Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  When he picked it up and turned it over, he found himself staring into one of the Lizards’ three-dimensional pictures. It showed the male who had just died in the Roman theater. Letter by letter, he sounded out the Lizard’s name: “Ekretkan.”

  He wondered what sort of person Ekretkan had been, how he’d lived before he came to Earth, what he’d thought of the Race’s war before he became one of its victims. The card offered no clue to that. Next to Ekretkan’s photo was a complicated network of golds and greens that reminded Russie of the body paint pattern the Lizard had worn. He supposed it showed the dead male’s rank, seniority, and specialization, but had no idea how to read it.

  The card went into his bag with the papers. Moishe went through the rest of the pouches, looking for more clues to Ekretkan the individual, as opposed to Ekretkan the soldier. Even Nazis had parents, wives, children, dogs, and often carried pictures of them. Not Ekretkan. He had a couple of pictures Moishe thought were of himself, one with him astride a contraption that looked like a four-wheeled motorcycle, another with him wearing a somewhat simpler version of the body paint in which he’d died.

  Ekretkan also had a couple of photos of a flat, empty of other Lizards but filled with gadgets that did things incomprehensible to Russie. Home sweet home, he thought. And the Lizard carried a photo of a street scene that looked like the New York Moishe had seen in the cinema, only more so: tall, thrusting buildings of steel and glass, streets crowded with vehicles, sidewalks full of Lizards who looked as if they were in a hurry. His home town? Russie wondered.

  He set the meager handful of photographs on the ground in a row and stared at them, trying to draw meaning from them. If Ekretkan was a typical male, what did that say about how the Race lived? Could a male’s life be as barren as the pictures made it look? Most of the males Moishe had known in Warsaw had seemed happy enough, and no crazier than human beings filling similar social roles.

  “And so?” he muttered. The Race had mating seasons, not families; he’d learned that back in Warsaw, too. The Lizards thought human mating customs just as strange and revolting as most humans found theirs. Russie examined the pictures again, searching for clues like a Talmudic scholar contemplating a difficult text.

  The most important difference he saw between Lizards and people was that Lizards didn’t have families. That meant—what? That they were alone a lot, especially when they weren’t working. They probably liked it that way, too. Ekretkan’s pictures showed either himself or his empty flat, which argued in favor of Moishe’s line of reasoning.

  What about the street scene, then? Moishe picked that one up, set it aside from the others, and thought about families some more. No Lizard families. That didn’t mean lonely Lizards, even if the Lizards were often alone. But it did mean the family wouldn’t get in the way of whatever loyalty the Lizards gave to any entity bigger than the individual.

  He nodded, pleased with himself. That fit. He didn’t know whether it was true, but it fit. All the loyalty each Lizard didn’t reserve for himself went straight to the Race. Moishe had seen that; the Race and the Emperor were as important to each male, if in a less vicious way, as the Volk and the Führer were to a Nazi.

  Moishe gathered up the pictures and put them in his black bag along with the rest of the luckless Ekretkan’s effects. He got out of the shell hole and headed back toward regimental headquarters. Other people needed to evaluate what he’d found.

  He wondered how his conclusions would stack up against those of a real Lizard expert.

  “You know, Sergeant,” Ben Berkowitz said, clasping his hand behind his head and leaning back in his chair, “the Lizards are plenty to drive a psychiatrist meshuggeh. I ought to know; I am one.” He paused. “You know what meshuggeh means? No offense, but you don’t sound like you’re from New York.”

  Sam Yeager chuckled. “I better not—I’m from Nebraska. But yeah—uh, yes, sir—I know what it means. Something like crazy, right? I’ve played ball with a few Jewish guys; it’s one of the things they’d say. But why do the Lizards drive you nuts? Except because they’re Lizards, I mean.”

  “How much do you know about psychiatry?” Berkowitz asked.

  “Not much,” Yeager admitted. Astounding had run some great articles about the physical sciences, and even about weird things like linguistics for time travelers, but zilch about psychiatry.

