Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  As if picking the thought from his head, Skorzeny said, “I’d better move along. I need to get this beast under cover as quick as I can, then arrange to ship it back to Germany so the lads with the high foreheads and the thick glasses can figure out what makes it tick.”

  “Can you wait long enough for me to look inside?” Without waiting for an answer, Jager scrambled up onto the upper deck of the fighting compartment and stuck his head through the driver’s hatch. He envied the Lizards the compactness their smaller body size allowed; Skorzeny must have been bent almost double in there.

  The driver’s controls and instruments were a curious mix of the familiar and the strange. The wheel, the foot pedals (though there was no clutch), and the shift lever might have come from a German panzer. But the driver’s instrument panel, with screens and dials full of unfamiliar curlicues that had to be Lizard letters and numbers, looked complicated enough to have belonged in the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190.

  In spite of that, the space wasn’t cluttered: very much on the contrary. Refined was the word that crossed Jager’s mind as he contemplated the layout. In any German panzer-any human panzer-not everything was exactly where it would most efficiently belong. Sometimes you couldn’t see a dial without moving your head, or reach for your submachine gun without banging your wrist against a projecting piece of metal. None of that here-all such tiny flaws had been designed out of the area. He wondered how long the Lizards had been making little progressive changes to get everything both perfect and perfectly finished. A long time, he suspected.

  He climbed up onto the top of the turret, undogged the commander’s cupola. Ignoring Skorzeny’s impatient growl, he slithered down into the turret. This was where he belonged in a panzer, where he could most easily judge what was similar and what was different about the way the Lizards did things.

  Again, he noticed refinement. No sharp edges, no outthrust chunks of metal anywhere. You could, if you were Lizard-sized, move around without fear of banging your head, Then he noticed the turret had no loader’s seat, just as there’d been no hull gunner’s position in the Lizard panzer’s forward compartment. Did the gunner or commander have to load shells, then? He couldn’t believe it. That would badly slow the panzer’s rate of fire, and he knew from bitter experience the Lizards could shoot quicker than their German counterparts.

  Some of the gadgetry that filled the turret without crowding it had to be an automatic loader, then. He wondered how it worked. No time to wonder, not now, except to hope German engineers could copy it. The gunner’s station, like the driver’s instrument panel, was a lot more complex than he was used to. He wondered how the Lizard who sat there could figure out what he needed to do in time to do it. Pilots managed, so maybe the gunner could, too. No-again from experience, certainly the gunner could, too.

  Skorzeny’s voice, peremptory now, came down through the open cupola: “Get your arse out of there, Jager. I’m going to drive this beast away right now.”

  Regretfully-he hadn’t seen all he wanted-Jager slithered out and dropped down to the ground. The SS man climbed up onto the deck of the Lizard panzer and got back into the forward compartment. He was thicker through the waist than Jager and had a devil of a time squeezing in, but he managed.

  Back when the Wehrmacht first ran into the Russian T-34, there’d been talk of building an exact copy. In the end, the Germans didn’t do that, although the Panther incorporated a lot of the T-34’s best features. If the Reich copied this Lizard panzer, Jager thought, they’d have to train ten-year-olds to crew it. Nobody else really fit.

  Skorzeny started up the motor. It was amazingly quiet, and didn’t belch clouds of stinking fumes-refinement again. Jager wondered what it used for fuel. Skorzeny put it in gear and drove off. Jager stared after him, shaking his head. The man was an arrogant bastard, but he accomplished things nobody in his right mind would dream of trying, let alone pulling off.

  Atvar glowered at the male who stood stiffly in front of his desk. “You did not clean out that clutch of ginger-lickers as thoroughly as you should have,” he said.

  “The exalted fleetlord is correct,” Drefsab replied tonelessly. “He may of course punish me as he sees fit.”

  Some of Atvar’s anger evaporated. Drefsab had himself been trapped in ginger addiction; that he worked at all against his corrupted colleagues gave the fleetlord a weapon he would otherwise have had to do without. Nevertheless, he snapped, “A landcruiser disappearing! I never would have thought it possible.”

