Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “It shall be done,” Teerts said, and swung his killercraft in the direction ordered.

  For Rance Auerbach, the war was over. For a while there, he’d thought he was over. He’d wished he was, with a bullet in the chest and another in the leg. Rachel Hines had tried to drag him back to the American lines after he was hit. He remembered coming to in the middle of that, a memory he wouldn’t have kept if he’d had any choice in the matter.

  Then the Lizards, sallying out of Karval against the cavalry raiders he’d led, got close. He remembered blood bubbling from his nose and mouth as he’d croaked—he’d tried to yell—for Rachel to get the hell out of there. He’d figured he was done for anyhow, and why should they get her, too?

  The one good memory he had from that dreadful time was the kiss on the cheek she’d given him: not an attention he would have wanted from most cavalry troopers. He hoped she’d got away. He didn’t know whether she had or not; his lights had gone out again right about then.

  Next thing he knew, he was in Karval, which was a hell of a mess after the shelling the Americans had given it. A harassed-looking human doctor was sprinkling sulfa powder into the wound in his thigh, while a Lizard who had red crosses in white circles added to his Lizardly body paint watched with two-eye-turreted fascination.

  Auerbach had tried to raise his right arm to let the doc—and the Lizard who looked to be a doctor, too—know he was among those present. That was when he noticed the needle stuck in his vein and the tubing that led up to the plasma bottle a young woman was holding.

  The motion was feeble, but the girl noticed it and exclaimed. He’d been too woozy to notice her face, which was masked anyhow, but he recognized her voice. He’d lost Rachel Hines, but now he’d found Penny Summers.

  “You understand me?” the human doctor had asked. When he’d managed a quarter-inch’s worth of nod, the fellow had gone on, “Just in case you’re wondering, you’re a POW, and so am I. If it weren’t for the Lizards, odds are you’d be dead. They know more about asepsis than we’ll learn in a lifetime. I think you’re gonna make it. You’ll walk again, too—after a while.” At that moment, walking hadn’t been the biggest thing on his mind. Breathing had seemed plenty hard enough.

  Now that the Lizard armor had moved out of Karval, the aliens were using it as a center for wounded prisoners they’d taken. Pretty soon, the few battered buildings left in town weren’t enough to hold everybody. They’d run up tents of a briliant and hideous orange, one to a patient. Auerbach had been in one for several days now.

  He didn’t see the doctor as often as he had at first. Lizards came by to look him over several times a day. So did human nurses, Penny Summers as often as any and maybe more often than most. The first couple of times he needed it, he found the bedpan mortifyingly embarrassing. After that, he stopped worrying about it: it wasn’t as if he had a choice.

  “How’d they get you?” he asked Penny. His voice was a croaking whisper, he hardly had breath enough to blow out a match.

  She shrugged. “We were evacuating wounded out of Lamar when the Lizards were comin’ in. You know how that was—they didn’t just come in, they rolled right on through. They scooped us up like a kid netting sunfish, but they let us go on takin’ care of hurt people, and that’s what I’ve been doin’ ever since.”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, they seem to play by the rules, pretty much, anyhow.” He paused to get some more air, then asked. “How’s the war going?”

  “Can’t hardly tell,” she answered. “Ain’t no people around here with radios, none I know about, anyways. I’ll say this much, though—they been shippin’ a whole lot o’ POWs back here lately. That’s liable to mean they’re winning, isn’t it?”

  “Liable to, yeah,” he said. He wanted to cough, but held what little breath he had till the urge went away. He’d coughed once or twice already, and it felt as if his chest was going to rip to pieces. When he could speak again, he went on, “Do you know what kind of casualties they’re taking?”

  She shook her head. “No way for me to tell. They ship their own wounded back somewheres else.”

  “Ah,” he said, then shook his head—carefully, because that pulled at the stitches that were holding him together. Boris Karloff might have had more when he played in Frankenstein, but not a whole lot. “Darned if I know why I’m even bothering to ask. It’s going to be a long time before I’m able to worry about that kind of stuff.”

