Tilting the Balance

The boat drifted to a stop at the edge of the ice. Gunnysacks made the treacherous surface easier to walk on. The crew handed Larssen his gear, wished him good luck, and headed back to the Duluth Queen.

He headed over toward a dog-drawn sledge that didn’t have too many crates in it. “Can I get a ride?” he called, and the driver nodded. He felt like a character out of Jack London as he got in behind the man.

The trip across the ice gave him more time to think. It also convinced him that if he was going to live in the twentieth century, he’d use its tools where he could. He’d do better even if the Lizards did bomb him while he was just partway to Denver. When at last he got into Duluth, he went looking for the train station.

The hauler aircraft rolled to a stop. Ussmak stared out the window at the Tosevite landscape. It was different from the flat plains of the SSSR where the landcruiser driver had served before, but that didn’t make it any better, not as far as he was concerned. The plants were a dark, wet-looking green under sunlight that seemed too white, too harsh.

Not that the star Tosev adequately heated its third world. Ussmak felt the chill as soon as he descended from the hauler onto the concrete of the runway. Here, though, at least water wasn’t falling frozen from the sky. That was something.

“Landcruiser crew replacements!” a male bawled. Ussmak and three or four others who had just deplaned tramped over to him. The male took their names and identity numbers, then waved them into the back of an armored transporter.

“Where are we?” Ussmak asked as the machine jounced into life. “Whom are we fighting?” That was a better question; the names the Big Uglies gave to pieces of Tosev 3 meant little to him.

“This place is called France,” a gunner named Forssis answered. “I served here for a while shortly after we landed, before the commander decided it was largely pacified and transferred my unit to the SSSR.”

All the males let their mouths fall open in derisive laughter at that. Everything had seemed so easy in the days right after the landing. Ussmak remembered being part of a drive that had smashed Soviet landcruisers as if they were made of cardboard.

Even then, though, he should have had a clue. A sniper had picked off his commander when Votal, like any good landcruiser leader, stuck his head out the cupola to get a decent view of what was going on. And Krentel, the commander who replaced him, did not deserve the body paint that proclaimed his rank.

Well, Krentel was dead, too, and Telerep the gunner with him. A guerrilla-Ussmak did not know whether he was Russki or Deutsch-had blown the turret right off the landcruiser while they were trying to protect the crews cleaning up nuclear material scattered when the Big Uglies had managed to wreck the starship that carried the bulk of the Race’s atomic weapons.

From his driver’s position, Ussmak had bailed out of the landcruiser when it was stricken-out of the landcruiser and into radioactive mud. He’d been in a hospital ship ever since… till now.

“So whom are we fighting?” he repeated. “The Francais?”

“No, the Deutsche, mostly,” Forssis answered. “They were ruling here when we arrived. I hear the weapons we’ll be facing are better than the ones they threw at us the last time I was here.”

Silence settled over the transporter’s passenger compartment. Fighting the Big Uglies, Ussmak thought, was like poisoning pests: the survivors kept getting more resistant to what you were trying to do to them. And, like any other pests, the Big Uglies changed faster than you could alter your methods of coping with them.

The heated compartment, the smooth ride over a paved highway, and the soft purr of the hydrogen-burning engine helped most of the males doze off before long: veterans, they knew the value of snatching sleep while they had the chance. Ussmak tried to rest, too, but couldn’t. The longing for ginger gnawed at him and would not let go.

An orderly had sold him some of the precious herb in the hospital ship. He’d started tasting as much out of boredom as for any other reason. When he was full of ginger, he felt wise and brave and invulnerable. When he wasn’t-that was when he discovered the trap into which he’d fallen. Without ginger, he seemed stupid and fearful and soft-skinned as a Big Ugly, a contrast just made worse because he so vividly remembered how wonderful he knew himself to be when he tasted the powdered herb.

He didn’t care how much he gave the orderly for his ginger: he had pay saved up and nothing he’d rather spend it on. The orderly had an ingenious arrangement whereby he got Ussmak’s funds even though they didn’t go directly into his computer account.