Striking the Balance (54 page)

“Hell, yes, I want to hear it,” Groves answered. “If I understand what I’m supposed to be doing, figuring out how to do it gets easier.”

“Not everybody thinks that way,” Bradley said. “A lot of people want to concentrate on their tree and forget about the forest. But for whatever you think it’s worth, my view is that the only fit use for the bombs we have is to make the Lizards sit down at the table and talk seriously about ending this war. Any peace that lets us preserve our bare independence is worth making, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Our bare independence?” Groves tasted the words. “Not even all our territory? That’s a hard peace to ask for, sir.”

“Right now, I think it’s the best we can hope to get. Considering the Lizards’ original war aims, even getting that much won’t be easy,” Bradley said. “That’s why I’m so pleased with your efforts here. Without your bombs, we’d get licked.”

“Even with them, we’re getting licked,” Groves said. “But we aren’t getting licked fast, and we are making the Lizards pay like the dickens for everything they get.”

“That’s the idea,” Bradley agreed. “They came here with resources they couldn’t readily renew. How many of them have they expended? How many do they have left? How many more can they afford to lose?”

“Those are the questions, sir,” Groves said.
“The
questions.”

“Oh, no. There’s one other that’s even more important,” Bradley said. Groves raised an interrogative eyebrow. Bradley explained: “Whether
we
have anything left by the time
they
start scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Groves grunted. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Nuclear fire blossomed above a Tosevite city. Seen from a reconnaissance satellite, the view was beautiful. From up at the topmost edges of the atmosphere, you didn’t get the details of what a bomb did to a city. Riding in a specially protected vehicle, Atvar had been through the ruins of El Iskandariya. He’d seen firsthand what the Big Uglies’ bomb had done there. It wasn’t beautiful, not even slightly.

Kirel had not made that tour, though of course he had viewed videos from that strike and others, by both the Race and the Tosevites. He said, “And so we retaliate with this Copenhagen place. Where does it end, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Shiplord, I do not know where it ends or even if it ends,” Atvar answered. “The psychologists recently brought me a translated volume of Tosevite legends in the hope they would help me—would help the Race as a whole—better understand the foe. The one that sticks in my mind tells of a Tosevite male fighting an imaginary monster with many heads. Every time he cut one off, two more grew to take its place. That is the predicament in which we presently find ourselves.”

“I see what you are saying, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Hitler, the Deutsch not-emperor, has been screaming over every radio frequency he can command about the vengeance he will wreak on us for what he calls the wanton destruction of a Nordic city. Our semanticists are still analyzing the precise meaning of the term
Nordic.”

“I don’t care what it means,” Atvar snapped petulantly. “All I care about is carrying the conquest to a successful conclusion, and I am no longer certain we shall be able to accomplish that.”

Kirel stared at him with both eyes. He understood why. Even when things seemed grimmest, he had refused to waver from faith in the ultimate success of the Race’s mission. He had, he admitted to himself, repeatedly been more optimistic than the situation warranted.

“Do you aim to abandon the effort, then, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, his voice soft and cautious. Atvar understood that caution, too. If Kirel didn’t like the answer he got, he was liable to foment an uprising against Atvar, as Straha had done after the first Tosevite nuclear explosion. If Kirel led such an uprising, it was liable to succeed.

And so Atvar also answered cautiously: “Abandon it? By no means. But I begin to believe we may not be able to annex the entire land surface of this world without suffering unacceptable losses, both to our own forces and to that surface. We must think in terms of what the colonization fleet will find when it arrives here and conduct ourselves accordingly.”

“This may involve substantive discussions with the Tosevite empires and not-empires now resisting us,” Kirel said.

