Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  They were almost out of Hot Springs National Park when Barbara said in a small voice, “I’m sorry I barked at you back there.” Sam raised a questioning eyebrow. Looking down at the ground, Barbara went on, “I mean about hiking up my skirt. I remembered a time when—” She didn’t go on.

  Yeager kicked at the dirt. What she probably meant was that she remembered a time when Jens Larssen had hiked up her skirt. If she hadn’t thought Jens was dead, she never would have ended up with him. He knew that damn well. After a few seconds—maybe a couple of seconds too long—he said, “Don’t worry about it. Nobody here but the two of us now. That’s what counts.” With a laugh, he set his hand on her belly again. “Nobody here but the three of us, I mean.”

  Barbara nodded. They walked on. That’s what really counts, Sam thought. If she hadn’t been pregnant, dollars to doughnuts she would have gone back to Larssen when she found out he was alive. Yeager still marveled that she hadn’t. You play half your life in the minor league—and most of that in the low minors, to boot—you get used to winding up on the short end of the stick. Winning a big one like having the woman you’ve fallen in love with pick you instead of the other guy—that was pretty special.

  When they rounded the last corner and came into sight of the Army and Navy General Hospital, Barbara slipped her hand into his. He squeezed it gratefully. Every once in a while, he wondered whether she regretted the choice she’d made. That was another question he was smart enough never, ever to ask.

  A horse-drawn wagon pulled up in front of the two towers of the hospital building just as he and Barbara got to the entrance. A GI—even if the fellow was in civvies, Yeager knew one when he saw one—took a gadget, a Lizardy-looking gadget, from the bed of the wagon and started to carry it in.

  “What the devil you got there?” Yeager asked him. The thing, whatever it was, was cylindrical, maybe a foot long and three or four inches wide, with a glittering lens at one end and some wires trailing off the other.

  “Bomb guider,” the man answered, which left Sam unenlightened. The fellow went on, “We took it from a Lizard dude up in Chicago, figured we’d bring it down here to get the straight skinny on what it does and how it does it. We’ve got several up there, and we can’t make ’em work worth a damn.” He pointed at Yeager. “You talk Lizard talk?”

  “Matter of fact, I do, not too bad,” Yeager answered.

  “Okay. I figured a lot of guys down here would,” the GI said. “You know what skelkwank means? That’s what the Lizard POWs say when they talk about this stupid thing, and nobody up north can make it make sense.”

  “Skelkwank?” Yeager echoed. “Yeah, that’s a word I’ve run into.” He was damn glad it was, too. Saying you were an expert and then showing you weren’t got old fast. “It’s something to do with light—I’m not sure exactly what, and I’m not sure anybody else human is, either. I’ve heard Lizards say skelkwank when they’re talking about rangefinders, things like that.”

  “That helps some,” the fellow said, nodding. “How’s skelkwank light different than any other kind, though?”

  “There you’ve got me,” Sam admitted. “Tell you what—bring that thing inside and we’ll round up a Lizard or two and ask ’em some questions. They’re pretty good about giving straight answers. As soon as they get captured, they figure we’re their superiors now, and they have to obey us. They’re not as ornery as people, you know what I mean?”

  “Once they’re caught, they’re not, maybe,” the man with the skelkwank device said. “Long as they’re still carrying guns, they’re no fun at all.”

  Sam gave an emphatic cough to show he agreed with that. The other fellow understood and nodded. Barbara said, “Here, Sam, you’re working again. Give me the picnic basket. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Okay, honey.” Sam held the door open for her and for the soldier with the Lizard gadget, then followed them into the lobby of the hospital building. He spotted Ristin there, talking with one of the human doctors. Ristin waved to him, a human gesture he’d picked up. Sam waved back, and then waved him over.

  Ristin came up, gaudy in his American-flag style “official” POW body paint. “Hello, superior sir,” he said in his hissing English. “You need me?”

  “Sure do, pal” Yeager pointed to the device the other man held. “Tell me about that thing, will you?”

