In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “What, a civilized language?” Ristin said, laughing his kind of laugh once more. He turned civilized into a long hiss.

  Despite his accent, he gave as good as he got. Yeager didn’t fire back at him. Instead, he asked Barbara, “Why did they let you go early?”

  “I turned green, I guess,” she answered. “I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It gets me any old time of day it feels like.”

  “You look okay now,” he said.

  “I got rid of what ailed me,” Barbara said bleakly. “I’m just glad the plumbing works. If it didn’t, somebody—probably me—would have a mess to clean up.”

  “You’re supposed to be eating for two, not throwing up what one has,” Sam said.

  “If you know a secret way to make lunch stay down, I wish you’d tell me what it is,” Barbara answered, now with a snap in her voice. “Everybody says this is supposed to go away after I get further along. I hope to heaven that’s true.”

  Another knock, this one on the frame of the open door. “Here you go, Corporal,” said a kid in dungarees with a pistol holster on his belt. “I’ve brought your pet Lizard back for you.” Ullhass walked in and exchanged sibilant greetings with Ristin. The kid, who except for the pistol looked like a college freshman, nodded to Yeager, gave Barbara a quick once-over and obviously decided she was too old for him, nodded again, and trotted off down the hall.

  “I am not a pet. I am a male of the Race,” Ullhass said with considerable dignity.

  Yeager soothed him: “I know, pal. But haven’t you noticed that people don’t always say exactly what they mean?”

  “Yes, I have seen this,” Ullhass said. “Because I am a prisoner, I will not tell you what I think of it.”

  “If you ask me, you just did,” Yeager answered. “You were very polite about it, though. Now come on, boys; I’ll take you home.”

  Home for the Lizards was an office converted into an apartment. Maybe cell block was a better word for it, Yeager thought: at least, he’d never seen any apartments with stout iron bars across the windows and an armed guard waiting outside the door. But Ristin and Ullhass liked it. Nobody bothered them in there, and the steam radiator let them heat the room to the bake-oven level they enjoyed.

  Once they were safely ensconced, Yeager walked Barbara out onto the lawn. Unlike Ristin, she didn’t complain it was too cold. All she said was, “I wish I had some cigarettes. Maybe they’d keep me from wanting to toss my cookies.”

  “Now that you haven’t smoked in a while, they’d probably just make you sicker.” Sam slipped an arm around Barbara’s waist, which was still deliciously slim. “As long as you are off early, you want to go back to the place and …?” He let his voice trail away, but squeezed her a little.

  Her answering smile was wan. “I’d love to go back to the place, but if you don’t mind, all I want to do is lie down, maybe take a nap. I’m tired all the time, and my stomach isn’t what you call happy right now, either. Is it okay?” She sounded anxious.

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” Yeager answered. “Fifteen years ago, I probably would have fussed and sulked, but I’m a grown-up now. I can wait till tomorrow.” My dick doesn’t think for me the way it used to, he thought, but that wasn’t something he could say to a new-wed wife.

  Barbara let her hand rest on his. “Thanks, hon.”

  “First time I ever got thanked for getting old,” he said.

  She made a face at him. “You can’t have it both ways. Are you a grown-up and saying it’s okay because it really is, or are you just getting old and saying it’s okay because you’re all feeble and tired?”

  “Ooh.” He mimed a wound. When she wanted to, she could get him chasing his tail like nobody’s business. He didn’t think of himself as dumb (but then, who does?), but he hadn’t had formal training in logic and in fencing with words. Trading barbs with ballplayers in his dugout and the ones on the other side of the field wasn’t the same thing.

  Barbara let out a loud, theatrical groan as she got to the top of the stairs. “That’s going to be even less fun when I’m further along,” she said. “Maybe we should have looked for a place on the ground floor. Too late to worry about it now, I suppose.”

  She groaned again, this time with pleasure, when she flopped onto the sofa in the front room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the bed?” Yeager asked.

  “Actually, no. I can put my feet up this way.” The overstuffed sofa had equally overstuffed arms, so maybe that really was comfortable. Sam shrugged. If Barbara was happy, he was happy, too.