  “Okay,” Berkowitz said equably. “One of the basic principles of Freudian analysis is that a big part of why people do what they do comes from their sex drive and the conflicts that revolve around it.”

  “No offense, sir, but it doesn’t seem to me like you have to be a psychiatrist to figure that one out.” Yeager chuckled in fond reminiscence. “I think about some of the crazy things I used to do to get myself laid—”

  “Yeah, me, too, except I’m still doing ’em.” Berkowitz’s hand was bare of wedding ring. That didn’t have to signify, not with a man, but evidently it did. “But like you say, if it was that simple, anybody could see it. It’s not. Freud relates sex to all sorts of things that don’t look like they have anything to do with it at first glance: the competitive drive, the urge to create, the way you relate to people the same sex as you.” He hastily held up that ringless hand. “Don’t get me wrong—I don’t mean you in particular and I’m not calling you queer.”

  “It’s okay, Captain. I worked that out,” Sam said. Even if he was a shrink, Ben Berkowitz was a regular guy, too. Yeager hadn’t got to the point of realizing it might be important for a psychiatrist to be able to make like a regular guy to help him do the rest of his job better.

  “You with me so far?” Berkowitz asked.

  “I guess so,” Yeager said cautiously. “I never really thought about sex tying in to all that other stuff, but maybe it does.”

  “You’ll go with it for the sake of argument, you mean.”

  “I guess so,” Sam repeated.

  Berkowitz laughed at him. He was engagingly ugly; when he grinned, he looked about eighteen, like one of the bright—or sometimes smartass—kids who filled the letter column in Astounding. He said, “Careful son of a gun, aren’t you? Remind me not to play poker with you. Well, for the sake of argument, let’s say we can get all sorts of useful insights into the way the human mind works when we use Freudian analysis. It would be nice if we could do the same thing with the Lizards.”

  “So why can’t you?” Yeager asked. Then a lightbulb went on in his head. “Oh. They’ve got a waddayacallit—a mating season.”

  “Right the first time.” Ben Berkowitz grinned again. “You may look like a farm boy, Yeager, but you’re pretty damn sharp, you know that?”

  “Thank you, sir.” Sam didn’t think of himself as pretty damn sharp. Barbara, for instance, could run rings around him. But she didn’t seem bored with him, either, so maybe he wasn’t quite the near-hick he’d often felt hanging around with fast-talking big-city ballplayers.

  “ ‘Thank you, sir.’ ” Just like some of those fast-talking city guys, Berkowitz had a flare for mimicry. Unlike a lot of them, he didn’t spike it with malice. He said, “Believe me, Sergeant, if you were a dimbulb, you wouldn’t be in Hot Springs. This and the project you came from are probably the two most important places in the United States—and you’ve had your hand in both of them. Damn few people can say as much.”

  “I never thought of it like that,” Yeager said. When he did, he saw he had something to be proud of.

  “Well, you should have,” Berkowitz told him. “But back to business, okay? Like you said, the Lizards have a mating season. When their females smell right, they screw themselves silly. When they don’t—” He snapped his fingers. “Everything shuts off, just like that. It’s like they’re sexually neutral beings ninety percent of the time—all the time, if no lady Lizards are around.”

  “They think what we do is funny as hell,” Yeager said.

  “Don’t they just,” Berkowitz agreed. “Straha tells me they have a whole big research program going, jus
t trying to figure out what makes us tick, and they haven’t come close yet. We’re in the same boat with them, except we’re just starting out, and they’ve been doing it ever since they got here.”

  “That’s ’cause they’re winning the war,” Sam said. “When you’re ahead, you can afford to monkey around with stuff that isn’t really connected to the fighting. When you’re losing like we are, you have enough other problems closer to home, so you can’t worry about stuff out on the edge.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” Berkowitz said. The colloquialism dropped from his lips without sounding put-on, though Sam was sure he knew his whos and whoms as well as Barbara did. Not sounding put-on was also part of his job. He went on, “So how do we figure out what makes a Lizard tick, way down deep inside? It isn’t sex, and that makes them different from us at a level we have trouble even thinking about.”

