In the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “That doesn’t make it nice,” Krentel said. “That makes it stupid, if you ask me.” But he did not order Telerep to kill the Tosevite animal.

  Taking the commander’s silence as consent, Ussmak slowed the landcruiser to let the animal approach. That seemed to please it; it opened its mouth, almost as if it were a male of the Race, laughing. Ussmak knew it was making sharp yelping noises, even if he couldn’t hear them through the landcruiser’s armor. The animal ran right for the machine.

  That gave Ussmak pause; maybe it really was stupid, as Krentel had said. Then the driver noticed it had a square package strapped onto its back, a package with a cylindrical rod sticking straight up from it. He’d never seen one of these beasts so accoutered before, and didn’t trust it. “Telerep!” he said sharply, “I think you’d better shoot it after all.”

  “What? Why?” the gunner said. “It—” He must have spotted the package the Tosevite animal was carrying, for the machine gun started to chatter in the middle of his sentence.

  Too late. By then the animal was very close to, the landcruiser. With a sudden burst of speed, it ran under the right track, even though Ussmak tried to swerve away at the last instant. The strapped-on mine exploded even as the animal was crushed to red pulp.

  Ussmak felt as if he’d been kicked in the base of the tail by a Big Ugly wearing solid-iron foot coverings. The landcruiser’s right corner lifted up, then slammed back to the ground. Hot fragments of metal flew all around the driver; one buried itself in his arm. He screeched, then started to choke as fire-fighting foam gushed into the compartment.

  He opened and closed his hand. That hurt, but he could still use it. He tried the landcruiser’s controls. The tiller jerked; a horrible grinding noise came from the right side of the machine. He snapped his jaws in fury, swore as foully as he knew how. Then he realized Krentel and Telerep were both screaming into his audio button: “What happened? Are you all right? Is the landcruiser all right?”

  “We had a track blown off, may the spirits of the, Emperors of blessed memory curse the Tosevites forevermore,” Ussmak answered. He sucked in another breath that stank of foam, then spoke more formally: “Commander, this landcruiser is disabled. I suggest that we have no choice but to abandon it.” He flipped up the hatch over his head.

  “Let it be done,” Krentel agreed. His voice turned vicious. “I told you to slaughter that Tosevite beast.” That he’d been right made the rebuke sting worse. As far as Ussmak was concerned, it didn’t make him a better landcruiser commander.

  The driver pulled himself up and out of the compartment. It wasn’t easy; his bleeding right arm didn’t want to bear its share of his weight. He scrambled down behind the left side of the landcruiser. He would have liked to find out just what the mine had done to the other track and sprocket, but not enough to go around to the side exposed to the trees. That animal hadn’t been a wandering stray, not with a mine strapped to its back. Somewhere in the copse lay Big Uglies with guns. He was as sure of it as he was of his own name, or the Emperor’s.

  Sure enough, bullets began snapping by, pinging off the armor of the landcruiser. Krentel let out a hiss of pain. “Are you all right, Commander?” Ussmak said. He still didn’t think Krentel was fit to carry Votal’s equipment bag, but the new landcruiser commander remained a male of the Race.

  “No, I’m not all right,” Krentel snapped. “How can I be all right with a hole in my arm and two crewmales who are mental defectives?”

  “I regret your arm is wounded,” Ussmak said. He wished the commander had been hit in the head instead. Those of lower rank gave unswerving deference to their superiors; that was the way of the Race. But the way of the Race defined obligations that ran in the other direction, too. Superiors gave underlings respect in exchange for their loyalty. Those who didn’t often brought misfortune on themselves.

  Along with Ussmak and Krentel, Telerep also huddled behind the protective flank of the landcruiser. He waggled his left eye, the one that faced Ussmak, back and forth to show he was thinking along with the driver. Krentel remained oblivious to the dismay he caused his crew.

  A couple of the other landcruisers in the squadron slowed down, poured suppressive fire into the trees. The hall of bullets and high-explosive shells was so intense that the wood caught fire. But when Ussmak dashed away to scramble into the landcruiser that had pulled up behind his own wounded machine, Tosevite bullets flew all around him.

