Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “I know,” Mutt answered gloomily. “That’s the way it works. The ones who live, we’ll make soldiers out of some of ’em.”

  “ ‘S true,” Muldoon said. “ ‘S a fuckin’ waste, but it’s true. The real bitch of it is, some o’ the ones who stop a bullet early would make pretty decent men if they had any luck. Just how you roll the dice.”

  “Yeah,” Mutt said again. He fell silent. He didn’t like thinking about that, though he’d seen it in France and here in Illinois. If chance ruled, if skill played no part on the battlefield, you could die any old time, no matter how good a soldier you’d got to be. Of course you could. He knew that. Knowing it and contemplating it were two different things, though.

  A couple of hundred yards off to the left, back toward Lake Michigan, shooting started up. It was just a spattering of rounds, but Daniels hunkered down without conscious thought. Muldoon said, “Probably some of the rookies coming into the line. They get up here, they think they gotta start shootin’.”

  Mutt nodded. It had been like that in France. His granddad—hell, both his granddads—had said it was like that in the States War. It had probably been like that since the day Alley Oop, Jr., joined up with his dad and chucked a rock at the first dinosaur he saw.

  More noises from the rear. The firing wasn’t spreading, not yet. Daniels risked a peek back over his shoulder. Crawling through the wreckage of what had been a quiet North Side residential neighborhood came six or eight—they weren’t dogfaces, not yet. Puppyfaces, maybe.

  Those faces were all dirty, but only a couple of the rookies had struck up any serious acquaintance with a razor. To Mutt’s jaundiced eye, they all looked too pale and too skinny. Down in Mississippi, his first guess would have been hookworm. Here, he knew better. He thumped his belly, what was left of it. Nobody’d been eating good, not this whole past year—one more reason to hate the Lizards’ scaly hides.

  Muldoon slid back and took charge of the kids, moving them into the houses to either side of the one Mutt was in. Daniels had the heady feeling of actually being part of a real fighting line again, not just a picket of a band of skirmishers. That quickly went away. The new fish not only wouldn’t know when to shoot and when not to, they wouldn’t shoot worth a damn when they did open up.

  Sure as hell, one of them let loose with a long burst from a tommy gun. Through the racket—and after it abruptly fell silent—Daniels listened to Muldoon raking the kid over the coals: “You go blowin’ it off like that again, you worthless no-brain turd, and the lieutenant’ll chew on your ass, not just me. You don’t ever want that to happen, buddy, believe me you don’t.”

  Mutt snorted rueful laughter as Muldoon came back to him by way of a battered trench (in France in 1918 it hardly would have deserved the name; they’d known how to build trenches then) that ran across what had been a neat urban lawn. When Daniels had been a noncom, he, too, had warned privates about the fearsome wrath of their officers. Now he was one of those officers, awesome and distant as some minor-league god. He hadn’t changed, but when he’d got his gold bar, the way people looked at him had, sure as the dickens.

  The Lizards, worse luck, weren’t asleep at the switch. When somebody shot at them, they shot back. Mutt didn’t know if they really had all the ammo in the world, but they sure as hell acted that way. He threw himself flat; he’d return fire after the storm calmed down. A thump told him Muldoon had gone down on his belly, too. Muldoon knew how things worked.

  A couple of houses away, somebody started screaming for his mother in a high, broken voice. Mutt bit his lip. One of the rookies had just found misfortune, or rather, it had found him. He hoped the kid wasn’t wounded too badly. Any kind of gunshot wound hurt enough and was bloody enough to scare the piss out of you, even if it didn’t set you pushing up daisies.

  He looked out through a hole in the wall and saw a couple of Lizards skittering forward under cover of all the lead they were laying down. He fired in their direction. They dove for cover. He nodded to himself. Some ways, he had more in common with the Lizards these days than he did with raw recruits on his own side.

  A buzzing in the air made him scoot back from that hole. Anything in the air nowadays most likely belonged to the Lizards. When machine guns began to yammer, he congratulated himself on his own good sense and hoped none of the new fish would get killed.

