Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  “Oh, God, so do I.” Her hands shaped themselves into claws; her red nail polish made them look like bloody claws. Her face twisted. “God damn the Lizards for coming down here and wrecking everything people have tried to do for as long as there’ve been people. Even the bad things—they’re our bad things, nobody else’s.”

  Ullhass and Ristin had picked up almost as much English as Yeager had learned of their language. They flinched away from Barbara’s fury. “It’s all right,” Yeager told them. “Nothing’s going to happen to you two.” He understood how Barbara felt; he knew much of that same rage himself. But constantly being around the Lizard POWs had made him start thinking of them as people, too—sometimes almost as friends. He hated the Lizards collectively but not individually. It got confusing.

  Barbara seemed to share some of that confusion. she’d gotten to the point where she could tell one of the captive Lizards apart from another. “Don’t worry,” she said to Yeager’s two charges. “I know it’s not your fault in particular.”

  “Yes, you know this,” Ullhass said in his hissing voice. “But what can we do if you not know this? No thing. We are—how you say it?—in your grisp?”

  “Grip, maybe,” Yeager. answered. “Or do you mean grasp?”

  “I do not know what I mean,” Ullhass declared. “It is your speech. You teach, we learn.”

  “They’re like that,” Yeager said to Barbara, trying to find less emotionally charged things to talk about. “Now that they’re our prisoners, it’s like we’ve become their superior officers and anything we say goes.”

  “Dr. Burkett has talked about the same thing,” she said, nodding. She turned back to the Lizards. “Your people are trying to take our whole world into their grasp. Do you wonder that we don’t like you?”

  “But we are the Race,” Ristin said. “It is our right.”

  Yeager had got pretty good at reading tone in the Lizards’ voices. Ristin sounded surprised Barbara would question that “right.” Yeager clicked his tongue between his teeth. Both Lizard POWs swung their eyes toward him; it was something he did when he wanted to get their attention. He said, “You’ll find not everybody on this planet agrees with you about that”

  Teerts wished his ejection seat had malfunctioned. Better to have crashed with his aircraft than to fall into the hands of the Nipponese. Those hands lacked the Race’s claws, but were no less cruel for that.

  He’d found out about the Nipponese in a hurry. Even before they’d got him to Harbin, his illusion that they treated prisoners decently had been shattered. From what he’d seen of the way they treated their own kind, that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him.

  The rest of the Tosevite empires were barbarous, yes, but their leaders had the sense to recognize that war was a risky business in which things could go wrong, and that both sides were liable to lose prisoners when things did go wrong. Nipponese soldiers, however, were supposed to commit suicide before they let themselves be captured. That was bad enough. Worse, they expected their foes to play by the same set of rules, and scorned captives as cowards who deserved whatever happened to them.

  Teerts looked down at himself. From his neck all the way down to his groin, every rib was clearly visible. The food they gave him was vile, and they didn’t give him very much of it. He had the feeling that if they hadn’t been interrogating him, they might not have bothered to feed him at all.

  The door to the little room where they kept him swung noisily open on rusty hinges. A couple of armed guards came in. Teerts jumped to his feet and bowed to them. They’d beaten him once for forgetting. After that, he didn’t forget.

  The officer who had brought him to Harbin followed the guards into the smelly little cell. Teerts bowed again, deeper this time; the Nipponese made a point of being insanely punctilious about such things. Teerts said, “Good day, Major Okamoto. I hope you are well?”

  “I am well.” Okamoto did not ask how Teerts was; a prisoner’s health was beneath his notice. He shifted from Nipponese to the tongue of the Race. Despite a heavy accent, he was growing fluent: “You shall come with me at once.”

  “It shall be done,” Teerts said.

  Okamoto turned his back and walked out of the chamber. Short for a Tosevite, he still towered over Teerts. So did the Nipponese guards; the knives mounted on the ends of their rifles looked very long and cold and sharp. They gestured with the guns for Teerts to precede them. He was already in motion. By now, captivity had become a routine like any other.

