Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Before she could, Sam stepped up behind her and cupped a breast in each hand. She turned her head and smiled at him over her shoulder, but it wasn’t a smile of invitation, even though they had started making love again a couple of weeks before.

  “Do you mind too much if I just lie down for a while?” she said. “By myself, I mean. It’s not that I don’t love you, Sam-it’s just that I’m so tired, I can’t see straight.”

  “Okay, I understand that,” he said, and let go. The soft, warm memory of her flesh remained printed on his palms. He kicked at the linoleum floor, once.

  Barbara quickly pulled her dress up to where it belonged, then turned around and put her hands on his shoulders. “Thank you,” she said. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you, either.”

  “Takes some getting used to, that’s all,” he said. “Being in the middle of the war when we got married didn’t help a whole lot, and then you were expecting right away-” As best they could tell, that had happened on their wedding night. He chuckled. “Of course. If it hadn’t been for the war, we never would have met. What do they say about clouds and silver linings?”

  Barbara hugged him. “I’m very happy with you, and with our baby, and with everything.” She corrected herself, yawning: “With almost everything. I could do with a lot more sleep.”

  “I’m happy with just about everything, too,” he said, his arms tightening around her back. As he’d said. If it hadn’t been for the war, they wouldn’t have met. If they had met, she wouldn’t have looked at him; she’d been married to a nuclear physicist in Chicago. But Jens Larssen had been away from the Met Lab project, away for so long they’d both figured he was dead, and they’d become first friends, then lovers, and finally husband and wife. And then Barbara had got pregnant-and then they’d found out Jens was alive after all.

  Sam squeezed Barbara one more time, then let her go and walked over to the side of the crib to look down at their sleeping son. He reached out a hand and ruffled Jonathan’s fine, thin head of almost snow-white hair.

  “That’s sweet,” Barbara said.

  “He’s a pretty good little guy,” Yeager answered.And if you hadn’t been carrying him, odds are ten bucks against a wooden nickel you’d have dropped me and gone back to Larssen. He smiled at the baby.Kid, I owe you a big one for that. One of these days, I’ll see if I can figure out how to pay you back.

  Barbara kissed him on the lips, a brief, friendly peck, and then walked over to the bed. “Iam going to get some rest,” she said.

  “Okay.” Sam headed for the door. “I guess I’ll find me some Lizards and chin with them for a while. Do me some good now, and maybe even after the war, too. If there ever is an ‘after the war.’ Whatever happens, people and Lizards are going to have to deal with each other from here on out. The more I know, the better off I’ll be.”

  “I think you’ll be just fine any which way,” Barbara answered as she lay down. “Why don’t you come back in an hour or so? If Jonathan’s still asleep, who knows what might happen?”

  “We’ll find out.” Yeager opened the door, then glanced back at his son. “Sleep tight, kiddo.”

  The man who wore earphones glanced over at Vyacheslav Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, we are getting new reports that theYashcheritsi at the base east of Tomsk are showing interest in surrendering to us.” When Molotov didn’t answer, the technician made so bold as to add, “You remember, Comrade: the ones who mutinied against their superiors.”

  “I assure you, Comrade, I am aware of the situation and need no reminding,” Molotov said in a voice colder than Moscow winter-colder than Siberian winter, too. The technician gulped and dipped his head to show he understood. You were lucky to get away with one slip around Molotov; you wouldn’t get away with two. The foreign commissar went on, “Have they any definite terms this time?”

  “Da,Comrade Foreign Commissar.” The fellow at the wireless set looked down at the notes he’d scribbled. His pencil was barely as long as his thumb; everything was at a premium these days. “They want pledges not only of safe conduct but also of good treatment after going over to us.”

  “We can give them those,” Molotov said at once. “I would think even the local military commander would have the wit to see as much for himself.” The local military commander should also have had the wit to see that such pledges could be ignored the instant they became inconvenient.

