In the Balance (58 page)

She smiled as she came up; she wasn’t skittish about Ullhass and Ristin any more. “I’m here a lot. My husband works for the Met Lab, remember?”

“Yeah, you did tell me. I forgot.” Yeager wondered if Barbara Larssen knew how big a misnomer “Metallurgical Laboratory” was. Maybe, maybe not. Secrecy about atomic energy research wasn’t as tight as it had been before the Lizards proved it worked, but he’d been warned in no uncertain terms about what would happen to him if he talked too much. He didn’t want a cigarette bad enough to get a blindfold with it. He didn’t even want to think about that. He asked, “Any word?”

“Of Jens? No, none.” Barbara kept up a brave front, but it was getting tattered. Worry—no, fear—showed in her voice as she went on, “He should have been back weeks ago—you know he was long overdue the first time
you brought these little fellows into Dr. Burkett’s office. And if he doesn’t get back soon—”

From the way she stopped short, he thought he scented the great god Security. He said, “Professor Fermi told me the project is going to pull out of Chicago.”

“I wasn’t sure if you knew, and I didn’t want to say too much if you didn’t,” Barbara answered: security, sure enough. “Wouldn’t it be awful if he did make it here, only to find out there isn’t any Met Lab to come back to?”

“There may not be any Chicago to come back to,” Yeager answered. “From what Fermi said, the line’s just outside Aurora now.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Her lips thinned; a small vertical worry line appeared between her eyes. “They’re—getting close.”

“What will you do?” he asked. “Will you go with the Met Lab people when they pull out?”

“I just don’t know,” Barbara said. “That’s what I came up here to talk about, as a matter of fact. They’re holding a slot for me, but I don’t know if I should use it. If I were sure Jens was coming back, I’d stay no matter what. But he’s been gone so long, I have trouble believing that anymore. I try, but—” She broke off again. This time, security had nothing to do with it. She groped in her purse for a hanky.

Yeager wanted to put an arm around her. With the two Lizards standing between them, that wasn’t practical. Even without them, it probably would have been stupid. She’d just think he was coming on to her, and she’d be at least half right. He didn’t even tell her Fermi had asked him to evacuate with the Metallurgical Lab staff. Feeling awkward and useless, he said, “I hope he makes it back soon, Barbara.”

“Oh, God, so do I.” Her hands shaped themselves into claws; her red nail polish made them look like bloody claws. Her face twisted. “God
damn
the Lizards for coming down here and wrecking everything people have tried to do for as long as there’ve been people. Even the bad things—they’re
our
bad things, nobody else’s.”

Ullhass and Ristin had picked up almost as much English as Yeager had learned of their language. They flinched away from Barbara’s fury. “It’s all right,” Yeager told them. “Nothing’s going to happen to you two.” He understood how Barbara felt; he knew much of that same rage himself. But constantly being around the Lizard POWs had made him start thinking of them as people, too—sometimes almost as friends. He hated the Lizards collectively but not individually. It got confusing.

Barbara seemed to share some of that confusion. She’d gotten to the point where she could tell one of the captive Lizards apart from another. “Don’t worry,” she said to Yeager’s two charges. “I know it’s not your fault in particular.”

“Yes, you know this,” Ullhass said in his hissing voice. “But what can we do if you not know this? No thing. We are—how you say it?—in your grisp?”

“Grip, maybe,” Yeager. answered. “Or do you mean grasp?”

“I do not know what I mean,” Ullhass declared. “It is your speech. You teach, we learn.”

“They’re like that,” Yeager said to Barbara, trying to find less emotionally charged things to talk about. “Now that they’re our prisoners, it’s like we’ve become their superior officers and anything we say goes.”

“Dr. Burkett has talked about the same thing,” she said, nodding. She turned back to the Lizards. “Your people are trying to take our whole world into their grasp. Do you wonder that we don’t like you?”

“But we are the Race,” Ristin said. “It is our right.”

Yeager had got pretty good at reading tone in the Lizards’ voices. Ristin sounded surprised Barbara would question that “right.” Yeager clicked his tongue between his teeth. Both Lizard POWs swung their eyes toward him; it was something he did when he wanted to get their attention. He said, “You’ll find not everybody on this planet agrees with you about that.”