  Ristin turned one eye turret toward it. “That? That is a skelkwank sight, I think maybe from a bomb. Artillery shells use a smaller model. Skelkwank in your language is . . . is—” He paused and fluttered his lingers, a Lizardy way of showing frustration. “I think your language has not this word. Yep, that is what! think.”

  The fellow with the skelkwank sight snorted in amusement. “First time I ever heard a Lizard go, ‘Yep.’ ”

  Yeager kicked at the carpet. “He got that from me,” he said, mildly embarrassed. “I’m the guy he learned English from, and I say it. Made me laugh, too, first time I heard it from him” He turned back to Ristin. “Okay, we don’t have a word for it. Skelkwank has to do with light, right? What makes skelkwank light special?”

  “Why, it comes from a ftaskelkwank, of course,” Ristin said. Tacking fta- onto the front of a word in Lizard talk was about like tacking -er onto the back of one in English. A ftaskelkwank was something that turned light skelkwank a skelkwanker, in other words. The only trouble was, that didn’t help much with skelkwank still undefined.

  “Of course,” Yeager said with a sigh. “What does the ftaskelkwank do with the light to change it from regular to skelkwank?”

  “It makes the light—” Ristin used another Lizard word.

  Sam turned to the fellow with the gadget. “I’ve heard that term before, too. It means something like ‘coherent.’ I don’t know what that means here, though.”

  “Coherent, yep.” Ristin liked learning new English words. “Most light, ordinary light, is of waves of all different lengths, photons—is right word?—of all different energies. Coherent light has only one length of wave, only one energy. Is all exact same color, you could say.”

  “So if I put red cellophane on top of my flashlight lens, I’d have coherent light?” Sam asked, trying to figure out what the Lizard meant.

  “Nep. I mean, nope.” Ristin’s mouth fell open: he was laughing at himself. “Not all photons of exact same energy, only close. Not all going in exact same direction. This is what coherent means.”

  The GI with the Lizard skelkwank device said, “Okay, how do you get this, uh, coherent light?”

  “Take rod made of right kind of crystal,” Ristin answered. “Grind ends very, very flat, put on coating like mirror. Pump energy into the crystal. Coherent light will come out. Is one way. Are others.”

  For all the sense he made, he might as well have suddenly started speaking Tibetan. Yeager had seen that happen before when the Lizards talked about goodies they had and people didn’t. He said, “Never mind how. What can you do with a ftaskelkwank once you’ve got it?”

  “Aim it at, say, one of your landcruisers—no, tanks, you say. Skelkwank sight here sees that coherent light reflected, guides rocket or bomb straight to it. This is why we do not miss much when we use these sights.”

  The soldier stuck the sight under Ristin’s snout. “How does it see the coherent light and not any other kind?”

  “How?” Ristin turned one eye on the sight, the other on the soldier. He started to answer, spluttered, stopped, started over, stopped again. “I do not know how it does this. I only know that it does this.”

  “He’s just a dogface like me,” Yeager said, “or a dogface like I used to be—I’ve got three stripes when I’m not in civvies. You want more than that, friend, we’ve got a couple of Lizard technicians down here who’ll talk as long as you’ll listen.”

  The fellow with the sight stared at Sam. “You got this much out of an ordinary Lizard soldier? Holy Jesus, Sergeant, up north they’ve been beating around the bush with technicians who haven’t said as much in weeks as
I just got in ten minutes here. You’re doing a hell of a job.”

  “Thanks very much,” Sam said. “Here, let me take you over to Major Houlihan. He’ll be able to fix you up with the Lizards who can tell you the most.” He patted Ristin on his scaly shoulder. “Thanks for helping us out.”

  “It is for me a pleasure, superior sir,” Ristin said.

  Yeager was still grinning when he got upstairs. He told the story to Barbara, who listened while he burbled on. When he was done, she said, “Why should you be so surprised when somebody tells you you’re good at what you do?”

  “Because it’s not anything like something I imagined I could be good at, and because I don’t have any education to speak of—you know that, honey—and because it’s important to the country,” he answered. “Suppose you got into riveting some kind of way, and after a little while on the job you riveted more wings onto B-17s than anybody else at the plant, even people who’ve been riveting for twenty years. Wouldn’t you be surprised about that?”

