Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Jens dressed even faster than he’d undressed. Where before he’d thought of nothing but getting his ashes hauled, now he recalled how much a stranger he was here, and what could happen to strangers when they fooled around with small-town women.

  Another question formed in the back of his mind: did Mary expect to get paid? If he asked and the answer was no, he’d mortally offend her. If he didn’t ask and the answer was yes, he’d offend her a different way, one that might end up with his having a discussion he didn’t want with the gunman behind that curtained window.

  After a few seconds’ thought, he found a compromise that pleased him. “What do I owe you for lunch and everything?” he asked. If she wanted to interpret and everything to mean a couple of beers, fine. If she thought it meant more than that, well, okay, too.

  “Paper money?” Mary asked. Jens nodded. She said, “Thirty bucks ought to cover it.”

  Given the way prices had gone crazy since the Lizards came, that wasn’t out of line for good chicken stew and two mugs of beer. Jens felt a surge of pride that she hadn’t been a pro. He dug in his pocket for a roll that would have astonished him in prewar days, peeled off two twenties, and gave them to her. “I’ll get your change,” she said, and started for the cash register.

  “Don’t be silly,” he told her.

  She smiled. “I said you were a gentleman.”

  “Listen, Mary, when I come back from where I’m going-” he began, with the sentimentality satiation and a bit of beer can bring.

  She cut him off. “If I ever see you again, tell me whatever you’re going to tell me. Till then, I’m not gonna worry about it. The war’s made everybody a little bit crazy.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” he said, and thought about Barbara for the first time since he decided to try playing footsie with Mary. Take that, bitch, he said to himself. Aloud, to Mary, he went on, “Thanks for everything-and I mean for everything. I’d better be heading out now.”

  She sighed. “I know. Nobody ever stays in Idaho Springs-except me.” She took a couple of quick steps forward, pecked him on the cheek, and moved back again before he could grab her. “Wherever it is you’re going to, you be careful, hear me?”

  “I will.” Suddenly he wanted to stay in Idaho Springs, a town he’d never heard of until he started planning the trip for Hanford. Amazing what a roll in the hay can do, he thought. But discipline held, aided by doubts whether Mary wanted anything more from him than that one roll, either.

  The doorbell jingled again as he walked out of the First Street Cafe. He climbed onto his bicycle. “Giddyap,” he muttered as he started to pedal. The world wasn’t such a bad old place after all.

  He held that view even though he needed a solid day to get to the top of Berthoud Pass, which wasn’t much more than twenty miles beyond Idaho Springs. He spent the night in the mining hamlet of Empire, then tackled the run to the pass the next morning. He didn’t think he’d ever worked so hard in this life. He’d gained a thousand feet between Idaho Springs and Empire, and picked up another three thousand in the thirteen miles between Empire and the top of the pass. Not only was he going up an ever-steeper grade, he was doing it in air that got thinner and thinner. Berthoud Pass topped out at better than eleven thousand feet: 11,315, said a sign that announced the Continental Divide.

  “Whew.” Jens paused for a well-earned rest. He was covered with sweat and his heart was beating harder than it had when he’d come atop Mary Cooley, a day before and most of a mile lower. Denver had taken some getting used to. He wondered if anybody this side of an Andean Indian could hope to get used to the thin air of Berthoud Pass.

  And yet signs on side roads pointed the way to ski resorts. People actually came up here for fun. He shook his head. “Me, I’m just glad it’s downhill from here on out,” he said, swigging from one of the canteens he’d filled back at Bards Creek in Empire. The kind folk there had also given him chunks of roast chicken to take along. He gnawed on a drumstick as he tried without much luck to catch his breath.

  He thought he’d sweated out every drop of water in him, but emptying the canteen proved him wrong. He went off behind a boulder-not that anybody would have seen him if he’d taken a leak right out in the middle of US 40-and unzipped his fly.

  The second he started to whiz, he hissed in sudden and unexpected pain; somebody might as well have lighted a match and stuck it up his joint. And along with the urine came thick yellow pus. “What the hell is that?” he burst out, and then, a moment later, as realization struck, “Jesus Christ, I’ve got the fucking clap!”

