Tilting The Balance (53 page)

Lucille let out an impatient sniff. “Use your eyes, Mutt. You must know that people have two long bones in their forearms and one in their upper arms. See for yourself – with the Lizards it’s just the opposite.”

“Well, I’ll be a-” The memory of his father’s callused hand kept Mutt from saying what he’d be. Now that Lucille pointed it out, though, he saw she was right. His knowledge of anatomy came from no formal study, but from farming and from dealing with players who hurt themselves on the field – and with his own injuries, back when he was playing himself. Now that his attention was focused, he added, “I never seen any wrist bones like those, neither.”

“They have to be different from ours,” Lucille said. “A human wrist pivots the hand off two bones, these off only one. The muscle attachments would be very different, too, but we can’t see much of them any more.”

Freddie Laplace worked at the mud with his entrenching tool, not to dig in but to expose more of the dead Lizard’s skeleton. In spite of the rain, the dead-meat stink grew bad enough to make Mutt cough. He’d already seen that Lizards bled red. Now he learned they had no more dignity in death than men slain the same way.

“Lord, I wonder what happens to ‘em come Judgment Day?” he said, very much as if he were asking the Deity. He’d been raised a hardshell Baptist, and never bothered to question his childhood faith after he grew to manhood. But if God had made the Lizards at some time or other during Creation (and on which day would that have been?), would He resurrect them in the body come the Last Day? Mutt figured preachers somewhere were getting hot and bothered about that.

Freddie exposed some of the alien corpse’s ribcage. “Ain’t that peculiar?” he said. “More like latticework than a proper cage.”

“How come you know so much about it?” Mutt asked him. “My old man, he runs a butcher shop up in Bangor, Maine,” Laplace answered. “There’s one thing I seen a lot of, Sarge, it’s bones.”

Mutt nodded, conceding the point Lucille Potter said, “That latticework arrangement is very strong – the English used it for the skeletons of their Blenheim and Wellington bombers.”

“Is that a fact?” Daniels said. He was just making talk, though; if Miss Lucille said something was so, you could take it to the bank.

She asked Freddie, “Do you think you can dig out his skull for me?”

“I’ll give it a try, ma’am,” Laplace said, as If she’d asked him up to the blackboard for a tough multiplication problem he thought he could do. He started scraping away more mud with the folding shovel. Lucille Potter made little eager noises, as if he were digging up a brand-new Chevy (not that there were any brand-new Chevies) and enough gas to run it for a year.

Try and figure women, Mutt thought, as he watched Lucille take a scalpel from her little case of instruments. A dead Lizard interested her… but a live sergeant didn’t.

Mutt sighed. He thought Lucille liked him well enough. He knew he liked her well enough, and then some. He knew she knew that, too; she could hardly have doubted it after the kiss he’d given her when he used her bottle of ether to take out the Lizard tank. But the spark that jumped one way didn’t come back the other.

He wondered if she’d left a sweetheart behind when she signed up as an Army nurse. He had his doubts about that; she had maiden lady written all over her. Just my luck he thought.

He was not a man to spend a lot of time brooding over what he couldn’t help. If he had been that sort of man, years of catching and then of managing would have changed him into a different sort: too many decisions to let any one reach earthshaking proportions, even if it didn’t work. If you couldn’t understand that down in your guts, you were liable to end up like Willard Hershberger, the Reds’ catcher who’d cut his throat in a New York hotel room after he called the pitch Mel Ott hit into the Polo Grounds stands for a ninth-inning game-winning homer.

And so Mutt went around to see that the rest of his squad was well dug in and that Dracula Szabo had picked a spot with a good field of fire for his
BAR
Daniels didn’t expect to be attacked here, but you never could tell.

“We got anything decent for chow tonight, Sarge?” Szabo asked.

“Crations, I expect, and damn lucky to have those,” Mutt answered. “Better’n what we ever saw in France; you can believe that.” The only real thing Daniels had against the canned rations was that the supply boys had trouble getting enough of them into the field to keep him from being hungry more than he liked. With the Lizards controlling the air, logistics got real sticky.

Szabo had what Mutt thought of as a city slicker’s face: controlled, knowing, often with an expression that seemed to say he’d be laughing at you if only you were worth laughing at. It was a face that ached for a slap. Whether it did or whether it didn’t, though, Dracula had his uses. Now he reached under his poncho and showed Mutt three dead chickens. “Reckon we can do some better than C-rats,” he said smugly, grinning like a fox who’d just raided the hen coop.

