Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “No, ma’am, not like you mean. He’ll be okay in a minute or two. Why don’t you go on back to your place?” Jens kept his eyes on the pavement in front of him, but he couldn’t help listening to Barbara’s receding-rapidly receding-footsteps. Oscar hauled him to his feet with the same emotionless strength he’d shown before. “Let me dust you off, sir,” he said, and started to do just that.

  Jens knocked his hands away. “Fuck you,” he gasped with all the air he had in him. He didn’t care if he turned blue and died after that, and what with the way he still couldn’t breathe, he thought he just might.

  “Yes, sir,” Oscar said, tonelessly still. Just then, Jens’ motor finally turned over, and he managed a long, wonderful mouthful of air. Oscar nodded in approval. “There you go, sir. Not too bad. When you get on that bike, I’ll ride with you to BOQ, and tomorrow you can see about getting yourself a new guard.”

  “Won’t be soon enough,” Jens said, louder now that his lungs were following orders again.

  “If you’ll forgive me, sir, I feel the same way,” Oscar replied.

  Snarling, Jens stalked back to his bicycle, Oscar right on his heels. Jens rocketed away from the university. Oscar stuck with him; he’d already found out he couldn’t shake the guard. He wasn’t really trying-he was just doing his best to get rid of his own rage.

  Gravel kicked up under his wheels as he banked his weight to the side for the right turn from University to Alameda and on to Lowry Field. Of all the places in the world, Lowry Field BOQ was the last one he wanted to go. But where else was he supposed to sleep tonight?

  For a moment, he didn’t care about that, either. As the air base approached, all he wanted to do was keep on going, past the BOQ, past the endlessly cratered, endlessly repaired runways, past everything-keep on going to somewhere better than this stinking place, this stinking life.

  You keep on going the direction you’re headed in, you’ll end up in Lizard country, an interior voice reminded him. That was enough, for now, to make him swing the bike up toward BOQ like a good little boy.

  But even as he and Oscar parked their bicycles side by side, he was looking east again.

  “Come on, you mis’able lugs-get movin’,” Mutt Daniels growled. Rain ran off his helmet and down the back of his neck That never would’ve happened with an old limey-style tin hat, he thought resentfully. The anger put an extra snap in his voice as he added, “We ain’t on the newsreels today.”

  “We ain’t south o’ Bloomington no more, neither,” Dracula Szabo put in.

  “You are painfully, correct, Private Szabo,” Lucille Potter said in her precise, schoohmarmish voice. She pointed ahead to the complex of low, stout buildings just coming into view through the curtains of rain. “That looks to be Pontiac State Penitentiary up there.”

  When they got a little closer, Szabo grunted. “Looks like somebody kicked the sh-uh, the tar out of it, too.”

  “Us ‘n’ the Lizards must have done fought over this stretch of ground last year,” Mutt said. The penitentiary complex looked like any fortified area that had been a battleground a few times, which is to say, not a whole lot of it was left standing. A bullet-pocked wall here, half a building a hundred yards over that way, another wall somewhere else-the rest was rubble.

  Bloomington lay thirty-five bloody miles behind Mutt now. Most of it was rubble, too, now that the Lizards had run the Army out again. That made three times the town had changed hands in the past year. Even If the lizards went home and the war ended tomorrow, Mutt thought, the U.S.A. would be years pulling itself back up on its pins. He’d never imagined his own country turning into something that looked like the worst he’d seen in France in 1918.

  He did his best not to think about that. A sergeant, like a manager, had to keep his mind on what was happening now-you could lose the trees for the forest if you weren’t careful. Officers got paid to worry about forests. Mutt said, “Any place better’n this we can camp?”

  From behind him, somebody said, “It’s got good protection, Sarge.”

  “I know it does, from the ground, anyway,” Daniels said. “But If the Lizards bomb us, we’re sittin’ ducks.”

  “There’s a park-Riverview Park, I think the name of it is,” Lucille Potter said. “I’ve been there once or twice. The Vermilion River winds around three sides of it. Plenty of trees there, and benches, and an auditorium, too, if anything is left of it. It’s not far.”

