Upsetting the Balance

They were on the road north for several days. The highways held little traffic, and all of it drawn by horses or mules. Yeager felt transported back into the days of his father’s youth. Once they passed out of the pine woods and into those where broad-leafed trees predominated, the fiery colors of autumn replaced green. They interested Vesstil. None of the humans in the wagon could explain why the leaves changed color every year.

A sign on US 63 said they’d just passed from Arkansas up into Missouri. They’d also passed into what looked as if it had been one hell of a forest fire not so long ago. Yeager wondered if it had started when the rocket ship-the shuttlecraft, Vesstil called it-landed. He turned to Tompkins and said, “Sir, how do you go about hiding a shuttlecraft?”

“You’ll see when we get there,” the major answered, and set a finger alongside his nose. Sam didn’t know what to make of that, but he kept quiet.

Before long, the wagon was jolting down winding country roads and then along unpaved tracks that would turn into hub-deep glue at the first good rain. Off in the distance, Yeager saw what looked like the wreckage of the biggest tent in the world. About half a mile farther on, he spotted another enormous canvas Big Top, this one with a couple of bomb craters close by.

The proverbial cartoon lightbulb went on above his head. “We built so many tents, the Lizards never figured out which one had the pea under it.”

“Well, actually, they did,” Tompkins said. “But by the time they did, we’d managed to strip it pretty completely. They manufacture these critters the same way we do Chevvies, except maybe even better-everything comes apart real easy so you can work on it if you have to.”

“How else would you build something?” Vesstil asked.

“You’d be amazed,” Major Tompkins answered, rolling his eyes behind the horn-rims. “Your people have had a long, long time to learn to do everything the smooth way, the easy way, the efficient way. It’s not like that with us. A lot of the stuff we’re doing now, we’re doing for the very first time. We aren’t always as good at it as we might be, and we make a lot of dumb mistakes. But one way or another, we get it done.”

“This the Race has learned, often to its sorrow.” Vesstil made one of the leaky-kettle noises Lizards used when they were thinking hard. “The shiplord Straha, my commander that was, has this trait also, in larger measure, at least, than is usual for a male of the Race. Because the fleetlord would not heed him, he decided to join his fate to you.”

And yet Straha had had kittens about unauthorized body-paint designs. Even a radical Lizard, Sam thought, was a reactionary by human standards. He said, “I don’t really get to go aboard a real live spaceship, then? Too bad. Even working with the parts will be pretty good, though.”

“A question, if I may,” Vesstil said. “How does your English have a word for spaceship and the idea of a spaceship without having the spaceship itself? Does not the word follow the thing it describes?”

“Not always, not with us,” Yeager answered with a certain amount of pride. “We have something called science fiction. That means stories that imagine what we’ll be able to build when we know more than we do now. People who write those stories sometimes have to invent new words or use old ones in new ways to get across the new things or ideas they’re talking about.”

“You Tosevites, you imagine too much and you move too fast to make what you imagine real-so the Race would say,” Vesstil answered with a sniffy hiss. “Change needs study, not-stories.” He hissed again.

Sam felt like laughing, or possibly pounding his head against the side of the buckboard. Of all the thingshe’d never imagined, a Lizard sneering at the concept of science fiction stood high on the list.

They came to a little hamlet called Couch. Yeager had been in a lot of little backwoods towns before. He’d waited for the locals to give them the suspicious once-over he’d got more times than he could count. Having Vesstil along should have made things worse. But the Couchians or Couchites or whatever they were went about their business. Sam wondered how many visiting firemen had come to look over the spaceship. Enough to get them used to the idea of strangers, anyway.

The driver pulled up at a general store across the street from a big shed, much the largest building in town. Yeager wondered what it had been for: curing tobacco, maybe. It had that look. But, to his surprise, Tompkins didn’t take them over to the shed. Instead, they walked into the general store.

The fellow behind the counter was on the scrawny side and had a scraggly gray beard. Those details and some bare shelves aside, he and his store might have been pulled out of a Norman Rockwell painting and set in motion. “Mornin’,” he said with the hillbilly twang Yeager had heard from players in ballparks scattered all across the country.