Striking the Balance

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Striking the Balance Page 30

by Harry Turtledove


  “Yes, sir,” Mutt said. The unspoken corollary to Szymanski’s comment was, or die trying, which struck Mutt as likely. If it struck Szymanski as likely, too, he didn’t let on. Maybe he was a good actor; that was part of being a good officer, same as it was for being a good manager. Or maybe Szymanski didn’t really believe, not down deep, that his own personal private self could ever stop existing. If Szymanski was thirty yet, Mutt figured he was the King of England.

  Mutt was getting close to sixty. The possibility of his own imminent extinction felt only too real. Even before the Lizards came, too many of the friends he’d had since the turn of the century and before had up and dropped dead on him, from heart disease or cancer or TB. Throw bullets and shell fragments into the mix and a fellow got the idea he was living on borrowed time.

  “We’ll have the advantage of surprise,” Szymanski said.

  Of course we will, Mutt thought. The Lizards’ll be surprised—hell, they’ll be amazed—we could be so stupid. He couldn’t say that out loud, worse luck.

  Captain Szymanski pulled a much-folded piece of paper out of his pocket. “Let’s have a look at the map,” he said.

  Daniels and Muldoon crowded close. The map wasn’t anything fancy from the Army Corps of Engineers. Mutt recognized it at once: it had come from a Rand McNally road atlas, the same kind of map bus drivers had used to get his minor-league teams from one little town to the next. He’d used them himself when the drivers got lost, which they did with depressing regularity.

  Szymanski pointed. “The Lizards are holding the territory on the eastern side of the Illinois River, here. Havana, right on the eastern bank where the Spoon flows into the Illinois, is the key to their position along this stretch of the river, and they’ve got one of their prison camps right outside of town. Our objective is breaking in there and getting some of those people out. If we can do it here, maybe we’ll be able to do it down at Cairo and even in St Louis. If we’re going to win this war, we have to break their grip on the Mississippi.”

  “Sir, let’s us worry about doin’ this here little one right,” Mutt said. “We manage that, then the brass can start thinkin’ big.”

  Herman Muldoon nodded vigorously. After a moment, so did Szymanski. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’ve been promised that we’ll have one hell of a diversion laid on when we go tonight. I don’t mean just the stuff on the Spoon River, either. We already know about that; it’s part of the basic plan. But this’ll be something special. I know that much, even if they haven’t told me what it’ll be.”

  “Air support?” Muldoon asked, his voice eager. “When they have some, they don’t want to talk about it, in case somebody gets nabbed and spills his guts.”

  “I don’t know, and what I don’t know I can’t tell you,” Szymanski answered. “If you want to make like that proves your point, go ahead. Don’t go telling the troops that’s what it is, though, because if it turns out not to be, their morale will suffer. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Muldoon said. Mutt nodded. If there wasn’t any air support, or some kind of pretty juicy diversion, a lot more than their morale would suffer. He didn’t say anything about that. Szymanski was still a kid, but he wasn’t a fool. He could figure things out for himself.

  “Any more questions?” Szymanski asked. Mutt didn’t say anything. Neither did Muldoon. The captain folded up the map again and stuck it back in his pocket. “Okay, then. We wait for nightfall and we do it.” He got up and went off to brief his other platoon.

  “He makes it sound easy,” Mutt said. He peered out through the screen of willow branches that hung down into the water and—he devoutly hoped—kept the Lizards on the other side of the Illinois from figuring out what the Americans were up to.

  Ducks quacked on the far side of the river. The marshes over there were a national wildlife refuge. Mutt wished he could row across with a shotgun instead of the tommy gun he was toting. There had been an observation post over there, on top of a steel tower a hundred feet high. That had given the game wardens a dandy view of poachers. These days, it would have given the Lizards a dandy view of the surrounding countryside, but it had been blown up in one round or another of the fighting over central Illinois.

  Troops were scattered up and down the river, to escape detection if possible and to seem like routine patrols if they were spotted. Mutt and Muldoon made the rounds, telling the men what Szymanski had told them. It wasn’t fresh news; they’d been getting ready for this mission quite a while now. Telling them one more time what they were supposed to do wasn’t going to hurt, though. More times than he could count, Mutt had seen a ballplayer swing when he’d got the bunt sign or take when the hit and run was on. Somebody was still likely to foul up some way or other, even after a last go-round. Mutt had long since given up expecting perfection in men or their plans.

  Twilight fell, then darkness. In the water, a fish leaped and fell back with a splash. Back when Mutt had gone through this country in his minor-league playing days, they’d taken more fish out of the Illinois than from any other river save the Columbia. It wasn’t like that now, not with so many factories pouring filth into the water, but you could still do all right with a rod and reel, or even with a pole and a string and a hook.

  Mutt looked down at his watch. The softly glowing numbers and hands told him it was a quarter to ten. “Into the boats,” he whispered. “And quietly, God damn it, or we’re dead meat before we even get goin’.”

  At exactly ten o’clock by his watch, he and the rest of the company started rowing down the Illinois toward Havana. The oars seemed to make a dreadful racket as they dipped into the water and splashed out again, but no Lizard machine guns opened up on the far side of the river. Mutt sighed with relief. He’d been afraid they were heading into a trap right from the start.

  At 10:02, artillery and mortars and machine guns opened up on Havana from the west and south. “Right on time,” Mutt said; in the sudden chaos, noise from the boats mattered a lot less.

  The Lizards reacted promptly, with artillery of their own and with small-arms fire. Daniels tried to gauge whether they were shifting troops from the camp, which was north of Havana, to meet the noisy, obvious threat the Americans were showing them. For his sake, he hoped they were.

  A hot yellow glow sprang up in the southwest and swiftly spread toward Havana. Mutt wanted to whoop with glee, but had the good sense to keep his voice down: “They really went and did it, boys. They lit off the Spoon River.”

  “How many gallons of gas and oil did they pour into it before they lit a match?” somebody in the boat said. “How long could that stuff keep a tank running, or a plane?”

  “I dunno,” Mutt answered. “I figure they’re usin’ it against the enemy this way, too, an’ if it rattles the Lizards so much that they forget to shoot at me, I ain’t gonna complain. Now come on, boys, we gotta pull like bastards, get across the Illinois before the Spoon runs into it. We don’t manage that”—he let out a wheezy chuckle—“our goose is cooked.”

  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 to
o 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 get my 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 in Snow White or Fantasia. 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?”

 

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