Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Okamoto eventually noticed he’d got lost. “We have had a new success,” the interpreter said. “We have bombarded uranium with neutrons and produced the element plutonium. Production is still very slow, but plutonium will be easier to separate from uranium-238 than uranium-235 is.”

  “Hai,” Nishina echoed emphatically. “We prepared uranium hexafluoride gas to use to separate the two isotopes of uranium from each other, but it is so corrosive that we are having an impossible time working with it. But separating plutonium from uranium is a straightforward chemical process.”

  Major Okamoto had to translate some of that, too. He and Teerts used a mixture of terms from Nipponese and the language of the Race to talk about matters nuclear. Teerts took for granted a whole range of facts the Big Uglies were just uncovering, but though he knew that things could be done, he often had no idea as to how. There they were ahead of him.

  Nishina added, “Once we accumulate enough plutonium, we shall surely be able to assemble a bomb in short order. Then we will meet your people on even terms.”

  Teerts bowed, which he found a useful way of responding without saying anything. The Nipponese didn’t seem to have any idea how destructive nuclear weapons really were. Maybe it was because they’d never had any dropped on them. As he had a dozen times before, Teerts tried to get across to them that nuclear combat wasn’t anything to anticipate with relish. They wouldn’t listen, any more than they had those other dozen times. They thought he was just trying to slow down their research (which he was, and which, he knew, compromised his position). Okamoto said, “My country was backward until less than a hundred years ago. We saw then that we had to learn the ways of the Tosevite empires that knew more than we did, or else become their slaves.”

  Less than two hundred of our years, Teerts thought. Two hundred of his years before, the Race had been just about where it was now, leisurely contemplating the conquest of Tosev 3. Best wait till all was perfectly ready. What difference could a few years make, one way or the other?

  They’d found out.

  Okamoto went on, “Less than fifty years ago, our soldiers and sailors beat the Russians, one of the empires that had been far ahead of us. Less than two years ago, our airplanes and ships smashed those of the United States, which had been probably the strongest empire on Tosev 3. By then we were better than they. Do you see where I am leading with this?”

  “No, superior sir,” Teerts said, though he feared he did.

  Major Okamoto drove the point home with what Teerts had come to think of as customary Tosevite brutality: “We do not let anyone keep a lead on us in technology. We will catch up with you, too, and teach you to learn better than to attack us without warning.”

  Nishina and the other scientist nodded emphatically at that. In the abstract, Teerts didn’t suppose he could blame them. Had other starfarers attacked Home, he would have done everything he could to defend it. But war with nuclear weapons was anything but abstract-and if the Nipponese did build and use one, the Race would surely respond in kind, most likely on the biggest city Nippon had. Right on top of my head in other words.

  “This is not your concern,” Okamoto said when he worried about it out loud. “We will punish them for the wounds they have inflicted on us. Past that, all I need say is that dying for the Emperor is an honor.”

  He meant the Nipponese emperor, whose line was said to run back more than two thousand years and to be astonishingly ancient on account of that. Teerts was tempted to bitter laughter. Dying for the Emperor was an honor, too, but he didn’t want to do it any time soon, especially not at the hands of the Race.

  Nishina turned toward him. “Let’s go back to what we were discussing last week: the best arrangement for the uranium in a pile. I have the Americans’ report. I want to know how the Race does the same thing. You are likely to have more efficient procedures.”

  I should hope so, Teerts thought “How do the Americans do it, superior sir?” he asked as innocently as he could, hoping to get some idea of the Big Uglies’ technical prowess.

  But the Nipponese, though technically backward, were old in games of deceit. “You tell us how you do it,” Okamoto said. “We do the comparing. The rest is none of your business, and you would be sorry if you made it so.”

  Teerts bowed once more. That was how the Nipponese apologized. “Yes, superior sir,” he said, and told what he knew. Anything was preferable to giving Okamoto the excuse to start acting like an interrogator again.

