Upsetting the Balance (28 page)

“It’s okay, Captain. I worked that out,” Sam said. Even if he was a shrink, Ben Berkowitz was a regular guy, too. Yeager hadn’t got to the point of realizing it might be important for a psychiatrist to be able to make like a regular guy to help him do the rest of his job better.

“You with me so far?” Berkowitz asked.

“I guess so,” Yeager said cautiously. “I never really thought about sex tying in to all that other stuff, but maybe it does.”

“You’ll go with it for the sake of argument, you mean.”

“I guess so,” Sam repeated.

Berkowitz laughed at him. He was engagingly ugly; when he grinned, he looked about eighteen, like one of the bright—or sometimes smartass—kids who filled the letter column in
Astounding.
He said, “Careful son of a gun, aren’t you? Remind me not to play poker with you. Well, for the sake of argument, let’s say we can get all sorts of useful insights into the way the human mind works when we use Freudian analysis. It would be nice if we could do the same thing with the Lizards.”

“So why can’t you?” Yeager asked. Then a lightbulb went on in his head. “Oh. They’ve got a waddayacallit—a mating season.”

“Right the first time.” Ben Berkowitz grinned again. “You may look like a farm boy, Yeager, but you’re pretty damn sharp, you know that?”

“Thank you, sir.” Sam didn’t think of himself as pretty damn sharp. Barbara, for instance, could run rings around him. But she didn’t seem bored with him, either, so maybe he wasn’t quite the near-hick he’d often felt hanging around with fast-talking big-city ballplayers.

“ ‘Thank you, sir.’ ” Just like some of those fast-talking city guys, Berkowitz had a flare for mimicry. Unlike a lot of them, he didn’t spike it with malice. He said, “Believe me, Sergeant, if you were a dimbulb, you wouldn’t be in Hot Springs. This and the project you came from are probably the two most important places in the United States—and you’ve had your hand in both of them. Damn few people can say as much.”

“I never thought of it like that,” Yeager said. When he did, he saw he had something to be proud of.

“Well, you should have,” Berkowitz told him. “But back to business, okay? Like you said, the Lizards have a mating season. When their females smell right, they screw themselves silly. When they don’t—” He snapped his fingers. “Everything shuts off, just like that. It’s like they’re sexually neutral beings ninety percent of the time—all the time, if no lady Lizards are around.”

“They think what we do is funny as hell,” Yeager said.

“Don’t they just,” Berkowitz agreed. “Straha tells me they have a whole big research program going, just trying to figure out what makes us tick, and they haven’t come close yet. We’re in the same boat with them, except we’re just starting out, and they’ve been doing it ever since they got here.”

“That’s ’cause they’re winning the war,” Sam said. “When you’re ahead, you can afford to monkey around with stuff that isn’t really connected to the fighting. When you’re losing like we are, you have enough other problems closer to home, so you can’t worry about stuff out on the edge.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” Berkowitz said. The colloquialism dropped from his lips without sounding put-on, though Sam was sure he knew his whos and whoms as well as Barbara did. Not sounding put-on was also part of his job. He went on, “So how do we figure out what makes a Lizard tick, way down deep inside? It isn’t sex, and that makes them different from us at a level we have trouble even thinking about.”

“Ristin and Ullhass say the other two kinds of bug-eyed monsters the Lizards have conquered work the same way they do,” Yeager said.

“The Hallessi and the Rabotevs. Yes, I’ve heard that, too.” Berkowitz leaned back in his chair. Sweat darkened the khaki of his uniform shirt under the arms. Sam felt his own shirt sticking to him all down the back, and he wasn’t doing anything but sitting still. If, say, you wanted to go out and play ball . . . He recalled wringing out his flannels after games down here. You thought you remembered what this kind of weather was like, but when you found yourself stuck in it week in and week out, you learned your memory—maybe mercifully—had blocked the worst of it.

He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. Since one was about as wet as the other, that didn’t help much. “Hot,” he said inadequately.

“Sure is,” Berkowitz said. “I wonder about the Rabotevs and the Hallessi, I really do. I wish we could do something for them; the Lizards have held them down for thousands of years.”

