In the Balance w-1

by Harry Turtledove

  Tompkins laughed. “I’ve put bigger men than you back there, my friend. Sure, you’re tall, but you’re built like a pencil. We won’t have any trouble, I promise.”

  They didn’t have much. What there was, came because Larssen hadn’t been on any bicycle at all for a good many years, and needed a little while before his body remembered how to balance. Charlie Tompkins compensated for his lurches without saying a word. In a way, that only made them more embarrassing: weren’t you never supposed to forget how to stay on a bicycle? Jens sighed as he did his best not to maim himself while exploding the cliche.

  “Whereabouts you from, mister?” Tompkins asked as they rolled past the sign welcoming people to Strasburg.

  “Chicago,” Larssen answered.

  The mechanic twisted his head. That struck Larssen as foolhardy, but he kept his mouth shut. After a moment, Tompkins turned back to watch where he was going. He spoke over his shoulder: “And you were heading back there, were you, from wherever you were coming from?”

  “That’s right. What about it?”

  “Nothing, really.” Tompkins pedaled along for a few more seconds, then went on in a sad tone, “Thing is, though, you might not want to say that to just anybody around here who asks. Chicago’s still free, right? Sure it is. I’m not asking whether you would or you wouldn’t, mind, but I can see where you might not want the Lizards to get wind of whatever reasons you’ve got for going that way.”

  “How would the Lizards…” Larssen’s voice trailed away. “You don’t mean people would tell them?” He knew the Lizards had human collaborators: the Warsaw Jews, Chinese, Italians, Brazilians. Up till this second, though, he’d never imagined there could be such a thing as an American collaborator. He supposed that was naive of him.

  Evidently it was. Tompkins said, “Some people, they’ll do anything to get in good with the boss, no matter who the boss is. Some other people have gotten hurt on account of it.” He didn’t seem to care for the subject, either. Instead of giving details, he took one hand off the handlebars and pointed. “That your car up ahead there, that Plymouth?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” Tompkins stopped the bike with the soles of his shoes against the asphalt. He and Jens both got off. The mechanic unhooked the tool box, walked over to the deceased automobile, reached through the grill, and popped the hood latch. Once the long piece of sheet metal was up and out of the way, he bent over and peered into the engine compartment.

  A low, mournful whistle floated up. “Mister, I hate to tell you, but you got yourself a cracked block.” Another whistle, not much later. “Your valves are shot to shit, too, pardon my French. What the hell you been burnin’ in this machine, anyhow?”

  “Whatever I could get my hands on that would burn,” Larssen answered honestly.

  “Well, I know how that goes, what with the way things are, but Jesus, even if times were good I couldn’t fix this poor bastard by my lonesome. What with the way things are, I don’t think I can fix her at all. Hate to have to tell you that, but I’m not gonna lie to you, either.”

  “How am I supposed to get back to Chicago, then?” Larssen wasn’t really asking Tompkins; it was more a cry to the unhearing gods. When he’d come east through Ohio, the Lizards hadn’t been anywhere near this far north. When he’d come east through Ohio, his car had been in reasonably good shape, too.

  “Wouldn’t take you forever to walk there,” Tompkins said. “What is it, maybe three, four hundred miles? Could be done.”

  Jens stared at the mechanic in dismay. At least two weeks on shank’s mare, more likely a month? Dodging in and out of the Lizards’ territory? Dodging bandits, too, likely enough (one more thing he’d never expected in America, at least outside the vanished Wild West)? Winter was on the way, too; already the sky had lost the perfect, transparent blue of summer. Barbara would think he was dead by the time he got back-if he got back.

  His eye fell on Tompkins’ bicycle. He pointed. “Tell you what-I’ll trade you my set of wheels for yours. You can use the parts that are still good to keep other cars running.” Before the Lizards came, swapping a two-year-old Plymouth for an elderly bicycle would have been insane. Before the Lizards came, of course, his car could have been fixed if it broke down. Before the Lizards came, his car wouldn’t have broken down because he wouldn’t have had to abuse it so.

