Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, good!” Barbara exclaimed when the burp came out. She dabbed at Sam’s uniform tunic with a diaper. “There. I got most of it, but I’m afraid you’re going to smell like sour milk for a while.”

  “World won’t end,” Yeager said. “This isn’t one of your big spit and polish places.” The smell of sour milk didn’t bother him any more. It was in the room most of the time, along with the reek that came with the diaper pail even when it was closed—that reminded him of the barnyard on his parents’ farm, not that he ever said so to Barbara. He held his little son out at arm’s length. “There you go, kiddo. You had that hiding in there where Mommy couldn’t find it, didn’t you?”

  Barbara reached for the baby. “I’ll take him back now. If you want.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. “I don’t get to hold him all that much, and you look like you could use a breather.”

  “Well, now that you mention it, yes.” Barbara slumped into the only chair in the room. She wasn’t the pert girl Sam had got to know; she looked beat, as she did most of the time. If you didn’t look beat most of the time with a new kid around, either something was wrong with you or you had servants to look beat for you. There were dark circles under her green eyes; her blond hair—several shades darker than Sam’s—hung limp, as if it were tired, too. She let out a weary sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette and especially a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh, Lord—coffee,” Yeager said wistfully. “The worst cup of joe I ever drank in the greasiest greasy spoon in the lousiest little town I ever went through—and I went through a lot of ’em . . . Jeez, it’d go good right now.”

  “If we had any coffee to ration, we ought to share it between soldiers in the front lines and parents with babies less than a year old. No one else could possibly need it so badly,” Barbara said. Frazzled as she was, she still spoke with a precision Sam admired: she’d done graduate work at Berkeley in medieval English literature before the war. The kind of English you heard in ballparks didn’t measure up alongside that.

  Jonathan wiggled and twisted and started to cry. He was beginning to make different kinds of racket to show he had different things in mind. Sam recognized this one. “He’s hungry, hon.”

  “By the schedule, it’s not time to feed him yet,” Barbara answered. “But do you know what? As far as I’m concerned, the schedule can go to the devil. I can’t stand listening to him yell until the clock says it’s okay for him to eat. If nursing makes him happy enough to keep still for a while, that suits me fine.” She wriggled her right arm out of the sleeve of the dark blue wool dress she was wearing, tugged the dress down to bare that breast. “Here, give him to me.”

  Yeager did. The baby’s mouth fastened onto her nipple. Jonathan sucked avidly. Yeager could hear him gulping down the milk. He’d felt funny at first, having to share Barbara’s breasts with his son. But you couldn’t bottle-feed these days—no formula, no easy way to keep things as clean as they needed to be. And after you got used to breast-feeding, it didn’t seem like such a big thing any more, anyhow.

  “I think he may be going to sleep,” Barbara said. The radio newsman who’d announced Jimmy Doolittle’s bomber raid over Tokyo hadn’t sounded more excited about a victory. She went on, “He’s going to want to nurse on the other side too, though. Help me out of that sleeve, would you, Sam? I can’t get it down by myself, not while I’m holding him.”

  “Sure thing.” He hurried over to her, stretched the sleeve out, and helped her get her arm back through past the elbow. After that, she managed on her own. The dress fell limply to her waist. A couple of minutes went by before she shifted Jonathan to her left breast.

  “He’d better fall asleep pretty soon,” Barbara said. “I’m cold.”

  “He looks as if he’s going to,” Sam answered. He draped a folded towel over her left shoulder, not so much to help warm her as to keep the baby from drooling or spitting up on her when she burped him.

  One of her eyebrows rose. “ ‘As if he’s going to’?” she echoed.

  He knew what she meant. He wouldn’t have said it that way when they first met; he’d made it through high school, then gone off to play ball. “Must be the company I keep,” he replied with a smile, and then went on more seriously: “I like learning things from the people I’m around—from the Lizards, too, it’s turned out. Is it any wonder I’ve picked things up from you?”

  “Oh, in a way it’s a wonder,” Barbara said. “A lot of people seem to hate the idea of ever learning anything new. I’m glad you’re not like that; it would make life boring.” She glanced down at Jonathan. “Yes, he is falling asleep. Good.”

  Sure enough, before long her nipple slipped out of the baby’s mouth. She held him a little longer, then gently raised him to her shoulder and patted his back. He burped without waking up, and didn’t spit up, either. She slid him back down to the crook of her elbow, waited a few minutes more, and got up to put him in the wooden crib that took up a large part of the small room. Jonathan sighed as she laid him down. She stood there for a moment, afraid he would wake. But when his breathing steadied, she straightened and reached down to fix her dress.

  Before she could, Sam stepped up behind her and cupped a breast in each hand. She turned her head and smiled at him over her shoulder, but it wasn’t a smile of invitation, even though they had started making love again a couple of weeks before.

  “Do you mind too much if I just lie down for a while?” she said. “By myself, I mean. It’s not that I don’t love you, Sam—it’s just that I’m so tired, I can’t see straight.”

  “Okay, I understand that,” he said, and let go. The soft, warm memory of her flesh remained printed on his palms. He kicked at the linoleum floor, once.

