In th Balance

by neetha Napew

  "Yeah." Daniels' shiver had only a little to do with the cold that snuck into his very bones. He'd read about tanks since the new war began, seen them in newsreels. But until, the Lizards turned the whole world upside down, he hadn't really undertood what they did to fighting. It wasn't just that they picked up big guns and put them on tracks. Worse still, behind their thick armor, the crews that served those guns were almost invulnerable to infantry.

  Almost. Mutt scuttled forward on hands and knees. If that tank— if any Lizard tank— forced its way to the eastern bank of the Fox River, the job of defending Chicago would take another step on the road to impossibility.

  The tank's machine gun chattered, firing at one of the Americans defending Aurora or else at random to make humans keep their heads down. Combat here was house-to-house, concentrated; in fact, it reminded Daniels of the trench warfare he'd known in France. Aurora marked the western edge of the factory belt that spread out across the prairie from Chicago.

  Fighting all the way into the big city would be like this— if anyone lived to retreat all the way into the big city. Mutt had his doubts about that. He'd had his doubts in 1918, too, but then he'd been on the side with more men and bigger guns. Now he was getting a taste of how the poor damned Boches must have

  felt as everything rained down on them.

  The Germans had kept fighting like bastards right up till the Armistice. Mutt felt asimilar obligation to keep going as long as he could. The front wall of the factory had been bombed not long before he holed up in it; its bricks were part of the rubble through which the Lizard tank was forcing its way. He crawled toward what had been a window opening and was now just a hole a little squarer than most. Knife-sharp shards of glass tore his pants and his knees.

  Ever so cautiously, he peered out. The tank was about thirty yards east of him. It had slowed to shove aside some burned-out trucks the Americans were using as a roadblock. The commander had nerve. In spite of rattling small-arms fire, he stood head and shoulders out of his cupola so he could see what was going on around him.

  His back was to Daniels. Mutt had grown up hunting squirrels and possums for the pot. He swung the rifle up to his shoulder, exhaled, saw the front of the Lizard's head explode in a red mist a split second before he threw himself away from his firing position.

  "Nailedthe son of a bitch!" he shouted through the din of gunfire and explosions. The other Americans sheltering in the ruined factory raised a cheer. Such a clear-cut cry of victory came their way too seldom. Had the Lizards had the numbers to match the might of their marvelous machines, Daniels knew the fight would have been long since lost.

  Nor did he get more than a moment to exult in his successful piece of sniping. Bullets from the tank's machine gun lashed the factory building. He huddled in back of another broken power tool, grateful for the heavy chunk of iron and steel that shielded him from flying death.

  "Good job, Mutt," Sergeant Schneider bawled. "You diverted him from the advance he was making. Taking us out doesn't mean a thing strategically."

  Daniels wondered whether he'd be any less dead if he got killed in an action strategically meaningless. He didn't think so. "Damn shame," he muttered. He also marveled that Schneider could still think and talk like a professional soldier while being hosed down by machine-gun slugs.

  Then there was a sudden hot yellow glare outside, as if the sun had come on in the middle of the street. The roar that accompanied it was loud, the wham-crash! of the shell from the tank's big gun even louder. Chunks of brick rained down on Daniels; a timber that would have smashed him like a bug was instead smashed itself against the machine behind which he cowered.

  The tank gave the factory two more rounds: flash, boom crash: flash, boom, crash. Mutt screamed for all he was worth, but couldn't hear himself or anyone else. He wondered if he'd ever hear anything again. At the moment, it was the least of his worries. He realized he'd wet his pants, but he didn't care about that, either.

  When he tried to scramble away, his arms and legs shook so much he could hardly move. "Shell shock," he said, feeling the words on his lips but not hearing them at all. He'd seen men like this in the trenches after a good German barrage. Other soldiers would jeer at them, but not too hard— it wasn't as if the poor bastards could help themselves. He marveled at being alive.

  "Hey, Schneider," he called, "you think them Lizards are fucking diverted enough for now?"

  He didn't hear Schneider answer, but that was

  all right— he hadn't heard himself ask the question. He glanced over to where the sergeant had been hiding. Any further jokes stuck in his throat. The veteran was nothing but splashed blood and raw meat ground not too fine.

  Daniels gulped. "Jesus," he whispered. Schneider was the best soldier he'd ever known— by a wide margin in this crazy war and, he thought, also better than any of the top sergeants he'd served under in France. One way you told good soldiers from bad was that the good ones lived to learn new things while the bad ones bought their farms in a hurry. Seeing a good soldier dead reminded you that you could end up the same way yourself. Mutt didn't want reminders like that.

  He smelled smoke, sharp and fresh. It was a reminder, too, a reminder there were nastier ways to die than getting chewed to pieces by a storm of shell splinters. Schneider, at least,

  never knew what hit him. If you roasted, you'd have plenty of time to regret it. All at once, Daniels' shaky limbs worked, if not perfectly, then well enough.

