Tilting the Balance

Even before his conscious mind willed him to action, Teerts was on his feet and bounding toward the bars between which that hand so temptingly protruded. But before his tongue could touch that precious powder, Okamoto jerked the hand back. Teerts almost slammed his muzzle against the cold, unyielding iron that caged him. Careless of his own safety, he cursed Okamoto as vilely as he knew how.

The Tosevite threw back his head and let out several of the loud barking noises his kind used for laughter. “So you want more ginger, do you? I thought you might. We have learned males of the Race are-how do you say it?  — very fond of this herb. ”

Ginger. Now Teerts had a name for what be craved. For some reason, that only made him crave it more. His fury collapsed into depression once again. Instead of hissing at Okamoto, he pleaded with him: “Give it to me, I beg. How can you hold it away from me if you know www.dvdbuycheap.ru how badly I need it? ”

Okamoto laughed again. “One who lets himself be captured does not deserve to have anything given to him. ” When it came to prisoners of war, the Nipponese knew only scorn. Okamoto went on, “Maybe, though, just maybe, you can earn more ginger for yourself. Do you understand? ”

Teerts understood too miserably well. The trap’s teeth were sharp, sharp. His captors had given him a taste for ginger in his food, withheld it, shown him exactly what he craved, and now were withholding it again. They expected that would make him submit. They were, he admitted to himself, dead right. Hating the cringing whine he heard in his own voice, he said, “What do you want me to do, superior sir? ”

“More exact answers to the questions we have been putting to you on explosive metals might make us more pleased with you, ” Okamoto said.

Teerts knew that was a lie. Because he’d let himself be taken prisoner, the Nipponese would never be happy with him, no matter what he did. But they might find him more useful; he’d already seen how his treatment varied with their perception of his value. If he satisfied them, they would give him ginger. The thought tolled in his head like the reverberations from a big bass drum.

Despite it, he had to say, “I have already given you the best and truest answers I can. ”

“So you claim now, ” Okamoto answered. “We shall see how you’reply when you want ginger more than you can imagine now. Maybe then you will remember better than you do today. ”

The teeth of the trap were not only sharp, they were jagged as well. The Nipponese didn’t just want Teerts to be their prisoner, they wanted him to be their slave, Slavery had vanished from the culture of the Race long before Home was unified, but the Rabotevs (or was it the Hallessi?  — Teerts had always dozed through history lessons) practiced it whenever their world, whichever it was, came into the Empire. They returned the concept, if not the institution, to the notice of the Race. Teerts feared it wasn’t just a concept on Tosev 3.

He also feared that if he went without ginger, he would go mad. The craving ate at him like acid dripping on his scaly skin. “Please, let me taste it now, ” he begged.

Some of his Nipponese captors had been wantonly cruel, and exulted in their cruelty in the exact proportion that they enjoyed power over his helplessness. They would have refused, merely to experience the pleasure they took from watching him suffer. Okamoto, to give him his limited due, did not daub on that pattern of body paint. Having shown Teerts he was indeed trapped, the Big Ugly let him sample the bait once more.

The feeling of power and wisdom flooded through Teerts again. While he reached that ecstatic, exalted peak, he did his best to come up with a way to escape the prison where the Nipponese held him. For an all but omnipotent genius, it should have been easy.

But no brilliant ideas came. Maybe the ginger did sharpen his analytical faculty a little: he swiftly concluded the feeling of brilliance it gave him was just that, a feeling, and nothing more. Had the powder not been coursing through his veins, he would have been bitterly disappointed. As things were, he noted the problem, then dismissed it.

Tosevites were impetuous, hot-blooded, always doing things. The Race’s virtues were study, patience, careful planning. So Teerts had been indoctrinated, and little he had seen inclined him to doubt what his killercraft squadron’s briefing officers had said. But now, out in the hallway, Okamoto stood quietly and waited as patiently as any male of the Race.

And Teerts? As the joy from the ginger ebbed in him, leaving only a memory of sensation, Teerts became a veritable parody of a Big Ugly, grabbing at the bars of his cell, shouting curses, reaching uselessly for Okamoto in a foredoomed effort to get more ginger onto his tongue: in short, he acted blindly, without the slightest concern for consequences. He should have been ashamed of himself. He was ashamed of himself-but not enough to stop.

Okamoto waited until his blustering had died away, swallowed in the crushing depression that followed ginger euphoria. Then, at just the right instant, the Nipponese said, “Tell me everything you know about the process that transforms element 92 to element 94. ”

“The special word for this in our language is ‘transmutes, ’ ” Teerts said. “It takes place in several steps. First-” He wondered how much Okamoto would make him talk before he got another taste.

Bobby Fiore threw an easy peg to the young Chinese man who stood waiting to catch the ball. The fellow actually did catch it, too; it slapped into the leather glove (a duplicate of Fiore’s) he wore, and he covered it with his bare hand.

“Good job! ” Fiore said, using tone and expression and dumb show to get across what he still had trouble saying in Chinese. “Now throw it back. ” Again, gesture showed what he wanted.

The Chinese, whose name was Lo, threw high. Fiore sprang and caught the ball. He landed lightly, ready to throw again himself: after so many years on so many infields, he could probably do that in his sleep. Drop a ball anywhere near him and he’d be on it like a cat.