  Barbara quickly pulled her dress up to where it belonged, then turned around and put her hands on his shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you, either.”

  “Takes some getting used to, that’s all,” he said. “Being in the middle of the war when we got married didn’t help a whole lot, and then you were expecting right away—” As best they could tell, that had happened on their wedding night. He chuckled. “Of course. If it hadn’t been for the war, we never would have met. What do they say about clouds and silver linings?”

  Barbara hugged him. “I’m very happy with you, and with our baby, and with everything.” She corrected herself, yawning: “With almost everything. I could do with a lot more sleep.”

  “I’m happy with just about everything, too,” he said, his arms tightening around her back. As he’d said. If it hadn’t been for the war, they wouldn’t have met. If they had met, she wouldn’t have looked at him; she’d been married to a nuclear physicist in Chicago. But Jens Larssen had been away from the Met Lab project, away for so long they’d both figured he was dead, and they’d become first friends, then lovers, and finally husband and wife. And then Barbara had got pregnant—and then they’d found out Jens was alive after all.

  Sam squeezed Barbara one more time, then let her go and walked over to the side of the crib to look down at their sleeping son. He reached out a hand and ruffled Jonathan’s fine, thin head of almost snow-white hair.

  “That’s sweet,” Barbara said.

  “He’s a pretty good little guy,” Yeager answered. And if you hadn’t been carrying him, odds are ten bucks against a wooden nickel you’d have dropped me and gone back to Larssen. He smiled at the baby. Kid, I owe you a big one for that. One of these days, I’ll see if I can figure out how to pay you back

  Barbara kissed him on the lips, a brief, friendly peck, and then walked over to the bed. “I am going to get some rest,” she said.

  “Okay.” Sam headed for the door. “I guess I’ll find me some Lizards and chin with them for a while. Do me some good now, and maybe even after the war, too. If there ever is an ‘after the war.’ Whatever happens, people and Lizards are going to have to deal with each other from here on out. The more I know, the better off I’ll be.”


  “I think you’ll be just fine any which way,” Barbara answered as she lay down. “Why don’t you come back in an hour or so? If Jonathan’s still asleep, who knows what might happen?”

  “We’ll find out.” Yeager opened the door, then glanced back at his son. “Sleep tight, kiddo.”

  The man who wore earphones glanced over at Vyacheslav Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, we are getting new reports that the Yashcheritsi at the base east of Tomsk are showing interest in surrendering to us.” When Molotov didn’t answer, the technician made so bold as to add, “You remember, Comrade: the ones who mutinied against their superiors.”

  “I assure you, Comrade, I am aware of the situation and need no reminding,” Molotov said in a voice colder than Moscow winter—colder than Siberian winter, too. The technician gulped and dipped his head to show he understood. You were lucky to get away with one slip around Molotov; you wouldn’t get away with two. The foreign commissar went on, “Have they any definite terms this time?”

  “Da, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” The fellow at the wireless set looked down at the notes he’d scribbled. His pencil was barely as long as his thumb; everything was at a premium these days. “They want pledges not only of safe conduct but also of good treatment after going over to us.”

  “We can give them those,” Molotov said at once. “I would think even the local military commander would have the wit to see as much for himself.” The local military commander should also have had the wit to see that such pledges could be ignored the instant they became inconvenient.

  On the other hand, it was probably just as well that the local military commander displayed no excessive initiative, but referred his questions back to Moscow and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for answers. Commanders who usurped Party control in one area were only too likely to try to throw it off in others.

  The wireless operator spoke groups of seemingly meaningless letters over the air. Molotov sincerely hoped they were meaningless to the Lizards. “What else do the mutineers want?” he asked.

  “A pledge that under no circumstances will we return them to the Lizards, not even if an end to hostilities is agreed to between the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union and the alien imperialist aggressors from whose camp they are trying to defect.”

  “Again, we can agree to this,” Molotov said. It was another promise that could be broken at need, although Molotov did not see the need as being likely to arise. By the time peace between the USSR and the Lizards came along, he guessed the mutineers would be long forgotten. “What else?”

  “They demand our promise to supply them with unlimited amounts of ginger, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the technician replied, again after checking his notes.

  As usual, Molotov’s pale, blunt-featured face revealed nothing of what was in his mind. In their own way, the Lizards were as degenerate as the capitalists and fascists against whom the glorious peasants and workers of the USSR had demonstrated new standards of virtue. Despite their high technology, though, the Lizards were in social terms far more primitive than capitalist societies. They were a bastion of the ancient economic system: they were masters, seeking human beings as slaves—so the dialecticians had decreed. Well, the upper classes of ancient Rome had been degenerates, too.

  And, through degeneracy, the exploiters could be exploited. “We shall certainly make this concession,” Molotov said. “If they want to drug themselves, we will gladly provide them with the means to do so.” He waited for more code groups to go out over the air, then asked again, “What else?”

  “They insist on driving the tanks away from the base themselves, on retaining their personal weapons, and on remaining together as a group,” the wireless operator answered.

