Tilting The Balance (20 page)

Goldfarb rummaged through the tools on his belt till he found a flat-blade screwdriver whose blade fit across the diagonal of one of the Lizard screws. He turned it. Nothing happened. He gave the screw a hard look that quickly turned speculative and tried to turn it the other way. It began to come out.

Bad language was coming from the
RAF
men working on the engine. Suspecting he knew why, Goldfarb called, “The screws are backwards to ours: anticlockwise tightens, clockwise loosens.”

He heard a couple of seconds’ silence, then a grunt of satisfaction. Fred Hippie said, “Thank you, David. Lord only knows how long that would have taken to occur to us. One can sometimes become too wedded to the obvious.”

Goldfarb fairly burst with pride. This from the man who had designed and patented the jet engine almost ten years before the war began! Praise indeed, he thought.

The bad language from the engine crew faded away as the officers got the casing off and started looking at the guts. “They use fir-tree roots to secure the turbine blades, sir,” Julian Peary said indignantly. “Pity you had so much trouble convincing the powers that be it was a good notion.”

“The Lizards have had this technology in place rather longer than we have, Wing Commander,” Hippie answered. Despite long thwarting by
RAF
indifference and even hostility, he showed no bitterness.

“And look,” Basil Roundbush said. “The blades have a slight twist to them. How long ago did you suggest that, sir? Two years? Three?”

Whatever Hippie’s answer was, Goldfarb didn’t hear it. He’d loosened enough screws himself to get off a panel of the radar’s case. He had a good notion of what he’d find inside: since physical laws had to be the same all through the universe, he figured the Lizard set would closely resemble the ones he was used to. Oh, it would be smaller and lighter and better engineered than
RAF
models, but still essentially similar. Valves, after all, remained valves – unless you went to the United States, where they turned into tubes.

But the second he got a good look at the radar, the flush of pride he’d felt a little while before evaporated. Hippie and his team could make some sense of what they saw inside the jet engine. The parts of the radar set remained a complete mystery to Goldfarb. The only thing of which he could be certain was that it had no valves… or even tubes.

What took their place was sheets of grayish-brown material with silvery lines etched onto them. Some had little lumpy things of various shapes and colors affixed. Form said nothing about function, at least not to Goldfarb.

Basil Roundbush chose that moment to inquire, “How goes it with you, David?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t go at all.” Goldfarb knew he sounded like a bad translation from the French. He didn’t care: he’d found the simplest way to tell the truth.

“Pity,” Roundbush said. “Well, I don’t suppose we need every single answer this morning. One or two of them may possibly wait until tonight.”

Goldfarb’s answering laugh had a distinctly hollow ring.

Mutt Daniels drew the cloth patch through the barrel of his tommy gun. “You got to keep your weapon clean,” he told the men in his squad. Telling – even ordering – accomplished only so much. Leading by example worked better.

Kevin Donlan obediently started in on his rifle. He obeyed Daniels like a father (or maybe, Mutt thought uneasily, like a grandfather – he was old enough to be the kid’s grandfather, if he and his hypothetical child had started early). Other than that, though, he had a soldier’s ingrained suspicion of anyone of higher rank than his own – which in his case meant just about the whole Army. He asked, “Sarge, what are we doing in Mount Pulaski anyways?”

Daniels paused in his cleaning to consider that. He wished he had a chaw; working the wad of tobacco in his mouth always helped him think. He hadn’t come across one in a long time, though. He said, “Near as I can see, somebody looked at a map, saw ‘Mount,’ and figured this here was high ground. Hell of a mountain, ain’t it?”

The men laughed. Mount Pulaski was on higher ground than the surrounding hamlets – by twenty, thirty, sometimes even fifty or sixty feet. It hardly seemed worth having spent lives to take the place, even if it did also sit at the junction of State Roads 121 and 54.

Bela Szabo said, “They finally figured out we weren’t about to take Decatur, so they figured they’d move us someplace new and see how many casualties we can take here.” Szabo wasn’t much older than Kevin Donlan, but had a couple of extra lifetimes’ worth of cynicism under his belt.

But Mutt shook his head. “Nash, that ain’t it, Dracula. What they’re really after is seein’ how many fancy old-time buildings they can blow to hell. They’re gettin’ right good at it, too.”

