In the Balance

Teerts peered through the dirty glass. “I see a whole swarm of Tosevites working at the curve ahead.” How many Big Uglies labored there? Hundreds certainly, more likely thousands. No one carried anything more impressive than a pick, a shovel, or a crowbar. If one of the Race’s aircraft spied them, a strafing run would leave great red steaming pools in the snow.

But if no aircraft came over, the Big Uglies could perform astonishing feats. Before he came to Tosev 3, Teerts had taken machinery for granted. He’d never imagined that masses of beings armed with hand tools could not only duplicate their results but also work nearly as fast as they did.

He said, “Forgive the ignorant question, superior sir, but how do you keep them from perishing of cold or from being injured at this hard, dangerous work?”

“They are only Chinese peasants,” Major Okamoto said with chilling indifference. “As we use them up, we seize as many more as we need to do what must be done.”

For some reason, Teerts had expected the Big Uglies to treat their own kind better than they did him. But to the Nipponese, the Tosevites here were not of their own kind, however much alike they seemed to a male of the Race. The reasons for distinction at a level lower than the species,as a whole were lost on Teerts. Whatever they were, though, they let the Nipponese treat their laborers like pieces of the machines in whose place they were used, and with as little concern about their fate. That was something else Teerts hadn’t imagined before he came to Tosev 3. This world was an education in all sorts of matters where he would have preferred continued ignorance.

The vast swarms of workers (Teerts thought not so much of people as of the little social hive-creatures that occasionally made nuisances of themselves back on Home) drew back from the railroad track after a surprisingly short time. The train rolled slowly forward.

Three or four laborers lay in the snow, too worn to move on to the next stretch of broken track. Nipponese guards-males dressed far more warmly than those in their charge-came up and kicked at the exhausted peasants. One managed to stagger to his feet and rejoin his comrades. The guards picked up crowbars and methodically broke in the heads of the others.

Teerts wished he hadn’t seen that. He already knew the Nipponese had no compunctions about doing dreadful things to him if he failed to cooperate or even failed to be useful to them. Yet now he discovered that having knowledge confirmed before his eyes was ten times worse than merely knowing.

The train picked up speed after it passed the repaired curve. “Is this not a fine way to travel?” Okamoto said. “How swiftly we move!”

Teerts had crossed the gulf between the stars at half the speed of light-admittedly, in cold sleep. He ranged the air above this main landmass of Tosev 3 at speeds far greater than sound. How, then, was he supposed to be impressed with this wheezy train? The only conveyance next to which it seemed fast was the one in which the poor straining Tosevite had hauled him to the station.

But that latter sort of conveyance was what the Race had expected to find all over Tosev 3. Maybe the train, decrepit as it appeared to Teerts, was new enough to be marvelous to the Big Uglies. He knew better than to contradict Major Okamoto, anyhow. “Yes, very fast,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could feign.

Through the dirty window, Teerts watched more Tosevites-Chinese peasants, he supposed-struggling to build new defensive lines for the Nipponese. They were having a tough time; the miserable local weather had frozen the ground hard as stone.

He had no idea how sick he’d become of the train, of its endless shaking, of the seat that did not conform to his backside because it made no provision for a tailstump, of the endless jabber from the Nipponese troops in the back of the car, of the odor that rose from them and grew thicker as the journey went on. He even came to miss his cell, something he had not imagined possible.

The journey seemed to stretch endlessly, senselessly. How long could it take to traverse one small part of a planetary surface? Given fuel and maintenance for his killercraft, Teerts could have circumnavigated the whole miserable world several times in the interval he needed to crawl across this tiny portion of it.

He finally grew fed up-and incautious-enough to say that to Major Okamoto. The Big Ugly looked at him for a moment, then asked, “And how fast could you go if someone kept dropping bombs in front of your aircraft?”

After heading east for a day and a half, the train swung south. That puzzled Teerts, who said to his keeper, “I thought Nippon lay in this direction, across the sea.”

“It does,” Okamoto answered, “but the port Vladivostok, which is nearest to us, belongs to the Soviet Union, not to Nippon.”