Striking the Balance w-4 Read online

  Penny Summers said, “I spent a lot of time praying everyone would come through the mission safe. I do that every time people ride out of here.”

  “It’s not the worst thing to do,” Auerbach said, “but coming out and cooking or nursing or whatever you want wouldn’t hurt, either.” Since she’d come to Lamar, Penny had spent a lot of time in a little furnished room in an overcrowded apartment house, brooding and reading the Bible. Getting her out for mutton chops was something of a triumph.

  Or so he thought, till she shoved her plate away and said, “I don’t like mutton. It tastes funny and it’s all greasy. We never had it much back in Lakin.”

  “You should eat,” Auerbach told her, knowing he sounded like a mother hen. “You need it” That was true; Penny was rail-thin. She hadn’t been that way when she came to Lamar, but she hadn’t been the same in a lot of ways since Wendell Summers got himself messily killed.

  “Hey, it’s food,” Rachel Hines said. “I don’t even mind the beets, not any more. I just shovel it all down; I quit worrying about it as soon as I put on the uniform.”

  She filled out that uniform in a way the Army bureaucrats who’d designed it hadn’t had in mind. Despite her talk of gluttony, she wasn’t the least bit fat. If she hadn’t been so all-around good-natured, she would have had half the men in the company squabbling over her. There were times when Auerbach had been tempted to pull rank himself. Even if she’d been interested, though, that would have created as many problems as it solved, maybe more.

  He glanced over to Penny again. He felt responsible for her, too. He also had the feeling more was there than met the eye. With Rachel, what you saw was what you got-he couldn’t imagine her holding anything back. With Penny, he got the feeling her present unhappiness masked something altogether different. He shrugged. The other possibility was that his imagination had gone and run away with him.Wouldn’t be the first time, he thought.

  To his surprise, she did take back the plate and start eating again, not with any great enthusiasm but doggedly, as if she were fueling a car. With what she’d been giving herself lately, a car would long since have run out of gas. He didn’t say anything. That might have broken the spell.

  Rachel Hines shook her head. She’d cropped her hair into a short bob, the better to have it fit under a helmet. She said, “Going off and giving secrets to the Lizards. I purely can’t fathom that, and there’s a fact. But plenty of people in Lakin got on with ’em just fine and dandy, like they were the new county commissioners or something.”

  “You’re right.” Penny Summers’ face twisted into an expression both fierce and savage, one altogether unlike any Auerbach had seen on her since she’d come to Lamar. “Joe Bentley over at the general store, he sucked up to them for all he was worth, and when Edna Wheeler went in there and called them a bunch of goggle-eyed things from out of a freak show, you tell me he didn’t go trotting off to them fast as his legs could take him. And the very next day she and her husband and both their kids got thrown out of their house.”

  “That’s so,” Rachel said, nodding. “It sure is. And Mel Six-killer, I guess he got sick of folks calling him half-breed all the time, on account of he’d even make up tales to take to the Lizards, and they’d believe ’em, too. He got a lot of people in trouble like that. Yeah, some people were mean to him, but you don’t go getting even by hurting ’em that kind of way.”

  “And Miss Proctor, the home economics teacher at the high school,” Penny said. “What was it she always called the Lizards? ‘The wave of the future,’ that was it, like we couldn’t do anything about ’em no matter what. And then she’d go out and make sure we couldn’t do anything.”

  “Yeah, she sure did,” Rachel said. “And… ”

  They went on for another five or ten minutes, talking about the collaborators back in their little hometown. Auerbach sat quietly, drinking his beer, finishing his supper (he didn’t mind mutton, but he could have lived for a long time without looking another beet in the eye) and listening. He’d never seen Penny Summers so lively, and he’d never seen her finally clean her plate, either-she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it. Complaining about the old neighbors got her juices flowing as nothing else had.

  The brawny waitress came by. “Get you folks some more beer, or are you gonna sit there takin’ up space?”

