Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  He flicked on the radio that sat on his desk, worked the search buttons to go from station to station. Some of the broadcasts the receivers picked up came from the Race; others, mushy with static, brought him the incomprehensible words of the Big Uglies. He didn’t really want to hear either group, feeling dreadfully isolated from both.

  Then, to his surprise, he found what had to be a Tosevite transmission, but one where the broadcaster not only spoke his language but was plainly a male of the Race: no Tosevite was free of accent either annoying or amusing. This fellow was not just one of his own but, by the way he spoke, a male of considerable status:

  “-tell you again, this war is being conducted by idiots with fancy body paint. They anticipated none of the difficulties the Race would confront in trying to conquer Tosev 3, and, when they found those difficulties, what did they do about them? Not much, by the Emperor! No, not Atvar and his clique of cloaca-licking fools. They just pressed on as if the Big Uglies were the sword-swinging savages we’d presumed them to be when we set out from Home. And how many good, brave, and obedient males have died on account of their stupidity? Think on it, you who still live.”

  “Truth!” Ussmak exclaimed. Whoever this male was, he understood what was what. He had a grasp of the big picture, too. Ussmak had heard captive males broadcasting before. Most of them just sounded pathetic, repeating the phrases the Tosevites ordered them to say. It made for bad, unconvincing propaganda. This fellow, though, sounded as if he’d prepared his own material and was enjoying every insult he hurled at the fleetlord.

  Ussmak wished he’d caught the beginning of this transmission, so he could have learned the broadcaster’s name and rank. The fellow went on, “Here and there on Tosev 3, males are getting the idea that continuing this futile, bloody conflict is a dreadful mistake. Many have thrown down their weapons and yielded to the Tosevite empire or not-empire controlling the area in which they were assigned. Most Tosevite empires and not-empires treat prisoners well. I, Straha, shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower, can personally attest to this. Atvar the brain-addled fool was going to destroy me for daring to oppose his senseless policies, but I escaped to the United States, and have never regretted it even for an instant.”

  Straha! Ussmak swung both eye turrets to focus sharply on the radio. Straha had been the third-ranking male in the conquest fleet. Ussmak knew he’d fled to the Big Uglies, but hadn’t known much about why: he hadn’t caught any of the shiplord’s earlier broadcasts. He clawed at a sheet of paper, slicing it into strips. Straha had told the truth and, instead of being rewarded as was proper, had suffered for it.

  The refugee shiplord went on, “Nor is yielding to the Tosevites your only choice. I have heard reports of brave males in Siberia who, tired at last of endless orders to do the impossible, struck a blow for freedom against their own misguided commanders, and who now rule their base independent of foolish plans formulated by males who float in comfort high above Tosev 3 and who think that makes them wise. You who hear my voice, ignore orders whose senselessness you can see with one eye turret and with the nictitating membrane over that eye. Remonstrate with your officers. If all else fails, imitate the brave Siberians and reclaim liberty for yourselves. I, Straha, have spoken.”

  Static replaced the shiplord’s voice. Ussmak felt stronger, more alive, than even ginger could make him. However much he enjoyed that intoxication, he knew it was artflicial. What Straha had said, though, was real, every word of it. Males on the ground had been treated shabbily, had been sacrfliced for no good purpose-for no purpose at all, as far as Ussmak could tell.

  Straha had also told him something he badly needed to know. When he’d spoken with the males up in orbit, he’d threatened to surrender the base to the local Big Uglies if the Race didn’t meet his demands or attacked him. He’d hesitated about doing anything more than threatening, since he didn’t know how the Soviets would treat males they captured. But Straha had set his mind at ease. He didn’t know much about Tosevite geography, but he did know the United States and the SSSR were two of the biggest, strongest not-empires on Tosev 3.

  If the United States treated its captured males well, no doubt the SSSR would do the same. Ussmak hissed in satisfaction. “We now have a new weapon against you,” he said, and turned both eye turrets up toward the starships still in orbit around Tosev 3.

  His mouth dropped open. Those males up there certainly didn’t know much about the Big Uglies.

