A couple of innocents beamed; perhaps their sarcasm detectors were out of commission for the duration. A couple of people with short fuses—Jens Larssen was one—glared at him. Several people looked thoughtful: if he set them a problem, they’d start working on it. He approved of that attitude; it was what he would have done himself.
“Gentlemen, I think that’s enough for today,” he said.
Major Okamoto seemed out-of place in a laboratory, Teerts thought. What the Big Uglies called a lab wasn’t impressive to a male of the Race: the equipment was primitive and chaotically arranged, and there wasn’t a computer anywhere. One of the Nipponese who wore a white coat manipulated a curious device whose middle moved in and out as if it were a musical instrument.
“Superior sir, what is that thing?” Teerts asked Okamoto, pointing.
“What thing?” Okamoto looked as if he wanted to be interrogating, not interpreting and answering questions. “Oh, that. That’s a slide rule. It’s faster than calculating by hand.”
“Slide rule,” Teerts repeated, to fix the term in his memory. “How does it work?”
Okamoto started to answer, then turned and spoke in rapidfire Nipponese to the Big Ugly who was wielding the curious artifact. The scientist spoke directly to Teerts: “It adds and subtracts logarithms—you understand this word?”
“No, superior sir,” Teerts admitted. Explanations followed, with considerable backing and filling. Eventually Teerts got the idea. It was, he supposed, clever in an archaic way. “How accurate is this slide rule?” he asked.
“Three significant figures,” the Nipponese answered.
Teerts was appalled. The Big Uglies hoped to do serious scientific research and engineering with accuracy to only one part in a thousand? That gave him a whole new reason to hope their effort to harness nuclear energy failed. He didn’t want to be anywhere close if it succeeded: it was liable to succeed altogether too well, and blow a big piece of Tokyo into radioactive slag.
The Nipponese added, “For finer calculations, we go back to pen and paper, but pen and paper are slow. Do you understand?”
“Yes, superior sir.” Teerts revised his opinion of the Big Uglies’ abilities—slightly. Because they had no electronic aids, they did what they could to calculate more quickly. If that meant they lost some accuracy, they were willing to make the trade.
The Race didn’t work that way. If they came to a place where they needed two different qualities and had to lose some of one to get some of the other, they generally waited instead, until in the slow passage of time their arts improved to the point where the trade was no longer necessary. Because of that slow, careful evolution, the Race’s technology was extremely reliable.
What the Big Uglies called technology was anything but. Not only didn’t they seem to believe in fail-safes, he sometimes wondered if they believed in safety at all. Much of Tokyo, which was not a small city even by the standards of the Race, looked to be built from wood and paper. He marveled that it hadn’t burnt down a hundred times. Traffic was even more horrifying than it had been in Harbin, and if a vehicle ran into another one, or over a male who was also using the street, too bad. Along with inaccuracy, the Big Uglies accepted a lot of carnage as the price they had to pay for getting things done.
That thought put Teerts in mind of something he thought he’d heard a couple of the Nipponese scientists discussing. He turned to Major Okamoto. “Excuse me, superior sir, may I ask another question?”
“Ask,” Okamoto said with the air of an important male granting a most unimportant underling a boon beyond his station. Despite so many differences between them, in some ways the Race and Big Uglies weren’t that far apart.
“Thank you for your generosity, superior sir.” Teerts played the inferior role to the hilt, as if he were addressing the fleetlord rather than a rather tubby Tosevite whom he devoutly wished dead. “Did this humble one correctly hear that some other Tosevites also experimenting with explosive metal suffered a mishap?”
Again Okamoto and the scientist held a quick colloquy. The latter said, “Why not tell him? If he is ever in a position to escape, the war will be so badly lost that that will be the least of our worries.”
“Very well.” Okamoto gave his attention back to Teerts. “Yes, this did happen. The Germans had an atomic pile—what is the phrase?—reach critical mass and get out of control.”
