Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Daniels said. Every other house in Chicago—some parts of town, every single house—was wrecked. Places where fire hadn’t done the job for you, you could burn a lot of wood staying warm.

  The neighborhood in which the platoon was presently encamped was one of those areas where next to nothing was left upright. Since winter arrived, the Americans had pushed their front south a couple of miles. The Lizards weren’t grinding forward any more; they were letting humanity come to them. The price was ghastly. One thing the cold weather did do: it kept the stink of rotting flesh from becoming intolerable instead of just bad.

  Fighting back and forth across the same stretch of ground also produced a landscape whose like Mutt—and Muldoon, too—had seen over in France in 1918. Not even an earthquake shattered a town the way endless artillery barrages did. In France, though, once you got out of a town, you were back in the country again. Chewed-up countryside was pretty bad, too, but it didn’t have quite the haunted feel of stretches where people used to be crowded together. And Chicago wasn’t anything but stretches where people had been packed close together.

  “One thing,” Mutt said: “I don’t believe in ghosts no more.” He waited for a couple of people to wonder why out loud, then said, “If there was such a thing as ghosts, they’d be screamin’ to beat the band at what we done to Chicago and done to their graveyards in partic’lar. I ain’t seen none o’ that, so I reckon ghosts ain’t real.”

  Off to the rear, American artillery opened up. Mutt listened to the shells whistling by overhead. That was a reassuring noise, nothing like the roaring screech they made when they were coming straight at you. They landed a couple of miles south of the house in whose wreckage he was squatting. The explosions sounded flat and harsh, not so big as they might have been. Mutt grimaced. He knew the why of that.

  So did Muldoon. “Gas,” he said, as if tasting something sour.

  “Yeah.” It was one of the big reasons the Lizards had stopped advancing in Chicago, but that didn’t mean Daniels liked it. Nobody who’d ever been on the receiving end of a gas bombardment liked the idea of gas. “All the hell we let loose on this city our own selves, us and the Lizards, I mean, maybe it’s no wonder we ain’t seen any ghosts. By now, I reckon they’re liable to be more scared of us than we are of them.” He scratched his head. “What the dickens was the Irving Berlin song from the last war? ‘Stay Down Here Where You Belong,’ that’s it—the one where the devil tells his son not to go up to earth on account of it was worse there than it was down in hell. Maybe the devil knew what he was talkin’ about.”

  “Maybe he did.” Muldoon nodded. “Thing of it is, though, it’s either do what we gotta do or else have the Lizards do somethin’ worse.”

  “Yeah,” Daniels said again. “An’ that reminds me—I’m gonna go up and check on the sentries, just to make sure the Lizards ain’t doin’ somethin’ worse right here.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Muldoon said. “I sorta got fond of living, all that time between the wars—I’d like to keep on doin’ it a while longer now. But you wanna watch yourself, Lieutenant. The Lizards, they can see like cats in the dark.”

  “I seen that already,” Mutt agreed. “Dunno whether it’s their eyes or the gadgets they got. Don’t reckon that matters anyway. They sure can do it, and that’s what counts.”

  Most officers just used .45s. Mutt had been a noncom and a dog-face too long to trust his neck to anything less than the best weapon he could carry. If that meant he had to lug around the extra weight of a tommy gun, he was willing to put up with it.

  He paused a while outside the mined house where his men were sheltering, so his eyes could adapt to the dark all around. He didn’t see like a cat, and he didn’t have any gadgets to help him do it, either. No moon in the sky and, even had there been, the cloud cover would have kept him from seeing it The only light came from the fires that turned parts of the skyline orange. Chicago was so big, it never seemed to run out of things that would burn.

  The Lizards’ lines lay about half a mile to the south of the positions the Americans were holding. Between them were both sides’ sentry posts, along with American barbed wire and Lizard razor wire coiling through the ruins of what had been middle-class homes not long before. Those ruins made the no-man’s-land an even more dangerous place than it had been in France back in 1918. They gave snipers wonderful cover.

