In the Balance (35 page)

The shiplords muttered among themselves. Atvar did not blame them. Anything that cast doubt on the sovereignty of the Emperor had to be intensely disturbing. The Emperor was the rock to which their souls were tethered, the central focus of all their lives. Without him, they could only wander through existence alone and afraid, no better than the Big Uglies or any other beasts of the field.

Yet this briefing held more that would disquiet them. As the mutters died away, Atvar spoke again: “The case of Britain is more obscure. Again, though it is an empire, its emperor holds no real power. Some of you will have noticed the name of the male, uh, Churchill, as appearing repeatedly among those who urge the Tosevites to continue their futile and foredoomed resistance to the Race. This Churchill, it seems (admittedly from the limited data we have and our own imperfect—the Emperor be praised!—understanding of Tosevite customs), is but the leader of the Britainish faction which currently musters more support than any other. If the factions shift, their leaders meeting together may at any time choose for themselves a different chief.”

Straha’s jaws gaped in amusement. “And when they do, Exalted Fleetlord, how will this war leader, this—Churchill, did you say?—respond? By abandoning the power he has seized? Isn’t he more likely to set soldiers on them to cure their presumption? Isn’t that what you or I or any sane male would do?”

“We have reason to believe he would abandon power,” Atvar answered, and had the satisfaction of seeing Straha’s mouth close with a snap. “Intercepted radio signals indicated such—how best to put it?—resignation to factional shifts is a commonplace of government (or lack of government) among the Britainish.”

“Madness,” Straha said.

“What else would you expect from the Big Uglies?” Atvar said. “And if you think the Britainish mad, how do you account for the Tosevite land called the United States?”

Straha did not answer. Atvar had not expected him to answer. The rest of the shiplords also fell silent. Without a doubt the most prosperous land
on Tosev 3, the United States was by any rational standard an anarchy. It had no emperor; as far as any of the Race’s savants could tell, it had never had an emperor. But it also had few of the trappings of a land ruled by force like the SSSR or Deutschland.

Atvar summed up the Race’s view of the United States in one scornful word: “Snoutcounters! How do they have the hubris to imagine they can build a land that amounts to anything by counting one another’s snouts?”

“And yet they have,” Kirel said, as usual soberly sticking to observable truth. “Analysis suggests they acquired the snout-counting habit from the Britainish, with whom they share a language, and then extended it further than even the Britainish countenance.”

“They even count snouts in the prison camps we have established on their soil,” Atvar said. “When we needed Big Ugly representatives through whom to deal with their kind, that’s how they chose them—instead of picking ones known to be wise or brave, they let several vie for the jobs and counted snouts to see which had the most in favor.”

“How are these representatives working out?” asked Hassov, who was rather a cautious male and thus inclined to Kirel’s faction. “How much worse are they than those selected by some rational means?”

“Our officers have noted no great differences between them and similar representatives elsewhere on Tosev 3,” Atvar said. “Some are better and more obedient than others, but that is the case all around the planet.”

The, admission bothered him. It was as if he were confessing that the manifest anarchy of the United States worked as well as a system that made sense. As a matter of fact, it did seem to work well, by Tosevite standards anyhow. And the American Big Uglies (he did not understand how they derived
American
from
United States
, but he did not pretend to be a linguist, either) fought as hard for the sake of their anarchy as other Big Uglies battled for their emperors or non-imperial rulers.

Straha said, “Very well, Exalted Fleetlord, the Tosevites rule themselves in ways we find incomprehensible or revolting or both. How does this affect our campaign against them?

“A relevant question,” Atvar said approvingly. He did not trust Straha; the male had enough ambition to be—why, he had almost enough ambition to be one of those freewheeling American Big Uglies himself, Atvar thought with the new perspective he’d gained from half a year on Tosev 3. But no denying his ability.

The fleetlord resumed: “The Tosevites, with these ramshackle, temporary governments of theirs, have shown themselves to be more versatile, more flexible, than we are. No doubt those back on Home would be shocked at the improvisations we have been forced to make in the course of our conquest here.”

