Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Moments later, the blast wave caught up with the fleeing killercraft and flicked it through the air. It was stronger and sharper than Teerts had expected. The airframe groaned under the sudden strain, but held. Together, Teerts and the killercraft’s computer rewon control.

  “By the Emperor,” Hossad said softly as he, too, mastered his killercraft. “We take for granted what the atom can do. It gives us electric power, it electrolyzes hydrogen and oxygen for our vehicles, it powers our ships between the stars. But when you let it loose—” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on. Teerts wished he had a taste of ginger.

  Jisrin, still matter-of-fact, put the capper on the mission: “The target is destroyed. Returning to base.”

  Atvar listened to the bestial howls of rage that came over the crackling shortwave frequencies from Deutschland. One thing the atomic bomb that had smote München had not done: it had not got rid of Hitler, the not-emperor of the Deutsche. Even without understanding a single word of the Deutsch language, Atvar also gathered that it had not persuaded Hitler to yield.

  He turned away from the incomprehensible rantings of the Deutsch not-emperor to a translation: “We shall have vengeance!” Hitler was saying; the translator added an emphatic cough to show the stress the Big Ugly put on the words. “Our strength lies not in defense but in attack. Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles. We shall once more make the heroic decision to resist Our idea—our people—is right, and so is invincible; every persecution will lead to our inner strengthening. This war is one of the elemental conflicts which will usher in a new world era. At its end, Deutschland will either be a world power or will not be at all! If the Deutsch people despair now, they will deserve no better than they get. If they despair, I will not be sorry for them if God lets them down.”

  The translator added, “Speaking in my own voice for a moment, I should note that all of these not particularly rational utterances are accompanied by vehement and prolonged applause from the Big Uglies in the audience. Rational or not, Hitler has a strong hold on the Tosevites of his not-empire.”

  When he resumed, the febrile tone he assumed showed he was once more passing on Hitler’s words: “We shall have vengeance, I say again! For every bomb the Lizards use against us, we shall use six, eight, ten, a hundred bombs against them. We shall destroy them so completely, it shall be as if they never were. They have dared test themselves against the master race, and they shall fail!” The translator added another emphatic cough, then said, “This preposterous and vain pronouncement was greeted with more applause.”

  Atvar turned off the Tosevite’s speech. “Well, what do you think of that?” he asked Kirel.

  “Destroying München has failed to intimidate the Deutsche,” Kirel answered. “I find this most unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate, yes,” Atvar said, with an emphatic cough of his own. Kirel’s restrained pattern of speech could sometimes be most effective. Atvar went on, “What do you make of this Hitler’s threat, to respond bomb against bomb?”

  “My opinion, Exalted Fleetlord, is that he will do so if he has the ability,” Kirel said. “And, since analysis confirms that this latest bomb was made partly from nuclear material not stolen from us . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “—He either does have the ability or will have it soon,” Atvar finished unhappily. “That is my conclusion also. My other conclusion is that this war has just grown a great deal worse. Spirits of departed Emperors willing, I shall not have to say that so often in future.”

  Mutt Daniels opened his canteen and poured from it into his cup. The liquid that went from one to the other was a deep amber color. He lifted the cup in salute before he drank. “Mud in your eye, Miss Willard,” he said, and gulped the whiskey down.

  “Ain’t this a hell of a thing, Lieutenant?” said Sergeant Muldoon, who had his own canteen full of whiskey. “Havin’ a drink in the Frances E. Willard Home, I mean.” He drank, too. “All the little old ladies from the WCTU must be spinning in their graves, I figure.”

  “I seen plenty o’ the Women’s Christian Temperance Union down home in Mississippi when I was growing up,” Mutt answered. “I figured anything those sour old prunes were against had to be good enough for me to want to be for it. And you know what? Put it all together, I reckon I was right”

  “Damn straight you were,” Muldoon said, taking another drink.

  “But that ain’t why I chose this here house for us,” Daniels said.

  Herman Muldoon laughed. “I know why you chose it: it’s standing up.”

