In the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Bobby Fiore hadn’t juggled fractions in his head since high school. The trouble he’d had with them then had helped convince him he’d be better off playing ball for a living. He needed some painful mental work before he finally nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s right, superior sir.”

  “Sstrange.” Another word Tessrek turned into a hiss. “You Big Uglies take so long to give birth to your hatchlings. Why is this?”

  “How the devil should I know?” Fiore answered; again he had the feeling of taking a test he hadn’t studied for. “It’s just the way we are. I’m not lying, superior sir. You can check that one with anybody.”

  “Check? This means confirm? Yes, I do that.” The Lizard psychologist spoke Lizard talk into what looked like a little microphone. Different squiggles went up on the screen. Fiore wondered if it was somehow writing down what Tessrek said. Hell of a gadget if it could do that, he thought. The Lizard went on, “I do not think you lie. What is the advantage to you on this question? But I wonder why you Tosevites are so, not like Race and other species of the Empire.”

  “You oughta talk to a scientist or a doctor or somebody.”

  Fiore scratched his head. “You say you Lizards lay eggs?”

  “Of course.” By his tone, Tessrek implied that was the only thing a right-thinking creature could possibly do.

  Bobby thought back to the chickens that had squawked and clucked in a little coop behind his folks’ house in Pittsburgh. Without those chickens and their eggs, he and his brothers and sisters would have gone hungry a lot more than they did, but that wasn’t why they came to mind now. He said, “An egg can’t get any bigger once you lay it. When the chick inside—or I guess the baby Lizard, too—is too big for the eggshell to hold it any more, it has to come out. But a baby inside a woman has more room to grow.”

  Tessrek brought both eyes to bear on him. He’d learned a Lizard did that only when you’d managed to get its full attention (he’d also learned its full attention wasn’t always something you wanted to have). The psychologist said, “This may be worth more study.” He made it sound like an accolade.

  He leaned close to the microphone, went back into his language. Again, the screen showed fresh Lizard writing. It really was a note-taker, Fiore realized. He wondered what else it could do—besides showing movies that should never have been made.

  Tessrek said, “You Big Uglies are of the kind of Tosevite creature where the female feeds the hatchling with a fluid that comes out of her body?” It wasn’t exactly a question, even though he made the interrogative noise at the end: he already knew the answer.

  Bobby Fiore had to take a mental step backward and work out what the Lizard was talking about. After a second, the light bulb went on. “With milk, you mean, superior sir? Yeah, we feed babies milk.” He’d been a bottle baby himself, not nursed, but he didn’t complicate the issue. Besides, what had the bottle held?

  “Milk. Yes.” Now Tessrek sounded as if Bobby had admitted humans picked their noses and fed babies on boogers, or else like a fastidious clubwoman who for some reason had to talk about syphilis. He paused, pulled himself together. “Only the females do this, am I correct? Not the males?”

  “No, not the males, superior sir.” Imagining a baby nursing at his flat, hairy tit made Fiore squeamish and also made him want to laugh. And it rammed home, just when he was starting to get used to the Lizards again, how alien they were. They didn’t have a clue about what being human meant. Even though Liu Han and he had to use some Lizard words to talk with each other, they used them in a human context they both understand just because they were people, and probably used them in ways the Lizards would have found nonsensical.

  That made him wonder how much Tessrek, in spite of his fluent English, truly grasped of the ideas he mouthed. Passing information back and forth was all very well; the Lizard psychologist’s grasp of the language was good enough for that. But once he had the information, how badly would he misinterpret it just because it was different from anything he was used to?

  Tessrek said, “If you males do not give—milk—to hatchlings, what point to staying by them and by females?”

  “Men help women take care of babies,” Fiore answered, “and they can feed babies, too, once the babies start eating real food. Besides, they usually make the money to keep families going.”

  “Understand what you Big Uglies do; not understand why,” Tessrek said. “Why males want to stay with females? Why you have families, not males with females at random, like the Race and other species we know?”

