Worldwar: In the Balance by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: World War, Science fiction, Space Opera, 1939-1945, General, Science Fiction, American, Imaginary wars and battles, Adventure, Life on other planets, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345388520
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1994-12-27T10:00:00+00:00

“This is Radio Deutschland.” Not Radio Berlin, Moishe Russie thought as he moved his head closer to the speaker of the shortwave set. Not any more. Nor was the signal, though on the same frequency as Berlin had always used, anywhere near as strong as it had been. Instead of shouting, it was as if the Germans were whispering now, in hope of not being overheard.

“An important bulletin,” the news reader went on. “The government of the Reich is grieved to report that Washington, D.C., capital of the United States of America, appears to have been the victim of a bomb of the type which recently made a martyr of Berlin. All radio transmissions from Washington ceased abruptly and without warning approximately twenty-five minutes ago; confused reports from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond speak of a pillar of fire mounting into the night sky. Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has expressed his condolences for the American people, victims like the Germans of the insane aggression of these savage alien invaders. The Führer’s words—”

Russie clicked off the set. He did not care what Adolf Hitler had to say; he wished with all his heart that Hitler had been in Berlin when the Lizards dropped their bomb on it. The regime there had deserved to go up in a pillar of fire.

But Washington! If Berlin represented everything dark and bestial in the human spirit, Washington stood for just the opposite: freedom, justice, equality … yet the Lizards destroyed them both alike.

“Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay rabo—” Russie murmured the memorial prayer for the dead. So many would be dead, across the ocean; he remembered the posters the Germans had plastered all over Warsaw before the city fell to the Lizards … before the Jews and the Polish Home Army rose up and helped the Lizards drive the Germans out of Warsaw.

No doubt that had been justified; without the Lizards, Russie knew he and most if not all his people would have died. That reasoning had let him support them after they entered Warsaw. Gratitude was a reasonable emotion, especially when as fully deserved as here. That the outside world thought him a traitor to mankind hurt deeply, but the outside world did not know—and refused to see—what the Nazis had done here. Better the Lizards than the SS; so he still believed.

But now—Booted feet pounded down the corridor toward his office, breaking in on his thoughts. The door flew open. The moment he saw Mordechai Anielewicz’s face, he knew the fighting leader had heard. “Washington—” they both said in the same breath.

Russie was the first to find more words. “We cannot go on comfortably working with them after this, not unless we want to deserve the hatred the rest of mankind would give us for such a deed.”

“Reb Moishe, you’re right,” Anielewicz said, the first time in a long while he’d given Russie such unqualified agreement. But where Russie thought in terms of right and wrong, the Jewish soldier almost automatically began considering ways and means. “We cannot simply rise up against them, either, not unless we want the bloodbath back again.

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