  “I’ll have another one, thanks,” Auerbach said. To his surprise, Penny nodded before Rachel did. The waitress went away, came back with fresh mugs. “Thanks, Irma,” Auerbach told her. She glowered at him, as if doing her job well enough to deserve thanks showed she’d somehow failed at it.

  “You’ve raided Lakin since you got us out, haven’t you, Captain?” Rachel asked.

  “Sure we have,” Auerbach answered. “You weren’t along for that, were you? No, you weren’t-I remember. We hurt ’em, too; drove ’em clean out of town. I thought we’d be able to keep it, but when they threw too much armor at us-” He spread his hands. “What can you do?”

  “That’s not what she meant,” Penny said. “I know what she meant.”

  Auerbach stared at her. She surely hadn’t been this animated before. “What did she mean?” he asked, hoping to keep her talking-and, more than that, hoping to keep her involved with the world beyond the four walls within which she’d chosen to shut herself away.

  It worked, too; Penny’s eyes blazed. “She meant, did you settle up scores with the quislings?” she said. Rachel Hines nodded to show her friend was right.

  “No, I don’t think we did,” Auerbach said. “We didn’t know just who needed settling back then, and we were too busy with the Lizards to risk putting anybody’s nose out of joint by getting the locals mad at us for giving the wrong people a hard time.”

  “We’re not going back to Lakin any time soon, are we?” Rachel asked.

  “Not that I know of, anyhow,” Auerbach said. “Colonel Nordenskold might have a different idea, but he hasn’t told me about it if he does. And if he gets orders from somewhere up the line-” He spread his hands again. Above the regimental level, the chain of command kept getting broken links. Local commanders had a lot more autonomy than anybody had figured they would before the Lizards started plastering communications.

  “The colonel needs to get word to the partisans,” Rachel said. “Sooner or later, those bastards ought to get what’s coming to ’em.” She brought out the word as casually as any cavalry trooper might have; Auerbach didn’t think of it as a woman swearing till he listened to the sentence over again inside his head. Even if she had curves, Rachel was a cavalryman, all right.

  “That’s what needs doing,” Penny Summers said with a vigorous nod. “Oh yes indeed.”

  “Seems funny, talking about American partisans,” Rachel said. “I mean, we saw the Russians hiding in the woods in the newsreels before the Lizards came, but to have to do that kind of stuff ourselves-”

  “Funny to you, maybe, but you’re from Kansas,” Auerbach answered. “You come from Texas the way I do, or from Virginia like Lieutenant Magruder, and you’ll know about bushwhacking, ’cause odds are you’re related to somebody who did some of it during the States War.” He touched his sleeve. “Good thing this uniform isn’t blue the way it used to be. You come out of the South, your part of the country’s been invaded before.”

  Rachel shrugged. “For me, the Civil War’s something out of a history book, that’s all.”

  “Not to Southerners,” Auerbach said. “Mosby and Forrest are real live people to us, even nowadays.”

  “I don’t know who they are, but I’ll take your word for it,” Penny said. “Thing of it is. If we can do that, we ought to. Can Colonel Nordenskold get in touch with the partisans?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Auerbach said, “and do you know how?” He waited for her to shake her head, then set a finger by the side of his nose and grinned. “Carrier pigeons, that’s how. Not even any radio for the Lizards to intercept, and they haven’t figured it out yet.” He knew he was talking too mu
ch, but the chance to see Penny Summers act like a real live human being led him to say a little more than he should.

  She bounced up off her stool now. “That’s terrflic. Let’s go talk with the colonel right this minute.” It was as if she’d flicked a switch inside herself, and everything she’d turned off over the past months came back to life all at once. It was quite a thing to see.Hell of a woman there, Auerbach thought, and then, a moment later,and she’s a civilian, too.

  Colonel Morton Nordenskold made his headquarters in what still said it was Lamar’s First National Bank. Back in the twenties, some sort of spectacular robbery had happened there; Lamar natives talked about it even now. There weren’t a lot of Lamar natives left any more, though. Soldiers and refugees dominated the town now.