  Sam Yeager looked at the rocket motor painfully assembled from parts made in small-town machine shops all over Arkansas and southern Missouri. It looked-well,crude was the politest word that came to mind. He sighed. “Once you see what the Lizards can do, anything people turn out is small potatoes alongside it. No offense, sir,” he added hastily.

  “None taken,” Robert Goddard answered. “As a matter of fact, I agree with you. We do the best we can, that’s all.” His gray, worn face said he was doing more than that: he was busy working himself to death. Yeager worried about him.

  He walked around the motor. If you set it alongside the pieces of the one from the Lizard shuttlecraft that had brought Straha down to exile, it was a kid’s toy. He took off his service cap, scratched at his blond hair. “You think it’ll fly, sir?”

  “The only way to find out is to light it up and see what happens,” Goddard answered. “If we’re lucky, we’ll get to test-fire it on the ground before we wrap sheet metal around it and stick some explosives on top. The trouble is, test-firing a rocket motor isn’t what you’d call inconspicuous, and we’d probably have a visit from the Lizards in short order.”

  “It’s a straight scaledown from the motor in the Lizard shuttlecraft,” Yeager said. “Vesstil thinks that should be a pretty good guarantee it’ll work the right way.”

  “Vesstil knows more about flying rockets than anyone human,” Goddard said with a weary smile. “Seeing as he flew Straha down from his starship when he defected, that goes without saying. But Vesstil doesn’t know beans about engineering, at least the cut-and-try kind. Everything else changes when you scale up or down, and you have to try the new model to see what the devil you’ve got.” He chuckled wryly. “And it’s notquite a straight scaledown anyhow, Sergeant: we’ve had to adapt the design to what we like to do and what we’re able to do.”

  “Well, yes, sir.” Sam felt his ears heat with embarrassment. Since his skin was very fair, he feared Goddard could watch him flush. “Hell of a thing for me to even think of arguing with you.” Goddard had more experience with rockets than anybody who wasn’t a Lizard or a German, and he was gaining on the Germans. Yeager went on, “If I hadn’t read the pulps before the war, I wouldn’t be here working with you now.”

  “You’ve taken advantage of what you read,” Goddard answered. “If you hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t be of any use to me.”

  “You spend as much time bouncing around as I’ve done, sir, and you know that if you see a chance, you’d better grab for it with both hands, ’cause odds are you’ll never see it again.” Yeager scratched his head once more. He’d spent his whole adult life, up till the Lizards came, playing minor-league ball. A broken ankle ten years before had effectively ended whatever chance he’d had of making the majors, but he’d hung in there anyhow. And on the endless bus and train trips from one small or medium-sized town to the next, he’d killed time withAstounding and any other science-fiction magazines he’d found on the newsstands. His teammates had laughed at him for reading about bug-eyed monsters from another planet. NowNow Robert Goddard said, “I’m glad you grabbed this one, Sergeant. I don’t think I could have gotten nearly so much information out of Vesstil with a different interpreter. It’s not just that you know his language; you have a real feel for what he’s trying to get across.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said, feeling about ten feet tall. “Soon as I got the chance to have anything to do with the Lizards besides shooting at ’em, I knew that’s what I wanted. They’re-fascinating, you know what I mean?”

&
nbsp; Goddard shook his head. “What they know, the experience they have-that’s fascinating. But them-” He laughed self-consciously. “A good thing Vesstil’s not around right now. He’d be insulted if he knew he gave me the creeps.”

  “He probably wouldn’t, sir,” Yeager said. “The Lizards mostly don’t make any bones about us giving them the creeps.” He paused. “Hmm, come to think of it, he might be insulted at that, sort of like if a Ku-Kluxer found out some Negroes looked down their noses at white men.”

  “As if we don’t have the right to think Lizards are creepy, you mean.”

  “That’s right.” Sam nodded. “But snakes and things like that, they never bothered me, not even when I was a kid. And the Lizards, every time I’m with one of them, I’m liable to learn something new: not just new for me, I mean, but something nobody, no human being, ever knew before. That’s pretty special. In a way, it’s even more special than Jonathan.” Now he laughed the nervous laugh Goddard had used before. “Don’t let Barbara found out I said that.”