  But the machine-gun bullets, by the sound of them, were slamming into the Lizard position, not his own. He grinned wickedly—the scaly bastards didn’t often screw up like that. The aircraft, whatever it was, passed right overhead. A bomb landed on the Lizards, close enough to batter his ears and make the ground shake under him.

  Even the most cautious man will take a chance every once in a while. Daniels wriggled forward, ever so warily peeked out through the hole in the wall. He burst out laughing, a loud, raucous noise altogether at variance with the racket of combat.

  “What the hell?” Muldoon grunted.

  “You know what just strafed the Lizards, Muldoon?” Daniels held up a solemn hand to show he was telling the truth: “A so-help-me-God Piper Cub with a couple machine guns, one slung under each wing. Got away, too. Flew in maybe ten feet off the rooftops here, or what’s left of ’em, shot up the Lizards, dropped that light bomb, and got the hell out of there.”

  “A Piper Cub, Lieutenant?” Muldoon didn’t sound as if he believed his ears. “Jesus God, we really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

  “I dunno about that,” Mutt answered. “I heard somewheres the Russians been giving the Lizards fits with these little no-account biplanes, fly so low and slow they’re damn near impossible to stop until they’re right on top of you—they can do stuff a regular fighter plane can’t.”

  “Maybe,” Muldoon said dubiously. “I tell you one thing, though, sir: you wouldn’t get me up on one of those little crates, not for all the tea in China. Hell, the Lizards can pick out which eye they’re gonna shoot you through. No, thanks. Not for me, no way, nohow.”

  “Not for me, either,” Daniels admitted. “I ain’t never been on an airplane, an’ it’s too late for me to start now. But this here ain’t exactly a safe line o’ work we done picked ourselves, neither.”

  “Boy, don’t I wish you was wrong.” Muldoon slithered up beside Mutt. “But them Lizards, half the time they ain’t aiming at me in particular. They’re just throwin’ bullets around, and if I happen to stop one, I do. But if you’re up there in an airplane and they’re shooting at you, that’s personal, you know what I mean?”

  “I guess maybe I do,” Mutt said, “but a dogface who stops one of those bullets with his head, he’s just as dead as the Red Baron who got shot down all personal-like.”

  Muldoon didn’t answer. He was looking out through the hole in the wall. Mutt got up on one knee and peered through the window. The strafing run from the Piper Cub had taken the wind right out of the sails of the Lizards’ pounding of his position. That made him think he could maybe do a little pounding of his own.

  “Stay here and give us some coverin’ fire,” he told Muldoon. “I’m gonna see if we can head south for a change, ‘stead o’ north.”

  At Muldoon’s acknowledging nod, Daniels crawled through the trench to the ruins of the house next door. The men who had dug it had broken both gas and water mains, but, since neither had worked for months, that didn’t matter. A soldier he didn’t recognize gave him a hand up out of the trench.

  He pointed southward. “They’re hurting there. Let’s go take us back some houses before they remember which end is up.”

  The young soldiers cheered with an intensity that made him proud and frightened at the same time. They’d do whatever they thought it took, the same way a young outfielder would chase a fly ball right into a fence. Sometimes the fence would be wood, and give a little. Sometimes it would be concrete. Then they’d cart the kid off on a stretcher.

  They’d cart a lot of these kids off on stretchers before the fight was through. Mutt tried not to think about
that. They’d carted him off on a stretcher once already. Now he was back. He hoped he’d stay in there this time.

  “Come on, we can’t waste time here,” he said. He told some men to move forward with him, others to stay back and give covering fire. The ones he told to stay back squawked and pouted like spoiled children deprived of a lollipop. He held up a hand: “Don’t get in a swivet, boys. This here’ll be fire and move. Soon as we find cover up ahead, we’ll hunker down and start shootin’ so you-all can move on up ahead of us. You’ll get your share, I promise.” Your share of shattered skulls and splintered bones and belly wounds. Exploiting such eagerness filled Mutt with guilt. He’d never again feel it himself.

  Yelling like fiends, his men moved forward, some shooting from the hip to add to the Americans’ firepower and make the Lizards keep their heads down. Mutt dove behind the burnt-out hulk of somebody’s old Packard. Sheet metal wouldn’t keep bullets from biting him, not the way a good pile of concrete or dirt would. But if the Lizards couldn’t see him, they wouldn’t send as many bullets toward him.