  No sentries stood outside the bank. Half the town away, a couple of dummies from Feldman’s tailor shop, dressed in Army uniform from helmet to boots, guarded a fancy house. If the Lizards came by with bombers, the hope was that they’d hit there instead of the real HQ. So far, they hadn’t bothered either one.

  Inside, where reconnaissance couldn’t spot them, two real live soldiers came to attention when Auerbach walked through the door with Rachel and Penny. “Yes, sir, you can see the colonel now,” one of them said.

  “Thanks,” Auerbach said, and headed for Nordenskold’s office.

  Behind him, one of the sentries turned to the other and said, not quite quietly enough, “Look at that lucky son of a bitch, will you, walkin’ out with two o’ the best-lookin’ broads in town.”

  Auerbach thought about going back and calling him on it, then decided he liked it and kept on toward the colonel’s office.

  The Tosevite hatchling made a squealing noise that grated in Ttomalss’ hearing diaphragms. It reached up for the handle of a low cabinet, grabbed hold on about the third try, and did its best to pull itself upright. Its best wasn’t good enough. It fell back down, splat.

  Ttomalss watched curiously to see what it would do next. Sometimes, after a setback like that, it would wail, which he found even more irritating than its squeals. Sometimes it thought a fall was funny, and let out one of its annoyingly noisy laughs.

  Today, rather to Ttomalss’ surprise, it did neither of those. It just reached up and tried again, as deliberate and purposeful an action as he’d ever seen from it. It promptly fell down again, and banged its chin on the floor. This time, it did start to wail, the cry it made to let the world know it was in pain.

  When it did that, it annoyed everyone up and down the corridor of the starship orbiting above Tosev 3. When the other males researching the Big Uglies got annoyed, they grew more likely to side against Ttomalss in his struggle to keep the hatchling and keep studying it rather than returning it to the female from whose body it had emerged.

  “Be silent, foolish thing,” he hissed at it. The hatchling, of course, took no notice of him, but continued to make the air hideous with its howls. He knew what he had to do: he stooped and, being careful not to prick its thin, scaleless skin with his claws, held it against his torso.

  After a little while, the alarming noise eased. The hatchling liked physical contact. Young of the Race, when newly out of the eggshell, fled from anything larger than they were, instinctively convinced it would catch and eat them. For the first part of their lives, Big Uglies were as immobile as some of the limestone-shelled creatures of Home’s small seas. If they got into trouble, the females who’d ejected them (and a hideous processthat was, too) had to save them and comfort them. With no such female available here, the job fell to Ttomalss.

  The hatchling’s cheek rubbed against his chest. That touched off its sucking reflex. It turned its head and pressed its soft, wet mouth against his hide. Unlike a Tosevite female, he did not secrete nutritive fluid. Little by little, the hatchling was realizing that faster than it had.

  “A good thing, too,” Ttomalss muttered, and tacked on an emphatic cough. The little Tosevite’s saliva did unpleasant things to his body paint. He swung down an eye turret so he could look at himself. Sure enough, he’d have to touch up a spot before he was properly presentable. He hadn’t intended to demonstrate experimentally that body paint was not toxic to Big Uglies, but he’d done it.

  He turned the other eye turret down, studied the hatchling with both eyes. It looked up at him. Its own eyes were small and flat and dark. He wondered what went on behind them. The hatching had never seen itself, nor its own kind. Did it think it looked like him? No way to know, not until its verbal skills developed further. But its perceptions would have changed by then, too.

  He watched the corners of its absurdly mobile mouth curl upwards. Among the Tosevites, that was an expression of amiability, so he had succeeded in making it forget about its hurt. Then he noticed the cloth he kept around its middle was wet. The Tosevite had no control over its bodily function. Interrogations suggested Big Uglies did not learn such control for two or three of their years-four to six of those by which Ttomalss reckoned. As he carried the hatchling over to a table to clean it off and set a new protective cloth in place, he found that a very depressing prospect.

  “Youare a nuisance,” he said, adding another emphatic cough.

