Tilting The Balance (49 page)

“I’m going to go take my little hissing chums off Smitty’s hands,” he said. “Have to see what he’ll want from me later on for babysitting them so I could get free for my Saturday matinee with you.”

Barbara glanced at the electric clock on the mantel. It showed a quarter to four. So did Sam’s watch; he was having to get reused to the idea of clocks that kept good time. She said, “It’ll still be afternoon for a little while longer, won’t it?”

As he took her in his arms, Yeager wondered if she just needed reassurance after the brief, wordless, but unpleasant encounter with Jens Larssen. If she did, he was ready to give it. If you couldn’t do that, you didn’t have much business being a husband, as far as he was concerned.

Liu Han felt like a trapped animal with the little scaly devils staring at her from all sides. “No, superior sirs, I don’t know where Bobby Fiore went that night,” she said in a mixture of the little devils’ language and Chinese. “These men wanted him to teach them to throw, and he went with them to do that. He didn’t come back.”

One of the scaly devils showed her a photograph. It was not a plain black-and-white image; she’d seen those before, and even the color pictures the foreign devils printed in some of their fancy magazines. But this photograph was of the sort the little scaly devils made: not only more real than any human could match, but also with the depth the scaly devils put into their moving pictures. It made her feel as if she could reach in and touch the man it showed.

“Have you seen this male before?” the scaly devil holding the picture demanded in vile but understandable Chinese.

“I – may have, superior sir,” Liu Han said, gulping. Just because she felt she could reach into the picture didn’t mean she wanted to. The man it showed was obviously dead, lying in a bean field with his blood and brains splashing the plants and ground around his head. He had a neat hole just above his left eye.

“What do you mean, you may have?” another scaly devil shouted. “Either you have or you have not. We think you have. Now answer me!”

“Please, superior sir,” Liu Han said desperately. “People dead look different from people alive. I cannot be certain. I am sorry, superior sir.” She was sorry Lo – for the dead man in the picture was undoubtedly he – had ever wanted Bobby Fiore to show him how to throw. She was even sorrier he and his henchmen had come to the hut and taken Bobby Fiore away.

But she was not going to tell the little scaly devils anything she didn’t have to. She knew they were dangerous, yes, and they had her in their power. But she also had a very healthy respect – fear was not too strong a word – for the Communists. If she spilled her guts to the little devils, she knew she would pay: maybe not right now, but before too long.

The scaly devil holding the picture let his mouth hang open: he was laughing at her. “To you, maybe. To us, all Big Uglies look alike, alive or dead.” He translated the joke into his own language for the benefit of his comrades. They laughed, too.

But the little devil who had shouted at Liu Han said, “This is no joke. These bandits injured males of the Race. Only through the mercy of the watchful Emperor” – he cast down his eyes, as did the other little devils-”was no one killed.”

No one killed? Liu Han thought. What of Lo and his friends? She was reminded of signs the European devils were said to have put up in their parks in Shanghai: NO
DOGS
OR
CHINESE
ALLOWED
. To the little scaly devils, all human beings might as well have been dogs.

“We should give her the drug that makes her tell the truth,” the scaly devil with the picture said. “Then we will find out what she really knows.”

Liu Han shivered. She was ready to believe the scaly devils had such a drug. They were devils, after all, with powers effectively unlimited. If they gave it to her, they would find out she hadn’t told them everything, and then… then they would do something horrible to her. She didn’t care to think about that.

But then Ttomalss spoke up. The – what had Bobby Fiore named his calling?-the psychologist, that was it, said, “No, Ssamraff, for two reasons. No first because the drug is not as effective as we believed it would be when we first made it. And no second because this female Big Ugly has a hatchling growing inside her.”

Most of that was in Chinese, so Liu Han could follow it. Ssamraff replied in the same language: “Who cares what she has growing inside her?”

“This growth is disgusting, yes, but it is part of a research study,” Ttomaiss insisted. “Having the Big Ugly male who sired it disappear is bad enough. But drugs could do to Big Ugly hatchlings what they sometimes do to our own as they grow in the egg before the female lays it. We do not want this hatchling to emerge defective if we can avoid it. Therefore I say no to this drug.”