  On the other hand, it was probably just as well that the local military commander displayed no excessive initiative, but referred his questions back to Moscow and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for answers. Commanders who usurped Party control in one area were only too likely to try to throw it off in others.

  The wireless operator spoke groups of seemingly meaningless letters over the air. Molotov sincerely hoped they were meaningless to the Lizards. “What else do the mutineers want?” he asked.

  “A pledge that under no circumstances will we return them to the Lizards, not even if an end to hostilities is agreed to between the peace-loving workers and peasants of the Soviet Union and the alien imperialist aggressors from whose camp they are trying to defect.”

  “Again, we can agree to this,” Molotov said. It was another promise that could be broken at need, although Molotov did not see the need as being likely to arise. By the time peace between the USSR and the Lizards came along, he guessed the mutineers would be long forgotten. “What else?”

  “They demand our promise to supply them with unlimited amounts of ginger, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the technician replied, again after checking his notes.

  As usual, Molotov’s pale, blunt-featured face revealed nothing of what was in his mind. In their own way, the Lizards were as degenerate as the capitalists and fascists against whom the glorious peasants and workers of the USSR had demonstrated new standards of virtue. Despite their high technology, though, the Lizards were in social terms far more primitive than capitalist societies. They were a bastion of the ancient economic system: they were masters, seeking human beings as slaves-so the dialecticians had decreed. Well, the upper classes of ancient Rome had been degenerates, too.

  And, through degeneracy, the exploiters could be exploited. “We shall certainly make this concession,” Molotov said. “If they want to drug themselves, we will gladly provide them with the means to do so.” He waited for more code groups to go out over the air, then asked again, “What else?”

  “They insist on driving the tanks away from the base themselves, on retaining their personal weapons, and on remaining together as a group,” the wireless operator answered.

  “Theyare gaining in sophistication,” Molotov said. “This I shall have to consider.” After a couple of minutes, he said, “They may drive their vehicles away from their base, but not to one of ours: the local commandant is to point out to them that trust between the two sides has not been fully established. He is to tell them they will be divided into several smaller groups for efficiency of interrogation. He may add that. If they are so divided, we shall let them retain their weapons, otherwise not.”

  “Let me make sure I have that, Comrade, before I transmit it,” the technician said, and repeated back Molotov’s statement. When the foreign commissar nodded, the man sent out the appropriate code groups.

  “Anything more?” Molotov asked. The wireless operator shook his head. Molotov got up and left the room somewhere deep under the Kremlin. The guard outside saluted. Molotov ignored him, as he had not bothered giving the man at the wireless a farewell. Superfluities of any sort were alien to his nature.

  That being so, he did not chortle when he went upstairs. By his face, no one could have guessed whether the Lizard mutineers had agreed to give up or were instead demanding that he present himself for immediate liquidation. But insideFools,he thought.They are fools. No matter that they’d become more sophisticated than before: the Lizards were still naive enough to make even Americans seem worldly by comparison. He’d seen that before, even among their chiefs. They
had no notion of how to play the political games human diplomates took for granted. Their ruling assumption had plainly been that they would need no such talents, that their conquest of Earth would be quick and easy. Now that that hadn’t happened, they were out of their depth.

  Soldiers snapped to attention as he strode through the halls of the Kremlin. Civilian functionaries muted their conversations and gave him respectful nods. He did not acknowledge them. He barely noticed them. Had he failed to receive them, though, he would have made sharp note of that.

  The devil’s cousin or some other malicious wretch had dumped a stack of papers on his desk while he went down to bring himself up to date on the talks with the mutinous Lizards. He had high hopes for those talks. The Soviet Union already had a good many Lizard prisoners of war, and had learned some useful things from them. Once Lizards surrendered, they seemed to place humans in the positions of trust and authority their own superiors had formerly occupied for them.