  And where he’d got it was painfully obvious, in the most literal sense of the word. Not from the palm of his own hand, that was for goddamn sure. Somebody who’d lie down with one stranger passing through Idaho Springs… he wondered how many strangers she’d lain down with. One of them had left her a present, and she’d been generous enough to give it to him.

  “That’s great,” he said. “That’s just wonderful.” Here he’d been on the point of rejoining the human race, and this had to happen. What he’d hoped would be his ticket out of the black gloom that had seized him ever since Barbara started laying that miserable ballplayer now turned out to be just another kick in the nuts-again, literally.

  He thought about turning the bicycle around and heading back toward Idaho Springs. Give that tramp a Springfield thank-you, he thought. It would be an easy ride, too-all downhill. Down that grade, I could do twenty miles in twenty minutes. He knew he was exaggerating, but not by that much.

  In the end, he shook his head. He didn’t quite have cold-blooded murder in him. Revenge was something else. As far as he was concerned, the whole human race had given him a screwing that made the dose he’d got from Mary Cooley look like a pat on the back by comparison.

  Well, not quite like a pat on the back. As he climbed back onto the bicycle and started down the western slope of the Rockies, he was already dreading the next time he’d have to piss. Back before the war, sulfa had started knocking gonorrhea for a loop, if any doctor so much as had the stuff these days, he’d be saving it for matters more urgent than a case of VD.

  “Hanford,” Jens muttered. His breath smoked as the word escaped his lips; even now, the snow didn’t lie that far above Berthoud Pass. He pedaled harder to get warm again.

  He’d go on to Hanford. He’d see what there was to see. He’d head back for Denver and make his report. He wondered how much good it would do, or whether General Leslie hotshot Groves would pay the least bit of attention to it if he didn’t like what he said. None of the Met Lab people paid any attention to him these days. They were probably too busy laughing at him behind his back-and they’d laugh even harder when he came home with a drippy faucet. So would Barbara.

  He wondered why he was wasting so much effort on sons of bitches-and one proper bitch-who wouldn’t appreciate what he did if he went out and built a bomb single-handed. But he’d said he’d go and he’d said he’d come back, and duty still counted for a lot with him.

  “Hell, hadn’t been for duty, I’d still be married-yes, sir, I sure would,” he said. They’d asked him to take word about the Met Lab from Chicago to the government-in-hiding in West Virginia, and he’d gone and done it. But getting back hadn’t been so easy-and nobody’d bothered to ask his wife to keep her legs closed while he was gone.

  So he’d do what he’d promised. He hadn’t made any promises about afterwards, though. He might take it into his head to ride east out of Denver after all.

  He picked up speed and he rolled downhill. The thin air that blew against his face was spicy with the smell of the pines from the Arapaho National Forest all around.

  “Or who knows?” he said. “I might even run into some Lizards on the way to Hanford. They’d listen to me, I bet. What do you think?” The breeze didn’t answer.

  XVII

  Atvar stood on sand, looking out to sea. “This is a most respectable climate,” the fleetlord said. “Decently warm, decently dry-” The wind blew
bits of grit into his eyes. They bothered him not in the least; his nictitating membranes flicked them out of the way without conscious thought on his part.

  Kirel came crunching up beside him. “Even this northern Africa is not truly Home, though, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said. “It grows beastly cold at night-and winter here, by the reports, is almost as hideous as anywhere else on Tosev 3.”

  “Not winter now.” For a moment, Atvar turned an eye turret toward the star the Race called Tosev. As always, its light struck him as too harsh, too white, not quite like the mellow, sunshine of Home. “I thought I would come down to the planet’s surface to see it at its best, not its worst.”

  “It is well-suited to us here,” Kirel admitted. “Reports say the Tosevites from Europe there”-he pointed north across the blue, blue water-“who were fighting here when we arrived, spent most of their time complaining about how hot and dry this part of their planet was. Even the natives don’t care for the area during summer.”

