In th Balance Read online

  Fleetlord Atvar strode briskly into the command station of the invasion fleet bannership 127th Emperor Hetto. Officers stiffened in their seats as he came in. But for the way his eye turrets swiveled in their sockets, one to the left, the other to the right, he ignored them. Yet had any been so foolish as to omit the proper respect, he would have noticed—and remembered.

  Shiplord Kirel, his body paint less elaborate only than Atvar's, joined him at the projector. As Atvar did every morning, he said, "Let us examine the target." Kirel served the fleetlord by touching the control with his own index claw. A blue and gray and white sphere sprang into being, a perfect representation of a life-bearing world floating in space.

  All the officers turned both eyes toward the hologram. Atvar, as was his custom, walked

  around the projector to view it from all sides: Kirel followed him. When they were back where they had begun, Atvar ran out a bifurcated tongue. "Cold-looking place," the fleetlord said, as he usually did. "Cold and wet."

  "Yet it will serve the Race and the Emperor," Kirel replied. When he spoke those words, the rest of the officers returned to their assigned tasks; the morning ritual was over. Kirel went on, "Pity such a hot white star as Tosev has hatched so chilly an egg."

  "Pity indeed," Atvar agreed. That chilly world revolved around a star more than twice as bright as the sun under which he'd been raised. Unfortunately, it did so toward the outer edge of the biosphere. Not only did Tosev 3 have too much free water, it even had frozen water on the ground here and there. In the Empire's three current worlds, frozen water was rare outside the laboratory.

  Kirel said, "Even if Tosev 3 is colder on average than what we're used to, Fleetlord, we won't have any real trouble living there, and parts will be very pleasant." He opened his jaws slightly to display small, sharp, even teeth. "And the natives should give us no difficulty."

  "By the Emperor, that's true." Though his sovereign was light-years away, Atvar automatically cast both eyes down to the floor for a moment. So did Kirel. Then Atvar opened his jaws, too, sharing the shiplord's amusement. "Show me the picture sequence from the probe once more."

  "It shall be done." Kirel poked delicately at the projector controls. Tosev 3 vanished, to be replaced by a typical inhabitant: a biped with a red-brown skin, rather taller than a typical male of the Race. The biped wore a strip of cloth round its midsection and carried a bow and several stone-tipped arrows. Black fur

  sprouted from the top of its head

  The biped vanished. Another took its place, this one swaddled from head to foot in robes of dirty grayish tan. A curved iron sword hung from a leather belt at its waist. Beside it stood a brown-furred riding animal with a long neck and a hump on its back.

  Atvar pointed to the furry animal, then to the biped's robes. "Even the native creatures have to protect themselves from Tosev 3's atrocious climate." He ran a hand down the smooth, glistening scales of his arm.

  More bipeds appeared in holographic projection, some with black skins, some golden brown, some a reddish color so light it was almost pink. As the sequence moved on, Kirel opened his jaws in amusement once more. He pointed to the projector. "Behold— now!— the fearsome warrior of Tosev 3."

  "Hold that image. Let everyone, look closely at it," Atvar commanded.

  "It shall be done." Kirel stopped the flow of images. Every officer in the command station swiveled one eye toward the image, though most kept the other on the tasks before them.

  Atvar laughed silently as he studied the Tosevite fighter. This native belonged to the pinkish race, though only one hand and his face were visible to testify to that. Protective gear covered the rest of him almost as comprehensively as had the earlier biped's robes. A pointed iron helmet with several dents sat on top of his head. He wore a suit of rather rusty mail that reached almost to his knees, and heavy leather boots below them. A flimsy coat of bluish stuff helped keep the sun off the mail.

  The animal the biped rode, a somewhat more graceful relative of the humped creature,

  looked bored with the whole business. An iron-headed spear projected upward from the biped's seat. His other armament included a straight sword, a knife, and a shield with a cross painted on it.

  "How well do you think his kind is likely to stand up to bullets, armored fighting vehicles, aircraft?" Atvar asked rhetorically. The officers all laughed, looking forward to an easy conquest, to adding a fourth planet and solar system to the dominions of the Emperor.

  Not to be outdone in enthusiasm by his commander, Kirel added, "These are recent images, too: they date back only about sixteen hundred years." He paused to poke at a calculator. "That would be about eight hundred of Tosev 3's revolutions. And how much, my fellow warriors, how much can a world change in a mere eight hundred revolutions?"

  The officers laughed again, more widely this time. Atvar laughed with them. The history of the Race was more than a hundred thousand years deep; the Ssumaz dynasty had held the throne for almost half that time, ever since techniques for ensuring male heirs were worked out. Under the Ssumaz Emperors, the Race took Rabotev 2 twenty-eight thousand years ago, and seized Halless 1 eighteen thousand years after that. Now' it was Tosev 3's turn. The pace of conquest was quickening, Atvar thought.

  "Carry on, servants of the Emperor," the fleetlord said. The officers stiffened once more as he left the command station.

  He was back in his suite, busy with the infinite minutiae that accompanied command, when his door buzzer squawked. He looked up from the computer screen with a start. No one was scheduled to interrupt him at this time, and the Race did not lightly break routine.

