In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  As if she’d picked the thought out of his head, Barbara said, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, hon.” His arms tightened around her. “I’m glad we’re married.” That seemed just the right thing to say on a wedding night.

  “So am I.” Barbara ran the palm of her hand along his cheek. “Even if you are scratchy,” she added. He tensed, ready to grab her; sometimes when she made jokes in bed, she’d poke him in the ribs. Not tonight—she turned serious instead. “You made exactly the right toast this afternoon. ‘Life goes on’ … It has to, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what I think, anyhow.” Yeager wasn’t sure whether she was asking him or trying to convince herself. She still couldn’t be easy in her mind about her first husband. He had to be dead, but still …

  “You have the right way of looking at things,” Barbara said, serious still. “Life isn’t always neat; it’s not orderly; you can’t always plan it and make it come out the way you think it’s supposed to. Things happen that nobody would expect—”

  “Well, sure,” Yeager said. “The war made the whole world crazy, and then the Lizards on top of that—”

  “Those are the big things,” she broke in. “As you say, they change the whole world. But little things can turn your life in new directions, too. Everybody reads Chaucer in high-school English, but when I did, he just seemed the most fascinating writer I’d ever come across. I started trying to learn more about his time, and about other people who were writing then … and so I ended up in graduate school at Berkeley in medieval literature. If I hadn’t been there, I never would have met Jens, I never would have come to Chicago—” She leaned up and kissed him. “I never would have met you.”

  “Little things,” Sam repeated. “Ten, eleven years ago, I was playing for Birmingham down in the Southern Association. That’s Class A-1 ball, the second highest class in the minor leagues. I was playing pretty well, I wasn’t that old—if things had broken right, I might have made the big leagues. Things broke, all right. About halfway through the season, I broke my ankle. It cost me the rest of the year, and I wasn’t the same ballplayer afterwards. I kept at it—never found anything I’d rather do—but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere any more. Just one of those things.”

  “That’s just it.” She nodded against his chest. “Little things, things you’d never expect to matter, can turn up in the most surprising ways.”

  “I’ll say.” Yeager nodded, too. “If I hadn’t read science fiction, I wouldn’t have gotten chosen to take our Lizard POWs back to Chicago or turned into their liaison man—and I wouldn’t have met you.”

  To his relief, she didn’t make any cracks about his choice of reading; someone who dove into Chaucer for fun was liable to think of it as the literary equivalent of picking your nose at the dinner table. Instead, she said, “Jens always had trouble seeing that the little things could make—not a big difference, but a surprising difference. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Yeager kept his answer to a grunt. He didn’t have anything against Jens Larssen, but he didn’t want his ghost coming between them on their wedding night, either.

  Barbara went on, “Jens wanted things just so, and thought they always had to be that way. Maybe it was because his work was so mathematically precise—I don’t know—but he thought the world operated that way, too. That sort of need for exactitude could be hard to live with sometimes.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Sam grunted again, but something loosened in his chest even so. He never remembered her criticizing Jens before.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than she said, “I guess what I’m trying to tell you, Sam, is that I’m glad I’m with you. Taking things as they come is easier than trying to fit everything that happens into some pattern you’ve worked out.”

  “That calls for a kiss,” he said, and bent his head down to hers. She responded eagerly. He felt himself stirring, and knew a certain amount of pride: if you couldn’t wear yourself out on your wedding night, when were you supposed to?

  Barbara felt him stirring, too. “What have we here?” she said when the kiss finally broke. She reached between them to find out. Yeager’s lips trailed down her neck toward her breasts again. Her hand tightened on him. His found the dampness between her legs.

  After a while, he rolled onto his back: easier to stay hard for a second round that way, especially if you weren’t in your twenties any more. He’d learned Barbara didn’t mind getting on top every so often.

  “Oh, yes,” he said softly as she straddled him. He was glad she hadn’t made him put on a rubber tonight; you could feel so much more without one. He ran his fingers lightly down the smooth curve of her back. She shivered a little.