  Now-Now Charlie Tompkins looked from the bike to the Plymouth, slowly shook his head. “What’s the point to that, mister? You take off for Chicago, you gonna carry your car on your back? I’ll get to scavenge it whether I give you my bike or not.”

  “Why, you-” Larssen wanted to murder the mechanic. The force of the feeling frightened him, left him almost sick. He wondered how many killings had sprung from the chaos the Lizards spread across the United States, across the world. Times grew ever more desperate, the risk of getting caught shrank… so why not kill, if you needed to?

  To fight the temptation, he jammed his hands deep into his trouser pockets. Amidst keys and small change, the fingers of his right hand closed round his cigarette lighter. The Zippo, unlike the Plymouth, would work forever, or at least as long as he could keep coming up with flints. It would also burn moonshine a lot better than the car had.

  He yanked out the buffed steel case, flipped open the top. His thumb went to the lighter’s wheel. “You don’t trade me your bike, Charlie, I’ll burn the goddamn car. Let’s see how you like that.”

  The mechanic started to grab for a wrench from his tool kit. Larssen’s mouth went dry-maybe he hadn’t been the only one thinking of murder. Then Tompkins’ hand stopped suddenly. His high-pitched laugh sounded unnatural, but it was a laugh. “Godawful times,” he said, to which Jens could only nod. “All right, Larssen, take the bike. I expect I’ll be able to come up with another one from somewheres.”

  Larssen relaxed, but not very far. His Zippo might torch the Plymouth, but it didn’t stack up very well against a monkey wrench. He walked over to the rear end of the car, opened the trunk. He took out the smaller of the two suitcases there and a ball of twine, slammed the trunk shut. He did the best job he could of tying the suitcase to the rack on which he’d ridden, then pulled the trunk key off the ring and tossed it to Charlie Tompkins.

  He swung his right leg over the bicycle saddle, as if he were mounting a horse. If he’d wobbled as a passenger, he was even more unsteady up there by himself. But he managed to stay upright and keep the bike rolling forward. After a couple of hundred yards, he took a chance and looked back over his shoulder. Tompkins was already going through the suitcase he’d had to leave behind. He scowled and kept pedaling.

  The U-2 buzzed through the night, so low that an instant’s inattention or simply a hillock she’d forgotten would have cost Ludmila Gorbunova her life. The Kukuruznik was proving the Soviet Union’s ace in the hole in the war against the Lizards. Newer Red Air Force planes with greater speed and better guns, but also with more metal in their airframes and higher minimum ceilings, had all but vanished from the skies. The obsolescent little biplane trainer, too small, too slow, and too low to be noticed, soldiered on.

  The slipstream blew chilly over Ludmila’s goggled face. Fall was in the air. The rains would start any day now. Her lips curled upward in a mirthless smile. The rasputitsa, the time of mud, had hurt the fascists badly last year. She wondered how the Lizards’ armored vehicles would enjoy trying to push forward through slimy porridge.

  She also wondered, just for a moment, what her superiors had done with the two Germans she’d delivered to them from the Ukrainian collective farm. Having deadly foes suddenly turn into allies was disconcerting, as was the realization the Nazis were human beings like her own side. Better when they’d seemed only small field-gray shapes scurrying like lice before the bullets from her machine guns.

  She glanced down at the map book balanced on her knees. The lights from her instrument panel bet her trace her assigned flight path. She flew over a riv
et A quick peek at her watch told her how long she’d been in the alt Yes, it ought to be the Slovechna, which meant she needed to swing farther south… now.

  Her breath came short and fast when she spotted lights on the horizon ahead. Some of the Lizards still kept the stupid habit of lighting up their campsites at night. Maybe they thought it made them safer from ground attack. Given the range and power of their weapons, maybe it even did; Ludmila was no Marshal of the Soviet Union, to know everything there was to know about ground tactics. she did know being able to see what she was shooting at made her own job easier.

  She couldn’t gain altitude and then glide silently to the attack, as she had against the Nazis. Aircraft that attacked the Lizards from anything much above ground height came down in pieces, a lesson learned from bitter experience. Stay low and you had a chance.

