Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Little tongues of flame, drifting on the water, were already at the junction of the rivers and starting to flow down the Illinois. More floating fire followed. The Lizards didn’t run gunboats along the river or anything like that, so the fire wasn’t likely to do them any real harm, but it did draw their attention toward the Spoon and the territory west of it-and away from the boats sliding down the Illinois toward Havana from the north.

  “Come on, pull hard, come on, come-” Mutt tumbled off his seat in the middle of a word when the boat ran hard aground. He came up laughing. If you made a fool of yourself in front of your men, you had to admit it. He jumped out onto the riverbank. Mud squelched under his boots. “Let’s go break our boys outta stir.”

  He looked away from the burning Spoon River to let his eyes adapt to the darkness. That black shape there wasn’t forest; the forest around it had been cut down. He waved an arm to urge his men after him and trotted toward the Lizards’ prison camp.

  Not too far away, Sergeant Muldoon was warning, “Spread out, you dumb bastards. You want ’em to go picking you off the easy way?”

  The prison camp was designed more to keep people in than to keep them out. Nothing prevented the Americans from drawing close to the main gate, which lay on the northern side. Mutt, in fact, was beginning to think they could march on in when a couple of Lizards did open up on them from a little guardhouse.

  Grenades and submachine-gun fire quickly suppressed the opposition. “Come on, hurry up!” Mutt yelled all the same. “If those scaly sons of bitches had a radio, we’re gonna get company up here pretty damn quick!”

  Soldiers with wire cutters attacked the razor wire of the gateway. From inside the camp, men-and women-roused by the gunfire (Mutt hoped nobody, or at least not too many people, had stopped stray bullets) crowded up to the gate. As soon as there was a pathway out of the camp for them, they started pouring forth.

  Captain Szymanski shouted, “Anybody who wants to go back to fighting the Lizards full time, come with us. Lord knows you’ll be welcome. Otherwise, folks, scatter as best you can. We can use guerrillas, too, and a lot of people round about here will give you shelter and share what they’ve got. Good luck to you.”

  “God bless you, sir,” a man called. More echoed that. Some people stuck close to their rescuers; others melted away into the night.

  Firing picked up off to the south, and rapidly started getting closer. “Skirmish line forward!” Mutt called. “We gotta hold ’em off as long as we can, give people a chance to get away.”

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than what sounded like a hell of a big bomb landed right next to the advancing Lizards. He looked around wildly; he hadn’t heard any airplanes in the neighborhood. He still didn’t, as a matter of fact. But a long rumble of cloven air came from the sky, then slowly faded: it was as if the explosive or whatever it was had arrived before word of its coming.

  “That’s got to be an American long-range rocket bomb,” Captain Szymanski said. Whatever it was, the Lizards weren’t steaming forward now the way they had been.

  A few minutes later, another one of those rocket bombs went off, this one, by the sound of it, a couple of miles away from any of the fighting around Havana. The missiles didn’t seem to be what you’d call accurate; they could have come down here as easily as on the Lizards.But try stopping them, Daniels thought.Go ahead and try.

  In the darkness, he found Szymanski. “Sir, I think it’s about time to get the hell out of here. We stay around tryin’ to do more than we can, a lot of us’ll end up dead.”

  “You’re probably right, Lieutenant,” the company commander said. “No, you’re certainly right.” He raised his voice: “Back to the river, men!”

  Piling into one of the boats-now crowded almost to sinking with rescued prisoners-felt very good to Mutt. Getting back across the Illinois, though, made him sweat big drops. If a Lizard helicopter came chattering by overhead just now, there wouldn’t only be fire on the water: there’d be blood in it, too. Everybody understood that; the men at the oars pulled like maniacs as they got over to the west bank of the river.

  Stumbling out of the boat and away, Mutt wondered if Sam Yeager had made the acquaintance of these fancy rockets (he also wondered, as he had ever since they’d separated outside Chicago, whether Sam was still alive to have met them). What with all the funny pulp magazines he’d always read, he’d be in better shape to make sense of this crazy new world than damn near anybody else.