  Somebody knocked on the door. “Who’s that?” Sam and Barbara said in the same breath. Why doesn’t he go away? lay beneath the words.

  Whoever it was didn’t go away, but kept on knocking. Yeager strode over and threw open the door, intending to give a pushy Fuller Brush man a piece of his mind. But it wasn’t a Fuller Brush man, it was Jens Larssen. He looked at Sam like a man finding a cockroach in his salad. “I want to talk to my wife,” he said.

  “She’s not your wife any more. We’ve been through this,” Yeager said tiredly, but his hands bunched into fists at his sides. “What do you want to say to her?”

  “It’s none of your damn business,” Jens said, which almost started the fight-then and there. But before Yeager quite decided to knock his block off, he added, “But I came to tell her good-bye.”

  “Where are you going, Jens?” In her stocking feet, Barbara came up behind Sam so quietly that he hadn’t heard her.

  “Washington State,” Larssen answered. “I shouldn’t even tell you that much, but I figured you ought to know, in case I don’t come back.”

  “That sounds as if I shouldn’t ask when you’re going,” Barbara said, and Larssen nodded to show she was right. Coolly, she told him, “Good luck, Jens.”

  He turned red. Because he was so fair, the process was easy to watch. He said, “For all you care, I could be going off to desert to the Lizards.”

  “I don’t think you’d do that,” she said, but Larssen was right: she didn’t sound as if she much cared. Yeager had all he could do to keep from breaking into a happy grin. Barbara went on, “I told you good luck and I meant it. I don’t know what more you want that I can give you.”

  “You know good and well what I want,” Jens said, and Yeager gathered himself again. If Larssen wanted that fight bad enough, he’d get it.

  “That I can’t give you, I said,” Barbara answered.

  Jens Larssen glared at her, at Sam, at her again, as if he couldn’t decide which of them he wanted to belt more. With a snarl of curses, some in English, others in throaty Norwegian, he stomped off. His furious footfalls thundered on the stairs. He slammed the front door of the apartment building hard enough to rattle windows.

  “I wish that hadn’t happened,” Barbara said. “I wish—oh, what difference does it make what I wish now? If he’s going away for a while, that may be the best thing that could happen. We’ll get some peace and quiet, and maybe by the time he gets back he’ll have figured out he can’t do anything about this.”

  “God, I hope so,” Yeager said. “What he’s put you through ever since we got here isn’t right.” He’d been riding the roller coaster himself, but he kept quiet about that. Barbara was the one who’d had the tough time, because she’d been in love with Jens—right up to the minute she found out he was still alive, Sam thought. Since then, since she’d chosen to stay Barbara Yeager instead of going back to being Barbara Larssen, Jens had done his best to act about as unlovable as a human being could.

  Barbara’s sigh showed a weariness that had nothing to do with her being pregnant. “Very strange to think that a year ago he and I were happy together. I don’t think he’s the same person any more. He never used to be bitter—but then, he never used to have much to be bitter about, either. I guess you can’t really tell about someone till you see him when the chips are down.”

  “You’re probably right.” Sam had seen that playing ball—some guys wanted to b
e out there with the game on the line, while others hoped they wouldn’t come up or be on the mound or have the ball hit to them in that kind of spot.

  Musingly, Barbara went on, “I suppose that’s one of the reasons people write so much about love and war: they’re the situations that put the most strain on a person’s character, so you can see it at its best and at its worst.”

  “Makes sense.” Yeager hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but it did make sense to him. He’d seen enough war close up to know it was more terrifying than exciting, but it remained endlessly interesting to read about. He’d never thought about why until now. “You put things in a whole new light for me,” he said admiringly.

  She looked at him, then reached out and took his hands in hers. “You’ve put some things in a new light for me, too, Sam,” she murmured.

  He felt ten feet tall the rest of the day, and didn’t give Jens Larssen another thought.

  “Superior sir, I greet you and welcome you to our fine base here,” Ussmak said to the new landcruiser commander. My latest, he thought, and wondered how many more he’d go through before Tosev 3 was conquered—if it ever was.