  As if the blamed war isn’t bad enough, what with the gas and the tanks and the shells and the planes and the machine guns and all that other shit, Mutt thought. But no, you gotta worry about some damn sniper puttin’ a bullet through your head while your damn underpants are down around your ankles so you can take a dump. Some things didn’t change. One of his grandfathers had fought in the Army of Northern Virginia during the States War, and he’d complained about snipers, too.

  Going out to the sentry positions, Mutt used a route he’d worked out that kept him behind walls most of the way: he didn’t believe in making a sniper’s job any easier. He had three or four different ways to get from the main line to the pickets in front of it, and he didn’t use any one of them more than twice running. He made sure the sentries took the same precautions. His platoon hadn’t had a man shot going up to sentry duty in weeks. A low but threatening whisper: “Who’s that?”

  Daniels answered with the password: “Cap Anson. How they hangin’, Jacobs?”

  “That you, Lieutenant?” The sentry let out a low-voiced chuckle. “You give us those baseball names for recognition signals, why don’t you make ’em people like DiMaggio or Foxx or Mel Ott that we’ve heard of, not some old guy who played way back when?”

  Mutt remembered hearing about Cap Anson when he was a kid. Was that way back when? Well, now that you mentioned it, yes. He said, “The Lizards’ll know about today’s players. They might fool you.”

  “Sure, okay, yeah, but we can forget the old guys,” Jacobs said. “Then we’re liable to end up shooting at each other.”

  Did I talk back to my officers in France like that? Mutt wondered. Thinking back on it, he probably had talked back like that. American soldiers were a mouthy lot, no two ways about it. That had been true for a long time, too, and even more so a long time ago. Some of the things his granddads said they’d called the officers over them would curl your hair.

  He sighed and said, “Sonny, if you don’t want your buddies shootin’ at you, you better remember, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure, Lieutenant, but—” Jacobs quit bitching and stared out into the darkness. “What was that?”

  “I didn’t hear nothin’,” Daniels said. But his voice came out as the barest thread of whisper. His ears were old-timers, and knew it. Jacobs couldn’t be a day over nineteen. He had more balls than brains, but he could hear. Mutt made sure he was under cover. Jacobs pointed at the direction from which the sound had come. Mutt didn’t see anything, but that didn’t signify.

  He picked up a fist-sized lump of plaster, hefted it in his hand. “Be ready, kid,” he breathed. Jacobs, for a wonder, didn’t say For what? He just took a firmer grip on his rifle and nodded.

  Mutt tossed the plaster underhand through the air. It came down maybe thirty feet to one side, clattering off what sounded like a brick chimney. Out in no-man’s-land, a Lizard cut loose with his automatic rifle, squeezing off a burst whose bullets whined through the area where the plaster had landed.

  Jacobs and Daniels both fired at the muzzle flashes from the Lizard’s weapon. “Did we get him?” Jacobs demanded, shoving a fresh clip into his Springfield.

  “Damnfino,” Mutt answered. His ears were still ringing from the racket the tommy gun made. “It ain’t always—how do you say it?—cut and dried like that. Next thing we gotta do is, we gotta find you a new position. We just told ’em where this one’s at.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant,” Jacobs said. “I hadn’t thought of that myself, but it makes sense now that you’ve said it.”

  Daniels sighed, a long, sile
nt exhalation. But he was used to thinking strategically, and a lot of people weren’t. “We gotta be careful,” he whispered. “If we didn’t get that son of a bitch of a Lizard, he’ll be out there waitin’ to nail us. Now if I remember straight, there was a house over that way”—he pointed west with his right hand—“maybe a hundred yards that’d fill the bill. Lemme go check it out. That Lizard starts shootin’ at me, keep him busy.”

  “Sure, okay, yeah, Lieutenant,” Jacobs said. Throwing those words into varying combinations seemed to be his sport for the evening.

  Down on his belly like a reptile, Mutt slithered through rubble toward the house he had in mind. Part of its second story was still standing, which made it damn near unique around these parts—and made it a good observation point, too, at least till the Lizards figured out somebody was up in it. Then they were liable to expend a rocket or a bomb just to knock down the place.

  Something skittered by, a few feet in front of Mutt. He froze. It wasn’t a Lizard; it was a rat. That much he saw. His imagination filled in the rest—a fat, happy rat like the ones he’d seen in the trenches of France, with a diet it was better not to think about.