  “Not that anything makes sense any more,” Daniels muttered, and set about getting his men under cover.

  A coal-fired generator chugged, down in the basement of Dover College. David Goldfarb felt the throbbing in his bones. He could hear it, too, but didn’t unless he made a conscious effort to do so. As long as it went on, lightbulbs shone, wireless sets played, radar worked, and he could pretend the world was as it had been back before the Lizards came.

  When he remarked on that, Basil Roundbush said, “In my humble opinion”-he was about as humble as the Pope was Jewish, but at least he knew it-“playing those games doesn’t much help. As soon as we leave the laboratory, the real world rudely steps up and kicks us in the teeth.”

  “Too right it does,” Goldfarb said. “Even with every spare square inch of the island growing wheat and potatoes and mangelwurzels, heaven only knows how we’re going to feed everyone.”

  “Oh, indeed.” Roundbush’s mustache fluffed as he blew air out through it. “Rations were dreary enough when we were just fighting the Jerries. It’s worse now-and the Yanks these days haven’t the wherewithal to ship their surpluses over to us. For that matter, they haven’t got surpluses any more, either, from all I’ve heard.”

  Goldfarb grunted and nodded. Then he took a video platter-the name that seemed to have stuck for the shimmering disks on which the Lizards stored sounds and pictures-and fed it into the captured machine that played it.

  “What have you got there?” Roundbush asked.

  “I won’t know till I hit the switch that makes it play,” Goldfarb answered. “I think they just dumped every video platter they could find into a crate and sent them all here. We get a few that are actually useful to us, and we get to label the ones that aren’t and ship them on to people for whom they might come in handy.”

  “Bloody inefficient way of doing things,” Roundbush grumbled, but he mooched over to see what the platter would yield. You never could tell. The British had captured a lot of them in the process of driving the Lizards off their island. Some were entertainments, some seemed to contain payrolls and such, and some were the Lizard equivalent of manuals. Those were the real prizes.

  Goldfarb flicked the switch. Unlike the valves human electronics used, Lizard gadgets didn’t need a minute or two to warm up before they started working. The screen showed the image of a Lizard tank. Having faced such beasts on the ground, Goldfarb had a wholesome respect for them. Nonetheless, they weren’t what he was after.

  He watched for a couple of minutes to confirm that the video platter was indeed a tank maintenance manual, then shut it off and made the player spit out the platter. After he’d done that, he wrapped it in a sheet of paper, on which be scribbled its subject. He picked up another one and fed it into the machine. It showed scenes of a city on the Lizards’ home planet-whether it was a travelogue or a drama he couldn’t tell.

  “I hear some of these have been found with blue movies on them,” Roundbush remarked as Goldfarb removed the video platter and labeled with its possible categories the paper he used to wrap it.

  “Good heavens, who cares?” Goldfarb said. “Watching Lizards rut wouldn’t getmy juices flowing, I tell you that.”

  “You misunderstand, old chap,” Roundbush answered. “I mean blue movies of our own kind of people. There’s this one Chinese woman, I’m told, who shows up in a lot of them, and also in one where she’s having a baby.”

  “Why do the Lizards care about that?” Goldfarb said. “We must be as ugly to them as
they are to us. I’d bet it’s a rumor the brass started to give us a reason to keep sifting through these bloody things.”

  Roundbush laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that, and I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised if you were right. How many more platters do you plan to go through this session?”

  “Oh, perhaps another six or eight,” Goldfarb said after a moment’s thought. “Then I’ll have wasted enough time on them for a while, and I can go back to making little futile lunges at the innards of the radar set there.” He pointed to the array of electronic components spread out over his workbench in what he hoped was a logical, sensible arrangement.

  The first three video platters held nothing of any earthly use to him-nothing of any earthly use to anybody earthly, he thought Two of them were nothing but endless columns of Lizard chicken scratches: most likely the mechanized equivalent of a division’s worth of paybooks. The third showed a Lizard spaceship and some weird creatures who weren’t Lizards. Goldfarb wondered if it was fact or the alien version of Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon two-reelers. Maybe some boffin would be able to figure it out. He couldn’t.