  That gloomy reflection was a far cry from the spirit of unity with which he—and all landcruiser males—had gone into this campaign. Then, they’d thought crews would stay together through the whole war. They’d trained on that assumption, so that a male without his crew was an object of pity, both to his comrades and to himself.

  Things hadn’t quite worked that way. Ussmak had had two commanders and a gunner killed on him, and another commander and gunner swept away in the wild hunt for ginger lickers. He studied this new male and wondered how long he’d last.

  The fellow seemed promising enough. He was good-looking and alert, and his neatly applied body paint argued that he didn’t have his tongue in a ginger jar (though you never could tell; Ussmak was fastidious about his own paint just to keep his superiors from getting—justifiably—suspicious).

  “Landcruiser Driver Ussmak, I am Landcruiser Commander Nejas; you are assigned to my crew,” the male said. “Skoob, our gunner, will be along shortly; he must be completing reporting formalities. Both of us will draw heavily on your knowledge, as you have more combat experience than we do.”

  “I shall help you in any way I can, superior sir,” Ussmak said, as he had to. He did his best to sound fulsome, but was not rejoicing inside. He’d hoped he’d get crewed with veterans, but no such luck. As delicately as he could, he added, “The Deutsche are not opponents to take lightly.”

  “So I am given to understand,” Nejas said. “I am also given to understand that this garrison has problems beyond the Deutsche, however. Is it true that the Big Uglies actually spirited a landcruiser out of the vehicle park here?”

  “I fear it is, superior sir.” Ussmak was embarrassed about that himself, though he’d had nothing to do with it. It showed Drefsab hadn’t managed to sweep out all the ginger tasters, and it showed some of them didn’t care for anything on Tosev 3 past where their next taste was coming from.

  “Disgraceful,” Nejas said. “We must have order aboard our own ship before we can hope to put down the Tosevites.”

  Another male came into the barracks and swiveled his eye turrets every which way, taking the measure of the place, By the time he was through, he looked dismayed. Ussmak understood that; he’d felt the same way the first time he’d inspected his new housing. From everything he’d heard, even the Big Uglies lived better than this these days.

  The newcomer might have been Nejas’ broodbrother. They both had the same perfect body paint, the same alert stance, and, somehow, the same air of trusting innocence about them, as if they’d just come out of cold sleep and didn’t know anything about the way the war against the Big Uglies was (or rather wasn’t) going, about what ginger had done to the landcruiser crews at Besançon, or about any of the many other unpleasant surprises Tosev 3 had given the Race. Ussmak didn’t know whether to envy or pity them.

  Nejas said, “Driver Ussmak, here is Skoob, the gunner of our landcruiser crew.”

  Ussmak closely studied Skoob’s body paint. It said the other male’s rank was about the same as his. Nejas’ neutral introduction said the same thing. Ussmak had the feeling he was vastly superior in combat experience: what Nejas had said told him as much, at any rate. On the other hand, Skoob looked to have been together with Nejas for a long time. Ussmak said, “I greet you, superior sir.”

  Skoob took the deference as nothing less than his due, which irked Ussmak. “I greet you, driver,” he said. “May we brew up many Tosevite landcruisers together.”

  “May it be so.” Ussmak wished he had a taste of ginger; better that than the taste of condescension he got from Skoob. But, because his life would depend in no small measure on how well the gunner did his job, he went on politely, “The other half of the bargain involves keeping the Big Uglies from brewing us up.”

  “Shouldn’t be that difficult,” Nejas said. “I’ve studied the technical specifications for all the Tosevites’ landcruisers, even the latest ones from the Deutsche. They’ve improved, yes, but we still handily outclass them.”

  “Superior sir, in theory there’s no doubt you’re right,” Ussmak said. “The only trouble is—may I speak frankly?”

  “Please do,” Nejas said, Skoob echoing him a moment later. From that, they were an established crewpair. I was wise to defer to Skoob after all, even if he is arrogant, Ussmak thought.

