Upsetting the Balance

“I wish they were a pack of lazy, incompetent fools,” Atvar answered. “Lazy, incompetent fools, though, could not have built and detonated an atomic device, even if the plutonium was stolen from our stockpile. As a matter of fact, prisoner interrogations imply that the roads are so shoddy for a strategic reason: to hinder invasion from Deutschland to the west. They certainly had reason to fear such invasion, at any rate, and the measures taken against the Deutsche have also served to hinder us.”

“So they have,” Kirel hissed in anger. “Of all the Tosevite not-empires, I most want to see the SSSR overthrown. I realize that their emperor was but a Big Ugly, but to take him from his throne and murder him-” He shuddered. “Such thoughts would never have crossed our minds before we came to Tosev 3. If males ever had them, they are vanished in the prehistory of the Race. Or they were, until the Big Uglies recalled them to unwholesome life.”

“I know,” Atvar said sadly. “Even after we do conquer this world, after the colonization fleet sets down here, I fear Tosevite ideas may yet corrupt us. The Rabotevs and Hallessi differ from us in body, but in spirit the Empire’s three races might have hatched from the same egg. The Big Uglies are alien, alien.”

“Which makes them all the more dangerous,” Kirel said. “If the colonization fleet were not following us, I might think sterilizing Tosev 3 the wisest course.”

“So Straha proposed early on,” Atvar replied. “Have you come round to the traitor’s view?” His voice grew soft and dangerous as he asked that question. Straha’s broadcasts from the U.S.A. had hurt morale more than he liked to admit.

“No, Exalted Fleetlord. I said, ‘If the colonization fleet were not following us.’ But it is, which limits our options.” Kirel hesitated, then continued, “As we have noted before, the Tosevites, unfortunately, operate under no such restraints. If they construct more nuclear weapons, they will use them.”

“The other thing I doubt is the effectiveness of nuclear weapons as intimidators against them,” Atvar said. “We have destroyed Berlin, Washington, and now Tokyo. The Deutsche and Americans keep right on fighting us, and the Nipponese also seem to be carrying on. But when the Soviet Big Uglies detonated their device, they intimidated us for a long period of time. That is not how warfare against a primitive species should progress.”

“One thing the Tosevites have taught us: technology and political sophistication do not necessarily travel together,” Kirel said. “For us, dealings between empires are principles to be absorbed out of old texts from previous conquests; for the Big Uglies, they are the everyday stuff of life. No wonder, then, that they find it easier to manipulate us than we them. By the Emperor”-he cast down his eyes-“that might have been true even if they were as technologically backwards as our probes led us to believe.”

“So it might, but then they would not have had the strength to back up their deviousness,” Atvar said. “Now they do. And sooner or later, the Soviets will manage to build another nuclear weapon, or the Deutsche, or the Americans-and then more difficult choices will present themselves to us.”

“Difficult, yes,” Kirel said. “We suspect the Americans and the Deutsche and the British as well of having nuclear programs, as the Soviets surely do. But what if we cannot find the source of their production, as we were lucky enough to manage with the Nipponese? Shall we destroy one of their cities instead, taking vengeance for their nuclear attacks in that way?”

“It is to be considered,” Atvar answered. “Many things are to be considered which we had not contemplated before we came here.” That made him nervous in and of itself. Maneuvering through uncharted territory was not what the Race did best. It was seldom something the Race had to do at all, for those who led knew their kind’s weaknesses full well. But on Tosev 3, Atvar found himself with only the choice of too many choices.

The ruined gray stone castle before which Ussmak had halted his landcruiser seemed to him immeasurably old. Intellectually, he knew the frowning pile of stone could hardly have stood there for more than a couple of thousand years (half that, if you counted by Tosev 3’s slow revolutions around its primary)-hardly a flick of the nictitating membrane in the history of the Race.

But his own people had not built such structures since days now more nearly legendary than historical. None survived; a hundred thousand years and more of earthquakes, erosion, and constant construction had seen to that. Chugging up the hill to the castle at Farnham, Ussmak had felt transported in time back to primitive days.