Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Bugger off,” Goldfarb said, which summed up his comrades’ responses pretty well, too. The ack-ack gunners laughed.

  Henry said, “What they were shootin’ at, it were up in the sky, and they weren’t in range of the bleedin’ Lizards every minute of every bleedin’ day. ‘Ad it right soft, they did, you ask me.”

  “Amen to that,” Goldfarb said, and the other RAF men on the wagon added not only agreement but profane embellishment. If you weren’t a pilot, you were probably safer in the RAF than as an infantryman. You certainly lived softer in the RAF than in the poor bloody infantry, as you learned if you found yourself at the thin end of the wedge on the ground, the way Goldfarb had.

  The driver pulled back on the reins. His two-horse team stopped. One of the animals bent its head and began pulling up grass. “Taxi ride’s done, lads,” the driver said. He pointed, “You go over there now.”

  “Over there” was a Nissen hut, its semicylindrical bulk black against the slightly lighter sky. Goldfarb scrambled down from the wagon. He led the way toward the hut. Several of the other RAF men hung back, grumbling. He was glad he’d be returning to a job that could use his special skills. Any bloke could make an infantryman.

  He opened the door and pushed his way through two blackout curtains. The light inside came from candles and lanterns, not electric fixtures, but still seemed bright to his night-accustomed eyes. A tired-looking flight sergeant waved him over to a desk piled high with forms. “All right, let’s see what we can do with you,” he said. He examined Goldfarb’s draggled uniform. “You’ve not had the easiest time of it, seems like.”

  Goldfarb shrugged. “You do what you have to do.”

  “That’s the way of it,” the flight sergeant said, nodding. He pulled out a form and a short nub of pencil. “Very good—stand and deliver.” Goldfarb rattled off his name—surname first, Christian name (an irony in his case), middle initial—rank, and service number. The flight sergeant wrote them down, then asked, “And your speciality, uh, Goldfarb?”

  “I’m a radarman, sir.”

  The flight sergeant started to write that down, too, then looked up sharply at Goldfarb. “Radarman? Somebody should have his bloody head examined, turning you into a ground-pounding Tommy. How the devil did that happen?”

  “Sir, I was on duty south of Leicester when the Lizards hit my establishment. We beat them back, but they wrecked the place and scattered us to the four winds. I fell in with some soldiers, and—” He spread his hands. “You know how it is, sir. I was separated from my unit, but I still wanted to fight, and so I did.”

  The flight sergeant sighed. “If I had a farthing for every time I’ve heard that story this past fortnight, I’d be the richest man in England, sure as hell. But a radarman—” His grin suddenly made him look younger than he had. “I’ll get a ‘well done’ for coming up with you, I will. What was your establishment, and what were you doing there?”

  “I don’t like to say, sir,” Goldfarb answered. Radar had been a secret vital to conceal from the Germans when the war was young. The Lizards knew more about radar than any Englishman was likely to learn for the next generation, but old habits died hard.

  “What was your establishment, and what did you do there?” the flight sergeant repeated with the air of a man used to cutting through multiple layers of nonsense. “Don’t waste my time.”

  The rest of the RAF men stood before other desks, giving out their service records. Goldfarb surrendered: “Sir, I was at Bruntingthorpe, working under Group Captain Hipple to fit radar into Meteor jets and to see what we could learn from captured Lizard radars.”

  “Then you bloody well ought to be court-martialed for letting anybody—and I mean up to field-marshal’s rank—take you away from what you were doing,” the flight sergeant said. At Goldfarb’s alarmed expression, he went on, “Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen. But getting yourself shot up would have been a bloody waste.”

  “Sir, Bruntingthorpe had taken a hiding,” Goldfarb said defensively. “I don’t even know if Group Captain Hipple is alive or dead.”

  “If he’s dead, someone else will be minding that store.” The flight sergeant spoke with conviction. “And if everyone above you has bought his plot, why, then the store is yours.”

