Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, she probably could,” the doctor said. “One thing you find out pretty fast is that people are tougher than you’d imagine. But we’re not going to let her. You and I, Sergeant, we’ll get her up there.”

  They did, too, in a sort of modified fireman’s carry that had them both panting by the time they made it to the fourth floor. The nurse followed with Jonathan. When they finally came out into the hallway Barbara said, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

  Walk she did, toward their room. It was more shamble than stride; her feet were as wide apart as if she’d spent the last twenty years in the saddle. While that wasn’t true, she had spent a good long while in the stirrups.

  Straha came out of his room to see what was going on in the hall. He kept his body paint unsmeared and in the magnificent shiplord’s pattern he’d worn when defecting: no Official American Prisoner markings for him. He came skittering up to the nurse. She drew back a pace, as if to protect the baby from him. “It’s okay,” Sam said quickly. “We’re friends. Let him see Jonathan.”

  The nurse looked dubious, but held out the baby boy. As Straha examined it, he looked dubious, too. “This is a Tosevite hatchling?” he said in his own hissing language. “It is a Little Ugly, not a Big Ugly.” His mouth fell open in appreciation of his own wit.

  Barbara answered in the same tongue: “Shiplord, that ismy hatchling, and it is not ugly.” For good measure, she tacked on an emphatic cough. Yeager added one of his own, to show he agreed. Among the Lizards, that was grammatically uncouth, but it got the message across.

  “Familial attachments,” Straha said, as if reminding himself. “No insult was intended, I assure you. For a Tosevite hatchling, this is undoubtedly a paragon.”

  “What’s he talking about?” the doctor asked.

  “He says we’ve got a cute kid,” Sam answered. He was skeptical about Straha’s sincerity, but the Lizard was too big a cheese for him to make a fuss over it. Besides, except for an exaggerated sense of his own brilliance and worth-hardly a trait unique to Lizards-he was a pretty good fellow.

  Barbara returned to English: “I may be able to walk, but I can’t stand in one place very long. I’m going inside and lying down.” She waddled the last few steps toward their door and started to go into the room. The nurse followed with the baby.

  Before she got there, Ristin and Ullhass came out to look over the new arrival. They were politer than Straha, but still curious. When Jonathan opened his mouth to squawk, Ristin exclaimed, “The hatchling has no teeth! How can it eat if it has no teeth?”

  Barbara rolled her eyes. “If the baby did have teeth, it wouldn’t eat from me,” she said feelingly.

  “That’s right-you Tosevites nourish your hatchlings yourself.” Ullhass was more thoughtful, less high-spirited than Ristin. “I am sure you will do everything you can to make this little-is it a male or a female? — this little male an upstanding member of your race.”

  “Thank you, Ullhass,” Barbara said, “but if I’m on my feet another minute, I’m going to be a downfalling member of my race.” She went into the room she and Sam would now share with their son.

  The nurse brought in the baby. “Y’all holier if there’s anything we can do,” she said as she gave it to Barbara. “Good luck to you, honey.” Then she left, and closed the door behind her. All at once, in spite of what the nurse had said, it seemed to Sam that he, his wife, and their child were the only people left in the world. He gulped. Could he handle responsibility like that? After a moment, he realized the question hardly mattered. He wouldn’t get that much chance to handle the responsibility of being a father, not when Jonathan was here and he’d be heading back up to Missouri.

  Barbara set Jonathan in the crib he’d bought at a secondhand store in Hot Springs. The crib wasn’t very large-even if it did crowd the already-crowded room-but the baby all but disappeared in it With a long, shuddering sigh, Barbara lay down. “You all right, hon?” Sam asked anxiously.

  “I think so,” she said. “I don’t know for sure, though. I’ve never done this before. Am I supposed to feel as if a steamroller just mashed me?”

  “I can’t tell you from what I know myself, but by everything my mother used to say, that is how you’re supposed to feel.”

  “That’s good. I’m going to sleep for a while, I think, while the baby’s resting, and then, if he’s still asleep, I’ll stagger down the hall and take a shower. Thank heavens the hot springs give us all the hot water we need, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt so… greasy in my whole life. That was hard work.”