  “You know how to get there from here?” Mutt asked. When Lucille nodded, he said, “Okay, Riverview Park it is.” He raised his voice: “Hey, Freddie, look alive up there. Miss Lucille’s comin’ up on point with you. She knows where a decent place for us to lay our bodies down is at.” I hope, he added to himself.

  He’d seen a lot of parks in Illinois, and knew what to expect: rolling grass, plenty of trees, places where you could start a fire for a cookout, probably a place to rent a fishing boat, too, since the park was on a river. The grass would be hay length now, most likely; he didn’t figure anybody would have mowed it since the Lizards came.

  Lucille Potter found Riverview Park without any trouble. Whether it was worth finding was another question. Once, in one of those crazy magazines Sam Yeager used to read, Mutt had seen a picture of the craters of the moon. Add in mud and the occasional tree that hadn’t been blown to pieces and you’d have a pretty good idea of what the park was like.

  Daniels wondered if enough trees still stood to offer his squad decent cover from Lizard air attack. The rain wouldn’t stop the scaly sons of bitches; he’d already seen that They weren’t a whole lot less accurate in bad weather than in good, either. He didn’t know how they managed that. He just wished to the dripping heavens that they weren’t able to do it.

  From up ahead Freddie Laplace called, “There’s bones stickin’ up outta the ground.”

  “Yeah? So what?’ Mutt answered. “This here place been fought over two-three times, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “I know that, Sarge,” Laplace answered in an injured voice. “Thing of it is, some of ’em look like they’re Lizard bones.” He sounded half intrigued, half sick.

  “What’s’ that?” Lucille Potter said sharply. “Let me see those, Frederick.”

  Mutt went over to have a look at what Freddie had found, too. Lizard bones were the most interesting thing Riverview Park had to offer, as far as he was concerned. If he didn’t take a gander at them, he’d have to get out his entrenching tool and start digging himself a hole in the torn-up mud.

  Squelch, squelch, squelch. His boots threatened to come off at every step. The rain kept pattering down. Mutt sighed. Too damn bad you couldn’t call a war on account of rain. Or on second thought, maybe not. On the ground if not in the air, the storm probably slowed down the Lizards worse than it did the Americans. “Course, we were slower to start with,” he muttered under his breath.

  Freddie Laplace, a skinny little guy with a highly developed sense of self-preservation, pointed down into a shell hole that was rapidly turning into a pond. Sure enough, white bones stuck out of the dirt. “Those never came from no human bein’, Sarge,” Freddie said.

  “You’re right,” Lucille, Potter answered. “Those never came from any creature on Earth.”

  “Just look like arm bones to me,” Mutt said. “Yeah, they got claws ‘stead of fingers, but so what?” He wrinkled his nose. “Still got some old meat on ’em, too.” The rain banished the worst of the after-the-battle stench, but not all of it.

  Lucille let out an impatient sniff. “Use your eyes, Mutt. You must know that people have two long bones in their forearms and one in their upper arms. See for yourself-with the Lizards it’s just the opposite.”

  “Well, I’ll be a-” The memory of his father’s callused hand kept Mutt from saying what he’d be. Now that Lucille pointed it out, though, he saw she was right. His knowledge of anatomy came from no formal study, but from farming and from dealing with players who hurt themselves on the field-and with his own injur
ies, back when he was playing himself. Now that his attention was focused, he added, “I never seen any wrist bones like those, neither.”

  “They have to be different from ours,” Lucille said. “A human wrist pivots the hand off two bones, these off only one. The muscle attachments would be very different, too, but we can’t see much of them any more.”

  Freddie Laplace worked at the mud with his entrenching tool, not to dig in but to expose more of the dead Lizard’s skeleton. In spite of the rain, the dead-meat stink grew bad enough to make Mutt cough. He’d already seen that Lizards bled red. Now he learned they had no more dignity in death than men slain the same way.

  “Lord, I wonder what happens to ’em come Judgment Day?” he said, very much as if he were asking the Deity. He’d been raised a hardshell Baptist, and never bothered to question his childhood faith after he grew to manhood. But if God had made the Lizards at some time or other during Creation (and on which day would that have been?), would He resurrect them in the body come the Last Day? Mutt figured preachers somewhere were getting hot and bothered about that.