  “Mine?” Goldfarb was mortified when his voice rose to a startled squeak, but couldn’t help it. He stammered on: “I’m—I don’t know enough on my own. I—”

  “If you know more about it than anyone else who might do it, it’ll be yours,” the flight sergeant said. He turned to the flying officer at the desk next to his. “Pardon me, sir, but I’ve a chap here who’s not only a radarman but has also been working on a couple of what sound like Most Secret projects.”

  “Just you wait one moment,” the flying officer said to the aircraftman standing in front of him. He grilled Goldfarb for a minute or two, then raised his eyes to the heavens in an expression of theatrical despair. “You were at Bruntingthorpe, you say, and they drafted you into the infantry? Dear God in heaven, I sometimes think we deserve to lose this war as punishment for our own stupidity.”

  “Sir, after the base took a pounding, I wanted to hit back at the Lizards any way I could,” Goldfarb said. “I wasn’t drafted into the infantry—I wanted to fight.”

  “Young man, that only makes you a fool, too.” The flying officer might possibly have been two years older than Goldfarb. “You can do them much more damage fighting with your head than with a rifle. Flight Sergeant, get on the telephone to London. Ask them where the most fitting possible billet for your man is, then see that he gets to it.” He gave his attention back to the patiently waiting aircraftman. “Do carry on. You were saying landing gear was your maintenance speciality?”

  “You come with me,” the flight sergeant told Goldfarb, rising from his desk.

  Goldfarb came. “You can ring up London?” he asked, following the other RAF man out into the night. “I thought all telephone lines were long since wrecked.”

  “All the civilian ones are, and likely to stay so,” the flight sergeant answered. “You want to be careful here; if you step off the path, you’ll be ankle-deep in muck. Can’t very well run a military outfit, though, without being able to talk back and forth, eh?”

  “I suppose not.” Goldfarb couldn’t see the path he wasn’t supposed to step off of, which gave each step a certain feeling of adventure. He went on, “It must have been a bit dicey while the Lizards stood between here and London.”

  “Oh, it was,” the flight sergeant agreed cheerily. “We were cut off a couple of times, as a matter of fact. But ground-laid cable is not what you’d call conspicuous, and we managed to infiltrate men to make repairs the couple of times it did get broken. Ah, here we are.”

  He opened the door to a Maycrete building whose walls were already beginning to crumble even though they’d been up for only a couple of years. After the usual pair of blackout curtains, he and Goldfarb went into a stuffy little room where a corporal sat relaxing by what looked like a fancied-up version of an ordinary field telephone.

  The corporal nodded to the flight sergeant. “ ‘Ello, Fred,” he said, dropping his aitches like the lower-class Londoner he undoubtedly was. “ ‘Oo’s this bloke wiv yer?”

  “Flying officer says we’ve got to ring up London, figure out what the devil to do with him,” the flight sergeant—Fred—answered. “Get them on the horn for me, would you?”

  “Right y’are.” The corporal vigorously turned the crank on the side of the telephone, then picked up the handset. Goldfarb watched the process with interest. Any new gadget fascinated him, and he hadn’t seen this model telephone before. He wished he could ask questions, but the corporal was intent on his task. Suddenly the fellow grinned and began to talk: “ ‘Ello, darlin’, I was ‘opin’ you’d be on tonight. ‘Ow’s tricks?”

  “Chat her up another time, Nigel,” Fred said dryly. “This is business.”

  The corporal nodded, saying, “Listen, love,
put me through”—it came out frew—”to the blokes in Personnel, would you? That’s a lamb—we got us a square peg wot wants a round ‘ole.” He waited, then passed the handset to the flight sergeant.

  Fred told Goldfarb’s story to whoever was on the other end in London. The longer he talked, the more excited he sounded and the more details he asked of Goldfarb. “Very good, sir. Thank you, sir,” he said at last. “I’ll see that he’s sent on there straightway.” He hung up.

  “Sent on where?” Goldfarb asked.

  “Dover,” the flight sergeant answered. “The Lizards never got that far, and I gather something which may interest you is going on there, though they wouldn’t tell me—What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, sir, not really,” Goldfarb said. He’d been thinking of a song from an American film he’d seen back before the war began, a catchy number called “California, Here I Come.” After all this time, he’d be right back where he started from.