“From what I’ve heard, they’re supposed to be as loyal to the Emperor as the Lizards are themselves,” Yeager answered. “They’re honorary Lizards, pretty much. I guess that’s what the Lizards had in mind for us, too.”

“I think you’re right,” Berkowitz said, nodding. “You want to hear something funny, something I got out of Straha?” He waited for Sam to nod back, then went on, “About eight hundred years ago, the Lizards sent some kind of a probe to Earth. It beamed a whole bunch of pictures and I don’t know what else back to the planet the Lizards call Home . . . and they figured we’d be a piece of cake, because we couldn’t possibly have changed much in that short a time.”

Sam thought that one over for a few seconds. Then his eye caught Berkowitz’s. They both started to laugh. Yeager said, “You mean they thought they’d be fighting King Arthur and Richard the Lion-Hearted and, and . . .?” He gave up; those were the only two medieval names he could come up with.

“That’s just what they thought,” Berkowitz agreed. “They expected to run tanks and fighter planes up against knights on horseback. The conquest would have taken maybe twenty minutes, and the only way a Lizard would have gotten hurt was if he fell down and stubbed his toe.”

“We gave ’em a little surprise, didn’t we?” Sam said. “A lot’s happened since”—he paused to subtract in his head—“1142 or so.”

“Uh-huh. Good thing for us it has, too. But you know, here’s the strange part: if they’d sent the probe in 342 and come in 1142, things wouldn’t have changed that much—they’d still have had a walkover. Or if they’d sent it in”—now Berkowitz paused for subtraction—“458 B.C. and come in A.D. 342, it would have been the same story. So they might have been right when they figured things wouldn’t change much, and they could take their own sweet time getting ready to squash us flat.”

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Yeager admitted. He didn’t care to think about it like that, either. Something else occurred to him. “They sure came loaded for bear if they expected to be taking on knights in shining armor.”

“Didn’t they just?” Berkowitz ruefully shook his head. “I asked Straha about that. He kind of reared back, the way they do when they think you’re being stupid, you know what I mean? Then he said, ‘You do not go to a war without enough tools to win it. This is what we thought we had.’ ”

“He may still be right,” Sam said.

“So he may.” Berkowitz looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to run and interview a Lizard tank officer about armor-piercing shells. I enjoy chewing the fat with you, Sergeant—you’ve got the right kind of mind to deal with the Lizards. People who start out too sure of themselves end up, you should pardon the expression, nuts.”

Laughing, Yeager went up to the fourth floor. He found Ullhass and Ristin in a state of high excitement. “Look, Exalted Sergeant Sam,” Ristin said, holding up a set of what looked like bottles of nail polish. “The grand and magnificent shiplord Straha brought with him a great store of body paints. He will share them with us. Now we no longer need be naked.”

“That’s nice,” Sam agreed equably. “Does each of you paint himself, or do you paint each other?”

“We paint each other.” Ullhass let out a mournful, hissing sigh. “But we really should not paint our old rank patterns on our bodies. We hold those ranks no longer. We are only prisoners.”

“Then paint yourselves to show that,” Yeager said.

“There are markings to show one is a prisoner,” Ristin said, “but a prisoner who has done something wrong and is being punished. We did nothing wrong; you Big Uglies captured us and made us prisoners. We have no markings for that.”

Probably didn’t think it would ever happen when you set out from Home,
Yeager thought. He said, “If you don’t have those markings, why not invent some?”

Ristin and Ullhass looked at each other. Obviously, that idea hadn’t occurred to them, and wouldn’t have, either. “Such markings would not be official,” Ullhass said, as if that doomed the notion in and of itself.

But Sam said, “Sure they would. They’d be official U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks. If you’re our prisoners, you should use our marks, right?”

The two Lizards looked at each other again. They took suggestions from superior authority very seriously indeed. “What are these U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks?” Ristin asked.

Yeager was about to tell him to make up his own when he had a better idea—much more than most people, Lizards liked doing as they were told. He said, “You should paint yourselves with red and white stripes and blue stars. That way you’ll look like you’re wearing American flags.”

Ristin and Ullhass talked back and forth in their own language. Sam was getting fluent enough now to follow them pretty well. He hid a smile as he listened to their enthusiasm grow. Before long, Ristin said, “It shall be done.”