  “You have my word,” the rocket scientist said solemnly. “But I do understand what you mean. Your son is an unknown to you, but he’s not the first baby that ever was. Really discovering something for the first time is a thrill almost as addictive as-as ginger, shall we say?”

  “As long as we don’t let the Lizards hear us say it, sure,” Yeager answered. “They sure do like that stuff, don’t they?” He hesitated again, then went on, “Sir, I’m mighty glad you decided to move operations back here to Hot Springs. Gives me the chance to be with my family, lets me help Barbara out every now and then. I mean, we haven’t even been married a year yet, and-”

  “I’m glad it’s worked out well for you, Sergeant,” Goddard said, “but that’s not the reason I came down here from Couch-”

  “Oh, I know it’s not, sir,” Sam said hastily.

  As if he hadn’t spoken, Goddard went on, “Hot Springs is a decent-sized city, with at least a little light manufacturing. We’re not far from Little Rock, which has more. And we have all the Lizards at the Army and Navy General Hospital here, upon whom we can draw for expertise. That has proved much more convenient than transferring the Lizards up to southern Missouri one by one.”

  “Like I said, it’s great by me,” Yeager told him. “And we’ve moved an awful lot of pieces of the Lizard shuttlecraft down here so we can study ’em better.”

  “I worried about that,” Goddard said. “The Lizards always knew about where Vesstil brought Straha down. We were lucky we concealed and stripped the shuttlecraft as fast as we did, because they tried their hardest to destroy it. They easily could have sent in troops by air to make sure they’d done the job, and we’d have had the devil’s own time stopping them.”

  “They don’t go poking their snouts into everything the way they did when they first landed here,” Sam said. “I guess that’s because we’ve hurt ’em a few times when they tried it.”

  “A good thing, too, or I fear we’d have lost the war by now.” Goddard rose and stretched, though from his grimace that hurt more than it made him feel good. “Another incidental reason for coming to Hot Springs is the springs. I’m going to my room to draw myself a hot bath. I’d gotten used to doing without such things, and almost forgot how wonderful they are.”

  “Yes, sir,” Yeager said enthusiastically. The fourth-floor room in the Army and Navy General Hospital he shared with Barbara-and now Jonathan-didn’t have a tub of its own; washing facilities were down at the end of the hall. That didn’t bother him. For one thing, Goddard was a VIP, while he was just an enlisted man doing what he could for the war effort. For another, the plumbing on the Nebraska farm where he’d grown up had consisted of a well and a two-holer out back of the house. He didn’t take running water, cold or especially hot, for granted.

  Walking up to his room was a lot more comfortable in winter than it had been in summertime, when you didn’t need to soak in the local springs to get hot and wet. As he headed down the hall toward room 429, he heard Jonathan kicking up a ruckus in there. He sighed and hurried a little faster. Barbara would be feeling harassed. So would the Lizard POWs who also lived on this floor.

  When he opened the door, Barbara sent him a look that went from hunted to relieved when she saw who he was. She thrust the baby at him. “Would you try holding him, please?” she said. “No matter what I do, he doesn’t want to keep quiet.”

  “Okay, hon,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s a burp hiding in there.” He got Jonathan up on his shoulder and started thumping the kid’s back. He did it hard enough to make it sound as if he were working out on the drums. Barbara, who had a gentler touch, frowned at that the way she usually did, but he got results with it. As now-Jonathan gave forth with an almost baritone belch and a fair volume of half-digested milk. Then he blinked and looked much happier with himself.

  “Oh, good!” Barbara exclaimed when the burp came out. She dabbed at Sam’s uniform tunic with a diaper. “There. I got most of it, but I’m afraid you’re going to smell like sour milk for a while.”

  “World won’t end,” Yeager said. “This isn’t one of your big spit and polish places.” The smell of sour milk didn’t bother him any more. It was in the room most of the time, along with the reek that came with the diaper pail even when it was closed-that reminded him of the barnyard on his parents’ farm, not that he ever said so to Barbara. He held his little son out at arm’s length. “There you go, kiddo. You had that hiding in there where Mommy couldn’t find it, didn’t you?”