  Barbara Yeager folded her hands over her belly. More forcefully than a shout, the wordless gesture reminded Sam she was pregnant. After not showing for what seemed a very long time, these past couple of months she’d ballooned. A couple of months more and he’d be a father.

  “I wish you weren’t going away,” Barbara said. She was a trouper; that was as close as she would come to reminding him things didn’t always work out exactly as planned. Just because the baby was due around Christmastime didn’t mean it had to wait that long.

  He shrugged. “They gave me my orders, hon. It’s not like I have a whole lot of choice.” He patted the stripes on his shirtsleeve.

  “You don’t fool me one bit, Sam Yeager,” Barbara said, laughing at him. Maybe they’d been married only seven months or so, but she read him like a book. “You’re champing at the bit, and you know it. You and your pulp fiction.”

  She said it affectionately, so it didn’t sting, or not much. But he’d heard similar noises from so many people that his response sounded more nettled than it was: “It’s science fiction, not just any pulp fiction. And with the Lizards here, it’s not fiction any more, it’s the straight goods, same as . . . what the Met Lab was working on.” They were alone in their room, but he didn’t mention atomic bombs by name.

  Barbara spread her hands. “That’s all true, and I admit every word of it. But you’re as excited about working with a real live spaceship as a little kid would be with an all-day sucker.”

  “Well, what if I am?” he said, yielding the point. “I earned this chance, and I want to make the most of it. If I do a good job here, the way I did with the work on that light-amplifier gadget, maybe—just maybe—they’ll turn me into an officer. And that’s not minor league at all. I spent too much time in the bushes, babe—I want to hit the bigs.”

  “I know,” Barbara answered. “I think that’s good—I think it’s better than good, as a matter of fact. But as I said, you can’t fool me. If we start building spaceships of our own, you want to ride one, don’t you?”

  Sam hugged her. The way her belly pressed against his reminded him again of the child growing within her. He said, “Having a wife who understands me is a darn good thing. Sure, I’d love that, if it ever happens. And the only way it will is if I get real good at talking with the Lizards about how rockets work and what you’re supposed to do with ’em. I don’t have the education to know how to make ’em myself, or the training—and the reflexes—to be a pilot.”

  “I understand all that,” she said, and kissed him fiercely. “And I’m proud of you for it, and I love you for working hard to make something of yourself—and I wish you weren’t going.”

  “But I’ve got to.” He started to show her his wristwatch. Before he could, somebody knocked on the door. He quickly kissed her. “I’ve got to go now, hon.” She nodded. He opened the door.

  Standing in the hall were an Army major and a Lizard with pretty fancy body paint. “Morning, Yeager,” the major said. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a thin, sandy mustache. The name tag above his right breast pocket said TOMPKINS.

  “Morning, sir.”

  The major glanced toward the Lizard. “And you’ll know Vesstil, I expect—Straha’s pilot for his flight down here.”

  “Oh, sure.” Sam shifted into the Lizards’ language: “In the name of the Emperor, I greet you and wish you health.” Every time he talked with a male of the Race, he was reminded of just how informal a language English was. He’d never thought about that till he started picking up Lizard talk.

  “I return your wishes in the Emperor’s name,” Vesstil said in fair English. Even using English, he lowered his eyes at the mention of his sovereign.

  “Okay, let’s go.” Tompkins sounded like a man in a hurry. Yeager waved to Barbara one last time and set off behind him. To Vesstil, Tompkins said, “We have clothes downstairs for you, to make you look like a human being if your friends upstairs are watching.”

  “They are not my friends, not now,” the Lizard pilot said. “If they were my friends, I should not be here assisting you.” The remark held an unmistakable note of reproof. Sam wondered if Tompkins heard it.

  A Lizard in trousers and shirt and wide-brimmed hat could not help looking anything but ridiculous, not at close range. From the air, though, he’d seem just another Big Ugly, which was the point of the exercise. He and his human companions got into a buckboard. A driver dressed like a hayseed clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The wagon rattled off.