  He looked around the gloomy inside of the factory building— considerably less gloomy now that the Lizards had done some fresh ventilation work on the front— for the rest of the Americans who'd been in here with him. A couple of them weren't going anywhere: they lay dead as gruesomely as Schneider. Three or four others, as lucky as he'd been himself, were getting away from the fire as fast as they could. And a couple of wounded men flopped on the floor like fresh-landed fish in the bottom of a boat.

  Both Mutt's grandfathers had fought in the War Between the States, and both, as old men will, told stories to the wide-eyed boy he'd been. He remembered Pappy Daniels, long white beard stained with tobacco juice,

  talking about the Battle of the Wilderness and how wounded men there had shot themselves before any of the little blazes all the musketry had started could wash over them.

  That memory— one he hadn't called to mind in years— told him what he had to do. He hurried forward, grabbed one of the injured soldiers, and dragged him away from the spreading flames over to a tumbledown wall that might shelter him for a little while.

  "Thanks," the fellow gasped.

  "It's okay." Daniels quickly bandaged the worst of the man's wounds, then went back to pick up his comrade. He had to sling his rifle; the other fellow had passed out, and was a two-hand carry. He'd just taken him onto his shoulders when a Lizard infantryman skittered into the factory.

  He was sure he was dead. After what seemed

  an age but had to have been only a heartbeat, the Lizard pointed the muzzle of its rifle to the floor, gestured with its free hand: get your wounded buddy out of here.

  Sometimes— far from always— the Germans had extended that courtesy in France; sometimes— just as far from always— the Americans returned it. Daniels never expected to encounter it from a thing that looked like one of the monsters in the serials his ballplayers liked to watch.

  "Obliged," he told the Lizard, though he knew it couldn't understand. Then he raised his voice to the men hiding somewhere in the ruins: "Don't shoot this one, fellas! He's all right."

  Staggering under the weight of the soldier he'd lifted, he carried him back to the wall behind which he'd laid the other wounded man. At the same time, the Lizard slowly

  backed out of the factory building. Nobody fired at it.

  The tiny truce held for perhaps half a minute. Mutt rolled the second injured soldier off his shoulder, discovered he wasn't breathing. He grabbed the fellow's wrist; his finger found the spot just on the thumb side of the tendons.
No pulse. The soldier's arm flopped limply when he let it fall. "Aah, shit," he said dully. The strange moment of comradeship had gone for nothing, lost in the waste that was war.

  More Lizards dashed into the building. They fired their automatic weapons from the hip, not aiming at anything in particular but making the Americans keep their heads down. Only a couple of rifle rounds answered them. The fellow who shoots first has the edge. Daniels thought. He'd learned that in the trenches, and it still seemed true.

  All at once, he realized that with Schneider

  dead, he was the senior noncom present. He'd been in charge of more men than these as a manager but the stakes hadn't been so high— nobody shot you for hanging a curve ball no matter how much people talked about it

  The first wounded man he d dragged to cover was still very much alive. "Fall back!" Mutt yelled. He started crawling away, dragging the hurt soldier after him. Stand up now and you'd stop one of those sprayed bullets just as sure as sunrise.

  A beam crashed down behind him. Flames crackled, then roared at his back He tried to crawl faster. "Over here!" somebody shouted.

  He changed direction. Hands reached out to help pull the wounded man behind a file cabinet that, between its metal and the reams of paper spilling from it, probably could have stopped a Lizard tank round. Mutt got in back of it himself and lay there, panting like a dog

  on a Mississippi summer day.

  "Smitty still alive up there?" asked the soldier already under cover.

  Daniels shook his head. "For all I know, he could've been dead when I picked him up. Goddamn shame." He didn't say anything about the Lizard who'd refrained from shooting him. He had the strange feeling that mentioning it would take the magic away, as if it were the seventh inning of a building no-hitter.

  The other soldier— his name was Buck Risberg— pointed and said, "The fire's holding the Lizards back."

  "Good to know somethin' can." Daniels made a sour face. He was turning cynical fast in this fight I'm gettin' old, he thought, and then, Gettin'? Hell. I am old. But he was also in command. He dragged his mind back to what

  needed doing right now. "Get Hank here out of this mess," he told Risberg. "There ought to be a medic a couple blocks north o'here, less'n the Lizards drove him out by now. But you gotta try."

  "Okay, Mutt." Half dragging, half carrying the now-unconscious Hank, Risberg made his way out of the firing line. The burning beam helped light his way through the gloom, and also provided a barrier the Lizards hesitated to cross.

  Shells screamed down on the factory and the street outside: not from Lizard tank cannon, these, but out of the west from American batteries still in place on Stolp's Island in the middle of the Fox River. The gunners were bringing the fire right down onto the heads of their own men in the hope of hitting the enemy, too. Daniels admired their aggressiveness, and wished he weren't on the receiving end of it

  The incoming artillery made the Lizards who were poking their snouts into the factory building stop shooting and hunker down. At least, that was what Mutt assumed they were doing— it was certainly what he was doing himself. But all too soon, even in the midst of the barrage, they started up again with nasty three and four-bullet bursts that would chew a man to rags. Mutt felt as inadequate with the Springfield jammed against his shoulder as Pappy Daniels must have if he'd ever tried to fight Yankees toting Henry repeaters with his single-shot, muzzle-loading rifle musket.