  “Ristin and Ullhass say the other two kinds of bug-eyed monsters the Lizards have conquered work the same way they do,” Yeager said.

  “The Hallessi and the Rabotevs. Yes, I’ve heard that, too.” Berkowitz leaned back in his chair. Sweat darkened the khaki of his uniform shirt under the arms. Sam felt his own shirt sticking to him all down the back, and he wasn’t doing anything but sitting still. If, say, you wanted to go out and play ball . . . He recalled wringing out his flannels after games down here. You thought you remembered what this kind of weather was like, but when you found yourself stuck in it week in and week out, you learned your memory—maybe mercifully—had blocked the worst of it.

  He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. Since one was about as wet as the other, that didn’t help much. “Hot,” he said inadequately.

  “Sure is,” Berkowitz said. “I wonder about the Rabotevs and the Hallessi, I really do. I wish we could do something for them; the Lizards have held them down for thousands of years.”

  “From what I’ve heard, they’re supposed to be as loyal to the Emperor as the Lizards are themselves,” Yeager answered. “They’re honorary Lizards, pretty much. I guess that’s what the Lizards had in mind for us, too.”

  “I think you’re right,” Berkowitz said, nodding. “You want to hear something funny, something I got out of Straha?” He waited for Sam to nod back, then went on, “About eight hundred years ago, the Lizards sent some kind of a probe to Earth. It beamed a whole bunch of pictures and I don’t know what else back to the planet the Lizards call Home . . . and they figured we’d be a piece of cake, because we couldn’t possibly have changed much in that short a time.”

  Sam thought that one over for a few seconds. Then his eye caught Berkowitz’s. They both started to laugh. Yeager said, “You mean they thought they’d be fighting King Arthur and Richard the Lion-Hearted and, and . . .?” He gave up; those were the only two medieval names he could come up with.

  “That’s just what they thought,” Berkowitz agreed. “They expected to run tanks and fighter planes up against knights on horseback. The conquest would have taken maybe twenty minutes, and the only way a Lizard would have gotten hurt was if he fell down and stubbed his toe.”

  “We gave ’em a little surprise, didn’t we?” Sam said. “A lot’s happened since”—he paused to subtract in his head—“1142 or so.”

  “Uh-huh. Good thing for us it has, too. But you know, here’s the strange part: if they’d sent the probe in 342 and come in 1142, things wouldn’t have changed that much—they’d still have had a walkover. Or if they’d sent it in”—now Berkowitz paused for subtraction—“458 B.C. and come in A.D. 342, it would have been the same story. So they might have been right when they figured things wouldn’t change much, and they could take their own sweet time getting ready to squash us flat.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Yeager admitted. He didn’t care to think about it like that, either. Something else occurred to him. “They sure came loaded for bear if they expected to be taking on knights in shining armor.”

  “Didn’t they just?” Berkowitz ruefully shook his head. “I asked Straha about that. He kind of reared back, the way they do when they think you’re being stupid, you know what I mean? Then he said, ‘You do not go to a war without enough tools to win it. This is what we thought we had.’ ”

  “He may still be right,” Sam said.

  “So he may.” Berkowitz looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to run and interview a Lizard tank officer about armor-piercing shells. I enjoy chewing the fat with you, Sergeant—you’ve got the right kind of mind to deal with the Lizards. People who start out too sure of themselves end up, you should pardon the expression, nuts.”

  Laughing, Yeager went up to the fourth floor. He found Ullhass and Ristin in a state of high excitement. “Look, Exalted Sergeant Sam,” Ristin said, holding up a set of what looked like bottles of nail polish. “The grand and magnificent shiplord Straha brought with him a great store of body paints. He will share them with us. Now we no longer need be naked.”

  “That’s nice,” Sam agreed equably. “Does each of you paint himself, or do you paint each other?”

  “We paint each other.” Ullhass let out a mournful, hissing sigh. “But we really should not paint our old rank patterns on our bodies. We hold those ranks no longer. We are only prisoners.”

  “Then paint yourselves to show that,” Yeager said.

