Tilting the Balance w-2 Read online

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” The aide switched off.

  Being reminded of Drefsab did nothing to improve Atvar’s mood. “There’s something else that hasn’t worked as well as I’d hoped,” he complained.

  “What’s that, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked.

  “The whole problem with that vile Tosevite herb, ginger,” Atvar said. “Drefsab recently tracked down and eliminated the Big Ugly who was a major supplier of the horrid drug, and I had hoped that would help us control our addicted males’ demand for it. Unfortunately, a thicket of smaller dealers has sprung up to take the exterminated major supplier’s place.”

  “Frustrating,” Kirel observed, “to say nothing of dangerous to our cause.”

  Atvar swung one eye turret toward Kirel in a sidelong glance of suspicion. The commander of the bannership was the second highest ranking male in the fleet, his body paint less elaborate only than Atvar’s own. If Atvar’s policies led to disaster, he was the next logical choice as fleetlord. He was stable and conservative and had always acted loyal, but who could say when the fangs of ambition would begin to grow? Any remark that sounded like criticism made Atvar wary.

  Not that ginger wasn’t a problem. One more thing we didn’t learn from the probe, Atvar thought. The cursed herb made males feel they were brighter and stronger than they really were; it also made them want to recapture that feeling as often as they could. They’d do almost anything to get ginger, even trade weapons and information to the Big Uglies.

  “With the problem ginger poses to our security, it occurs to me that we may have been lucky the Big Uglies succeeded in blowing up the ship which carried the bulk of our nuclear weapons,” the fleetlord said. “Otherwise, some male seeking pleasure for his tongue might have sought to convey one to the Tosevites in exchange for his precious herb.”

  “There’s a pleasant thought!” Kirel exclaimed. “The Tosevites are barbarians without care for tomorrow-they would not hesitate to ruin their own planet if it meant defeating us.”

  “Truth,” Atvar said glumly. After initial in-atmosphere bursts to wreck Tosevite communications with electromagnetic pulse (unsuccessfully, because the Big Uglies’ electronic devices were too primitive to use solid-state components), the Race had expended only two nuclear devices: against Berlin and Washington, centers of local resistance. But resistance had continued anyhow.

  “Ironic that we have a greater obligation to maintain this world as nearly intact as possible than does the species that evolved on it,” Kirel said. “Of course, the Tosevites are not aware our colonization fleet is on the way behind us.”

  “Indeed,” Atvar said. “If it arrives and finds Tosev 3 uninhabitable, we will have failed here, no matter what else we accomplish.”

  “We also have to bear in mind that the Big Uglies are engaging in nuclear weapons research of their own, certainly with the material their guerrillas captured from us in the SSSR and, the evidence would suggest, with projects altogether their own as well,” Kirel said. “Should one of those projects succeed, our problems here will become measurably more difficult.”

  “Immeasurably, you mean,” Atvar said. The Big Uglies would not worry about what they did to Tosev 3, as long as that meant getting rid of the Race. “Deutschland, the SSSR, the United States, maybe those little island empires, too-Nippon and Britain-we have to keep both eye turrets on every one of them. The trouble is, a planet is a very large place. Their projects will not be easy to track down. But it must be done.” He spoke as much to remind himself as to tell Kirel.

  “It shall be done,” the shiplord echoed loyally.

  It had better be done, they thought together.

  The horse-drawn wagon pulled to a stop in New Salem, North Dakota. Sam Yeager looked around. As a seventeen-year veteran of bush-league baseball and its endless travel, he was a connoisseur of small towns. New Salem might have had a thousand people in it; then again, it might not.

  He scrambled out of the wagon. Barbara Larssen handed him his Springfield. He took the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, then held out a hand to help Barbara down. They clung to each other for a moment. He kissed the top of her head. The ends of her dark blond hair still showed traces of permanent wave. Most of it was straight, though; a long time had gone by since she’d got a permanent.

  He didn’t want to let her go, but he had to. He grabbed the rifle again, pointed it at the wagon. Military routine, he thought, and then, military fiddlesticks. But since he wore a corporal’s stripes these days, he played the game by the rules. “Come on out, boys,” he called.

