Striking the Balance

He and his companions paced among the headstones-some straight, some tilting drunkenly-looking for freshly turned earth. Some of the grass in the cemetery was knee high; it had been poorly tended ever since the Germans first took Lodz, almost five years before.

“Would it fit in an ordinary grave?” Gruver asked, pausing before one that couldn’t have been more than a week old.

“I don’t know,” Anielewicz answered. He paused. “No. Maybe I do. I’ve seen regular bombs the size of a man. Airplanes can carry those. What the Germans have has to be bigger.”

“We’re wasting our time here, then,” the fireman said. “We should go down to the ghetto field, where the mass graves are.”

“No,” Bertha Fleishman said. “Where the bomb is-that doesn’t have to look like a grave, you know. They could have made it seem as if they’d repaired the sewer pipes or something of that sort.”

Gruver scratched at his chin, then finally nodded. “You’re right”

An old man in a long black coat sat by one of the graves, a battered fedora pulled down low over his face against the drizzle. He closed the prayerbook he’d been reading and put it in his pocket. When Mordechai and his friends went by, the fellow nodded but did not speak.

A walk through the cemetery didn’t show any new excavations of any sort bigger than ordinary graves. Gruver had an I-told-you-so look in his eye as he, Mordechai, and Bertha headed south into the ghetto field.

Grave markers got fewer there, and many of them, as Solomon Gruver had said, marked many corpses thrown into one pit: men, women, and children dead of typhus, of tuberculosis, of starvation, perhaps of broken hearts. Grass grew on a lot of those mounds, too. Things were not so desperate now. With the Nazis gone, times had improved all the way up to hard, and burials were by ones, not by companies at a time.

Bertha paused in front of one of the large interments: the board that was all the marker the poor souls down there would ever get had fallen over. When she stooped to straighten it, she frowned. “What’s this?” she said.

Mordechai couldn’t see what “this” was till he came close. When he did, he whistled softly under his breath. A wire whose insulator was the color of old wood ran the length of the board, held to it by a couple of nails pounded in and bent over. The nails were rusted, so they didn’t stand out. The wire stopped at the top of the memorial board, but kept going from the bottom. There, it disappeared into the ground.

“Wireless aerial,” he muttered, and yanked at it. It didn’t want to come out. He pulled with all his strength. The wire snapped, sending him stumbling backwards. He flailed his arms to keep from falling.“Something’s under there that doesn’t belong,” he said.

“Can’t be,” Solomon Gruver rumbled. “The ground’s not torn up the way it… ” His voice trailed away. He got down on his hands and knees, heedless of what the wet grass would do to his trousers. “Will you look at this?” he said in tones of wonder.

Mordechai Anielewicz got down beside him. He whistled again. “The grass has been cut out in chunks of sod and then replaced,” he said, ru

“Where’s the dirt?” Gruver demanded, as if Anielewicz had stolen it himself. “I don’t care if they didn’t bury the thing deep, they were going to have some left over-and they would have spilled it to either side of the grave as they were digging.”

“Not if they set canvas down first and tossed the spoil onto that,” Mordechai said. Gruver stared at him. He went on, “You have no idea how thorough the Nazis can be when they do something like this. Look at the way they camouflaged their ante

“If the board hadn’t fallen over-” Bertha Fleishman said in a dazed voice.

“I’ll bet it was like that when the SS bastards got here,” Anielewicz told her. “If you hadn’t had the keen eyes to notice the aerial-” He made silent clapping motions and smiled at her. She smiled back. She really was quite extraordinary when she did that, he thought.

“Where’s the dirt?” Solomon Gruver repeated, intent on his own concerns and not noticing the byplay between his comrades. “What did they do with it? They couldn’t have put it all back.”

“You want me to guess?” Mordechai asked. At the fireman’s nod, he went on, “If I were ru

“I think you’re right. I think that’s just what they did.” Bertha Fleishman looked over to the detached wire. “The bomb can’t go off now?”

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or, anyhow, they can’t set it off by wireless now, which is good enough for us. If they hadn’t needed the aerial, they wouldn’t have put it there.”

“Thank God,” she said.

“So,” Gruver said, sounding as if he still didn’t believe it. “We have a bomb of our own now?”

“If we can figure out how to fire it,” Anielewicz said. “If we can get it out of here without the Lizards’ noticing. If we can move it so that if, God forbid, we have to, we can fire it without blowing ourselves right out of this world. If we can do all that, we have a bomb of our own now.”

Sweat burst from Rance Auerbach’s forehead. “Come on, darling,” Pe

Auerbach gathered himself, gasped, grunted, and, with an effort that took everything he had in him, heaved himself upright on his crutches. Pe

His arms weren’t strong, either; supporting so much of his weight with his armpits was anything but easy. His wounded leg didn’t touch the ground, and wouldn’t for a long time yet. Getting around with one leg and two crutches felt like using an unsteady photographic tripod instead of his proper equipment.

Pe

“Don’t think I can yet,” Auerbach answered. This was only the third or fourth time he’d tried the crutches. Starting to move on them was as hard as getting an old Nash’s motor to turn over on a snowy morning.

“Oh, I bet you can.” Pe

From outside the tent, a dry voice said, “That’s the best incentive for physical therapy I’ve ever heard.” Auerbach almost fell down. Pe

By the way his own face heated, Auerbach was pretty sure he was the same color. “Uh, sir, it’s not-” he began, but then his tongue stumbled to a halt even more readily than his poor damaged carcass had.

The doctor stepped into the tent. He was a young fellow, a stranger, not one of the Lizards’ POW medicos. He looked from Auerbach to Pe