  It wasn’t always a good chance. Her air regiment was chewed to bits. She knew of only three or four other pilots from it still flying. The regiment was long since broken up, of course-large concentrations of aircraft on the ground drew the Lizards’ wrath like nothing else. These days, the Kukuruzniks flew by ones and twos, not in formation.

  The lighted area swelled ahead of her. Her finger went to the firing button for the machine guns. She spied what looked at first like bumpy ground but proved as she drew nearer to be some sort of vehicles under camouflage netting. Trucks, she thought-Lizard tanks, being almost impervious to human weapons, were seldom concealed so carefully.

  She started her firing run. The machine guns hammered under her wings. The little U-2 shook like a leaf in an autumn wind. The flying sparks of tracer bullets helped guide her aim.

  Almost in the same instant, the Lizards began shooting back. They owned more firepower than the Germans had been able to bring to bear; by the muzzle flashes on the ground, Ludmila thought ten thousand automatic weapons had opened up on her all at once. The fabric skin of the Kukuruznik’s wings made cheerful popping noises as bullets pierced it.

  Then one of the trucks blew up in a blue-white ball of hydrogen fire, so different from the orange flames of blazing petrol. The blast of heat seared Ludmila’s cheeks as she flew past; it tried to fling her aircraft tumbling out of control. She wrestled with stick and pedals, held it steady in the air.

  Touched off by the first, more trucks exploded behind her. She gave the U-2 all the meager power it had, banked away toward the friendly darkness. A few Lizards kept shooting at her, but only a few; more ran to fight the fires she’d touched off. As night drew its cloak around her, she took one hand off the stick for a moment, pounded fist against thigh. she’d hurt them this time.

  Now to find her way home. Even without flying a combat mission, navigating at night was anything but easy. She straightened onto compass course 047. That would bring her somewhere close to the airstrip from which she’d been operating. She checked her watch and her airspeed indicator, the other vital tools of night flying. After about-hmm-fifty minutes, she’d begin to circle and look for landing lights.

  Just surviving a mission was enough to make her proud-and to make her remember all her friends who would never fly again. That thought quickly leached joy from her, leaving behind only weariness and the jittery residue of terror.

  Either she was a better navigator than she’d thought or much luckier than usual, for she spotted the dim banding lanterns after only a couple of circles. They were hooded so as not to be visible from high overhead. The Red Air Force had learned the dangers of that from the Luftwaffe; the lesson was all the more vital against the Lizards.

  Her approach in the dark was tentative, the makeshift airstrip anything but smooth. The landing she made would have earned only scorn from her Osoaviakhim instructor (she wondered if the man was still alive). she didn’t care. She was down and among her own people and safe-until her next mission. she didn’t even have to think about that, not yet.

  As soon as she got out of the U-2, groundcrew started dragging it to cover. A woman mechanic pointed to the bullet holes. Ludmila shrugged. “Patch them as you get the chance, comrade. I’m all right and so is the aircraft.”

  “Good,” the mechanic said. “Oh-you have a letter down in the bunker.”

  “A letter?” The Soviet post, erratic since the start of the war, had grown frankly chaotic once the Lizards added their ravages to those of the Nazis. Eagerly, Ludmila asked, “From whom?”

  “I don’t know. It’s in an envelope, and it doesn’t say on the outside,” the mechanic answered.

  “An envelope? Really?” The very occasional letters Ludmila had had from her brothers and her father and mother were all written on folded single sheets of paper, with her name and unit scrawled on the reverse. she’d had only one note since the Lizards came, three hasty lines, from her younger brother Igor, letting her know he was alive. She trotted for the shelter bunker, saying, “I’ll have to see who’s gotten rich.”

  Curtains and doglegs in the entry passage kept candlelight from leaking out. Yevdokia Kasherina looked up from the tunic she was darning. “How did it go?” she asked with a fellow pilot’s concern. It was a long way from the formal debriefings of earlier missions, but the Soviet Air Force was too dispersed and battered to have much room for formalities these days.