“And I say we need to learn who is trying to foully murder males of the Race,” Ssamraff retorted. “This, to me, is more important.” But he spoke weakly; his body paint was less ornate than Ttomaiss’, which, Liu Han had gathered, meant he was of lower rank.

The little devils had made her give her body to strange men in their experiments. They had watched her pregnancy with the same interest she would have given to a farrowing sow, and no more. Now, though, because she was pregnant, they wouldn’t give her the drug that ‘might have made’ her betray Lo and the other Reds. About time I got some good out of being only an animal to them, she thought.

Ssamraff said, “If we cannot drug the female, how can we properly question her, then?” He swung his turreted eyes toward Liu Han. She still had trouble reading the scaly devils’ expressions, but if that wasn’t a venomous stare, she’d never seen one. “I am sure she is telling less than she knows.”

“No, superior sir;” Liu Han protested, and then stopped in some confusion: not only Ssamraff, but all the devils were staring at her. She realized he’d spoken in his tongue – as had she when she answered.

“You know more of our words than I thought,” Ttomalss said in Chinese.

Liu Han gratefully returned to the same language: “I am very sorry, superior sir, but I did not realize I was not supposed to learn.”

“I did not say that,” the psychologist answered. “But because you know, we have to be more careful with what we say around you.”

“Because she knows, we should be trying to find out what she knows,” Ssamraff insisted. “This male she was mating with had something to do with the attack on our guard station. I think she is lying when she says she knows nothing of these other males we killed. They are dead, and the one she mates with is missing. Is this not a connection that hisses to be explored?”

“We are exploring it,” Ttomaiss answered. “But, as I said, we shall not use drugs.”

Ssamraff turned one eye turret toward Liu Han to see how she would react as he spoke in his own language: “What about pain, then? The Big Uglies are very good at using pain when they have questions to ask. Maybe this once we should imitate them.”

A lump of ice formed in Liu Han’s belly. The Communists and the Kuomintang – to say nothing of local bandit chiefs routinely used torture. She had no reason to doubt the little scaly devils would be devilishly good at it.

But Ttomalss said, “No, not while the hatchling grows inside her. I told you, you may not disturb the conditions under which this experiment is being conducted.”

This time, even the little devil who’d shouted at Liu Han supported Ttomalss: “Using pain to force our will even on a Big Ugly is-” Liu Han didn’t understand the last word he used, but Ssamraff sputtered in indignation almost laughably obvious, so it must have been one he didn’t care for.

When he could speak instead of sputtering, he said, “I shall protest this interference with an important military investigation.”

“Go ahead,” Ttomaiss said. “And I shall protest your interference with an important scientific investigation. You have no sense of the long term, Ssamraff. We are going to rule the Big Uglies for the next hundred thousand years. We need to learn how they work. Don’t you see you are making that harder?”

“If we don’t root out the ones who keep shooting at us, we may never rule them at all,” Ssamraff said.

To Liu Han’s way of thinking, he had a point, but the other little scaly devils recoiled as if he’d just said something much worse than suggesting that they torture her to find out what she knew of Lo and the Communists. Ttomaiss said, “Will you add that to your report? I hope you do; it will show you up as the shortsighted male you are. I shall certainly make a note of your statement when I file my own protest. You were rash to be so foolish in front of a witness.” His eye turrets swung toward the little devil who’d yelled at Liu Han.

Ssamraff looked at that little devil, too. He must not have liked what he saw, for he said, “I shall make no protest in this matter. By the Emperor I pledge it.” He flicked his glance down at the floor for a moment.

So did the other little scaly devils. Then Ttomalss said, “I knew you were a male of sense, Ssamraff. No one wants to have a charge of shortsightedness down on his record, not if he hopes to improve the design of his body paint.”

“That is so,” Ssamraff admitted. “But this I also tell you: to view in the long term on Tosev 3 is also dangerous. The Big Uglies change too fast to make projections reliable – or else we would have conquered them long since.” He turned and skittered out of Liu Han’s hut. Had he been a man instead of a scaly devil, she thought he would have stomped away.