  XV

  Ristin let his mouth hang open, showing off his pointy little teeth and Lizardy tongue: he was laughing at Sam Yeager. “You have what?” he said in pretty fluent if accented English. “Seven days in a week? Twelve inches in a foot? Three feet in a mile?”

  “A yard,” Sam corrected.

  “I thought something with grass growing in it was a yard,” Ristin said. “But never mind. How do you’remember all these things? How do you keep from going mad trying to remember?”

  “All what you’re used to,” Yeager said, a little uncomfortably: he remembered trying to turn pecks into bushels into tons in school. That was one of the reasons he’d signed a minor-league contract first chance he got-except for banking and his batting average, he’d never worried about math since. He went on, “Most places except the United States use the metric system, where everything is ten of this and ten of that.” If he hadn’t read science fiction, he wouldn’t have known about the metric system, either.

  “Even time?” Ristin asked. “No sixty seconds make a minute or an hour or whatever it is, and twenty-four minutes or hours make a day?” He sputtered like a derisive steam engine, then tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

  “Well, no,” Sam admitted. “All that stuff stays the same all over the world. It’s-tradition, that’s what it is.” He smiled happily-the Lizards lived and died by tradition.

  But Ristin wasn’t buying it, not this time. He said, “In our ancient days, before we were what is the word? civilized? — yes, civilized, we had traditions like that, traditions that did harm, not good. We made them work for us or we got rid of them. This was a hundred thousand years ago. We do not miss these bad traditions.”

  “A hundred thousand years ago,” Yeager echoed. He’d gotten the idea that Lizard years weren’t as long as the ones people used, but even so… “A hundred thousand years ago-fifty thousand years ago, too, come to that-people were just cavemen. Savages, I mean. Nobody knew how to read and write, nobody knew how to grow their own food. Hell, nobody knew anything to speak of.”

  Ristin’s eye turrets moved just a little. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed, but Sam had spent more time around Lizards than just about anybody. He knew the alien was thinking something he didn’t want to say. He could even make a pretty fair guess about what it was: “As far as you’re concerned, we still don’t know anything to speak of.”

  Ristin jerked as if Sam had stuck him with a pin. “How did you know that?”

  “A little bird told me,” Yeager said, grinning.

  “Tell it to the Marines,” Ristin retorted. He didn’t quite understand what a Marine was, but he had the phrase down pat and used it at the right times. Sam wanted to bust out laughing every time he heard it.

  “Shall we go outside?” he asked. “It’s a nice day.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s cold. It’s always cold on this miserable iceball of a world.” Ristin relented. “It’s not as cold as it was, though. You are right about that.” He gave an exaggerated shiver to show how cold it had been. “If you say we must go out, it shall be done.”

  “I didn’t say we had to,” Yeager answered. “I just asked if you wanted to.”

  “Not very much,” Ristin said. “Before I was a soldier, I was a male of the city. The-what do you call them? — wide open spaces are not for me. I saw enough of them on the long, long way from Chicago to this place to last me forever.”

  Sam was amused to hear his own turns of phrase coming out of the mout
h of a creature born under the light of another star. It made him feel as if, in some small way, he’d affected the course of history. He said, “Have it your own way, then, even though I don’t call some grass on the University of Denver the wide open spaces. Maybe it’s just as well; Ullhass ought to be back in a few minutes, and then I can take both you guys back to your rooms.”

  “They do not need you to be there any more to translate?” Ristin asked.

  “That’s what they say.” Yeager shrugged. “Professor Fermi hasn’t called me this session, so I guess maybe he doesn’t. Both of you speak English pretty well now.”

  “If you are not needed for this, will they take you away from us?” Ristin showed his teeth. “You want me and Ullhass to forget how we speak English? Then they still need you. We do not want you to go. You have been good to us since you catch us all this time ago. We think then that you people hurt us, kill us. You showed us different. We want you to stay.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay,” Yeager said. A year before, he’d have found absurd the notion that anything a turret-eyed creature with a hissing accent said could touch him. Touched he was, though, and sometimes he had to remind himself how alien Ristin really was. He went on, “I’ve been a bench warmer before. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “It may be.” From sympathetic, Ristin turned serious. “If you humans do build an atomic bomb, it may be. You will use it, and we will use it, and little will be left when all is done.”

