Tilting the Balance

Not that ginger wasn’t a problem. One more thing we didn’t learn from the probe, Atvar thought. The cursed herb made males feel they were brighter and stronger than they really were; it also made them want to recapture that feeling as often as they could. They’d do almost anything to get ginger, even trade weapons and information to the Big Uglies.

“With the problem ginger poses to our security, it occurs to me that we may have been lucky the Big Uglies succeeded in blowing up the ship which carried the bulk of our nuclear weapons,” the fleetlord said. “Otherwise, some male seeking pleasure for his tongue might have sought to convey one to the Tosevites in exchange for his precious herb.”

“There’s a pleasant thought!” Kirel exclaimed. “The Tosevites are barbarians without care for tomorrow-they would not hesitate to ruin their own planet if it meant defeating us.”

“Truth,” Atvar said glumly. After initial in-atmosphere bursts to wreck Tosevite communications with electromagnetic pulse (unsuccessfully, because the Big Uglies’ electronic devices were too primitive to use solid-state components), the Race had expended only two nuclear devices: against Berlin and Washington, centers of local resistance. But resistance had continued anyhow.

“Ironic that we have a greater obligation to maintain this world as nearly intact as possible than does the species that evolved on it,” Kirel said. “Of course, the Tosevites are not aware our colonization fleet is on the way behind us.”

“Indeed,” Atvar said. “If it arrives and finds Tosev 3 uninhabitable, we will have failed here, no matter what else we accomplish.”

“We also have to bear in mind that the Big Uglies are engaging in nuclear weapons research of their own, certainly with the material their guerrillas captured from us in the SSSR and, the evidence would suggest, with projects altogether their own as well,” Kirel said. “Should one of those projects succeed, our problems here will become measurably more difficult.”

“Immeasurably, you mean,” Atvar said. The Big Uglies would not worry about what they did to Tosev 3, as long as that meant getting rid of the Race. “Deutschland, the SSSR, the United States, maybe those little island empires, too-Nippon and Britain-we have to keep both eye turrets on every one of them. The trouble is, a planet is a very large place. Their projects will not be easy to track down. But it must be done.” He spoke as much to remind himself as to tell Kirel.

“It shall be done,” the shiplord echoed loyally.

It had better be done, they thought together.

The horse-drawn wagon pulled to a stop in New Salem, North Dakota. Sam Yeager looked around. As a seventeen-year veteran of bush-league baseball and its endless travel, he was a connoisseur of small towns. New Salem might have had a thousand people in it; then again, it might not.

He scrambled out of the wagon. Barbara Larssen handed him his Springfield. He took the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, then held out a hand to help Barbara down. They clung to each other for a moment. He kissed the top of her head. The ends of her dark blond hair still showed traces of permanent wave. Most of it was straight, though; a long time had gone by since she’d got a permanent.

He didn’t want to let her go, but he had to. He grabbed the rifle again, pointed it at the wagon. Military routine, he thought, and then, military fiddlesticks. But since he wore a corporal’s stripes these days, he played the game by the rules. “Come on out, boys,” he called.

Ristin and Ullhass, the two Lizard POWs who accompanied the Metallurgical Laboratory’s wagon train on the way from Chicago to the Lab’s planned new home in Denver, poked their heads up over the side of the wagon. “It shall be done, superior sir,” they chorused in hissing English. They dropped down in front of Yeager and Barbara.

“Hard to think-things-so small could be so dangerous,” Barbara murmured. Neither of the Lizards came up even to her shoulder.

“They aren’t small with guns in their hands, or inside tanks, or inside planes, or inside their spaceships,” Yeager answered. “I fought against them, remember, before my unit captured these boys.”

“We thought you kill us,” Ullhass said.

“We thought you kill us, then eat us,” Ristin agreed.

Yeager laughed. “You’d been reading too much science fiction, both of you.” He laughed again, more reflectively. If he hadn’t been in the habit of reading science fiction himself to pass the time on trains and buses, he never would have volunteered-or been accepted-as the Lizards’ principal guard, translator, and explainer of matters Earthly.