In the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Then the Nipponese officer started hustling him away from the front line again. The jets’ wail vanished; the other two pilots in the flight must have expended their munitions and had to head home. Artillery shells whistled overhead every so often. Most came from the west and landed on Tosevite positions. The Big Uglies kept firing back, though. They seemed too stubborn to know when to give up.

  Teerts walked toward the dawn that was breaking in the east. As light grew, Nipponese artillery fire also picked up. Lacking night-vision gear, the Tosevites were limited to targets they could actually see. Each salvo of theirs drew quick counterbattery fire from the gunners of the Race.

  Back at the rear edge of the Nipponese trench system, a new party of Big Uglies took charge of Teerts. By the way the officer who had captured him acted toward the one who now received him, the latter was far more prominent. They bowed to each other one last time before the junior officer and the males who had accompanied him headed back to their position.

  Teerts’ new keeper surprised him by speaking the language of the Race. “You come this way,” he said. His accent was mushy and he barked out his words, but the flight leader followed him well enough.

  “Where are you taking me?” Teerts asked, glad for the chance to communicate with something more expressive than gestures.

  The Nipponese officer whirled and struck him. He staggered and almost fell; the blow had been cleverly aimed. “Not talk unless I say you can talk!” the Big Ugly shouted. “You prisoner now, not master. You obey!”

  Obedience had been drilled into Teerts his whole life long. His captor might be a savage, but he spoke as one who had the right to command. Almost instinctively, the flight leader responded to his tone. “May I speak?” he asked, as humbly as if he were addressing a shiplord.

  “Hai,” the Nipponese said, a word Teerts did not understand. As if realizing that, the Tosevite abandoned his own jargon. “Speak, speak.”

  “Thank you, exalted male.” With no notion of the officer’s rank, Teerts laid the honorifics on with a trowel. “Without asking where, exalted male, do you have places in which you keep your captives from the Race?”

  The Nipponese showed his teeth. Among the Big Uglies, Teerts knew, that was a gesture of amiability, not amusement. The officer, however, looked not the least bit amiable. He said, “You prisoner now. No one care what happen to you.”

  “Forgive me, exalted male, but I do not understand. You Tosevites”—Teerts carefully did not say Big Uglies—“take prisoners in your own wars and mostly treat them well. Is it just to use us so differently from your own?”

  “Not do so,” the Nipponese officer answered. “Be prisoner go against bushido.” The word was in Nipponese. The officer explained it: “Against way of fighting male. Proper fighting male die before become prisoner. Become prisoner, not deserve to live. Become—how you say?—sport for those who catch.”

  “That’s—” Teerts caught himself before he blurted out insane. “That’s not the way most other Tosevites act.”

  “They fools, idiots. We Nipponese, we—how you say?—people of the emperor. Our way right, proper. Same family rule us two thousand five hundred year.” He drew himself up as if that paltry figure were a matter for pride. Teerts didn’t think it wise to point out that the Emperors’ family had ruled the Race for fifty thousand years, which was twenty-five thousand revolutions of Tosev 3. A small pride, he reasoned, might be more easily hurt by a large truth.

  He said, “What will you do with me, then?”

  “What we want,” the officer answered. “You ours now.”

  “If you mistreat me, the Race will avenge itself on your people,” Teerts warned.

  The Nipponese officer made a peculiar barking noise. After a bit, Teerts realized it had to be what the Big Uglies used for laughter. The officer said, “Your Race already hurt Nippon so bad, how you do worse on account of prisoners, eh? You try make me afraid? I show you. I not afraid to do this—”

  He kicked Teerts, hard. The flight leader hissed in surprise and pain. When the Big Ugly kicked him again, he whirled round and tried to fight back—even, if he was smaller than a Tosevite, he had teeth and claws. They did him no good. The officer did not even bother reaching for the sword or the small firearm he carried on his belt He’d somehow learned to use his legs and arms as deadly weapons. Teerts couldn’t so much as tear his tunic.

