Free Striking the Balance by Harry Turtledove Page A

Nussboym watched a couple of NKVD men make their way toward the compartment entrance, which had no door, only a sliding grate of similar crosshatched bars. The compartment had no windows that opened on the outside world, just a couple of tiny barred blinds that might as well not have been there.
    Nussboym didn’t care. He’d learned that when the NKVD men walked by with that slow deliberate stride, they had food with them. His stomach rumbled. Spit rushed into his mouth. He ate better in the prison car—a Stolypin car, the Russians universally called it—than he had in the Lodz ghetto before the Lizards came, but not much better.
    One of the NKVD men opened the grate, then stood back, covering the prisoners with a submachine gun. The other one set down two buckets. “All right, you
zeks
!” he shouted. “Feeding time at the zoo!” He laughed loudly at his own wit, though he made the joke every time it was his turn to feed the prisoners.
    They laughed too, loudly. If they didn’t laugh, nobody got anything to eat. They’d found that out very fast. A couple of beatings soon forced the recalcitrant ones into line.
    Satisfied, the guard started passing out a chunk of coarse, black bread and half a salted herring apiece. They’d got sugar once, but the guards said they were out of that now. Nussboym didn’t know whether it was true, but did know he was in no position to find out.
    The prisoners who reclined on the middle bunk got the biggest loaves and fishes. They’d enforced that rule with their fists, too. Nussboym’s hand went to the shiner below his left eye. He’d tried holding out on them, and paid the price.
    He wolfed down the bread, but stuck his bony fragment of herring in a pocket. He’d learned to wait for water before he ate the fish. It was so salty, thirst would have driven him mad till he got something to drink. Sometimes the guards brought a bucket of water after they brought food. Sometimes they didn’t. Today they didn’t.
    The train rumbled on. In summer, having two dozen men stuffed into a compartment intended for four would have been intolerable—not that that would have stopped the NKVD. In a Russian winter, animal warmth was not to be despised. In spite of being cold, Nussboym wasn’t freezing.
    His stomach growled again. It didn’t care that he would suffer agonies of thirst if he ate his herring without water. All it knew was that it was still mostly empty, and that the fish would help fill it up.
    With a squeal of brakes, the train pulled to a halt Nussboym almost slipped down onto men below. Ivan had done that once. They’d fallen on him like a pack of wolves, beating and kicking him till he was black and blue. After that, the fellows perched on the baggage racks had learned to hang on tight during stops.
    “Where are we, do you think?” somebody down below asked.
    “In hell,” somebody else answered, which produced laughs both more bitter and more sincere than the ones the guard had got for himself.
    “This’ll be Pskov, I bet,” a
zek
in the middle bunk declared. “I hear tell we’ve cleared the Lizards away from the railroad line that leads there from the west. After that”—he stopped sounding so arrogant and sure of himself—“after that, it’s north and east, on to the White Sea, or maybe to the Siberian
gulags
.”
    Nobody spoke for a couple of minutes after that. Winter labor up around Archangel or in Siberia was enough to daunt even the heartiest of spirits.
    Small clangs and jerks showed that cars were either being added to the train or taken off it. One of the
zeks
sitting on the bottom bunks said, “Didn’t the Hitlerites take Pskov away from the
rodina?
Shit, they can’t do anything worse to us than our own people do.”
    “Oh yes, they can,” Nussboym said, and told them about Treblinka.
    “That’s Lizard propaganda, is what that is,” the big-mouthed
zek
in the middle bunk said.
    “No,” Nussboym said. Even in the face of opposition from the