  Then from in back of him came a long, ripping burst of fire that made him wonder for a dreadful instant how the Lizards had got round to his rear. But not only did the Lizards usually have better fire discipline than that, the weapon did not sound like one of theirs. When Daniels recognized it, he yelled, "You with the tommy gun! Get your ass up here!"

  A minute later, a soldier flopped down beside him. "Where they at, Corporal?" he asked.

  Mutt pointed. "Right over that way; leastways, that's where they shot from last."

  The tommy gun chattered. The fellow with it— not a man from Daniels unit— went through a fifty-round drum as if he were going to have to pay for all the rounds he didn't fire off. Another submachine gun opened up behind Daniels and to his left. Grinning at Mutt's surprised expression, the soldier said, "Our whole platoon cathes 'em, Corporal. We got enough firepower to make these scaly sons of bitches think twice about messin' with us."

  Daniels started to say, "That's crazy," but maybe it wasn't. Out in open country it would have been; a tommy gun fired a .45-caliber pistol cartridge, and was accurate out to only a couple of hundred yards. But in street fighting or building-to-building combat like

  this, volume of fire counted for a lot more than accuracy. Since the U.S.A. couldn't match the Lizards' automatic rifles, submachine guns were probably the next best thing.

  So instead of cussing the high command for a worthless brainstorm, Mutt said, "Yeah, some of the German assault troops in France carried those damn things, too. I didn't much care to go up against 'em, either."

  The tommy-gunner turned his head. "You were Over There, were you? I reckon this is worse."

  Daniels thought about it. "Yeah, probably. Not that that was any fun, mind you, but it's always easier bein' on the long end of the stick. And this here fightin' in factories— I didn't used to think they made anything worse'n trenches, but I'm comin' round to believe I was wrong."

  An airplane roared by, just above rooftop

  height. "Ours," the tommy-gunner said in glad surprise. Daniels shared it; American planes were all too few these days. The aircraft pounded the advancing Lizards for a few seconds, machine guns bellowing. Then came another bellow, an almost solid wall of noise, from the ground. The airplane's engine stopped screaming; the machine guns cut off at the same time. The plane crashed with a boom that would have broken windows had Aurora had any windows left to break.

  "Damn!" the tommy-gunner and Daniels said together. Mutt added, "I hope he came down on top of a whole pile of the bastards."

  "Yeah," said the soldier with the Thompson gun. "I just wish he could have got away so he'd be able to hit 'em again tomorrow." Daniels nodded; he sometimes thought no American ever lived to fly more than one mission against the Lizards. Using up pilots as fast as planes was a losing way to do

  business.

  The tommy-gunner squeezed off a burst in the direction of the Lizards. He said, "Corporal, I'll cover you if you want to slide away from here. You ain't much good in this fight with just your old Springfield."

  Had he left off the second sentence, Daniels might have taken him up on the offer. But he discovered he had pride left to flick. He could think of himself as old and he'd already thought of his rifle as antiquated, but he wasn't about to let this punk kid tell him he couldn't cut it "I'll stick," he said shortly.

  "However you want it," the tommy-gunner said, shrugging. Mutt got the idea that only his stripes kept the kid from tacking Pop onto the end of the sentence.

  The Lizards skittered forward, firing as they came. The flames that leapt from the burning

  beam lit them up but also helped screen their movements. Daniels snapped off a shot. A skitter turned into a tumble. He raised a Rebel yell his grandpappy would have been proud of. "No good in a fight, am I?" The soldier beside him looked innocent "Did I say something?"

  The kid got up on one knee to fire, then went over backward with almost the grace of a circus acrobat. Something hot and wet splashed Daniels. The flickering firelight showed red-streaked gray on the back of his hand. He violently wiped it against his trouser leg. "Brains," he said, shuddering. When he glanced over at the tommy-gunner, the top of the youngster's head was clipped off, as if by a hatchet. A spreading pool of blood reached toward him.

  He didn't have time to be as sick as he would have liked. As far as he could tell, he was the forwardmost American still fighting. He fired at one Lizard— a miss, he thought, but he

  made the little monster duck— then whirled through a quarter-circle to shoot at another.

 
He had no idea what, if anything, that second round did. He did know that if he had to keep using a bolt-action rifle against what were in essence machine guns, he was going to get his ass killed— and the rest of him with it. He snatched up the tommy gun. The kid lying dead beside him was carrying another couple of drums of ammo, so he could use it for a while.

  It bucked against his shoulder like an ornery horse when he opened up. He sprayed bullets hose-fashion out in front of him. The prolonged muzzle flash nearly blinded him before he dropped back behind cover. Hell of-a way to fight, he thought— lay down a lot of lead and hope the bad guys walk into it

  It was, he realized, a hell of a place to fight, too: gloom-filled ruins lit only by fires and

  muzzle flashes, echoing with gunshots and screams, the air thick with smoke and the smells of sweat and blood and fear.