Tilting the Balance

Before Ussmak could say no as he’d intended, his tongue shot out and licked the little mound of ginger from the palm of the gunner’s hand. He opened and closed his jaws several times, gulped the powder down his throat.

“That’s good, ” he exclaimed. With the herb buzzing through him, he felt like a brand-new male. All his worries, all his fears, ebbed away. “I wish we had the Big Uglies in our sights again. ” Part of him knew that was just the ginger talking, but none of him cared.

“So do I, ” Tvenkel said fiercely. “If they think I’d miss ’em again at that range, I tell you they’re wrong. ”

So Tvenkel had missed when he should have hit, had he? Under the influence of the ginger, Ussmak felt almost as much contempt for him as he did for the Big Uglies. The bungling incompetent couldn’t hit a city if he was in the middle of it, he thought.

Hessef said, “We didn’t do as well as we should have. ” His voice held melancholy uncertainty; the drug was wearing off, leaving crushing sadness and emptiness behind. He also sounded more thoughtful than usual as he continued, “Maybe Ussmak is right: maybe we should go into combat without tasting first. ”

“I think that would be a good idea, superior sir, ” Ussmak said. At the moment, he would have thought any ideas good that agreed with his own. He went on, “We may think we do well when we taste the herb, but in fact we don’t. ” The contrast between belief and reality hit him with stunning force, almost as if his own words came not from his mouth but from one of the great departed Emperors of the past.

“It may be so, ” Hessef agreed mournfully. He was sliding down from his peak of omnipotent euphoria, sure enough.

“Nonsense, superior sir. ” Tvenkel must have had another taste just before he gave one to Ussmak, for he still sounded ginger-certain about things. “Just bad luck, that’s all. Can’t hit everything all the time-and these Big Uglies had the advantage of position on us. ”

“Yes, and how did they get it? ” Ussmak answered his own question: “They got it because we rushed ahead without taking proper notice of our surroundings and we did that because too many of us were tasting. ” His mouth fell open. Here he was complaining about tasting while he had a head full of ginger. The irony struck him as deliciously funny.

“We should smash them anyhow, ” Tvenkel declared.

“When we first landed, we would have, I think, ” Hessef said. “Now we face tougher landcruisers… and ours remain the same. ”

“Still better by far than anything the Big Uglies have, ” Tvenkel said with an angry hiss; the herb was making him confident to the point of being combative. “Even these new machines are slow and weak next to ours. ”

“That’s so, ” Hessef said, “but they’re not as slow or as weak as the ones we met before. And who can say what the Tosevites will build next? ” He shivered a little. Just as Tvenkel was arrogant under the influence of ginger and ignored real problems, Hessef saw those problems magnified in the depression that came when the drug wore of