  “Well enough,” Ludmila said. “I shot up some trucks that weren’t hidden well enough, and I got back here alive. Now what’s this I hear about a letter?”

  “It’s over there on your blankets,” Yevdokia said, pointing. “You don’t think anyone would dare do anything with it, do you?”

  “Better not,” Ludmila said fiercely. Both women laughed. Ludmila hurried over to where she slept. The clean, white envelope gleamed against the dark blue wool of the blankets. She snatched it up, carried it over to a candle.

  she’d expected to recognize the script on the envelope at a glance, and thus know who had written to her before she started the letter itself. Hearing from any of her family would be so good… But, to her surprise and disappointment, the handwriting was unfamiliar to her. Indeed, handwriting was too good a word for it; her name and unit were printed in large copybook letters of the sort a bright eight-year-old might make.

  “Who’s it from?” Yevdokia asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Ludmila said.

  The other pilot laughed. “A secret admirer, Ludmila Gorbunova?”

  “Hush.” Ludmila tore open the envelope, pulled out the piece of paper inside. The words on that were also printed rather than written. For a moment, they seemed utterly meaningless to her. Then she realized she had to switch languages and even alphabets: the letter was in German.

  Her first reaction was fright. Before the Lizards came, a letter in German would have been delivered by a harsh-faced NKVD man certain she was guilty of treason. But censors must have seen this note and decided to let it go through. Reading it probably would not endanger her.

  To the brave flier who plucked me from the kolkhoz, it began. Flier had a feminine ending tacked on, and kolkhoz was spelled out in those copybook Cyrillic letters. I hope you are well and safe and hitting back against the Lizards. I write this as simply as I can, as I know your German is slow, though much better than my Russian. I am now in Moscow, where I work with your government to hurt the Lizards in new ways. These will-

  A few words were neatly clipped out of the letter. A censor had been at it, then. Some of Ludmila’s fear returned: somewhere in Moscow, her name appeared in a dossier for getting mail from a German. As long as Germany and the Soviet Union kept on working together against the Lizards, that dossier would not matter. If they had a falling out…

  Ludmila read on: I hope one day we may see each other again. This may be so, because-The censor had excised another section. The letter finished, Your country and mine have been enemies, allies, enemies, and now allies again. Life is strange, not so? I hope we shall not be enemies ourselves, you and I. The signature was a scrawl that looked to her eyes nothing like Heinrich Jager, but that was surely what it said. Underne
ath, in the clear printing that marked the rest of the note, he had appended Major, 16th Panzer, as if she were unlikely to remember him without being reminded.

  She stared at the piece of paper for a long time, trying to sort out her own feelings. He was polite, he was well-spoken, he was not the ugliest man she had ever seen… he was a Nazi. If she answered his letter, another note would go down in the dossier. She was as certain of that as of tomorrow’s sunrise.

  “Well?” Yevgenia said when she did not comment.

  “You were right, Yevgenia Gavrilovna-it is from a secret admirer.”

  The other pilot made a rude noise. “The Devil’s nephew, no doubt.”

  “How did you guess?”

  11

  A shell screamed down and landed in the middle of the grove of larches south of Shabbona, Illinois. Mutt Daniels threw himself flat. Splinters of wood and more deadly splinters of metal whined past overhead. “I am getting too old for this shit,” Daniels muttered to no one in particular.

  A flock of black-crowned night herons-“quawks,” the locals called them, after the noise they made-leapt into the air in panic. They were handsome birds, two feet tall or more, with long yellow legs, black or sometimes dark green heads and backs, and pearl-gray wings. Quawking for all they were worth, they flew south as fast as they could go.

  Mutt listened to their receding cries, but hardly looked up to watch them go. He was too busy deepening the foxhole he’d already started in the muddy ground under the larches. In the generation that had passed since he’d got back from France, he’d forgotten how fast you could dig while you were lying on your belly.

  Another shell burst, this one just east of the grove. The few quawks that hadn’t taken flight at the first explosion did at this one. From a hole a few feet away from Daniels’, Sergeant Schneider said, “They likely won’t be back this year.”