Atvar could not read the shiplord’s opinion of that. He was not sure of his own opinion about it, either. Even contemplating it was entering uncharted territory. The plans with which the Race had left Home anticipated the complete conquest of Tosev 3 in a matter of days, not four years—two of this planet’s slow turns around its star—of grueling warfare with the result still very much in the balance. Maybe now the Race would have to strike a new balance, even if it wasn’t one in the orders the Emperor had conferred upon Atvar before he went into cold sleep.

“Shiplord, in the end it may come to that,” he said. “I still hope it does not—our successes in Florida, among other places, give me reason to continue to hope—but in the end it may. And what have you to say to that?”

Kirel let out a soft, wondering hiss. “Only that Tosev 3 has changed us in ways we could never have predicted, and that I do not care for change of any sort, let alone change inflicted upon us under such stressful circumstances.”

“I do not care for change, either,” Atvar answered. “What sensible male would? Our civilization has endured for as long as it has precisely because we minimize the corrosive effect of wanton change. But in your words I hear the very essence of the difference between us and the Big Uglies. When we meet change, we feel it is inflicted on us. The Tosevites reach out and seize it with both hands, as if it were a sexual partner for which they have developed the monomaniacal passion they term
love.”
As well as he could, he reproduced the word from the Tosevite language called English: because it was widely spoken and even more widely broadcast, the Race had become more familiar with it than with most of the other tongues the Big Uglies used.

“Would Pssafalu the Conqueror have negotiated with the Rabotevs?” Kirel asked. “Would Hisstan the Conqueror have negotiated with the Hallessi? What would their Emperors have said if word reached them that our earlier conquests had not achieved the goals set for them?”

What he was really asking was what the Emperor would say when he learned the conquest of Tosev 3 might not be a complete conquest. Atvar said, “Here speed-of-light works with us. Whatever he says, we shall not know about it until near the time when the colonization fleet arrives, or perhaps even a few years after that.”

“Truth,” Kirel said. “Until then, we are autonomous.”

Autonomous,
in the language of the Race, carried overtones of
alone
or
isolated
or
cut off from civilization.
“Truth,” Atvar said sadly. “Well, Shiplord, we shall have to make the best of it, for ourselves and for the Race as a whole, of which we are, and remain, a part.”

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “With so much going on in such strange surroundings at so frenetic a pace, keeping that basic fact in mind is sometimes difficult.”

“Is frequently difficult, you mean,” Atvar said. “Even without the battles, there are so many irritations here. That psychological researcher the Big Uglies in China have kidnapped . . .  They state it is in reprisal for his studies of a newly hatched Tosevite. How can we do research on the Big Uglies if our males go in fear of having vengeance taken on them for every test they make?”

“It is a problem, Exalted Fleetlord, and I fear it will only grow worse,” Kirel said. “Since we received word of this kidnapping, two males have already abandoned ongoing research projects on the surface of Tosev 3. One has taken his subjects up to an orbiting starship, which is likely to skew his results. The other has also gone aboard a starship, but has terminated his project. He states he is seeking a new challenge.” Kirel waggled his eye turrets, a gesture of irony.

“I had not heard that,” Atvar said angrily. “He should be strongly encouraged to return to his work: if necessary, by kicking him out the air lock of that ship.”

Kirel’s mouth fell open in a laugh. “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“Exalted Fleetlord!” The image of Pshing, Atvar’s adjutant, suddenly filled one of the communicator screens in the fleetlord’s chamber. It was the screen reserved for emergency reports. Atvar and Kirel looked at each other. As they’d just said, the conquest of Tosev 3 was nothing but a series of emergencies.

Atvar activated his own communications gear. “Go ahead, Adjutant. What has happened now?” He was amazed at how calmly he brought out the question. When life was a series of emergencies, each individual crisis seemed less enormous than it would have otherwise.

Pshing said, “Exalted Fleetlord, I regret the necessity of reporting a Tosevite nuclear explosion by a riverside city bearing the native name Saratov.” After a moment in which he swiveled one eye turret, perhaps to check a map, he added, “This Strata is located within the not-empire of the SSSR. Damage is said to be considerable.”