  In an abstract way, Bobby thought males with females at random sounded like fun. He’d enjoyed himself with the women with whom the Lizards had paired him before he’d ended up with Liu Han. But he enjoyed being with her, too, in a different and maybe deeper sense.

  “Answer me,” Tessrek said sharply.

  “I’m sorry, superior sir. I was trying to figure out what to say. I guess part of the answer is that men fall in love with women, and the other way round, too.”

  “Love.” Tessrek used the word with almost as much revulsion as he had when he said milk. “You Big Uglies talk loudly of this word. You do not ever make this a word with a meaning. You, Bobby Fiore, tell me what this love word means.”

  “Uh,” Fiore said. That was a tall order for a poet, a philosopher, or even Cole Porter, let alone a minor-league second baseman. As he would have at the plate overmatched against Bob Feller, he gave it his best shot: “Love is when you care about somebody and want to take care of them and want them to be happy all the time.”

  “You say what. I want why,” the Lizard psychologist said with a discontented hiss. “Is because you Big Uglies mate all the time, use mating as social bond, form families because of this mating bond?”

  Fiore was anything but an introspective man. Nor had he ever spent much time contemplating the nature of the family: families were what you grew up in, and later what you started for yourself. Not only that, all the talk about sex, even with a Lizard, embarrassed him.

  “I guess maybe you’re right,” he mumbled. When he thought about it, what Tessrek had to say did make some sense.

  “I am right,” Tessrek told him, and added the emphatic cough. “You help me show the disgusting habits of you Big Uglies are to blame for you being so strange, so—what is word?—so anomalous. Yes, anomalous. I prove this, yes I do.” He spoke in his own language to the guards, who started marching Fiore back to his cell.

  As he went, he reflected that while the Lizards were massively ignorant of humanity, they and people weren’t so different in some ways: just like a lot of people he’d known, Tessrek was using his words to prop up an idea the Lizard had already had. If he’d said just the opposite, Tessrek would have found some way to use that, too.

  20

  Jens Larssen’s neck muscles tensed under the unaccustomed weight of the tin hat on his head. He was developing a list to the right from the slung Springfield he’d been issued. Like most farm kids, he’d done some plinking with a .22, but the military rifle had a mass and heft to it unlike anything he’d ever known.

  Technically, he still wasn’t a soldier. General Patton hadn’t impressed him into the Army—“Your civilian job is more important than anything you can do for me,” he’d rumbled—but had insisted that he be armed: “We’ve got no time to coddle noncombatants.” Jens knew an inconsistency when he heard one, but hadn’t had any luck convincing the major general.

  He looked at his watch. The greenly glowing hands showed it was just before four A.M. The night was dark and cloudy and full of blowing snow, but it was anything but peaceful. More engines added their roar and the stink of their exhaust to the air every moment. The second hand ticked round the dial. A minute before four … half a minute …

  His watch was synchronized pretty well, but not perfectly. At—by his reckoning—3:59:34, what seemed like every cannon in the world cut loose. The low clouds glowed yellow for a few seconds from all the muzzle flashes packed together. The thre
e-inch howitzers and the 90mm antiaircraft cannon pressed into service as field guns roared again and again, as fast as their crews could keep the shells coming.

  As he’d been told, Jens yelled as loud as he could, to help equalize the pressure on his ears. The noise was lost in the overwhelming cacophony of the guns.

  Lizard counterbattery fire began coming in a couple of minutes later. By then the tanks and men of Patton’s force were already on the move. The American artillery barrage eased up as abruptly as it had begun. “Forward to the next firing position!” an officer near Larssen screamed. “The Lizards zero in on you fast if you stay, in one place too long.”

  Some of the howitzers were on their own motorized chassis. Halftracks towed most of the rest of the artillery pieces. A few were either horsedrawn or pulled by teams of soldiers. If the advance went as Patton planned (hoped, Jens amended to himself), those would soon fall behind. For the moment, every shell counted.

  “Come on, you lugs—get your butts in gear!” a sergeant yelled with the dulcet tones of sergeants all through history.