  “I have long since given up trying to fathom the Big Uglies’ tastes,” Atvar said. “I would call them revoltingly ignorant, except that, were they only a little more ignorant, our conquest would have been accomplished some time ago.”

  “With the return of good-well, bearable-weather to the lands of our principal foes, the optimism I felt at the outset of our campaign here begins to return as well,” Kirel said. “We’ve gained against the Deutsche from both east and west we’re driving toward the capital of the SSSR, this Moskva being an important rail and transport center along with an administrative site; we continue to consolidate our hold on China despite bandits behind our lines; and the Americans fall back on the lesser continental land mass.”

  “All true,” Atvar agreed, more happily than he’d spoken of the military situation on Tosev 3 for some time. “I begin to hope the colonists may yet find a pacified world awaiting their settlement. During the past winter in this hemisphere, I wouldn’t have put much credit in that.”

  “Nor I, Exalted Fleetlord. But if our munitions hold out, I think we can successfully complete the conquest and settle down to administering rather than fighting.”

  Atvar wished the shiplord hadn’t added that qualifying phrase. Munitions were a continuing problem. Provident as usual, the Race had given the conquest fleet far more supplies and weapons systems than it had expected the warriors to need against the animal-riding, sword-swinging savages the probes had shown inhabiting Tosev 3.

  The only troubles was that, while Atvar still reckoned the Big Uglies savages, these days they made landcruisers, fired automatic weapons, and were beginning to fly jet aircraft and launch missiles. What would have been lavish supplies against primitives had to be carefully rationed to keep from running out before the Tosevites did. Atvar knew such care slowed the war effort, but he lacked the munitions to shut down all the Big Uglies’ industrial areas and keep them shut down.

  “It does make things harder,” Kirel said when Atvar spoke of his concern. “Still, I count us ahead of the game in that we’ve not had to use nuclear weapons to any great degree. Wrecking the planet for the colonists would not leave our names in good odor in the annals of the Race.”

  Would not leave Atvar’s name in good odor, was what he meant, though he was too polite to say so. The fleetlord won the glory-if any glory was to be won. If not, he won the blame. Atvar didn’t intend to win any blame.

  “Some males-Straha, for instance,” he observed, “would destroy Tosev 3 in order to conquer it. They might as well be Big Uglies themselves, for all the care they give to the future.”

  “Truth in your words, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said; he didn’t care for Straha, either. But he was also a thoroughgoing and conscientious officer, so he added, “In truth, though, sometimes the Tosevites are exasperating enough to make me wonder if we shouldn’t exterminate them to keep them from troubling us later. Take this latest trouble with-what was that Big Ugly’s name? — Moishe Russie.”

  “Oh yes-that.” Atvar stuck out his tongue, as at a bad smell. “I thought it had to be one of Skorzeny’s exploits till intelligence reminded me Russie belonged to one of the groups the Deutsche were busy slaughtering until we came to Tosev 3. Computer analysis makes it unlikely they would have tried to rescue one of their foes, and I must say I agree with the machines here.”

  “As do I,” Kirel said with a hissing sigh. “But don’t you think dismissing Zolraag as governor of the province was a trifle harsh? Other than when dealing with Russie and matters concerning him, his record was good enough.”

  “What he’s cost us in those matters outweighs the rest,” Atvar said. “He petitioned for a reconsideration; I denied it. We hold too much of Tosev 3 only because the locals submit to us out of fear. If we are made to look like idiots, we shall no longer be objects of fear, and we shall have to divert forces from serious fighting to hold down areas now quiet. No, Zolraag deserved sacking, and sacking he got.”

  Kirel cast his eyes to the ground in obedience to the fleetlord’s will. Another male came up to him and Atvar, one whose rather drab body paint made him seem out of place in such august company. “I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord, Superb Shiplord,” he said. His words were perfectly correct, his voice held the proper deference, and yet Atvar doubted his sincerity even so.

