That evening, they stopped at a farmhouse by a pond. Ludmila didn’t wonder how they’d found that particular house. Not only was it on the water, the Germans must have used it for target practice, for it was ringed by old, overgrown bomb craters, some of them, the deeper ones, on the way to becoming ponds themselves as groundwater seeped up into them.
No one asked or gave names there. Ludmila understood that; what you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell. The middle-aged couple who worked the farm with their swarm of children put her in mind ofkulaks, the prosperous peasants who in the Soviet Union had resisted giving up their property to join the glorious egalitarian collective farm movement, and so had disappeared off the face of the earth when she was still a girl. Poland had not seen the same leveling.
The wife of the couple, a plump, pleasant woman who wore on her head a bright kerchief like a Russianbabushka, cooked up a great pot of what she calledbarszcz: beet soup with sour cream, which, except for the caraway seeds stirred into it for flavor, might have come from a Russian kitchen. Along with it she served boiled cabbage, potatoes, and a spicy homemade sausage Ludmila found delicious but Avram wouldn’t touch. “Jew,” the woman muttered to her husband when Avram was out of earshot. They helped the partisans; that didn’t mean they loved all of them.
After supper, Avram and Wladeslaw went out to sleep in the barn. Ludmila got the sofa in the parlor, an honor she wouldn’t have been sorry to decline, as it was short and narrow and lumpy. She tossed and turned and almost fell off a couple of times in the course of an uncomfortable evening.
Toward sunset the next day, they crossed the Pilica River, a tributary of the Vistula, over a rebuilt wooden bridge and came into Warka. Wladeslaw waxed enthusiastic: “They make the best beer in Poland here.” Sure enough, the air held the nutty tang of malt and hops. The Pole added, “Pulaski was born in Warka.”
“And who is Pulaski?” Ludmila asked.
Wladeslaw let out a long, resigned sigh. “They don’t teach you much in those Bolshevik schools, do they?” As she bristled, he went on, “He was a Polish nobleman who tried to keep the Prussians and the Austrians and you Russians from carving up our country. He failed.” He sighed again. “We have a way of failing at such things. Then he went to America and helped the United States fight England. He got killed there, poor fellow. He was still a young man.”
Ludmila had been on the point of calling-or at least thinking of-Pulaski as a reactionary holdover of the corrupt Polish feudal regime. But helping the revolutionary movement in the United States had surely been a progressive act. The curious combination left her without an intellectual slot in which to pigeonhole Pulaski, an unsettling feeling. This was the second time she’d left the confines of the USSR. On each trip, her view of the world had shown itself to be imperfectly adequate.
No doubt a Talmudic perspective would be even worse,she thought.
She consciously noticed what she’d been hearing for a while: a low, distant rumble off to the north and west. “That can’t be thunder!” she exclaimed. The day was fine and bright and sunny, with only a few puffy white clouds drifting slowly across the sky from west to east.
“Thunder of a sort,” Avram answered, “but only of a sort. That’s Lizard artillery going after the Nazis, or maybe German artillery going after the Lizards. It’s not going to be easy any more, getting where we’re going.”
“One thing I’ve learned,” Ludmila said, “is that it’s never easy, getting where you’re going.”
Avram plucked at his beard. “If you know that much, maybe those Bolshevik schools aren’t so bad after all.”
“Okay, listen up, people, because this is what we’re going to do,” Rance Auerbach said in the cool darkness of Colorado night “Right now we’re somewhere between Karval and Punkin Center.” A couple of the cavalry troopers gathered round him chuckled softly. He did, too. “Yeah, they’ve got some great names for places ’round these parts. Before the sunset, scouts spotted Lizard outposts north and west of Karval. What we want to do is make ’em think there’s a whole hell of a lot more than us between them and Punkin Center. We do that, we slow down this part of their drive on Denver, and that’s the idea.”
“Yeah, but Captain Auerbach, thereain’t nothin’ but us between them and Punkin Center,” Rachel Hines said. She looked around in the darkness at the shapes of their companions. “There ain’t that much left of us, neither.”