  The hatchling squealed, then made a noise of its own that sounded like an emphatic cough. It had been imitating the sounds Ttomalss made more and more lately, not just emphatic and interrogative coughs but sometimes real words. Sometimes he thought it was making those noises with deliberate intent. Tosevites could and did talk, often to excess-no doubt about that.

  When the hatchling was clean and dry and content, he set it back down on the floor. He tossed the soaked cloth into an airtight plastic bin to prevent its ammoniacal reek from spreading, then squirted cleansing foam on his hands. He found the Tosevites’ liquid wastes particularly disgusting; the Race excreted neat, tidy solids.

  The hatchling got up on all fours and crawled toward the cabinets again. Its quadrupedal gait was much more confident than it had been at the beginning; for a couple of days, the only way it had been able to get anywhere was backwards. It tried pulling itself erect-and promptly fell down once more.

  The communicator chimed for attention. Ttomalss hurried over to it. The screen lit, showing him the image of Ppevel, assistant administrator for the eastern region of the main continental mass. “I greet you, superior sir,” Ttomalss said, doing his best to hide nervousness.

  “I greet you, Research Analyst,” Ppevel replied. “I trust the Tosevite hatchling whose fate is now under discussion with the Chinese faction known as the People’s Liberation Army remains healthy?”

  “Yes, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. He turned one eye turret away from the screen for a moment, trying to spot the hatchling. He couldn’t. That worried him. The little creature was much more mobile than it had been, which meant it was much more able to get into mischief, too… He’d missed some of what Ppevel was saying. “I’m sorry, superior sir?”

  Ppevel waggled his eye turrets ever so slightly, a sign of irritation. “I said, are you prepared to give up the hatchling on short notice?”

  “Superior sir, of course I am, but I do protest that this abandonment is not only unnecessary but also destructive to a research program vital for the successful administration of this world after it is conquered and pacflied.” Ttomalss looked around for the hatchling again, and still didn’t see it. In a way, that was almost a relief. How could he turn it over to the Chinese if he didn’t know where it was?

  “No definitive decision on this matter has yet been made. If that is your concern,” the administrator said. “If one is reached, however, rapid implementation will be mandatory.”

  “At need, it shall be done, and promptly,” Ttomalss said, hoping he could keep relief from his voice. “I understand the maniacal stress the Big Uglies sometimes place on speedy performance.”

  “If you do understand it, you have the advantage over most males of the Race,” Ppevel said. “The Tosevites have sped through millennia of technical dev
elopment in a relative handful of years. I have heard endless speculation as to the root causes of this: the peculiar geography, the perverse and revolting sexual habits the Big Uglies practice-”

  “This latter thesis has been central to my own research, superior sir,” Ttomalss answered. “The Tosevites certainly differ in their habits from ourselves, the Rabotevs, and the Hallessi. My hypothesis is that their constant sexual tensions, to use an imprecise simile, are like a fire continually simmering under them and stimulating them to ingenuity in other areas.”

  “I have seen and heard more hypotheses than I care to remember,” Ppevel said. “When I find one with supporting evidence, I shall be pleased. Our analysts these days too often emulate the Tosevites not only in speed but also in imprecision.”

  “Superior sir, I wish to retain the Tosevite hatching precisely so I can gather such evidence,” Ttomalss said. “Without studying the Big Uglies at all stages of their development, how can we hope to understand them?”

  “A point to be considered,” Ppevel admitted, which made Ttomalss all but glow with hope; no administrator had given him so much reason for optimism in a long time. Ppevel continued, “We-”

  Ttomalss wanted to hear more, but was distracted by a yowl-an alarmed yowl-from the Big Ugly hatchling. It also sounded oddly far away. “Excuse me, superior sir, but I believe I have encountered a difficulty,” the researcher said, and broke the connection.

  He hurried along the corridors of his laboratory area, looking to see what the hatchling had managed to get itself into this time. He didn’t see it anywhere, which worried him-had it managed to crawl inside a cabinet? Was that why its squawks sounded distant?

  Then it wailed again. Ttomalss went dashing out into the corridor-the hatchling had taken it into its head to go exploring.