Tilting the Balance

“Best we could do,” the bald Jew said with a shrug. “That’s why you don’t want to wave it around unless somebody asks for it. But if somebody does, he probably won’t look at it; he’ll feed it into a Lizard machine-and it shows you’ve been authorized for the past two weeks to leave Lodz on a buying trip.” He clucked mournfully. “Cost us plenty to pay off a Pole who works for the Lizards to make these for us, and he’d only take the best.”

“Gold?” Russie asked.

“Worse,” the fellow answered. “Tobacco. Gold at least stays in circulation. Tobacco, you smoke it and it’s gone.”

“Tobacco.” Goldfarb sounded even more mournful than the bald Jew had. “What I wouldn’t give for a fag. It’s been a bloody long time.”

Russie didn’t care one way or the other about tobacco. He’d never got the habit, and his medical studies made him pretty sure it wasn’t good for you. But it did show how far the underground had gone to rescue him. That warmed him, especially since some people thought him a traitor for broadcasting for the Lizards. He said, “Thank you more than I know how to tell you. I-”

Shmuel cut him off: “Listen, you’d better get out of here. You want to thank us, broadcast from England.”

“He’s right,” David Goldfarb said. “Come on, cousin. Standing around chattering doesn’t up the chances of our living to collect an old age pension-not that we’re in serious danger of it at any rate, things being as they are.”

Out of the flat, out of the block of flats, they went. As they walked north, they listened to rumors swirl around them: “All the prisoners free-” “The Nazis did it. My aunt saw a man in a German helmet-” “Half the Lizards in Lodz killed, I heard. My wife’s brother says-”

“By tomorrow, they’ll be saying the Lizards dropped an atomic bomb on this place,” Goldfarb remarked dryly.

“Did you hear what he said?” someone going the other way exclaimed. “They used an atomic bomb to blow up the prison.” Russie and Goldfarb looked at each other, shook their heads, and started to laugh.

Less than an hour had gone by since the first blast (piat, Goldfarb called it, which sounded more Polish than either Yiddish or English) hit the prison, but the streets heading out of the ghetto already had checkpoints on them; the Lizards and their human henchmen, Order Service thugs and Polish bullies, had wasted not a moment. Some people took one look and decided they didn’t need to leave after all; others queued up to show they had the right.

Moishe started to get into a line that led up to a couple of Poles. Goldfarb pulled him out of it. “No, no,” he said loudly. “Come on over here. This line is much shorter.”

Of course that line was much shorter: at its head stood three Lizards. Nobody in his right mind wanted to trust his fate to them when human beings were around. Humans might be thugs, but at least they were your own kind of thugs. But Moishe couldn’t drag Goldfarb back from the line he’d chosen without making a scene, and he didn’t dare do that. Convinced his cousin was leading them to their doom, he took his place in the queue that led up to the aliens.

Sure enough, the wait to get to them was short. A Lizard turned one eye turret toward Russie, the other toward Goldfarb. “You is?” he asked in bad Yiddish. He repeated the question in worse Polish.

“Adam Zilverstajn,” Goldfarb answered at once, using the name on his new, forged identity card.

“Felix Kirshbojm,” Moishe said more hesitantly.

He waited for alarms to go off, for guns to be pointed and maybe fired. But the Lizard just stuck out his hand and said, “Card.” Again, Goldfarb promptly surrendered his. Again, Moishe paused almost long enough to draw suspicion to himself before he handed his over.

The Lizard fed Goldfarb’s card into a slot on a square metal box that sat on a table next to him. The box gulped it down as if alive. While still collaborating with the Lizards, Russie had seen enough of their astonishing gadgetry to wonder if perhaps that wasn’t so. It spat out Goldfarb’s phony card. The Lizard looked at a display-like a miniature movie screen, Moishe thought-it held in its hand. “You go on business? You be back-seven days?” it said as it returned the card to Moishe’s cousin.

“That’s right,” Goldfarb agreed.

Then Russie’s card went into the machine. He almost broke and ran as the Lizard turned an eye turret toward the handheld display; he was sure words like traitor and escapee showed up there. But evidently they didn’t, for the Lizard waited till the card came out again, then said, “You go business seven days, too?”

“Yes,” Moishe said, remembering not to tack “superior sir” onto the end.

“You both go seven days,” the Lizard said. “You go-how to say-together?”

“Yes,” Moishe repeated. He wondered if the Lizards were looking for people traveling in groups. But the guard just handed him his card and got ready to receive the next set of people passing through the checkpoint.