  “I love you, honey.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek, then turned and shook a severe finger at Jonathan. “And you, buster, keep it quiet for a while.” He laughed. “There, I’m already showing our kid who’s boss.”

  “That’s easy-he is.” Barbara closed her eyes.

  Sam sat down in the one chair the room boasted. Barbara dropped off almost at once. Her slow, deep breaths mixed oddly with Jonathan’s quick, uncertain ones. The baby was a restless sleeper, wiggling and thrashing and sometimes trying to suck at the sheets or the blanket that covered him. Every so often, Yeager got up to peer at him. He tried to figure out whom the baby looked like. He couldn’t tell. What Jonathan mostly looked was squashed. Even his head almost came to a point at the top. None of the doctors or nurses had got upset about that, so Sam supposed it was normal.

  After an hour or so, Barbara woke up, stretched, and said. “Isn’t he a little angel, sleeping like that? I am going to get clean. I won’t be long. Pick him up and hold him if he fusses while I’m gone.”

  Sam hadn’t thought about that. He was going off and leaving Barbara on the spot for God only knew how long, but she was a woman-she was supposed to be able to take care of babies. What would he do if Jonathan started crying?

  Jonathan started crying. One minute he was quiet except for snorts and grunts, the next he sounded like an air-raid siren in the little room. Gulping, Sam picked him up, careful to support his head as the doctor had shown him. One thing immediately became obvious: the kid was wet.

  Next to the crib stood a pile of diapers; safety pins lay on top of the chest of drawers. Sam undid the diaper Jonathan had on, and discovered he was more than wet; he had a mess in there, too. Sam stared at it: was it supposed to be greenish black? He didn’t know, but figured he’d assume everything was normal there, too, till he heard otherwise.

  Growing up on a farm had inured him to dealing with messes of most sorts. He wiped his son’s bottom, which made Jonathan fuss more, then folded a diaper into a triangle and got it onto the kid. He stuck himself with a pin only once, which he reckoned a victory of sorts. The doctors hadn’t circumcised the baby. He wasn’t circumcised himself, so that didn’t bother him.One less thing to have to worry about, he thought.

  Jonathan kept fussing. “It’s okay, kid, it really is,” Sam said, rocking the baby in his arms. After a while, the cries subsided to whimpers. Jonathan drifted off to sleep. Ever so carefully, Sam put him back in the crib. He didn’t wake up. Sam felt as if he’d caught a fly ball that clinched a pennant.

  Barbara came back a couple of minutes later. “Is hestill asleep?” she exclaimed, looking at the baby.

  Sam pointed to the galvanized bucket where he’d tossed the dirty diaper. “I managed,” he said, which, with his ballpark thought of a little while before, made him wonder how Mutt Daniels was doing these days. The news coming out of embattled Chicago lately was better than it had been earlier in the year, but still not good.

  “I wish you didn’t have to go back tomorrow,” Barbara said that evening as they got ready for bed.

  “So do I.” Sam passed her the cigar the doctor had given him: they were sharing it for a treat. “But I can’t do anything about that I’m just lucky Dr. Goddard was a good enough guy to let me get down here at all.”

  By the time he crawled out of bed the next morning, Sam wasn’t so sure he was sorry to go. He wondered i
f it might not be more like an escape. He’d expected Jonathan to wake several times in the night, and the baby did. Whenever he roused, Barbara nursed him. What he hadn’t expected-nor Barbara, either, by her increasingly haggard look-was that the baby could wake them without waking up him self. Every little snort or grunt or slurping noise Jonathan made would bring his parents alert, their eyes wide, wondering what they needed to do next. Often the answer wasnothing, but they couldn’t know that in advance.

  As he put on his khakis, shirt, and jacket, Sam felt himself moving as if underwater. Barbara looked to be in worse shape than he was.

  “Jesus,” he said, his voice a rusty croak, “I wish there was coffee.”

  “Oh, so do I,” Barbara said fervently. She managed a wan smile. “One thing about the shortages, though: I don’t have to worry about your falling asleep at the reins of your horse and driving him into a tree or a ditch.”

