Tilting the Balance

Ristin let his mouth hang open, showing off his pointy little teeth and Lizardy tongue: he was laughing at Sam Yeager. “You have what? ” he said in pretty fluent if accented English. “Seven days in a week? Twelve inches in a foot? Three feet in a mile? ”

“A yard, ” Sam corrected.

“I thought something with grass growing in it was a yard, ” Ristin said. “But never mind. How do you’remember all these things? How do you keep from going mad trying to remember? ”

“All what you’re used to, ” Yeager said, a little uncomfortably: he remembered trying to turn pecks into bushels into tons in school. That was one of the reasons he’d signed a minor-league contract first chance he got-except for banking and his batting average, he’d never worried about math since. He went on, “Most places except the United States use the metric system, where everything is ten of this and ten of that. ” If he hadn’t read science fiction, he wouldn’t have known about the metric system, either.

“Even time? ” Ristin asked. “No sixty seconds make a minute or an hour or whatever it is, and twenty-four minutes or hours make a day? ” He sputtered like a derisive steam engine, then tacked on an emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

“Well, no, ” Sam admitted. “All that stuff stays the same all over the world. It’s-tradition, that’s what it is. ” He smiled happily-the Lizards lived and died by tradition.

But Ristin wasn’t buying it, not this time. He said, “In our ancient days, before we were what is the word? civilized?  — yes, civilized, we had traditions like that, traditions that did harm, not good. We made them work for us or we got rid of them. This was a hundred thousand years ago. We do not miss these bad traditions. ”

“A hundred thousand years ago, ” Yeager echoed. He’d gotten the idea that Lizard years weren’t as long as the ones people used, but even so… “A hundred thousand years ago-fifty thousand years ago, too, come to that-people were just cavemen. Savages, I mean. Nobody knew how to read and write, nobody knew how to grow their own food. Hell, nobody knew anything to speak of. ”

Ristin’s eye turrets moved just a little. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed, but Sam had spent more time around Lizards than just about anybody. He knew the alien was thinking something he didn’t want to say. He could even make a pretty fair guess about what it was: “As far as you’re concerned, we still don’t know anything to speak of. ”

Ristin jerked as if Sam had stuck him with a pin. “How did you know that? ”

“A little bird told me, ” Yeager said, grinning.

“Tell it to the Marines, ” Ristin retorted. He didn’t quite understand what a Marine was, but he had the phrase down pat and used it at the right times. Sam wanted to bust out laughing every time he heard it.

“Shall we go outside? ” he asked. “It’s a nice day. ”

“No, it’s not. It’s cold. It’s always cold on this miserable iceball of a world. ” Ristin relented. “It’s not as cold as it was, though. You are right about that. ” He gave an exaggerated shiver to show how cold it had been. “If you say we must go out, it shall be done. ”

“I didn’t say we had to, ” Yeager answered. “I just asked if you wanted to. ”

“Not very much, ” Ristin said. “Before I was a soldier, I was a male of the city. The-what do you call them?  — wide open spaces are not for me. I saw enough of them on the long, long way from Chicago to this place to last me forever. ”

Sam was amused to hear his own turns of phrase coming out of the mouth of a creature born under the light of another star. It made him feel as if, in some small way, he’d affected the course of history. He said, “Have it your own way, then, even though I don’t call some grass on the University of Denver the wide open spaces. Maybe it’s just as well; Ullhass ought to be back in a few minutes, and then I can take both you guys back to your rooms. ”

“They do not need you to be there any more to translate? ” Ristin asked.

“That’s what they say. ” Yeager shrugged. “Professor Fermi hasn’t called me this session, so I guess maybe he doesn’t. Both of you speak English pretty well now. ”

“If you are not needed for this, will they take you away from us? ” Ristin showed his teeth. “You want me and Ullhass to forget how we speak English? Then they still need you. We do not want you to go. You have been good to us since you catch us all this time ago. We think then that you people hurt us, kill us. You showed us different. We want you to stay. ”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay, ” Yeager said. A year before, he’d have found absurd the notion that anything a turret-eyed creature with a hissing accent said could touch him. Touched he was, though, and sometimes he had to remind himself how alien Ristin really was. He went on, “I’ve been a bench warmer before. It’s not the end of the world. ”

“It may be. ” From sympathetic, Ristin turned serious. “If you humans do build an atomic bomb, it may be. You will use it, and we will use it, and little will be left when all is done. ”

“We weren’t the first ones to use them, ” Yeager said. “What about Washington and Berlin? ”