  He made it to the house he had in mind without getting shot at, which he took as a sign, if not a sure one, that he and Jacobs had hit the Lizard would-be infiltrator. The house seemed all right. The stairway wobbled a little when you went up it, but considering that half the second floor wasn’t there, he didn’t suppose you could expect miracles. And you could see a long way from the second-story window.

  He returned to the current sentry post and told Jacobs, “Everything’s okay. Come on with me and I’ll show you where I’m moving you.” Once he’d installed the sentry in his new position, he said, “I’ll go back and give your replacement word about where you’ll be.”

  “Yeah, okay, Lieutenant,” Jacobs said.

  When Mutt had almost made it back for the second time to the ruins where Jacobs had been, stationed, the Lizard out there in no-man’s-land fired at him. He dug his face into the dirt as bullets cracked all around him and ricocheted with malignant whines from stones and chunks of concrete.

  “Sneaky little bastard, ain’t you?” he muttered, and squeezed off a burst of his own, just to let the Lizard know he was still among those present. The Lizard shot back. They traded fire for a few minutes in a surprisingly sporting way, then gave up. Mutt went back to his lines; he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if the Lizard did the same thing.

  Go on ahead, Lizard, he thought. You had your at-bats this summer. Now that cold weather’s here, we’ll throw your scaly ass right out of Chicago. Just wait and see if we don’t.

  The Tosevite hatchling rolled over on the floor of the laboratory chamber that had been its home since Ttomalss had taken charge of it. After a little while, it rolled over again, and then again. All three rolls were in the same direction. Ttomalss thought the hatchling was beginning to get the idea of going some particular way.

  Any sign of neuromuscular progress in the little creature interested him, since all such signs were few and far between. By the standards of the Race, Hatchling Tosevites had no business surviving to grow up to become the Big Uglies who had proved such complete nuisances ever since the conquest fleet arrived. Were they to be separated from those who cared for them for the first years of their lives, they could not survive. The Race had many stories of feral hatchlings who came from untended clutches of eggs and survived to adulthood, most of them well-authenticated. Among the Tosevites, such tales were vanishingly rare, and even when told often had more of the feel of legend than fact.

  Something crinkled—the little female had got its hands on a crumpled-up piece of cellophane that had fallen unnoticed off some work surface. Ttomalss bent quickly and got the cellophane out of the Tosevite’s mouth.

  “That is not edible,” he said in what he hoped was a severe voice.

  The hatchling laughed at him. Anything it could reach went into its mouth. You had to watch it every waking moment. A miracle all the Big Uglies didn’t poison themselves or choke on things they swallow, Ttomalss thought. He picked up the hatchling. It had soiled itself again.

  With a hissing sigh, he carried it over to the table where he kept the waste-absorbing (or at least partially absorbing) cloths. It babbled cheerfully all the while. Some of the babbles were beginning to sound as if they were emulating the hisses and clicks that made up a good part of the Race’s language. Those were nothing like the sounds it would have been hearing had it stayed among the Big Uglies. Its linguistic talents, he suspected, would prove very adaptable.

  After he had cleaned it, it gave the whining cry that meant it was hungry. He let it suck from the bottle, then walked back and forth with it as it fought a losing battle against sleep. At last, with a sigh of relief, he set it down on the pad where it rested.

  “The Emperor be praised,” he said softly when the hatching did not wake up. Since he’d taken it up here, he measured the time that was his own by the spaces during which it slept. Even when he left the laboratory, he always wore a monitor attached to his belt. If the Big Ugly started to squawk, he had to hurry back and calm it. He hadn’t been able to trust any other males to do the job properly; no one else had his unique and hard-won expertise.

  No sooner had he taken a couple of steps away from the pad on which the hatchling lay than another psychologist, a male named Tessrek, tapped with his fingerclaws on the doorjamb to the chamber to show he wanted to come in. When Ttomalss waved that he could enter, he said, “How is the little Tosevite treating you today, Mother?” His mouth dropped open in amusement at the joke.

