Upsetting the Balance

“No, sir, I was a baseball player.” Sam’s face heated as he admitted, “All I knew about creatures from outer space before the war, sir, I got from reading science fiction.”

Berkowitz grinned. It made him look like a kid. “You know what, Sergeant? I’m just the same way. You know what else? That starts us out two jumps ahead of everybody else, because our minds are flexible.” He looked down at the papers in the clipboard again. “We’ve got you and your wife and the POWs assigned to rooms 427 and 429 upstairs. Why don’t you get settled in tonight-supper’s at 1800, about half an hour from now-and report with the Lizards at 0800 tomorrow.”

“That sounds fine, sir,” Sam said. “Uh-our bags are still in the wagon, sir.”

“Somebody will carry them up for you,” Berkowitz said. “Your job is to ride herd on your friends here.”

A room in a hospital wasn’t going to be as nice as an apartment across the street from the University of Denver, but Yeager was in no position to argue. He hoped Barbara wouldn’t mind the change too much. She wasn’t in the Army, but it still jerked her around.

When he and his companions trudged up to the fourth floor, the rooms proved bigger than he’d expected. The window to 429 had iron bars fitted-on the inside, so they wouldn’t show from the air-which meant that one was intended for the Lizards.

A Negro in khaki brought up the luggage. Sam pulled a half-dollar out of his pocket. The black man shook his head. “Sergeant, I’m in the Army, jus’ like you. This here’s my job.”

“I don’t care if you’re a congressman, buddy. You do that kind of work in this kind of weather, you ought to get something special for it.” Yeager tossed the man the half-dollar. He picked it out of the air with an infielder’s smoothness, sketched a salute, and went down the hall whistling something Dixieland.

Drawn by the noise in the hallway, a Lizard came out of room 431 to see what was going on. He had the fanciest body paint Sam had ever seen. Ristin and Ullhass hadn’t kept themselves painted for months, which made the contrast all the more striking: this male’s body gleamed with spirals and swirls of silver and gold and red.

Ullhass and Ristin turned and stared, their eye turrets swiveling toward the fancily painted Lizard as if drawn to him by magnets. Then they started spluttering honorifics Yeager had never heard before: “Supreme sir!” “Splendid Shiplord!” “How did you come here, splendid sir?”

Barbara didn’t follow the Lizards’ language as well as Sam, but tone and gesture spoke volumes by themselves. “That’s animportant Lizard,” she said quietly.

“No kidding,” Yeager murmured back. His two scaly buddies were reacting to the fellow with the bright paint job the way a couple of bobby-soxers would have reacted to Frank Sinatra. He walked over to the Lizard, gave forth with his best interrogative cough, and said, “May I ask your name and rank?” He didn’t use any of the formal titles of respect Ullhass and Ristin had employed; the Lizard was, after all, a prisoner.

The male turned from his two fellow aliens to Yeager. “You speak our language as well as any Tosevite I have heard,” he said, and added the emphatic cough. Sam grinned a wide, foolish grin, as if he’d just knocked in the game-winning run in the bottom of the ninth. The Lizard went on, “I am Straha, shiplord of the206th Emperor Yower. Former shiplord, I should say-no more, thanks to the exalted incompetence of Atvar the fleetlord.”

Yeager stared. How the devil had the Americans bagged a shiplord? From what he knew, a lot of them stayed up in outer space where nothing human could touch them, let alone capture them. Ristin said, “This is our third-highest male, superior sir, in all the fleet. Above him are only the shiplord of the bannership and the exalted fleetlord himself.”

Most of that was in English, so Barbara caught it, too. It was her turn to gape. “What’s he doing here?” she asked, a split second ahead of her husband.

“Whatare you doing here, Shiplord?” Sam asked in the Lizard’s language. He granted Straha his title, but not the flowery language that went with it.

The Lizard didn’t take offense. He said, “When the Russkis set off their plutonium bomb-you know about this?” He waited for Yeager to say he did, then went on, “And when other parts of our campaign were botched and mishandled, I alone had the courage to stand up and propose that we replace the inept exalted fleetlord. My motion had large majority, but not the three parts in four our law requires. It was defeated.”

“Oh, lord,” Yeager said softly. The scene sounded like something out of South America or the Balkans. Somehow he hadn’t imagined the Lizards with political squabbles of their own. It made them seem much more-human. He switched back to their language: “What happened then?”