No doubt a good many of you are, too
, Atvar added silently to himself. From lack of practice or need, the Race did not improvise well. When change came in the Empire (which was seldom), it came in slow, carefully planned steps, with likely results and plans to meet them mapped out beforehand. The Emperor and his servants thought in terms of millennia. That was good for the Race as a whole, but did not promote quick reflexes. Here on Tosev 3, situations had a way of changing even as you looked at them; yesterday’s perfect plan, if applied day after tomorrow, was as apt to yield fiasco as triumph.

“Improvising, though, seems a way of life for the Big Uglies,” Atvar said. “Witness the antilandcruiser mines they mounted on animals’ backs. Would any of us have imagined such a ploy? Bizarre as it is, though, it has hurt us more than once. And the supply of munitions available to us, as compared to that which the Tosevites continue to produce, remains a source of some concern.”

“By the Emperor, we rule the skies on this world,” Straha said angrily. “How is it that we’ve failed to smash the factories down below?” Just too late, he added, “Exalted Fleetlord.” Several shiplords stirred uneasily at the implied criticism of Atvar.

The fleetlord did not let his own anger show. “The answer to your question, Shiplord Straha, has two parts. First, Tosev 3 has a great many factories, scattered through several areas of the planet’s surface. Destroying them all, or even most of them, is no easy task. Besides which, the Tosevites are adept at quickly repairing damage. This, I suppose, is another result of their having been at war among themselves when we arrived. They cannot match our technology, but are extremely effective within the limits of their own.”

“We should have had more resources before we undertook the conquest of an industrialized planet,” Feneress complained.

Now Atvar did project the image of the mail-clad Tosevite warrior captured by the earlier probe from Home. “Shiplord, let me remind you that this is the opposition we expected to face. Do you think our forces adequate to defeat such foes?” Feneress sensibly stood silent—what reply could he hope to make? Against sword-swinging primitives, the fight would have been over in days, probably without the loss of a single male of the Race.

Atvar touched the controls again. New images replaced the familiar one of the Tosevite fighting male: a gun-camera hologram of a swept-wing fighter with two jet engines and the hooked-cross emblem of Deutschland; a landcruiser from the SSSR, underpowered and undergunned by the standards of the Race, certainly, but needing only scaling up to become a truly formidable weapon; a bombed-out factory complex in the United States
that had been turning out several bombing planes every day; and, finally, the satellite picture of the unsuccessful Deutsch missile launch.

Into the shiplords’ sudden silence, Atvar said, “Considering the unexpectedly strong struggle the Big Uglies have been able to maintain, we can be proud of our successes thus far. As we gradually continue to cripple their industrial base, we may find future victories coming more easily.”

“Simply because we did not have the walkover we expected, we need not twitch our tailstumps and yield to despair or pessimism,” Kirel added. “Instead, we should give thanks that the Emperor in his wisdom sent us forth with force overwhelming for our anticipated task, thus allowing us to accomplish the far more difficult one that awaited us here.”

The fleetlord sent him a grateful look. He could not imagine a more encouraging note on which to close the gathering. But before he had the chance to dismiss the shiplords, Straha asked, “Exalted Fleetlord, in view of the technological base the Tosevites do have, could they be working toward nuclear weapons of their own and, if so, how can we prevent this development short of sterilizing the planet’s surface?”

Some of the lesser shiplords, and those less given to paying attention to their briefings, twitched in alarm. In a way, Atvar did not blame them; he had trouble thinking of anything more horrid than Tosevites armed with fission bombs. But they also annoyed him, for they should have been able to envision the potential problem for themselves, without Straha’s prodding. The more Atvar had to deal with Tosevites, the more he thought his own people lacked imagination.

“We have no evidence that they are,” he said. “How much this extrapolation from a negative means, however, is uncertain. If one of their warring empires were involved in such research, I doubt it would trumpet the fact over the radio, lest it encourage its enemies to do the same.”

“You have spoken truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Straha agreed. “Let me ask the question another way: do the Big Uglies know enough about the inner workings of the atom to envision nuclear weapons?”

“After our initial bombardment to disrupt their communications, and especially after we smashed the capital of Deutschland, they need not envision nuclear weapons,” Kirel said. “They have seen them.”