  “Something to that,” Sam said. “Not much, but something.” He hugged her, then smiled himself. “I don’t have to lean over your belly any more. That’s pretty good.”

  “I’m still all-” Barbara gestured. “I hope I’ll have my figure back when I see you again.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t, because that would mean I won’t see you for a while, and I want you back here as soon as you can come. I love you, Sam, and besides, Jonathan needs to know who his daddy is.”

  “Yeah.” The baby was asleep for the moment. Yeager kissed the tip of his own finger and brushed it against Jonathan’s cheek. “So long, kiddo.” He hugged Barbara again. “So long, hon. Love you, too.” Sighing, he lurched out the door and headed down the hall to the stairs.

  From behind him, Straha called in peremptory tones: “I must tell you that your hatchling’s howls last night disturbed me and, I have no doubt, other males of the Race on this floor. How long can we expect this unseemly cacophony to continue?”

  “Oh, about six months, more or less,” Sam answered cheerfully. “That’s one of your years, isn’t it? So long. I’m going back to Missouri, away from the noise.” He ducked down the stairway, leaving the shiplord staring after him.

  Georg Schultz spun the U-2’s prop. The five-cylinder Shvetsov radial engine caught at once. Being air-cooled, it was less susceptible to cold weather than a lot of aircraft powerplants. When the weather got cold enough, oil didn’t want to flow, but it wasn’t quite that bad today. It had been, on and off, and Ludmila Gorbunova had no doubt it would be again before long.

  Schultz got out of the way in a hurry. Ludmila released the brake and let theKukuruznik bounce down the rutted dirt of the airstrip. When she’d built up enough speed, she pulled back on the stick and clawed her way into the air. Getting the little biplane off the ground always made her feel that, if you wanted to badly enough, you could run along with your arms spread and take off and fly all by yourself.

  The slipstream that came over the windscreen threatened to freeze her cheeks and mouth, the only flesh she bared to it She went into a wide turn and flew over the airstrip on her way south. Georg Schultz was already out of sight.Probably on his way to Tatiana ‘s bed, Ludmila thought scornfully. But he was right: she really had no business complaining. She didn’t want him, and was just as glad to have him out of her hair once and for all.

  She buzzed over the defense lines south of Pskov, built with such unflagging and dreadful civilian effort the summer before. Soldiers in the trenches waved at her. And, as happened fairly often, a couple of fools shot at her, not believing anything built by human beings could be in the air. She saw muzzle flashes, heard a couple of bullets crack past.

  “Who do you think I am, the devil’s grandmother?” she shouted. That helped relieve her own feelings, but the men on the ground couldn’t hear her. Sometimes, when bullets came closer than they had today, she thought longingly about machine-gunning the trenches of her own side.

  Then she was over the Lizards’ lines. She gunned the U-2 for all it was worth, but that, as she knew only too well, was a matter of kopecks, not rubles. A couple of Lizards shot at her, too. They didn’t come any closer than the Russians had. That wasn’t what worried her. They’d use their radios to let their side know she was out and flying, and the Lizards had antiaircraft weapons far more deadly than automatic rifles.

  Once she was past the Lizards’ main line, she swung theKukuruznik ’s nose west, then south, then west again, then north for a little ways, and then east for an even shorter time. The less predictable she made her path, the less likely they were to blow her out of the sky.

  Some kilometers south of the Lizards’ forward positions, she spotted a convoy of tanks and soft-skinned vehicles slogging along a dirt road. Now that snow had replaced the fall rains, roads were passable again: what had been mud was frozen solid.

  That wasn’t what drew her notice to the convoy, though. The tanks and lorries weren’t moving up to help the Lizards advance on Pskov. Instead, they were heading south themselves, away from the city. They had artillery with them, too, some self-propelled and some towed weapons captured from the Red Army and the Germans.

  She didn’t get too close to the convoy. A lot of those vehicles mounted machine guns for defense against low-flying aircraft, and her best hope for surviving such a barrage was not drawing it in the first place. As soon as she was sure they really were southbound, she flew away as fast as the U-2 would take her.