  “You think you’re scared, just wait’ll you see the goddamn Lizards when we hit ’em.” That was the gospel according to Patton. Whether it was the gospel truth remained to be proved. Along with, the men around him, Jens tramped off toward the west.

  Airplanes roared low overhead carefully husbanded against this day of need and now to be expended, win or die Larssen waved at the planes as they darted past; he didn’t think many of the pilots would be coming back. If attacking Lizard positions in the snowy dark wasn’t a suicide mission he didn’t know what was.

  Of course, he realized a few seconds later, that was what he was doing too even if he wasn’t in a fighter. Off to one side a soldier with a voice that still cracked exclaimed, “Ain’t this exciting!”

  “Now that you mention it, no,” Larssen said.

  Artillery Supervisor Svallah shouted into his field telephone: “What do you mean, you can’t send me any more ammunition right now? The Big Uglies are moving, I tell you! We haven’t faced large-scale combat like this since just after we landed on this miserable ball of muddy ice.”

  The voice that came out of the speaker was cold: “I am also receiving reports of heavy fighting on the northwestern flank of our thrust toward the major city by the lake. Supply officers are still evaluating priorities.”

  Had Svallah possessed hair like a Big Ugly, he would have pulled great clumps of it from his head. Supply still seemed to think they were back Home, where a delay of half a day never mattered and one of half a year wasn’t always worth getting excited about, either. The Tosevites, worse luck, didn’t operate that way.

  “Listen,” he yelled, “we’re low on cluster bombs, our landcruisers are short of both high-explosive and antiarmor rounds, we don’t have enough antilandcruiser missiles for the infantry … By the Emperor, though it’s not my province, I hear we’re even short on small-arms rounds!”

  “Yours is not the only unit in this predicament,” replied the maddeningly dispassionate voice on the other end of the line. “Every effort will be made to resupply to the best of our ability as quickly as possible. Shipments may not be full resupplies; shortages do exist, and expenditures have been too high for too long. I assure you, we shall do the best we can under the circumstances.”

  “You don’t understand!” Svallah wasn’t yelling any more—he was screaming. He had reason: Tosevite shells had started feeling for his position. “Do you hear those bursts? Do you hear them? May you be cursed with an Emperorless afterlife, those aren’t our guns! The stinking Big Uglies have ammunition. It’s not as good as ours, but if they’re shooting and we’re not, what difference does it make?”

  “I assure you, Artillery Supervisor, resupply will reach you as expeditiously as is practicable,” answered the male in Supply, who wasn’t being shot at (not yet, Svallah thought bitterly). “I also assure you that yours is not the only unit urgently requesting munitions. We are making every effort to balance demands—”

  The Tosevites’ shells were walking closer, fragments of brass and steel rattled off tree trunks and branches. Svallah said, “Look, if you don’t get me some shells pretty quick, my request won’t matter, because I’m about to be overrun here. Is that plain enough for you? By the Emperor, it’d probably make you happy, because then you’d have one thing fewer to worry about.”

  “Your attitude is not constructive, Artillery Supervisor,” the male safe in the rear said in hurt tones.

  “Ask me if I care,” Svallah retorted. “Just so you know, I’m going to order a retreat before I get chopped to pieces. Those are my only two choices, since you can’t get me ammunition. I—”

  A Tosevite round landed within a male’s length of him. Between them, blast and fragments left him hardly more than a red rag splashed across the snow. By a freak of war, the field telephone was undamaged. It squawked, “Artillery Supervisor? Are you there, Artillery Supervisor? Respond, please. Artillery Supervisor …?”

  For the first couple of days, it was easier than Larssen would have imagined possible. Patton really had managed to catch the Lizards napping, and to hit them where their defenses were thin. How the soldiers cheered when they crossed from Indiana into Illinois! Instead of running or desperately holding on like a stunned boxer in a clinch, they were advancing. It made new men of them—got their peckers up, was the way one sergeant had put it.

