Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Lo smiled. So did two or three of his buddies. The others just sat, still and watchful. Lo said, “If you are prisoners, you must want to help the oppressed peasants and workers strike a blow for freedom.”

  Liu Han’s translation wasn’t anywhere near as smooth as that. Fiore cocked his head to one side anyway. Traveling through small and medium-sized towns in an America staggered by the Depression, he’d heard plenty of guys standing on crates at street corners who talked like that. He pointed a finger at Lo. “You’re a Red, that’s what you are-a Communist, a Bolshevik.”

  Liu Han didn’t recognize any of the English (or Russian). She stared and spread her hands, at a loss to interpret. But one of the terms made sense to Lo. He nodded soberly to Bobby Fiore, as if to say he was smarter than the Chinese had figured. Then he spoke to Liu Han, letting her know what was going on.

  She didn’t gasp as if she’d just seen a rat scurry across the floor, the way a lot of American women would have. She just nodded and tried to explain to Fiore, then fell silent when she realized he already understood. “They not bad,” she told him. “They fight Japanese, more than Kuomintang does.”

  “Okay,” he said. “The Reds were on our side before the Lizards came, sure. And everybody wants to give them a good swift kick. But what do these guys want with me?”

  Lo didn’t answer, not with words. Instead, he nudged one of his comrades. The young man reached under his tunic and pulled out a grenade. He didn’t say anything, either. He just let it sit in the palm of his hand.

  Bobby didn’t need more than a heartbeat before the light went on in his head. He started to laugh. “So you want me to do your pitching for you, huh?” he said, not caring that neither Lo nor Liu Han understood what he was talking about. “I wish Sam Yeager was here. You think my arm’s hot stuff, you oughta see his.”

  Lo politely waited till he was done before speaking. Liu Han hesitantly translated: “They want you-” She forgot the English for throw, but made a gesture to show what she meant. Fiore nodded. Then she pointed at the grenade.

  “Yeah, I already worked that out,” Fiore said. He’d worked out some other things, too: if he said no, for instance, he and Liu Han were liable to end up wearing whatever Chinamen used for concrete overshoes. This wasn’t just a shakedown. If he said no, he was a big danger to these people. From everything he’d ever heard, Bolsheviks didn’t let people who were dangerous to them keep walking and breathing.

  And besides, he didn’t want to say no. He wished he could have chucked some grenades at the Lizards back in Cairo, Illinois, after they caught him the first time. That would have kept him out of this whole mess. Even though he did care for Liu Han, he would have given a lot to be back in the good old U.S. of A.

  Since he couldn’t have that, giving the little scaly bastards a hard time here on the other side of the world would have to do. “So what do you want me to blow up?” he asked Lo.

  Maybe the Red hadn’t expected such enthusiastic cooperation. He talked in low tones with his friends before he turned back to Liu Han. She sounded worried as she told Fiore, “They want you to go with them. No say where.”

  He wondered if he ought to insist that Lo tell Liu Han where he’d be. After a second’s doubt, he decided that would be stupid. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell anybody, especially the Lizards… and, if she didn’t know, the Reds would have less reason to come after her to shut her up in case things went wrong.

  He got to his feet. “Let’s go take care of it,” he said to Lo.

  He felt edgy, almost bouncy, as he walked, as if Mutt Daniels (and he wondered what had happened to old Mutt) had flashed him the sign to steal home on the next pitch. Well, why not? He wasn’t just trying to steal home. He was going into combat.

  Sooner or later, he was sure, he would have volunteered for the Army. But even then, he would have trained for months before he got the chance to see action. Now-it was as if he’d got his rifle and headed up to the front line one right after the other. No wonder he felt all loosey-goosey.

  He blew Liu Han a kiss. Lo and his fellow Bolsheviks snickered and said things that were probably rude to one another: Chinese men weren’t in the habit of showing they gave a damn about their women. Well, to hell with them, too, he thought. Liu Han managed a return smile, but he could see she was frightened about this whole business.