  The beating and stomping went on for some time. Finally the Nipponese officer kicked the flight leader’s broken wrist. Teerts’ vision blurred and threatened to go out, just as it had when the ejection seat hurled him away from his killercraft. As if from very far away, he heard someone screaming, “Enough! Enough!” He needed a while before he recognized the voice as his own.

  “You talk stupid again?” the Big Ugly asked. He stood balanced on one leg, ready to kick Teerts some more. If the flight leader said no, the Tosevite might stop; if he said yes, he was sure he’d get kicked to death. He got the feeling the officer didn’t much care one way or the other what he answered. In a way, that indifference was even more frightening than the beating itself.

  “No, I won’t talk stupidly again, or I’ll try not to, anyway,” Teerts gasped. The tiny qualification held all the defiance left in him.

  “You get up, then.”

  Teerts didn’t think he could. But if he failed, the Big Ugly would have another excuse to hurt him. He struggled to his feet, did his best to wipe the mud off his scales one-handed.

  “What you learn from this?” the Nipponese officer asked.

  The flight leader could hear the danger in that question. It wasn’t just rhetoric; he’d better answer it in a way that satisfied the Tosevite. Slowly, he said, “I learned that I am your prisoner, that I am in your power, that you can do whatever you want with me.”

  The Big Ugly moved his head up and down. “You keep this in your mind, eh?”

  “Yes.” Teerts didn’t think he was likely to forget.

  The Nipponese officer gave him a light shove. “You come on, then.”

  Moving hurt, but Teerts managed. He didn’t dare fail; maybe the Big Ugly really had taught him a lesson after all. Dawn was breaking when they came to a transport center. The Race had worked it over at least once: truck carcasses lay here and there, some flipped over, others burnt out, still others both.

  But the center still functioned. Nipponese soldiers, chanting as they worked, unloaded cloth sacks from a few intact motor vehicles and from a great many animal-drawn wagons. The officer shouted to the males there. A couple of them came rushing over. They exchanged bows with the flight leader’s captor, spoke rapidly back and forth.

  The officer shoved Teerts again, pointed toward a wagon. “You go on that one.”

  Teerts awkwardly climbed into the wagon. The Nipponese officer gestured for him to sit in one corner. He obeyed. The wooden bottom and sides scratched against his sore hide. The officer and a Big Ugly soldier got into the wagon with him. Now the officer took out his small firearm. The soldier kept his rifle aimed at Teerts, too. The flight leader’s mouth wanted to fall open. The Tosevites had to be crazy if they thought he was in any shape to try something.

  Crazy they might have been, but they weren’t stupid. The officer spoke again in his own language. The males around the wagon obeyed with an alacrity that would not have shamed members of the Race. They snatched up a heavy, dirty tarpaulin and draped it over Teerts and his guards.

  “No one see you now,” the officer said, and laughed his noisy, barking laugh once more.

  Teerts was afraid he was right. From the air, the wagon would look like any other, hardly worth shooting up and certainly not worth investigating. Oh, in an infrared scan the wagon bed might show up warmer than it would have were it just carrying supplies, but no one was likely to bother scanning it.

  Somebody with heavy, booted feet got up onto the front of the wagon, the part the tarpaulin didn’t cover. The wagon shifted under his weight. The newcomer said something, though not to Te
erts or the Big Uglies. The only answer he got was a soft snort from one of the two animals tethered to the front end of the wagon.

  The animals started to walk. In that instant, Teerts discovered the wagon had no springs. He also discovered the road over which it traveled did not deserve the name. The first two jounces made him bite his tongue. After that, with the iron taste of blood in his mouth, he deliberately clamped his jaws shut and endured the rattling as best he could. He was jolted worse here at a walking pace than he’d ever been inside his killercraft.

  After a while, daylight began to seep through the space between the tarpaulin and, the top of the wagon. The two Tosevites did not seem to have so much as twitched since they sat down. Their weapons remained pointed straight at Teerts. He wished he were as dangerous as they thought he was.