  He said it that way to keep from thinking it would never matter to him again. If his chest healed. If his leg healed, he’d eventually go to a real POW camp, and maybe there, however many months away that was, he could start planning how to escape. If his chest healed but his leg didn’t, he wouldn’t be going anywhere—nowhere fast, anyhow. If his leg healed but his chest didn’t . . . well, in that case, they’d stick a lily in his hand and plant him.

  Penny looked at him, looked down at the shiny stuff—it was like thick cellophane, but a lot tougher—the Lizards had used to cover the dirt on which they’d set up the tent, then back at him again. In a low voice, she said, “Bet you wish now you would have laid me when you had the chance.”

  He laughed, panted, laughed again. “You really want to know, I’ve been wishing that ever since the Lizards bombed Lamar. But look at me.” His left arm worked, more or less. He gestured with it. “Not much I can do about that now, so why worry about it?”

  “No, you can’t, that’s so.” Penny’s eyes kindled. She knelt beside the government-issue cot on which he was lying and flipped back the blanket. “But I can.” She laughed as she took him in hand and bent over him. “If I hear anybody comin’, I’ll make like I was givin’ you the bedpan.”

  He gasped when her mouth came down on him. He didn’t know whether he’d rise. He didn’t know whether he wanted to rise. Suddenly he understood how a woman had to feel when the guy she was with decided he was going to screw her then and there and she was too drunk to do anything about it.

  Rise he did, in spite of everything. Penny’s head bobbed up and down. He gasped again, and then again. He wondered if he was going to have enough air in him to come, no matter how good it felt . . . and her lips and teasing tongue felt as good—well, almost as good—as getting shot up felt bad.

  She closed her hand around his shaft, down below her busy mouth, and squeezed him, hard. Not more than two heartbeats later, he shuddered and exploded. For a moment, purple spots swam before his eyes. Then the inside of the tent filled with light, so clear and brilliant it seemed to be—

  The Lizard fighter-bomber broke off its attack run and began to gain altitude. Omar Bradley scratched at the little bandage on his nose; he’d had a boil there lanced a couple of days before. “I’m glad we’re doing this with a radio signal to back up the wire,” he said. “Lay you seven to two the bombs and rockets broke the link.”

  “My old man always told me never bet when I was liable to lose,” Leslie Groves answered. “No flies on him.”

  “Not a one,” Bradley agreed. “You’ve got the buttons right there, General. One of them had better work. You want to do the honors and push them?”

  “You bet I do,” Groves said. “I’ve been building these damn things for a hell of a long time now. About time I get to find out what they’re like when they go off.”

  One of the ignition devices had an insulated wire coming out of it. The other one didn’t. Groves’ broad right thumb came down on one red button, his left on the other.

  “Take that, you scaleless, egg-addled, stiff-jointed things!” Teerts cried as his rockets turned a stretch of Tosevite defenses into an oven where the meat would be diced and ground as it was roasted

  The Race’s landcruisers were snouting forward even as he bombarded the Big Uglies. The Tosevites had made a mistake this time—they’d made their attack with inadequate resources, and not shifted over to the defensive fast enough when they ran out of steam. The Race’s commanders, who’d learned alertness since coming to Tosev 3, were ma
king them pay for it.

  There wasn’t even much in the way of antiaircraft fire in this sector. The Big Uglies had probably had a lot of guns overrun when the Race’s counterattack went in. As Teerts began to climb back into the sky so he could return to the Kansas air base and rearm his killercraft, he decided he hadn’t had such an easy mission since the early days of the conquest, well before the Nipponese captured him.

  Sudden impossible swelling glare made the nictitating membranes slide over his eyes in a futile effort to protect them. The killercraft spun and flipped and twisted in the air, violently unstable in all three axes. The controls would not answer, no matter what Teerts did.

  “No!” he shouted. “Not twice!” He stabbed a thumb toward the ejector button. The killercraft smashed into a hillside just before he reached it.

  —real.

  Penny Summers pulled back from him, gulping and choking a little, too. She took a long, deep breath, then said, “What the dickens do you suppose that is?”