  All of a sudden, it wasn’t easy any more. In the open fields in front of a grim little town called Cissna Park stood a Lizard tank. It was defiantly out in the open, with a view that reached for miles. In front of it, burning or by now burnt out, lay the hulks of at least half a dozen Lees and Shermans. Some had been killed at close to three miles. They didn’t have a prayer of touching the Lizard tank at that range, let alone killing it.

  The tank crew had high-explosive shells as well as armor-piercers. Larssen had been on the receiving end of bombardments back in Chicago. He preferred giving them out. He couldn’t do anything about it, though, except throw himself flat when the big gun spoke again.

  “That son of a whore’s gonna hold up the whole brigade all by his lonesome,” somebody said with sick dread in his voice. The soldiers’ peckers might be up now, but how long would they stay that way if the onslaught failed?

  A fellow who looked much too young to be wearing a major’s gold oak leaves began ticking off men on his fingers. “You, you, you, you, and you, head off to the right flank and make that bastard notice you. I’m coming, too. We’ll see what we can do about him.”

  Jens was the second of those yous. He opened his mouth to protest: he was supposed to be a valuable physicist, not a dog-face. But he didn’t have the nerve to finish squawking, not when the rest of the party was heading out, not when everybody was looking at them—and at him. Legs numb with fear, he lurched after the others.

  The tank seemed almost naked out there. If it had any infantry support, the Lizards on the ground were holding their fire. Larssen watched the distant turret. It got less distant all the time, which meant it got more and more able to kill him. If it swings this way, I know I’m going to run, he thought. But he kept trotting forward.

  One of the soldiers lay flat on the ground, opened up with a Browning automatic rifle. He had about as much chance of hurting the tank with it as a mosquito did blowing holes in an elephant. “Come on, keep moving!” the kid who was a major bawled. Jens kept moving. The farther he got from the brave maniac with the BAR, the better he liked it.

  A couple of hundred yards farther on, another fellow, also armed with a BAR, took cover in some bushes that wouldn’t have been there if the field had been tended since last summer. He too started firing short bursts at the Lizard tank. Now Larssen was close enough to see a couple of sparks as bullets spanged off its turret. Again, he couldn’t see that they did any good.

  “The rest of you, spread out, find what cover you can, and start shooting,” the major said. “We are a diversion. We have to
make that gunner pay attention to us.”

  Diversion indeed, Jens thought. The Lizard gunner ought to have extraordinarily good sport chewing up humans who couldn’t do him any damage in return.

  But there was another tall patch of snow-covered dead weeds just ahead. He dropped down behind them. Even through several layers of clothes, the snow chilled his belly. He drew a bead on the tank, squeezed the Springfield’s trigger.

  Nothing happened. Scowling, he checked the rifle. He’d left the safety on. “You idiot!” he snarled to himself as he clicked it off. He aimed again, fired. The kick hammered his shoulder, a lot harder than he remembered from when he’d fooled around with a .22.

  The physicist part of him took over: You’re sending a heavier slug out at a higher velocity—of course it’ll kick harder. Newton’s Second Law, remember—good old F = ma? He adjusted the sight for long range; his first shot, with it set for four hundred yards, couldn’t have come close. He pulled the trigger again. This time he was better braced against the recoil. He still couldn’t tell whether he hit it or not.

  As he’d been ordered, he banged away. The rest of the detachment was making a lot of noise, too. If somebody got real lucky with a round, he might mess up a sight or a periscope. Past that, the major’s diversion wasn’t doing anything more than standing out in the open with a SHOOT ME sign would have accomplished.

  After a while, though, the Lizard commanding the tank must have got tired of just sitting there in a target suit. The turret skewed toward one of the BAR men. Having seen American tank turrets in action, Larssen was appalled at how fast this one traversed.

  Fire spurted from the turret, not the main armament—why swat flies with a sledgehammer?—but the coaxial machine gun by it. Snow and dirt spurted up all around the soldier with the automatic rifle. It wasn’t a long burst—the gunner was flung for effect. After a few seconds’ silence, the BAR man shifted his weapon on its bipod, sent back a few defiant rounds. Here I am! he seemed to be saying. Nyaah, nyaah!