  “You ain’t just joking.” Even here in Evanston, north of the Chicago city line, devastation was heavy. The Northwestern University campus had been pounded hard. The water filtration plant close by was just a ruin. Maybe it was the whiskey—though he’d had only the one swig—and maybe just frustration boiling up in him, but he burst out, “God damn it to hell, we don’t need to be in Evanston. We should be takin’ the fight to the Lizards down in Chicago.”

  “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “But as long as we’re here, we got ourselves a nice fire goin’, an’ we can get snug as a couple of bugs in a rug.”

  The fireplace in the sitting room of the Willard House still worked fine, and there was anything but a shortage of wood to feed it. A plaque on the wall of the room said it was dedicated to Miss Anna Gordon, Frances Willard’s lifelong companion and a world president of the WCTU in her own right. Mutt wondered exactly what lifelong companion meant. Lucille Potter, who was dead now, had shown him that even if it meant what he suspected it did, it wasn’t necessarily as shocking and sinful as he’d been brought up to believe.

  “You know what?” he said, almost plaintively, to Muldoon. “You get stuck in a war, you don’t just set your body on the line. Everything you knew or thought you knew goes up into the front lines with you, and some of it ends up dead even if you don’t.”

  “That’s over my head, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “I’m a dumb noncom, nothin’ else but I leave the thinking to officers like you.” He laughed to show Mutt wasn’t supposed to take him all that seriously. “What I think is, sounds like you could use another drink.”

  “I’d like to, don’t you doubt it for a minute,” Daniels answered. “But if I’m gonna keep track of this platoon full of wild men, I can’t afford to get me lit up.”

  Later, he wondered if God had been listening to him. A brilliant yellow-white light blazed through the south-facing window of the sitting roam, printing his shadow against the far wall, the one with the plaque on it. It reminded him of the way a flashbulb could do the same thing. But a flashbulb was there and then it was gone, while this light was not only brighter than any flashbulb but went on for several seconds, though it got fainter and redder as time went on.

  The ground jerked under Daniels’ feet. As he exclaimed in surprise and alarm, he heard a report that reminded him of a big artillery piece being fired maybe a hundred yards away. The few shards of glass that remained in the sitting-room window blew out. By luck, none of them pierced him or Muldoon.

  “What the hell was that?” the sergeant burst out. “Biggest darn boom I’ve ever been through, and I’ve been through some doozies. Somebody’s ammunition dump going up, maybe. Hope to Jesus it was theirs and not ours.”

  “Yeah.” Mutt went to the window to see what he could see. Muldoon joined him a moment later. For perhaps half a minute, they stared south together. Then, very softly and not in the least irreverently, Mutt whispered, “Goddamn.” Muldoon’s head bobbed up and down. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.

  Mutt had seen plenty of explosions and their aftermaths. He’d seen an ammunition dump go up, too, maybe from a lucky hit, maybe because somebody got careless—not enough was left afterwards for anyone to be sure. But he’d never seen anything like this.

  He had no idea how high into the night the glowing cloud mounted. Miles, that was all he could be sure of. Other thing was, the base of that cloud l
ooked a lot farther away than he’d figured it would—which meant the explosion was even bigger than he’d guessed.

  “Goodgodalmightydamnwillyoulookitthat!” Muldoon said, as if words had just been invented and nobody quite knew yet where they stopped and started. Mutt had the feeling that words to describe what he was seeing hadn’t been invented yet, and maybe never would be.

  What was he seeing, anyhow? Pursuing his earlier thought, he said, “That ain’t no ammo dump. You could blow up all the ammo in the world, and it wouldn’t make a cloud like that there one.”

  “Yeah,” Muldoon agreed, almost with a sigh. “Whatever it is, it came down on the Lizards’ heads, not ours. Look where it’s at, Lieutenant—that’s the part of Shytown we retreated out of.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Mutt said. “Maybe we was lucky to get out of there when we did. Or maybe—” He stopped, his eyes going wide. “Or maybe, an’ I hate like hell to say it, the brass ain’t so dumb after all.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ about, uh, sir?” Muldoon said. Then he got a faraway look on his face, too. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Lieutenant, you think we pulled back on purpose so those scaly bastards could walk right into that big boom like they was moths divin’ into a fire?”

