Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Atvar said, “Look at Chicago yourself. Our forces continue to advance through the city. The large factories you defended for so long are now practically cleared of Tosevites, and soon our victorious males will reach the shore of the lake by which the city lies.”

  “Bully for them,” Hull answered, which caused the interpreter considerable confusion. After the misunderstanding was straightened out, the U.S. Secretary of State said, “Some of your victorious males may make it to Lake Michigan, but how many of ’em won’t? How many of ’em are dead and stinking in the streets of Chicago?”

  “Far fewer than the males you throw away like wastepaper in a futile effort to halt us,” Atvar snapped. He didn’t like being reminded of the casualties the conquest of Chicago was costing the Race.

  Cordell Hull’s face twisted into one of the leers the Big Uglies used to show emotion. (“This is an expression of amusement and irony,” the interpreter told Atvar in a brief aside.) He said, “We have more men to spend than you do, and more of everything else, too. Before long, you’re going to have to start robbing Peter to pay Paul if you want reinforcements.”

  The interpreter needed to go back and forth with Hull a few times, but when he finally made sense of that, it made sense to Atvar, too. Worst of it was that the Tosevite was right. Every time fresh males went into Chicago, an offensive somewhere else on Tosev 3 necessarily suffered, either that or a garrison in a “safely conquered” region was reduced, whereupon, more often than not, the region was found not to be so safely conquered after all.

  Trying to match Hull’s irony, the fleetlord said, “What would you have us do, then, Exalted Tosevite?”

  “Who, me? I’m just a jumped-up Tennessee lawyer,” Hull replied, which occasioned still more translation difficulties. Once they were resolved, Hull went on, “We don’t hold with fancy titles in the United States—never have, never will. We figure part of being free is getting away from all that nonsense.”

  Atvar stared at him in honest bewilderment. Every society built by every intelligent race was hierarchical—how could it be otherwise? Why pretend such a manifest and obvious truth did not exist?

  He had no time to ponder that; Hull was still talking: “If you really want to know what I want you to do, what the people of the United States want you to do, what the people of the world want you to do, it’s not what anybody would call complicated: quit killing people and go back to your own planet.”

  The fleetlord tried to imagine his reception if he returned to Home with a beaten army in cold sleep, bearing word that the species that had defeated him was now seeking to develop space travel on its own and would in a short time (as the Race reckoned such things) be heading out toward the Empire. “It cannot be,” he answered quickly.

  “Well, I allow I reckoned you’d say as much,” Cordell Hull told him. “Next best would be for you to stay here—we’d set aside land somewhere for you, maybe—and make peace with us.”

  “You Tosevites are not in any position to grant us terms,” Atvar said angrily. “We are in the process of conquering you, of bringing you into the Empire, and we shall continue until victory is won, in Chicago and everywhere else.”

  “If you’re going to take that attitude, why did you bring me up here to this spaceship in the first place?” Hull asked. “Flying up here was a big jolt for an old man like me.”

  “You were summoned to hear our demand for the return of the traitor Straha, which you have insolently refused, and to bring a warning back to your emperor,” Atvar said.

  “We don’t have an emperor, or want one, either,” Hull said.

  “Your leader, then—whatever you call him.” Atvar hissed in exasperation. “The warning is simple: if you seek to produce nuclear weapons, you will be utterly destroyed.”

  Hull studied him for a while before answering. Every so often, despite their weird features, the Tosevites could look disconcertingly keen. This was one of those times. Being divided up into tens or hundreds of ephemeral little squabbling empires, each always trying to outdo or outcheat its neighbors, had given them a political sophistication—or perhaps just a talent for chicanery—the Race, despite its long history, had trouble matching.

  Slowly, Hull said, “You intend to conquer us whether we make these weapons or not. Why should we give up the best chance not just to hurt you but to beat you? What’s the percentage in it for us?”

  “We shall conquer you with or without your nuclear weapons,” Atvar answered. “More of your not-empire, more of your people, will survive if you do not force us to extremes.”