  Afterwards, she didn’t pull away, but sprawled down on top of him. He kissed her cheek and the very corner of her mouth. “Nice,” she said, her voice sleepy. “I just want to stay right here forever.”

  He put his arms around her. “That’s what I want, too, hon.”

  Oscar appeared in the doorway of Jens Larssen’s BOQ room. “Colonel Hexham wants to see you, sir. Right away.”

  “Does he?” Larssen had been sprawled out on the cot, reading the newest issue of Time—now getting on toward a year old—he could find. He got up in a hurry. “I’ll come.” He hadn’t been “sir” to Oscar since he’d gone on strike, not till now. Maybe that was a good sign.

  He didn’t think so when the guard escorted him back into the colonel’s office. Hexham’s toothpick was going back and forth like a metronome, his bulldog face pinched and sour. “So you won’t do any work unless you write your miserable letter, eh?” he ground out, never opening his mouth wide enough for the toothpick to fall out.

  “That’s right,” Jens said—not defiantly, but more as if stating a law of nature.

  “Then write it.” Hexham looked more unhappy than ever. He shoved a sheet of paper and a pencil across the desk at Jens.

  “Thank you, sir,” Larssen exclaimed, taking them gladly. As he started to write, he asked, “What made you change your mind?”

  “Orders.” Hexham bit the word off. So you’ve been overruled, have you? Jens thought as he let the pencil race joyously across the paper. Trying to get a little of his own back, the colonel went on, “I will read that letter when you’re done with it. No last names, no other breaches of security will be permitted.”

  “That’s fine, sir. I’ll go back to Science Hall the minute I’m done here.” Larssen scrawled Love, Jens and handed the paper back to Colonel Hexham. He didn’t bother waiting for Hexham to read it, but started out to keep his end of the bargain. If you worked at it, he thought, you could make things go the way they were supposed to.

  IV

  Bobby Fiore almost wished he was still on the Lizards’ spaceship. For one thing, as far as he was concerned, the food had been better up there. For another, all the human beings on the spaceship had been aliens, guinea pigs. Plopped down in the middle of God only knew how many Chinamen, he was the alien in this refugee camp.

  His lips quirked wryly. “I’m the only guinea here, too,” he said out loud.

  Speaking English, even to himself, felt good. He didn’t get much chance to do it these days, even less than he’d had when he was up in space. Some of the Lizards there had understood him. Here nobody did; if the Lizard camp guards spoke any human language—not all of them did—it was Chinese. Only Liu Han knew any English at all.

  His face set in a frown. He hated depending on a woman; it made him feel as if he were eight years old again, and back in Pittsburgh with his mama. He couldn’t help it, though. Except for Liu Han, nobody for miles around could speak with him.

  He rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. The first thing he’d done when the Lizards dumped him here was get a razor and get rid of his beard. Not only did shaving make him stand out less from everybody else, a razor was a handy thing to have in a fight. He’d seen enough barroom brawls to know that; he’d been in a few, too.

  T
he funny thing was how little notice he drew. He wore wide-legged pants and baggy shirts that reminded him of pajamas, the same as the Chinese (even with them, he was cold a lot of the time—and he wasn’t used to that after the spaceship, either), which helped him fit in. A lot of the locals were too busy to pay him any mind, too; they made stuff for the Lizards out of straw and wicker and leather and scrap metal and God only knew what all else, and they worked hard.

  But what really surprised him was that his looks weren’t so far out of place. Sure, he still had his big Italian nose; his eyes were too round and his hair was wavy. But eyes and hair were dark; a blond like Sam Yeager would have stood out like a sore thumb. And his olive skin wasn’t that different from the color of the people around him. As long as he stayed cleanshaven, he wasn’t that remarkable.

  “I’m even tall,” he said, smiling again. Back in the States, five-eight was nothing. Even here he wasn’t huge, but for a change he was bigger than average.