  “We weren’t the first ones to use them,” Yeager said. “What about Washington and Berlin?”

  “Warning shots,” Ristin said. “We could choose to use them in a way that did little harm”-he ignored the choked noise that escaped from Sam’s throat-“because we had them and you did not. If they turn into just another weapon of war, the planet will be badly hurt.”

  “But if we don’t use them, the Race is probably going to conquer us,” Yeager said.

  Now Ristin made a noise that reminded Sam of a water heater in desperate need of replacement. “This is-how do you say two things that cannot be true at the same time but are anyhow?”

  “A paradox?” Sam suggested after some thought; it wasn’t a word he hauled out every day.

  “If that is what you say. Paradox,” Ristin repeated. “You may lose the war without these bombs, but you may lose it, too, because of them. Is this a paradox?”

  “I guess so.” Yeager gave the Lizard a hard look. “But if you think things are like that, how come you and Ullhass have been so much help to the Met Lab?”

  “At first, we did not think you Big Uglies could know enough to make a bomb anyhow, so no harm done,” Ristin said. Sam knew he was worried, because he didn’t often slip and use the Lizard slang name for human beings. He went on, “Soon we found how wrong we were. You know enough and more, and were mostly using us to check the answers you had already. Again, because of this not much harm could come, so we went along.”

  “Oh,” Yeager said. “Nice to know we surprised you.”

  Ristin’s mouth opened and he wagged his head slightly: he was laughing at himself, “This whole planet has been a surprise, and not a good one. From the first time people started shooting at us with rifles and cannon, we knew everything we had believed about Tosev 3 was wrong.”

  Somebody rapped on the door of the office where Yeager and Ristin were talking. “That’ll be Ullhass,” Yeager said.

  But when the, door opened, Barbara came through it “You are not Ullhass,” Ristin said in accusing tones. He let his mouth hang open again to show he’d made a joke.

  “You know what?” Sam said. “I’m darn glad she isn’t. Hi, hon.” He gave her a hug and a peck of a kiss. “I didn’t think they were going to let you off work till later.”

  “One thing about English majors: we do learn how to type,” Barbara said. “As long as we don’t run out of ribbons, I’ll have plenty to do. Or until the baby comes-whichever happens first. They ought to give me a couple of days off for that.”

  “They’d better,” Yeager said, and added the emphatic cough.

  He laughed at himself. To Ristin, he said, “That’s what I get for hanging around with the likes of you.”

  “What, a civilized language?” Ristin said, laughing his kind of laugh once more. He turned civilized into a long hiss.

  Despite his accent, he gave as good as he got. Yeager didn’t fire back at him. Instead, he asked Barbara, “Why did they let you go early?”

  “I turned green, I guess,” she answered. “I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It gets me any old time of day it feels like.”

  “You look okay now,” he said.

  “I got rid of what ailed me,” Barbara said bleakly. “I’m just glad the plumbing works. If it didn’t, somebody-probably me-would have a mess to clean up.”

  “You’re supposed to be eating for two, not throwing up what one has,” Sam said.

  “If you know a secret way to make lunch stay down, I wish you’d tell me what it is,” Barbara answered, now with a snap in her voice. “Everybody says this is supposed to go away after I get further along. I hope to heaven that’s true.”

  Another knock, this one on the frame of the open door. “Here you go, Corporal,” said a kid in dungarees with a pistol holster on his belt. “I’ve brought your pet Lizard back for you.” Ullhass walked in and exchanged sibilant greetings with Ristin. The kid, who except for the pistol looked like a college freshman, nodded to Yeager, gave Barbara a quick once-over and obviously decided she was too old for him, nodded again, and trotted off down the hall.