  A couple of men were down, one twisting, one ominously limp and still. The Lizards weren’t sending out the wall of lead they had before, though. Daniels waved for the troops who had been covering to move forward past and through the detachment that had accompanied him. Those men, in turn, laid down covering fire for their buddies. They did a better job than Mutt had thought they had in them. Maybe he would be able to push the Lizards out of their forward positions.

  One Lizard had other ideas. He’d pop up in a window like a jack-in-the-box, squeeze off a few rounds, and duck back down before anybody could nail him. He was a good shot, too. Somebody brave and stubborn and lucky like that, whether human or twisty-eyed alien critter, could derail an advance.

  Mutt gauged the distance from himself to the house in which the Lizard sheltered: maybe forty yards. The window the Lizard was using wasn’t a very big one, which wasn’t surprising—being a twisty-eyed alien critter didn’t make you stupid. The Lizard let loose with another burst. Off to Mutt’s right, a human voice started screaming.

  He grimaced, shook his head, and took a grenade from his belt. His arm had got him to the majors, even if that was a long time ago—and even if his lousy bat hadn’t let him stay there. Almost without conscious thought, he went into a catcher’s crouch in back of, not the plate, but the trunk of the Packard.

  He yanked the pin out of the grenade, popped up (knocking off his helmet with the back of one wrist, as if it had been a catcher’s mask), and let fly. He went down behind the car before the grenade sailed through the window. It went off with a bang! different from those of the rifles and submachine guns and Lizard automatic weapons all around.

  A GI dashed for that window. The Lizard didn’t pop up to shoot him. The young dogface leaned in (suicidally stupid, had the Lizard been playing possum), and fired a long burst from his tommy gun. “Hell of a peg, Lieutenant!” he yelled. “Little bastard’s raw meat now.” Cheers rang amid the shooting.

  Move and fire, move and fire . . . and then the Lizards were moving and firing, too, in retreat. Mutt ran to a corner of the house where the tough Lizard had holed up, fired at its buddies as they pulled back. For the time being, a block of ruined North Side Chicago was back in American hands.

  By the hideous standards of fighting in the city, that counted for a victory. He owed the kids a mental apology. They’d done great.

  Ttomalss wondered again how any Tosevite ever lived to grow up. The hatchling he was hand-rearing was more than half a year old; it had also had a year and a half of growth inside the female who bore it. It was still helpless. It still had no control over its messy bodily functions; the chamber in which it lived—in which Ttomalss perforce did most of his living, too—smelled unpleasantly of stale Tosevite waste.

  Several times a day, Ttomalss wished he had left the Big Ugly hatchling with the female from whose body it had so disgustingly emerged. She’d fought like a wild thing to keep the little squalling creature. If she had had it all this time, Ttomalss was confident she would have been willing to hand it over to him decorated with whatever the Big Uglies used to signify a gift.

  It was lying on the soft mat where it slept—when it slept. Lately, Ttomalss had had to install wire mesh around the mat, because the hatchling had—finally—developed enough neuromuscular control to roll over. At this stage of their lives, hatchlings of the Race were aggressive little predators: keeping them from hurting themselves and others counted for more than anything else in raising them. The only way the Tosevite could hurt itself would be to roll off a high place and fall down. No hatchling of the Race would have been so foolish.

  The little Big Ugly looked up at Ttomalss out of its dark, narrow eyes. Its elastic face twisted into the grimace Tosevites used to show amiability. It kicked its arms and legs, as if that added to the effect of the facial grimace. Most of the time, it seemed sublimely unaware of its limbs, though it was beginning to suspect it had hands.

  It let out a long sequence of meaningless noises. That still unnerved Ttomalss every time he heard it. Hatchlings of the Race were silent little things, which made sense in evolutionary terms: if you were small and quiet, you were less likely to get eaten than if you were small and raucous.

  Ttomalss said to it, “You are the most preposterous specimen of a preposterous planet.”