  “But Sam, nobody’s been talking with the Lizards for twenty years,” Barbara reminded him. “You have more experience at that than just about anyone else here. And you may not have thought you’d be good at it, but by now you should have seen that you are.” She gave him the kind of appraising look that always made him nervous, lest she see less than she wanted. “Isn’t that what you’d call bush-league thinking, thinking you’re not good enough for the big time?”

  He stared at her. “What are you doing using baseball talk on me?”

  “I’m married to you, remember?” she answered, sticking her tongue out at him. “Don’t you think I’d look for some way to get ideas through your thick head?”

  Sam walked over and gave her a big kiss. “I’m a heck of a lucky guy, you know that? When I got you, I wasn’t thinking bush league at all, not even a little bit.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “We keep on like this for another thirty or forty years and we’ll have something pretty fine.” He nodded. She pulled back a little as his beard rasped her cheek. That, unfortunately, reminded him how unlikely they were to live another thirty or forty years, or to be free if they did live so long.

  The pitching deck of a ship in the Baltic did not strike Vyacheslav Molotov as the ideal locale on which to hold diplomatic negotiations. Stalin, however, had not asked his opinion, merely sent him forth.

  Being aboard ship had one advantage: it meant he could avoid flying, an experience he heartily loathed. Molotov watched the fishing vessel approach. It flew a Danish flag, white cross on red. His own ship sported the red, gold, and green ensign of Lithuania, even though that unhappy land had first been incorporated into the USSR and then overrun by the Nazis. But the Lizards were more likely to shoot at vessels displaying German and Soviet flags than those of small, weak nations.

  A signal light blinked across the water from the fishing boat. “Comrade Foreign Minister, it is indeed the vessel of the German foreign minister,” the captain said. “They ask permission to come alongside.”

  “I am ready to meet with von Ribbentrop,” Molotov said—not eager, but ready. “As for matters of shiphandling, that is why you are here, is it not?”

  “Yes, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” The captain met icy sarcasm with wooden obedience. “I shall have them convey the foreign minister to this vessel.”

  “You had better,” Molotov answered. “Anyone who thinks I am going to board that—scow—is sadly mistaken.” The Soviet ship in Lithuanian colors was a rust-bucket freighter. Next to the fishing boat now sidling up to it, it seemed a decadent capitalist luxury liner by comparison. A strong odor of stale herring made Molotov wrinkle his nose—or perhaps, he thought, it was only Ribbentrop and his Nazi policies he was smelling.

  A couple of sailors let down a rope ladder to the deck of the fishing boat. The German foreign minister scrambled up to the Soviet ship like a monkey, closely followed by his interpreter, who rather resembled one. Molotov’s own interpreter appeared at his elbow. Each side guarded itself against twisted meaning from the other.

  Ribbentrop turned his complacent pop-eyed face, marbled with fat like expensive beef, toward the Lithuanian flag. Half sketching a salute to that banner of a country which no longer existed, he said, “I honor the brave Lithuanian people.”

  Molotov was more than a little surprised his opposite number remembered that flag represented Lithuania rather than Estonia or Latvia. He was also coldly furious, though he kept his face and voice expressionless as he replied, “If you honor them so much, why did Germany include Lithuania in the territory designated as a Soviet sphere of influence in the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of 1939, which you helped negotiate? You do recall that clause, I trust?”

  Ribbentrop coughed and spluttered and turned a mottled shade of red. Thanks to Hitler’s favor, he could bluster his way through the Nazi hierarchy, but that meant nothing to Molotov. “Well, let us speak of the present and not of the past,” Ribbentrop said with the air of a man making a great concession.

  “You would have been well-advised to do that from the beginning,” Molotov said.

  “Do not take that tone with me,” Ribbentrop snapped, the bluster returning to his voice. What was the old saying?—The German was either at your throat or at your feet. Much truth there—no middle ground. The foreign minister went on, “Just because you have managed to set off one explosive-metal bomb, you should not count yourselves little tin gods. We Germans are nearly to the point of being able to do that as well, and we are also deploying other new weapons in the fight against the Lizards.”