  He heard one of those bullets strike home with a dull, horribly final-sounding smack. He couldn’t look back; he was scrambling through the front hull hatch, almost falling down on top of the other landcruiser’s driver. That male swore. “One of your crewmales just got hit. He won’t get up, either.”

  “Was it—?” But it wasn’t, Ussmak knew, for there was Krentel, nattering away over nothing in particular up in the turret. Telerep, the driver thought with a surge of pain. They’d been together all through training; they’d awakened from cold sleep side by side, within moments of each other; with Votal they’d fought their landcruiser across this seemingly endless plain. Now Votal was dead, and the landcruiser, and Telerep. And there was Krentel, nattering.

  “The Big Uglies are getting too stinking good at this ambush business,” the driver of the other landcruiser said.

  Ussmak didn’t answer. He’d never felt so completely alone. Among the Race, one always knew one’s place in the mosaic, and the places of those all around one. Now all those around Ussmak were gone like fallen tesserae, and he felt himself rattling around in the middle of a void.

  The landcruiser grunted into motion once more, and sensibly so. No point to staying still an instant longer than needed; the Tosevites didn’t need more than a moment to work the most appalling mischief. As the armored fighting vehicle built up speed, Ussmak began to rattle around literally as well as in the bitter corners of his mind.

  Here, though, he was not in the middle of a void. The driver’s compartment barely had room to hold an extra male. Worse, everything from foam spray nozzle to the bracket that held the driver’s personal weapon on the wall was hard and had sharp edges. He’d never noticed that while he was in the driver’s chair. The chair, of course, had padding and safety belts to hold him where he belonged. Now he was just jetsam, tossed in here at random.

  “Too bad about your other crewmale,” the other driver said as he shoved the landcruiser up into the next higher gear. “How did your machine get hit?”

  So Ussmak had to tell him about the Tosevite animal with the mine on its back, and how a moment’s kindness had cost so much. He felt halfstrangled as he spoke; he couldn’t begin to say what he thought about either Krentel or Telerep, not even to a male who was a squadronmate. He hissed helplessly. That void around him again …

  The driver hissed, too. “Yes, I know the beasts you mean. We haven’t bothered them, either. Now I suppose we’ll have to shoot them on sight, if the eggless Big Uglies have taken to strapping mines on their backs. Too bad.”

  “Yes,” Ussmak said, and fell silent again. Rattle, rattle, rattle …

  A little later, the driver of the other landcruiser made a sharp, disgusted noise. “They’re gone,” he said.

  Recalled to himself, Ussmak asked, “Who’s gone?” He had no vision slits, not in his present awkward perch, and no way of seeing outside.

  “The Big Uglies. All that’s here is a couple of wrecked launcher boxes for their stinking rockets. Not, even any dead ones lying around. They must have touched them off at long range, then run away.” The driver clicked off the intercom switch that connected him to the turret before he added one quiet sentence more: “This whole trip back here was for nothing.”

  For nothing. The words reverberated inside Ussmak’s head. For nothing Krentel had ordered them to turn around. For nothing his landcruiser had been wrecked. For nothing Telerep had caught a bullet. For nothing Ussmak huddled here on a steel and ceramic floor, about as useful to the Race as the sack of dried meat he felt like. For nothing.


  The other driver, still secure in his web, of duties rather than all alone and falling, let out a sigh of both annoyance and—infuriating to Ussmak—resignation. “So it goes,” he said.

  7

  Two or three times, in his travels through the bush leagues, Sam Yeager had had to dig in at the plate against every hitter’s nightmare: a fireballing kid who couldn’t find the plate if you lit it up like Times Square. Whenever he did it, he faced a deadly weapon. At the time, he hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms, but it was true. The worst sound in baseball was the mushy splat of a ball getting somebody in the head. He’d seen friends lose careers in an instant of inattention and bad lights. He knew it was only luck he hadn’t lost his the, same way.