The Mount Pulaski Courthouse was his case in point, here. Almost a hundred years old, it was a two-story Greek Revival building of red-brown brick with a plain classical pediment. Or rather, it had been: after a couple of artillery hits, more of it was rubble than building. But enough still stood to show it would have been worth saving.

“You boys hungry?” a woman called. “I’ve got some ducks and some fried trout here if you are.” She held up a big wicker picnic basket.

“Yes, ma’am,” Mutt said enthusiastically. “Beats the sh – pants off what the Army feeds us – when they feed us.” Quartermaster arrangements had gone to hell, what with the Lizards hitting supply lines whenever they could. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of locals, Daniels and his men would have gone hungry a lot more than they did.

The woman came up to the front porch of the wrecked house where the squad was sitting. None of the young soldiers paid her any particular mind – she was a year or two past forty, with a tired face and mousebrown hair streaked with gray. Their attention was on the basket she carried.

Springfields and M-1s still came with bayonets, even If nobody was likely to use them in combat any more. They turned out to make first-rate duck carvers, though. The roast ducks were greasy and gamy. Mutt still ate duck in preference to trout; the only fish he cared for was catfish.

“Mighty fine, ma’am,” Kevin Donlan said, licking his fingers. “Where’d you come by all this good stuff, anyhow?”

“Up in Lincoln Lakes, six, seven miles north of here,” she answered. “They aren’t real lakes, just gravel pits filled with water but they re stocked with fish and I can use a shotgun.”

“Found that out,” Mutt said His teeth had stumbled on birdshot a couple of times. You could break one that way If you weren’t lucky. He tossed aside a leg bone gnawed bare, then went on, “Mighty kind, of you to go to so much trouble for us, uh” – his eyes flicked to her left hand to see if she wore a ring-”Miss…”

“I’m Lucille Potter,” she answered. “What’s your name?”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Lucille,” he said. “I’m M – uh, Pete Daniels.” He thought of himself as Mutt these days; he had for years. But that didn’t seem the right way to introduce yourself to a woman you’d just met. The kids might ignore her – they were younger than most of the players he’d managed – but she didn’t look half bad to him.

Only trouble was, the kids wouldn’t let him get away with being Pete. Some of them started rolling in the dirt; even Kevin Donlan snorted. Lucille looked from one of them to the next. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

Resignedly, Daniels said, “My name’s Pete, but they usually call me Mutt.”

“Is that what you’d rather be called?” she asked. When he nodded, she went on, “Why didn’t you say so, then? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Her brisk tones made a couple of the soldiers look abashed, but more of them didn’t care what she said, even If she had brought them food. The matter-of-fact common sense in her words made him eye her speculatively. “You a schoolteacher, ma’am?”

She smiled. That made some of her tiredness fall away and let him see what she’d looked like when she was twenty-five or so. No, she wasn’t bad at all. She said, “Pretty good guess, but you didn’t notice my shoes.”

They were white – an awfully dirty white now – with thick, rubbery soles. “You’re a nurse,” Mutt said.

Lucille Potter nodded. “I sure am. I’ve been doing a doctor’s work since the Lizards came, though. Mount Pulaski only had Doc Hanrahan, and somebody’s bomb – God knows whose – landed in his front yard just when he was coming out the door. He never knew what hit him, anyhow.”

“Lord, I wish we could take you with us, ma’am,” Kevin Donlan said. “The medics we got, they ain’t everything they oughta be. ‘Course, what is these days?”

“That purely is a fact,” Daniels agreed. The Army tried hard, the same as it did with supplies. As with supplies, war’s disruption was too great to permit hurt men proper care. He suspected his grandfathers in the War Between the States hadn’t risked much worse medical treatment. Doctors knew a lot more nowadays, but so what? All the knowledge in the world didn’t matter if you couldn’t get your hands on the medicines and instruments you needed to use it.

Lucille Potter said, “Why the hell not?”

Mutt gaped at her, startled twice – first at the casual way she swore and then by how she fell in with Donlan’s suggestion, which had been more wistful than serious. Mutt said, “But, ma’am, you’re a woman.” He thought that explained everything.

“So?” Lucille said – evidently she didn’t. “Would you care if I was digging a bullet out of your leg? Or do you think your boys here are going to gang-rape me the second your back is turned?”