  Night in the prison camp was darker than anything Fiore had known back in the States, even in the panicky blackouts that had followed Pearl Harbor. Few of the huts had any windows, and few of what windows there were had lights showing through them. If the moon was up in the sky, a thick layer of clouds made sure nobody could see it. Though that made Fiore stumble along, he didn’t bellyache, not even to himself: darkness would give the Lizards a harder time spotting him. That he liked.

  The Chinese picked their way through the black as if they had headlights. A couple of times, Bobby Fiore heard people getting out of their way in a hurry. A large group of disciplined men traveling confidently was something few wanted to mess with. He liked that, too.

  Before long, he had no idea where in the camp Lo was taking him. It all looks alike to me, he thought, and stifled a nervous giggle. He didn’t know if the Bolsheviks were walking him around in circles to get him lost or if it just worked out that way, but lost he undoubtedly was.

  Lo opened the door of a shabby little hut, gestured for his companions and Fiore to go in. The inside of the hut was darker than the alley had been. That didn’t stop Lo. He shoved aside a heavy wooden chest-by all appearances, the only furniture in the place-and pulled up a square piece of board underneath it. He and two of his friends dropped down into the tunnel the board concealed.

  One of the remaining Reds nudged Fiore and pointed to the round mouth of the tunnel. He went into it with all the eagerness of a man walking to the electric chair. As he had when he left the hut he shared with Liu Han, he learned new lessons about how dark darkness could be. As far as his eyes were concerned, he’d just gone blind. But with Chinese ahead and Chinese pushing him on from behind, he could have no doubt about which direction to go.

  The tunnel wasn’t tall enough for him to stand upright, or even to crouch. He had to crawl along on hands and knees, and even then the top of his head kept bumping on the roof and showering clods of dirt down onto his neck. The air in the tunnel smelled like moist earth, dank and musty, and felt dead, as if nobody had any business breathing down here.

  He had no idea how long he crawled, either in time or distance. It seemed forever, either way. He imagined the tunnel was sloping up several times, but each one proved to be just that: imaginary. Without eyes to help it, his sense of balance played tricks on him.

  At last, though, he smelled fresh air. He hurried forward, and now found himself going unmistakably upward as well. He scrambled out and lay gasping in relief in a hollow in a field. After the tunnel, that seemed a wonderful luxury. It also seemed almost bright as day. The other three Chinese Reds came out of the hole just as eagerly as he had. That made him feel better.

  Lo cautiously raised his head. He turned to Bobby Fiore, pointed. Fiore raised his head, too. Off in the distance sat a Lizard guard station on the camp perimeter. Fiore mimed lobbing a grenade in that direction. Lo smiled, his teeth startlingly white in the darkness. Then he reached out and thumped Fiore on the shoulder, as if to say, You’re okay, Mac.

  He whispered something to one of the other young men, who handed Bobby Fiore a grenade. He felt for the pin, found it. Lo held up fingers close to his face-one, two, three. Then he, too, mimed throwing. “Yeah, I know I gotta get rid of it,” Fiore said laconically.

  The fellow who’d given him the grenade proved to have three more, which he also passed on. Fiore took them, but less enthusiastically each time. He figured he could throw one, maybe two, and get away in the confusion, but anything after that and he’d be asking to get blown to pieces.

  But the Reds weren’t asking him to do anything they weren’t game for the
mselves. Some of them pulled out pistols from the waistbands of their trousers; Lo and one other fellow had submachine guns instead-not tommy guns like gangsters, but stubbier, lighter weapons of a make Fiore didn’t recognize. He wondered if they were Russian. Any which way, he was glad he hadn’t tried using that baseball bat back in his hut.

  Lo started crawling through the field-beans were growing in it, Fiore discovered-toward the Lizard outpost. The other raiders and Fiore trailed after him. The reek of night soil (as poetic a way of saying shit as he’d ever heard) filled his nostrils; the Chinese used it for fertilizer.

  The Lizards obviously weren’t expecting trouble from the outside. The humans easily got within fifty yards of their perimeter. Lo looked a question to Bobby Fiore: was this close enough? He nodded. Lo nodded back and thumped him on the shoulder again. For a Chinaman and a Communist, Lo was all right.

  The raiders slithered out into a rough skirmish line. Lo stayed close by Fiore. He gave his comrades maybe a minute and a half to find firing position, then pointed to Fiore and then to the guard station.