  Ristin and Ullhass, the two Lizard POWs who accompanied the Metallurgical Laboratory’s wagon train on the way from Chicago to the Lab’s planned new home in Denver, poked their heads up over the side of the wagon. “It shall be done, superior sir,” they chorused in hissing English. They dropped down in front of Yeager and Barbara.

  “Hard to think-things-so small could be so dangerous,” Barbara murmured. Neither of the Lizards came up even to her shoulder.

  “They aren’t small with guns in their hands, or inside tanks, or inside planes, or inside their spaceships,” Yeager answered. “I fought against them, remember, before my unit captured these boys.”

  “We thought you kill us,” Ullhass said.

  “We thought you kill us, then eat us,” Ristin agreed.

  Yeager laughed. “You’d been reading too much science fiction, both of you.” He laughed again, more reflectively. If he hadn’t been in the habit of reading science fiction himself to pass the time on trains and buses, he never would have volunteered-or been accepted-as the Lizards’ principal guard, translator, and explainer of matters Earthly.

  He’d been with them continuously for better than six months now, long enough to come to see them as individuals rather than mere creatures. They never had been much like the bug-eyed monsters he used to read about. They were short and skinny and, even dressed in multiple layers of warm clothes that hung on them like sacks, complained all the time about how cold it was (it wasn’t just midwinter on the northern Great Plains, either; they’d complained about all but the hottest days back in Chicago, too).

  By now, Yeager took for granted their turreted eyes that, chameleonlike, moved independently of each other, the green-brown scales they used for skin, their clawed hands and feet, their wide mouths full of little pointed teeth. Even the bifurcated tongues they sometimes used to lick their hard, immobile lips were just part of them, although he’d needed quite a while to get used to those.

  “We will be warm tonight?” Ristin asked. Though he spoke English, at the end of the sentence he tacked on the little cough the Lizards used: sort of an audible question mark.

  “We will be warm tonight,” Sam answered in the Lizards’ language, punctuating his sentence with a different cough, the one that put emphasis on his words.

  He had reason for his confidence. The Lizards’ bombers hadn’t hit North Dakota badly: not much up here needed hitting, Yeager thought. The flat farming country reminded him of the flat farming country in eastern Nebraska where he’d grown up. New Salem could easily have been one of the little towns between Lincoln and Omaha.

  The wagon had stopped not far from a snow-covered boulder with an unnaturally flat top. Barbara brushed off the snow with her sleeve. “Oh, it has a plaque on it,” she said, and brushed away more snow so she could read the words on the bronze. She started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Yeager asked. He absentmindedly tacked the interrogative cough onto that question, too.

  “This is the Wrong Side Up Monument,” she answered. “That’s what the plaque says, anyhow. Seems one of the early farmers had just started breaking the ground so he could plant for the first time when an Indian came along, looked at a chunk of sod, set it back the right way, and said, ‘Wrong side up.’ The farmer thought about it, decided he was right, and went into dairying instead. This is part of a big dairy area now.”

  “We should eat well tonig
ht, then.” Yeager’s mouth watered at the thought of milk, cheese, probably big steaks, too-the folk around here might well be inclined to do some slaughtering for their guests, because they wouldn’t be able to keep feeding all their livestock now that the Lizards had made moving grain and hay on a large scale impossible.

  More wagons from the convoy came into town, some carrying people but more loaded down with the equipment that had filled much of Eckhart Hall back at the University of Chicago. Not all the wagons would stop here tonight, they were spread out for miles along the highway and back roads that ran parallel to it, both to avoid looking interesting to the Lizards and to keep from taking too much destruction from an air attack if they did.

  Enrico Fermi helped his wife Laura down from their wagon, then waved to Yeager. He waved back. He still felt a rush of pride at hanging around with scientists and even helping them when they had questions for the Lizard prisoners. Till a few months ago, his closest brush with scientists had been with the near-supermen who populated the pages of Astounding.