  “Don’t know if it’s so, but it stands to reason,” Daniels answered. “The Russians, they figured out last year how to make one of them big bombs the Lizards use, and the Nazis, they fired one off last week, I hear, ‘less’n the radio’s tellin’ more lies’n usual.”

  “Fat lot of good it did ’em, too,” Muldoon retorted. “The Lizards went and blew one of their cities to hell and gone right afterwards.”

  Mutt refused to let that distract him. “If the Reds can do it and the goddamn Nazis can do it, though, why the hell can’t we? You think we don’t got a bunch o’ guys with thick glasses and what d’you call ’ems—slide rules, that’s it—tryin’ to figure out how to make our own bombs? You’re crazy if you do. And you ain’t never seen an explosion like that, and neither have I, so what do you think it’s liable to be?”

  “That makes sense, sounds like,” Muldoon said reluctantly. Then he brightened. “Jeez, if that’s what it was, Lieutenant, a whole bunch o’ Lizards and all their gear just went up in smoke.”

  “Reckon that was the idea.” Daniels thought back to the crew who’d been hiding the big crate in what looked like more rubble. Had they been setting the bomb there so it would be waiting for the Lizards when they advanced in pursuit of the withdrawing Americans? He didn’t know for sure; no way he ever would, but he couldn’t think of any better reason for wanting to conceal a crate. He laughed. You’d have a devil of a time proving him wrong, that was for sure.

  “Let’s say it was one o’ those bombs, Lieutenant,” Muldoon persisted. “When the Germans used one, next thing you know the Lizards knocked one of their towns flat, like I said. They gonna do the same thing to us?”

  Mutt hadn’t thought about that. Now that he did, he found he didn’t fancy any of the answers that popped into his head. “Damfino,” he said at last. “We’ll just have to wait and find out, seems like to me. That’d be a damned ugly way to fight a war, wouldn’t it? You blew up all o’ my guys in this city over here, so I’ll go and blow up all o’ yours in that one over yonder.”

  “Shit, that’s what the krauts and the limeys were doin’ to each other when the Lizards got here,” Muldoon said. “But doin’ it with one bomb to a city makes you start runnin’ out o’ cities pretty damn quick.”

  “Lordy, don’t it just,” Mutt said. “Like two guys playin’ Russian roulette, ‘cept they’re pointin’ the guns at each other an’ five o’ the chambers are loaded. Maybe all six of ’em, you come to that.”

  The cloud to the south of them was fading now, dispersing, the wind sweeping it away toward Lake Michigan. Pretty soon it would be gone. But the horrible dilemmas it raised would not disappear so soon.

  Uneasily, Mutt looked north, east, west, and then last of all south once more, toward and past the dissipating cloud. “What you tryin’ to do, Lieutenant?” Muldoon asked. “You tryin’ to figure out where the Lizards are gonna drop the one they use to answer ours?”

  Daniels scowled. He didn’t like being that obvious. But he didn’t want to be a liar, either, not when he was talking about something as important as this. He sighed. “Yeah,” he said.

  The alarm hissed hideously. When Atvar woke, for a moment he thought he was dreaming about the last time the alarm had gone off. Then, incontestably, his senses came to full alertness, and the alarm was still yammering away. And there was Pshing’s face in the communicator screen, just as it had been that dreadful, all-too-recent night.

  “Activate two-way voice,” Atvar said to the computer, as he had then. Whatever disaster his adjutant had to report, it couldn’t be so hideous as news of the Deutsche with nuclear weapons. So the fleetlord told himself, even as he was asking Pshing, “What now?”

  “Exalted Fleetlord—” Pshing began, and then had trouble going on. Gathering himself, he finally managed to continue: “Exalted Fleetlord, I regret to have to inform you that the Tosevites of the not-empire of the United States detonated a fission bomb in the northern sector of the city known as Chicago. As our males had only just succeeded in occupying this sector, and as the front lay not far north, our concentrations in the area of the explosion, and thus our losses, appear to have been heavy.”