  Sudden shouts not far away—even when he didn’t speak the language, Fiore knew fury and outrage when he heard them. He turned toward the sudden racket. Being taller than most let him see over the crowd. A man was running his way with a hen under each arm. Behind him, screeching like a cat with its tail stuck in a door, dashed a skinny woman. The chicken thief gained ground with every stride.

  Fiore looked down to the dirt of the street. A nice-sized rock lay there, just a couple of feet away. He snatched it up, took a couple of shuffling steps sideways to get a clear shot at the man, and let fly.

  When he was playing second base for the Decatur Commodores, he’d had to get off accurate throws to first with a runner bearing down on him with spikes high. Here he didn’t even need to pivot. He hadn’t done any throwing since the Lizards took him up into space, but he’d played pro ball for a lot of years. The smooth motion was still there, automatic as breathing.

  The rock caught the fellow with the chickens right in the pit of the stomach. Fiore grinned; he couldn’t have placed it any better with a bull’s-eye to aim at. The would-be thief dropped the chickens and folded up like an accordion. His face was comically amazed as he fell—he had no idea what had hit him.

  The two chickens ran away, squawking. The screeching woman started kicking the fellow who’d swiped them. She might have been better advised to chase them, but she seemed to put revenge ahead of poultry. The chicken thief couldn’t even fight back. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, and had to lie there and take it.

  One of the chickens darted past Fiore. It disappeared between two huts before he could decide to grab it for himself. “Damn,” he said, kicking at the dirt. “I should’ve brought that home for Liu Han.” Somebody else—almost certainly not its proper owner—would enjoy it now.

  “Too bad,” he muttered. He’d eaten some amazing things since the Lizards stuck him here. He’d thought he knew what Chinese food was all about. After all, he’d stopped at enough chop suey joints on the endless road trips that punctuated his life. You could fill yourself up for cheap, and it was usually pretty good.

  The only familiar thing here was plain rice. No chop suey, no crunchy noodles, no little bowls of ketchup and spicy mustard. No fried shrimp, though that made sense, because he didn’t think the camp was anywhere near the ocean. Not even fried rice, for God’s sake. He wondered if the guys who ran the chop suey places were really Chinese at all.

  The vegetables here looked strange and tasted stranger, and Liu Han insisted on serving them while they were still crunchy, which meant raw as far as he was concerned. He wanted a string bean—not that there were any string beans—to keep quiet between his teeth, not fight back. His mama had cooked vegetables till they were soft, which made it Gospel to him.

  But Liu Han’s mama had had different ideas. He wasn’t about to cook for himself, so he ate what Liu Han gave him.

  If the vegetables were bad, the meat was worse. Papa Fiore had known hard times in Italy; every once in a while, he’d slip and call a cat a roof rabbit. Roof rabbit seemed downright tempting compared to some of the things for sale in the camp marketplace: dog meat, skinned rats, elderly eggs. Bobby had quit asking about the bits and strips of flesh Liu Han served along with her half-raw vegetables: better not to know. That was one of the reasons he regretted not grabbing the chicken—for once, he would have been sure of what he was eating.

  The woman quit kicking the chicken thief and started after the bird that hadn’t come near Fiore. That hen had sensibly decided to go elsewhere. The woman stopped screeching and started wailing. What with all the racket she made, Fiore decided he was on the chicken’s side. That wouldn’t help the bird; if it stayed anywhere in camp, it would end up in somebody’s pot pretty damn quick.

  Fiore picked his way through the crowded, narrow streets back toward his hut. He was glad he had a good sense of direction. Without it, he wouldn’t have gone out past his own front door. Nobody here had ever heard of street signs, and even if signs hung on every corner, they wouldn’t have been in a language he could read.

  Liu Han was chattering away in Chinese with a couple of other women when he walked in. They turned and stared at him, half in curiosity, half in alarm. He bowed, which was good manners here. “Hello. Good day,” he said in his halting Chinese.

  The women giggled furiously, maybe at his accent, maybe just at his face: as far as they were concerned, anybody who wasn’t Chinese might as well have been a nigger. They spoke rapidly to each other; he caught the phrase foreign devil, which they applied to those not of their kind. He wondered what they were saying about him.

