In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  That’s the ginger talking, Ussmak thought. Hessef and Tvenkel had both tasted just before they started this mission: ginger was cheap and easy to come by here in France. They’d both laughed at him for declining—he’d used even more than they had while sitting around waiting for something to happen.

  But he still thought combat was different. The Big Uglies were barbarous, but he knew they could fight. He’d had landcruisers wrecked around him; he’d lost crewmales. And the Deutsche were supposed to be more dangerous than the Russki had been. That was plenty to make him want to go at them undrugged.

  Tvenkel had sneered, “Don’t worry about it. The landcruiser just about fights itself.”

  “Do what you want,” Ussmak had answered. “I’ll taste plenty when we get back, I promise you that.” He missed the confidence and exuberance ginger gave him, but he didn’t think he really was smarter when he tasted—he only felt that way. A lot of tasters failed to draw the distinction, but he thought it was there.

  At Hessef’s blithe order, he started the landcruiser’s engine. Part of a long column, the big, heavy machine rumbled out of the fortress and through the narrow streets of Besançon. Big Uglies in their ridiculous clothes stared as it went past. Some of the Big Uglies yelled things. Ussmak hadn’t learned any Français, but the tone didn’t sound friendly.

  Males of the Race, aided here and there by Tosevites in low, flat-topped cylindrical hats, held back local traffic until the column passed by. Most of the traffic was Big Uglies on foot or on the two-wheeled contraptions that used their own body energy for propulsion. Others sat atop animal-drawn wagons that seemed to Ussmak something straight out of an archaeology video.

  One of the animals let a pile of droppings fall to the street. None of the Big Uglies rushed to clean it up; none of them seemed to notice it was there. Hessef spoke to Ussmak from the landcruiser’s intercom: “Filthy creatures, aren’t they? They deserve to be conquered, and we’re going to do it.” An unnatural confidence filled his voice.

  But for the landcruisers, only a couple of motorized vehicles moved in Besançon. Both of them had big metal cylinders rising from the rear like tumors. “What are those things?” Ussmak asked. “Their engines?”

  “No,” Tvenkel answered. The gunner went on, “They’re built to burn petroleum by-products, like Tosevite landcruisers. But they can’t get those by-products any more. The gadgets you see extract burnable gas from wood. They’re ugly makeshifts like most of what the Big Uglies do, but they work after a fashion.”

  “Oh.” Up in the fortress that overlooked Besançon, Ussmak had grown used to smells he’d never smelled before. Now that he saw what produced some of those smells, he wondered what they were doing to his lungs.

  The operations order said the landcruisers were to proceed northeast from Besançon. Through the town, however, they rumbled northwest. Ussmak wondered if that was right, but didn’t say anything about it. All he was doing was following the male in front of him. You couldn’t possibly get in trouble if you did that.

  The male in front of him—and all the males in the column, right up to the lead driver, who had to make his own decisions—proved to know what they were doing. They rattled across a bridge (to the relief of Ussmak, who wasn’t sure it would take his landcruiser’s weight), past the earthworks of yet another fort, and then out onto a road that led in the proper direction.

  Ussmak undogged his entry hatch and stuck out his head. Driving unbuttoned gave him the best view, even if the breeze in his face was chilly. Shouldn’t be dangerous here, he thought. Nothing even slightly out of the ordinary had happened since he came to Besançon. He’d become convinced the area was thoroughly pacified.

  Up ahead, something went whump. Ussmak recognized that noise from the SSSR: somebody had driven over a land mine. Sure enough, landcruisers started going off the road on either side to get around a disabled vehicle. From the commander’s cupola, Hessef said, “Ah, will you look at that? It’s blown the track right off him.”

  The ground to either side of the paved road was soft and soggy: not surprising, Ussmak supposed, since the highway ran parallel to the river that flowed through Besançon. He didn’t think anything of it until a landcruiser, and then another one, bogged down in the muck.

  From the woods to the north of the road came another sound with which Ussmak had become intimately familiar in the SSSR: a sharp, fast, harsh tac-tac-tac. He slammed the hatch with a clang. “They’re shooting at us!” he screamed. “That’s an egg-addled machine gun, that’s what that is!” Bullets ricocheting from the landcruiser’s composite armor underscored his words.

