Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Kirel tried again: “We continue to expend the antimissile missiles at a rate of several per day. We also seek to destroy the launchers from which the Deutsch missiles come, but we have had only limited success there, as they are both mobile and easy to conceal.”

  “Any success on Tosev 3 seems limited,” Atvar said with a sigh. “We might do better to blast the factories in which the missiles are manufactured. If the Deutsche cannot produce them, they cannot fire them. And missiles require great precision; if we destroy the tools needed to make them, the Big Uglies will be a long while coming up with more.” He realized he was once more reduced to buying time against the Tosevites, but that was better than losing to them.

  “This course is also being attempted,” Kirel said, “but, while it pains me to contradict the exalted fleetlord, the Tosevite missiles are astonishingly crude. Their guidance is so bad as to make them no more than area weapons, extremely long-range artillery, but the prospect of large weights of high explosive landing behind our lines remains unpleasant; some have evaded our countermeasures and done considerable damage, and that situation will grow far worse as we run out of countermissiles. The corresponding point is that they are far easier to build than the missiles that shoot them down. We attack factories we’ve identified as producing missile components, but the Deutsche continue to produce and launch the pestilential things.”

  Atvar sighed again. There in an eggshell was the story of the war against the Big Uglies. The Race took all the proper steps to contain them—and got hurt anyhow.

  A screen on his desk lit up, showing the features of his adjutant, Pshing. Atvar immediately started to worry. Pshing wouldn’t interrupt his conference with Kirel for anything that wasn’t important, which meant, in practice, for anything that hadn’t gone wrong. “What is it?” Atvar demanded, putting a fierce snarl into the interrogative cough.

  “Forgive me for troubling you, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said nervously, “but Fzzek, commander of invasion forces in Britain, has received under sign of truce a disturbing message from Churchill, the chief minister to the petty emperor of Britain. He requests your orders on how to proceed.”

  “Give me the message,” Atvar said.

  “It shall be done.” Pshing swung an eye turret to one side, evidently reading the words from another screen. “This Churchill demands that we begin evacuating our forces from Britain in no more than two days or face an unspecified type of warfare the Tosevites have not yet employed against us, but one which is asserted to be highly effective and dangerous.”

  “If this Churchill uses nuclear arms against us, we shall not spare his capital,” Atvar said. “The island of Britain is so small, a few nuclear weapons would utterly ruin it.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, Churchill specifically denies the weapons he describes are nuclear in nature,” Pshing replied. “They are new, they are deadly. Past that, the British spokesmale declined detailed comment.”

  “Having begun the conquest of Britain, we are not going to abandon it on the say-so of a Tosevite,” Atvar said. “You may tell Fzzek to relay that to Churchill. For all we know, the Big Ugly is but running an enormous bluff. We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived. Relay that to Fzzek as well.”

  “It shall be done,” Pshing said. The screen holding his image went blank.

  Atvar turned back to Kirel. “Sometimes the presumption Tosevites show astonishes me. They treat us as if we were fools. If they have a new weapon, which I doubt, advertising it will produce nothing from us, especially since we’ve seen for ourselves what liars they are.”

  “Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

  Mutt Daniels crouched in ruins, hoping the Lizard bombardment would end soon. “If it don’t end soon, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left of Chicago,” he muttered under his breath.

  “What’s that, Lieutenant?” Dracula Szabo asked from the shelter of a shell hole not far away.

  Before Mutt could answer, several Lizard shells came in, close enough to slam him down as if he’d been blocking the plate when a runner bowled him over trying to score. He thanked his lucky stars he’d been breathing out rather than in; a blast could rip your lungs to bits and kill you without leaving a mark on your body.

  “Come on,” he said, and charged west across the ruined lawn of Poro College toward the rubble that had been shops and apartments on the other side of South Park Way. Szabo followed at his heels.

  Somewhere close by, a Lizard opened up with an automatic rifle. Daniels didn’t know whether the bullets were intended for him, and didn’t wait to find out. He threw himself flat, ignoring the bricks and stones on which he landed. Bricks and stones could hurt his bones, but bullets . . . he shuddered, not caring for the parody on the old rhyme.