  The real ones, while bright enough, weren’t a lot like their fictional counterparts. For one thing, a lot of the best ones-Fermi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner-were dumpy foreigners with funny accents. Fermi talked like Bobby Fiore’s father (he wondered what had happened to his old roommate, the second baseman on the Decatur Commodores). For another; just about all of them, foreign and American, were much more human than their fictional analogs; they’d have a drink (or more than one), they’d tell stories, and they’d argue with their wives. Yeager liked them more for it, not less.

  Steaks there proved to be, cooked over open flames and eaten by the fireside-no gas and no electricity in New Salem. Yeager cut his into very small pieces as he ate it: though he wouldn’t be thirty-six for another couple of months, he had full upper and lower plates. He’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and his teeth had rotted in his head. The only teeth of his own he had were the ones that gave everybody else trouble: seven or eight years after the epidemic, his wisdom teeth had come in fine.

  Ullhass and Ristin, by contrast, held big chunks of meat up to their mouths and worried bites off them. The Lizards didn’t chew much; they’d get a gobbet in and then gulp it down. The locals watched with undisguised curiosity-these were the first Lizards they’d ever seen. Yeager had watched that at every stop all the way across Minnesota and North Dakota.

  “Where you going to put those critters tonight?” a man asked him. “We sure as hell don’t want them getting loose.”

  “They’re not critters. They’re people-funny kind of people, but people,” Yeager said. With small-town politeness, the man didn’t argue, but obviously didn’t believe him, either. Yeager shrugged; he’d seen that happen before, too. He asked, “Do you have a jail here?”

  The local hooked a thumb into the strap of his denim overalls. “Yah, we do,” he said. Yeager hid a smile-he’d heard “yah” for “yes” at every stop in North Dakota. Grinning, the local went on, “We’ll put a drunk Indian in there every now and again-or sometimes a drunk squarehead, too. Hell, I’m an eighth Sioux myself, even if my name is Thorkil Olson.”

  “That’d be perfect,” Yeager said, “especially if you can put a board or a blanket or something over the window, if there is one. Lizards can’t take as much cold as people can. Can you take us there, let me look it over?”

  With Ristin and Ullhass safely behind bars, Yeager figured he had the night off. A lot of times, he’d had to stay alert because they were in the next room of a private house. He didn’t think they’d try to escape; they risked both freezing and getting shot on a world not their own. You couldn’t afford to take chances, though.

  He and Barbara went home with Olson and his wife Louise, a pleasant, red-cheeked woman in her late forties. “Take the spare bedroom for the night, and welcome,” Louise said. “We’ve rattled around the house since our boy George and his wife headed down to Kansas City so he could work in a defense plant.” Her face clouded. “The Lizards are in Kansas City. I pray he’s all right.”

  “So do I, ma’am;” Yeager said. Barbara’s hand tightened on his; her husband Jens, a Met Lab physicist, had never come back from a cross-country trip that had skirted Lizard-held territory.

  “Plenty of blankets on the bed, folks, and Grandma’s old thundermug under it,” Thorkil Olson boomed as he showed them the spare room. “We’ll feed you breakfast when you get up in the morning. Sleep tight, now.”

  There were plenty o. blankets, heavy wool ones from Sears, with a goose-down comforter on top. “We can even get undressed,” Yeager said happily. “I’m sick of sleeping in three, four layers of clothes.”

  Barbara looked at him sidelong. “Stay undressed, you mean,” she said, and blew out the candle Olson had set on the nightstand. The room plunged into darkness.

  Afterwards, Sam peeled off his rubber, then groped around under the bed till he found the chamber pot. “Something for them to cluck over after we leave,” he said. He dove back under the covers as fast as he could; without them, the bedroom was a chilly place.

  Barbara clung to him, for warmth, but for reassurance, too. He ran a hand down the velvety skin of her back. “I love you,” he said softly.

  “I love you, too.” Her voice caught; she shoved herself against him. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. I’d have been so lost. I-” Her face was buried in the hollow of his shoulder. A hot tear splashed down on him. After a few seconds, she raised her head. “I miss him so much sometimes. I can’t help it.”

  “I know. You wouldn’t be who you are if you didn’t.” Yeager spoke with the philosophy of a man who had spent his entire adult life playing bush-league ball and never come close to the majors: “You do the best you can with the cards you get dealt, even if some of them are pretty rotten. Me, I never got an ace before.” Now he squeezed her.