  In the turret, Hessef shouted in high excitement. “I see muzzle flashes, by the Emperor! There he is, Tvenkel, right over there! Bring the turret around—that’s the way. Give him some with the machine gun, and then a round of high explosive. We’ll teach the Big Uglies to fool with us!”

  Ussmak let out a slow hiss of wonder. Hessef’s sloppy commands weren’t anything like the ones that had been drilled into the landcruiser crews in endless days of simulator training and exercises back on Home. Ussmak realized he was listening to the ginger talking again. An adjutant monitoring Hessef would have swelled up as if he had the gray staggers.

  However unorthodox the orders, though, they accomplished their purpose. Hydraulics whirred as the turret smoothly traversed. The coaxial machine gun opened up. Heard from inside the landcruiser, it wasn’t loud at all. “Fool with us, will they?” Tvenkel yelled. “I’ll teach them this world belongs to the Race!” He fired a long, long burst. Not being turned toward the Big Uglies with the machine gun, Ussmak at first had trouble judging how effective Tvenkel’s shooting was. But then more bullets pattered off the landcruisers like pebbles thrown at a metal roof. They did no more damage than pebbles would have, but showed the Tosevite gunners were still in business.

  “Give ’em the real thing,” Hessef said. Again, thick armor muffled the cannon’s roar, though the landcruiser rocked slightly on its treads as it took up the recoil.

  “There, that’s done it,” Tvenkel said with satisfaction. “We put enough rounds on that machine gun so the Big Uglies running it won’t bother their betters again.” As if to underscore his words, bullets stopped hitting the landcruiser.

  Ussmak peered through his forward vision slits. Some of the other vehicles in the column were already moving ahead. A moment later, Hessef said, “Forward.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir.” Ussmak released the brake, put the landcruiser into low gear. It rumbled forward. He steered very close to the machine that had thrown a track, keeping one of his own on the paved road to make sure he didn’t bog down. As soon as he was past the crippled landcruiser, he sped up to try to recapture some of the time everyone had lost shooting at the Big Uglies and their machine gun.

  Hessef said, “Not bad at all. The column commander reports only two wounds, neither serious. And we obliterated those Tosevites.”

  The ginger was still talking through him, Ussmak thought. Landcruiser crews shouldn’t have taken any casualties from a nuisance machine gun. Besides which, Hessef was ignoring the disabled fighting vehicle and the delay that sprang from the little firefight. If you’d tasted ginger a while before, such setbacks were too small to be worth noticing. Had Ussmak tasted along with the rest of the crew, he wouldn’t have noticed them, either. Without a particle of the herb in him, though, they bulked large. He wondered just how clever he really was after a good taste.

  From behind and to the left, bullets clattered off the landcruiser’s rear deck and the back of the turret. The Big Uglies at their machine gun had lived through the firestorm around them after all.

  “Halt!” Hessef screeched. Ussmak obediently hit the brake. “Five rounds high explosive this time,” the commander ordered. “Do you hear me, Tvenkel? I want those maniacal males blown to bloody bits.”

  “So do I,” the gunner said. He and his commander agreed perfectly, just as training said members of a landcruis
er crew should. The only trouble was that the tactic on which they agreed struck Ussmak as insane.

  The landcruiser’s main armament boomed, again and again. And Hessef’s was not the only crew that had halted. Through his vision slits, Ussmak watched several other landcruisers stop so they could pour fire down on the Tosevites who had had the temerity to annoy them. The driver wondered if their commanders were tasting, too.

  When the barrage was done, Hessef said, “Forward,” in tones of self-satisfaction. Ussmak obeyed again. Not much later, the landcruiser column came to an enormous hole blown in the highway. “The Big Uglies can’t stop us with nonsense like that,” Hessef declared. And sure enough, the armored fighting vehicles swung off the road one by one.

  The machine just in front of Ussmak’s rolled over a mine and lost a track. As soon as it slewed to a stop, a concealed Tosevite machine gun opened up. The landcruisers again returned fire with cannon and machine guns.

  The column was very late reaching its assigned destination.