That was probably Just what he was, too, Mutt thought. He said “We ain’t supposed to forage on our own people,” but his heart wasn’t in it. Roast chicken did go down better than canned stew.

“Aw, Sarge, they were just struttin’ around, no people anywhere close,” Szabo said, as innocently as if he were telling the truth. Maybe more innocently.

But he knew as well as Mutt that Mutt wasn’t going to call him on it. “I’m right glad o’ that,” Daniels said. “You go, ah, findin’ chickens where there is people around, you’ll have Miss Lucille diggin’ pellets outta your ass. Birdshot if you’re lucky, buckshot if you ain’t.”

“Not while I’m luggin’ a
BAR
,” Szabo said with quiet assurance. “Didn’t Miss Lucille say something about an auditorium somewhere in this park? If there’s any roof at all, cooking these birds gets a lot easier.”

Mutt looked around. Riverview Park was good-sized, and with the rain coming down in curtains he couldn’t see anything that looked like a building. “I’ll ask her where it’s at,” he said, and sloshed back to where she was playing mad scientist with the late, unlamented Lizard’s remains.

“Look at this, Mutt,” Lucille said when he came up. She used her scalpel to point enthusiastically at the Lizard’s jaws. “Lots of little teeth, all pretty much the same, not specialized like ours.”

“Yeah, I seen that when I captured a couple live ones not long after they invaded us,” Mutt answered, averting his eyes; the skull had enough rotting meat still on it to threaten to kill his appetite.

“You captured Lizards, Sarge?” Freddie Laplace sounded impressed as all get out Lucille just took it in stride, the way she did most things. Mutt would have been happier had it been the other way around.

Nothing he could do about it, though. He asked her where the auditorium was; she pointed eastward. He slogged in that direction, hoping some of the place was still intact. Sure enough, he discovered that, although it had taken a shell hit that left one wall only a baby brickyard, the rest seemed sound enough.

In the rain, finding anything more than fifty yards away wasn’t easy. Mud thin as bad diarrhea slopped over his boot tops and soaked his socks. He hoped he wouldn’t come down with pneumonia or the grippe.

“Halt! Who goes?” Szabo’s voice came out of the water, as if from behind a falls. Daniels couldn’t see him at all. Dracula might be a chicken thief, but he made a pretty fair soldier.

“It’s me,” Mutt called. “Found that auditorium place. You want to give me them birds, I’ll cook ‘em for you. I grew up on a farm; reckon I’ll do a better job than you would anyways.”

“Yeah, okay. Come on this way.” Szabo stood up so Mutt could spot him. “Not gonna be any Lizards around for a while, though, Sarge – is it okay if I wander over there in an hour or so, and you’ll make sure there’s some dark meat left for me?”

“I think maybe we can do that,” Daniels said. “You put somebody here on your weapon before you go wandering, though, you hear me? In case we do have trouble, we’re gonna need all the firepower we can get our hands on.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Sarge,” Szabo said. “Even roast chicken ain’t worth gettin’ my ass shot off for.” He spoke with great conviction. From any other dogface in the squad, Daniels would have found that convincing. With Szabo, you never could tell.

He took the chickens back to the auditorium. Whoever had been there last, Americans or Lizards, had chopped up a lot of the folding wooden seats that faced the stage: more than they’d used for their fires. Taking advantage of the free lumber, Mutt built his blaze on the concrete floor where others had made theirs before him.

He pulled out his trusty Zippo. He wondered how long it would stay trusty. He had a package of flints in his shirt pocket, but the Zippo was burning kerosene these days, not lighter fluid, and he didn’t know when he’d come across any more kerosene, either. For now, it still gave him a flame on the first try.

He quickly found out why the previous occupants of the auditorium had been so eager to use the seats for fuel: the varnish that made them shiny also made them catch fire with the greatest of ease. He went back out into the rain to throw away the chicken guts and to get some sticks on which to skewer the pieces of chicken he was going to cook.

His belly growled when the savory smell of roasting meat came through the smoke from the fire. His grandfathers would have done their cooking in the War Between the States the same way he was now, except they’d have used lucifer matches instead of the Zippo to get the fire going.