  All that helped now, against weapons more overtly deadly. When bombs and bullets flew, a tin hat seemed small protection. For that matter, a tin hat was small protection. Yeager had seen more than one man gruesomely dead, helmet holed or smashed in or simply blown right off. But he wore his gladly, as better than nothing. Come to that, he wouldn’t have minded wearing it, or even something that covered rather more, whenever he went to bat against a hard-throwing righthander.

  He peeked up from behind the blackened pile of bricks which until recently had been the back wall of a dry-cleaning establishment; its sign lay fallen in the middle of Main Street. He ducked down again in a hurry. A Lizard autogiro was growling through the air toward him. The Invaders from Space (he thought of them that way, with the capital letters) were trying to push the ragtag American force of which he was a part out of Amboy and trap them against the Green River, where there’d be easy prey.

  When he said that out loud, Mutt Daniels grunted and answered, “Reckon you’re right, boy, but we’re gonna have the devil’s own time stoppin’ ’em.”

  A roar in the sky—Yeager automatically threw himself flat. He’d learned that even before he took the soldier’s oath, and had it reinforced when a fellow a few feet from him got smashed to a red smear for being a split second too slow to hit the dirt.

  But the roar came from two piston-engined fighters that streaked west toward the autogiro. The machine guns of the P-40 Warhawks hammered. Yeager stuck his head up again. The autogiro was firing back, and turning in midair to try to flee. The Lizards’ jets far outclassed anything humanity could make, but their flying troop carriers were vulnerable.

  The Warhawks whizzed past the autogiro, one to the right, the other to the left. They banked into tight turns for another firing pass, but no need. The Lizard machine, spurting smoke from just below the rotor, settled to the ground in what was half landing, half crash. The fighters darted away before anything more dangerous appeared over the horizon.

  Yeager scowled to see live Lizards scuttling out of the autogiro. “They left too soon,” he growled. “It wasn’t a clean kill.”

  Mutt Daniels worked the bolt on his Springfield to chamber a new round. “Means it’s up to us, don’t it?” Moving with a grace that belied his fleshy form, he scuffled forward.

  Yeager followed. He also had a rifle now, taken from a man who would never need one again. Back on the farm where he’d grown up, he’d shot at tin cans and gophers and the occasional crow with his father’s .22. The military weapon he carried now was heavier and kicked harder, but that wasn’t the main difference from those vanished days. When he shot at tin cans or gophers or crows, they didn’t shoot back.

  A heavy machine gun began to bark, up near the intersection of Main Street and Highway 52. Pieces flew off the Lizards’ autogiro and sparkled in the sunlight as they twirled through the air. As for the Lizards themselves, they took cover with the speed and alacrity of their small reptilian namesakes. One by one, they opened fire. Their weapons chewed out short bursts, not the endless racket of a belt-fed machine gun, but not single. shots, either.

  Was that a flicker of motion, over there behind the ornamental hedge? Yeager didn’t care to find out the hard way. He threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired. He scurried away to a new position before he looked toward the hedge again. Nothing moved there now.

  Another rumble in the air, this one from the southwest … Yeager fired at the incoming autogiro, but it stayed out of rifle range. Flame shot from under its stubby wings. With a cry of fear, Yeager buried his face in grass and mud.

  The rockets burst all around him, lances of fire that lashed the American position. The heavy machine gun fell silent. Through stunned ears, Yeager heard the Lizards on the ground moving forward.

  Then another roar announced that the Warhawks had returned. Their guns tore at the new autogiro. This time they did the job right. The aircraft slammed the ground sideways and became a fireball. Smoke rose into the blue sky. It was less, smoke than would have come from a human-built plane; the Lizards used cleaner fuel. But fuel wasn’t all that burned in there. Seats, paint, ammunition, the bodies of the crew … they all went up.

  Cheering, the Americans moved forward against the Lizards. “Careful there, you God-damned fools!” Sergeant Schneider bellowed, trying to shout over battlefield din. “You want to stay low.” As if to underscore the advice, someone who hadn’t stayed low enough suddenly pitched forward onto his face.

  The Warhawks came back to strafe the Lizards on the ground. Something rose on a pillar of fire from behind a boulder in the middle of a Main Street lawn that marked a spot where Lincoln had spoken. The P-40 fled, twisting with all the skill the pilot had. It was not enough. The rocket tumbled it from the sky.