  I get to open the show, huh? It was an honor Fiore could have done without, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He yanked the pin out of one of the grenades, hurled it as if he’d just taken a relay in short right and was trying to nail a runner at the plate. Then he flung himself flat on the stinking ground.

  Bang! The blast was oddly disappointing; he’d expected more. But it did what it was supposed to do: it got the Lizards’ attention. Fiore heard hissing shouts, saw motion in and around the guard post.

  That was what the Chinese had been waiting for. Their guns opened up with a roar quite satisfyingly loud. Lo went through a whole magazine in what seemed no more than a heartbeat; his submachine gun spat a flame bright and searingly yellow as the sun. He rammed in another clip and started shooting again.

  Did the hisses turn to screams? Did Lizards fall, pierced by bullets? Fiore didn’t know for sure. He jumped up and threw another grenade. Its boom added to the cacophony all around.

  For somebody who’d never seen action till that moment, he’d gauged it pretty well. No sooner had he hit the dirt again than the Lizards woke up. Searchlights came on. If the muzzle flash from Lo’s submachine gun had been sun-bright, they were like looking at the naked face of God. And the machine guns they opened up with reminded Fiore of God, too, or at least of His wrath. Bobby even wished he were back in the tunnel.

  Off to his left, one of the Chinese raiders started screaming and wouldn’t stop. Off to his right, fire from the second submachine gun cut off in the middle of a burst and didn’t start up again. Just over his head, bullets clipped off the tops of growing bean plants like a harvester from hell.

  Lo kept right on shooting, which made him either brave or out of his ever-loving mind. Two searchlights swung toward him, which meant that for a moment none was pointing at Bobby Fiore. He threw his third grenade, got down, and started rolling away from where he had been. The location didn’t seem healthy any more.

  Lo’s weapon fell silent. Fiore didn’t know whether he was dead or also moving. He kept rolling himself until he fetched up against a long obstruction: a dead Chinese, pistol still in hand. Fiore took it and scuttled away from the Lizard guns. He’d done all the fighting he intended to do today.

  He put all the distance he could between himself and that terrible fire. Bullets lashed the plants all around him, kicking up dirt that spattered his hands, his feet, his neck. Somehow, none of the bullets hit him. If Lizard infantry came out after him, he knew he was dead. But the aliens relied on firepower instead, and however awesome it was, it wasn’t perfect-not quite. The last Chinaman stopped shooting and started shrieking.

  Alternating Hail Marys with under-his-breath mutters of “Where the fuck’s that tunnel?” Fiore slithered back toward where he thought it was. After a while, he realized he must have gone too far. At the same instant, he also realized he couldn’t possibly go back, not if he wanted to keep on breathing.

  “If I can’t get back into camp, that means I better get my ass outta here,” he mumbled. He crawled and scuttled as fast as he could. No searchlights picked hip up as he dodged between rows of beans. Then he tumbled into a muddy ditch or tiny creekbed in the poorly tended field that providentially ran diagonally away from the Lizard guard post. He hoped the Chinese Reds had done some damage there, but was whatever they’d done worth six lives?

  He didn’t know. He was damned sure it wasn’t worth seven, though.

  After an eternity that might have lasted fifteen minutes, the beans on either side of the ditch gave way to bushes and sapling. About then, a helicopter came rattling over the field and raked it with fire. Dust and pulverized bean plants flew into the sky. The noise was like the end of the world. Bobby Fiore’s teeth chattered in terror. The same sort of flying gun-ships had strafed his train and the fields around it back in Illinois.

  After a while, the gunship flew away. It hadn’t lashed the place where Fiore lay trembling. That still didn’t mean he was safe. The farther out of there he got, the better off he’d be. He made himself move even though he shook. He didn’t feel as if he were in a tight baseball game any more. Combat against the Lizards was more like the fly taking on the swatter.

  He was altogether alone and on his own. He counted up his assets: he had one grenade, a pistol with an uncertain number of cartridges, and a tiny smattering of Chinese. It didn’t seem like enough.

  “Mild bloody climate,” George Bagnall muttered, stamping snow from his boots and brushing it from his shoulders. “Sod Jerome bloody Jones.”