Teerts let out a horrified hiss. The Big Uglies didn’t just accept risk, they pursued it with insane zeal. “How did this happen?” he asked.
“I am not certain the details are known, especially since the accident killed some of their scientists,” Okamoto said. “But those who still live are pressing ahead. We shall not make the mistakes they did. The Americans have succeeded in running a pile without immediately joining their ancestors, and they are sharing some of their methods with us.”
“Oh.” Teerts wished he had some ginger to chase away the lump of ice that formed in his belly. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the patchwork of tiny empires that dotted the planet’s surface had been a matter for jokes. It wasn’t funny any more. Back on Home, only one line of experiment at a time would have been pursued. Here, all the competing little empires worked separately. Disunion usually was weakness, but could also prove strength, as now.
Yoshio Nishina came into the room. His alarmingly mobile lips—or so they seemed to Teerts—pulled back so that he showed what was for a Big Ugly a lot of teeth. Teerts had learned that meant he was happy. He spoke with the other scientist and with Major Okamoto. Teerts did his best to follow, but found himself left behind.
Okamoto eventually noticed he’d got lost. “We have had a new success,” the interpreter said. “We have bombarded uranium with neutrons and produced the element plutonium. Production is still very slow, but plutonium will be easier to separate from uranium-238 than uranium-235 is.”
“Hai,” Nishina echoed emphatically. “We prepared uranium hexafluoride gas to use to separate the two isotopes of uranium from each other, but it is so corrosive that we are having an impossible time working with it. But separating plutonium from uranium is a straightforward chemical process.”
Major Okamoto had to translate some of that, too. He and Teerts used a mixture of terms from Nipponese and the language of the Race to talk about matters nuclear. Teerts took for granted a whole range of facts the Big Uglies were just uncovering, but though he knew that things could be done, he often had no idea as to how. There they were ahead of him.
Nishina added, “Once we accumulate enough plutonium, we shall surely be able to assemble a bomb in short order. Then we will meet your people on even terms.”
Teerts bowed, which he found a useful way of responding without saying anything. The Nipponese didn’t seem to have any idea how destructive nuclear weapons really were. Maybe it was because they’d never had any dropped on them. As he had a dozen times before, Teerts tried to get across to them that nuclear combat wasn’t anything to anticipate with relish.
They wouldn’t listen, any more than they had those other dozen times. They thought he was just trying to slow down their research (which he was, and which, he knew, compromised his position). Okamoto said, “My country was backward until less than a hundred years ago. We saw then that we had to learn the ways of the Tosevite empires that knew more than we did, or else become their slaves.”
Less than two hundred of our years, Teerts thought. Two hundred of his years before, the Race had been just about where it was now, leisurely contemplating the conquest of Tosev 3. Best wait till all was perfectly ready. What difference could a few years make, one way or the other?
They’d found out.
Okamoto went on, “Less than fifty years ago, our soldiers and sailors beat the Russians, one of the empires that had been far ahead of us. Less than two years ago, our airplanes and ships smashed those of the United States, which had been probably the strongest empire on Tosev 3. By then we were better than they. Do you see where I am leading with this?�
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“No, superior sir,” Teerts said, though he feared he did.
Major Okamoto drove the point home with what Teerts had come to think of as customary Tosevite brutality: “We do not let anyone keep a lead on us in technology. We will catch up with you, too, and teach you to learn better than to attack us without warning.”
Nishina and the other scientist nodded emphatically at that. In the abstract, Teerts didn’t suppose he could blame them. Had other starfarers attacked Home, he would have done everything he could to defend it. But war with nuclear weapons was anything but abstract—and if the Nipponese did build and use one, the Race would surely respond in kind, most likely on the biggest city Nippon had. Right on top of my head, in other words.
“This is not your concern,” Okamoto said when he worried about it out loud. “We will punish them for the wounds they have inflicted on us. Past that, all I need say is that dying for the Emperor is an honor.”