  She shook her head; her hair brushed softly across his chest. “But it’s not fair to you, Sam. Jens is dead; he has to be dead. If I’m going to go on-if we’re going to go on, I have to look ahead, not backwards. As you said, I’ll do the best I can.”

  “Can’t ask for more than that,” Yeager agreed. Slowly, he went on, “Seems to me, honey, that if you hadn’t loved your Jens a lot, and if he hadn’t loved you, too, you wouldn’t have been anybody I’d’ve wanted to fall in love with. And even if I had, just on account of you’re such a fine-looking woman”-he poked her in the ribs, because he knew she’d squeak-“you wouldn’t have loved me back. You wouldn’t have known how to.”

  “You’re sweet. You make good sense, too. You seem to have a way of doing that.” Instead of clutching, now Barbara snuggled against him; he felt her body relax. The tip of her nipple brushed his arm, just above the elbow. He wondered if she felt like making love again. But before he could try to find out, she yawned enormously. Voice still blurry, she said, “If I don’t get some sleep, God only knows what kind of wreck I’ll be tomorrow.” In the darkness, her lips found his, but only for a moment. “Good night, Sam. I love you.” She rolled over onto her side of the bed.

  “I love you, too. Good night.” Sam found himself yawning, too. Even if she had been interested, he wasn’t sure he could have managed two rounds so close together. He wasn’t a kid any more.

  He rolled over onto his left side. His behind brushed against Barbara’s. They chuckled and moved a little farther apart. He popped out his dentures, set them on the nightstand. Inside a minute and a half, he was snoring.

  Jens Larssen most cordially cursed the United States Army, first in English and then in the fragmentary Norwegian he’d picked up from his grandfather. Even as the oaths fell from his lips, he knew he was being unfair: if the Army hadn’t scooped him up as he was making his way across Indiana, he might well have got himself killed trying to sneak into Chicago as the Lizard attacks on the city rose to a climax.

  And even now, after General Patton and General Bradley had pinched off the neck of that attack, nobody
would let him fly out to join the rest of the Met Lab team in Denver. Again, the brass had their reasons-save for combat missions, aviation had almost disappeared in the United States. Human aviation had almost disappeared, anyhow. The Lizards dominated the skies.

  “Hellfire,” he muttered, clinging to the rail of the steamer Duluth Queen, “the damn Army wouldn’t even tell me where they’d gone. I had to go into Chicago and find out for myself.”

  That rankled; it struck him as security gone mad. So did everyone’s refusal to let him send on any word to the Met Lab crew. He couldn’t even let his wife know he was alive. Once more, though, the mucky-mucks had a point he couldn’t honestly deny: the Met Lab was America’s only hope of producing an atomic bomb like the ones the Lizards had used on Berlin and Washington, D.C. Without that bomb, the war against the aliens would probably fail. Nobody, then, could afford to draw any sort of attention toward the Metallurgical Laboratory or communicate with it in any way, for fear the Lizards would intercept a message and draw the wrong-or rather, the right-conclusions from it.

  The orders he’d been given made just enough sense for him not to try disobeying. But oh, how he hated them!

  “And now I can’t even get into Duluth,” he grumbled.

  He could see the town, which lay by the edge of Lake Superior where it narrowed to its westernmost point. He could see the gray granite bluffs that dwarfed man’s houses and buildings, and felt he could almost reach out and touch some of the homes atop these bluffs, the taller business buildings that climbed the steep streets toward them. But the feeling was an illusion; a sheet of blue-gray ice held the Duluth Queen away from the Minnesota town that had given it its name.

  Jens turned to a passing sailor. “How far out on the lake are we?”

  The man paused to think. His breath came out thick as smoke as he answered, “Can’t be more than four, five miles. Up to less than a mouth ago, it was open water all the way in.” He chuckled at Larssen’s groan. “Some years the port stays open all winter long. More often, though, it’ll freeze for twenty miles out, so this ain’t so bad.” He went on his way, whistling a cheery tune.