  “Which is probably just how it happened, Exalted Fleetlord,” Drefsab said: “No one else thought it was possible, either, and so no one took the precautions that would have kept it from happening.”

  “That Big Ugly with the scar again,” Atvar said. “They all look alike, but that male’s disfigurement makes him stand out. He has given us nothing but grief-the landcruiser now, and spiriting Mussolini away from right under our muzzles… and I have some reason to believe he was involved in the raid where the Big Uglies hijacked our scattered nuclear material.”

  “Skorzeny.” Drefsab turned the sibilants at the beginning and. middle of the name into long hisses.

  “That is what Deutsch propaganda called him after the Mussolini fiasco, yes,” Atvar said. “In spite of your unfortunate taste for ginger, Drefsab, you’remain, I believe, the most effective operative I have available to me.”

  “The exalted fleetlord is gracious enough to overestimate my capacities,” Drefsab murmured.

  “I had better not be overestimating them,” Atvar said. “My orders for you are simple: I want you to rid Tosev 3 of this Skorzeny, by whatever means become necessary. Losing him will hurt the Deutsche more than losing a hundred landcruisers. And the Deutsche, along with the British and the Americans, are the most troublesome and ingeniously obstreperous Big Uglies there are, which, considering the nature of the Big Uglies, is saying a great deal. He must be eliminated and you are the male to do it.”

  Drefsab saluted. “Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done.”

  After several months’ living and travel in places mostly without electricity, Sam Yeager had all but forgotten how wonderful having the stuff could be. The reasons weren’t always the obvious ones, either. Keeping food fresh was great, sure. So was having light at night, even if you did need blackout curtains so the Lizards wouldn’t spot it. But he hadn’t realized how much he missed the movies till he got to see one again.

  Part of the feeling sprang from the company he kept. Having Barbara on the plush seat beside him, her hand warm in his, would have put a warm glow on anything this side of going to the dentist (not a major concern for Yeager anyhow, not with his store-bought teeth). Later, his hand would probably drop to her thigh. In the dim cavern of the movie theater, nobody was likely to notice, or to care if he did notice.

  But part of what Sam got from the movies had nothing to do with Barbara. For a couple of hours, he could forget how miserable the world outside this haven on Sixteenth Street looked and pretend what happened on the screen was what mattered.

  “Funny,” he whispered to Barbara as they waited for the projectionist to start the newsreel: “I can get out of myself with a good story in a magazine or a book, but watching a show is more special somehow.”

  “Reading lets me get away from things, too,” she answered, “but a lot of people can’t escape that way. I feel sorry for them, but I know it’s true. The other thing is, when you’re reading, you’re by yourself. Here you’re with lots of other people looking for the same release you’re after. It makes a difference.”

  “I found what I was after,” Sam said, and squeezed her hand. She turned to smile at him. Before she could say anything, the lights dimmed and the big screen at the front of the theater came to sparkling life.

  The newsreel wasn’t the smoothly professional production it would have been before the Lizards came. Yeager didn’t know whether the aliens held Hollywood itself, but the distribution system for new films coming out of Californi
a had completely broken down.

  What the moviegoers got instead was a U.S. Army production, probably put together right here in Denver. Some of the bits had sound added, some used cards with words on them, something Sam remembered from silent film days but had thought to be gone for good.

  EASTERN FRANCE one of those cards announced. The camera panned slowly, lovingly, across burned-out Lizard tanks. A tough-looking fellow in German uniform walked among the wreckage.

  People cheered wildly. Barbara murmured, “Has everyone forgotten the Nazis were our worst enemies a year ago?”

  “Yes,” Yeager whispered back. He had no love for the Nazis, but if they were hurting the Lizards, more power to ’em. He hadn’t loved the Russian Reds last year, either, but he’d been damn glad they were in the fight against Hitler.