Teerts wished his ejection seat had malfunctioned. Better to have crashed with his aircraft than to fall into the hands of the Nipponese. Those hands lacked the Race’s claws, but were no less cruel for that.

He’d found out about the Nipponese in a hurry. Even before they’d got him to Harbin, his illusion that they treated prisoners decently had been shattered. From what he’d seen of the way they treated their own kind, that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him.

The rest of the Tosevite empires were barbarous, yes, but their leaders had the sense to recognize that war was a risky business in which things could go wrong, and that both sides were liable to lose prisoners when things did go wrong. Nipponese soldiers, however, were supposed to commit suicide before they let themselves be captured. That was bad enough. Worse, they expected their foes to play by the same set of rules, and scorned captives as cowards who deserved whatever happened to them.

Teerts looked down at himself. From his neck all the way down to his groin, every rib was clearly visible. The food they gave him was vile, and they didn’t give him very much of it. He had the feeling that if they hadn’t been interrogating him, they might not have bothered to feed him at all.

The door to the little room where they kept him swung noisily open on rusty hinges. A couple of armed guards came in. Teerts jumped to his feet and bowed to them. They’d beaten him once for forgetting. After that, he didn’t forget.

The officer who had brought him to Harbin followed the guards into the smelly little cell. Teerts bowed again, deeper this time; the Nipponese made
a point of being insanely punctilious about such things. Teerts said, “Good day, Major Okamoto. I hope you are well?”

“I am well.” Okamoto did not ask how Teerts was; a prisoner’s health was beneath his notice. He shifted from Nipponese to the tongue of the Race. Despite a heavy accent, he was growing fluent: “You shall come with me at once.”

“It shall be done,” Teerts said.

Okamoto turned his back and walked out of the chamber. Short for a Tosevite, he still towered over Teerts. So did the Nipponese guards; the knives mounted on the ends of their rifles looked very long and cold and sharp. They gestured with the guns for Teerts to precede them. He was already in motion. By now, captivity had become a routine like any other.

Cold smote him when he left the building where he was imprisoned. He was always chilly, even inside; what the Tosevites called heat was arctic to the Race. Outside, the weather really was arctic, with frozen water falling from the sky in feathery flakes. It clung to the ground, to trees, to buildings, coating everything with a layer of white that helped mask its inherent ugliness.

Teerts began to shiver violently. Okamoto paused, snapped an order to the guards. One of them set down his rifle for a moment, pulled a blanket out of his pack, and draped it over Teerts. The captured pilot pulled it as tight around himself as he could. Slowly, the shivers subsided.

Okamoto said, “You lucky you important prisoner. Otherwise, we let you freeze.”

Teerts would willingly have forgone such luck. A truer measure of his importance was the vehicle that waited outside his prison to take him to his next interrogation session. It was noisy and smelly and had a ride like a killercraft out of control and about to crash, but at least it boasted an engine rather than a Big Ugly pedaling hard enough to grow warm even in this frigid weather. Better yet, it also had an enclosed cabin.

One of the guards drove. The other sat beside him in the front seat. Major Okamoto sat behind the driver, Teerts behind the other guard. Okamoto did not have a rifle with a long knife on the end, but he did carry both a sword and a pistol. And even if Teerts could somehow have overcome him, what was the point? How could he flee out of this teeming den of Big Uglies without getting caught and meeting a fate even worse than the one he was now suffering?

Den
was the right word for Harbin, he thought as the military vehicle made its slow way through the narrow, twisting streets of Harbin. It was a city in size, but not, to his mind, in design. Indeed, it didn’t seem to have a design. Streets ran every which way. Big, important buildings sprawled next to appalling hovels. Here and there, piles of rubble testified to the
effectiveness of the Race’s bombardment. Half-naked Big Uglies labored at the piles, clearing them away a brick at a time.

Teerts thought longingly of Rosspan, the city back on Home where he’d grown up. Sunshine, warmth, cleanliness, streets wide enough for traffic, sidewalks wide enough for pedestrians—he’d taken all those things for granted till he came to Tosev 3. Now, by dreadful counterexample, he knew how lucky he’d been to enjoy them.

