Upsetting the Balance

Mavrogordato’s eyes went wide. He started to laugh. Getting to his feet in a hurry, he said, “This is a fine boy you have here. He will make a fine man if you can keep from strangling him first. We’ll have rolls and bad tea for breakfast in a couple of hours, when the sun rises. Come join us then.” With a last dip of his head, he went out of the cabin.

Rivka shut the door and used the blackout curtain. Then she clicked on the light switch. A ceiling bulb in a cage of iron bars lit up the metal cubicle. The cage was much like the ones aboard theSeanymph. The bulb, though, made Moishe squint and his eyes water. It wasn’t-it couldn’t have been-as bright as Gibraltar sunshine, but it seemed that way.

Moishe looked around the cabin. It didn’t take long. But for rivets and peeling paint and a couple of streaks of rust, there wasn’t much to see. In his mind’s eye, though, he looked farther ahead. “Halfway there,” he said.

“Halfway there,” Rivka echoed.

“Mama, Papa, I have to make apish,” Reuven said.

Moishe took his hand. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll find out where you do that here.”

Ussmak was dressed in more clothes than he’d ever worn in his life. Back on Home, he hadn’t worn anything beyond body paint and belts hung with pouches. That was the way you were supposed to go through life. But if he went out that door as if he were on Home, he’d freeze to death before he ever got to his landcruiser.

He turned an eye turret down toward the large, heavy gloves on his hands. “How are we supposed to do any sort of work on the machine in clumsy things like these?” he complained, not for the first time. “My grip has about as much precision as if I were using my tailstump.”

“We have to maintain the landcruiser, no matter how hard it is,” Nejas answered. The landcruiser commander was bundled up as thoroughly as Ussmak. “It has to be perfect in every way-no speck of dirt, no slightest roughness in the engine. If the least little thing goes wrong, the Big Uglies will swoop down and kill us before we even know they’re around.” He paused, then added, “I want a taste of ginger.”

“So do I, superior sir,” Ussmak said. He knew he’d probably saved Nejas’ life by giving him ginger when he was wounded in the invasion of Britain. But ginger fit Nejas’ personality only too well. He’d been a perfectionist before; now the least little flaw sent him into a rage. The herb also exaggerated his tendency to worry about everything and anything, especially after he’d been without it for a while.

A lot of males in this Emperor-forsaken frozen Soviet wasteland were like that. But for going on patrol and servicing their land-cruisers, they had nothing to do but sit around in the barracks and watch video reports on how the conquest of Tosev 3 was going. Even when couched in broadcasters’ cheerily optimistic phrases, those reports were plenty of incitement for any male in his right mind to worry about anything and everything.

“Superior sir, will this planet be worth having, once the war of conquest is over?” Ussmak asked. “The way things are going now, there won’t be much left to conquer.”

“Ours is not to question those who set strategy. Ours is to obey and carry out the strategy they set,” Nejas answered; like any proper male of the Race, he was as good a subordinate as a commander.

Maybe it was all the ginger Ussmak had tasted, maybe all the crewmales he’d seen killed, maybe just his sense that the Race’s broadcasters hadn’t the slightest clue about what the war they were describing was really like. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel like a proper male any more. He said, “Meaning no disrespect to the fleetlord and those who advise him, superior sir, but too much of what they’ve tried just hasn’t worked. Look what happened to us in Britain. Look at the poisonous gas and the atomic bombs the Big Uglies are using against us.”

Skoob was also climbing into the gear a male needed to survive in Siberia, the gear that turned quick death into prolonged discomfort. The gunner spoke in reproving tones: “The leaders know better than we what needs doing to finish the conquest of Tosev 3. Isn’t that right, superior sir?” He turned confidently to Nejas.

Skoob had come through the British campaign unwounded; he’d also managed to keep from sticking his tongue in the powdered ginger, though he turned his eye turrets the other way when his crewmales tasted. But for that toleration, though, he still seemed as innocent of the wiles of the Tosevites as all the males of the Race had been when the ships of the conquest fleet first came to Tosev 3. In a way, Ussmak envied him that. He himself had changed, and change for the Race was always unsettling, disorienting.

Nejas had changed, too-not as much as Ussmak, but he’d changed. With a hissing sigh, he said, “Gunner, sometimes I wonder what is in the fleetlord’s mind. I obey-but I wonder.”