  Heinrich Jäger paced through the cobblestoned streets of Hechingen. Up on a spur of the Schwäbische Alb stood Burg Hohenzollern. Its turrets, seen mistily through fog, made Jäger think of medieval epic, of maidens with long golden tresses and of the dragons that coveted them for their own dragonish reasons.

  The trouble these days, however, was Lizards, not dragons. Jäger wished he were back at the front so he could do something useful about them. Instead, he was stuck here with the best scientific minds of the Reich.

  He had nothing against them: on the contrary. They were far more likely to save Germany—to save mankind—than he was. But they thought they needed him to help them do it, and in that, as far as he could see, they were badly mistaken.

  He’d watched soldiers make the same kind of mistake. If a detachment from the quartermaster’s office brought a new model field telephone to the front-line soldiers, they were automatically seen as experts on the gadget, even if the only thing they knew about it was how to get it out of its crate.

  So with him now. He’d helped steal the explosive metal from the Lizards, he’d hauled it across the Ukraine and Poland. Therefore, the presumption ran, he had to know all about it. Like a lot of presumptions, that one presumed too much.

  Coming up the street toward him, munching on a chunk of black bread, was Werner Heisenberg. In spite of the bread, Heisenberg looked very much the academic: he was tall and serious-looking, with bushy hair combed straight back, fluffy eyebrows, and an expression mostly, as now, abstracted.

  “Herr Doktor Professor,” Jäger said, touching the brim of his service cap. No matter how bored he was, he remained polite.

  “Ah, Colonel Jäger, good day. I did not see you.” Heisenberg chuckled uneasily. Being taken for the traditional absent-minded professor had to embarrass him, not least because he really wasn’t that way. Up till now, he’d always seemed plenty sharp—and not just brilliant, which went without saying—to Jäger. He went on, “I am glad to find you, though. I must thank you again for the material you have given us to work with.”

  “To serve the Reich is my pleasure and my duty,” Jäger answered, politely still. If Heisenberg had ever seen combat, he didn’t show it. He could thank Jäger for bringing the explosive metal, but he didn’t really know what that meant, or how much blood had been spilled to get him his experimental material.

  He proceeded to prove that, saying, “A pity you could not have fetched us a bit more. Theoretical calculations indicate the amount we have is marginal for the production of a uranium explosive. Another three or four kilos would have been most beneficial.”

  That did it. Jäger’s boredom boiled away in fury. “Dr. Diebner had the courtesy to be grateful for what was provided rather than to complain about it. He also had the sense, sir”—Jäger loaded the title with scorn—“to remember how many lives were lost obtaining it.”

  He’d hoped to make Heisenberg ashamed. Instead, he flicked him on his vanity. “Diebner? Ha! He has not even his Habilitation. He is, if you ask me, more tinkerer than physicist.”

  “He knows what war entails, which is more than you seem to. And, by all accounts, he and his group are further along than yours in setting up the apparatus to produce more of this explosive metal for ourselves after we expend what we procured from the Lizards.”

  “By no means is his work theoretically sound,” Heisenberg said, as if he were accusing the other physicist of embezzlement.

  “I don’t care about theory. I care about results.” Jäger automatically reacted like a soldier. “Without results, theory is irrelevant.”

  “Without theory, results are impossible,” Heisenberg retorted. The two men glared at each other. Jäger wished he hadn’t bothered to greet the physicist. By the expression on his face, Heisenberg wished the same thing.

  Jäger shouted, “The metal is more real to you than the men who fell getting it.” He wanted to clout Heisenberg down from his cloud, make him glimpse, however distantly, the world beyond equations. He also wanted to kick him in the teeth.

  “I tried to express to you a civil good day, Colonel Jäger,” Heisenberg said in tones of ice. “That you return it to me with such, such recriminations I can take only as the mark of an unbalanced mind. Believe me, Colonel, I shall trouble you no further.” The physicist stalked off.

  Still steaming, Jäger stalked, too, in the opposite direction. He jumped and almost grabbed for his sidearm when someone said, “Well, Colonel, what was that in aid of?”

  “Dr. Diebner!” Jäger said. “You startled me.” He took his hand away from the flap of his holster.