  “You mean you see it, too?” Auerbach said in his ruined voice. His heart was racing like a thoroughbred on Kentucky Derby day.

  “Sure do.” Penny flipped the blanket up over him again. “Like somebody fired up a new sun right outside the tent.” She looked around. “Fading now, though.”

  “Yeah.” The preternatural glow had lasted only a few seconds. When Auerbach first saw it, he’d wondered if it was a sign he was going to cash in his chips right then and there. It would have been a hell of a way to go, but he was glad he was still around. “What do you suppose it was?”

  Before she answered, Penny scrubbed at her chin with a corner of the blanket. Then she said, “Couldn’t begin to guess. Probably some damn Lizard thing, though.”

  “Yeah,” Auerbach said again. He cocked his head to one side. There was some sort of commotion out in the streets of the growing tent city of wounded. He heard Lizards calling and shouting to one another, sounding like nothing so much as boilers with bad seams. “Whatever it was, they’re sure excited about it.”

  “Will you look at that?” Leslie Groves said softly, craning his neck back to look up and up and up at the cloud whose top, now spreading out like the canopy of an umbrella, towered far higher into the sky than any of the Rockies. He shook his head in awe and wonder. The Lizard fighter plane burning not far away, normally cause for a celebration, now wasn’t worth noticing. “Will you just look at that?”

  “I’d heard what they were like,” General Bradley answered. “I’ve been through the ruins of Washington, so I know what they can do. But I never imagined the blast itself. Until you’ve seen it—” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.

  “—and heard it,” Groves added. They were some miles back toward Denver: the one thing you didn’t want to be was too close to an atomic bomb when it went off. Even so, the roar of the blast had sounded like the end of the world, and the earth had jumped beneath Groves’ feet. Wind tore past, then quickly stilled.

  “I hope we pulled all our men back far enough so the blast didn’t harm them,” Bradley said. “Hard to gauge that, when we don’t have enough experience with these weapons.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves said, and then, “Well, we’re learning more all the time, and I expect we’ll know quite a lot before this war is through.”

  “I’m very much afraid you’re right, General,” Bradley said, scowling. “Now we have to see where and how the Lizards will reply. The price we’ve paid to stop this drive is a city given over to the fire. I pray it will prove a good bargain in the end.”

  “So do I, sir,” Groves replied. “But if we don’t hold Denver, we can’t hang on to the rest of the U.S.A.”

  “So I tell myself,” Bradley said. “It lets me fall asleep at night.” He paused. His features grew so grim and taut, Groves was easily able to imagine what he’d look like if he lived to eighty. “It lets me fall asleep,” he repeated, “but it doesn’t let me stay that way.”

  Atvar had been used to getting bad news up in his chamber aboard the 127th Emperor Hetto or in the bannership’s command center. Receiving it in this Tosevite room more or less adapted for the comfort of the Race was somehow harder. The furnishings and electronics were familiar. The design of the windows, the Tosevite cityscape he saw through them, the very size of the chamber—reminding him why the Race called Tosevites Big Uglies—all shouted at him that this was not his world, that he did not belong here.

  “Outside Denver, is it?” he said dully, and stared at the damage estimates coming up on the computer screen. The numbers were still preliminary, but they didn’t look good. The Americans, fighting ferociously from prepared positions, had already taken a heavy toll on his males. And now, just when he thought his forces had achieved a breakthrough—“Exalted Fleetlord, they tricked us,” Kirel said. “They conducted an attack in that sector, but so clumsily that they used themselves up in the process, leaving inadequate force to hold the line there. When the local commander sought to exploit what he perceived as a blunder—”

  “It was a blunder. Indeed it was,” Atvar said. “It was a blunder on our part. They are subtle, the Big Uglies, full of guile and deceit. They did not simply pull back and invite us forward, as they have with past nuclear weapons. We have warned our males against that. But no. They executed what seemed a legitimate if foolish tactical maneuver—and deceived us again.”

  “Truth,” Kirel said, his voice as worn and filled with pain as that of the fleetlord. “How shall we avenge ourselves now? Destroying their cities does not seem to deter the Big Uglies from employing the nuclear weapons they build.”