Atvar and Kirel looked at each other again, this time in consternation. They and their analysts had been confident the SSSR had achieved its one nuclear detonation with radioactives stolen from the Race, and that its technology was too backwards to let it develop its own bombs, as had Deutschland and the United States. Once again, the analysts had not known everything there was to know.

Heavily, Atvar said, “I acknowledge receipt of the news, Adjutant. I shall begin the selection process for a Soviet site to be destroyed in retaliation. And, past that”—he looked toward Kirel for a third time, mindful of the discussion they’d been having—“well, past that, right now I don’t know what we shall do.”

XIV

The typewriter spat out machine-gun bursts of letters:
clack-clack-clack, clack-clack-clack, clackety-clack
The line-end bell dinged. Barbara Yeager flicked the return lever; the carriage moved with an oiled whir to let her type another line.

She stared in dissatisfaction at the one she’d just finished. “That ribbon is getting too light to read any more,” she said. “I wish they’d scavenge some fresh ones.”

“Not easy to come by anything these days,” Sam Yeager answered. “I hear tell one of our foraging parties got shot at the other day.”

“I heard something about that, but not much,” Barbara said. “Was it the Lizards?”

Sam shook his head. “Nothing to do with the Lizards. It was foragers out from Little Rock, after the same kinds of stuff our boys were. There’s less and less stuff left to find, and we aren’t making much these days that doesn’t go straight out the barrel of a gun. I think it’ll get worse before it gets better, too.”

“I know,” Barbara said. “The way we get excited over little things now, like that tobacco you bought—” She shook her head. “And I wonder how many people have starved because crops either didn’t get planted or didn’t get raised or couldn’t get from the farm to a town.”

“Lots,” Sam said. “Remember that little town in Minnesota we went through on the way to Denver? They were already starting to slaughter their livestock because they couldn’t bring in all the feed they had to have—and that was a year and a half ago. And Denver’s going to go hungry now. The Lizards have tromped on the farms that were feeding it, and wrecked the railroads, too. One more thing to put on their bill, if we ever get around to giving it to them.”

“We’re lucky to be where we are,” Barbara agreed. “It gets down to that, we’re lucky to be anywhere.”

“Yeah.” Sam tapped a front tooth with a fingernail. “I’ve been lucky I haven’t broken a plate, too.” He reached out and rapped on the wooden desk behind which Barbara sat. “Way things are now, a dentist would have a heck of a time fixing my dentures if anything did break.” He shrugged. “One more thing to worry about.”

“We’ve got plenty.” Barbara pointed to the sheet of paper in the typewriter. “I’d better get back to this report, honey, not that anybody’ll be able to read it when I’m through.” She hesitated, then went on, “Is Dr. Goddard all right, Sam? When he gave me these notes to type up, his voice was as faint and gray as the letters I’m getting from this ribbon.”

Sam wouldn’t have put it that way, but Sam hadn’t gone in for literature in college, either. Slowly, he answered, “I’ve noticed it for a while now myself, hon. I think it’s getting worse, too. I know he saw some of the docs here, but I don’t know what they told him. I couldn’t hardly ask, and he didn’t say anything.” He corrected himself: “I take that back. He did say one thing: “We’ve gone far enough now that no one man matters much any more.’ “

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Barbara said.

“Now that I think about it, I don’t, either,” Sam said. “Sort of sounds like a man writing his own what-do-you-call-it—obituary—doesn’t it?” Barbara nodded. Sam went on, “Thing is, he’s right. Pretty much everything we’ve done with rockets so far has come out of his head—either that or we’ve stolen it from the Lizards or borrowed it from the Nazis. But we can go on without him now if we have to, even if we won’t go as fast or as straight.”

Barbara nodded again. She patted the handwritten originals she was typing. “Do you know what he’s doing here? He’s trying to scale up—that’s the term he uses—the design for the rockets we have so they’ll be big enough and powerful enough to carry an atomic bomb instead of TNT or whatever goes into them now.”