“Chow!” he yelled when he had a fair number of pieces finished. Men straggled in by ones and twos, ate quickly, and went back out into the rain. When Lucille Potter came in for hers, Mutt asked jokingly, “You wash your hands before supper?”

“You’d best believe I did – and with soap, too.”

Being a nurse, Lucille was in dead earnest about cleanliness. “Did you wash yours before you cleaned these birds and cut them up?”

“Well, you might say so,” Mutt answered; his hands had certainly been wet, anyhow. “Didn’t use soap, though.”

Had Lucille Potter’s stare been any fishier, she’d have grown fins. Before she could say anything, Szabo strolled into the auditorium. “You save me a drumstick, Sarge?”

“Here’s a whole leg, kid,” Mutt said. The
BAR
man blissfully started gnawing away. Daniels took half a breast off the fire, waved it in the air to cool it down, and also began to eat. He had to pause a couple of times to spit out burnt bits of feather; he’d done a lousy job of plucking the chickens.

Then he paused again, this time with the hunk of white meat nowhere near his mouth. Through the splashing rain came deep-throated engine rumblings and the mucky grinding noise of caterpillar tracks working hard to propel their burden over bad ground. The chicken Mutt had already swallowed turned to a small lump of lead in his stomach.

“Tanks.” The word came out as hardly more than a whisper, as if he didn’t want to believe it himself. Then he bellowed it with all the fear and force he had in him: “Tanks!”

Dracula Szabo dropped the mostly bare drumstick and thigh and sprinted back toward his
BAR
. What good it would do against Lizard armor, Mutt couldn’t imagine. He also didn’t think the rain would give him another chance to take out a Lizard tank with a bottle of ether – even assuming Lucille had any more, which wasn’t obvious.

He threw down his own piece of meat, grabbed his submachine gun, and peered out ever so cautiously through the gaping hole in the auditorium wall. The tanks were out there somewhere not far away, but he couldn’t see them. They weren’t firing; maybe they didn’t know his squad was in the park.

“That’s great,” he muttered. “Gettin” trapped behind enemy lines is just what I had in mind.”

“Enemy lines?” All his attention on the noises coming from the dripping gloom outside, Mutt hadn’t noticed Lucille Potter coming up behind him. She went on, “Those are our tanks, Mutt. They’re coming down from the north – either the Lizards haven’t taken out the bridges over the Vermilion or else we’ve repaired them – and they make a lot more racket than the machines the Lizards use.”

Mutt listened again, this time without panic blinding his ears. After a two-beat pause he used around Lucille to replace a useful seven-letter word, be said, “You’re right. Lord, I was ready to start shooting at my own side.”

“Some of the men are still liable to do that,” Lucille said. “Yeah.” Mutt stepped outside, shouted into the rain: “Hold your fire! American tanks comin’ south. Hold fire!”

One of the grunting, snorting machines rumbled by close enough for the commander to hear that cry. To Mutt, he was just a vague shape sticking up from the top of the turret He called back in unmistakable New England accents, “We’re friendly all right, buddy. We’re usin’ the rain to move up without the Lizards spotting us – give the little scaly sons of bitches a surprise if they come after you guys.”

“Sounds right good, pal,” Daniels answered, waving. The tank – he could tell it was a Sherman; the turret was too big for a Lee – rattled on toward the south edge of Riverview Park. In a way, Mutt envied the crew for having inches of hardened steel between them and the foe. In another way, he was happy enough to be just an infantryman. The Lizards didn’t particularly notice him. Tanks,

though, drew their special fire. They had some fancy can openers, too.

The tank commander had to know that better than Mutt did. He kept heading south anyhow. Mutt wondered how many times he’d been in action, and if this one would be the last. With a wave to the departing tank that was half salute, he went back into the ruined auditorium to finish his chicken.

All around him, the land burgeoned with Russian spring. The sun rose early now, and set late, and everything that had lain dormant through winter flourished in the long hours of daylight. Fresh green grass pushed up through and hid last year’s growth, now gray brown and dead. The willows and birches by the Moscow River wore new bright leafy coats. Concealed by those new leaves, birds chirped and warbled. Molotov did not know which bird went with which song. He could barely tell a titmouse from a toucan, not that you were likely to find a toucan in a Russian treetop even in springtime.