He meant the Nipponese emperor, whose line was said to run back more than two thousand years and to be astonishingly ancient on account of that. Teerts was tempted to bitter laughter. Dying for the Emperor was an honor, too, but he didn’t want to do it any time soon, especially not at the hands of the Race.
Nishina turned toward him. “Let’s go back to what we were discussing last week: the best arrangement for the uranium in a pile. I have the Americans’ report. I want to know how the Race does the same thing. You are likely to have more efficient procedures.”
I should hope so, Teerts thought. “How do the Americans do it, superior sir?” he asked as innocently as he could, hoping to get some idea of the Big Uglies’ technical prowess.
But the Nipponese, though technically backward, were old in games of deceit. “You tell us how you do it,” Okamoto said. “We do the comparing. The rest is none of your business, and you would be sorry if you made it so.”
Teerts bowed once more. That was how the Nipponese apologized. “Yes, superior sir,” he said, and told what he knew. Anything was preferable to giving Okamoto the excuse to start acting like an interrogator again.
XV
Ristin let his mouth hang open, showing off his pointy little teeth and Lizardy tongue: he was laughing at Sam Yeager. “You have what?” he said in pretty fluent if accented English. “Seven days in a week? Twelve inches in a foot? Three feet in a mile?”
“A yard,” Sam corrected.
“I thought something with grass growing in it was a yard,” Ristin said. “But never mind. How do you remember all these things? How do you keep from going mad trying to remember?”
“All what you’re used to,” Yeager said, a little uncomfortably: he remembered trying to turn pecks into bushels into tons in school. That was one of the reasons he’d signed a minorleague contract first chance he got—except for banking and his batting average, he’d never worried about math since. He went on, “Most places except the United States use the metric system, where everything is ten of this and ten of that.” If he hadn’t read science fiction, he wouldn’t have known about the metric system, either.
“Even time?” Ristin asked. “No sixty seconds make a minute or an hour or whatever it is, and twenty-four minutes or hours make a day?” He sputtered like a derisive steam engine, then tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.
“Well, no,” Sam admitted. “All that stuff stays the same all over the world. It’s—tradition, that’s what it is.” He smiled happily—the Lizards lived and died by tradition.
But Ristin wasn’t buying it, not this time. He said, “In our ancient days, before we were—what is the word? civilized?—yes, civilized, we had traditions like that, traditions that did harm, not good. We made them work for us or we got rid of them. This was a hundred thousand years ago. We do not miss these bad traditions.”
“A hundred thousand years ago,” Yeager echoed. He’d gotten the idea that Lizard years weren’t as long as the ones people used, but even so … “A hundred thousand years ago—fifty thousand years ago, too, come to that—people were just cavemen. Savages, I mean. Nobody knew how to read and write, nobody knew how to grow their own food. Hell, nobody knew anything to speak of.”
Ristin’s eye turrets moved just a little. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed, but Sam had spent more time around Lizards than just about anybody. He knew the alien was thinking something he didn’t want to say. He could even make a pretty fair guess about what it was: “As far as you’re concerned, we still don’t know anything to speak of.”
Ristin jerked as if Sam had stuck him with a pin. “How did you know that?”
“A little bird told me,” Yeager said, grinning.
“Tell it to the Marines,” Ristin retorted. He didn’t quite understand what a Marine was, but he had the phrase down pat and used it at the right times. Sam wanted to bust out laughing every time he heard it.
“Shall we go outside?” he asked. “It’s a nice day.”
“No, it’s not. It’s cold. It’s always cold on this miserable iceball of a world.” Ristin relented. “It’s not as cold as it was, though. You are right about that.” He gave an exaggerated shiver to show how cold it had been. “If you say we must go out, it shall be done.”
“I didn’t say we had to,” Yeager answered. “I just asked if you wanted to.”