  Another card flashed, MOSCOW. There stood Stalin, shaking hands with a factory worker in a cloth cap. Behind them, a row of almost-completed airplanes stretched as far as the eye-or the camera-could see. Yet another card said, THE SOVIET UNION STAYS IN THE FIGHT. More cheers echoed through the movie theater.

  The next segment had sound; a fellow with a flat midwestern accent said, “Outside of Bloomington, the Lizards banged their snouts into tough American resistance as they tried to push north toward Chicago again.” Another picture of a wrecked Lizard tank was followed by shots of tired-looking but happy GIs around a campfire.

  Yeager almost bounced out of his chair. “There’s Mutt, by God!” he told Barbara. “My old manager, I mean. Jesus, I wonder how he lived through all the fighting. He’s got sergeant’s stripes, too-did you see?”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized him, Sam. He wasn’t my manager,” she answered, which made him feel foolish. She added, “I’m glad he’s all right.”

  “Boy, so am I,” he said, “I’ve played for some real hard cases in my day, but he was one of the other kind, the good ones. He-” People to either side and behind made shushing noises. Yeager subsided, abashed.

  The newsreel cut to a card that said, SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S.A. “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!” the announcer said.

  In the black-and-white film, Franklin D. Roosevelt sat behind a desk in what looked like a hotel room. The drapes were drawn behind him, perhaps merely to give him a backdrop, perhaps to keep the Lizards from figuring out where he was by what the camera showed out the window.

  Roosevelt was in his shirtsleeves, his collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He looked tired and worn, but kept the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle in his mouth. He still had cigarettes, Yeager noted without resentment: FDR was working hard enough to be entitled to them.

  The President took the holder from his mouth, stubbed out the cigarette instead of letting it smolder to add a picturesque plume of smoke to the scene. He leaned toward the microphone in front of him. “My friends,” he said (and Yeager felt Roosevelt was speaking straight to him), “the fight goes on.”

  Applause rippled through the theater, then quickly faded so people could listen to what the President had to say. Even his first half-dozen words gave Sam fresh hope. FDR had always had that gift. He hadn’t always made things better, but he’d always made people feel they would get better, which was half the battle by itself-it made people go to work to improve their own lot instead of moaning about how dreadful everything was.

  Roosevelt said, “The enemy is on our soil and in the air above our homes. These creatures from another world believe they can frighten us into surrender by raining destruction down on our heads. As our gallant British allies did with the Germans in 1940, we shall prove them wrong.

  “Every day we have more new weapons to hurl against the Lizards. Every day they have less with which to resist. Those of you who still live free, everything you do to help the war effort helps ensure that your children, and your children’s children, will grow up in freedom, too. And to those of you in occupied territory who may see this, I say: do not collaborate with the enemy in any way. Do not work in his factories, do not grow crops for him, do nothing you can possibly avoid. Without human beings to be his slaves, sooner or later he will be helpless.

  “For we have hurt him, in America, in Europe, and in Asia as well. He is not superhuman, he is merely inhuman. Our united nations-now all the nations on this planet-will surely triumph in the end. Thank you and God bless you.”

  The next news segment showed ways to conserve scrap metal. It had a soundtrack, but Yeager didn’t pay much attention to it. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Just hearing FDR’s voice was a tonic. Roosevelt made you think everything would turn out okay, one way or another.

  The newsreel ended with a burst of patriotic music. Sam sighed; now he’d have “The Stars and Stripes Forever” noisily going around in his head for the next several days. It happened every time he heard the song.

  “Here comes the real movie,” somebody near him said as the opening credits for You’re in the Army Now filled the screen. Yeager had seen it, four or five times since it came out in 1941. New movies just weren’t getting out these days, and even if they did, they often couldn’t have been shown, because electricity was lost in so many places.

  When he’d seen the antics of Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante and the horrified reactions of their superior officers before, they’d left him limp with laughter. Now that he was in the Army himself, they didn’t seem so funny any more. Soldiers like that would have endangered their buddies. He wanted to give both comics a swift kick in the rear.