  “We’d go faster if we were riding horses,” Sam said. “We would if Vesstil here could ride one, anyway.” He translated the remark for the Lizard’s benefit.

  “I am willing to teach you how to fly the shuttlecraft the Race has made,” Vesstil said with dignity. “I am not willing to learn to barbarously balance myself on the back of a beast. These creatures strike me as being more dangerous than flying between the stars, which is but a matter of routine. Beasts are unpredictable.” By the way he said it, that was an inexpiable sin.

  They were on the road north for several days. The highways held little traffic, and all of it drawn by horses or mules. Yeager felt transported back into the days of his father’s youth. Once they passed out of the pine woods and into those where broad-leafed trees predominated, the fiery colors of autumn replaced green. They interested Vesstil. None of the humans in the wagon could explain why the leaves changed color every year.

  A sign on US 63 said they’d just passed from Arkansas up into Missouri. They’d also passed into what looked as if it had been one hell of a forest fire not so long ago. Yeager wondered if it had started when the rocket ship—the shuttlecraft, Vesstil called it—landed. He turned to Tompkins and said, “Sir, how do you go about hiding a shuttlecraft?”

  “You’ll see when we get there,” the major answered, and set a finger alongside his nose. Sam didn’t know what to make of that, but he kept quiet.

  Before long, the wagon was jolting down winding country roads and then along unpaved tracks that would turn into hub-deep glue at the first good rain. Off in the distance, Yeager saw what looked like the wreckage of the biggest tent in the world. About half a mile farther on, he spotted another enormous canvas Big Top, this one with a couple of bomb craters close by.

  The proverbial cartoon lightbulb went on above his head. “We built so many tents, the Lizards never figured out which one had the pea under it.”

  “Well, actually, they did,” Tompkins said. “But by the time they did, we’d managed to strip it pretty completely. They manufacture these critters the same way we do Chevvies, except maybe even better—everything comes apart real easy so you can work on it if you have to.”

  “How else would you build something?” Vesstil asked.

  “You’d be amazed,” Major Tompkins answered, rolling his eyes behind the horn-rims. “Your people have had a long, long time to learn to do everything the smooth way, the easy way, the efficient way. It’s not like that with us. A lot of the stuff we’re doing now, we’re doing for the very first time. W
e aren’t always as good at it as we might be, and we make a lot of dumb mistakes. But one way or another, we get it done.”

  “This the Race has learned, often to its sorrow.” Vesstil made one of the leaky-kettle noises Lizards used when they were thinking hard. “The shiplord Straha, my commander that was, has this trait also, in larger measure, at least, than is usual for a male of the Race. Because the fleetlord would not heed him, he decided to join his fate to you.”

  And yet Straha had had kittens about unauthorized body-paint designs. Even a radical Lizard, Sam thought, was a reactionary by human standards. He said, “I don’t really get to go aboard a real live spaceship, then? Too bad. Even working with the parts will be pretty good, though.”

  “A question, if I may,” Vesstil said. “How does your English have a word for spaceship and the idea of a spaceship without having the spaceship itself? Does not the word follow the thing it describes?”

  “Not always, not with us,” Yeager answered with a certain amount of pride. “We have something called science fiction. That means stories that imagine what we’ll be able to build when we know more than we do now. People who write those stories sometimes have to invent new words or use old ones in new ways to get across the new things or ideas they’re talking about.”

  “You Tosevites, you imagine too much and you move too fast to make what you imagine real—so the Race would say,” Vesstil answered with a sniffy hiss. “Change needs study, not—stories.” He hissed again.

  Sam felt like laughing, or possibly pounding his head against the side of the buckboard. Of all the things he’d never imagined, a Lizard sneering at the concept of science fiction stood high on the list.

  They came to a little hamlet called Couch. Yeager had been in a lot of little backwoods towns before. He’d waited for the locals to give them the suspicious once-over he’d got more times than he could count. Having Vesstil along should have made things worse. But the Couchians or Couchites or whatever they were went about their business. Sam wondered how many visiting firemen had come to look over the spaceship. Enough to get them used to the idea of strangers, anyway.