Upsetting the Balance

With a convulsive jerk of his hand, he popped the piece of ginger into his mouth. He went rooting through the bowl with the eating sticks, looking for others. He found them and gobbled them up. The Nipponese cook had been unusually generous. He wondered what that meant; the Nipponese were not given to generosity unless they expected to realize something from it.

Then, as the ginger took effect, he stopped worrying about why the Nipponese had given it to him. That they had was enough. He felt smart enough to outwit every Big Ugly interrogator and nuclear physicist, strong enough to bend the bars of his Tokyo prison cell and escape the life of torment that he led.

Those were only feelings. He knew it all too well. The interrogators and physicists had drained him dry; everything he’d known about splitting atoms, they now knew. They’d known much of it already. The Russkis had already built a bomb. How the Nipponese gloated over that! How they strained every fiber to get one of their own!

Could Teerts have torn out the bars of his cell, he would have. Thinking he could wasn’t enough to make it real. He’d tried, the first few times ginger had made him feel like a machine. In somber fact, he was just a male of the Race, and steel bars defeated him.

Usually when they fed him so much ginger, an interrogation was in the offing. The Nipponese liked to question him when the herb made his tongue loose and lively. He waited for Major Okamoto, his interpreter, interrogator, and occasional tormentor, to come down the hall. But Okamoto did not come.

From the top of the lift ginger gave him, Teerts slid into the trough of despair that followed. Just as he started to curl up in the farthest corner of his cell with the blanket drawn up over him both for warmth and to cut himself off from the unpleasant outside world, heavy Tosevite footsteps came echoing down the corridor.

The jailer unlocked his cell. “Come along,” Major Okamoto said in Teerts’ language. By now, Teerts paid little attention to his accent.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said, but Okamoto had to shout at him before he would get up. The silent guard who always accompanied the major gestured with his bayoneted rifle for Teerts to precede him.

Before they left the prison, Okamoto decked Teerts in a conical straw hat like the ones some Nipponese wore, and also gave him trousers and tunic. He looked ridiculous, but that was not the point: the point was to keep him from being spotted from the air or by the Race’s reconnaissance satellites.

The beast-drawn wagon that waited outside did not head off toward the nuclear physics laboratory, as it usually did. Instead, it took an unfamiliar path through the narrow, crowded streets of Tokyo. Teerts asked, “Where are we going, superior sir?”

“To the train station, and then on to Kobe,” Okamoto answered. “Dr. Nishina does not think you can tell him any more of use in his plutonium bomb project, so the naval aviators will resume their questioning of you.”

“I see,” Teerts said dully. Now something more than the absence of ginger weighed down his spirits. The scientists, on the whole, had been restrained when he didn’t know something. The military males-He shuddered.

The train station was packed with Nipponese, some in gowns, some in shirts and trousers, many in the uniforms of army and navy. Using a separate service for the water struck Teerts as absurd, but Tosev 3 had oceans where Home had small seas, so perhaps there was some justification for the idea.

Most of the train was even more crowded than the station as a whole, but Teerts, Major Okamoto, and the stolid guard had a car all to themselves, with tea and food already laid on. Okamoto did not object to Teerts’ feeding himself. His rice had ginger in it, which buoyed his spirits.

A jerk said the train was in motion. Puffs of smoky steam flew from the engine. Teerts reckoned the coal-burner an unbelievably filthy machine, but on such matters the Big Uglies did not solicit his opinion.

Above the racket of the engine, above the clicking of the cars it pulled over the rails, came another sound, one Teerts knew intimately: the high, screaming wail of a turbofan engine. Major Okamoto looked up in alarm. “Air raid!” he shouted, just as bombs and cannon fire began chewing up the train.

Shells punched through the roof of the car as if it were made of tissue. A bomb exploded right next to it. Teerts felt as if he were caught in the egg from which all earthquakes hatched. Glass sprayed around him. The car derailed and overturned.

When the crashing and the spinning stopped, he found himself sitting on what had been the roof. “I’m alive,” he exclaimed, and then, even more surprised, “I’m not hurt.” Major Okamoto and the silent, stolid guard lay on the roof, too, both of them bleeding and unconscious.