“You know that, and I know that,” Auerbach said. “As long as the Lizards don’t know it, everything’s swell.”
His company-or the survivors thereof, plus the ragtag and bobtail of other broken units who’d hooked up with them-laughed some more. So did he, to keep up morale. It wasn’t really funny. When the Lizards wanted to put on a blitzkrieg, they put one on that made the Nazis look like pikers. Since they started by pasting Lamar from the air, they’d ripped damn near halfway across Colorado, knocking out of their path everything that might have given them trouble. Auerbach was damned if he knew how anything could stop them before they hit the works outside of Denver. He’d got orders to try, though, and so he would.
Very likely, he’d die trying. Well, that was part of the job.
Lieutenant Bill Magruder said, “Remember, boys and girls, the Lizards have gadgets that let ’em see in the dark like cats wish they could. You want to keep under cover, use the fire from one group so they’ll reveal their position and another group can attack ’em from a different direction. They don’t play fair. They don’t come close to playing fair. If we’re going to beat ’em, we have to play dirty, too.”
The cavalry wasn’t going to beat ’em any which way. Auerbach knew that. Any of his troopers who didn’t know it were fools. As hit-and-run raiders, though, they still might accomplish something useful.
“Let’s mount up,” he said, and headed for his own horse.
The rest of the company was dim shadows, jangling harness, the occasional cough from a man or snort from an animal. He didn’t know this territory well, and worried about blundering into the Lizard pickets before he knew they were there. If that happened, he was liable to get his whole command chewed up without doing the cause a lick of good or the Lizards any harm.
But a couple of the men who rode along were farmers from these parts. They weren’t in uniform. Had they been going up against a human foe, that could have got them shot if they were captured. The Lizards didn’t draw those distinctions, though. And the farmers, in bib overalls, knew the country as intimately as they knew their wives’ bodies.
One of them, a fellow named Andy Osborne, said, “We split here.” Auerbach took it on faith that he knew wherehere was. Some of the company rode off under Magruder’s command. Auerbach-and Osborne-took the rest closer to Karval. After a while, Osborne said, “If we don’t dismount now, they’re liable to spot us.”
“Horseholders,” Auerbach said. He chose them by lot before every raid. Nobody admitted to wanting the job, which held you out of the fighting while your comrades were mixing it up with Lizards. But it kept you safe, too-well, safer, anyhow-so you might crave it without having the nerve to say so out loud. Picking holders at random seemed the only fair way.
“We got a couple o’ little ravines here,” Osborne said, “and if we’re lucky, we can sneak right on past the Lizards without them ever knowin’ we’re around till we open up. We manage that, we can hit Karval pretty damn hard.”
“Yeah,” somebody said, an eager whisper in the night. They had a mortar, a. 50 caliber machine gun, and a couple of bazooka launchers with plenty of the little rockets they shot. Trying to kill Lizard tanks in the darkness was a bad-odds game, but one of the things they’d found out was that bazookas did a hell of a job of smashing up buildings, which weren’t armored and didn’t travel over the landscape on their own. Get close enough to a Lizard bivouac and who could say what you might do?
The mortar crew slipped off on their own, a couple of troopers with tommy guns along to give them fire support. They didn’t ha
ve to get as close to Karval as the machine gunners and the bazooka boys did.
Auerbach slapped Osborne on the shoulder to signal him to guide them down the ravine that came closest to the little town. Along with the crews who served their fancy weapons, he and the rest of the men crouched low as they hustled along.
Off to the north somewhere, small-arms fire wentpop-pop-pop. It sounded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July, and the flares that lit up the night sky could have been fireworks, too. But fireworks commonly brought cheers, not the muffled curses that came from the troopers. “Spotted ’em too soon,” somebody said.
“And they’ll be lookin’ extra hard for us, too,” Rachel Hines added with gloomy certainty.
As if to underscore her words, a flare mounted skyward from the low hilltop where the Lizard pickets were posted. “That’s a good sign, not a bad one,” Auerbach said. “They can’t spy us with their funny gadgets, so they’re trying out the old Mark One eyeball.” He hoped he was right.