  “They are gaining in sophistication,” Molotov said. “This I shall have to consider.” After a couple of minutes, he said, “They may drive their vehicles away from their base, but not to one of ours: the local commandant is to point out to them that trust between the two sides has not been fully established. He is to tell them they will be divided into several smaller groups for efficiency of interrogation. He may add that. If they are so divided, we shall let them retain their weapons, otherwise not.”

  “Let me make sure I have that, Comrade, before I transmit it,” the technician said, and repeated back Molotov’s statement. When the foreign commissar nodded, the man sent out the appropriate code groups.

  “Anything more?” Molotov asked. The wireless operator shook his head. Molotov got up and left the room somewhere deep under the Kremlin. The guard outside saluted. Molotov ignored him, as he had not bothered giving the man at the wireless a farewell. Superfluities of any sort were alien to his nature.

  That being so, he did not chortle when he went upstairs. By his face, no one could have guessed whether the Lizard mutineers had agreed to give up or were instead demanding that he present himself for immediate liquidation. But inside—

  Fools, he thought. They are fools. No matter that they’d become more sophisticated than before: the Lizards were still naive enough to make even Americans seem worldly by comparison. He’d seen that before, even among their chiefs. They had no notion of how to play the political games human diplomates took for granted. Their ruling assumption had plainly been that they would need no such talents, that their conquest of Earth would be quick and easy. Now that that hadn’t happened, they were out of their depth.

  Soldiers snapped to attention as he strode through the halls of the Kremlin. Civilian functionaries muted their conversations and gave him respectful nods. He did not acknowledge them. He barely noticed them. Had he failed to receive them, though, he would have made sharp note of that.

  The devil’s cousin or some other malicious wretch had dumped a stack of papers on his desk while he went down to bring himself up to date on the talks with the mutinous Lizards. He had high hopes for those talks. The Soviet Union already had a good many Lizard prisoners of war, and had learned some useful things from them. Once Lizards surrendered, they seemed to place humans in the positions of trust and authority their own superiors had formerly occupied for them.

  And to lay hold of an entire base full of the equipment the alien aggressors from the stars manufactured! Unless Soviet intelligence was badly mistaken, that would be a coup neither the Germans nor the Americans could match. The British had a lot of Lizard gear, but the imperialist creatures had done their best to wreck it after their invasion of England failed.

  The first letter on the pile was from the Social Activities Committee of Kolkhoz 118: so the return address stated, at any rate. But the collective farm not far outside of Moscow was where Igor Kurchatov and his team of nuclear physicists were laboring to fabricate an explosive-metal bomb. They’d made one, out of metal stolen from the Lizards. Isolating more of the metal for themselves was proving as hard as they’d warned Molotov it would—harder than he’d wanted to believe.

  Sure enough, Kurchatov now wrote, “The latest experiment, Comrade Foreign Commissar, was a success less complete than we might have hoped.” Molotov did not need his years of reading between the lines to infer that the experiment had failed. Kurchatov went on, “Certain technical aspects of the situation still present us with difficulties. Outside advice might prove useful.”

  Molotov grunted softly. When Kurchatov asked for outside advice, he didn’t mean help from other Soviet physicists. Every reputable nuclear physicist in the USSR was already working with him. Molotov had put his own neck on the block by reminding Stalin of that; he shuddered to think of the risk he’d taken for the rodina, the motherland. What Kurchatov wanted was foreign expertise.

  Humiliating, Molotov thought. The Soviet Union should not have been so backwards. He would never ask the Germans for help. Even if they gave it, he wouldn’t trust what they gave. Stalin was just as well pleased that the Lizards in Poland separated the USSR from Hitler’s madmen, and there Molotov completely agreed with his leader.

  The American
s? Molotov gnawed at his mustache. Maybe, just maybe. They were making their own explosive-metal bombs, just as the Nazis were. And if he could tempt them with some of the prizes the Lizard base near Tomsk would yield . . .

  He pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper and began to draft a letter.

  “Jesus, God, will you lookit this?” Mutt Daniels exclaimed as he led his platoon through the ruins of what had been Chicago’s North Side. “And all from one bomb, too.”

  “Don’t hardly seem possible, does it, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Herman Muldoon agreed. The kids they were leading didn’t say anything. They just looked around with wide eyes and even wider mouths at their fair share of a few miles’ worth of slagged wreckage.

  “I been on God’s green earth goin’ on sixty years now,” Mutt said, his Mississippi drawl flowing slow and thick as molasses in this miserable Northern winter. “I seen a whole lot o’ things in my time. I fought in two wars now, and I done traveled all over the U.S. of A. But I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this here.”

  “You got that right,” Muldoon said. He was Daniels’ age, near enough, and he’d been around, too. The men alongside them in the ragged skirmish line didn’t have that kind of experience, but they’d never seen anything like this, either. Nobody had, not till the Lizards came.

  Before they came, Daniels had been managing the Decatur Commodores, a Three-I League team. One of his ballplayers had liked reading pulp stories about rocketships and creatures from other planets (he wondered if Sam Yeager was still alive these days). Mutt pulled an image from that kind of story now: the North Side reminded him of the mountains of the moon.