Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  Over to his right, behind the burned-out carcass of one of those Lees, a mortar team started lobbing bombs at the Lizard lines a few hundred yards south of the farmhouse.Whump! Whwnp! Whwnp! Those little finned shells didn’t have much in the way of range, but they could throw a lot of explosive and steel fragments in a hurry.

  The Lizards wasted no time replying. Mutt hunkered down and dug himself into the ground with his entrenching tool. Those weren’t only mortar bombs whistling in; the Lizards were shooting real cannon, too, and probably from a range at which American guns couldn’t reply.

  Under cover of that bombardment, Lizard infantry skittered forward. When Mutt heard the platoon BAR start chattering, he stuck his head up and blazed away with his tommy gun. He didn’t know whether any of the Lizards got hit or not. The BAR might well nail ’em at those ranges, but he’d just be lucky if he wounded one of the aliens. Still, they dove for cover and stopped advancing, which was the point of shooting early and often.

  “Haven’t seem ’em try to move up on us in a while,” Muldoon yelled through the din.

  “Me neither,” Daniels said. “They been happy enough on the defensive for a while. An’ you know somethin’ else? I was pretty much happy to have ’em that way my own self.”

  “Yeah,” Muldoon said. A big shell landed close by a couple of seconds later, showering both men with dirt and leaving them stunned and half deafened.

  Mutt glanced back into a foxhole about twenty yards away to make sure his radioman was still in one piece. The kid was still moving and wasn’t screaming, so Daniels figured nothing irreparable had happened to him. He wondered if he was going to have to call for mustard-gas shells to hold the Lizards back.

  He was about to yell to the radioman when the Lizards’ barrage let up. He peered suspiciously over the bricks. What sort of trick were they trying to play? Did they think they could catch the Americans all so deep in their holes that they wouldn’t notice attackers till those attackers were in among them? If they didn’t know better than that after more than two years of hard fighting, they damned well should have.

  But the Lizards, having tried one advance, weren’t pushing forward again. Small-arms fire from their side of the line had died away, too. “Made their point, I guess,” Mutt said under his breath.

  “Hey, Lieutenant, take a gander at that!” Herman Muldoon pointed out toward the Lizards’ lines. Something white was waving on the end of a long stick. “They want a parley or somethin’.”

  “Pick up their wounded, mebbe,” Daniels said. “I dickered that kind o’ deal with ’em once or twice. Wouldn’t mind doin’ it again: they make a truce, they keep it for as long as they say they’re gonna.” He raised his voice: “Hold fire, boys! I’m gonna go out there an’ parley with them scaly sons of bitches.” He turned to Muldoon as the Americans’ guns fell silent. “You got anything white, Herman?”

  “Still got a snotrag, believe it or not.” Muldoon pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket with no small pride; not many dogfaces could match it these days. It wasn’t very white, but Mutt supposed it would do. He looked around for something to fix it to. When he didn’t find anything, he cussed for a couple of seconds and then stood up, waving the hanky over his head. The Lizards didn’t shoot at him. He walked out into the debatable ground between the two forces. A Lizard holding his own flag of truce came toward him.

  He hadn’t gone very far before the radioman hollered, “Lieutenant! Lieutenant Daniels, sir!”

  “Whatever it is, Logan, it’s gonna have to wait,” Mutt called back over his shoulder. “I got business here.”

  “But, sir-”

  Mutt ignored the call and kept walking. If he turned around and went back now, the Lizards were liable to figure he’d changed his mind about the cease-fire and start shooting at him. The alien with the white flag approached to within maybe ten feet of him, then stopped. So did Mutt. He nodded politely; as a soldier, he had nothing but respect for the Lizards. “Second Lieutenant Daniels, U.S. Army,” he said. “You speak English?”

  “Yessss.” The Lizard drew the word out into a long hiss, but Mutt had no trouble understanding him.Good thing, too, he thought: he didn’t know word one of Lizard talk. The alien went on, “I am Chook, small-unit group leader, conquest fleet of the Race.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Chook. Our ranks match, pretty much.”

  “Yess, I think so also,” the Lizard said. “I come to tell you, there is cease-fire between conquest fleet of the Race and your U.S. Army.”