  Beside him, though, Barbara laughed at the capers they cut. Sam tried to enjoy the escape with her. The musical numbers helped: they reminded him this was Hollywood, not anything real. Getting angry at the actors for doing what was in the script, didn’t do him any good. Once he’d figured that out, he was able to lean back and enjoy the movie again.

  The house lights came up. Barbara let out a long sigh, as If she didn’t feel like coming back to the real world. Given its complications, Yeager didn’t much blame her. But the world was there, and you had to deal with it whether you wanted to or not.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s pick up our bikes and head back to the university.”

  Barbara sighed again, then yawned. “I suppose so. When we get back there, I think I want to lie down for a while. I’m so tired all the time these days.” She managed a wan smile. “I’ve heard this is what being expecting is supposed to do to you, and boy, it sure does.”

  “We’ll take it nice and easy on the way back,” said Yeager, who was still inclined to treat Barbara as if she were made of cut glass ad liable to break if jostled. “you’rest, and I’ll go round up Ullhass and Ristin.”

  “Okay, Sam.”

  Outside the theater, a herd of bicycles covered the sidewalk and the street by the curb. Keeping an eye on them, in lieu of a sheepdog, was a large, burly fellow, with a.45 on his hip. With no gas available for private cars, bikes had become the way of choice to get around, and stealing them as big a problem as horse theft in Denver’s younger days. As many people packed a gun now as they had in the old days, too; an unarmed guard wouldn’t have done much good.

  Most of Denver was laid out on a north-south, east-west grid. The downtown area, though, nestled into the angle of the Platte River and Cherry Creek, turned that grid at a forty-five-degree angle. Yeager and Barbara pedaled southeast down Sixteenth Street to Broadway, one of the main north-south thoroughfares.

  The Pioneer Monument at the corner of Broadway and Colfax caught Sam’s eye. Around the fountain were three reclining bronzes: a prospector, a hunter, and a pioneer mother. At the top of the monument stood a mounted scout.

  On him Yeager turned a critical gaze. “I’ve seen statues that looked realer,” he remarked, pointing.

  “He does look more like an oversized mantelpiece ornament than a pioneer, doesn’t he?” Barbara said. They both laughed.

  They turned left onto Colfax. Bicycles, people on foot, horse and mule-drawn wagons, and quite a few folks riding ho
rses made traffic, if anything, dicier than it had been when cars and trucks dominated. Then everything had moved more or less at the same speed. Now the ponderous wagons were almost like ambulatory roadblocks, but you went around them at your peril, too, because a lot of them were big enough to hide what was alongside till too late.

  The gilded dome of the three-story granite State Capitol on Colfax dominated the city skyline. On the west lawn of the capitol building stood a Union soldier in bronze, flanked by two Civil War brass cannon.

  Yeager pointed to the statue. He said, “Going up against the Lizards, sometimes I felt the way he would if he had to fight today’s Germans or Japs with his muzzleloader and those guns.”

  “There’s an unpleasant thought,” Barbara said. They pedaled along; on the east lawn of the capitol stood an Indian, also in bronze. She nodded to that statue. “I suppose he felt the same way when he had to fight the white man’s guns with nothing better than a bow and arrow.”

  “Yeah, he probably did at that,” said Sam, who’d never thought to look at it from the Indian’s perspective. “He got guns of his own, though, and he hit us some pretty good licks, too-at least, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in General Custer’s boots.”

  “You’re right.” But instead of cheering up, Barbara looked glum. “Even though the Indians hit us some good licks, they lost-look at the United States now, or the way it was before the Lizards came, anyway. Does that mean we’ll lose to the Lizards, even if we do hurt them in the fight?”

  “I don’t know.” Sam chewed on that for the next block or so. “Not necessarily,” he said at last. “The Indians never did figure out how to make their own guns and gunpowder; they always had to get ’em from white men.” He looked around to make sure nobody was paying undue attention to their conversation before he went on, “But we’re well on our way to making bombs to match the ones the Lizards have.”