Harry Turtledove - Upsetting the Balance

Triumphantly, Ttomalss said, “There, you see? The hatching, despite its deficiencies, is being socialized toward our usages even at this early stage in its development.”

“It was just another in the series of loud, unpleasant sounds the creature emits,” Tessrek insisted. “It held no intelligible meaning whatsoever.” To show he meant what he said, he let out a second emphatic cough.

Now Ttomalss looked anxiously toward the hatchling. Even he would have been willing to concede it did not know the meanings of the noises it made in imitation of his. It seemed likely to learn meanings by observing what the beings around it did in response to the stimuli varying sounds evoked. But despite his knowledge, he would have yielded a pay period’s wages to have it come out with another emphatic cough.

He didn’t think it was going to happen. But then, just when he’d given up hope, the little Tosevite did make a noise that sounded like an emphatic cough-sounded more like one, in fact, that its first effort had.

“Coincidence,” Tessrek declared, before Ttomalss could say a thing. Yet no matter how dogmatically certain he sounded, he did not presume to tack yet a third emphatic cough on behind his assertion.

“I think not,” Ttomalss said. “This is how the Big Uglies go about acquiring language. Since we are the language possessors with whom the hatchling is in constant contact, it is imitating our repertoire of sounds. Eventually, I believe, it will attach mental signification to the sounds it uses: in other words, it will begin to speak intelligibly.”

“The Big Uglies have enough trouble doing that no matter what language they use,” Tessrek said. But he did not try directly refuting Ttomalss, from which Ttomalss inferred he conceded the point.

Ttomalss said, “Since video and audio monitors constantly record the activities in this chamber, I want to thank you for adding to our store of data concerning Tosevite language acquisition.”

Tessrek hissed something unpleasant and departed more quickly than he’d come in. Ttomalss let his mouth fall open in a long laugh, which he thought well-earned. The Tosevite hatchling emitted one of the squeals it used in place of a sensibly quiet gesture. Sometimes those squeals, so unlike any sound the Race made, annoyed Ttomalss no end. Now he laughed even harder. The hatchling had understood his mirth and responded with its own.

For the benefit of the recorders, he emphasized that point aloud, adding, “This growing level of successful interspecies communication appears to me to warrant further serious investigation.” He looked at the little Tosevite with something more nearly approaching warmth than he ever remembered showing it. “Let’s see them try to take you away from me now. Even if you are a nuisance, you’re too valuable to give back to the Big Uglies.”

Jens Larssen peered out the window of the farmhouse where he’d taken shelter for the past several days. That was what he’d been doing lately: peering out the window and waiting for the searchers to give up and go away. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he muttered. “I’m too smart for them. I won’t let them catch me.”

He was pretty sure he could have outrun pursuit from Denver and made it to Lizard-held territory. Pursuit wasn’t the only problem, though. People would have been waiting for him out east. He hadn’t forgotten telegraph and telephone lines (even if those were likely to be down, could you take the chance?) and radio and even carrier pigeons. They’d know he was coming, oh yes they would.

So he’d been waiting for them to give up and quit looking for him. Sooner or later, they’d figure he’d got caught in a snowstorm and frozen to death, or that he’d managed a clean getaway, or else the war would heat up and they’d forget all about him and go off to fight. Then he’d start moving again. The time, he judged, was nearly ripe.

He laughed. “They aren’t going to catch me,” he repeated. “Hell, they were right in this house and they didn’t have a clue.”

He’d been smart. He was a physicist-he was supposed to be smart. He’d picked a house with a storm cellar in it. Whenever prying eyes came around, he’d ducked down into the cellar. He’d even tied a throw rug to a chair near the cellar door so it kept that door covered up after he went down below. He’d heard combat boots thumping up above his head, but none of the soldiers had had a hint that he was sitting in the darkness with his finger on the trigger of his Springfield in case anything had gone wrong.

He laughed again. The soldiers hadn’t had the brains to look beyond the ends of their noses. He’d expected nothing different, and he’d been right. “I usually am,” he said. “If those fools would have listened to me-” He shook his head. They hadn’t listened. The Lizards would.

Even though they hadn’t been physicists, the people who’d built this farm had been pretty smart, too. They weren’t around, though, so they hadn’t been smart enough to escape the Lizards. Or maybe they hadn’t been lucky enough. You never could tell. Whichever way it was, they were gone.

But they’d left behind that storm cellar, stocked with enough home-canned goodies to feed a platoon for a month. That was how it seemed to Jens, anyhow. Beef, pork, chicken, vegetables-they didn’t seem to have had any fruit trees, and he missed sweets till he came upon a gallon jar of tapioca pudding. The wife of the house must have made a lot more than she could use right away, and put up the rest. He ate tapioca till it started coming out of his ears.

He’d found cigarettes down there, too, but he hadn’t smoked any. The odor would linger in the house. When he got on the road again-ah, that was another matter. He looked forward to it, although the first couple of times he’d lit up after going without for a long time, he’d been like Tom Sawyer after Huck Finn gave him his first pipe.

He walked over to the window that looked across the fields toward US 40. It was snowing again, not so hard as it had back when he was a kid in Minnesota but plenty hard enough to cut way back on visibility. In a way, that was bad, because he couldn’t tell who, if anybody, was out there. He didn’t think anybody was. The highway had been quiet since that search party stomped through the house, and that was days ago now. And the snow could work for him, too. It would make him harder to spot, and harder to recognize if somebody did spot him.

“Well, then, time to get moving,” he said. He was just the Denver side of Limon. Once he made it past there, he’d be getting close to frontier country. He’d have to be careful again: the frontier meant soldiers. But unless he had it all wrong, they’d be worrying about Lizards, not about him.

And he didn’t have it all wrong. He couldn’t have it all wrong. The only mistake he’d made was not doing something like this a hell of a lot sooner. He went down into the storm cellar and hauled out his bicycle. As soon as he was on the road, he lit up a King Sano. Yeah, it made him halfway want to puke, but goddamn did it taste good.

The Russies had been buried alive before, first in the bunker under a Warsaw block of flats and then in the submarine that brought them from Poland to England. That didn’t mean Moishe enjoyed repeating the process. There were, however, worse choices these days.

A sandy-haired naval officer named Stansfield commanded the HMS Seanymph. “Welcome aboard,” he’d said as, somewhere off the coast of Portugal, or perhaps Spain, Moishe, Rivka, and Reuven transferred to his boat from the freighter that had brought them down from England. “I’d wager you’ll be glad to submerge for a spell.”

Like a lot of military types Moishe had met-Poles, Nazis, Englishmen, Lizards-he seemed almost indecently offhanded about the implications of combat. Maybe the only way he could deal with them was not to think about them. Moishe had answered, “Yes,” and let it go at that.