“Yeah, he’s talked about that with me,” Sam said. “The Nazis have the same kind of project going, too, he thinks, and they’re liable to be ahead of us. I don’t think they have a Lizard who knows as much as Vesstil, but their people were making rockets a lot bigger than Dr. Goddard’s before the Lizards came. We’re doing what we can, that’s all. Can’t do more than that.”

“No.” Barbara typed a few more sentences before she came to the end of a page. She took it out and ran a fresh sheet into the typewriter. Instead of going back to the report, she looked up at Sam from under half-lowered eyelids. “Do you remember? This is what I was doing back in Chicago, the first time we met. You brought Ullhass and Ristin in to talk with Dr. Burkett. A lot of things have changed since then.”

“Just a few,” Sam allowed. She’d been married to Jens Larssen then, though already she’d feared he was dead: otherwise, she and Sam never would have got together, never would have had Jonathan, never would have done a whole lot of things. He didn’t know about literature or fancy talk; he couldn’t put into graceful words what he thought about all that. What he did say was, “It was so long ago that when you asked me for a cigarette, I had one to give you.”

She smiled. “That’s right. Not even two years, but it seems like the Middle Ages, doesn’t it?” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’m the one who feels middle-aged these days, but that’s just on account of Jonathan.”

“Me, I’m glad he’s old enough now that you feel easy about letting the mammies take care of him during the day,” Sam said. “It frees you up to do things like this, makes you feel useful again, too. I know that was on your mind.”

“Yes, it was,” Barbara said with a nod that wasn’t altogether comfortable. She lowered her voice. “I wish you wouldn’t call the colored women that.”

“What? Mammies?” Sam scratched his head. “It’s what they are.”

“I know that, but it sounds so—” Barbara groped for the word she wanted and, being Barbara, found it. “So antebellum, as if we were down on the plantation with the Negroes singing spirituals and doing all the work and the kind masters sitting around drinking mint juleps as if they hadn’t the slightest idea their whole social system was sick and wrong—and so much of what was wrong then is still wrong now. Why else would the Lizards have given guns to colored troops and expected them to fight against the United States?”

“They sure were wrong about that,” Sam said.

“Yes, some of the Negroes mutinied,” Barbara agreed, “but I’d bet not all of them did. And the Lizards wouldn’t have tried it in the first place if they hadn’t thought it would work. The way they treat colored people down here . . .  Do you remember some of the newsreels from before we got into the war, the ones that showed happy Ukrainian peasants greeting the Nazis with flowers because they were liberating them from the Communists?”

“Uh-huh,” Sam said. “They found out what that was worth pretty darn quick, too, didn’t they?”

“That’s not the point,” Barbara insisted. “The point is that the Negroes here could have greeted the Lizards the same way.”

“A good many of them did.” Sam held up a hand before she could rhetorically rend him. “I know what you’re getting at, hon: the point is that so many of ’em didn’t. Things down here would have been mighty tough if they had, no two ways about it.”

“Now you understand,” Barbara said, nodding. She always sounded pleased when she said things like that, pleased and a little surprised: he might not have a fancy education, but it was nice that he wasn’t dumb. He didn’t think she knew she was using that tone of voice, and he wasn’t about to call her on it. He was just glad he could come close to keeping up with her.

He said, “Other side of the coin is, whatever the reasons are, these colored women—I won’t call ’em mammies if you don’t want me to—they can’t do the job you’re doing right now. Since they
are
on our side, shouldn’t we give ’em jobs they
can
do, so the rest of us can get on with doing the things they can’t?”

“That isn’t just,” Barbara said. But she paused thoughtfully. Her fingernails clicked on the home keys of the typewriter, enough to make the type bars move a little but not enough to make them hit the paper. At last, she said, “It may not be just, but I suppose it’s practical.” Then she did start typing again.

