Tilting the Balance

“Ironic that we have a greater obligation to maintain this world as nearly intact as possible than does the species that evolved on it, ” Kirel said. “Of course, the Tosevites are not aware our colonization fleet is on the way behind us. ”

“Indeed, ” Atvar said. “If it arrives and finds Tosev 3 uninhabitable, we will have failed here, no matter what else we accomplish. ”

“We also have to bear in mind that the Big Uglies are engaging in nuclear weapons research of their own, certainly with the material their guerrillas captured from us in the SSSR and, the evidence would suggest, with projects altogether their own as well, ” Kirel said. “Should one of those projects succeed, our problems here will become measurably more difficult. ”

“Immeasurably, you mean, ” Atvar said. The Big Uglies would not worry about what they did to Tosev 3, as long as that meant getting rid of the Race. “Deutschland, the SSSR, the United States, maybe those little island empires, too-Nippon and Britain-we have to keep both eye turrets on every one of them. The trouble is, a planet is a very large place. Their projects will not be easy to track down. But it must be done. ” He spoke as much to remind himself as to tell Kirel.

“It shall be done, ” the shiplord echoed loyally.

It had better be done, they thought together.

The horse-drawn wagon pulled to a stop in New Salem, North Dakota. Sam Yeager looked around. As a seventeen-year veteran of bush-league baseball and its endless travel, he was a connoisseur of small towns. New Salem might have had a thousand people in it; then again, it might not.

He scrambled out of the wagon. Barbara Larssen handed him his Springfield. He took the rifle, slung it over his shoulder, then held out a hand to help Barbara down. They clung to each other for a moment. He kissed the top of her head. The ends of her dark blond hair still showed traces of permanent wave. Most of it was straight, though; a long time had gone by since she’d got a permanent.

He didn’t want to let her go, but he had to. He grabbed the rifle again, pointed it at the wagon. Military routine, he thought, and then, military fiddlesticks. But since he wore a corporal’s stripes these days, he played the game by the rules. “Come on out, boys, ” he called.

Ristin and Ullhass, the two Lizard POWs who accompanied the Metallurgical Laboratory’s wagon train on the way from Chicago to the Lab’s planned new home in Denver, poked their heads up over the side of the wagon. “It shall be done, superior sir, ” they chorused in hissing English. They dropped down in front of Yeager and Barbara.

“Hard to think-things-so small could be so dangerous, ” Barbara murmured. Neither of the Lizards came up even to her shoulder.

“They aren’t small with guns in their hands, or inside tanks, or inside planes, or inside their spaceships, ” Yeager answered. “I fought against them, remember, before my unit captured these boys. ”

“We thought you kill us, ” Ullhass said.

“We thought you kill us, then eat us, ” Ristin agreed.

Yeager laughed. “You’d been reading too much science fiction, both of you. ” He laughed again, more reflectively. If he hadn’t been in the habit of reading science fiction himself to pass the time on trains and buses, he never would have volunteered-or been accepted-as the Lizards’ principal guard, translator, and explainer of matters Earthly.

He’d been with them continuously for better than six months now, long enough to come to see them as individuals rather than mere creatures. They never had been much like the bug-eyed monsters he used to read about. They were short and skinny and, even dressed in multiple layers of warm clothes that hung on them like sacks, complained all the time about how cold it was (it wasn’t just midwinter on the northern Great Plains, either; they’d complained about all but the hottest days back in Chicago, too).

By now, Yeager took for granted their turreted eyes that, chameleonlike, moved independently of each other, the green-brown scales they used for skin, their clawed hands and feet, their wide mouths full of little pointed teeth. Even the bifurcated tongues they sometimes used to lick their hard, immobile lips were just part of them, although he’d needed quite a while to get used to those.

“We will be warm tonight? ” Ristin asked. Though he spoke English, at the end of the sentence he tacked on the little cough the Lizards used: sort of an audible question mark.

“We will be warm tonight, ” Sam answered in the Lizards’ language, punctuating his sentence with a different cough, the one that put emphasis on his words.

He had reason for his confidence. The Lizards’ bombers hadn’t hit North Dakota badly: not much up here needed hitting, Yeager thought. The flat farming country reminded him of the flat farming country in eastern Nebraska where he’d grown up. New Salem could easily have been one of the little towns between Lincoln and Omaha.

The wagon had stopped not far from a snow-covered boulder with an unnaturally flat top. Barbara brushed off the snow with her sleeve. “Oh, it has a plaque on it, ” she said, and brushed away more snow so she could read the words on the bronze. She started to laugh.

“What’s so funny? ” Yeager asked. He absentmindedly tacked the interrogative cough onto that question, too.

“This is the Wrong Side Up Monument, ” she answered. “That’s what the plaque says, anyhow. Seems one of the early farmers had just started breaking the ground so he could plant for the first time when an Indian came along, looked at a chunk of sod, set it back the right way, and said, ‘Wrong side up. ’ The farmer thought about it, decided he was right, and went into dairying instead. This is part of a big dairy area now. ”