  “We can do that,” Mutt agreed. “How long do you want the truce to last? Till nightfall, say? That’ll give both sides plenty of time to bring in whoever’s hurt and let us have a bit of a blow-a little rest,” he added, thinking the Lizard was liable not to know slang-“afterwards, too.”

  “You not understand, Second Lieutenant Daniels,” Chook said. “Is cease-fire between conquest fleet of the Race and your U.S. Army. Whole U.S. Army, whole part of conquest fleet here. Declared by Atvar, fleetlord of conquest fleet. Agree by not-emperor of your U.S. Army, whatever him name be. Cease-fire in place for now: not move forward, not move back. No set time to ending of cease-fire. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?”

  “Yeah,” Mutt answered absently. “Jesus.” He didn’t know the last time he’d felt like this. November 1918, maybe, but he’d been expecting that cease-fire. This was a bolt from the blue. He turned and hollered, loud as he could: “Logan!”

  “Sir?” The radioman’s voice came back thin and tiny over a hundred fifty yards of ground.

  “We got a cease-lire with these Lizards?”

  “Yes, sir. I was trying to tell you, sir, I just got the word when-”

  Mutt turned back to Chook. The Lizard had already given him the word. He spoke formally to Chook, to make sure the alien knew he had it straight: “I hear you, Small-Unit Group Leader Chook. I understand you, too. We got us a cease-fire in place here, just like all over the U.S. of A, no time limit.”

  “Truth,” Chook said. “This what we have. This cease-fire not only for you. Is also for SSSR”-Mutt needed a second to figure out he meant Russia-“and for Deutschland.” After going Over There, Daniels got that one fast.

  “Lordy,” Mutt said in an awed voice. “You pile that all together, it’s half the world, pretty much.” He noticed something else, too. “You made truces with the countries that bombed you back when you bombed ’em.”

  “Truth,” Chook said again. “Are we fools, to waste cease-fire on empires we have beaten?”

  “Look at things from your end o’ the stick and I guess maybe you got a point,” Mutt admitted. He wondered what was going to happen to England. Chook hadn’t said a thing about the limeys, and Mutt had admired them ever since he’d seen them in action in France in the war that was supposed to end war. Well, the Lizards had tried invading them once, and got a clout in the snout for their trouble. Maybe they’d learned a lesson.

  Chook said, “You are good fighters, you Big Uglies. I tell you that much. It is truth. We come to Tosev 3-this planet, this world-we think we will win and win fast. We not win fast. You fight good.”

  “You’re no slouches your own selves.” Mutt half turned. “One of your boys, he shot me right there.” He indicated his left nether cheek.

  “I am lucky. I am not shot. Many males who are my friends, they are shot,” Chook said. Mutt nodded. He knew about that. Every front-line soldier knew about that. Chook said, “We are fighters, you and I.” Mutt nodded again. Chook let loose with a hissing sigh, then went on, “I think now one time, now another time, fighters of Race, fighters at the tips of the tongue of the fight, these males more like Big Uglies at tips of tongue of fight than like other males far away. You hear, Second Lieutenant Daniels? You understand?” He made a funny coughing noise after each question.

  “Small-Unit Group Leader Chook, I hear you real good,” Mutt said. “I understand you real good, too. What do you say when something is just right? You say ‘trut
h,’ don’t you? That there’s truth, Chook.”

  “Truth,” Chook agreed. He spoke into something not much bigger than a paperback book. Back at his line, Lizards started standing up and poking their noses out of cover.He’s got a radio right there with him, Mutt realized,and so do all his troops. Ain’t that a hell of a thing? Wish we could do the like.

  He turned around and waved to his own men. One by one, they stood up, too. Of them all, Herman Muldoon was the last fellow to show himself. Mutt didn’t blame him a bit. He’d been shot at so many times by now, he probably had trouble believing this wasn’t some sort of trick Mutt would have, too, if he hadn’t already been standing out here all vulnerable in case the Lizards did aim to pull off something sneaky.