  Emergency in space was improbable in the extreme, but who would dare disturb him for anything less?

  "Enter," he growled.

  The junior officer who came into the suite looked nervous; his tail stump twitched and his eyes swiveled quickly, now this way, now that, as if he were scanning the room for danger. "Exalted Fleetlord, kinsmale of the Emperor, as you know, we draw very near the Tosev system," he said, his voice hardly louder than a whisper.

  "I had better know that," Atvar said with heavy sarcasm.

  "Y-yes, Exalted Fleetlord." The junior officer, almost on the point' of bolting, visibly gathered himself before continuing: "Exalted Fleetlord, I am Subleader Erewlo, in the communications section. For the past few ship's days, I have

  detected unusual radio transmissions coming from that system. These appear to be artificial in nature, and, and"— now he had to force himself to go on and face Atvar's certain wrath—"from tiny doppler shifts in the signal frequency, appear to be emanating from Tosev 3."

  In fact, the fleetlord was too startled to be furious. "That is ridiculous," he said. "How dare you presume to tell me that the animal-riding savages our probes photographed have moved in the historic swivel of an eye turret up to electronics when we required tens of millennia for the same advance?"

  "Exalted Fleetlord, I presume nothing," Erewlo quavered. "I merely report to you anomalous data which may be of import to our mission and therefore to the Race."

  "Get out," Atvar said, his voice flat and deadly dangerous. Erewlo fled.

  The fleetlord glared after him. The report was ridiculous, on the face of it. The Race changed but slowly, in tiny, sensible increments. Though both the Rabotevs and the Hallessi were conquered before they developed radio, they had had comparably long, comparably leisurely developments. Surely that was the norm among intelligent races.

  Atvar spoke to his computer. The data the subleader had mentioned came up on his screen. He studied them, asked the machine for their implications. The implications were as Erewlo had said: with a probability that approached one, those were artificial radio signals coming from Tosev 3.

  The fleetlord snarled
a command the computer was not anatomically equipped to obey. If the natives of Tosev 3 had somehow stumbled across radio, what else did they know?

  Just as the hologram of Tosev 3 had looked like a world floating in space, so the world itself, seen through an armorglass window, resembled nothing so much as a holographic image. But to get round to its other side now, Atvar would have to wait for the 127th Emperor Hetto to finish half an orbit.

  The fleetlord glared down at the planet below. He had been glaring at it ever since the fleet arrived, one of his own years before. No one in all the vast history of the Race had ever been handed such a poisonous dilemma. The assembled shiplords stood waiting for Atvar to give them their orders. His the responsibility, his the rewards— and the risks.

  "The natives of Tosev 3 are more technologically advanced than we believed they would be when we undertook this expedition," he said, seeing if gross understatement would pry a reaction from them.

  As one, they dipped their heads slightly in assent. Atvar tightened his jaws— would that he might bite down on his officers' necks. They were going to give him no help at all. His the responsibility. He could not even ask the Emperor for instructions. A message Home would take twenty-four Home years to arrive, the reply another twenty-four. The invasion force could go back into cold sleep and wait— but who could say what the Tosevites would have invented by then?

  Atvar said, "The Tosevites appear at the moment to be fighting several wars among themselves. History tells us their disunity will work to our advantage." Ancient history, he thought; the Empire had had a single rule so long that no one, had any practice playing on the politics of disunion. But the manuals said such a thing was possible, and the manuals

  generally knew what they were talking about.

  Kirel assumed the stooping posture of respect, a polite way to show he wished to speak. Atvar turned both eyes on him, relieved someone would say at least part of what he thought. The shiplord of the 127th Emperor Hetto said, "Is it certain we can successfully overcome the Tosevites, Fleetlord? Along with radio and radar, they have aircraft of their own, as well as armored fighting vehicles— our probes have shown them clearly."

  "But these weapons are far inferior to ours of similar types. The probes also show this clearly." That was Straha, shiplord of the 206th Emperor Yower. He ranked next highest among the shiplords after Kirel, and wanted to surpass him one day.

  Kirel knew of Straha's ambitions, too. He abandoned the posture of respect to scowl at

  his rival. "A great many of these weapons are in action, however, and more being manufactured all the time. Our supplies are limited to those we have fetched across the light-years."

  "Have the Tosevites atomics?" Straha jeered. "If other measures fail, we can batter them into submission."

  "Thereby reducing the value of the planet to the colonists who will follow us," Kirel said.

  "What would you have us do?" Straha said. "Boost for home, having accomplished nothing?"

  "It is within the fleetlord's power," Kirel said stubbornly.

  He was right; abandoning the invasion was within Atvar's power. No censure would fall on him if he started back— no official censure.

  But instead of being remembered through all the ages as Atvar World conqueror, an epithet only two in the long history of the Race had borne before him, he would go down in the annals as Atvar Worldfleer, a title he would be the first to assume, but hardly one he craved.

  His the responsibility. In the end, his choice was no choice. "The awakening and orientation of the troops has proceeded satisfactorily?" he asked the shiplords. He did not need their hisses of assent to know the answer to his question; he had been following computer reports since before the fleet took up orbit around Tosev 3. The Emperor's weapons and warriors were ready.