  He took out the platter and stuck in another one. As soon as it started to play, Basil Roundbush let out a whoop and thumped him on the back. There on the screen stood a Lizard in medium-fancy body paint disassembling a jet engine that lay on a large table in front of him.

  Engines were Roundbush’s speciality, not his own, but he watched with the RAF officer for a while. Even without understanding the Lizards’ language, he learned a lot from the platter. Roundbush was frantically scribbling notes as he watched. “If only Group Captain Hipple could see this,” he muttered several times.

  “We’ve been saying that for a long time now,” Goldfarb answered unhappily. “I don’t think it’s going to happen.” He kept watching the video platter. Some of the animation and trick photography the Lizard instructor used to get his point across far outdistanced anything the Disney people had done inSnow White orFantasia. He wondered how they’d managed several of the effects. However they did it, they took it as much for granted as he did-or rather, as he had-when he flicked a wall switch to make light come out of a ceiling fixture.

  When the instructional film was over, Roundbush shook himself, as if he were a dog emerging from a chilly stream. “We definitely need to keep that one,” he said. “Would be nice if we had the services of a Lizard prisoner, too, so we could find out what the blighter was actually saying. That business with the turbine blades, for instance-was he telling the technicians to fiddle with them or not to mess about with them under any circumstances?”

  “I don’t know,” Goldfarb said. “We ought to find out, though, and not by experimenting. If we can help it.” He made the player spit out the video platter, wrapped it and labeled it, and set it on a pile separate from the others. That done, he glanced at his wristwatch. “Good heavens, has it got round to seven o’clock already?”

  “That it has,” Roundbush answered. “Seeing as we’ve been here for something on the close order of thirteen hours, I’d say we’ve earned the chance to knock off, too. How say you?”

  “I’d like to see what the rest of these platters are first,” Goldfarb said. “After that, I’ll worry about things like food.”

  “Such devotion to duty,” Roundbush said, chuckling. “Among the things like food you’ll be worrying about, unless I’m much mistaken, would be a pint or two at the White Horse Inn.”

  Goldfarb wondered whether his ears were hot enough to glow on their own if he turned out the lights. He tried to keep his voice casual as he answered, “Now that you mention it, yes.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed, old man.” Now Roundbush laughed out loud. “Believe me, I’m jealous of you. That Naomi of yours is a lovely girl, and she thinks the sun rises and sets on you, too.” He poked Goldfarb in the ribs. “We shan’t tell her any different, what?”

  “Er-no,” Goldfarb said, embarrassed still. He fed the remaining video platters he’d picked into the player, one at a time. He hoped none of them would prove to be about the care and feeding of radars. He even hoped none of them would be blue movies featuring Roundbush’s probably legendary Chinese woman. He didn’t tell his colleague that; Roundbush would have claimed someone was sprinkling saltpeter on his food.

  He was in luck; a couple of minutes’ watching was plenty to show him none of the platters was either relevant to his work or pornographic. As the player ejected the last of them, Basil Roundbush gently booted him in the backside. “Go on, old man. I’ll keep the fires burning here, and try not to burn down the building while I’m about it.”

  With England on Double Summer Time, the sun was still in the sky when Goldfarb got outside. He swung aboard his bicycle and pedaled north toward the White Horse Inn. Like a lot of establishments these days, the pub had a bicycle guard outside to make sure the two-wheelers didn’t pedal off of their own accord while their owners were within.

  Inside, torches blazed in wall sconces. A hearty fire roared in the hearth. Since the place was packed with people, that left it hot and smoky. As it didn’t have a generator chugging away, though, the blazes were necessary to give it light. A couple of chickens roasted above the hearth fire. Their savory smell made spit rush into Goldfarb’s mouth.

  He made his way toward the bar. “What’ll it be, dearie?” Sylvia asked. Naomi was carrying a tray of mugs and glasses from table to table. She spotted Goldfarb through the crowd and waved to him.

  He waved back, then said to Sylvia, “Pint of bitter, and are all the pieces from those birds spoken for yet?” He pointed toward the fireplace.