  Cordell Hull made a strange noise, half gasping, half barking. “This is what the Big Uglies use for laughter,” the interpreter said.

  “Yes, I know that,” Atvar answered impatiently. “What did I say that was so amusing?”

  When the U.S. Secretary of State spoke again, he made a grim kind of sense: “Why should we care? In your scheme of things, we’re all going to be your slaves forever anyhow. To keep that from happening, we’ll do anything—anything, I tell you. Men are meant to live free. When you came here, we were fighting among ourselves to make that happen. We’ll fight you, too.”

  Now Atvar was the one who hesitated. The Big Uglies constantly prated of freedom. The best analysts of the Race kept trying to understand, and kept having trouble. Atvar didn’t find the concept attractive; what the Tosevites meant by it seemed to him nothing more than anarchy.

  “Do you not care what happens to the males and females under your rule?” he asked. To any civilized male, the Race came first. Any individual’s fate paled in importance beside the welfare of the group.

  If the Tosevites thought like that, they did a good job of hiding it. Cordell Hull said, “If the United States isn’t free, if her people aren’t free, there’s no point to the whole business. Time you figured that out. You get your soldiers and your bases out of our country, maybe we have something to talk about. Until then, forget it.”

  Molotov had made the same demand, although he’d couched it in terms of—what had he called it?—the ineluctable historical dialectic, a notion that gave analysts even more trouble than did the mysterious and quite possibly unreal thing called freedom. The Big Uglies had a gift for dreaming up concepts unsupported by evidence.

  Atvar said, “If you cannot make us do something, you are in a poor position to tell us we must do it as a price for beginning talks.”

  “The same applies to you,” Hull retorted. “You can’t make us quit trying to beat you by any way that comes to hand, so you’d just as well give up on that. Maybe after we’ve battered you some more, you’ll be more willing to talk sense.”

  The fleetlord’s breath hissed out in a long sigh. “You will regret your obstinacy.” He turned to one of the males who had brought Hull to the conference chamber. “We are finished here. Take him back to the shuttle; let him convey to his emperor—his not-emperor, I should say—the substance of our discussion.” When the Tosevite was gone, Atvar sighed again. “They refuse to see reason. The more readily they yield and accept the Emperor’s supremacy, the higher their place within the Empire will be. If we cannot trust them, if they are always rising in futile revolt—”

  Before he could finish the thought, Pshing’s face appeared on the screen once more. “Exalted Fleetlord, urgent new reports from Britain.”

  By his adjutant’s tone, the new reports weren’t good ones. Urgent news from the surface of Tosev 3 was seldom good. “Give them to me,” Atvar said.

  “It shall be done. As threatened, the British have turned loose their new weapon or weapons against us. Chemicals?of what sort we are still investigating—are being delivered by artillery and aerosol to poison our males. Casualties have occurred as a result of this. These poisonous gases have also adversely affected morale; when the Big Uglies employ them, they are sometimes able to achieve local successes in their wake. Commanders in Britain urgently request countermeasures.”

  Atvar stared at Pshing, who looked back at him as
if expecting him to produce countermeasures from a pouch on his belt. “Refer all this to our scientific teams, with a highest priority tag,” the fleetlord answered. Then he asked, “Are the Tosevites indiscriminately poisoning their own fighting males in an effort to harm us?”

  One of Pshing’s eye turrets swiveled down toward his desktop to study a report there. “Exalted Fleetlord, this does not appear to be the case. They wear masks which give them at least some protection against their own chemical agents. Some of these have been captured. We are endeavoring to modify them to serve our own needs, and doing the same with our antiradiation masks. Unfortunately, we have very limited quantities of the latter.”

  “Good that you thought of it, though,” Atvar said. For a moment there, he’d wondered if he was the only male in the entire Race left with a working brain. Then he realized that now, instead of worrying about whether the Big Uglies were able to match the technical developments of the Race, he was worrying about whether the Race could duplicate something the Big Uglies had invented.