  “I shall try not to do that again,” Kurt Diebner said. “I can see it might not be healthy for me.” Where Heisenberg looked like a professor, Diebner at first glance seemed more likely to be a farmer. He was in his thirties, with a broad, fleshy face and a receding hairline which he emphasized by slicking down his dark hair with grease and combing it straight back. He wore his baggy suit as if he’d been out walking the fields in it. Only the thick glasses that showed how nearsighted he was argued for a different interpretation of his character.

  Jäger said, “I had a—disagreement with your colleague.”

  “I saw that, yes.” Behind the glasses, amusement glinted in Diebner’s eyes. “I don’t believe I have ever seen Dr. Heisenberg so provoked; he normally cultivates an Olympian imperturbability. I came round the corner only for the tail end of the—disagreement, you said?—and was wondering what touched it off.”

  The panzer colonel hesitated, since his compliments for Diebner had helped set Heisenberg off. At last he said, “I was concerned that Professor Heisenberg did not, ah, fully realize the difficulties in getting this metal to you nuclear physicists so you could exploit it.”

  “Ah.” Diebner turned his head, peered this way and that; unlike Jäger and Heisenberg, he was careful about who heard him speak. His big thick spectacles and their dark rims gave him the air of a curious owl. “Sometimes, Colonel Jäger,” he said when he was sure the coast was clear, “from the top of the ivory tower it is hard to see the men struggling down in the mud.”

  “This may be so.” Jäger studied Diebner. “And yet—forgive me, Herr Doktor Professor—it seems to me, a colonel of panzers admittedly ignorant of all matter pertaining to nuclear physics, that you, too, dwell in this ivory tower.”

  “Oh, I do, without a doubt.” Diebner laughed; his plump cheeks shook. “But I do not dwell on the topmost floor. Before the war, before uranium and its behavior became so important to us all, Professor Heisenberg concerned himself almost exclusively with the mathematical analysis of matter and its behavior. You have perhaps heard of the Uncertainty Principle which bears his name?”

  “I’m sorry, but no,” Jäger said.

  “Ah, well.” Diebner shrugged. “Put me in charge of a panzer and I would be quickly killed. We all have our areas of expertise. My gift is in physics, too, but in experimenting to see what the properties of matter actually are. Then
the theoreticians, of whom Professor Heisenberg is among the best, use these data to develop their abstruse conclusions over what it all means.”

  “Thank you. You have clarified that for me.” Jäger meant it—now he understood why Heisenberg had sneeringly called Diebner a tinkerer. The difference was something like the one between himself and a colonel of the General Staff. Jäger knew he didn’t have the broad strategic vision he’d need to succeed as a man with the Lampassen—the broad red stripes that marked a General Staff officer—on his trousers. On the other hand, a General Staff officer wasn’t likely to have acquired the nuts-and-bolts knowledge (often in the literal sense of the words) to run a panzer regiment.

  Diebner said, “Do try to bear with us, Colonel. The difficulties we face are formidable, not least because we are under such desperate pressure of time and strategy.”

  “I follow,” Jäger said. “I wish I were back with my unit, so I could use what I have learned to help hold the Lizards out of the Reich and let you complete your work. I am badly out of place here.”

  “If you advance our building of the uranium bomb, you will have done more for the Reich than you could possibly accomplish in the field. Believe me when I say this.” Now Diebner looked earnest, like a farmer solemnly explaining how excellent his beets were.

  “If.” Jäger remained unconvinced that he could do anything useful here at Hechingen: he was about as valuable as oars on a bicycle. He came up with a plan, though, one that made him smile. Diebner smiled back; he seemed a very decent fellow. Jäger felt a little guilty at going against him, but only a little.

  When he got back to his quarters, he drafted a request to be returned to active duty. On the space in the form that asked his reason for seeking the transfer, he wrote, I am of no use to the physicists here. If confirmation is required, please inquire of Professor Heisenberg.

  He sent the request off with a messenger and awaited results. They were not long in coming—the application got approved faster than he had thought possible. Diebner and a couple of the other physicists expressed regret that he was leaving. Professor Heisenberg said not a word. He’d no doubt had his say to the office who’d called or telegraphed about Jäger.