  “I greet you, Drefsab,” the fleetlord returned, swinging one eye turret toward the intelligence operative. Drefsab’s motions were quick and jerky. With another male, that might have betrayed a ginger habit, but Drefsab had moved that way even before he became addicted to the Tosevite herb; he had a Big Ugly’s restlessness trapped in a body that belonged to the Race. Atvar said, “I presume you have come to report on the progress of your project in-what is the name of that Emperorless land?”

  “Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska-the Independent State of Croatia,” Drefsab answered. His clawed fingers twitched restlessly, a sure sign of disgust. “Do you know, Exalted Fleetlord, there are times when the Big Uglies are as easy to manipulate as hatchlings still wet from the juices of their eggs?”

  “I wish there were more such times,” Kirel observed.

  “So do we all,” Atvar said. “How have you managed to manipulate the-Croats? — then?”

  “They’re subordinates of the Deutsche, of course,” Drefsab said. “The Deutsche gained their support by giving them weapons and a free hand against their local enemies, which essentially means anyone who lives nearby and is not a Croat. All I had to do was promise more and better weapons and an even freer hand, and all at once they became most cooperative.”

  Atvar felt faintly sick. The guidelines on conquering Tosev 3 he’d brought from Home, tomes composed thousands of years before, after the Race subjected first the Rabotevs and then the Hallessi, suggested playing local groups against one another. That sounded clean and logical. The reality, at least on Tosev 3, was apt to be sordid and soaked in blood.

  Drefsab went on, “When measured against Tosev 3 as a whole-as opposed to Tosev 3 as a hole, which the Emperor surely knows it is-the Independent State of Croatia is of no importance whatever, being barely visible to the naked eye. But its position gives it importance to the Deutsche, who do not want us gaining influence there at their expense. And we have deliberately kept our effort there on a small scale, confining it to the coastal city of Split.”

  “If you can damage the Deutsche in this Croatia place, why make only a small effort?” Kirel asked. “They are among the most dangerous, of the Tosevites.”

  “To us, though, Superb Shiplord, Croatia has no great significance” Drefsab said. “And, in any case, I am seeking to elicit a specific response from the Deutsche. I don’t want them flooding the area with males; the terrain inland is mountainous and very bad for both armor and aircraft. I want them to bring in their own specialists in sabotage and destruction, and then I want to trap and destroy those specialists.”

  “This is the lure you have prepared for Skorzeny,” Atvar exclaimed.

  “Exalted Fleetlord, it is,�
�� Drefsab agreed. “As you pointed out, he has embarrassed the Race too many times. Soon he will do so no more.”

  “Eliminating Skorzeny will go a long way toward getting rid of a weakness you just finished discussing, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said excitedly. “Big Uglies around the world will have new reason to fear us once we take him out of play.”

  “Exactly so.” Atvar turned his eye turrets back toward Drefsab. “How fares your other battle?”

  “The one against the Tosevite herb, you mean?” Drefsab let out a long hiss. “I still taste now and again; that far, the addiction keeps its hold. I continue to struggle not to let it master all my thoughts. It has my body, but I work to keep my mind as free as I can.”

  “Another lonely battle, and a brave one,” Atvar said. “So many yield both to ginger.”

  “As free as I can, I said,” Drefsab answered. Dropping his eyes in. deference, he went on, “Emperor knows the craving never leaves, not altogether. Under the worst circumstances, who knows what I might do for a taste? For that very reason, I attempt to avoid placing myself in those circumstances.”

  Atvar and Kirel also looked down at the yellow-brown sand. When the fleetlord raised his eyes once more, he said, “Your discipline in the face of this adversity does you great credit. Because of it, I am all the more certain you will succeed in eliminating that menace, Skorzeny.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done,” Drefsab said.

  Vyacheslav Molotov peered between the backs of Stalin and his generals to study the map pinned down on the table in front of them. From the way things looked, Soviet forces were effectively pinned down, too.

  “Comrade General Secretary, if Moscow is to be held, we need more men, more armor, more aircraft, and above all more time to place our assets in proper position,” Marshal Georgi Zhukov said. “Absent these, I do not see how we are to prevail.”