  “I am not a pet I am a male of the Race,” Ullhass said with considerable dignity.

  Yeager soothed him: “I know, pal. But haven’t you noticed that people don’t always say exactly what they mean?”

  “Yes, I have seen this,” Ullhass said. “Because I am a prisoner, I will not tell you what I think of it.”

  “If you ask me, you just did,” Yeager answered. “You were very polite about it, though. Now come on, boys; I’ll take you home.”

  Home for the Lizards was an office converted into an apartment. Maybe cell block was a better word for it, Yeager thought: at least, he’d never seen any apartments with stout iron bars across the windows and an armed guard waiting outside the door. But Ristin and Ullhass liked it. Nobody bothered them in there, and the steam radiator let them heat the room to the bake-oven level they enjoyed.

  Once they were safely ensconced, Yeager walked Barbara out onto the lawn. Unlike Ristin, she didn’t complain it was too cold. All she said was, “I wish I had some cigarettes. Maybe they’d keep me from wanting to toss my cookies.”

  “Now that you haven’t smoked in a while, they’d probably just make you sicker.” Sam slipped an arm around Barbara’s waist, which was still deliciously slim. “As long as you are off early, you want to go back to the place and…?” He let his voice trail away, but squeezed her a little.

  Her answering smile was wan. “I’d love to go back to the place, but if you don’t mind, all I want to do is lie down, maybe take a nap. I’m tired all the time, and my stomach isn’t what you call happy right now, either. Is it okay?” She sounded anxious.

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” Yeager answered. “Fifteen years ago, I probably would have fussed and sulked, but I’m a grown-up now. I can wait till tomorrow.” My dick doesn’t think for me the way it used to, he thought, but that wasn’t something he could say to a new-wed wife.

  Barbara let her hand rest on his. “Thanks, hon.”

  “First time I ever got thanked for getting old,” he said.

  She made a face at him. “You can’t have it both ways. Are you a grown-up and saying it’s okay because it really is, or are you just getting old and saying it’s okay because you’re all feeble and tired?”

  “Ooh.” He mimed a wound. When she wanted to, she could get him chasing his tail like nobody’s business. He didn’t think of himself as dumb (but then, who does?), but he hadn�
�t had formal training in logic and in fencing with words. Trading barbs with ballplayers in his dugout and the ones on the other side of the field wasn’t the same thing.

  Barbara let out a loud, theatrical groan as she got to the top of the stairs. “That’s going to be even less fun when I’m further along,” she said. “Maybe we should have looked for a place on the ground floor. Too late to worry about it now, I suppose.”

  She groaned again, this time with pleasure, when she flopped onto the sofa in the front room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the bed?” Yeager asked.

  “Actually, no. I can put my feet up this way.” The overstuffed sofa had equally overstuffed arms, so maybe that really was comfortable. Sam shrugged. If Barbara was happy, he was happy, too.

  Somebody knocked on the door. “Who’s that?” Sam and Barbara said in the same breath. Why doesn’t he go away? lay beneath the words.

  Whoever it was didn’t go away, but kept on knocking. Yeager strode over and threw open the door, intending to give a pushy Fuller Brush man a piece of his mind. But it wasn’t a Fuller Brush man, it was Jens Larssen. He looked at Sam like a man finding a cockroach in his salad. “I want to talk to my wife,” he said.

  “She’s not your wife any more. We’ve been through this;” Yeager said tiredly, but his hands bunched into fists at his sides. “What do you want to say to her?”

  “It’s none of your damn business,” Jens said, which almost started the fight then and there. But before Yeager quite decided to knock his block off, he added, “But I came to tell her good-bye.”

  “Where are you going, Jens?” In her stocking feet, Barbara came up behind Sam so quietly that he hadn’t heard her.

  “Washington State,” Larssen answered. “I shouldn’t even tell you that much, but I figured you ought to know, in case I don’t come back.”