  Cold smote him when he left the building where he was imprisoned. He was always chilly, even inside; what the Tosevites called heat was arctic to the Race. Outside, the weather really was arctic, with frozen water falling from the sky in feathery flakes. It clung to the ground, to trees, to buildings, coating everything with a layer of white that helped mask its inherent ugliness.

  Teerts began to shiver violently. Okamoto paused, snapped an order to the guards. One of them set down his rifle for a moment, pulled a blanket out of his pack, and draped it over Teerts. The captured pilot pulled it as tight around himself as he could. Slowly, the shivers subsided.

  Okamoto said, “You lucky you important prisoner. Otherwise, we let you freeze.”

  Teerts would willingly have forgone such luck. A truer measure of his importance was the vehicle that waited outside his prison to take him to his next interrogation session. It was noisy and smelly and had a ride like a killercraft out of control and about to crash, but at least it boasted an engine rather than a Big Ugly pedaling hard enough to grow warm even in this frigid weather. Better yet, it also had an enclosed cabin.

  One of the guards drove. The other sat beside him in the front seat. Major Okamoto sat behind the driver, Teerts behind the other guard. Okamoto did not have a rifle with a long knife on the end, but he did carry both a sword and a pistol. And even if Teerts could somehow have overcome him, what was the point? How could he flee out of this teeming den of Big Uglies without getting caught and meeting a fate even worse than the one he was now suffering?

  Den was the right word for Harbin, he thought as the military vehicle made its slow way through the narrow, twisting streets of Harbin. It was a city in size, but not, to his mind, in design. Indeed, it didn’t seem to have a design. Streets ran every which way. Big, important buildings sprawled next to appalling hovels. Here and there, piles of rubble testified to the effectiveness of the Race’s bombardment. Half-naked Big Uglies labored at the piles, clearing them away a brick at a time.

  Teerts thought longingly of Rosspan, the city back on Home where he’d grown up. Sunshine, warmth, cleanliness, streets wide enough for traffic, sidewalks wide enough for pedestrians—he’d taken all those things for granted till he came to Tosev 3. Now, by dreadful counterexample, he knew how lucky he’d been to enjoy them.

  The truck rumbling along in front of Teerts’ vehicle ran over one of the scavenger beasts that roamed the streets of Harbin. The animal’s yelp of agony pierced the deep engine rattle that was the main traffic noise in Harbin. The truck never slowed as the animal passed under its wheels. It had somewhere important to go; what did one animal matter? Teerts got the idea it wouldn’t have paused after running over a Big Ugly, either.

  It could have, easily enough. If Harbin owned any traffic rules, Teerts hadn’t discovered them. Vehicles with engines pushed their way as best they could through swarms of animal-drawn wagons and carts and even thicker swarms of Tosevites—Tosevites on foot, Tosevites carrying burdens on poles balanced on their shoulders, Tosevites riding two-wheeled contraptions that looked as if they ought to fall over but never did, Tosevites pedaling other Tosevites about in bigger contraptions or pulling them in carts as if they were beasts of burden themselves. Sometimes, at a particularly insane intersection, a Nipponese with white gloves and a swagger stick would try to bring a little order into the chaos. The next Big Ugly Teerts saw obeying any of them would be the first

  He got the idea Harbin was a peculiar kind of place even by Tos
evite standards, which was saying a good deal. Nipponese troops were the most aggressively visible piece of the blend; in a town near a fighting front, that was not surprising. What was surprising was the way they knocked around Big Uglies not in uniform, natives who, to Teerts’ inexperienced eyes, looked no different from themselves save in clothing.

  The farther east Teerts’ vehicle went, the more he saw of another variety of Big Ugly: pink-skinned, with light-colored—brown or even yellow—tufts of fluff or fur or whatever it was on top of their heads. They seemed less voluble than the darker natives who made up most of the local population, and went about their business with a stolid determination—that impressed Teerts.

  He turned to Major Okamoto. “These pale Tosevites”—he’d learned, by painful experience, never to say Big Ugly to a Big Ugly’s face—“may I ask where they come from?”

  “No,” Okamoto answered at once. “Prisoners may not spy. No questions from you, do you hear me? Obey!”