  “May I speak?” he asked. The Nipponese officer’s head moved up and down. Hoping that meant yes, the flight leader said, “May I please have some water?”

  “Hai,” the officer said. He turned to the other male, spoke briefly. The soldier shifted his weight—he could move after all. He carried a water bottle slung on his right hip. He undid it with one hand (the other kept his rifle aimed at Teerts), passed it to his commander. The officer in turn gave it to Teerts, making sure all the while that the flight leader could not grab his small firearm.

  Teerts found the water bottle hard to use. The Tosevites could wrap their flexible lips around its opening to keep from spilling it. His own mouthparts were less mobile. He had to hold the bottle above his head, pour the water down into his mouth. Even so, some of it dribbled out the corners of his jaws and made a couple of small puddles on the floor of the wagon.

  Refreshed, he dared ask, “May I also have some food?” Saying the word told him how empty his belly was.

  “You eat food like us?” The officer paused, tried to make himself clearer: “You eat food from this world?”

  “Of course I do,” Teerts answered, surprised the Big Ugly could doubt it. “Why would we conquer this world if we could not support ourselves upon it afterwards?”

  The officer grunted, then spoke to the other soldier again. This time, the junior male moved slowly, grudgingly. He had to put down his rifle to reach into the pack on his back. From it he took out a cloth wrapped around a couple of flat, whitish grainy cakes. He handed one of them to Teerts, carefully refolded the cloth, and put the other cake back into the pack. Then he picked up the rifle again. By the way he held it, he wouldn’t have been sorry to shoot the flight leader.

  Teerts stared down at the cake he held in his good hand. It didn’t look particularly appetizing—why was the male so unhappy to give it up? The flight leader took a while to realize the two cakes might have been the only food the soldier had. They’re barbarians, after all, he reminded himself. They still have things like hunger—and we’ve been hitting their supply lines as hard as we can.

  He knew about hunger himself now. He bit into the cake. It tasted bland and starchy—given a better choice, it wasn’t anything he would have eaten. Of itself, though, his tongue flicked out to clean the last couple of crumbs off his claw. He wished he had another cake just like it—or maybe another three.

  Maybe, he thought too late, he shouldn’t have shown just how hungry he was. He didn’t like the way the Nipponese officer stretched out his lips and showed his teeth.

  10

  Vyacheslav Molotov glanced around the room. Here was a sight that would have been impossible to imagine a few months before: diplomats from Allies and Axis, imperialists and progressives, fascists and Communists and capitalists, all gathered together to seek a common strategy against a common foe.

  Had Molotov been a different man, he might have smiled. As it was, his expression never wavered. He had been in a place more unimaginable than this when he floated feather-light in the Lizard leader’s bake-oven of a chamber hundreds of kilometers above the Earth. But this London room was remarkable enough.

  The room might have been anywhere in the world. It was in London because Great Britain lay relatively close to all the powers here save only Japan because the Lizards hadn’t invaded the islands, and because their attacks on shipping were haphazard enough to have given everyone a reasonable chance of arriving safely. And, indeed, everyone had arrived safely, though the conference was starting late because the Japanese foreign minister had been delayed zigzagging around the Lizard-held areas of North America.

  The only disadvantage Molotov could see to meeting in London was that it gave Winston Churchill the right to preside. Molotov had nothing personal against Churchill—though imperialist, he was a staunch anti-fascist, and without him Britain might well have folded up and come to terms with the Hitlerites in 1940. That would have left the Soviet Union in a bad way when the Nazis turned east the next year.

  No, it wasn’t personal animosity. But Churchill did have a habit of going on and on. He was by all accounts a master orator in English. Molotov, unfortunately, spoke no English; even masterful oratory, when understood only through the murmurs of an interpreter, soon palled.

  That didn’t bother Churchill. Round and plump and ruddy-faced, waving a long cigar, he looked the very picture of a capitalist oppressor. But his words were defiant: “We cannot yield another inch of ground to these creatures. It would mean slavery for the human race forevermore.”

