Upsetting the Balance

“Morning, Terence,” Major Tompkins answered. “Mind if we use your back room?” Terence (hell of a name,Sam thought) shook his head. Before the major could lead Yeager and Vesstil through the door to the back room, it opened, and three men came out into the store.

Sam stared. He knew he was staring, but he couldn’t help it. Of all the people he never would have expected to see in a small-town general store, Albert Einstein ranked high on the list-so high, in fact, that he needed a moment to realize one of the physicist’s companions was Benito Mussolini, complete with the enormous concrete jaw that showed up in all the newsreels.

Einstein eyed Vesstil with the same fascination Yeager felt towardhim. Then the third man of the group spoke to Tompkins: “Bob’s still back there. He’s the one you’ll want to see, isn’t he, Major?”

“Yes, General Eisenhower,” the major answered. By then, Yeager had given up staring. When you got to the point where a mere general’s company made him not worth noticing till he opened his mouth, you’d come a hell of a long way from the Three-I League.

Eisenhower shepherded his VIPs out of the general store. Tompkins shepherded his not-so-VIPs into the backroom. Terence the storekeeper took everything in stride.

The back room had a trapdoor set into the floor. As soon as he saw it, Yeager figured out what was going on. Sure enough, it led not to a basement but to a tunnel, formidably shored up with timber. Tompkins carried an old-fashioned lantern to light the way. The lantern might once have burned kerosene, but now the smell of hot fat came from it.

The tunnel came out inside the shed, as Sam had expected it would. The interior of the building did smell powerfully of tobacco, though none was curing there now. Sam sighed. He still missed cigarettes, even if his wind was better these days than it had been for the past ten years.

But he forgot all about his longing when he looked around. These tanks and lines and valves and unnamable gadgets had come out of a veritable spaceship Vesstil had flown down from outer space to the surface of the earth. If people could figure out how to duplicate them-and the frame in which they’d flown-space travel would turn real for mankind, too.

Prowling among the disassembled pieces of the Lizard shuttlecraft was a tall, gray-haired man with slightly stooped shoulders and a long, thoughtful face. “Come on over with me-I’ll introduce you,” Tompkins said to Sam. Nodding to the tall man, he said, “Sir, this is Sergeant Sam Yeager, one of our best interpreters. Yeager, I’d like you to meet Robert Goddard. We filched him from the Navy when Vesstil brought Straha down in the shuttlecraft. He knows more about rockets than anyone around.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,” Yeager said, sticking out his hand. “I’ve read about your work inAstounding.”

“Good-we won’t be starting from scratch with you, then,” Goddard said with an encouraging smile. He was somewhere in his fifties, Yeager thought, but not very healthy… or maybe, like so many people, just working himself to death. He went on, “Hank-your Major Tompkins-is too kind. A good many Germans know more about this business than I do. They’ve made big ones; I’ve just made small ones. But the principles stay the same.”

“Yes, sir,” Yeager said. “Can we build-one of these?” He waved at the collection of hardware.

“The mechanical parts we can match-or at least we can make equivalents for them,” Goddard said confidently. Then he frowned. “The electric lines we can also match. The electronic controls are another matter altogether. There our friends here”-he nodded to Vesstil-“are years, maybe centuries, ahead of us. Working around that will be the tricky part.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam repeated. “What will you want me to do, sir?”

“You’re supposed to be a hot translator, aren’t you? You’ll run questions and answers back and forth between me and Vesstil. Between what we already know and what he can tell us-it’ll be a while before we get spaceships of our own, I expect, but even big rockets like the ones the Germans have would help us a lot. Hitting the Lizards from a couple of hundred miles away is a lot better than going at ’em face-to-face.”

“That’s true, sir.” Sam wondered how big a rocket would have to be to carry an atomic bomb. He didn’t ask. Vesstil had no business hearing of such things, and he didn’t know whether Goddard was cleared for them, either.

He laughed a little. The United States didn’t have a big rocket, and it didn’t have atomic bombs, either-and here he was, putting the two together. From everything he’d seen of the Lizards, they didn’t make leaps of imagination like that-which was why human beings still had a chance to win this war.

14

Nieh Ho-T’ing glowered at Liu Han. “You are the most exasperating woman in the history of the world,” he snarled.