  “It shall be done,” Teerts said, anxious not to anger his captor. The small part of him that was not hungry and afraid insisted the Big Ugly was being foolish: he would never escape to tell what he knew. But Okamoto tolerated no argument, so Teerts gave him none.

  The vehicle pulled up in front of a building from which flew Nipponese flags, red ball on white ground. Several antiaircraft guns poked their noses into the sky from sandbagged installations around it. When Teerts was flying killercraft, he’d laughed at such puny opposition. He’d stopped laughing when the Big Uglies shot him down. He hadn’t laughed since.

  The guards got out of the vehicle. One unlocked Teerts’ door and pulled it open, then jumped back so the other could level-his rifle at the pilot. “Out!” they yelled together in Nipponese. Out Teerts came, marveling as usual that the Big Uglies could find his unarmed and miserable self so dangerous. He. only wished they were right.

  Since they were unfortunately mistaken, he let them lead him into the building. The stairs did not fit his size or his gait. He climbed them anyhow; the interrogation chamber was on the third floor. He walked. in with trepidation. Some very unpleasant things had happened to him in there.

  Today, though, the three Big Uglies behind the desk all wore pilot’s wings. That relieved Teerts, a little. If these questioners were pilots, they’d presumably ask him about his killercraft. At least he would know the answers to their questions. Other interrogators had grilled him about the Race’s landcruisers, ground tactics, automatic weapons, even its diplomatic dealings with other Tosevite empires. He’d pleaded ignorance, and they’d punished him for it even though he told the truth.

  As he’d learned, he bowed low to the interrogation team and then to Major Okamoto, who interpreted for them. They didn’t bow back; he gathered a prisoner forfeited the right to any gesture of respect.

  The Big Ugly in the middle turned loose a torrent of barking Nipponese. Okamoto translated: “Colonel Doi is interested in the tactics you use with your killercraft against our planes.”

  Teerts bowed to the Tosevite who had asked the question. “Tactics are simple: you approach the enemy as closely as you can, preferably from behind and above so you are not detected, then you destroy him with missiles or cannon shells.”

  Doi said, “True, this is the basis of any successful fighter run. But how do you achieve it? Where precisely do you deploy your wing man? What is his role in the attack?”

  “We commonly fly in groups of three,” Teerts answered: “a leader and two trailers. But once in combat, we fly independent missions.”

  “What? That is nonsense,” Doi exclaimed.

  Teerts turned and bowed nervously to Okamoto, hoping to appease him. “Please tell the colonel that, while it would be nonsense for his aircraft, ours are superior enough to those you Tosevites fly to make my words the truth.”

  He didn’t like the grunt that came from the colonel. Of itself, one of his eye turrets swiveled to the collection of nasty tools hung on the wall behind him. When the Race needed to interrogate one of its own, or a Rabotev, or a Hallessi, they pumped the suspected offender full of drugs and then pumped him dry. No doubt physicians were hard at work developing drugs that would let them do the same for the Big Uglies.

  The Nipponese were more primitive and more brutal. Techniques to gain information by inflicting pain were lost in the mists of the Race’s ancient history. The Nipponese, however, had proved intimately familiar with such techniques. Teerts suspected they could have hurt him much worse had he been one of their own kind. Since he was strange and valuable, they’d gone easy for fear of killing him before they’d wrung out everything they wanted to know. What they had done was quite ingenious enough.

  He felt like cheering when the Big Ugly named Doi changed the subject: “How do these missiles of yours continue to follow aircraft even through the most violent evasive actions?”

  “Two ways,” Teerts answered. “Some of them home on the heat from the target aircraft’s engine, while others use radar.”

  The Nipponese translation of that took a good deal longer to say than Teerts’ words had. Colonel Doi’s answer was also lengthy, and Major Okamoto fumbled a good deal in putting it into the language of the Race. What he did say sounded like a paraphrase: “The colonel instructs you to give us more information on this radar.”

  “Do you mean he doesn’t know what it is?” Teerts asked.

  “Do not be insolent, or you shall be punished,” Okamoto snapped. “He instructs you to give us more information on radar. Do so.”