  It was a very unpleasant way to come full circle.

  When the Lizards first came to Earth, Moishe Russie had been starving in the Warsaw ghetto, praying for a sign from God that He would not abandon His people. Russie had taken the nuclear bomb they’d exploded high above Central Europe as a sign his prayer was being answered, though he’d learned later that the Lizards had hoped to use the blast to scramble communications and disrupt electronics generally. For reasons he didn’t altogether understand, it hadn’t worked out as they’d expected.

  That wasn’t the point, though. When the light in the sky answered his prayer, people in the ghetto had started calling him Reb Moishe, and some of them had even looked on him as a prophet. He hadn’t believed that himself, not really, but sometimes you wondered.

  Now, crouched down in a rubble-strewn St. Albans street between a theater left over from the days of ancient Rome and the even more battered ruins of what had been some wealthy noble’s mansion a couple of hundred years before, he wondered again. As he’d predicted to Nathan Jacobi, here he was in British service, wearing a Red Cross armband.

  “I didn’t think about the gas mask, though,” he said. The mask distorted his voice and made him sound like something from another planet, although not, thank God, a Lizard. With its long snout and the tube running down to the chemical canister that purified the air, the mask made him look inhuman, too: rather like a kangaroo with an elephant’s trunk.

  Not only did it change the way he looked, it changed the way he saw. Peering out at the world through a pair of portholes that got dirty whenever they felt like it and stayed more or less permanently steamed up made him appreciate what a marvel normal vision was.

  Somewhere north of St. Albans, the Lizards were licking their wounds. They’d been in the city itself till a barrage of mustard gas and phosgene, followed by a desperate infantry attack, drove them out again. Now St. Albans was in British hands once more. Moishe wondered when the Lizards would start using poison gas of their own. It probably wouldn’t be long. He also wondered if anyone on either side would be alive when the war was over.

  Down in the Roman theater, someone called out “Help!” in a drowned, choking voice. The cry wasn’t Yiddish or Polish; Moishe had to translate it into a language he habitually used. Then he realized it wasn’t English, either. That was a hurt Lizard down there.

  He hesitated no more than a heartbeat before he scrambled down into the remains of the theater. He wondered for a moment what sort of plays the ancient inhabitants of St. Albans (which surely hadn’t been the Roman name for the place) had watched there. The theater was shaped like a capital C, with a colonnade—one column still miraculously standing—behind the rectangular stage that occupied what would have been the open space keeping the C from becoming an O. Curved banks of earth formed the letter itself, and showed where the seats had been.

  The Lizard lay in the flat, open area in the center of the theater. Would that have been called the orchestra? Moishe knew only slightly more of the classical theater than he did of the fine points of Chinese calligraphy.

  That also held true, he realized, for what he knew about how to treat injured Lizards—not that any human being was likely to be expert in that field. “I’ll do what I can,” he muttered inside the mask. He’d dealt with the Lizards long enough in Warsaw to come to see them as people, too. And Lizard prisoners were valuable. He hadn’t had much in the way of a briefing before they sent him out to do his best for King and Country (not his king or his country, but that was irrelevant now), but they’d made that crystal clear.

  Then he got a clearer look through his dirty, steamy windows on the world and realized this Lizard wasn’t going to live long enough to be worth anything as a captive. Its body was covered with blisters, some of them bigger than Moishe’s fist. The blisters destroyed the patterns of its body paint. They seemed to cluster under its arms and at the join of its legs, although it also had one that swallowed up an eye turret. From the bubbling way it breathed, Russie was sure the mustard gas was wrecking its lungs as well.

  The Lizard could still see out of the eye the gas had not destroyed. “Help me,” it gasped, not caring in the least that he was a despised Tosevite. “Hurts.” It added the emphatic cough, then kept on coughing and couldn’t stop. Bloody bubbles came out of its mouth and nostrils.

  “Help how?” Russie asked with an interrogative cough. “Not know.” Seeing what the gas had done left him sick to his stomach, although being sick inside a gas mask was anything but a good idea.

