Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “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 himReb 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 go
ing 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-neededhim-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 pliable, 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.

  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 th
e 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 theVolk and theFuhrer 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 psychiatristmeshuggeh. I ought to know; I am one.” He paused. “You know whatmeshuggeh 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-”