  The hatchling made more burbling noises. It liked him to talk to it. Its arms and legs kicked more. Then it started to whimper. He knew what that meant: it wanted to be picked up.

  “Come here,” he said, bending over and lifting it off the mat. Its head didn’t flop around so loosely that it had to be supported, as had been true at the onset. Now it could hold that big, ungainly head up and look around. It liked being held against his warm skin. When its mouth fell onto his shoulder, it started sucking, as if he secreted nutrient fluid. He found the wet, slimy touch most unpleasant. It would suck on anything its mouth could reach; it would even suck when it was asleep.

  “What am I going to do with you?” he asked it, as if it could understand. Males of the Race often embarked on lifetime research projects, but raising a Tosevite up to what passed for adulthood in the species? He’d had something like that in mind when he took the work the job involved. If it kept on being so much work for years to come . . .

  “I’ll fall over dead,” he told the hatchling. It wiggled at the sound of his voice. It was a social little thing. “I’ll fall over dead,” he repeated. It seemed to recognize the repetition, and to like it. It made a noise which, after a moment, he recognized as a hatchling-sized version of the vocalization Big Uglies used for laughter.

  “I’ll fall over dead,” he said, again and again. The hatchling found that funnier and funnier for several repetitions, laughing and squealing and kicking its feet against his chest. Then, for whatever reason, the joke wore thin. The hatchling started to fuss.

  He gave it a bottle of nutrient fluid, and it gulped avidly. He knew what that meant: it was sucking in air along with liquid. When it did that, the air had to be got out of the hatchling’s stomach; it commonly returned along with slightly digested fluid, which stank even worse than the stuff that came out the other end.

  He was glad the hatchling seemed healthy, such revolting characteristics aside. The Race’s knowledge of Tosevite biochemistry and pathogens still left a great deal to be desired, while the Big Uglies were as ignorant about that as they were about everything else save military hardware. Some of their not-empires knew how to immunize against some of their common diseases, and had begun to get the idea that there might be such things as antibiotics. Past that, their knowledge stopped.

  Ttomalss wondered if he should give the hatchling such immunizations as the Big Uglies had developed. The little Tosevite would eventually encounter others of its own kind. The Big Uglies had a concept called “childhood diseases”: illnesses that were mild if a hatchling contracted them but could be serious if caught in adulthood. The notion
made Ttomalss, who had never suffered from any such misfortunes, queasy, but research showed the Race had shared it in the earliest days of recorded history.

  The hatchling started to wail. Ttomalss had heard that particular cry many times before, and knew it meant genuine distress. He knew what kind of distress, too: the air it had sucked in was distending its stomach. He resignedly picked up one of the cloths used for containing bodily wastes and draped it over his shoulder.

  “Come on, get the air out,” he told the hatchling as he patted its back. It twisted and writhed, desperately unhappy at what it had done to itself. Not for the first time, the Big Uglies’ feeding arrangements for their young struck him as being inefficient as well as revolting.

  The hatchling made a noise astonishingly loud and deep for something its size. It stopped thrashing, a sign its distress was eased. The sour odor that reached Ttomalss’ chemoreceptors said it had indeed spit up some of the nutrient fluid he’d given it. He was glad he’d draped himself with the cloth; not only did the fluid smell bad, it also dissolved his body paint.

  He was about to lay the hatchling back on the mat when it made another noise with which he was intimately familiar: a throaty grunt. He felt sudden warmth against the arm under the hatchling’s hindquarters. With a weary, hissing sigh, he carried it over to the cabinet, undid the fastenings that held the cloth round the hatchling’s middle closed, and tossed that cloth into a sealed bin along with several others he’d put there that day.

  Before he could put another cloth under the hatchling, it dribbled out a fair quantity of liquid waste to accompany the solid (or at least semisolid) waste it had just passed. He mopped that off the hatchling and off the cabinet top, reminding himself to disinfect the latter. While he was cleaning up, the hatchling almost rolled off the cabinet.

  He caught it with a desperate lunge. “You are the most troublesome thing!” he exclaimed. The hatchling squealed and made Tosevite laughing noises. It thought his displays of temper were very funny.