  Bela Szabo returned five with his BAR. “Ain’t this a hell of a mess?” he called to Mutt.

  “You might say that, yeah—you just might,” Mutt answered. Off to the west, some Americans still fought in the Swift and Armour plants; every so often, little spatters of gunfire rang out from that direction. The plants themselves were worse rubble than the Bronzeville wreckage amidst which he crouched. The Lizards had finally pushed around them and driven halfway toward Lake Michigan. That put them and Chicago’s American defenders smack in the middle of Bronzeville, Chicago’s Black Belt. Nobody had any real solid claim to the land between the packing plants and where Mutt now lay.

  Dracula jerked a thumb back at what had been, in happier times, Poro College. “What the hell kind of place was that, anyways?” he asked. “I seen pictures of colored women all gussied up scattered along with all the other junk.”

  “That there was what they call a beauty college,” said Mutt, who’d seen a sign on the ground. “I guess that’s where you went to learn how to gussy up colored folk, like you said.”

  “Not me, Lieutenant,” Dracula said.

  “Not me, neither, but somebody,” Mutt answered. Like most white men from Mississippi, he automatically thought of Negroes as ignorant sharecroppers who were fine as long as they kept to their place. Barnstorming against black ballplayers in the winter and endless travels through the north and west, where things worked a little differently, had softened his attitude without destroying it.

  That complicated life at the moment, because Bronzeville held, along with Lizard assault troops and American defenders and counterattackers, a fair number of Negro civilians living in cellars and makeshift shelters cobbled together from the wreckage of what had once been fine houses. They were nonpareil scavengers; that they’d stayed alive in the hell Chicago had become proved as much. They found all sorts of goodies—canned food, medicine, sometimes even smokes and booze—for the Army units fighting hereabouts. But not for Mutt: as soon as they heard his drawl, they dummied up. One, more forthright than the rest, said, “Mistuh, we came no’th to git away from that kind o’ talk.”

  As if picking the worry from Mutt’s mind, Dracula Szabo said, “Lieutenant, we gotta get some more help from the spooks around here. I mean, I ain’t the worst scrounger ever born—”

  “You’re a sandbaggin’ son of a bitch, is what you are, Dracula,” Daniels answered. Szabo was the best scrounger he’d ever seen, and he’d seen some real pros, Americans and English and especially Frenchmen, in France during the First World War. Hadn’t been for Dracula, the platoon would have been hungrier and grouchier. Mutt still had a couple of precious cigarettes stashed against a day when he’d have to smoke one or die.

  Dracula grinned, unabashed. As if Mutt hadn’t spoken, he took up where he’d left off: “—but the thing of it is, the spooks know where most of the stuff is, account of they’re the ones who stashed it in the first place. I’m just goin’ around, maybe finding things by luck, know what I mean? Luck’s a handy thing, no doubt about it, but having an angle’s a damn sight better.” He spoke with the calm assurance of a man who tucked an ace up his sleeve every now and again.

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong, kid. Tell you what—ne
xt time we’re tryin’ to get somethin’ from ’em, you handle it. Tell ’em the lieutenant made you the official U.S. Army special duty supply bloodhound for the platoon. We’ll see how that goes for a while—if we don’t get pushed outta here and don’t walk into a shell.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant, if that’s how you want it.” Szabo kept his voice so carefully neutral that Mutt had to put his sleeve up against his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He knew he’d just given the fox the keys to the henhouse. Dracula would be scrounging for himself, not just for the platoon, and he’d turn a handsome profit on some of the things he came up with. But he was smart enough to do that after the things that really needed doing. Or he’d better be smart enough, because if he wasn’t, Mutt would land on him like a ton of bricks.

  From somewhere back not far from the shore of Lake Michigan, a mortar started lobbing bombs onto the Lizards over on Calumet Avenue. “Come on!” Mutt shouted, and ran forward toward a house that was more or less intact. The men he led came with him, rifles and submachine guns banging away as they sprinted from one piece of cover to the next.

