Upsetting the Balance

He took a large taste of ginger. He wasn’t in combat now, and decided he could use the quickened reflexes the herb gave him without endangering himself or the landcruiser. He tried to get Skoob to taste ginger, but the gunner was too far gone to extend his tongue. When Ussmak opened Skoob’s jaws to pour in the stimulant powder, he realized the gunner wasn’t breathing any more. Ussmak laid a hearing diaphragm over the gunner’s chest cavity. He heard nothing. Some time in the last little while, Skoob had quietly died.

The ginger kept Ussmak from feeling the grief that would otherwise have crushed him. What filled him instead was rage-rage at the Big Uglies, rage at the cold, rage at the base commandant for sending males out to fight in these impossible conditions, rage at the Race for establishing a base in Siberia and for coming to Tosev 3 in the first place. As the base drew near, he tasted again. His rage got hotter.

He halted the landcruiser close by the anticold airlock. The crew of mechanics started to protest “What if everybody wanted to park his machine there?” one of them said.

“What if every landcruiser came back with two crewmales dead?” Ussmak snarled. Most of the mechanics fell back from his fury. When one started to argue further, Ussmak pointed his personal weapon at him. The male fled, hissing in fright.

Still carrying the weapon, Ussmak went into the barracks. He looked down at himself as he waited for the inner door to open. The blood of Nejas and Skoob still covered the front of his protective garments. Several males inside exclaimed in startled dismay when he came into the communal chamber. More, though, were watching a televisor screen. One of them turned an eye turret toward Ussmak. “The Big Uglies just hatched another atomic egg,” he said.

Fueled by his rage and loss-and by the ginger-Ussmak shouted, “We never should have come to this stinking world in the first place. Now that we’re here, we ought to quit wasting lives fighting the Big Uglies and figure out how to go Home!”

Some of the males stared at him. Others turned their eye turrets away, as if to say he didn’t even deserve to be stared at. Somebody said, “We have been ordered to bring Tosev 3 under the rule of the Emperor, and it shall be done.”

“Truth,” a couple of males said, agreeing with the fellow.

But others shouted, “Truth!” in a different tone of voice. “Ussmak is right,” one of them added. “What have we got from Tosev 3 but death and misery?”

That brought another, louder, chorus of “Truth!” from the males who’d supported Ussmak in the first place, and from a few who hadn’t. A lot of his backers, he saw, were males who had their tongues deep in the ginger vial. Not all, though, not by any means. That made him feel good. Even full of ginger, he knew males full of ginger were not similarly full of good sense.

“We want to go Home!” he yelled, as loud as he could, and then again: “We want to goHome!” More and more males added their voices to the cry. It filled the communal chamber and echoed through the base. Having the other males follow his lead lifted Ussmak’s spirits almost the way ginger did. This had to be what the fleetlord knew, or even the Emperor himself.

A few males who refused to join the outpouring of anger fled the chamber. But more came rushing in, first to see what the commotion was about and then, more often than not, to join it. “We want to goHome!” Ussmak’s hearing diaphragms throbbed with the rhythmically repeated roar.

“Attention all males! Attention all males!” A countering shout rose from the intercom speaker on the wall: “End this unseemly display at once and return to your duties. I, Hisslef, base commandant, so order. Return to your duties at once, I say!”

One or two males meekly squeaked, “It shall be done,” and skittered away.

With ginger still in him, though, Ussmak wasn’t so inclined to pay the strict attention to subordination he would have when he first came to Tosev 3. “No!” he shouted. A lot of males in the command chamber were tasting ginger. “No!” they yelled with him. Somebody added, “Fancy body paint’s not enough!” In a moment, that became a new war cry.

Had Hisslef let the males shout and carry on till ginger exhilaration gave way to after-ginger gloom, the uprising probably would have died a natural death. Instead, he chose to stalk into the communal chamber and shout, “Who has perpetrated this outrageous conduct?”

“I have, sup-” Ussmak said. He’d automatically started to add Hisslef’s honorific, but choked it down. What honor did Hisslef deserve? Fancy body paintwasn’t enough.

“You will place yourself under arrest,” Hisslef said coldly. “You are a disgrace to the Race, and shall be punished as you deserve.”