  “Whatare they doing?” she wondered aloud. Had she not been wearing thick gloves and a leather flying helmet, she would have scratched her head. She’d never seen such a large-scale withdrawal by the Lizards before.

  She skimmed along a few meters above the treetops, drawing occasional potshots from the woods below, but was gone before the Lizards could do her any damage. She was thinking hard. The evasive maneuvers she’d performed south of the Lizards’ lines had left her a trifle disoriented, but if she was where she thought she was, she ought to strike another road if she flew southeast for a couple of minutes.

  And there it was! Like most roads between Soviet cities, it was dirt-surfaced. But it also had Lizard armor on it, and lorries with the tanks and fighting vehicles. This was a bigger column than the one she’d seen before, and also heading south-southwest, actually, given the direction of the highway, which ran toward Daugavpils in what had been Latvia till the Soviet Union reclaimed it a couple of years before.

  “Whatare they doing?” she repeated, but that seemed pretty obvious. They were pulling back from Pskov, or at least pulling back the forces with which they could advance farther rather than merely holding in place.

  She found another question: “Why are they doing it?” She didn’t think it was because they’d despaired of conquering Pskov. They had to want the armor somewhere else. Where, she had no idea, and it wasn’t her job to worry about such things anyhow. But she needed to get the information to someone whose jobwas worrying about them.

  Not for the first time, she wished theKukuruznik had a radio. She sighed; a lot of Soviet aircraft and tanks went without radios. That saved the expense of building and installing them, and the trouble of training personnel who were liable to be illiterate peasants just off the farm. Whether such economies were worth the disadvantage of being without good communications was another question entirely.

  When she bounced in for a landing outside Pskov, no Soviet groundcrew men waited for her. The possibility that she might come back early had never entered their minds. She taxied as far from the concealed airplanes as she could, leaving her own at the very edge of the trees. With luck, the Lizards would be so intent on their retreat that they wouldn’t notice theKukuruznik.

  Without luck…“Nichevo,” Ludmila said: “It can’t be helped.”

  She hurried into Pskov. By the time she got to theKrom, she was sweating; if anything would keep you warm, flight gear would. She almost ran into George Bagnall as he was coming out “What’s going on?” he asked in his bad Russian.

  She poured out the story, first in Russian and then, when she real
ized she was going too fast for him to follow, in German instead.

  “And so I must seeGeneralleutnant Chill and the Soviet brigadierssofort — immediately,” she finished. German was a good language in which to sound urgent. If you didn’t get your way, it seemed to warn, something terrible would happen.

  But Bagnall only nodded.“Da, they all need to know that,” he said, and, setting a hand on her shoulder to show she was with him, he marched her through layers of sentries and subordinates to the commandments of Pskov.

  She told them the story in the same mix of languages she’d used with Bagnall. Aleksandr German translated from the Russian for Kurt Chill and from the German for Nikolai Vasiliev. The leaders were as excited as Ludmila had been. Vasiliev slammed a fist down on the tabletop. “We can drive them far from our city!” he shouted.

  “They’re already going,” Chill said. “Whereare they going-and why? We must have more intelligence reports. I shall order up additional flights.” He reached for a field telephone.

  Until they got more data, the commanders weren’t about to order anything irrevocable, which struck Ludmila as sensible. She and Bagnall both withdrew. He said, “You did well to come back so soon. You showed a lot of-” He had trouble with the word, both in Russian and in German. Finally, after some fumbling, Ludmila decided he was trying to sayinitiative.

  She shrugged. “It needed doing, so I did it.” Only after the words were out of her mouth did she realize that was unusual, at least among the Soviets. You did what you were told, and nothing else. That way, you never got in trouble. From what she’d seen, the Germans were looser, more demanding of imagination from their lower ranks. She didn’t know how the English did things.

  “Das ist gut,”he said, and then repeated himself, this time in Russian:“Khorosho.” Ludmila supposed that meant he thought initiative was a good thing, too. Like a lot of Soviet citizens, she mistrusted the concept How could social equality survive if some people shoved themselves ahead of the rest?