  Warily, still holding weapons, humans and Lizards approached each other. Some of them tried to talk back and forth, though Chook’s males knew a lot less English than he did, and few Americans had much in the way of Lizard lingo. That was okay. You didn’t need a whole lot of talking to get across the idea that you weren’t trying to kill anybody right now, even if you had been a few minutes before. Mutt had seen that on truces in no-man’s-land in France in 1918. Only a few of his buddies had been able to talk with theBoches, but they’d got on well enough.

  Of course, back then the Yanks (Daniels remembered how irate he’d been to find the French considering him a Yankee) andBoches had swapped smokes and rations when they met. He’d traded rations only once; as far as he was concerned, it was a miracle the Germans fought so damn hard on the slop they got to eat.

  He didn’t figure he’d see anything like that here now. The Lizards didn’t smoke, and their rations were nastier than anything theBoches had had. But when he looked around, he saw some of his guys trading something with the aliens. What the devil did they nave that the Lizards wanted?

  Chook was watching that, too, his eye turrets twisting every which way while his head hardly moved. Mutt wondered if he’d stop this unofficial commerce. Instead, after a minute or so, he said, “You, Second Lieutenant Daniels, have any of the fruit or small cakes with what you Big Uglies callginger in them?”

  A lighthulb went on in Mutt’s head. He’d heard the Lizards had a hell of a yen for the stuff. “ ‘Fraid I don’t, Small-Unit Group Leader,” he said, and itwas too bad-no telling what sort of interesting stuff a Lizard might have to trade. “Looks like some of my boys do, though.”

  As he spoke, he wondered why some of his boys were carrying around stuff with ginger in it. The only answer that came to mind was that they’d already been doing some trading with the Lizards on the sly. Any other time, that would have made him furious. When you looked at it after a cease-fire, though, how could you get excited about it?

  “Yess. Truth,” Chook said. With an eager spring in his skittering stride, he hurried off to find out what the Americans did have for sale. Behind his back, Mutt Daniels smiled.

  Fluffy white clouds floated lazily across a blue sky. The sun was high and, if not hot, pleasantly warm. It was a fine day for walking hand in hand with the girl you-loved? David Goldfarb hadn’t used the word with Naomi Kaplan, not out loud, but he thought it more and more often these days.

  Naomi’s thoughts, on the other hand, seemed focused on politics and war, not love. “But you are in the RAF,” she said indignantly. “How could you not know whether we have got a cease-fire with the Lizards or have not got any such thing?”

  He laughed. “How could I not know? Nothing simpler: they don’t tell rue. I don’t need to know to do my job, which is a good enough reason for not telling. All I know is what I want to know: I’ve not heard any Lizard aircraft-nor heardof any Lizard aircraft-over England since the cease-fire with the Yanks, the Russians, and the Nazis.”

  “Then it is a cease-fire,” Naomi insisted. “It must be a cease-fire.”

  Goldfarb shrugged. “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not. I admit, I don’t know of any of our planes heading off to bomb the Continent, either, but we’ve not done much of that lately anyhow; the loss rate got too beastly high to bear. Maybe it’s one of those informal arrangements: you don’t hurt me and I shan’t hurt you, but we’ll not put anything in writing for fear of admitting we’re doing whatever it is we’re doing-or not doing.”

  Naomi frowned. “This is not right This is not proper. This is not orderly.” At that moment, she sounded very German. Goldfarb would sooner have bitten through his tongue than said so out loud. She went on, “The Lizards’ agreements with the other nations are formal and binding. Why not with us?”

  “I told you I don’t know anything for certain,” Goldfarb said. “Will you listen to my guess?” When she nodded, he went on, “The Americans, the Russians, and the Nazis have all used super-bombs of the same type the Lizards have. We’ve not done that. In their eyes, maybe we don’t deserve a truce because we’ve not done it. But when they tried invading us, they found we weren’t a walkover. And so they leave us alone without saying they’re doing it.”

  “This is possible, I suppose,” Naomi admitted after some serious thought. “But it is still not orderly.”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “No matter what it is, though, I’m glad not to hear the air-raid sirens go off every day, or twice a day, or every hour on the hour.”