When they were through, Yeager thought they looked gaudy as all get out, but nobody’d hired him for base art critic, so he kept his big mouth shut. Ullhass and Ristin were delighted, which was the point of the exercise. In the next few days, several other formerly paintless Lizards started sporting stars and stripes. Sam’s highly unofficial suggestion looked as if it might turn official after all.

Then one day, as Sam was coming out of the room he shared with Barbara, a peremptory hiss stopped him in his tracks. “You are the Tosevite who devised these—these unpleasant prisoner color combinations?” Straha demanded.

“That’s right, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “Is something wrong with them?”

“Yes, something is wrong.” Straha used an emphatic cough to show how wrong the something was. Past that, he looked angry enough to be twitching; he reminded Yeager of nothing so much as a tent-show revival preacher testifying against the evils of demon rum and loose women. “This you have done with the paint, this is wrong. This is a mark the Race does not use. It must be cleansed at once from the scales of the males. It is an—” Yeager hadn’t heard the next word before, but if it didn’t mean something like
abomination,
he’d eat his hat.

“Why is that, Shiplord?” he asked, as innocently as he could.

“Because it destroys all order and discipline,” Straha replied, as if to an idiot child. “Body paint shows rank and assignment and seniority; it is not to be used for frivolous purposes of decoration.”

“Shiplord, it does show assignment: it shows that the males who wear it are prisoners of the United States,” Sam said. “If you want it to show seniority, too, the males who have been prisoners longer can wear more stars than the others. Would that be all right?”

He tried to sound quiet and reasonable. All the same, he expected Straha to blow up like a pressure cooker with its safety valve stuck. But the shiplord surprised him: “The trouble with dealing with Tosevites is that one forgets how perspective shifts. Do you understand this?”

“I don’t think I do, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “I’m sorry.”

Straha made an exasperated noise, rather like a water heater with a slow leak. “I explain further, then. With the Race, all is as it has been. We do not casually invent body paint designs. They all fit into a system we have been refining for more than a hundred thousand years.” Yeager knew enough to divide that by two to convert it into Earthly years, but it was still a hell of a long time. Straha went on, “You Big Uglies, though, you just casually invent. You care nothing for large-scale system; all that matters to you is short-term results.”

“We’re at war, Shiplord. We were at war before the Race got here,” Yeager said. “Whatever it takes to win, we’ll do. We change all the time.”

“This we have noticed, to our sorrow,” Straha said. “The weapons with which you fight us now are better than the ones you used when we first came. Ours are still the same. This is what I meant about looking at you from a different perspective. If something suits you for the moment, you will seize upon it, not caring a bit how it accords with what you formerly did. You invent a body-paint pattern on the spur of the moment.” The shiplord hissed again. “I suppose I should be used to that sort of thing, but every now and again it still shocks me. This was one of those times.”

Yeager thought of all the pulp science-fiction stories he’d read where an inventor had an idea one day, built it the next, and mass-produced it the day after that, generally just in time to save the world from the Martians. He’d always taken those with a grain of salt about the size of the Great Salt Flats outside Salt Lake City. Real life didn’t work that way.

To the Lizards, though, Earth must have seemed the embodiment of pulp science fiction run amok. In not a whole lot more than a year, human beings had rolled out long-range rockets, bazookas, and jet planes, to say nothing of the atomic bomb. That didn’t count improvements to already existing items like tanks, either. And by all accounts, poison gas, which dated back to World War I, was new and nasty to the Lizards.

“So you’ll forgive the other prisoners here for using American-style body paint, then?” Sam asked.

“I am not a prisoner; I am a refugee,” Straha said with dignity. “But yes, I forgive it. I was hasty when I condemned it out of hand, but haste, for the Race, is to be actively discouraged. The captive males may wear any sort of marking Tosevite authorities suggest.”

“Thank you, Shiplord,” Yeager said. As Lizards went, Straha seemed like a pretty adaptable guy. If you actively discouraged haste, though, you didn’t make life any easier for yourself, not on Earth, you didn’t.

Teerts sometimes felt guilty about what happened to Tokyo. Millions of intelligent beings dead, and all because he’d warned of what the Nipponese Tosevites were attempting.