Sam felt as if he’d just laced a game-winning double in the ninth. He didn’t often make Barbara back up a step in any argument. He set a fond hand on her shoulder. She smiled up at him for a moment. The clatter of the typewriter didn’t stop.

Liu Han cradled the submachine gun in her arms as if it were Liu Mei. She knew what she had to do with it if Ttomalss got out of line: point it in his direction and squeeze the trigger. Enough bullets would hit him to keep him from getting out of line again.

From what Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her, the gun was of German manufacture. “The fascists sold it to the Kuomintang, from whom we liberated it,” he’d said. “In the same way, we shall liberate the whole world not only from the fascists and reactionaries, but also from the alien aggressor imperialist scaly devils.”

It sounded easy when you put it like that. Taking revenge on Ttomalss had sounded easy, too, when she’d proposed it to the central committee. And, indeed, kidnapping him down in Canton had proved easy—as she’d predicted, he had returned to China to steal some other poor woman’s baby. Getting him up here to Peking without letting the rest of the scaly devils rescue him hadn’t been so easy, but the People’s Liberation Army had managed it.

And now here he was, confined in a hovel on a
hutung
not far from the roominghouse where Liu Han—and her daughter—lived. He was, in essence, hers to do with as she would. How she’d dreamed of that while she was in the hands of the little scaly devils. Now the dream was real.

She unlocked the door at the front of the hovel. Several of the people begging or selling in the alleyway were fellow travelers, though even she was not sure which ones. They would help keep Ttomalss from escaping or anyone from rescuing him.

She closed the front door after her. Inside, where no one could see it from the street, was another, stouter, door. She unlocked that one, too, and advanced into the dim room beyond it.

Ttomalss whirled. “Superior female!” he hissed in his own language, then returned to Chinese: “Have you decided what my fate is to be?”

“Maybe I should keep you here along time,” Liu Han said musingly, “and see how much people can learn from you little scaly devils. That would be a good project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?”

“That
would
be a good project for you. You would learn much,” Ttomalss agreed. For a moment, Liu Han thought he had missed her irony. Then he went on, “But I do not think you will do it. I think instead you will torment me.”

“To learn how much thirst you can stand, how much hunger you can stand, how much pain you can stand—that would be an
interesting
project, don’t you think, Ttomalss?” Liu Han purred the words, as if she were a cat eyeing a mouse it would presently devour—when it got a little hungrier than it was now.

She’d hoped Ttomalss would cringe and beg. Instead, he stared at her with what, from longer experience with the scaly devils than she’d ever wanted, she recognized as a mournful expression. “We of the Race never treated you so when you were in our claws,” he said.

“No?” Liu Han exclaimed. Now she stared at the little devil. “You didn’t take my child from me and leave my heart to break?”

“The hatchling was not harmed in any way—on the contrary,” Ttomalss replied. “And, to our regret, we did not fully understand the attachment between the generations among you Tosevites. This is one of the things we have learned—in part, from you yourself.”

He meant what he said, Liu Han realized. He didn’t think he had been wantonly cruel—which didn’t mean he hadn’t been cruel. “You scaly devils took me up in your airplane that never landed, and then you made me into a whore up there.” Liu Han wanted to shoot him for that alone. “Lie with this one, you said, or you do not eat. Then it was lie with that one, and that one, and that one. And all the time you were watching and taking your films. And you say you never did me any harm?”

“You must understand,” Ttomalss said. “With us, a mating is a mating. In the season, male and female find each other, and after time the female lays the eggs. To the Rabotevs—one race we rule—a mating is a mating. To the Hallessi—another race we rule—a mating is a mating. How do we know that, to Tosevites, a mating is not just a mating? We find out, yes. We find out because of what we do with people like you and the Tosevite males we bring up to our ship. Before that, we did not know. We still have trouble believing you are as you are.”