“But – But-” Mutt spluttered like a man who can’t swim floundering out of a creek. He felt his face turn red. His men were staring at Lucille Potter with their mouths open. Rape wasn’t a word you said around a woman, let alone a word you expected to hear from one.

She went on, “Maybe I should bring my shotgun along. You think that might make ‘em behave?”

“Y all mean it,” he said, surprised again this time into a Southernism he seldom used.

“Of course I. mean it,” she said. “Get to know me for a while and you’ll find out I hardly ever say things I don’t mean. People in town were stupid, too, till they started coming down sick and breaking bones and having babies. Then they found out what I could do – because they had to. You can’t afford to wait around like that, can you? If you give me five minutes, I’ll go home and get my black bag. Or” – she shrugged-”you can do without.”

Mutt thought hard. Whatever the trouble she brought with her, could it be worse than the hurts they’d take that would go bad without a doctor? He didn’t think so. But he also wanted to find out why she was volunteering, so he asked, “How come you want to leave this town, If you’re the only thing even halfway close to a doctor here?”

“When the Lizards held this part of the state, I had to stay here – I was the only one around who could do anything,” Lucille answered. “But now that proper human beings are back in charge, it’ll be easier to bring a real doctor around. And an awful lot of what I’ve been doing lately is patching up hurt soldiers. I hate to put it so plain, Mutt, but I think you people are liable to need me worse than Mount Pulaski does.”

“That makes sense,” Mutt said. Glancing at Lucille Potter, he got the feeling she would make sense a lot of the time. He rubbed his chin. “Tell you what, Miss Lucille. Let’s take you over to Captain Maczek, see what he thinks about the idea. If it’s all right with him, I like it.” He looked over to the men in his squad. They were all nodding. Mutt suddenly grinned. “Here – bring some of this duck along with you. That’ll help put him in the right kind of mood.”

Maczek was around the corner, eating with another squad from the company. He was maybe half Mutt’s age, but not altogether lacking in sense.

Mutt grinned again to see him digging a spoon in what looked like a can of baked beans. He held up the duck leg. “Got something better’n that for you, sir – an’ here’s the lady who shot the bird.”

The captain stared in delight at the duck, then turned to Lucille. “Ma’am, my hat’s off to you.” He took himself literally, doffing his net-covered helmet. The sweaty blond hair underneath it stuck up in all directions.

“Pleased to meet you, Captain.” Lucille Potter gave her name, shook Maczek’s hand with a decisive pump. Then the captain took the drumstick and thigh from Daniels and bit into it. Grease ran down his chin. His expression turned ecstatic.

“You know what else, sir?” Mutt said. He told Maczek what else.

“Is that a fact?” Maczek said.

“Yes, sir, it is,” Lucille said. “I’m not a proper doctor, and I don’t claim to be one. But I’ve learned a hell of a lot these past few months, and I’m a lot better than nothing.”

Maczek absently took another bite of duck. As Mutt had, he eyed the men around him. They’d all been listening with eager curiosity. You couldn’t run an army by asking what everybody thought all the time, but you didn’t ignore what people thought, either, not if you were smart. Maczek wasn’t stupid, anyhow. He said, “I’ll clear it with the colonel later, but I don’t think he’ll say no. It’s irregular as all get out, but this whole stinking war is irregular.”

“I’ll go get my tools,” Lucille said, and strode off to do just that.

Captain Maczek watched her no-nonsense walk for a few seconds before he turned back to Daniels. “You know, Sergeant, if you’d come along to me with some little chippy you’d found, I’d have been very angry at you. But this one – I think she may do. If I’ve ever seen a female who can take care of herself, she’s it.”

“Reckon you’re right, sir.” Mutt pointed to the bones Maczek was still holding. “And we already know she can handle a shotgun.”

“That’s true, by God.” Maczek laughed. “Besides, she’s old enough to be a mother for most of the men. You have anybody in your squad with an Oedipus complex, you think?”

‘With a what, sir?” Mutt frowned-just because Maczek had been to college, he didn’t need to show off. And besides-”She’s not bad-lookin’, I don’t think.”

Captain Maczek opened his mouth to say something. By the glint in his eye, it would have been lewd or rude or both. But he didn’t say it – he was too smart an officer to make fun of his noncoms, especially in front of a bunch of listening soldiers. What he did finally say was, “However you like, Mutt. But remember, she’s going to be medic for the whole company, maybe the battalion, not just your squad.”