Upsetting the Balance

“I think you’re right,” Berkowitz said, nodding. “You want to hear something funny, something I got out of Straha?” He waited for Sam to nod back, then went on, “About eight hundred years ago, the Lizards sent some kind of a probe to Earth. It beamed a whole bunch of pictures and I don’t know what else back to the planet the Lizards call Home… and they figured we’d be a piece of cake, because we couldn’t possibly have changed much in that short a time.”

Sam thought that one over for a few seconds. Then his eye caught Berkowitz’s. They both started to laugh. Yeager said, “You mean they thought they’d be fighting King Arthur and Richard the Lion-Hearted and, and…?” He gave up; those were the only two medieval names he could come up with.

“That’s just what they thought,” Berkowitz agreed. “They expected to run tanks and fighter planes up against knights on horseback. The conquest would have taken maybe twenty minutes, and the only way a Lizard would have gotten hurt was if he fell down and stubbed his toe.”

“We gave ’em a little surprise, didn’t we?” Sam said. “A lot’s happened since”-he paused to subtract in his head-“1142 or so.”

“Uh-huh. Good thing for us it has, too. But you know, here’s the strange part: if they’d sent the probe in 342 and come in 1142, things wouldn’t have changed that much-they’d still have had a walkover. Or if they’d sent it in”-now Berkowitz paused for subtraction-“458 B.C. and come in A.D. 342, it would have been the same story. So they might have been right when they figured things wouldn’t change much, and they could take their own sweet time getting ready to squash us flat.”

“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Yeager admitted. He didn’t care to think about it like that, either. Something else occurred to him. “They sure came loaded for bear if they expected to be taking on knights in shining armor.”

“Didn’t they just?” Berkowitz ruefully shook his head. “I asked Straha about that. He kind of reared back, the way they do when they think you’re being stupid, you know what I mean? Then he said, ‘You do not go to a war without enough tools to win it. This is what we thought we had.’ ”

“He may still be right,” Sam said.

“So he may.” Berkowitz looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to run and interview a Lizard tank officer about armor-piercing shells. I enjoy chewing the fat with you, Sergeant-you’ve got the right kind of mind to deal with the Lizards. People who start out too sure of themselves end up, you should pardon the expression, nuts.”

Laughing, Yeager went up to the fourth floor. He found Ullhass and Ristin in a state of high excitement. “Look, Exalted Sergeant Sam,” Ristin said, holding up a set of what looked like bottles of nail polish. “The grand and magnificent shiplord Straha brought with him a great store of body paints. He will share them with us. Now we no longer need be naked.”

“That’s nice,” Sam agreed equably. “Does each of you paint himself, or do you paint each other?”

“We paint each other.” Ullhass let out a mournful, hissing sigh. “But we really should not paint our old rank patterns on our bodies. We hold those ranks no longer. We are only prisoners.”

“Then paint yourselves to show that,” Yeager said.

“There are markings to show one is a prisoner,” Ristin said, “but a prisoner who has done something wrong and is being punished. We did nothing wrong; you Big Uglies captured us and made us prisoners. We have no markings for that.”

Probably didn’t think it would ever happen when you set out from Home,Yeager thought. He said, “If you don’t have those markings, why not invent some?”

Ristin and Ullhass looked at each other. Obviously, that idea hadn’t occurred to them, and wouldn’t have, either. “Such markings would not be official,” Ullhass said, as if that doomed the notion in and of itself.

But Sam said, “Sure they would. They’d be official U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks. If you’re our prisoners, you should use our marks, right?”

The two Lizards looked at each other again. They took suggestions from superior authority very seriously indeed. “What are these U.S. Lizard POW at Hot Springs marks?” Ristin asked.

Yeager was about to tell him to make up his own when he had a better idea-much more than most people, Lizards liked doing as they were told. He said, “You should paint yourselves with red and white stripes and blue stars. That way you’ll look like you’re wearing American flags.”

Ristin and Ullhass talked back and forth in their own language. Sam was getting fluent enough now to follow them pretty well. He hid a smile as he listened to their enthusiasm grow. Before long, Ristin said, “It shall be done.”