  “There are markings to show one is a prisoner,” Ristin said, “but a prisoner who has done something wrong and is being punished. We did nothing wrong; you Big Uglies captured us and made us prisoners. We have no markings for that.”

  Probably didn’t think it would ever happen when you set out from Home, Yeager thought. He said, “If you don’t have those markings, why not invent some?”

  Ristin and Ullhass looked at each other. Obviously, that idea hadn’t occurred to them, and wouldn’t have, either. “Such markings would not be official,” Ullhass said, as if that doomed the notion in and of itself.

  But Sam said, “Sure they would. They’d be official U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks. If you’re our prisoners, you should use our marks, right?”

  The two Lizards looked at each other again. They took suggestions from superior authority very seriously indeed. “What are these U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks?” Ristin asked.

  Yeager was about to tell him to make up his own when he had a better idea—much more than most people, Lizards liked doing as they were told. He said, “You should paint yourselves with red and white stripes and blue stars. That way you’ll look like you’re wearing American flags.”

  Ristin and Ullhass talked back and forth in their own language. Sam was getting fluent enough now to follow them pretty well. He hid a smile as he listened to their enthusiasm grow. Before long, Ristin said, “It shall be done.”

  When they were through, Yeager thought they looked gaudy as all get out, but nobody’d hired him for base art critic, so he kept his big mouth shut. Ullhass and Ristin were delighted, which was the point of the exercise. In the next few days, several other formerly paintless Lizards started sporting stars and stripes. Sam’s highly unofficial suggestion looked as if it might turn official after all.

  Then one day, as Sam was coming out of the room he shared with Barbara, a peremptory hiss stopped him in his tracks. “You are the Tosevite who devised these—these unpleasant prisoner color combinations?” Straha demanded.

  “That’s right, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “Is something wrong with them?”

  “Yes, something is wrong.” Straha used an emphatic cough to show how wrong the something was. Past that, he looked angry enough to be twitching; he reminded Yeager of nothing so much as a tent-show revival preacher testifying against the evils of demon rum and loose women. “This you have done with the paint, this is wrong. This is a mark the Race does not use. It must be cleansed at once from the scales of the males. It is an—” Yeager hadn’t heard the next word before, but if it didn’t mean something like abomination, he’d eat his hat.

  “Why is that, Shiplord?” he
asked, as innocently as he could.

  “Because it destroys all order and discipline,” Straha replied, as if to an idiot child. “Body paint shows rank and assignment and seniority; it is not to be used for frivolous purposes of decoration.”

  “Shiplord, it does show assignment: it shows that the males who wear it are prisoners of the United States,” Sam said. “If you want it to show seniority, too, the males who have been prisoners longer can wear more stars than the others. Would that be all right?”

  He tried to sound quiet and reasonable. All the same, he expected Straha to blow up like a pressure cooker with its safety valve stuck. But the shiplord surprised him: “The trouble with dealing with Tosevites is that one forgets how perspective shifts. Do you understand this?”

  “I don’t think I do, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “I’m sorry.”

  Straha made an exasperated noise, rather like a water heater with a slow leak. “I explain further, then. With the Race, all is as it has been. We do not casually invent body paint designs. They all fit into a system we have been refining for more than a hundred thousand years.” Yeager knew enough to divide that by two to convert it into Earthly years, but it was still a hell of a long time. Straha went on, “You Big Uglies, though, you just casually invent. You care nothing for large-scale system; all that matters to you is short-term results.”

  “We’re at war, Shiplord. We were at war before the Race got here,” Yeager said. “Whatever it takes to win, we’ll do. We change all the time.”

  “This we have noticed, to our sorrow,” Straha said. “The weapons with which you fight us now are better than the ones you used when we first came. Ours are still the same. This is what I meant about looking at you from a different perspective. If something suits you for the moment, you will seize upon it, not caring a bit how it accords with what you formerly did. You invent a body-paint pattern on the spur of the moment.” The shiplord hissed again. “I suppose I should be used to that sort of thing, but every now and again it still shocks me. This was one of those times.”