  Still, he hoped their willingness to listen meant something. “The trouble with the Big Uglies is, they don’t fight the way we’d expect, or the way our simulations prepared us to meet. They’re masters at setting ambushes, at using terrain to mask what they’re up to, at using feints and minefields to channel our moves into the direction they want, and their intelligence is superb.”

  “Ours should be better,” Skoob said. “We have reconnaissance satellites in place, after all, to see how they move.”

  “How they move, yes, but not always what the moves mean,” Ussmak said. “They’re very good at concealing that—until they hurt us. And we may have satellites, but they have every Big Ugly between here and their positions to let them know where we’re going. This isn’t like the SSSR, where a lot of the Tosevites preferred us to either the Deutsche or the Russkis. These Big Uglies don’t want us, and they wish we’d all disappear.”

  Nejas’ tongue flicked out and then in again, as if at a bad taste. “Helicopter gunships should take the edge off their tactics.”

  “Superior sir, they’re of less use here than they were in the SSSR,” Ussmak said. “For one thing, the countryside gives the Deutsche good cover—I said that before. And for another, they’ve learned to bring antiaircraft artillery well forward. They’ve hurt our gunships badly enough that the males in charge of them have grown reluctant to commit them to battle except in emergency, and sometimes then, too.”

  “What good are they to us if they cannot be used?” Skoob asked angrily.

  “A good question,” Ussmak admitted. “But what good are they to us if they get blown out of the air before they damage the Big Uglies’ landcruisers?”

  “You are saying we face defeat?” Nejas’ voice was silky with danger. Ussmak guessed part of his mission was keeping an eye turret turned for defeatists as well as ginger tasters.

  “Superior sir, no, I am not saying that,” the driver replied. “I am saying we need to be more wary than we thought we would against the Tosevites.”

  “More wary, possibly,” Nejas said with the air of a male making a concession to another who was inferior mentally as well as in rank. “But, when faced in accord with sound tactical doctrine, I have no doubt the Big Uglies will fall.”

  Ussmak had had no doubts, either, not until he had a couple of landcruisers wrecked while he was in them. “Superior sir, I say only that the Tosevites are more devious than our tactical doctrine allows for.” He held up a hand to keep Nejas from interrupting, then told the story of the mortar at
tack on the Race’s local base and the land mine waiting for the armor as it hurried toward the bridge that would let it get at the raiders.

  Nejas did break in: “I have heard of this incident. My impression is that males with their heads in the ginger vial were in large measure responsible for our losing an armored fighting vehicle. They charged straight ahead without considering possible risks.”

  “Superior sir, that’s true,” Ussmak said, recalling just how true it was. “But it’s not the point I was trying to make. Had they gone more cautiously, they would have taken an alternate route … under which the Big Uglies also had a bomb waiting. We are devious by doctrine and training; they seem to be devious straight from hatchlinghood. They play a deeper game than we do.”

  That got through, to Skoob if not to Nejas. The gunner said, “How do we protect ourselves against this Tosevite deviousness, then?”

  “If I had the whole answer to that, I’d be fleetlord, not a landcruiser driver,” Ussmak said, which made both his new crewmales laugh. He went on, “The one thing I will say is that, if a move against the Big Uglies looks easy and obvious, you’ll probably find it has claws attached. And the first thing you think of after the obvious move may well be wrong, too. And so may the second one.”

  “I have it,” Skoob said. “The thing to do is post our landcruisers in a circle in the middle of a large, open field—and then make sure the Big Uglies aren’t digging under them.”

  Ussmak let his mouth drop open at that: good to see one of the new males could crack wise, anyhow. Nejas remained serious. Letting his eyes roam around the barracks once more, he said, “This is such a gloomy place, I’d hardly mind getting out of it to fight in a landcruiser. I expect I’d be more comfortable in one than I will here. Does it have anything in its favor?”

  “The plumbing is excellent,” Ussmak said. Through the newcomers’ hisses of surprise, he explained, “The Big Uglies have messier body wastes than we do, so they need more in the way of plumbing. And this whole planet is so wet, they use water more for washing and such than we would dare back on Home. Standing under a decently warm spray is invigorating, even if it does play hob with your body paint.”