  Ttomalss did not think it was funny. By now, he’d heard it from a lot of his colleagues. Most, like Tessrek, borrowed the word mother from the Tosevite language with which they were most familiar. That seemed to make it doubly amusing for them: they could imply not just that Ttomalss was an egg-laying male, but one who’d hatched out a Big Ugly.

  He said, “The creature is doing very well, thank you. It’s definitely been displaying increased mobility and a greater sense of purpose lately.” It still couldn’t come close to matching what a hatchling of the Race was able to do the moment the eggshell cracked, and he’d been thinking disparaging thoughts about it only moments before. But mocking the Big Ugly hatchling was mocking his chosen research topic, and that he would defend as fiercely as he had to.

  Tessrek’s mouth opened in a different way: to show distaste. “It certainly is an odiferous little thing, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Have you any other pleasantries to add?” Ttomalss asked, his tone frigid. He and Tessrek were of identical rank, which complicated matters: as neither owed the other formal deference, they had no social lubricant to camouflage their mutual dislike. Ttomalss went on, “My scent receptors do not record the odor to any great degree. Perhaps I have grown used to it.” That was at best a quarter-truth, but he would not let Tessrek know it.

  “That must be because you have spent so much time with the creature,” Tessrek said. “Continual exposure has dulled your chemoreceptors—or perhaps burned them out altogether.”

  “Possibly so,” Ttomalss said. “I have been thinking I spend an inordinate amount of time here with the hatchling. I really do need someone to relieve me of creature-tending duties every so often, not least so I can pass on some of the data I have gathered.” He swung both eye turrets toward Tessrek. “As a matter of fact, you might make an excellent choice for the role.”

  “Me?” Tessrek recoiled in alarm. “What makes you say that? You must be daft to think so.”

  “By no means, colleague of mine. After all, did you not study the Tosevite male Bobby Fiore, whose matings with the Tosevite female brought into our spacecraft for research purposes led to her producing the hatchling here? You have a—what is the term the Big Uglies use?—a family attachment, that’s it.”

  “I have no attachment at all to that ugly little thing,” Tessrek said angrily. “It is your problem and your res
ponsibility. At need, I shall state as much to superior authority. Farewell.” He hurried out of the laboratory chamber.

  Behind him, Ttomalss’ mouth opened wide. Sometimes jokes had teeth, as he’d shown Tessrek. He’d put forward his suggestion in an effort to make the other psychologist’s skin itch right down under the scales where you couldn’t scratch. But, now that he thought about it, it struck him as a pretty good idea. He could use help with the Tosevite hatchling, and Tessrek was the logical male to give it to him.

  Still laughing, he picked up the telephone and called the office of the seniormost psychologist.

  17

  Sam Yeager paced back and forth in the Army and Navy General Hospital waiting room. He wondered how much experience the doctors had with delivering babies. Soldiers and sailors being of the male persuasion, they weren’t likely to end up in a family way themselves. How often had the medical staff here helped their wives? Lots and lots, he devoutly hoped.

  From the delivery room beyond the swinging doors came a muffled shriek. It made him clench his fists till nails bit into flesh, bite his lip till he tasted blood. That was Barbara in there, straining with all her might to bring their child into the world. Part of him wished he could be in there with her, holding her hand and reassuring her everything was all right (Please, God, let everything be all right!) Another part of him was grimly certain he’d either lose his lunch or pass out if he watched what she was going through.

  He paced harder, wishing he had a cigarette to calm him and to give him something to do with his hands. He’d actually smoked a couple of pipefuls up in southern Missouri; they grew tobacco around there. But when word came that Barbara was going to pop any day now, he’d hurried back to Hot Springs fast as horseflesh would carry him. Robert Goddard had been good about letting him go; he owed his boss one for that.

  Barbara shrieked again, louder. Sam’s guts churned. For a man to have to listen to his wife in agony just wasn’t right. But the only other things that came to mind were charging into the delivery room, which he couldn’t do, and sneaking off somewhere like a yellow dog and holing up with a bottle of booze, which he couldn’t do, either. He just had to stay here and take it. Some ways, going into combat had been easier. Then, at least, the danger had been his personally, and he’d had some small control over it. Now he couldn’t do anything but pace.