Upsetting the Balance

Night had fallen by the time the males either killed or drove out the last British defenders of Wargrave. Even then, small-arms fire kept rattling from the woods below the crest of the hill atop which the village sat.

An aggressive officer would have sent males into those woods to clear out the nuisance. The local commander did nothing of the sort. Ussmak didn’t blame him. Even with infrared gear, Tosevite forests were frightening places at night for males of the Race. The Big Uglies belonged in amongst those trees and bushes, and could move quietly through them. The Race didn’t and couldn’t. A lot of males had ended up dead trying.

“Shall we get out and stretch our legs and wiggle our tailstumps?” Nejas asked. “The Emperor only knows when we’ll see another chance.”

As he’d been trained, Ussmak cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. Skoob said, “It’ll be cold out there, but I’ll come. Even a Big Ugly town is better than looking at my gunsight and autoloader all day.”

“What about you, driver?” Nejas asked.

“No thank you, superior sir,” Ussmak said. “With your permission, I’ll sit tight. I’ve already seen more Big Ugly towns than I ever wanted.”

“You don’t want to hatch out of your nice steel eggshell,” Nejas said, but jokingly, not in a way that would cause offense. “As you will, of course. I can’t say I disagree with you for not caring about Tosevite towns. They’re generally ugly before we smash them up, and uglier afterwards.”

He scrambled out through the cupola. Skoob opened his escape hatch and joined him. Ussmak waited till they both jumped down from the landcruiser. Then he reached under the mat below the control pedals and pulled out his little jar of ginger. He’d been twitchy with need for it all through the fighting, but made himself refrain. Males who went snarling into combat with a head full of the herb were braver than they would have been otherwise-and also stupider. It was a bad combination.

Now, though-He pulled off the stopper to the vial and hissed in dismay. The little bit of brownish powder that poured into the palm of his hand was all he had left. His forked tongue flicked out and lapped it up.

“Ah!” he said. Well-being flowed through him. Fear, loneliness, even cold fell away. He felt proud to be a male of the Race, bringing the benighted Tosevites into the domain of civilization. He thought he could singlehandedly force a crossing of the Thames ahead and effect a junction with the rest of the Race’s males north of London.

With a distinct effort of will, he made himself keep his hands away from the wheel and his foot away from the accelerator. He’d been using ginger a long time now, and knew he wasn’t as omnipotent as he thought he was.

He hadn’t been all that smart before he tasted, though. Had he remembered how low on the herb he was, he could have got out of the landcruiser and found an infantrymale who had more than he could taste at the moment. Now, though, he’d look foolish if he emerged. Worse, he’d look suspicious. Nejas and Skoob both had untainted tongues. They thought he did, too. If they ever found out otherwise, he’d be sent off for punishment, with green stripes painted on his arms.

But if he didn’t find some ginger somewhere, before long his condition would be apparent to them anyhow. He’d be a red-nostriled nervous wreck. Once you started tasting ginger, it got its claw in you and you had to keep doing it.

The exaltation from the herb faded. He sank as low as he had been high. Now the only thing he wanted to do was sit quietly and pretend the world outside the landcruiser didn’t exist. Nejas had had the right of it: he was using the vehicle as an eggshell to separate himself from everything around him. The world couldn’t come in here.

But it did, in the persons of Nejas and Skoob. The landcruiser commander said, “You were wiser than we, driver. Nothing here worth seeing, nothing worth taking. Better we should have stayed inside.”

“We’ll sleep in here, no matter how cramped it is,” Skoob added. “I don’t want to be out in the open if the British start throwing gas at us.”

“No arguments there,” Nejas said, whereupon they did start arguing about who would try to sleep in the turret and who would have the dubious privilege of stretching halfway out next to Ussmak’s reclining driver’s seat. Being the landcruiser commander, Nejas won the argument. The victory proved of dubious value because, among other things, he tried lying down on the spent machine-gun cartridges that littered the floor.