The troopers scuttled along down Osborne’s wash. The flare fell, faded, died. In the north, a mortar opened up. That half of the company wasn’t as close to Karval as it should have been, but it was doing what it could.Crump! Crump! If the bombs weren’t landing in the little flyspeck of a town, they weren’t missing by much, either.
Then Auerbach heard motor vehicles moving around inside Karval. His mouth went dry. Expecting to find the Lizards asleep at the switch didn’t always pay off.
“This here’s the end of the wash,” Andy Osborne announced in a tone like doom.
Now Auerbach wished he’d laid Penny Summers when he had the chance. All his scruples had done was to give him fewer happy memories to hold fear at bay. He didn’t even know what had happened to Penny. She’d been helping the wounded last he’d seen her, a day or so before a Lizard armored column smashed Lamar to bits. They’d evacuated the injured as best they could with horse-drawn ambulances-his States War ancestors would have sympathized with that ordeal. Penny was supposed to have gone out with them. He hoped she had, but he didn’t know for sure.
“Okay, boys,” he said out loud. “Mortar crew went off to the left. Machine gun to the right and forward. Bazookas straight ahead. Good luck to everybody.”
He went forward with the two bazooka crews. They’d need all the fire support they could get, and the M-l on his back had more range than a tommy gun.
The Lizard pickets behind them started firing. Troopers who’d stayed back with the mortar crew engaged the Lizards. Then another Lizard machine gun chattered, this one almost in Auerbach’s face. He hadn’t noticed the armored personnel carrier till it was nearly on top of him; Lizard engines were a lot quieter than the ones people built. He stretched himself flat in the dirt as bullets spattered dust and pebbles all around.
But that machine gun gave away the position of the vehicle on which it was mounted. One of the bazooka crew let fly at it. The rocket left the launcher with a roar like a lion. It trailed yellow fire as it shot toward the personnel carrier.
“Get the hell out of there!” Auerbach yelled at the two-man crew. If they missed, the enemy would just have to trace the bazooka’s line of flight to know where they were.
They didn’t miss. A Lizard tank’s frontal armor laughed at the shaped-charge head of a bazooka round, but not an armored personnel carrier. Flame spurted from the stricken vehicle, lighting it up. Troopers with small arms opened up on it, potting the Lizard crew as they popped out of the escape hatches. A moment later, the deep stutter of the. 50 caliber machine gun added itself to the nighttime cacophony.
“Keep moving! Come on, forward!” Auerbach screamed. “We gotta hit ’em inside Karval!” Behind him, his mortar crew started lobbing bombs at the hamlet. He was rooting for one of them to start a fire to illuminate the area. Lots of the Lizards were shooting back now, and they had a much better idea where his men were than the other way around. A nice cheery blaze would help level the playing field.
As if it were Christmas, he got his wish. A clapboard false front in Karval went up in yellow flames. By the way it burned, it had been standing and curing for a long time. Flames leaped to other false fronts along what had probably been the pint-sized main drag. Their lurid, buttery light revealed skittering Lizards like demons in hell.
From more than a mile outside of town, the heavy machine gun started blazing away at the targets the light showed. You couldn’t count on any one bullet hitting any one target at a range like that, but when you threw a lot of bullets at a lot of targets, you had to score some hits. And, when a. 50 caliber armor-piercing bullet hit a target of mere flesh and blood, that target (a nice bloodless word for a creature that thought and hurt like you) went down and stayed down.
Auerbach whooped like a red Indian when another Lizard armored personnel carrier brewed up. Then both bazooka crews started firing rockets almost at random into Karval. More fires sprouted. “Mission accomplished!” he shouted, though nobody could hear him, not even himself. The Lizards had to figure they were getting hit by something like an armored brigade, not a raggedy cavalry company.