  “Damn if it didn’t look like a Fourth of July skyrocket, right down to the big boom at the end,” Daniels said.

  “It flew like it had eyes,” Yeager said, thinking of the turning path the rocket had scrawled across the sky. “I wonder how they make it do that.”

  “Right now I got more important things to wonder about, like if I’m gonna be alive this time tomorrow,” Mutt said.

  Yeager nodded, but his bump of curiosity still itched. Writers in Astounding and the other pulps had talked about detection devices for as long as he’d been reading them, and likely longer than that. He’d discovered on the night the Invaders from Space descended on the world that living through science fiction was a lot stranger—and a lot more deadly—than just reading it.

  A hiss in the sky, a whistle, a noise like a train pulling into a station—an artillery shell burst among the embattled Lizards, then another and another. Dirt fountained skyward. The enemy’s fire slackened. Yeager didn’t know whether the Lizards were killed or hurt or just playing possum, but he used the lull to slide closer to them … and also closer to where the shells were landing. He wished he hadn’t thought of that, but kept crawling ahead.

  A Lizard plane shot past, heading east. Yeager cringed, but the pilot wasted no time on a target as trivial as infantry. No doubt he wanted that battery of field guns. The shells kept coming for about another minute, maybe two, then abruptly stopped.

  By that time, though, Yeager and the other Americans were on top of the Lizard position. “Surrender!” Sergeant Schneider shouted. Yeager was sure he was wasting his breath; where would the Lizards have learned English? And even if they had, would they quit? They seemed more like Japs than any other people Yeager knew of—at least, they were small and liked sneak attacks. Japs didn’t surrender for hell, so would the Lizards?

  One of them had got some English, God knew where. “No—ssrenda,” came the reply, a dry hiss that made the hair stand up on Yeager’s arms. A burst of machine-rifle fire added an exclamation point.

  The burst was close, close. Yeager grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, lobbed it as if he were aiming for a cutoff man. It flew toward the concrete block fence behind which he thought the Lizard who didn’t want to surrender was hiding. He didn’t see it go over. By the time it did, he was behind his own cover once more. He hadn’t needed more than one or two bullets snapping past his head to learn that lesson forever.

  The grenade went off with a crash. Before the echoes died, Yeager sprinted up to
the gray fence. He fired over it, once, twice, blindly. If the Lizard wasn’t badly hurt, he wanted to rattle it as much as he could. Then, gulping, he vaulted over the fence into the alleyway on the other side.

  The Lizard was down and thrashing and horribly wounded; its red, red blood stained the gravel of the alley. Yeager’s stomach did a slow, lazy loop. He’d never expected the agony of a creature from another world to reach him, but it did. The Lizard yammered something in its own incomprehensible language. Yeager had no idea whether it was defiance or a plea for mercy. All he wanted to do was put the alien out of its misery and make it be quiet. He raised his rifle, shot it through the head.

  It twitched once or twice, then lay still. Yeager let out a whistling sigh of relief; he’d thought too late that it didn’t necessarily have to store its brains in its head. He wondered if that would have occurred to any of the men fighting around him. Probably not; science-fiction readers were thin on the ground. As things worked out, it hadn’t mattered anyway.

  He bent over the scaly corpse, scooped up the machine rifle the Lizard had carded. He was amazed at how light it was. Somebody, he thought, would have to take it apart and figure out how it worked.

  Sergeant Schneider yelled again: “Surrender, you Lizards! Throw down your guns! Give up and we won’t hurt you.”

  Yeager thought he was wasting his breath, but the bursts of enemy fire quickly ceased. Schneider came out in the open with something white—it was a by-God pillowcase, Yeager saw—tied to his rifle. He waved toward the houses and stores in which the last few Lizards were holed up, then made a peremptory gesture no human could have misunderstood: come out.

  From behind Yeager, Mutt Daniels said, “He oughta get the Medal of Honor for that.” Yeager nodded, trying not to show how shaken he was; he hadn’t heard his manager—no, his ex-manager now, he supposed—come up at all.