Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “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 outfrew- ”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 saidTOMPKINS.

  “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 inte
rested 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. We 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 thingshe’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.

  The driver pulled up at a general store across the street from a big shed, much the largest building in town. Yeager wondered what it had been for: curing tobacco, maybe. It had that look. But, to his surprise, Tompkins didn’t take them over to the shed. Instead, they walked into the general store.

  The fellow behind the counter was on the scrawny side and had a scraggly gray beard. Those details and some bare shelves aside, he and his store might have been pulled out of a Norman Rockwell painting and set in motion. “Mornin’,” he said with the hillbilly twang Yeager had heard from players in ballparks scattered all across the country.

  “Morning, Terence,” Major Tompkins answered. “Mind if we use your back room?” Terence (hell of a name,Sam thought) shook his head. Before the major could lead Yeager and Vesstil through the door to the back room, it opened, and three men came out into the store.

  Sam stared. He knew he was staring, but he couldn’t help it. Of all the people he never would have expected to see in a small-town general store, Albert Einstein ranked high on the list-so high, in fact, that he needed a moment to realize one of the physicist’s companions was Benito Mussolini, complete with the enormous concrete jaw that showed up in all the newsreels.

  Einstein eyed Vesstil with the same fascination Yeager felt towardhim. Then the third man of the group spoke to Tompkins: “Bob’s still back there. He’s the one you’ll want to see, isn’t he, Major?”

  “Yes, General Eisenhower,” the major answered. By then, Yeager had given up staring. When you got to the point where a mere general’s company made him not worth noticing till he opened his mouth, you’d come a hell of a long way from the Three-I League.

  Eisenhower shepherded his VIPs out of the general store. Tompkins shepherded his not-so-VIPs into the backroom. Terence the storekeeper took everything in stride.

  The back room had a trapdoor set into the floor. As soon as he saw it, Yeager figured out what was going on. Sure enough, it led not to a basement but to a tunnel, formidably shored up with timber. Tompkins carried an old-fashioned lantern to light the way. The lantern might once have burned kerosene, but now the smell of hot fat came from it.

  The tunnel came out inside the shed, as Sam had expected it would. The interior of the building did smell powerfully of tobacco, though none was curing there now. Sam sighed. He still missed cigarettes, even if his wind was better these days than it had been for the past ten years.

  But he forgot all about his longing when he looked around. These tanks and lines and valves and unnamable gadgets had come out of a veritable spaceship Vesstil had flown down from outer space to the surface of the earth. If people could figure out how to duplicate them-and the frame in which they’d flown-space travel would turn real for mankind, too.

  Prowling among the disassembled pieces of the Lizard shuttlecraft was a tall, gray-haired man with slightly stooped shoulders and a long, thoughtful face. “Come on over with me-I’ll introduce you,” Tompkins said to Sam. Nodding to the tall man, he said, “Sir, this is Sergeant Sam Yeager, one of our best interpreters. Yeager, I’d like you to meet Robert Goddard. We filched him from the Navy when Vesstil brought Straha down in the shuttlecraft. He knows more about rockets than anyone around.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,” Yeager said, sticking out his hand. “I’ve read about your work inAstounding.”

  “Good-we won’t be starting from scratch with you, then,” Goddard said with an encouraging smile. He was somewhere in his fifties, Yeager thought, but not very healthy… or maybe, like so many people, just working himself to death. He went on, “Hank-your Major Tompkins-is too kind. A good many Germans know more about this business than I do. They’ve made big ones; I’ve just made small ones. But the principles stay the same.”

  “Yes, sir,” Yeager said. “Can we build-one of these?” He waved at the collection of hardware.

  “The mechanical parts we can match-or at least we can make equivalents for them,” Goddard said confidently. Then he frowned. “The electric lines we can also match. The electronic controls are another matter altogether. There our friends here”-he nodded to Vesstil-“are years, maybe centuries, ahead of
us. Working around that will be the tricky part.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sam repeated. “What will you want me to do, sir?”

  “You’re supposed to be a hot translator, aren’t you? You’ll run questions and answers back and forth between me and Vesstil. Between what we already know and what he can tell us-it’ll be a while before we get spaceships of our own, I expect, but even big rockets like the ones the Germans have would help us a lot. Hitting the Lizards from a couple of hundred miles away is a lot better than going at ’em face-to-face.”

  “That’s true, sir.” Sam wondered how big a rocket would have to be to carry an atomic bomb. He didn’t ask. Vesstil had no business hearing of such things, and he didn’t know whether Goddard was cleared for them, either.

  He laughed a little. The United States didn’t have a big rocket, and it didn’t have atomic bombs, either-and here he was, putting the two together. From everything he’d seen of the Lizards, they didn’t make leaps of imagination like that-which was why human beings still had a chance to win this war.

  14

  Nieh Ho-T’ing glowered at Liu Han. “You are the most exasperating woman in the history of the world,” he snarled.

  Liu Han smiled back across the table at the dingy Peking rooming house. She sipped tea, nibbled at a rice cake, and said nothing. She’d been saying nothing ever since she’d let him know she had a good idea weeks before. He still had no notion what her idea was. She’d wanted to keep more control over it than he was willing to give: basically, she wanted to become one of the leaders in the Communists’ Peking underground. Nieh hadn’t been willing to pay that kind of price.

  Beside him, Hsia Shou-Tao laughed raucously. “You sound like you’re in love with her, for heaven’s sake,” he said. Nieh glowered at him, too. Hsia thought of everything in terms of his crotch, not economics. But he also thought he knew how to get what he wanted. “If she won’t open up, we can always liquidate her. No one would miss her, that’s certain.”