  He waited to see if Naomi would say such an irregular schedule of raids was disorderly, too. Instead, she pointed to the bright red breast of a robin streaking through the air after a dragonfly.

  “That’s the only kind of aircraft I want to see in the sky.”

  “Hmm,” Goldfarb said. “I am partial to a nice flight of Meteors, but I’d be stretching things if I didn’t say you had a point.”

  They walked on for a while, not talking, glad of each other’s company. It was very quiet. A bee buzzed from flower to flower in a field by the side of the road. Goldfarb noticed both the sound and the field without any vegetables growing in it: it had to be one of the few such so close to Dover.

  Apparently apropos of nothing in particular, Naomi remarked, “My father and mother like you, David.”

  “I’m glad,” he answered, which was true enough. Had Isaac and Leah Kaplan not liked him, he wouldn’t be out walking with their daughter now. “I like them, too.” That was also true to a large degree: he liked them about as well as a young man could like the parents of the girl he was courting.

  “They think you have a serious mind,” Naomi went on.

  “Do they?” Goldfarb said, a little more cautiously now. If by serious-minded they meant he wouldn’t try to seduce their daughter, they didn’t know him as well as they thought they did. He’d already tried that. Maybe they knew Naomi, though, because it hadn’t worked. And yet he hadn’t gone off in a huff because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Did that make him serious-minded? Maybe it did. He realized he had to say something more. “I think it’s good they don’t worry about where I’m from-or where my mother and father are from, I should say.”

  “They think of you as an English Jew,” Naomi answered. “So do I, as a matter of fact.”

  “I suppose so. I was born here,” Goldfarb said. He didn’t think of himself as an English Jew, though, not when his parents had fled here from Warsaw on account of pogroms before the First World War. German Jews had a way of looking down their noses at their Eastern European cousins. If Naomi met his parents, it would be quite plain they weren’t what she thought of as English Jews. If-Thoughtfully, he went on, “My father and mother would like you, too. If I get leave and you can get a day off from the pub, would you like to go up to London and meet them?”

  “I would like that very much,” she replied. Then she cocked her head to one side and looked over at him. “How would you introduce me?”

  “How would you like me to introduce you?” he asked. But Naomi shook her head; that one wasn’t for her to answer.Fair enough, he thought. He went on for another couple of paces before trying a slightly different question: “How would you like me to introduce you as my fiancee?”

  Naomi s
topped in her tracks. Her eyes went very wide. “You mean this?” she asked slowly. Goldfarb nodded, though his stomach felt as it sometimes had up in a Lancaster taking violent evasive action. Naomi said, “I would like this very much,” and stepped into his arms.

  The kiss she gave him nailed his stomach firmly back in place, though it made his head spin. When one hand of his closed softly on her breast, she didn’t pull away. Instead, she sighed and held him tighter. Emboldened, he slid his other down from the small of her back to her right buttock-and, with a twirl as neat as a jitterbug dancer’s, she twisted away from him.

  “Soon,” she said. “Not yet. Soon. We tell my parents. I meet your mother and father-and my mother and father will want to do the same. We find a rabbi to marry us. Then.” Her eyes glittered. “And I tell you this-you will not be the only one who is impatient.”

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe we ought to go tell your father and mother now.” He turned and started toward Dover. The faster he cleared obstacles out of the way, the sooner she wouldn’t use that little twirl His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground all the way back to the city.

  Mordechai Anielewicz’s voice came out flat as the Polish plain, hard as stone: “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

  “Fine. Whatever you say.” The Polish farmer had been milking a cow when Anielewicz found him. He turned away from the Jewish fighting leader and back to the business at hand.Siss! Siss! Siss! Jets of milk landed in the dented tin pail. The cow tried to walk off. “Stay here, you stupid bitch,” the Pole growled.

  “But see here, Mieczyslaw,” Mordechai protested. “It’s impossible, I tell you. How could the Nazis have smuggled an explosive-metal bomb into Lodz without us or the Lizards or the Polish Home Army knowing about it?”

  “I don’t know anything about how,” Mieczyslaw answered. “I hear tell they’ve done it. I’m supposed to tell you somebody stayed at Lejb’s house in Hrubieszow. Does that mean anything to you?”