Striking the Balance

“I won’t know till I hit the switch that makes it play,” Goldfarb answered. “I think they just dumped every video platter they could find into a crate and sent them all here. We get a few that are actually useful to us, and we get to label the ones that aren’t and ship them on to people for whom they might come in handy.”

“Bloody inefficient way of doing things,” Roundbush grumbled, but he mooched over to see what the platter would yield. You never could tell. The British had captured a lot of them in the process of driving the Lizards off their island. Some were entertainments, some seemed to contain payrolls and such, and some were the Lizard equivalent of manuals. Those were the real prizes.

Goldfarb flicked the switch. Unlike the valves human electronics used, Lizard gadgets didn’t need a minute or two to warm up before they started working. The screen showed the image of a Lizard tank. Having faced such beasts on the ground, Goldfarb had a wholesome respect for them. Nonetheless, they weren’t what he was after.

He watched for a couple of minutes to confirm that the video platter was indeed a tank maintenance manual, then shut it off and made the player spit out the platter. After he’d done that, he wrapped it in a sheet of paper, on which be scribbled its subject. He picked up another one and fed it into the machine. It showed scenes of a city on the Lizards’ home planet-whether it was a travelogue or a drama he couldn’t tell.

“I hear some of these have been found with blue movies on them,” Roundbush remarked as Goldfarb removed the video platter and labeled with its possible categories the paper he used to wrap it.

“Good heavens, who cares?” Goldfarb said. “Watching Lizards rut wouldn’t getmy

juices flowing, I tell you that.”

“You misunderstand, old chap,” Roundbush answered. “I mean blue movies of our own kind of people. There’s this one Chinese woman, I’m told, who shows up in a lot of them, and also in one where she’s having a baby.”

“Why do the Lizards care about that?” Goldfarb said. “We must be as ugly to them as they are to us. I’d bet it’s a rumor the brass started to give us a reason to keep sifting through these bloody things.”

Roundbush laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that, and I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised if you were right. How many more platters do you plan to go through this session?”

“Oh, perhaps another six or eight,” Goldfarb said after a moment’s thought. “Then I’ll have wasted enough time on them for a while, and I can go back to making little futile lunges at the innards of the radar set there.” He pointed to the array of electronic components spread out over his workbench in what he hoped was a logical, sensible arrangement.

The first three video platters held nothing of any earthly use to him-nothing of any earthly use to anybody earthly, he thought Two of them were nothing but endless columns of Lizard chicken scratches: most likely the mechanized equivalent of a division’s worth of paybooks. The third showed a Lizard spaceship and some weird creatures who weren’t Lizards. Goldfarb wondered if it was fact or the alien version of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon two-reelers. Maybe some boffin would be able to figure it out. He couldn’t.

He took out the platter and stuck in another one. As soon as it started to play, Basil Roundbush let out a whoop and thumped him on the back. There on the screen stood a Lizard in medium-fancy body paint disassembling a jet engine that lay on a large table in front of him.

Engines were Roundbush’s speciality, not his own, but he watched with the RAF officer for a while. Even without understanding the Lizards’ language, he learned a lot from the platter. Roundbush was frantically scribbling notes as he watched. “If only Group Captain Hipple could see this,” he muttered several times.

“We’ve been saying that for a long time now,” Goldfarb answered unhappily. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” He kept watching the video platter. Some of the animation and trick photography the Lizard instructor used to get his point across far outdistanced anything the Disney people had done inSnow White orFantasia. He wondered how they’d managed several of the effects. However they did it, they took it as much for granted as he did-or rather, as he had-when he flicked a wall switch to make light come out of a ceiling fixture.

When the instructional film was over, Roundbush shook himself, as if he were a dog emerging from a chilly stream. “We definitely need to keep that one,” he said. “Would be nice if we had the services of a Lizard prisoner, too, so we could find out what the blighter was actually saying. That business with the turbine blades, for instance-was he telling the technicians to fiddle with them or not to mess about with them under any circumstances?”