Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “I’m afraid not,” Mather answered. “I’ve not even heard that he got there. You know how security is.” He seemed faintly embarrassed. “I daresay I shouldn’t have told you what I just did, but blood’s thicker than water, what?”

  “Yes.” Goldfarb gnawed on his lower lip. “Better to know, I suppose.” He wasn’t sure he meant what he said. He felt helpless. But then, Mather might as easily have brought news that Moishe and Rivka and Reuven had been killed in a Lizard air raid on London. There was still hope. Clinging to it, he said, “Well, we haven’t much choice but to get on with it, have we?”

  “Right you are,” Mather said, and Goldfarb gathered he’d made a favorable impression. The SAS man went on, “Only way to keep from going mad is to carry on.”

  How very British, Goldfarb thought, half ruefully, half in admiration. “Let’s find out what Mzepps knows about radars, and what he can tell us about the sets we’ve captured from his chums.”

  Before that first day’s work with the Lizard prisoner was done, he learned as much in some areas as he had in months of patient—and sometimes not so patient—trial and error. Mzepps gave him the key to the color-coding system the Lizards used for their wires and electrical components: far more elaborate and more informative than the one with which Goldfarb had grown up. The Lizard also proved a deft technician, showing the RAF radarman a dozen quick tricks, maybe more, that made assembling, disassembling, and troubleshooting radars easier.

  But when it came to actually repairing the sets, he was less help. Through Mather, Goldfarb asked him, “What do you do when this unit goes bad?” He pointed to the gadgetry that controlled the radar wavelength. He didn’t know how it did that, but more cut and try had convinced him it did.

  Mzepps said, “You remove the module and replace it with one in good working order.” He reached into the radar. “See, it snaps in and out like this. Very easy.”

  It was very easy. From an accessibility standpoint, the Lizards’ sets beat what the RAF made all hollow. The Lizards designed them so they not only worked but were also convenient to service. A lot of good engineering had gone into that. British engineers had just got to the point of being able to design radars that worked. Every time he looked at the cat’s cradle of wires and resistors and capacitors and the rest of the electronics that made up the guts of an RAF set, Goldfarb was reminded that they hadn’t yet concerned themselves with convenience.

  But Mzepps hadn’t quite grasped what he’d meant. “I see how you replace it, yes. But suppose you haven’t got a replacement for the whole unit. Suppose you want to repair the part in it that’s gone bad? How do you diagnose which part that is, and how do you fix it?”

  Captain Mather put the revised question to the Lizard. “No can do,” Mzepps said in English. He went on in his own language. Mather had to stop and ask more questions a couple of times. At last he gave Goldfarb the gist: “He says it really can’t be done, old man. That’s a unitary assembly. If one part of it goes, the whole unit’s buggered for fair.” Mzepps added something else. Mather translated again: “The idea is that it shouldn’t break down to start with.”

  “If he can’t fix it when it breaks, what the devil good is he?” Goldfarb said. As far as he was concerned, you had no business mucking about with electronics without some notion of the theory behind the way the machines worked—and if you understood the theory, you were halfway to being able to jury-rig a fix when something went wrong. And something would go wrong.

  After a moment, he realized he wasn’t quite fair. Plenty of people ran motorcars without knowing more about how they worked than where to put in the petrol and how to patch a punctured inner tube. Still, he wouldn’t have wanted one of those people on his team if he were driving a race car.

  Mzepps might have been thinking along with him. Through Captain Mather, the Lizard said, “The task of a technician is to know which unit is ailing. We cannot manufacture components for our sets on this planet, anyhow. Your technology is too primitive. We have to use what we brought with us.”

  Goldfarb imagined a Victorian expeditionary force stranded in darkest Africa. The British soldiers could cut a great swath through the natives—as long as their ammunition held out, their Maxim guns didn’t break some highly machined part, their horses didn’t start dying of sleeping sickness, and they didn’t come down with malaria or yaws or whatever you came down with in darkest Africa (sure as hell, you’d come down with something). If that Victorian army was stuck there, without hope of rescue . . .

  He turned to Donald Mather. “Do you know, sir, this is the first bit of sympathy I’ve ever felt for the Lizards.”