  “Your nerve gases, you mean,” Molotov said. Reluctantly, Ribbentrop nodded. Molotov remarked, “You Germans seem as reluctant to speak of your successes gassing Lizards as you were of your earlier successes gassing Jews.”

  The eyes of Molotov’s interpreter slid to him for a moment. Maybe he shaded the translation, for Ribbentrop’s man murmured into his principal’s ear afterwards. Ribbentrop said, “I am given to understand that the chemical weapon bureau of the Red Army has made inquiries as to the formula for these gases—both kinds.”

  Molotov changed the subject, the closest he would come to acknowledging the hit: “Let us detail the ways in which our two governments can cooperate in our common struggle against the imperialist aggressors.” Stalin was nervous about the Germans’ poison gas. Nuclear bombs, as yet, were too bulky to fit into any rocket mere humans could build. The same did not hold true for gas. Only the stretch of Lizard territory in what had been Poland kept the soil of the Soviet Union from being vulnerable to German rockets loaded with invisible death.

  Ribbentrop said, “This is why we were to meet here in this way. The rudeness that has gone on is distracting.” He seemed blithely unaware he had begun the rudeness himself. That probably was no affectation, either. The Nazis had a remarkable knack for ignoring their own flaws.

  “Let us try to be polite to each other for the rest of this meeting, then.” Molotov was not sure that was possible, but he would make the effort. “Since the Führer requested this meeting of General Secretary Stalin, I presume you will enlighten me as to what he intended to accomplish by it.”

  Ribbentrop gave a fishy stare, as if suspecting sarcasm. Molotov doubted he would recognize it till—or perhaps even after—it chewed out the seat of his pants. The German foreign minister said, “Indeed yes. The Führer wishes to discuss with you the possibilities of coordinating our future use of explosive-metal bombs against the Lizards.”

  “Does he?” Molotov had a good reason to stall for time: having nearly exhausted its store of explosive metal with its first blast, the Soviet Union, despite frantic work, was nowhere near ready to loose another one. Hearing that the Nazis were close enough to having a weapon of their own to want to talk with the USSR about how best to use it was disquieting, to say the least.

  But Ribbentrop nodded, his pop eyes bulging like a netted bream’s. “That is his purpose, yes. Between these explosive-metal bombs and
our poison gas, we are in a position to make this world a very unpleasant place for the invaders.”

  “And for ourselves,” Molotov said. “The last time I discussed with Hitler the use of explosive-metal bombs, his principal aim was to level Poland with them, and to use the poisons that spread from them to wreck the Soviet Union as well. To this we could not possibly agree. I hope also that your engineers and scientists are more careful than they were earlier at producing explosive metal without wrecking themselves in the process.”

  He wondered if Ribbentrop would resent any of that. It sounded sardonic, but every word of it was true. The German foreign minister said, “Production problems seem well on their way to solution.”

  “That is good news,” Molotov lied.

  “Is it not?” Ribbentrop agreed, not noticing the lie at all. Like a fat puppy, Molotov thought scornfully. And then he wonders why he gets kicked. Ribbentrop went on, “We were fortunate when the Lizards diverted forces from their offensive against us to assail England. That let us stop them at the Rhine. They had come uncomfortably close to our research facilities.”

  “How fortunate for you that they were halted,” Molotov agreed tonelessly, if he’d been Himmler, he would have had Ribbentrop’s interpreter reporting back to him. And, if he’d been Himmler, he’d have had some sharp things to say to Ribbentrop about talking too much. Molotov knew better than to reveal, even in the most general terms, where the Soviet nuclear weapons project was based.

  “Yes, wasn’t it?” Ribbentrop said without a shred of guile. “The Führer still is of the opinion that punishing the Lizards and the Jews in Poland is the best strategic course to take. It would open up that blocked passage between Germany and the Soviet Union and permit direct communications between our two great countries once more. This could be vital in carrying on the war.”