  “No, not yet,” the redheaded barmaid answered. “Which d’you fancy-legs or breasts?”

  “Well, I think I’d like a nice, juicy thigh,” he answered-and then caught the double entendre. Sylvia laughed uproariously at the look on his face. She poured him his beer. He raised the pint pot to his mouth in a hurry, not least to help mask himself.

  “You’re blushing,” Sylvia chortled.

  “I am not,” he said indignantly. “And even if I was, you’d have the devil’s own time proving it by firelight.”

  “So I would, so I would,” Sylvia said, laughing still. She ran her tongue over her upper lip. Goldfarb was urgently reminded-as he was intended to be reminded-they’d been lovers not that long before. She might as well have been telling him,See what you’re missing? She said, “I’ll get you that chicken now.” When she headed toward the fireplace, she put even more sway in her walk than she usually did.

  Naomi came over a minute later. “What were you two laughing about?” she asked. To Goldfarb’s relief, she sounded curious, not suspicious. He told her the truth; if he hadn’t, Sylvia would have. Naomi laughed, too. “Sylvia is very funny,” she said, and then, in a lower voice, “Sometimes, maybe, too much for her own good.”

  “Whose own good?” Sylvia asked, returning with a steaming chicken leg on a plate. “Has to be me. I tell too many jokes for my own good? Likely I do, by Jesus. But I’m not joking when I tell you that chicken’s going to cost you two quid.”

  Goldfarb dug in his pocket for the banknotes. Prices had climbed dizzyingly high since the Lizard invasion, and his radarman’s pay hadn’t come close to keeping up. Even so, there were times when the rations he got grew too boring to stand.

  “Besides,” he said as he set the money on the bar, “what better have I got to spend it on?”

  “Me,” Naomi answered. Had that been Sylvia talking, the response would have been frankly mercenary. Naomi didn’t really care that he couldn’t spend like an air vice marshal. That was one of the things that made her seem wonderful to him. She asked, “Have you got more word of your cousin, the one who did the wireless broadcasts for the Lizards?”

  He shook his head. “My family found that he lived through the invasion: that much I do know. But not long after that, he and his wife and their son might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody knows what’s become of them.”r />
  “Somebody knows,” Naomi said with conviction as Goldfarb dug into the chicken leg. “No one may be talking, but someone knows. In this country, people do not disappear for no reason. Sometimes I think you do not know how lucky you are that this is so.”

  “I know,” Goldfarb said, and after a moment Naomi nodded, conceding the point. He smiled at her, even if crookedly. “What’s the matter? Did you take me for an Englishman again?” Looking a little flustered, she nodded once more. He dropped into Yiddish to say, “If we win the war, and if I have children, or maybe grandchildren, they’ll take that for granted. Me-” He shook his head.

  “If you have children, or maybe grandchildren-” Naomi began, and then let it drop. The war had loosened everyone’s standards, but she still wasn’t what you’d call forward. Sometimes Goldfarb regretted that very much. Sometimes he admired it tremendously. Tonight was one of those nights.

  “Let me have another pint, would you please?” he said. Sometimes quiet talk-or what they could steal of it while she was also busy serving other customers-was as good as anything else, maybe better.

  He hadn’t thought that with Sylvia. All he’d wanted to do with her was to get her brassiere off and her panties down. He scratched his head, wondering where the difference was.

  Naomi brought him the bitter. He took a pull, then set the pot down. “Must be love,” he said, but she didn’t hear him.

  Artillery was harassing the Race in a push north from their Florida base. The Big Uglies were getting smart about moving their guns before counterbattery fire found them, but they couldn’t do much about attack from the air. Teerts had two pods of rockets mounted under his killercraft. They were some of the simplest weapons in the arsenal of the Race. They weren’t even guided: if you saturated an area with them, that did the job. And, because they were so simple, even Tosevite factories could turn them out in large quantities. The armorers loved them these days, not least because they had plenty.

  “I have acquired the assigned target visually,” Teerts reported back to his commanders. “I now begin the dive on it.”