  Freddie exposed some of the alien corpse’s ribcage. “Ain’t that peculiar?” he said. “More like latticework than a proper cage.”

  “How come you know so much about it?” Mutt asked him. “My old man, he runs a butcher shop up in Bangor, Maine,” Laplace answered. “There’s one thing I seen a lot of, Sarge, it’s bones.”

  Mutt nodded, conceding the point Lucille Potter said, “That latticework arrangement is very strong-the English used it for the skeletons of their Blenheim and Wellington bombers.”

  “Is that a fact?” Daniels said. He was just making talk, though; if Miss Lucille said something was so, you could take it to the bank.

  She asked Freddie, “Do you think you can dig out his skull for me?”

  “I’ll give it a try, ma’am,” Laplace said, as If she’d asked him up to the blackboard for a tough multiplication problem he thought he could do. He started scraping away more mud with the folding shovel. Lucille Potter made little eager noises, as if he were digging up a brand-new Chevy (not that there were any brand-new Chevies) and enough gas to run it for a year.

  Try and figure women, Mutt thought, as he watched Lucille take a scalpel from her little case of instruments. A dead Lizard interested her… but a live sergeant didn’t.

  Mutt sighed. He thought Lucille liked him well enough. He knew he liked her well enough, and then some. He knew she knew that, too; she could hardly have doubted it after the kiss he’d given her when he used her bottle of ether to take out the Lizard tank. But the spark that jumped one way didn’t come back the other.

  He wondered if she’d left a sweetheart behind when she signed up as an Army nurse. He had his doubts about that; she had maiden lady written all over her. Just my luck he thought.

  He was not a man to spend a lot of time brooding over what he couldn’t help. If he had been that sort of man, years of catching and then of managing would have changed him into a different sort: too many decisions to let any one reach earthshaking proportions, even if it didn’t work. If you couldn’t understand that down in your guts, you were liable to end up like Willard Hershberger, the Reds’ catcher who’d cut his throat in a New York hotel room after he called the pitch Mel Ott hit into the Polo Grounds stands for a ninth-inning game-winning homer.

  And so Mutt went around to see that the rest of his squad was well dug in and that Dracula Szabo had picked a spot with a good field of fire for his BAR Daniels didn’t expect to be attacked here, but you never could tell.

  “We got anything decent for chow tonight, Sarge?” Szabo asked.

  “C-rations, I expect, and damn lucky to have those,” Mutt answered. “Better’n what we ever saw in France; you can believe that.” The only real thing Daniels had against the canned rations was that the supply boys had trouble getting enough of them into the field to keep him from being hungry more than he liked. With the Lizards controlling the air, logistics got real sticky.

  Szabo had what Mutt thought of as a city slicker’s face: controlled, knowing, often with an expression that seemed to say he’d be laughing at you if only you were worth laughing at. It was a face that ached for a slap. Whether it did or whether it didn’t, though, Dracula had his uses. Now he reached under his poncho and showed Mutt three dead chickens. “Reckon we can do some better than C-rats,” he said smugly, grinning like a fox who’d just raided the hen coop.

  That was probably Just what he was, too, Mutt thought. He said “We ain’t supposed to forage on our own people,” but his heart wasn’t in it. Roast chicken did go down better than canned stew.

  “Aw, Sarge, they were just struttin’ around, no people anywhere close,” Szabo said, as innocently as if he were telling the truth. Maybe more innocently.

  But he knew as well as Mutt that Mutt wasn’t going to call him on it. “I’m right glad o’ that,” Daniels said. “You go, ah, findin’ chickens where there is people around, you’ll have Miss Lucille diggin’ pellets outta your ass. Birdshot if you’re lucky, buckshot if you ain’t.”

  “Not while I’m luggin’ a BAR,” Szabo said with quiet assurance. “Didn’t Miss Lucille say something about an auditorium somewhere in this park? If there’s any roof at all, cooking these birds gets a lot easier.”

  Mutt looked around. Riverview Park was good-sized, and with the rain coming down in curtains he couldn’t see anything that looked like a building. “I’ll ask her where it’s at,” he said, and sloshed back to where she was playing mad scientist with the late, unlamented Lizard’s remains.

