Upsetting the Balance

“It’s okay, Captain. I worked that out,” Sam said. Even if he was a shrink, Ben Berkowitz was a regular guy, too. Yeager hadn’t got to the point of realizing it might be important for a psychiatrist to be able to make like a regular guy to help him do the rest of his job better.

“You with me so far?” Berkowitz asked.

“I guess so,” Yeager said cautiously. “I never really thought about sex tying in to all that other stuff, but maybe it does.”

“You’ll go with it for the sake of argument, you mean.”

“I guess so,” Sam repeated.

Berkowitz laughed at him. He was engagingly ugly; when he grinned, he looked about eighteen, like one of the bright-or sometimes smartass-kids who filled the letter column inAstounding. He said, “Careful son of a gun, aren’t you? Remind me not to play poker with you. Well, for the sake of argument, let’s say we can get all sorts of useful insights into the way the human mind works when we use Freudian analysis. It would be nice if we could do the same thing with the Lizards.”

“So why can’t you?” Yeager asked. Then a lightbulb went on in his head. “Oh. They’ve got a waddayacallit-a mating season.”

“Right the first time.” Ben Berkowitz grinned again. “You may look like a farm boy, Yeager, but you’re pretty damn sharp, you know that?”

“Thank you, sir.” Sam didn’t think of himself as pretty damn sharp. Barbara, for instance, could run rings around him. But she didn’t seem bored with him, either, so maybe he wasn’t quite the near-hick he’d often felt hanging around with fast-talking big-city ballplayers.

“ ‘Thank you, sir.’ ” Just like some of those fast-talking city guys, Berkowitz had a flare for mimicry. Unlike a lot of them, he didn’t spike it with malice. He said, “Believe me, Sergeant, if you were a dimbulb, you wouldn’t be in Hot Springs. This and the project you came from are probably the two most important places in the United States-and you’ve had your hand in both of them. Damn few people can say as much.”

“I never thought of it like that,” Yeager said. When he did, he saw he had something to be proud of.

“Well, you should have,” Berkowitz told him. “But back to business, okay? Like you said, the Lizards have a mating season. When their females smell right, they screw themselves silly. When they don’t-” He snapped his fingers. “Everything shuts off, just like that. It’s like they’re sexually neutral beings ninety percent of the time-all the time, if no lady Lizards are around.”

“They think what we do is funny as hell,” Yeager said.

“Don’t they just,” Berkowitz agreed. “Straha tells me they have a whole big research program going, just trying to figure out what makes us tick, and they haven’t come close yet. We’re in the same boat with them, except we’re just starting out, and they’ve been doing it ever since they got here.”

“That’s ’cause they’re winning the war,” Sam said. “When you’re ahead, you can afford to monkey around with stuff that isn’t really connected to the fighting. When you’re losing like we are, you have enough other problems closer to home, so you can’t worry about stuff out on the edge.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” Berkowitz said. The colloquialism dropped from his lips without sounding put-on, though Sam was sure he knew his whos and whoms as well as Barbara did. Not sounding put-on was also part of his job. He went on, “So how do we figure out what makes a Lizard tick, way down deep inside? It isn’t sex, and that makes them different from us at a level we have trouble even thinking about.”

“Ristin and Ullhass say the other two kinds of bug-eyed monsters the Lizards have conquered work the same way they do,” Yeager said.

“The Hallessi and the Rabotevs. Yes, I’ve heard that, too.” Berkowitz leaned back in his chair. Sweat darkened the khaki of his uniform shirt under the arms. Sam felt his own shirt sticking to him all down the back, and he wasn’t doing anything but sitting still. If, say, you wanted to go out and play ball… He recalled wringing out his flannels after games down here. You thought you remembered what this kind of weather was like, but when you found yourself stuck in it week in and week out, you learned your memory-maybe mercifully-had blocked the worst of it.

He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. Since one was about as wet as the other, that didn’t help much. “Hot,” he said inadequately.

“Sure is,” Berkowitz said. “I wonder about the Rabotevs and the Hallessi, I really do. I wish we could do something for them; the Lizards have held them down for thousands of years.”

“From what I’ve heard, they’re supposed to be as loyal to the Emperor as the Lizards are themselves,” Yeager answered. “They’re honorary Lizards, pretty much. I guess that’s what the Lizards had in mind for us, too.”