  “Don’t waste it,” Mather advised him. “They’d waste precious little on you, and that’s the God’s truth. They’re a nasty set of foes, which only means we shall have to be nasty in return. Gas, these bombs . . . If we’re not to go under, we must seize what spares we can.”

  That was inarguably true. Even so, Goldfarb didn’t think Mather took his point. He glanced over at the SAS man. No, Mather didn’t look to be the sort who’d appreciate argument by historical analogy or any such pilpul—not that he’d know that word, either.

  “Ask Mzepps what he’ll do when he and his scaly chums run out of spares,” Goldfarb said.

  “By then, we’ll be beaten,” Mather said after the Lizard was done with his noises. “That’s still their propaganda line, in spite of the thrashing they took when they came over here.”

  “Can’t expect them to go about saying they’re doomed, I suppose,” Goldfarb allowed. “But if our charming prisoner there still thinks we’re going to be trounced, why is he being so cooperative here? He’s helping grease the skids for his own people. Why not just name, rank, and pay number?”

  “There’s an interesting question.” Mather made steam-engine noises at Mzepps. Goldfarb doubted he came up with many interesting questions on his own, not ones unrelated to the immediate task at hand. The Lizard prisoner replied at some length, and with some heat. Mather gave Goldfarb the essence of it: “He says we are his captors, so we have become his superiors. The Lizards obey their superiors the way Papists obey the Pope, only rather more so.”

  Goldfarb didn’t know how well, or even if, Catholics obeyed the Pope. He didn’t point out his ignorance to Mather. The SAS man was liable to have other aversions, including one to Jews. If he did, he didn’t let it interfere with the way he did his job. Goldfarb was willing to settle for that. The world being as it was these days, it was more than you could count on getting.

  “What sort of treatment does he get?” he asked Mather, pointing to Mzepps. “After he’s done here, where does he go? How does he spend his time?”

  “We’ve brought several Lizards into Dover to work with you boffins,” Mather replied. That in itself surprised Goldfarb, who was used to thinking of people like Fred Hipple as boffins, not to having the label applied to himself. He supposed that, to a combat soldier like Mather, anyone who fought the war with slide rule and soldering iron rather than Sten gun and hand grenade counted as an intellectual sort. His bemusement made him miss part of the SAS man’s next sentence: “—billeted them at a cinema house that was worthless otherwise with so little electricity in town. They get the same rations our troops do, but—”

  “Poor devils,” Goldfarb said with deep feeling. “Isn’t that against the Geneva Convention? Being purposely cruel to prisoners, I mean.”

  Mather chuckled. “I shouldn’t wonder. I was going to say, they get more meat and fish than we do, which isn’t hard, I know. Signs are, they need it in their diet.”

  “So do I,” Basil Roundbush said plaintively from across the room. “Oh, so do I. Can’t you see me pining away for want of sirloin?” He let out a theatrical groan.

  Captain Mather rolled his eyes and tried to carry on: “The ones who want it, we give ginger. Mzepps hasn’t got that habit. They talk among themselves. Some of them have taken up cards and dice and even chess.”

  “Those can’t
be games anything like what they’re used to,” Goldfarb said.

  “They have dice, Mzepps tell me. The others, I suppose, help fill up the time. We don’t let them have any of their own amusements. Can’t. Most of those are electric—no, you’d say electronic, what?—devices of one sort or another, and who knows but what they might build some sort of wireless from them.”

  “Mm, that’s so.” Goldfarb glanced over at Mzepps. “Is he happy?”

  “I’ll ask him.” Mather did, then laughed “ ‘Are you crazy?’ he says.” Mzepps spoke some more. Mather went on, “He says he’s alive and fed and not being tortured, and all that’s more than he expected when he was captured. He may not be dancing in the daisies, but he’s got no kick coming.”

  “Fair enough,” Goldfarb said, and went back to work.

  Sergeant Herman Muldoon peered out through a glassless second-story window of the Wood House across Quincy, Illinois, down toward the Mississippi at the base of the bluffs. “That there,” he declared, “is one hell of a river.”