  “Look at this, Mutt,” Lucille said when he came up. She used her scalpel to point enthusiastically at the Lizard’s jaws. “Lots of little teeth, all pretty much the same, not specialized like ours.”

  “Yeah, I seen that when I captured a couple live ones not long after they invaded us,” Mutt answered, averting his eyes; the skull had enough rotting meat still on it to threaten to kill his appetite.

  “You captured Lizards, Sarge?” Freddie Laplace sounded impressed as all get out Lucille just took it in stride, the way she did most things. Mutt would have been happier had it been the other way around.

  Nothing he could do about it, though. He asked her where the auditorium was; she pointed eastward. He slogged in that direction, hoping some of the place was still intact. Sure enough, he discovered that, although it had taken a shell hit that left one wall only a baby brickyard, the rest seemed sound enough.

  In the rain, finding anything more than fifty yards away wasn’t easy. Mud thin as bad diarrhea slopped over his boot tops and soaked his socks. He hoped he wouldn’t come down with pneumonia or the grippe.

  “Halt! Who goes?” Szabo’s voice came out of the water, as if from behind a falls. Daniels couldn’t see him at all. Dracula might be a chicken thief, but he made a pretty fair soldier.

  “It’s me,” Mutt called. “Found that auditorium place. You want to give me them birds, I’ll cook ’em for you. I grew up on a farm; reckon I’ll do a better job than you would anyways.”

  “Yeah, okay. Come on this way.” Szabo stood up so Mutt could spot him. “Not gonna be any Lizards around for a while, though, Sarge-is it okay if I wander over there in an hour or so, and you’ll make sure there’s some dark meat left for me?”

  “I think maybe we can do that,” Daniels said. “You put somebody here on your weapon before you go wandering, though, you hear me? In case we do have trouble, we’re gonna need all the firepower we can get our hands on.”

  “Don’t you worry about that, Sarge,” Szabo said. “Even roast chicken ain’t worth gettin’ my ass shot off for.” He spoke with great conviction. From any other dogface in the squad, Daniels would have found that convincing. With Szabo, you never could tell.

  He took the chickens back to the auditorium. Whoever had been there last, Americans or Lizards, had chopped up a lot of the folding wooden seats that faced the stage: more than they’d used for their fires. Taking advantag
e of the free lumber, Mutt built his blaze on the concrete floor where others had made theirs before him.

  He pulled out his trusty Zippo. He wondered how long it would stay trusty. He had a package of flints in his shirt pocket, but the Zippo was burning kerosene these days, not lighter fluid, and he didn’t know when he’d come across any more kerosene, either. For now, it still gave him a flame on the first try.

  He quickly found out why the previous occupants of the auditorium had been so eager to use the seats for fuel: the varnish that made them shiny also made them catch fire with the greatest of ease. He went back out into the rain to throw away the chicken guts and to get some sticks on which to skewer the pieces of chicken he was going to cook.

  His belly growled when the savory smell of roasting meat came through the smoke from the fire. His grandfathers would have done their cooking in the War Between the States the same way he was now, except they’d have used lucifer matches instead of the Zippo to get the fire going.

  “Chow!” he yelled when he had a fair number of pieces finished. Men straggled in by ones and twos, ate quickly, and went back out into the rain. When Lucille Potter came in for hers, Mutt asked jokingly, “You wash your hands before supper?”

  “You’d best believe I did-and with soap, too.” Being a nurse, Lucille was in dead earnest about cleanliness. “Did you wash yours before you cleaned these birds and cut them up?”

  “Well, you might say so,” Mutt answered; his hands had certainly been wet, anyhow. “Didn’t use soap, though.”

  Had Lucille Potter’s stare been any fishier, she’d have grown fins. Before she could say anything, Szabo strolled into the auditorium. “You save me a drumstick, Sarge?”

  “Here’s a whole leg, kid,” Mutt said. The BAR man blissfully started gnawing away. Daniels took half a breast off the fire, waved it in the air to cool it down, and also began to eat. He had to pause a couple of times to spit out burnt bits of feather; he’d done a lousy job of plucking the chickens.