Ttomalss and the devil who’d shouted at her both laughed as If he’d been funny. Liu Han didn’t see the joke.

It wasn’t the usual fears he’d known, not the heart-clutching spasm of alarm he’d had, for instance, when he’d seen his face on the wall in the Balut Market square with warnings that he raped and murdered little girls. You’d have to be meshuggeh, he thought, not to be frightened over something like that.

But what he felt now was different, smaller-just a tickling at the back of his neck and the skin over his spine that something wasn’t quite right somewhere. The first day it was there, he tried to make believe he didn’t notice it. The second day, he knew it was there, but he didn’t tell Rivka. I could be wrong, he thought.

The third day – or rather the evening, after Reuven had gone to bed – he said out of the blue, “I think we should move someplace else.”

Rivka looked up from the sock she was darning. “Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong here?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe nothing. But maybe something, too.”

“If you were a woman, they’d call that the vapors,” Rivka said. But instead of laughing at him as she had every right to do, she grew serious. “Someplace else where? A different flat in Lodz? A different town? A different country?”

“I’d say a different planet, but the Lizards seem to be using the others, too.” Now he laughed, but it wasn’t funny.

“Nu, if you think we should go, we’ll go,” Rivka said. “Better we should move and not need to than need to and not move. Why don’t you start looking for a new flat tomorrow, if you think that will be good enough.”

“I just don’t know,” he said. “I wish I could tune the feeling like a wireless set, but it doesn’t work that way.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed gravely. “What do you want to do? Do you want to go to Zgierz, for instance? That’s not far, but it would probably mean leaving things behind. Still, we’ve left enough things behind by now that a few more won’t matter. So long as the three of us are together, nothing else counts. If the war has taught us anything, that’s it.”

“You’re right.” Russie got up from his battered chair, walked over to the bare light bulb by which Rivka sat. He let his hand rest on her shoulder. “But we shouldn’t need a war to remind us of that.”

She set down the sock and put her hand on top of his. “We don’t, not really. But it has shown us we don’t need things to get by in the world, just people we love.”

“A good thing, too, because we don’t have many things.” Moishe stopped, afraid his attempt at a joke had wounded his wife. Not only had they left things behind, they’d left people as well a little daughter, other loved ones dead in the ghetto. And unlike things, you could not get a new set of people.

If she noticed the catch in Moishe s voice, Rivka gave no sign. She stayed resolutely practical, saying, “You never did answer me. Do you want to get out of Lodz, or shall we stay here?”

“The towns around here, most of them are Judenfrei,”he said. “We’d stick out. We don’tlook Polish. We can t look Polish, I don’tthink.” He sighed. “Litzmannstadt” – the name the Germans gave Lodz-”would have been Judenfrei, too, If the Lizard hadn’t come.”

“All right, we’ll stay here, then,” Rivka said, accepting his oblique answer.

He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. Maybe they would be wiser to flee far from Lodz, even if that meant taking to the road to go to the eastern parts of Lizardheld Poland where the Nazis had not had time to root out all the Jews. But he couldn’t make himself flee like that for what might have been, as Rivka said, a case of the vapors.

To make himself feel he was doing something, he said, “I’ll start looking for a new flat tomorrow over by Mostowski Street.” That was about as far from where they were as one could go and remain in the Lodz ghetto.

“All right,” Rivka said again. She picked up the sock and put another few stitches in it. After a moment, though, she added meditatively, “We’ll have to keep on shopping in the Balut Market square, though.”

“That’s true:” Moishe started to pace back and forth. To go? To stay? He still couldn’t make up his mind.

“It will be all right,” Rivka said. “God has protected us for this long; would He abandon us now?”

That argument would have been more persuasive, Moishe thought, before 1939. Since then, how many of His people had God allowed to die? Moishe didn’t say that to his wife; he didn’t even care to think it himself. His own faith was shakier these days than he wished it were, and he didn’t want to be guilty of troubling hers.