In the Balance

“Out, out, out!” he screamed. He had almost been thrown out, on his head. Only two armored walls and the full weight of the engine had kept the enemy shell out of the fighting compartment. Once the fire got going, nothing would hold, that at bay.

Machine-gun bullets stitched the air around him as he pulled himself out of the cupola and dove into the tall grass. Other hatches came open. His crew began bailing out with him. A bullet struck home with a noise like a slap on a bare, wet back. Somebody shrieked.

The clean green smell of the weeds through which Jager scrambled filled his nostrils. He had two somewhat contradictory goals. He wanted to put the hulk of the killed tank between himself and the oncoming Lizards, but he also wanted to get as far away from that hulk-and from the Lizards-as he could. The ammunition in the Panzer III was going to start cooking off any minute now, maybe any second, and the Lizards were not likely to be well-disposed toward German tankmen, especially a crew that had managed to destroy one of their fancy machines.

Another shell slammed into the Panzer III. It went up with a roar. Stupid, Jager thought, stupid and wasteful. That tank was already dead meat. Meanwhile, though, machine-gun bullets probed the grass. They made tiny, whispering tic-tic-tic sounds as they clipped the leaves. Jager wondered what kind of sounds he would make if they clipped him.

The Lizards’ tank rolled majestically past, fewer than fifty meters off. Jager lay facedown and unmoving. If the enemy saw him, maybe they’d think he was already dead. Not only was it faster than both his Panzer III and a T-34, it was ghost-quiet to boot.

Somewhere a few hundred meters away, an MG-34 began to bark. Bullets ricocheted off the armor of the Lizard panzer. Its machine gun returned fire. The panzer itself turned toward the German machine-gun position.

As he crawled in the opposite direction, Jager almost bumped into Georg Schultz. After an instant of fright, the two men gri

“And you,” Jager answered. “Have you seen Fuchs?” Schqltz’s grin slipped. “He didn’t make it out.”

“That was the shriek, then,” Jager said. The gu

“Don’t know.”

They found Dieter Schmidt a few minutes later. Klaus Bauer, the hull gu

“Lucky we didn’t blow up when we were hit,” Jager said.

Schmidt surprised him by laughing. “Luck, hell, sir. We were just about dry of petrol, that’s all. We had maybe enough for another kilometer or two, no more.”

“Oh,” Jager said. He started to laugh himself, though it wasn’t really fu

For that matter, even this action wasn’t over yet. Lizard infantry had been moving up along with their armor. Jager had a pistol in his holster that he hadn’t fired in months. Schultz and Schmidt were both clutching their personal Schmeissers. Submachine guns were better than nothing, but they didn’t have the range to make proper infantry weapons.

“What now, sir?” Schultz asked.

“Now we get out of the sack,” Jager said. “If we can.”

Moishe Russie held up the Bible, read from the Book of Joshua in a loud voice: “ ‘And it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city.’ ”

The crowd of Jews behind him cheered. At his side, his wife, Rivka, beamed at him, her sweet brown eyes enormous in her thin face. Their son, Reuven, was even thi

“What now, Reb Moishe?” someone called.

“I’m no reb,” he said, looking modestly down at the ground.

“No reb?” several people exclaimed together in tones of disbelief. One added, “Who but you asked the Lord for a sign and was answered?” That tale had run through the ghetto almost be-fore the miraculous light in the sky faded. Every tale with hope in it spread even faster than typhus. With only hope to live on, the Jews made of it a banquet.

Someone else, a woman, said, “He’s no reb; he’s a prophet. Like Joshua whose Book he reads, he made the walls fall down.”

The Jews cheered again. Russie felt his ears grow hot. He hadn’t made the ghetto walls fall down, and he knew it. But the bombs that screamed out of the sky and smashed brick to powder seemed to have come from the same-people? monsters? — who’d touched off the light in the sky he’d taken for a signal from On High.

The only accounts of them in the ghetto came from garbled shortwave reports. By the rumors he’d heard, Russie knew the Lizards (a name he wondered about) were bombing fortifications all over the world. Nowhere, though, had their explosives done more than in Warsaw.

He wondered whether the Lizards thought the Nazis had an enemy under siege in the heart of the city (if so, they’d been right, though perhaps not in the way they’d believed). Whatever their reasons, they’d attacked the wall less than a week after they revealed their presence.

Russie remembered the German bombers dropping their endless loads of death almost randomly over Warsaw (although they had paid special attention to the Jewish districts). The Lizards’ raid was different. Even though they’d come at night, their bombs hit the wall and only the wall, almost as if they were aimed not by men-or even Lizards-but by the hand of the Almighty.

Rivka smiled at him. “Remember how we shivered under our blankets when the explosions started going off?”

“I’m not likely to forget,” Russie answered. Since Warsaw surrendered, the ghetto hadn’t known the sounds of real warfare. The dreaded crummp of bombs reminded everyone who had managed to endure since 1939 that more straightforward means of death than starvation, disease, and beatings were loose in the world. Russie went on, “And then, when the curfew lifted… Oh, when the curfew lifted!”

Bombs or no bombs, if he didn’t get to his sewing machine, he’d lose his job. He knew it, and sallied forth at the usual time. The streets had seemed to fill with amazing speed that morning. People moved along at their usual pace; no one who had work would risk losing it, and no one without would throw away a chance to find some. But somehow everyone managed to stop for a few seconds and gape at one-or more than one-of the holes torn in the wall that sundered the ghetto from the rest of Warsaw.

Russie stood in front of one of those holes now, a three-meter stretch where there was no wall. As he stepped into the bomb crater, the soles of his feet felt every sharp brick fragment through the rags that wrapped them. He did not care. Still holding the Holy Scriptures before him, he walked through the shallow crater and out of the ghetto.

Turning, he said, “Jericho’s walls could not hold the Hebrews out, nor can Warsaw’s hold us in. The Lord has set us free!”

The crowd of Jews cheered once more. He drank in the shouts of “Reb Moishe! Reb Moishe!” The more he heard them, the better they sounded in his ears. God had given, him the sign, after all.

Someone in the crowd, though, called, “The Lord may have set us free, but has He bothered to tell the Nazis?”