  And to lay hold of an entire base full of the equipment the alien aggressors from the stars manufactured! Unless Soviet intelligence was badly mistaken, that would be a coup neither the Germans nor the Americans could match. The British had a lot of Lizard gear, but the imperialist creatures had done their best to wreck it after their invasion of England failed.

  The first letter on the pile was from the Social Activities Committee ofKolkhoz 118: so the return address stated, at any rate. But the collective farm not far outside of Moscow was where Igor Kurchatov and his team of nuclear physicists were laboring to fabricate an explosive-metal bomb. They’d made one, out of metal stolen from the Lizards. Isolating more of the metal for themselves was proving as hard as they’d warned Molotov it would-harder than he’d wanted to believe.

  Sure enough, Kurchatov now wrote, “The latest experiment, Comrade Foreign Commissar, was a success less complete than we might have hoped.” Molotov did not need his years of reading between the lines to infer that the experiment had failed. Kurchatov went on, “Certain technical aspects of the situation still present us with difficulties. Outside advice might prove useful.”

  Molotov grunted softly. When Kurchatov asked for outside advice, he didn’t mean help from other Soviet physicists. Every reputable nuclear physicist in the USSR was already working with him. Molotov had put his own neck on the block by reminding Stalin of that; he shuddered to think of the risk he’d taken for therodina, the motherland. What Kurchatov wanted was foreign expertise.

  Humiliating,Molotov thought. The Soviet Union should not have been so backwards. He would never ask the Germans for help. Even if they gave it, he wouldn’t trust what they gave. Stalin was just as well pleased that the Lizards in Poland separated the USSR from Hitler’s madmen, and there Molotov completely agreed with his leader.

  The Americans? Molotov gnawed at his mustache. Maybe, just maybe. They were making their own explosive-metal bombs, just as the Nazis were. And if he could tempt them with some of the prizes the Lizard base near Tomsk would yield…

  He pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper and began to draft a letter.

  “Jesus, God, will you lookit this?” Mutt Daniels exclaimed as he led his platoon through the ruins of what had been Chicago’s North Side. “And all from one bomb, too.”

  “Don’t hardly seem possible, does it, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Herman Muldoon agreed. The kids they were leading didn’t say anything. They just looked around with wide eyes and even wider mouths at their fair share of a few miles’ worth of slagged wreckage.

  “I been on God’s green earth goin’ on sixty years now,” Mutt said, his Mississippi drawl flowing slow and thick as molasses in this miserable Northern winter. “I seen a whole lot o’ things in my time. I fought in two wars now, and I done traveled all over the U.S. of A. But I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this here.”

  “You got that right,” Muldoon said. He was Daniels’ age, near enough, and he’d been around, too. The men alongside them in the ragged skirmish line didn’t have that kind of experience, but they’d never seen anything like this, either. Nobody had, not till the Lizards came.

  Before they came, Daniels had been managing the Decatur Commodores, a Three-I League team. One of his ballplayers had liked reading pulp stories about rocketships and creatures from other planets (he wondered if Sam Yeager was still alive these days). Mutt pulled an image from that kind of story now: the North Side reminded him of the mountains of the moon.

  When he said that out loud, Herman Muldoon nodded. He was tall and thick-shouldered, with a long, tough Irish mug and, at the moment, a chin full of graying stubble. “I heard that about France back in nineteen an’ eighteen, and I thought it was pretty straight then. Goes to show what I knew, don’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Daniels said. He’d seen France, too. “France had more craters’n you could shake a stick at, that’s for damn sure. ‘Tween us and the frogs and the limeys and theBoches, we musta done fired every artillery shell in the world ’bout ten times over. But this here, it’s just the one.”

  You could tell where the bomb had gone off: all the wreckage leaned away from it. If you drew a line from the direction of fallen walls and houses and uprooted trees, then went west a mile or so and did the same thing, the place where those lines met would have been around ground zero.

  There were other ways of working out where that lay, though. Identfliable wreckage was getting thin on the ground now. More and more, it was just lumpy, half-shiny dirt, baked by the heat of the bomb into stuff that was almost like glass.