  “I don’t know how,” the Lizard answered, more fluent now that Russie had spoken to it in its own language. “You Big Uglies made this horrible stuff. You must have the antidote for it.”

  “No antidote,” Moishe answered. There was an ointment that was supposed to do some good on mustard gas burns and blisters, but he had none and, in any case, word was the stuff didn’t really help.

  “Then kill me,” the Lizard said. “Kill me, I beg.” Another emphatic cough turned into another paroxysm that tore the Lizard to pieces from the inside out.

  Moishe stared at it in dismay. Everything he’d learned in medical school, everything trained into him as a Jew, made him want to cry “No!” and to flee from the abominable act he’d been asked to perform. One of the things they had warned him about in medical school was that you didn’t learn everything you needed to become a doctor there. He’d seen that in Warsaw from 1939 on; now he saw it again, even more starkly.

  “I beg,” the Lizard said.

  He looked around. The Lizard must not have been gassed here, for he didn’t see its rifle. He had no weapons himself; medical personnel were supposed to be noncombatants. What was he supposed to do, bash in its head with a rock? He didn’t think he could, no matter how much the Lizard wanted him—needed him—to do just that.

  While he stood there in his own mental torment, yet another coughing fit wracked the Lizard. The coughs subsided to gasps; the gasps stopped. “Oh, thank God!” Moishe exclaimed. Sometimes even death could be a blessing—and he hadn’t had to inflict it.

  Since Lizards didn’t wear clothes, they carried what they needed in a pack on their back and in belt pouches. Russie peeled off the pack and undid the pouches. Then, because sitting out in the middle of the orchestra made him feel naked and exposed to artillery and whatever live Lizards might still be in the neighborhood, he took the chattels first up onto the stage, where he could shelter behind the one intact column and the stubs of the others, and then down into a shell hole behind it. He didn’t think he could find better cover than that.

  He opened the pack first. In it were several full magazines for the automatic rifles the Lizards used. Those would be useful; a few Englishmen carried captured Lizard weapons, and they were always crying for ammunition.

  He also found half a dozen little bricks of what the Lizards reckoned field rations, each one wrapped in stuff that reminded him of cellophane but was thicker, more pliabl
e, and less shiny. Lizard prisoners were welcome to the rations, which struck him as distinctly unappetizing. He wondered more about their wrapping: what it was and how they made it. It wasn’t really like anything mankind turned out.

  Something else spilled out of the pack, a case about the size of a ration brick. “Better and better,” Moishe said to no one in particular. The case was a wireless set, though how the Lizards managed to build such a tiny wireless was beyond him—and beyond the best human scientists and engineers in the world, too.

  In the same way that the ration wrappers reminded him of cellophane, the material from which the case was made put him in mind of Bakelite. But it wasn’t Bakelite; it was another one of the types of stuff the Lizards could manufacture and people couldn’t.

  Along with such practical things as food, ammunition, and communications gear, the Lizard also carried in its pack a whole sheaf of papers, more than Russie would have expected to find on any ten human casualties. One of the papers was a map; Moishe recognized the street grid of St. Albans down in one corner.

  The map had notations in the squiggly Lizard script. Moishe did his best to puzzle them out. Back in Warsaw, he’d learned the characters the Lizards used for their written language. It hadn’t taken him long: he already dealt with two versions of one alphabet for Yiddish and Hebrew and two versions of another for Polish and German. The trouble was that, while he could read the words, he mostly didn’t know what they meant. He hadn’t had time to build up anything but the most basic vocabulary.

  “Too bad,” he said, and tucked the papers into his medical bag. Somebody would understand what they meant. One thing that had impressed him about the English was the amount of scholarly talent they could bring to bear on almost anything.

  He fumbled at one of the belt pouches before he finally got it open: the closure would have been much easier to work if he’d had claws on his fingertips rather than nails. A card a little bigger than a standard business card spilled out onto the ground.