“They have seen them, yes.” Straha would not let his rival distract him from the point he was trying to make. “But can they understand what they have seen?”

Atvar hadn’t thought of the question in quite those terms. Finding out just what the Tosevites knew wasn’t easy. Even if they were reticent on the radio, their books surely revealed a great deal. But in only half a year (half of half a year, by Tosevite reckoning), who among the Race had had the chance to find and translate the relevant texts? The fleetlord knew the
answer perfectly well: no one. The war of conquest left no leisure for such fripperies as translation.

Except that now it was not a frippery. Straha had a point: finding out exactly what the Big Uglies knew about the inner workings of the atom could prove as important as anything else in this campaign. With hope, but without too much, Atvar put a hushmike to his mouth and asked the bannership’s computer what it knew.

He’d expected it to report back that it had no information. Instead, though, it gave him a translated radio intercept of a news item from the United States. “X-rays reveal the Cincinnati Reds outfielder Mike McCormick suffered a fractured leg in yesterday’s contest. He is expected to be out for the season.”

Like a lot of translated intercepts, this one didn’t tell Atvar everything he might have wanted to know. He wondered what sort of contest an outfielder (whatever an outfielder was) took part in, and for what season he was lost. Spring? Summer? Harvest? The fleetlord also wondered whether Cincinnati (whose name he did recognize) had Greens and Blues and Yellows to go with its Reds.

But all that was by the bye. The important thing about the intercept was that it showed this Mike McCormick’s leg fracture had been diagnosed by X-rays. Atvar presumed that meant X-rays were in common use down on Tosev 3: if they weren’t, then the Big Uglies wouldn’t have freely talked about them on the radio during wartime. And if X-rays were in common use …

“They know something about the inner workings of the atom,” he said, and explained his reasoning. Dismay spread through the ranks of the shiplords.

Straha spelled out the reason for that dismay: “Then they may indeed be covertly seeking a means of producing nuclear weapons.”

“So they may,” Atvar admitted. Oddly, the notion appalled him less than he would have guessed. He’d been appalled so many times already by the Tosevites and the unexpected things they did that he was getting hard to shock. He just let out a long, hissing sigh and said, “One more thing to worry about.”

The White Horse Inn smelled of beer and sweat and the tobacco smoke that made the air nearly as thick as a London peasoup fog. The barmaid named Daphne set pints of what was misleadingly called best bitter in front of David Goldfarb and Jerome Jones. She scooped up the shillings they’d laid on the bar, slapped Jones’s wrist when he tried to slip an arm around her waist, and spun away, laughing. Her skirt swirled high on her shapely legs.

Sighing, Jones followed her with his eyes. “It’s no use, old man,” Goldfarb said. “I told you that weeks ago—she only goes with fliers.”

“Can’t shoot a man for trying,” Jones answered. He tried every time they came to the White Horse Inn, and as consistently crashed in flames. He took a moody pull at his beer. “I do wish she wouldn’t giggle that way, though. Under other circumstances, it might discourage me.”

Goldfarb drank, too, then made a face. “This beer discourages me. Bloody war.” Thin and sour, the yellow liquid in his glass bore only the faintest resemblance to what he fondly recalled from the days before rationing. He sipped again. “Pah! I wonder if it’s saltpeter they’re putting in it, the way they do in schools to keep the boys from getting randy.”

“No, I know that taste, by God.”

“That’s right, you went to a public school.”

“So what? Back before the Lizards smashed our radar, you were better with it than I ever was.”

To cover his thoughts, Goldfarb drained his glass, raised a finger for another. Eventually, even bad beer numbed the tongue. Jerome could say
So what?
sincerely enough, but after the war was done—if it ever ended—he’d go back to Cambridge and end up a barrister or a professor or a business executive. Goldfarb would go back, too, back to repairing ireless sets behind the counter of a dingy little store on a dingy little street. To him, his friend’s egalitarianism rang hollow.

Blithely oblivious, Jones went on, “Besides, if there is saltpeter in this bitter, it’s not working worth a damn. I’d really fancy a go right now—but it’s the sods with wings on their shirtfronts who’ll get one. Look at that, will you?” He pointed. “Disgraceful, I call it.”