  More bombs fell, these just ahead of the advancing Americans, so close that a couple of fragments flew past Daniels with an ugly whistling noise. The mortars chewed up the landscape even worse than it was already. Mutt peered out from behind a corner of the house, fired a burst at what might have been a Lizard even if it probably wasn’t, and ran forward again to flop down behind a pile of bricks that once upon a time had been somebody’s chimney.

  He rested there for a couple of minutes, breathing hard—hell, panting. War was a young man’s business, and he wasn’t a young man any more. As he tried to catch his breath, he wondered whether pushing the Lizards back across a couple of miles of landscape-turned-trash-dump was worth the blood it would cost.

  He’d wondered the same thing Over There. Once you were in ’em, the stretches of shell-pocked German trenches you’d taken didn’t seem as if they could possibly make up for the guys who got shot while you were taking them. But you kept doing it, over and over and over, and eventually the Boches couldn’t stand the hammering any more and gave up.

  Mutt had figured it was what Mr. Wilson called it: the war to end war. But then up popped Hitler and up popped the Japs, and you had to go off and do it all over again. And then along came the Lizards, and all of a sudden you weren’t fighting in some godforsaken place nobody’d ever heard of, you were fighting in Chicago, for God’s sake. Hell, Comiskey Park, or whatever was left of it, couldn’t have been more than a mile away.

  Freight-train noises overhead said the Lizards were going after the mortar crews. Mutt didn’t wish those crews any harm, but he was just as glad to have the aliens’ artillery pounding at something in back of the line.

  On his belly, he scrambled toward the hulk of a dead Model-A Ford that sat on four flat tires. Small-arms fire was picking up; the Lizards didn’t feel like leaving the neighborhood. He was almost to the car when he got shot.

  He’d gone through months in France and more than a year in Illinois without a scratch. He hadn’t thought he was invulnerable; he knew better than that. But he hadn’t thought his number was up, either.

  At first he felt just the impact, as if somebody had kicked him in the rear, hard. “Ahh, shit,” he said, as if an umpire had blown a close call at third base and wouldn’t change it back no matter how obviously wrong he was. He twisted around, trying to see the wound. Given where he’d been hit, it wasn’t easy, but the seat of his pants was filling up with blood.

  “Jesus God,” he muttered. “Everybody goes and talks about gettin’ their ass shot off, but I went and did it.”

  Then the wound started to hurt, as if he had a red-hot skewer stuck into his hindquarters. “Medic!” he bawled. He knew he sounded like a branded calf, but he couldn’t help it.

  Dracula Szabo slithered over to him. When he saw where Mutt was hit, he started laughing. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said after a moment, and even halfway sounded as if he meant it. “I was just thinkin’, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna kiss it and make it better.”

  “I ask for a medic an’ I go an’ get W. C. Fields,” Mutt said. “You got a field dressing on you?” At Szabo’s nod, he went on, “Stick it on there, will you?”

  “Sure thing. Lift up a little, so I can get your pants down and get at where you’re hit.” When Mutt obeyed, Dracula bandaged him with cool competence that spoke of the practice he’d had at such things. His appraisal also told of that experience: “Doesn’t look too bad, sir. Not quite a crease, but it’s a through-and-through, and it’s just in the ham, not in the bone. You sit tight an’ wait for the medics to take you outta here. You’re gonna be okay, I think.”

  “Sit tight?” Mutt rolled his eyes. “I ain’t goin’ anyplace real fast, not with that, but I don’t wanna sit on it, neither.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see that,” Dracula answered. He swatted Mutt lightly on the shoulder. “You take care. Good luck to you.” Then he was gone, back to the fight. In the space of a moment, Daniels had gone from platoon leader—essentially, God’s right-hand man—to part of the detritus of war.

  He sang out again: “Medic!” That ran the risk of drawing Lizards to him, but he was willing to take the chance. The Lizards were pretty decent about not butchering wounded men, probably better than either the Germans or the Americans had been in the last war.

  “Where you hit, soldier?” The man with the Red Cross armband was black; at that moment, Mutt wouldn’t have cared if he’d been green.