  "We proceed," he said. The shiplords hissed again.

  "Come on, Joe!" Sam Yeager yelled in from

  left toward his pitcher. "One more to go. You can do it." / hope, Yeager added to himself.

  On the mound, Joe Sullivan rocked into his motion, wound up, delivered. Some days, Sullivan couldn't find the plate with a map. What do you expect from a seventeen-year-old kid? Yeager thought. Today, though, the big curve bit the outside corner. The umpire's right hand came up. A couple of people in the crowd of a couple of hundred cheered.

  Sullivan fired again. The batter, a big left-handed-hitting first baseman named Kobeski, swung late, lifted a lazy fly ball to left. "Shit!" he said loudly, and threw down his bat in disgust Yeager drifted back a few steps. The ball smacked his glove; his other hand instantly covered it. He trotted in toward the visitors' dugout. So did the rest of the Decatur Commodores.

  "Final score, Decatur 4, Madison 2," the announcer said over a scratchy, tinny microphone. "Winner, Sullivan. Loser, Kovacs. The Springfield Brownies start a series with the Blues here at Breese Stephens Field tomorrow. Game time will be noon. Hope to see you then."

  As soon as he got into the dugout, Yeager pulled a pack of Camels from the hip pocket of his wool flannel uniform. He lit up, sucked in a deep drag, blew out a contented cloud of smoke. "That's the way to do it, Joe," he called to Sullivan, who was ahead of him in the tunnel that led to the visitors' locker room. "Keep the ball down and away from a big ox like Kobeski and he'll never put one over that short right field they have here."

  "Uh, yeah. Thanks, Sam," the winning pitcher said over his shoulder. He took off his cap, wiped his sweaty forehead with a sleeve. Then he started unbuttoning his shirt.

  Yeager stared at Sullivan's back, slowly shook his head in wonder. The kid hadn't even known what he was up to; he'd just, happened to do the right thing. He's only seventeen, the left fielder reminded himself again. Most of the Commodores were just like Joe, kids too young for the draft. They made Yeager feel even older than the thirty-five years he actually carried.

  His "locker" was a nail driven into the wall. He sat down on a milking stool in front of it, began to peel off his uniform.

  Bobby Fiore landed heavily on the stool beside him. The second baseman was a veteran, too, and Yeager's roommate. "I'm getting too old for this," he said with a grimace.

  "You're what? Two years younger than I am?" Yeager said. "I guess so. Something like that." Fiore's dark, heavily bearded face, full of angles and shadows, was made to be a mask

  of gloom. It also made him a perfect contrast to Yeager, whose blond, ruddy features shouted farmboy! to the world. Gloomy now, Fiore went on, "What the hell's the use of playing in a lousy Class B league when you're as old as we are? You still think you're gonna be a big leaguer, Sam?"

  "The war goes on long enough, who can say? They may draft everybody ahead of me, and they don't want to give me a rifle. I tried volunteering six months ago, right after Pearl Harbor."

  "You got store-bought teeth, for Christ's sake," Fiore said.

  "Doesn't mean I can't eat, or shoot, either," Yeager said. He'd almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. His teeth, weakened by fever, rotted in his head and came out over the next few years; he'd worn full upper and lower plates since before he started shaving.

  Ironically, the only teeth of his own he had now were his four wisdom teeth, the ones that gave everyone else trouble. They'd come in fine, long after the rest were gone.

  Fiore just snorted and walked naked to the shower. Yeager followed. He washed quickly; the shower was cold. It could have been worse, he thought as he toweled himself dry. A couple of Three-l League parks didn't even have showers for the visiting team. Walking back to the hotel in a sticky, smelly uniform was a pleasure of bush-league ball he could do without

  He tossed his uniform into a canvas duffel bag, along with his spikes and glove. As he started getting into his street clothes, he picked up the conversation with Fiore: "What am I supposed to do, Bobby, quit? I've been going too long for that. Besides, I don't know a lot besides playing ball."

  "What do you need to know to get a job at a defense plant that pays better'n this?" Fiore
asked. But he was slinging his jock into his duffel bag, too.

  "Why don't you, if you're so fed up?" Yeager said.

  Fiore grunted. "Ask me on a day when I didn't get any hits. Today I went two for four." He slung the blue bag over his shoulder, picked his, way out of the crowded locker room.

  Yeager went with him. The cop at the players' entrance tipped his cap to them as they walked past; by his white mustache, he might have tried volunteering for the Spanish-American War.

  Both ballplayers took a long, deep breath at the same time. They smiled at each other. The air was sweet with the smell of the rolls and bread baking at Gardner's Bakery across

  the street' from the park. Fiore said, "I got a cousin who runs a little bakery in Pittsburgh. His place don't smell half as good as this."

  "Next time I'm in Pittsburgh, I'll tell your cousin you said that," Yeager said.

  "You ain't going to Pittsburgh, or any other big-league town, not even if the war goes on till 1955," Fiore retorted. "What's the best league you ever played in?"