The truck rumbling along in front of Teerts’ vehicle ran over one of the scavenger beasts that roamed the streets of Harbin. The animal’s yelp of agony pierced the deep engine rattle that was the main traffic noise in Harbin. The truck never slowed as the animal passed under its wheels. It had somewhere important to go; what did one animal matter? Teerts got the idea it wouldn’t have paused after running over a Big Ugly, either.

It could have, easily enough. If Harbin owned any traffic rules, Teerts hadn’t discovered them. Vehicles with engines pushed their way as best they could through swarms of animal-drawn wagons and carts and even thicker swarms of Tosevites—Tosevites on foot, Tosevites carrying burdens on poles balanced on their shoulders, Tosevites riding two-wheeled contraptions that looked as if they ought to fall over but never did, Tosevites pedaling other Tosevites about in bigger contraptions or pulling them in carts as if they were beasts of burden themselves. Sometimes, at a particularly insane intersection, a Nipponese with white gloves and a swagger stick would try to bring a little order into the chaos. The next Big Ugly Teerts saw obeying any of them would be the first

He got the idea Harbin was a peculiar kind of place even by Tosevite standards, which was saying a good deal. Nipponese troops were the most aggressively visible piece of the blend; in a town near a fighting front, that was not surprising. What was surprising was the way they knocked around Big Uglies not in uniform, natives who, to Teerts’ inexperienced eyes, looked no different from themselves save in clothing.

The farther east Teerts’ vehicle went, the more he saw of another variety of Big Ugly: pink-skinned, with light-colored—brown or even yellow—tufts of fluff or fur or whatever it was on top of their heads. They seemed less voluble than the darker natives who made up most of the local population, and went about their business with a stolid determination—that impressed Teerts.

He turned to Major Okamoto. “These pale Tosevites”—he’d learned, by painful experience, never to say
Big Ugly
to a Big Ugly’s face—“may I ask where they come from?”

“No,” Okamoto answered at once. “Prisoners may not spy. No questions from you, do you hear me? Obey!”

“It shall be done,” Teerts said, anxious not to anger his captor. The small part of him that was not hungry and afraid insisted the Big Ugly was being
foolish: he would never escape to tell what he knew. But Okamoto tolerated no argument, so Teerts gave him none.

The vehicle pulled up in front of a building from which flew Nipponese flags, red ball on white ground. Several antiaircraft guns poked their noses into the sky from sandbagged installations around it. When Teerts was flying killercraft, he’d laughed at such puny opposition. He’d stopped laughing when the Big Uglies shot him down. He hadn’t laughed since.

The guards got out of the vehicle. One unlocked Teerts’ door and pulled it open, then jumped back so the other could level his rifle at the pilot. “Out!” they yelled together in Nipponese. Out Teerts came, marveling as usual that the Big Uglies could find his unarmed and miserable self so dangerous. He. only wished they were right.

Since they were unfortunately mistaken, he let them lead him into the building. The stairs did not fit his size or his gait. He climbed them anyhow; the interrogation chamber was on the third floor. He walked in with trepidation. Some very unpleasant things had happened to him in there.

Today, though, the three Big Uglies behind the desk all wore pilot’s wings. That relieved Teerts, a little. If these questioners were pilots, they’d presumably ask him about his killercraft. At least he would know the answers to their questions. Other interrogators had grilled him about the Race’s landcruisers, ground tactics, automatic weapons, even its diplomatic dealings with other Tosevite empires. He’d pleaded ignorance, and they’d punished him for it even though he told the truth.

As he’d learned, he bowed low to the interrogation team and then to Major Okamoto, who interpreted for them. They didn’t bow back; he gathered a prisoner forfeited the right to any gesture of respect.

The Big Ugly in the middle turned loose a torrent of barking Nipponese. Okamoto translated: “Colonel Doi is interested in the tactics you use with your killercraft against our planes.”

Teerts bowed to the Tosevite who had asked the question. “Tactics are simple: you approach the enemy as closely as you can, preferably from behind and above so you are not detected, then you destroy him with missiles or cannon shells.”

Doi said, “True, this is the basis of any successful fighter run. But how do you achieve it? Where precisely do you deploy your wing man? What is his role in the attack?”

“We commonly fly in groups of three,” Teerts answered: “a leader and two trailers. But once in combat, we fly independent missions.”