  Barbara reached for the baby. “I’ll take him back now. If you want.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I don’t get to hold him all that much, and you look like you could use a breather.”

  “Well, now that you mention it, yes.” Barbara slumped into the only chair in the room. She wasn’t the pert girl Sam had got to know; she looked beat, as she did most of the time. If you didn’t look beat most of the time with a new kid around, either something was wrong with you or you had servants to look beat for you. There were dark circles under her green eyes; her blond hair-several shades darker than Sam’s-hung limp, as if it were tired, too. She let out a weary sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette and especially a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh, Lord-coffee,” Yeager said wistfully. “The worst cup of joe I ever drank in the greasiest greasy spoon in the lousiest little town I ever went through-and I went through a lot of ’em… Jeez, it’d go good right now.”

  “If we had any coffee to ration, we ought to share it between soldiers in the front lines and parents with babies less than a year old. No one else could possibly need it so badly,” Barbara said. Frazzled as she was, she still spoke with a precision Sam admired: she’d done graduate work at Berkeley in medieval English literature before the war. The kind of English you heard in ballparks didn’t measure up alongside that.

  Jonathan wiggled and twisted and started to cry. He was beginning to make different kinds of racket to show he had different things in mind. Sam recognized this one. “He’s hungry, hon.”

  “By the schedule, it’s not time to feed him yet,” Barbara answered. “But do you know what? As far as I’m concerned, the schedule can go to the devil. I can’t stand listening to him yell until the clock says it’s okay for him to eat. If nursing makes him happy enough to keep still for a while, that suits me fine.” She wriggled her right arm out of the sleeve of the dark blue wool dress she was wearing, tugged the dress down to bare that breast. “Here, give him to me.”

  Yeager did. The baby’s mouth fastened onto her nipple. Jonathan sucked avidly. Yeager could hear him gulping down the milk. He’d felt funny at first, having to share Barbara’s breasts with his son. But you couldn’t bottle-feed these days-no formula, no easy way to keep things as clean as they needed to be. And after you got used to breast-feeding, it didn’t seem like such a big thing any more, anyhow.

  “I think he may be going to sleep,” Barbara said. The radio newsman who’d announced J
immy Doolittle’s bomber raid over Tokyo hadn’t sounded more excited about a victory. She went on, “He’s going to want to nurse on the other side too, though. Help me out of that sleeve, would you, Sam? I can’t get it down by myself, not while I’m holding him.”

  “Sure thing.” He hurried over to her, stretched the sleeve out, and helped her get her arm back through past the elbow. After that, she managed on her own. The dress fell limply to her waist. A couple of minutes went by before she shifted Jonathan to her left breast.

  “He’d better fall asleep pretty soon,” Barbara said. “I’m cold.”

  “He looks as if he’s going to,” Sam answered. He draped a folded towel over her left shoulder, not so much to help warm her as to keep the baby from drooling or spitting up on her when she burped him.

  One of her eyebrows rose. “ ‘As if he’s going to’?” she echoed.

  He knew what she meant. He wouldn’t have said it that way when they first met; he’d made it through high school, then gone off to play ball. “Must be the company I keep,” he replied with a smile, and then went on more seriously: “I like learning things from the people I’m around-from the Lizards, too, it’s turned out. Is it any wonder I’ve picked things up from you?”

  “Oh, in a way it’s a wonder,” Barbara said. “A lot of people seem to hate the idea of ever learning anything new. I’m glad you’re not like that; it would make life boring.” She glanced down at Jonathan. “Yes, he is falling asleep. Good.”

  Sure enough, before long her nipple slipped out of the baby’s mouth. She held him a little longer, then gently raised him to her shoulder and patted his back. He burped without waking up, and didn’t spit up, either. She slid him back down to the crook of her elbow, waited a few minutes more, and got up to put him in the wooden crib that took up a large part of the small room. Jonathan sighed as she laid him down. She stood there for a moment, afraid he would wake. But when his breathing steadied, she straightened and reached down to fix her dress.