  “Do you suggest a change in policy, Shiplord?” Atvar asked. That could have been a very dangerous question, one all but ordering Kirel to deny he’d suggested any such thing. It wasn’t, not the way the fleetlord phrased it. He meant it seriously.

  Even so, Kirel’s voice was cautious as he answered, “Exalted Fleetlord, perhaps we might be wiser to respond in kind and destroy Tosevite military formations in the field against us. This may have more effect than our present policy of devastating civilian centers, and could hardly have less.”

  “That does appear to be truth.” Atvar called up a situation map of the fighting in the United States. That let him banish the damage reports from the computer screen. If not from his mind. He pointed to the narrow peninsula stabbing out into the water in the southeastern region of the not-empire. “Here! This Florida place is made for such exploitation. Not only is the fighting on a confined front where nuclear weapons can be particularly effective, striking the Big Uglies in this area will also let us avenge ourselves on the dark-skinned Tosevites who treacherously feigned allegiance to us.”

  “May I, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked, approaching the computer. At Atvar’s gesture of permission, he shifted the image to a more detailed map of the fighting front in Florida. He pointed. “Here, between this town called Orlando and the smaller one named . . . can it really be Apopka?”

  His mouth fell open in surprised amusement. So did Atvar’s. In the language of the Race, apopka meant “to create a bad smell.” The fleetlord leaned forward to examine the map. “That does seem to be what the characters say, doesn’t it? And yes, that is a likely spot for retaliation.”

  “Truth.” Kirel pointed to the dispositions on the map. “The Americans have concentrated a good deal of armor hereabouts. Let the bomb fall where you indicated—after our males withdraw just a bit too obviously. Perhaps we can lure the Tosevites with one of their own tricks.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done,” Kirel said.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing was glad the little scaly devils had finally stopped showing their pornographic films of Liu Han. They hadn’t succeeded in destroying her usefulness to the cause of the People’s Liberation Army, and, after they’d returned her daughter to her, there wasn’t much point in continuing to portray her as a slut.

  If anything, she’d gained prestige from their attacks on her. That had partly been Nieh’s doi
ng, through his showing how the films exposed not Liu Han’s character but the little scaly devils’ vicious exploitation of her when they had her in a situation where her only choice was to submit.

  That proposition had proved persuasive to the people of Peking. The central committee, however, had been less impressed. Oh, they’d gone along with Nieh’s arguments, because it redounded to their advantage to do so—and, indeed, Liu Han had gained prestige there, too. But they couldn’t forget that she had been photographed in positions far beyond merely compromising. Since they couldn’t blame her for that, they looked askance at Nieh for taking up with a woman who had done such things.

  “Not fair,” Nieh muttered under his breath. The complaints went unnoticed in the hutung down which he made his way. What with gossiping women, squealing children, yapping dogs, vendors crying. The virtues of their nostrums and fried vegetables, and musicians hoping for coins, anything less than machine-gun fire would have drawn scant attention. And even machine-gun fire, provided it wasn’t too close, went unremarked in Peking these days.

  Nieh came out onto the Liu Li Ch’ang, the Street of the Glazed Tile Factory. It would have been a pleasant place to pass time had he had more leisure, for it was full of shops selling old books and other curios. Though he’d been born in the dying days of the Chinese Empire, and though he’d been thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxist-Leninist thought, he still maintained more respect for antiquarian scholarship than he sometimes realized.

  Now, though, instead of going into one of those booksellers’ establishments, he paused at the little devils’ outdoor cinema device in front of it. Instead of leering at Liu Han as she let some man’s potent pestle penetrate her, the crowd gaped at what looked like the mother of all explosions.

  The smooth Chinese narrator for the newsreel—the same running dog who had so lovingly described Liu Han’s degradation—said, “Thus does the Race destroy those who oppose it. This blast took place in the American province called Florida, after the foolish foreign devils provoked the merciful servants of the Empire beyond measure. Let it serve as a warning to all those who dare to offend our masters here in China.”