“Not very much,” Ristin said. “Before I was a soldier, I was a male of the city. The—what do you call them?—wide open spaces are not for me. I saw enough of them on the long, long way from Chicago to this place to last me forever.”
Sam was amused to hear his own turns of phrase coming out of the mouth of a creature born under the light of another star. It made him feel as if, in some small way, he’d affected the course of history. He said, “Have it your own way, then, even though I don’t call some grass on the University of Denver the wide open spaces. Maybe it’s just as well; Ullhass ought to be back in a few minutes, and then I can take both you guys back to your rooms.”
“They do not need you to be there any more to translate?” Ristin asked.
“That’s what they say.” Yeager shrugged. “Professor Fermi hasn’t called me this session, so I guess maybe he doesn’t. Both of you speak English pretty well now.”
“If you are not needed for this, will they take you away from us?” Ristin showed his teeth. “You want me and Ullhass to forget how we speak English? Then they still need you. We do not want you to go. You have been good to us since you catch us all this time ago. We think then that you people hurt us, kill us. You showed us different. We want you to stay.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay,” Yeager said. A year before, he’d have found absurd the notion that anything a turret-eyed creature with a hissing accent said could touch him. Touched he was, though, and sometimes he had to remind himself how alien Ristin really was. He went on, “I’ve been a bench warmer before. It’s not the end of the world.”
“It may be.” From sympathetic, Ristin turned serious. “If you humans do build an atomic bomb, it may be. You will use it, and we will use it, and little will be left when all is done.”
“We weren’t the first ones to use them,” Yeager said. “What about Washington and Berlin?”
“Warning shots,” Ristin said. “We could choose to use them in a way that did little harm”—he ignored the choked noise that escaped from Sam’s throat—“because we had them and you did not. If they turn into just another weapon of war, the planet will be badly hurt.”
“But if we don’t use them, the Race is probably going to conquer us,” Yeager said.
Now Ristin made a noise that reminded Sam of a water heater in desperate need of replacement. “This is—how do you say two things that cannot be true at the same time but are anyhow?”
“A paradox?” Sam suggested after some thought; it wasn’t a word he hauled out every day.
“If that is what you say. Paradox,” Ristin repeated. “You may lose the war without these bombs, but you may lose it, too, because o
f them. Is this a paradox?”
“I guess so.” Yeager gave the Lizard a hard look. “But if you think things are like that, how come you and Ullhass have been so much help to the Met Lab?”
“At first, we did not think you Big Uglies could know enough to make a bomb anyhow, so no harm done,” Ristin said. Sam knew he was worried, because he didn’t often slip and use the Lizard slang name for human beings. He went on, “Soon we found how wrong we were. You know enough and more, and were mostly using us to check the answers you had already. Again, because of this not much harm could come, so we went along.”
“Oh,” Yeager said. “Nice to know we surprised you.”
Ristin’s mouth opened and he wagged his head slightly: he was laughing at himself. “This whole planet has been a surprise, and not a good one. From the first time people started shooting at us with rifles and cannon, we knew everything we had believed about Tosev 3 was wrong.”
Somebody rapped on the door of the office where Yeager and Ristin were talking. “That’ll be Ullhass,” Yeager said.
But when the door opened, Barbara came through it. “You are not Ullhass,” Ristin said in accusing tones. He let his mouth hang open again to show he’d made a joke.
“You know what?” Sam said. “I’m darn glad she isn’t. Hi, hon.” He gave her a hug and a peck of a kiss. “I didn’t think they were going to let you off work till later.”
“One thing about English majors: we do learn how to type,” Barbara said. “As long as we don’t run out of ribbons, I’ll have plenty to do. Or until the baby comes—whichever happens first. They ought to give me a couple of days off for that.”
“They’d better,” Yeager said, and added the emphatic cough. He laughed at himself. To Ristin, he said, “That’s what I get for hanging around with the likes of you.”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 121