  A predator in the warm, friendly deserts of Home dug a pit in the sand and hid at the bottom. When an animal stumbled into the pit, it would scrabble at the loose sand, but generally slide down deeper and deeper until the trapmaker came out and devoured it with a minimum expenditure of effort. Atvar felt now like a creature trapped in one of those sand pits. No matter what he did on Tosev 3, things kept getting worse.

  He gathered himself. “Tell me the rest,” he said, as if knowing the rest could somehow restore what the Race had lost.

  Pshing clung to what had been normality with some of the same desperation Atvar felt “Exalted Fleetlord, the bomb appears to have been of the same type as that which the Deutsche employed against us: that is to say, some of the plutonium in it was stolen from us, while the Big Uglies produced the rest for themselves.”

  “But the American Big Uglies are on the other side of an immense ocean from the Deutsche and the Russkis,” Atvar said, “and we have made air passage between the continental masses rare, difficult, and dangerous for the Tosevites to attempt. To think they could have smuggled the explosive metal across in one of the few successful flights—” He checked himself. “Wait I am overlooking something.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord?” By the tone of his interrogative cough, Pshing didn’t see what Atvar was missing.

  “Water. It is the curse of this world whether liquid or frozen,” Atvar said. “The Big Uglies have so much of it to deal with, they transport goods on it much more readily than ever became the norm back on Home. We’ve not properly dealt with their ships and boats because we’ve assumed them to be of relatively small importance—and because we’ve had so many other commitments on this miserable iceball of a world that seemed more urgent We may now be paying the price for our inability to think as the Big Uglies do.”

  Pshing made an eloquent gesture of distaste. “If becoming like the Big Uglies is a condition for victory over them, I for one would almost rather lose.”

  “A distinct point,” Atvar admitted. “Were it only my own personal choice, I should agree with you. But we have committed ourselves to bringing this world and its noxious inhabitants under the rule of the Emperor.” He cast down his eyes. What would his sacred sovereign think when he learned of the difficulties the Race was having in annexing Tosev 3? First reports of combat were already on the way Home, but at laggard lightspeed would have completed only about a sixth part of their journey.

  “For the Emperor, I would brave anything,” Pshing said, seeming to take fresh spirit. Sometimes Atvar thought loyalty and reverence to the Emperor
were all that kept his males performing as they should on a world where the weather and the natives both seemed calculated to drive them mad.

  Atvar forced himself to think clearly, even if not like a Tosevite. “The composition of the bomb, like the one the Deutsche used, means the Americans will soon have more such weapons, of production entirely native. For that matter,” he added, as if reminding himself, “they may already have more such weapons, and be saving them for future strikes against us.”

  “Underestimating the capacity of the Big Uglies has caused us grief and misfortune ever since we arrived here,” Pshing said.

  “Truth,” Atvar answered wearily. “Even when we build their advances in technology into our planning, as we did with the campaign against the Deutsche, we still underestimate them—and pay the price for it.” He let out a long, hissing sigh. “Rouse the targeting specialists. Also rouse the shiplord Kirel and summon him to the operations chamber. We must plan our response to the American bomb.”

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

  When Kirel reached the operations chamber, Atvar couldn’t decide if he looked sleepy or stunned. A bit of both, perhaps. “Another nuclear weapon, your adjutant tells me,” the shiplord said. “From the Americans this time? Did I hear that correctly?”

  “You did,” Atvar said. “As at Breslau, our progress at Chicago has been halted, and the spearhead of our forces destroyed.” He hissed again, this time thoughtfully. “In both instances, we were led to impale ourselves on the bomb by unforced or lightly forced retreats on the part of the Big Uglies. In future, we shall be more wary.”

  “A worthy plan, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “but the very recent past has been extremely damaging to us. Have we any notion where the Americans prepared their fission bomb?”