  “Not so bad in here,” Ken Embry answered. “Shut the door. You’re letting in the bloody spring.”

  “Right.” Bagnall slammed the door with a satisfying crash. He promptly started to sweat, and divested himself of fur cap and leather-and-fur flying suit. As far as he could tell, the Soviet Union in general and Pskov in particular had only two temperatures, too cold and too hot. The wood-burning stove in the corner of the house he and Embry had been assigned was more than capable of keeping it warm: too much more than capable. But none of the windows opened (the notion seemed alien to the Russian mind), and if you let the fire go out, you were facing chilblains again within the hour.

  “Want some tea?” Embry asked, pointing to a dented samovar that added its quotient of warmth to the close, tropical air.

  “Real tea, by God?” Bagnall demanded eagerly.

  “Not likely,” the pilot answered with a sneer. “Same sort of leaves and roots and muck the Bolshies are drinking these days. No milk, either, and no cups, same as always.” The Russians drank tea-and their ersatz, too-from glasses, and used sugar but no milk. Considering that at the moment there was no milk in Pskov, save from nursing mothers and a few officers’ closely guarded cows and goats, the Englishmen had had to get used to it that way, too. Bagnall consoled himself by thinking he was less likely to catch tuberculosis without milk in his tea; the Reds didn’t fret over attestation.

  He poured himself a glass of the murky brown brew, stirred in sugar (plenty of beets around Pskov), and tasted. “I’ve had worse,” he admitted. “Where’d you come by it?”

  “Bought it from a babushka,” Embry answered. “God knows where she got it-probably grew the herbs herself, then fixed them up to sell. Not what you’d call perfect communism, but then not much here seems to be.”

  “No, hardly,” Bagnall agreed. “I wonder if it has to do with the Germans’ having been here most of a year before the Lizards arrived.”

  “I have my doubts,” Embry said. “From all I’ve seen, my guess is that the Russians did what they had to do for the collective farm and the factory and then turned around and did all they could for themselves.”

  “Mm-you’re likely right.” Even after some weeks in Pskov, Bagnall did not know what to make of the Russians. He admired their courage and resilience. About everything else he had doubts. Had Englishmen so tamely submitted to those above them, no one would ever have qu
estioned the divine right of kings. Only their resilience had let the Russians survive the string of incompetents and tyrants who ruled them.

  “And what is the news of the day?” Embry asked.

  “I was just thinking I find Russians difficult to fathom,” Bagnall said, “but in one regard they are perfectly comprehensible: they still hate the Germans. And, I assure you, the sentiment is most generously returned.”

  Ken Embry rolled his eyes. “Oh, God, what now?”

  “Here, wait, let me get some more of this. It isn’t tea, but it isn’t too bad, either.” Bagnall poured his glass full, sipped, and went on, “One of the things we shall have to do, on the unlikely assumption the ground ever unthaws, is build miles upon miles of antitank ditches. Let me merely state that where to site these ditches, the personnel to excavate them, and the troops to defend them once dug are matters which remain in dispute.”

  “Do you care to give me the particulars?” Embry asked, with an expression that said he wasn’t particularly eager to hear them but felt he should. Bagnall understood that expression; he suspected his own matched it.

  He said, “General Chill is willing to have his Wehrmacht lads do some of the digging, but feels the rest should fall on the shoulders of what he terms the ‘otherwise useless population.’ Typical German tact there, what?”

  “I am certain his Soviet colleagues received that in the spirit in which it was intended,” Embry said.

  “No doubt,” Bagnall said dryly. “They were also particularly pleased with his proposal that Russian soldiers and partisans be those particularly concerned with stopping the Lizards’ tanks once they traverse said ditches.”

  “I can see that they would be. How generous of the distinguished German officer to offer his Soviet allies the opportunity to commit suicide under such distinguished circumstances.”

  “If you stick that tongue any farther into your cheek, you’re liable to bite it off,” Bagnall said. As long as he’d known Embry, he and the pilot had dueled to see which of them could wield the twin scalpels of irony and understatement more effectively. He feared Embry had just taken the lead on points.