  It was slippery like glass, too, especially with snow scattered over it. One of Mutt’s men had his feet go out from under him and landed on his can. “Oww!” he said, and then, “Ahh, shit!” As his comrades laughed at him, he tried to get up-and almost fell down again.

  “You want to play those kind o’ games, Kurowski, you get yourself a clown suit, not the one you’re wearin’,” Mutt said.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” Kurowski said in injured tones that had nothing to do with his sore fundament. “It ain’t like I’m doing it on purpose.”

  “Yeah, I know, but you’re still doin’ it.” Mutt gave up ragging him. He recognized the big pile of brick and steel off to the left. It had come through the blast fairly well, and had shielded some of the apartment houses behind it so they weren’t badly damaged at all. But the sight of upright buildings in the midst of the wreckage wasn’t what made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “Ain’t that Wrigley Field?” he whispered. “Gotta be, from where it’s at and what it looks like.”

  He’d never played in Wrigley Field-the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid’s dolly with its head blown off.

  Muldoon’s eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. “Gonna be a long time before the Cubs win another pennant,” he said, as good an epitaph as any for the park-and the city.

  South of Wrigley Field, a big fellow with a sergeant’s stripes and a mean expression gave Daniels a perfunctory salute. “Come on, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’m supposed to get your unit into line here.”

  “Well, then, go on and do it,” Mutt said. Most of his men didn’t have enough experience to wipe their asses after they went and squatted. A lot of them were going to end up casualties because of it. Sometimes all the experience in the world didn’t matter, either. Mutt had scars on his backside from a Lizard bullet-luckily, a through-and-through flesh wound that hadn’t chewed up his hipbone. A couple, three feet up, though, and it would have hit him right in the ear.

  The sergeant led them out of the blast area, down through the Near North Side toward the Chicago River. The big buildings ahead stood empty and battered, as meaningless to what was happening now as so man
y dinosaur bones might have been-unless, of course, they had Lizard snipers in them. “We shoulda pushed ’em farther back,” the sergeant said, spitting in disgust, “but what the hell you gonna do?”

  “Them Lizards, they’re hard to push,” Daniels agreed glumly. He looked around. The big bomb hadn’t leveled this part of Chicago, but any number of small bombs and artillery shells had had their way with it. So had fire and bullets. The ruins gave ideal cover for anybody who felt like picking a line and fighting it out there. “This here’s a lousy part of town for pushin’ ’em, too.”

  “This here’s a lousy part of town, period-sir,” the sergeant said. “All the dagos used to live here till the Lizards ran ’em out-maybe they did somethin’ decent there, you ask me.”

  “Knock off the crap about dagos,” Daniels told him. He had two in his platoon. If the sergeant turned his back on Giordano and Pinelli, he was liable to end up dead.

  Now he sent Mutt an odd glance, as if wondering why he didn’t agree: no pudgy old red-faced guy who talked like a Johnny Reb could be a dago himself, so what was he doing taking their part? But Mutt was a lieutenant, so the sergeant shut up till he got the platoon to its destination: “This here’s Oak and Cleveland, sir. They call it ‘Dead Corner’ on account of the da-the Eyetalian gents got in the habit of murdering each other here during Prohibition. Somehow, there never were any witnesses. Funny how that works, ain’t it?” He saluted and took off.

  The platoon leader Daniels replaced was a skinny blond guy named Rasmussen. He pointed south. “Lizard lines are about four hundred yards down that way, out past Locust. Last couple days, it’s been pretty quiet.”

  “Okay.” Daniels brought field glasses up to his eyes and peered down past Locust. He spotted a couple of Lizards. Things had to be quiet, or they never would have shown themselves. They were about the size of ten-year-olds, with green-brown skin painted in patterns that meant things like rank and specialization badges and service stripes, swively eyes, and a forward-leaning, skittery gait unlike anything ever spawned on Earth.