Upsetting the Balance

When they were through, Yeager thought they looked gaudy as all get out, but nobody’d hired him for base art critic, so he kept his big mouth shut. Ullhass and Ristin were delighted, which was the point of the exercise. In the next few days, several other formerly paintless Lizards started sporting stars and stripes. Sam’s highly unofficial suggestion looked as if it might turn official after all.

Then one day, as Sam was coming out of the room he shared with Barbara, a peremptory hiss stopped him in his tracks. “You are the Tosevite who devised these-these unpleasant prisoner color combinations?” Straha demanded.

“That’s right, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “Is something wrong with them?”

“Yes, something is wrong.” Straha used an emphatic cough to show how wrong the something was. Past that, he looked angry enough to be twitching; he reminded Yeager of nothing so much as a tent-show revival preacher testifying against the evils of demon rum and loose women. “This you have done with the paint, this is wrong. This is a mark the Race does not use. It must be cleansed at once from the scales of the males. It is an-” Yeager hadn’t heard the next word before, but if it didn’t mean something likeabomination, he’d eat his hat.

“Why is that, Shiplord?” he asked, as innocently as he could.

“Because it destroys all order and discipline,” Straha replied, as if to an idiot child. “Body paint shows rank and assignment and seniority; it is not to be used for frivolous purposes of decoration.”

“Shiplord, it does show assignment: it shows that the males who wear it are prisoners of the United States,” Sam said. “If you want it to show seniority, too, the males who have been prisoners longer can wear more stars than the others. Would that be all right?”

He tried to sound quiet and reasonable. All the same, he expected Straha to blow up like a pressure cooker with its safety valve stuck. But the shiplord surprised him: “The trouble with dealing with Tosevites is that one forgets how perspective shifts. Do you understand this?”

“I don’t think I do, Shiplord,” Sam answered. “I’m sorry.”

Straha made an exasperated noise, rather like a water heater with a slow leak. “I explain further, then. With the Race, all is as it has been. We do not casually invent body paint designs. They all fit into a system we have been refining for more than a hundred thousand years.” Yeager knew enough to divide that by two to convert it into Earthly years, but it was still a hell of a long time. Straha went on, “You Big Uglies, though, you just casually invent. You care nothing for large-scale system; all that matters to you is short-term results.”

“We’re at war, Shiplord. We were at war before the Race got here,” Yeager said. “Whatever it takes to win, we’ll do. We change all the time.”

“This we have noticed, to our sorrow,” Straha said. “The weapons with which you fight us now are better than the ones you used when we first came. Ours are still the same. This is what I meant about looking at you from a different perspective. If something suits you for the moment, you will seize upon it, not caring a bit how it accords with what you formerly did. You invent a body-paint pattern on the spur of the moment.” The shiplord hissed again. “I suppose I should be used to that sort of thing, but every now and again it still shocks me. This was one of those times.”

Yeager thought of all the pulp science-fiction stories he’d read where an inventor had an idea one day, built it the next, and mass-produced it the day after that, generally just in time to save the world from the Martians. He’d always taken those with a grain of salt about the size of the Great Salt Flats outside Salt Lake City. Real life didn’t work that way.

To the Lizards, though, Earth must have seemed the embodiment of pulp science fiction run amok. In not a whole lot more than a year, human beings had rolled out long-range rockets, bazookas, and jet planes, to say nothing of the atomic bomb. That didn’t count improvements to already existing items like tanks, either. And by all accounts, poison gas, which dated back to World War I, was new and nasty to the Lizards.

“So you’ll forgive the other prisoners here for using American-style body paint, then?” Sam asked.

“I am not a prisoner; I am a refugee,” Straha said with dignity. “But yes, I forgive it. I was hasty when I condemned it out of hand, but haste, for the Race, is to be actively discouraged. The captive males may wear any sort of marking Tosevite authorities suggest.”

“Thank you, Shiplord,” Yeager said. As Lizards went, Straha seemed like a pretty adaptable guy. If you actively discouraged haste, though, you didn’t make life any easier for yourself, not on Earth, you didn’t.

Teerts sometimes felt guilty about what happened to Tokyo. Millions of intelligent beings dead, and all because he’d warned of what the Nipponese Tosevites were attempting.