  “This is a hell of a place, too,” Mutt Daniels said. “Yeah, the windows are blown to smithereens, but the house itself don’t hardly look no different than the way it did last time I was in this town, back about nineteen and seven.”

  “They made the joint to last, all right,” Muldoon agreed. “You set stone blocks in lead, they ain’t goin’ anyplace. Bein’ shaped like a stop sign don’t hurt, neither, I guess: more chance to deflect a shell, less chance to stop one square.” He paused. “What were you doin’ here in 1907, Lieutenant, you don’t mind my askin’?”

  “Playin’ ball—what else?” Mutt answered. “I started out number two catcher for the Quincy Gems in the Iowa State League—my first time ever in Yankee country, and Lord! was I lonesome. Number one catcher—his name was Ruddock, Charlie Ruddock—he broke his thumb second week in May. I hit 360 for a month after that, and the Gray’s Harbor Grays, out in Washington State, bought my contract. The Northwestern League was Class B, two notches up from Quincy, but I was kinda sorry to leave just the same.”

  “How come?” Muldoon asked. “You ain’t the kind of guy to turn down a promotion, Lieutenant, and I bet you never was.”

  Daniels laughed softly. He looked out toward the Mississippi, too. It was a big river here, but not a patch on what it would be when it got down to his home state, which shared its name. It hadn’t had the Missouri or the Ohio or the Tennessee or the Red or a zillion other rivers join it, not yet.

  Only a quarter of him was thinking about the Mississippi, though. The rest looked not so much across Quincy as across almost two thirds of a lifetime. More to himself than to Herman Muldoon, he said, “There was this pretty little girl with curly hair just the color o’ ripe corn. Her name was Addie Strasheim, an’ I can see the little dimple in her cheek plain as if it was yesterday. She was a sweetie, Addie was. I’d’a stayed here all season, likely tell I woulda married her if I coulda talked her pa into it.”

  “You get the chance, you oughta go lookin’ for her,” Muldoon said. “Town ain’t been fought over too bad, and this don’t look like the kind of place where a whole bunch of people pull up stakes and head for the big city.”

  “You know, Muldoon, for a pretty smart guy, you can be a natural-born damn fool,” Mutt said. His sergeant grinned back at him, not in the least put out. Slowly, again half to himself, Daniels went on, “I was twenty-one then, she was maybe eighteen. Don’t think I was the first boy who ever kissed her, but I reckon there couldn’t have been more than a couple ahead of me. She’s alive now, she’s got old, same as me, same as you, same as everybody. I’d sooner think of her like she was, sweet as a peach pie.” He sighed. “Hell, I’d sooner think of me like I was, a kid who thought a kiss was somethin’ special, not a guy standin’ in line for a fast fuck.”

  “World’s a nasty place,” Muldoon said. “You live in it, it wears you down after a while. War makes it worse, but it’s pretty bad any old way.”

  “Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Mutt said.

  “Here.” Muldoon took his canteen off his belt and held it out to Mutt. “Good for what ails you.”

  “Yeah?” Nobody had ever offered Mutt water with a promise like that. He unscrewed the lid, raised the canteen to his lips, and took a swig. What came out was clear as water, but kicked like a mule. He’d had raw corn likker a time or three, but this stuff made some of the other moonshine he’d poured down feel like Jack Daniel’s by comparison. He swallowed, coughed a couple of times, and handed the canteen back to Muldoon. “Good thing I ain’t got me no cigarettes. I light a match and breathe in, I figure I’d explode.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit,” the sergeant said with a chuckle. He looked at his watch. “We better grab some sack time while we can. We start earnin’ our pay again at midnight.”

  Daniels sighed. “Yeah, I know. An’ if this goes just right, we push the Lizards back a quarter of a mile down the Mississippi. At that rate, we can have the whole damn river open about three weeks before Judgment Day.” Once he got the complaints out of his system, he rolled himself up in a blanket and fell asleep in a minute and a half, tops.

  As he was dozing off, he figured Captain Szymanski would have to kick him awake, because he was down for the count. But he woke up in good time without the help of the company commander’s boot. Mosquitoes made sure of that. They came through the glassless windows of the Wood House buzzing like a flight of fighter planes, and they didn’t chew him up a whole lot less than getting strafed would have.