  They didn’t stay long. After good-byes to Liu Han and bows to him—he had been polite, even if he was a foreign devil—they headed back to wherever they lived. He hugged Liu Han. You still couldn’t tell she was pregnant when she wore clothes, but now he felt the beginning of a bulge to her belly when they embraced.

  “You okay?” he asked in English, and added the Lizards’ interrogative cough at the end.

  “Okay,” she said, and tacked on the emphatic cough. For a while, the Lizards’ language had been the only one they had in common. Nobody but the two of them understood the mishmash they spoke these days. She pointed to the teapot, used the interrogative cough.

  “M’goi—thanks,” he said. The pot was cheap and old, the cups even cheaper, and one of them cracked. The Lizards had given them the hut and everything in it; Fiore tried not to think about what might have happened to whoever was living there before.

  He sipped the tea. What he wouldn’t have given for a big mug of coffee with sugar and lots of cream! Tea was okay once in a while, but all the time every day? Forget it. He started to laugh.

  “Why funny?” Liu Han asked.

  “Up there”—their shorthand for the spaceship—“you eat my kind food.” Most of the canned goods the Lizards fed them with came from the States or from Europe. Fiore made a horrible face to remind her how well she’d liked them. “Now I eat your kind food.” He made the face again, but this time he pointed to himself.

  A mouse scuttled across the floor, huddled against the baked-clay hearth to get warm. Liu Han didn’t carry on the way a lot of American women would have. She just pointed at it.

  Fiore picked up a brass incense burner and flung it at the mouse. His aim was still good. He caught the rodent right in the ribs. It lay there twitching. Liu Han picked it up by the tail and threw it out. She said, “You”—she made a throwing gesture—“good.”

  “Yeah,” he said. With their three languages and a lot of dumb show, he told her how he’d nailed the chicken thief. “The arm still works.” He’d tried explaining about baseball. Liu Han didn’t get it.

  She made the throwing gesture. “Good,” she repeated. He nodded; this wasn’t the first mouse he’d nailed. The camp was full of vermin. It had been a jolt, especially after the metallic sterility of the spaceship. It was also another reason not to want to know too much about what he ate. He’d never worried about what health departments back in
the U.S.A. did. But seeing what things were like without them gave him a new perspective.

  “Should make money, arm so good,” Liu Han said. “Not do like here.”

  “God knows that’s so,” Fiore answered, responding to the second part of what she’d said. Most Chinamen, he thought scornfully, threw like girls, shortarming it from the elbow. Next to them, he looked like Bob Feller. Then he noticed the key word from the first part. “Money?”

  He didn’t need much, not in camp. He and Liu Han were still the Lizards’ guinea pigs, so they didn’t pay rent for the hut and nobody dared haggle too hard in the marketplace. But more cash never hurt anybody. He’d made a little doing the hard physical work—hauling lumber and digging trenches—he’d started playing ball to avoid. And he won more than he lost when he gambled. Still …

  Mountebanks did well here, among people starved for any other entertainment: jugglers, clowns, a fellow with a trained monkey that seemed smarter than a lot of people Fiore knew. All the baseball skills he had—throwing, catching, hitting, even sliding—were ones the people here didn’t use. He’d never thought about turning baseball into a vaudeville act, but you could do it.

  He bent to kiss Liu Han. She liked that—not just that he did it, but that he made a production of it. She needed to know he kept caring for her. “Baby, you’re brilliant,” he said. Then he had to stop and explain what brilliant meant, but it was worth it.

  Ussmak was unenthusiastic about leaving the nice warm barracks at Besançon. The cold outside made his muzzle tingle. He hurried toward his landcruiser, whose crew compartment had a heater.

  “We’ll kill all the stupid Deutsch Big Uglies as far as the eye can see, then come back here and relax some more. Shouldn’t take long,” Hessef said. The landcruiser commander let the lid to his cupola fall with a clang.