The hammering of the guns hid the noise of the approaching helicopters till it was too late. The first warning of them Auerbach had was when they salvoed rockets at the bazooka crews. It seemed the Fourth of July all over again, but this time the fireworks were going the wrong way-from air to ground. That tortured ground seemed to erupt in miniature volcanoes.
Blast grabbed Auerbach, picked him up, and slammed him down again. Something wet ran into his mouth-blood from his nose, he discovered from the taste of iron and salt. He wondered if his ears were bleeding, too. If he’d been a little closer to one of those rockets-or maybe if he’d been inhaling instead of exhaling-he might have had his lungs torn to bits inside him.
He staggered to his feet and shook his head like a stunned prizefighter, trying to make his wits work. The bazookas weren’t in operation any more. The. 50 caliber machine gun turned its attention to the helicopters; its like flew in Army Air Force planes. He’d heard of machine guns bagging helicopters. But the helicopters could shoot back, too. He watched their tracers walk forward and over the machine-gun position. It fell silent.
“Retreat!” Auerbach yelled, for anyone who could hear. He looked around for his radioman. There was the fellow, not far away-dead, with the radio on his back blown to smithereens. Well, anybody who didn’t have the sense to retreat when he was getting hit and couldn’t hit back probably didn’t deserve to live, anyhow.
He wondered where Andy Osborne was. The local could probably guide him back to the ravine-although. If helicopters started hitting you from above while you were in there, it would be a death trap, not a road to safety. A couple of the Lizard outposts were still firing, too. There weren’t any roads to safety, not any more.
A shape in the night-He swung his Garand toward it before he realized it was a human being. He waved toward the northwest, showing it was time to head for home. The trooper nodded and said, “Yes, sir-we’ve got to get out of here.” As if from a great distance, he heard Rachel Hines’ voice.
Steering by the stars, they trotted in the right direction, more or less, though he wondered how they were going to find the horses some of the troopers were holding. Then he wondered if it would matter: those helicopters would chew the animals to dog food if they got there first.
They were heading that way, too, when the heavy machine gun started up behind them. With the crew surely dead, a couple of other men must have found it and started serving it. They had to have scored some hits on the helicopters, too, for the Lizard machines abandoned their course and swung back toward the. 50 caliber gun.
The makeshift crew played it smart: as soon as the helicopters got close, they stopped firing at them.No sense running up a SHOOT ME RIGHT HERE sign, Auerbach thought as he stumbled on through the darkness. The Lizard helicopters raked the area where the machine gun hid, then started to leave. As soon as they did, the troopers opened up on them again.
> They returned for another pass. Again, when they paused, the gunners on the ground showed they weren’t done yet. One of the helicopters sounded ragged. He dared hope the armor-piercing ammunition had done it some harm. But it stayed in the air. When the helicopters finished chewing up the landscape this time, the machine gun didn’t start up.
“Son of a bitch!” Rachel Hines said disgustedly. She swore like a trooper; half the time, she didn’t notice she was doing it. Then she said, “Son of a bitch,” in an altogether different tone of voice. The two hunting helicopters were swinging toward her and Auerbach.
He wanted to hide, but where could you hide from flying death that saw in the night?Nowhere, he thought, and threw his M-1 to his shoulder. He didn’t have much chance of damaging the machines, but what he could do, he would.If you’re going to go down, go down swinging.
The machine guns in the noses of both helicopters opened up. For a second or so, he thought they were beautiful. Then something hit him a sledgehammer blow. All at once, his legs didn’t want to hold him up. He started to crumple, but he didn’t know whether he hit the ground or not.
A guard threw open the door to Ussmak’s tiny cell. “You-out,” he said in the Russki language, which Ussmak was perforce learning.
“It shall be done,” Ussmak said, and came out. He was always glad to get out of the cell, which struck him as poorly designed: had he been a Tosevite, he didn’t think he would have been able to stand up or lie down at full length in it. And, for that matter, since Tosevites produced liquid as well as solid waste, the straw in the cell would soon have become a stinking, sodden mess for a Big Ugly. Ussmak did all his business over in one corner, and wasn’t too badly inconvenienced by the lack of plumbing fixtures.
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