ignacy was hardly the sort of leader she’d follow into battle with a song on her ups (though if she did, she thought wryly, she’d better sing in tune).

As she stood and thought and watched, gold faded out of the sky. Now the horizon was orange, with crimson creeping down the dome of heaven toward it. Some of the clouds, off in the east, were just floating dumplings, not fire incarnate. Night was coming.

Ludmila sighed. “What I’d really like,” she said, though nothing and no one was likely to pay her any heed, “is to go off somewhere-maybe by myself, maybe. If he wants, with Heinrich-and forget this whole war and that it ever started.” She laughed. “And while I’m wishing for that, why don’t I wish for the moon from out of the sky, too?”

Ttomalss paced back and forth on the concrete floor of his cell. His toeclaws clicked over the hard, rough surface. He wondered how long he would take to wear a groove in the floor, or maybe even wear through it so he could dig a hole in the dirt below and escape.

That depended on how thick the concrete was, of course. If the Tosevites had put down only a thin layer of the stuff, he shouldn’t need more than, oh, three or four lifetimes.

Not much light came in through the small, narrow windows of the cell. Those windows were set too high for him to see out through them, and too high for any Big Ugly to see in. He had been told that if he raised an outcry, he would be shot without a chance to explain or make amends. He believed the warning. It was very much in character for the Tosevites.