  “If we didn’t all agree in this, we would not be here today,” Cordell Hull said. The U.S. secretary of state raised a wry eyebrow. “Count Ciano isn’t, for instance.”

  Molotov appreciated the dig at the Italians, who had given up even pretending to fight the Lizards a couple of weeks before. The Italians had named fascism, and now they showed its bankruptcy by yielding essentially at the first blow. The Germans at least had the courage of their convictions; Mussolini seemed to lack, both.

  Translators murmured to their principals. Joachim von Ribbentrop spoke fluent English, so the five leaders got along with three languages and thus only two interpreters per man. That made the talks cumbersome, but not unmanageably so.

  Shigenori Togo said, “I feel our primary goal here is not so much to affirm the fight against the Lizards, with which we all agree, but to ensure that we do not allow the hostilities previously existing among ourselves adversely to affect our struggle.”

  “That is a good point,” Molotov said. The Soviet Union and Japan had been neutral, which allowed each of them to devote its full energies to foes it reckoned more important (though Japan’s foes were the USSR’s allies in its battle against Germany, Japan’s Axis partner—diplomacy could be a strange business).

  “Yes, it is,” Cordell Hull said. “We have come a long way in that direction, Mr. Togo—a short while ago, you’d not have been welcome in London, and even less welcome traveling across the United States to get here.” Togo bowed in his seat, politely acknowledging the American’s reply.

  Churchill said, “Another point we must address is the trouble we have rendering aid to one another. As matters now stand, we must sneak about on our own world like so many mice fearing the cat. It is intolerable; it shall not stand.”

  “Bravely spoken as usual, Comrade Prime Minister,” Molotov said. “You set forth an important and inspiring principle, but unfortunately offer no means of putting it into effect.”

  “To find such a means is the reason we have agreed to meet in spite of past differences,” Ribbentrop said.

  Molotov did not dignify that with a reply. If Churchill’s gift was for inspiration, the Nazi foreign minister’s was for stating the obvious. Molotov wondered why the pompous, posturing fool couldn’t have been in Berlin, when it disappeared from the face of the earth. Hitler might have had to replace him with a capable diplomat.

  Air-raid sirens began to wail. Lizard jets shrieked by on low-level attack runs. Antiaircraft guns pounded—not as many as warded Moscow, Molotov thought, but a goodly number. None of the diplomats at the table moved. Everyone looked at everyone, else for signs of fear and tried not to give
any of his own. They had all come under air attack before.

  “Times like these make me wish I were back in the wine business,” Ribbentrop said, lightly. He had animal courage, if nothing else; he’d been decorated for bravery during the First World War.

  I want those God-damned planes shot down,” Churchill said, as if giving someone unseen an order. If only it were that easy, Molotov thought. If Stalin could have done it by giving an order, the Lizards would long since have ceased to trouble us—as would the Hitlerites. Some things unfortunately yielded to no man’s orders. Maybe that was why foolish people imagined gods into being: to have someone whose orders were sure to be obeyed.

  A stick of bombs crashed down not far from the Foreign Office building. The noise was cataclysmic. Windows rattled. One broke and fell in tinkling shards to the floor. The interpreters were less obliged to show sangfroid than the men they served. Several of them muttered; one of Ribbentrop’s aides crossed himself and began fingering a rosary.

  More bombs fell. Another window broke, or rather blew inward. A fragment of glass flew past Molotov’s head and shattered against the wall. The translator who’d been praying cried out and clapped a hand to his cheek. Blood leaked between his fingers. So much for your imaginary God, Molotov thought. As usual, though, his face revealed nothing of what went on in his mind.

  “If you like, gentlemen, we can adjourn to the shelter in the basement,” Churchill said.

  Interpreters looked hopefully at foreign ministers. Molotov checked his confreres. None of them said anything, in spite of the suggestion’s obvious good sense. Molotov took the bull by the horns. “Yes, let us do that, Comrade Prime Minister. In all candor, our lives are valuable to the nations we serve. Foolish displays of bravado gain us nothing, if we can keep safe, we should do so.”