  “Right in the butt,” he answered.

  “Okay.” The black man had a partner who was white. Mutt noticed that, but didn’t say anything about it, even when the Negro kept on being the spokesman: “We’ll get the stretcher over by you, and you slide onto it on your belly, right?”

  “Right.” Mutt did as he was told. “Got me what the limeys used to call a Blighty wound: too bad to go on fightin’, but not bad enough to wreck me for good. They’d get shipped back to England and they were done with the war. Me—” He shook his head.

  The Negro chuckled sympathetically. “Afraid you’re right about that, Lieutenant. They’ll fix you up and send you out again.” He turned to the white stretcher bearer. “Come on, Jimmy. Let’s get him back to the aid station.”

  “Right, Doc.” Jimmy picked up his end of the stretcher.

  “Doc?” Mutt said. He’d wondered why the colored guy had done all the talking. “You a doctor?” he asked. He’d learned not to tack “boy” onto that.

  “That’s right.” The Negro didn’t look back at Daniels. For the first time, his voice got tight. “Does it bother you, Alabama? If I’m not lily-white enough to take care of you, I can leave you right here.” He sounded deadly serious.

  “I’m from Mississippi,” Mutt said automatically. Then he thought about the rest of the question. “I been out of Mississippi a while, too. If you’re American enough to want to patch my ass, I reckon I’m American enough to say thank-you when you’re done.” He waited. He’d run into a few educated black men who were just as good at hating as any Ku-Kluxer.

  Doc didn’t say anything for a couple of steps. Then he nodded. “Okay, Mississippi. That sounds fair.”

  It damn well better, Daniels thought. You’re not gonna get anything more out of me. But he didn’t say so out loud. The colored doctor was doing his job, and seemed willing to meet him halfway. Given Mutt’s own present circumstances, that was about as much as he had any right to expect.

  The aid station had a big Red Cross flag flying in front of it, and several more on the roof. It was a big, foursquare brick building not far from Lake Michigan. Doc said, “Hey, Mississippi, you know what this place was before the war?”

  “No, but that don’t matter, on account of I got the feeling you’re just about to tell me,” Mutt answered.

  “You’re right,” the Negro said. “You don’t let much bother you, do you? This was—still is, I guess—the Abraham Lincoln Center.”r />
  “Just another damnyankee,” Daniels said, so deadpan that the colored doctor gave him a sharp look over his shoulder before chuckling ruefully. Mutt went on, “Doc, I’ve done two turns of soldiering now, and in between ’em I was a bush-league manager for about a hundred years. So a smartmouth, even a smartmouth doc, that don’t bother me much, no. Gettin’ shot in the ass, now, that bothers me.”

  “I can see how that would mess up a man’s day,” Jimmy, the other stretcher bearer, put in.

  Some dogfaces trudged past Mutt on their way up to the front. About half of them were grimy veterans like him, the rest fresh-faced kids. Some of the kids looked at the bloodstained bandage on his backside and gulped. That didn’t bother Mutt. He’d done the same thing the first time he saw wounded in France. War wasn’t pretty, and you couldn’t make it pretty.

  What did bother him was that about one rifle-toting trooper in four was black. The Army was segregated, like any decent and proper outfit. Seeing white and colored soldiers together in the same outfit bothered Mutt as much as having white and colored ballplayers on the same team would have.

  Doc didn’t look back, but he didn’t have to be a mind-reader to figure out what Daniels was thinking, either. He said, “When you’re fightin’ to stay free, sometimes you get freer.” Mutt just grunted.

  Doc and Jimmy lugged him into the aid station. His nose wrinkled at the stink of wounds gone bad. “How messed up is this one?” somebody called from farther in.

  “Not too,” Doc answered. “Needs a tetanus shot, if we have any antitoxin, and some stitching. Should be okay, though.”

  “Yeah, there’s antitoxin,” the somebody—a worn, harassed somebody, by his voice—said. “It’s slow right now, so why don’t you sew him up quick before they bring in half a dozen bad ones all at the same time?”