  He slapped at his hands and his face. He wasn’t showing any other bare skin, but that was plenty for the mosquitoes. Come morning, he’d look like raw meat. Then he remembered the mission. Come morning, he was liable to be raw meat.

  Muldoon was awake, too. They went downstairs together, a couple of old-timers still hanging on in a young man’s world, a young man’s game. Back when he was a kid fighting to hook onto a big-league job even for a little while, he’d resented—he’d almost hated—old geezers who hung on and hung on and wouldn’t quit and give the new guys a chance. Now he was a geezer himself. When quitting meant going out feet first, you were less inclined to do it than when all you lost was your job.

  Captain Szymanski was already down there in the big hall, telling the dogfaces what they were going to do and how they’d do it. They were supposed to know, but you didn’t get anywhere taking brains for granted. Szymanski finished, “Listen to your lieutenant and your sergeant. They’ll get you through.” That made Mutt feel pretty good.

  More mosquitoes buzzed outside. Crickets chirped. A few spring peepers peeped, though most of them had already had their season. The night was warm and muggy. The platoon tramped south toward the Lizards’ forward positions. Boots clunked on pavement, then struck dirt and grass more quietly.

  A couple of scouts halted the advancing Americans just north of Marblehead, the hamlet next down the river from Quincy. “Dig in,” Mutt whispered through the sticky darkness. Entrenching tools were already biting into dirt. Daniels missed the elaborate trench networks of the First World War, but fighting nowadays moved too fast to make those practical in most places. Even a foxhole quickly scraped out of the dirt was mighty nice to have sometimes, though.

  He tugged back the cuff of his sleeve to look at his watch. A quarter to twelve, the glowing hands said. He held it up to his ear. Yes, it was ticking. He would have guessed it a couple of hours later than that, and something gone wrong with the attack “Time flies when you’re havin’ fun,” he muttered.

  No sooner had he lowered his arm than artillery opened up, off to the east of Quincy. Shells started slamming into Marblehead, some landing no more than a couple of hundred yards south of where he crouched. Nothing had gone wrong after all; he’d just been too keyed up to keep track of time.

  “Let’s go!” he shouted when his watch told him it was time. The barrage shifted at the same moment, plastering the southern half of Marblehead instead of the norther
n part. Lizard artillery was busy, too, but mostly with counterbattery fire. Mutt was glad the Lizards were shelling the American guns, not him.

  “Over here!” a scout yelled. “We’ve got paths cut through their wire.” The Lizards used stuff that was like nothing so much as a long, skinny double-edged razor blade. As far as he was concerned, it was even nastier than barbed wire. The plan had said there would be paths, but what the plan said didn’t always have a lot to do with reality.

  Lizards in Marblehead opened up on the Americans as they were coming through the wire. No matter how many traps you set, you wouldn’t get all the rats. No matter how you shelled a place, you wouldn’t clear out all the fighters. Mutt had been on the receiving end of barrages a lot worse than this one. He’d expected opposition, and here it was.

  He blazed away with his tommy gun, then threw himself flat behind the overturned hulk of an old Model A. Mike Wheeler, the platoon BAR man, hosed down the town with his Browning Automatic Rifle. Daniels wished for Dracula Szabo, the BAR man in his old platoon. Dracula would have got right up there nose-to-snout with the Lizards before he let ’em have it

  His platoon’s attack developed the Lizard position. The company’s other platoon moved on the town from the east a couple of minutes later. They knew where the enemy was holed up, and winkled the aliens out house by house. Some Lizards surrendered, some fled, some died. One of their medics and a couple of human corpsmen worked side by side on casualties

  A little fight, Mutt thought wearily. A few men killed—even fewer Lizards, by the look of things. Marblehead hadn’t been heavily garrisoned. A few of the locals started sticking their heads out of whatever shelters they’d made to protect themselves from pieces of metal flying around with hostile intent.

  “Not too bad,” Herman Muldoon said. He pointed west, toward the Mississippi. “Another stretch of river liberated. We’ll clear all the Lizards out a lot sooner than three weeks before Judgment Day like you said.”