  “The Deutsche, the Americans, and the British use it,” Teerts said, as innocently as he could. When that got translated, all three of his interrogators let out excited exclamations. He just stood quietly, waiting for the hubbub to die down. He thought—he hoped—he’d managed to. imply the Nipponese were barbarous even by Tosevite standards.

  Eventually, Doi said, “Go on, prisoner. Speak of this device as you use it.”

  “It shall be done.” Teerts bowed, granting the Big Ugly reluctant respect for not conceding Nipponese ignorance. “We shoot out a beam of rays like light but of longer wavelength, then detect those that reflect back from the objects they strike. From these we learn distance, speed, altitude, and bearing of targets.”

  The Nipponese chattered among themselves again before the one on- the left directly addressed Teerts. Okamoto translated: “Lieutenant Colonel Kobayashi says you are to help our technicians build one of these radar machines.”

  “I can’t do that!” Teerts blurted, staring appalled at Kobayashi. Did the Big Ugly have any idea what he was asking for? Teerts couldn’t have built, or even serviced, a radar set with the Race’s tools, parts, and instruments. To expect him to do it with the garbage that passed for electronics among the Tosevites was insane.

  Kobayashi spoke a few ominous-sounding words. They sounded even more ominous when Okamoto turned them into the language of the Race: “You refuse?”

  Again, Teerts’ eyes involuntarily swung back to the instruments of pain on the wall behind him. “No, I don’t refuse, I am not able,” he said, so quickly that Okamoto had to force him to repeat himself. “I have not the knowledge either of radar itself or of your forms of apparatus. I am a pilot, not a radar technician.”

  “Hontō?” Kobayashi asked Okamoto. That was one Nipponese word Teerts had learned; it meant Is it true? He waited fearfully for the interpreter’s reply. If Okamoto thought he was lying, he would likely renew his acquaintance with some of those instruments.

  “Hontō, hai,” Okamoto said: “Yes, it is true.” Teerts did his best not to show his relief, as he had tried not to reveal fear before.

  Kobayashi said, “What good is this Lizard if he can only babble of marvels without being able to share them?” Teerts took the return ride from relief to fear. The Nipponese kept him alive mainly because they were interested in what he could teach them. If they decided they weren’t learning, they wouldn’t hesitate to dispose of him.

  Colonel Doi spoke at some l
ength. Teerts had no idea what he said; instead of interpreting, Okamoto joined the discussion that came when the senior officer stopped talking. It grew loud. Several times, stubby Tosevite fingers stabbed out at Teerts. He did his best not to flinch. Any one of those gestures could have meant his death.

  All at once, the antiaircraft cannon outside the tower where he was being interrogated began to roar. The scream of killercraft overhead was incredibly loud and incredibly terrifying. The jolting thud of bombs going off made the floor shiver as if in an earthquake. If the Race had targeted this hall for destruction, it could kill Teerts along with the Nipponese. How dreadful, to die from the weapons of one’s friends!

  He had to admit the Big Ugly officers showed courage. They sat unmoving while the building shook around them. Colonel Doi looked at Teerts and said something in his own language. Major Okamoto translated: “The colonel says that if he joins his ancestors in the next little while, he will have the happy—no, the pleasure—that you go with him.”

  Maybe Doi’s words were intended to make Teerts afraid. Instead, they gave him one of the very few moments of pleasure he’d had since his aircraft swallowed those indigestible Nipponese bullets. He bowed first to Doi, then to Okamoto. “Tell the colonel I feel exactly the same way, with roles reversed.” Too late to regret the defiant words; they were already spoken.

  Okamoto turned them into Nipponese. Instead of getting angry, Colonel Doi leaned forward in his chair, a sign of interest. Ignoring the dreadful racket all around, he said, “Is that so? What do you believe happens to you when you die?”

  Had Teerts’ face been flexible like a Tosevite’s, he would have grinned enormously. At last, a question he could answer without fear of getting himself into deeper trouble! He said, “When we are through here, our spirits join those of the Emperors who guided the Race in the past so that we may go on serving them.” He didn’t just believe that, he was as sure of it as he was that this part of Tosev 3 would turn away from its star tonight. Billions of individuals of three species on three worlds shared that certainty.