Tilting The Balance (78 page)

“Perhaps you left your spectacles behind when you left London,” Chill suggested acidly.

“Maybe I. did, but I don’t think so.” Bagnall turned to Aleksandr German. “Brigadier, I know there aren’t many tanks on your section of the front; if the Lizards had a lot of tanks, they’d be here by now, and we’d all be dead, not bickering. But are they using those troop carriers with the turret-mounted guns?”

“Yes, we have seen a good many of them,” the partisan leader answered at once.

“There!” Bagnall said to Kurt Chill. “Are those troop carriers a good enough target for your antitank lads? You’d have to be lucky to take out a Lizard tank with an 88, but you can do all sorts of lovely things to a troop carrier with one.”

“This is so.” Chill rounded on Aleksandr German. “Why did you not say light armor was part of the threat you were facing? Had I known, I would have released units from the battalion at once.”

“Who can tell what will make up a fascist’s mind?” Aleksandr German answered. “If you’re going to send men, you’d, better go and do it.” They left the map room together, arguing now about how many men and guns and where they needed to go rather than whether to send any at all.

Bagnall indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt “Whew!” Jerome Jones walked over and patted him on the back.

“Nicely done,” Ken Embry said. “We are earning our keep here after all, seems to me.” He got himself a glass of hot, brownish muck from the samovar, then let one eyelid droop in unmistakable wink. “D’you suppose Comrade Brigadier German has really seen a whole fleet of armored troop carriers, or even so many as one?”

Jones gaped; his head swung from Embry to Bagnall and back again. Bagnall said, “I haven’t the foggiest notion, truth to tell. But he picked up his cue in a hurry, didn’t he? If armor rumbles into the neighborhood, even a literal-minded Jerry can hardly quarrel with rolling out the antitank guns, now can he?”

“Doesn’t look as though he can, at any rate,” Embry said. “I would have to say that hand goes to the heroic partisan.” He raised his glass in salute.

“Comrade German is one very sharp chap,” Bagnall said. “How good he is as a soldier or a leader of men I’m still not certain, but he misses very little.”

“You threw out that line sure it was a lie and expecting him to snap at it anyhow,” Jones said, almost in accusation.

“Haven’t you ever done the like, with a barmaid for instance?” Bagnall asked, and was amused to watch the radarman turn red. “My notion was that if he said no, we’d be no worse off than we were already: Chill was going to balk, and we have nothing save whatever he uses as a sense of honor to get him to keep the promise he made to accept our decision. Giving him a reason he could swallow for doing what we wanted looked to be a good idea.”

“And next time, with luck, he’ll be likelier to go along,” Embry said. “Unless, of course, his men get wiped out and the position overrun, which is a risk in this business.”

“If that happens, it will announce itself,” Bagnall said, “most likely by artillery shells starting to land on Pskov.” He pointed to the map. “We can’t lose much more ground without coming into range of their auns.”

“Nothing to do now but wait,” Jones said. “Feels like being back at Dover, waiting for the Jerries to fly over arid show up on the radar screen: it’s a cricket match with the other side at bat, and you have to respond to what their batsman does.”

Hours passed. A babushka brought in bowls of borscht, thick beet soup with a dollop of sour cream floating on top. Bagnall mechanically spooned it up till the bowl was empty. He’d never fancied either beets or sour cream, but he fancied going hungry even less. Fuel, he told himself. Nasty-tasting fuel, but you need to top off your tanks.

Evening came late to Pskov these days: the town didn’t have the white nights of Leningrad to the north and east, but twilight lingered long. The western sky was still a bright salmon pink when Tatiana came into the map room. Just the sight of her roused all the Englishmen, who were fighting yawns: even in the shapeless blouse and baggy trousers of a Red Army soldier, she seemed much too decorative to have a rifle with a telescopic sight slung over her back.

Jerome Jones greeted her in Russian. She nodded to him, but astonished Bagnall by walking up to him and kissing him to a point just short of asphyxiation. Her clothes might have concealed her shape, but she felt all woman in his arms.

“My God!” he exclaimed in delighted amazement. “What’s that in aid of?”

“I’ll ask,” Jones said, much less enthusiastically. He started speaking Russian again; Tatiana replied volubly. He translated. “She says she’s thanking you for getting the Nazi mother-molester – her words – to move his guns forward. They hit a munitions store when they shelled the rear area, and took out several troop carriers at the front lines.”

“They really were there,” Embry broke in.

Tatiana went on right through him. After a moment, Jones fallowed her: “She says she had a good day sniping, too, thanks to the confusion the guns sowed among them, and she thanks you for that, too.”

“Looks as though we’ve held, at least for the time being,” Embry said.

Bagnall nodded, but he kept glancing over at Tatiana. She was watching him, too, as if through that rifle sight. Her gaze was smoky as the fires Pskov used for heating and cooking. It warmed Bagnall and chilled him at the same time. He could tell she wanted to sleep with him, but the only reason he could see for it was that he’d helped her do a better job of killing. The old saw about the female of the species being more deadly than the male floated through his mind. He’d heard it dozen times over the years, but never expected to run across its exemplification. He didn’t meet Tatiana’s gaze again. No matter how pretty she was, as far as he was concerned, Jerome Jones was welcome to her.

Crack! Sam Yeager took an automatic step back. Then he realized the line drive was hit in front of him. He dashed in, dove. The ball stuck in his glove. His right hand closed over to make sure it didn’t pop out. He rolled over on the grass, held up his glove to show he had the ball.

The fellow who’d smacked the drive flipped away his bat in disgust. Yeager’s teammates and, from behind the backstop, Barbara yelled and clapped. “Nice catch, Sam!” “Great play!” “You’re a regular Hoover out there.”

He threw the ball back to the
RFC
who was playing short, wondering what all the fuss was about. If you couldn’t make that play, you weren’t a ballplayer, not by the standards he set for himself. Of course, by those standards he was probably the only ballplayer at the Sunday afternoon pickup game. He sight not have ever come close to the big leagues, but even a Class B outfielder looked like Joe DiMaggio here.

After an error on a routine ground ball, a strikeout ended the inning. Yeager tossed his glove to the ground outside the foul line and trotted in to the chicken-wire cage that served for a dugout. He was due to lead off the bottom of the sixth.

He’d walked his first time up and swung at a bad ball the second, hitting a little bleeder that had been an easy out. The pitcher for the other side had a pretty strong arm, but he also thought he was Bob Feller – or maybe getting Yeager the last time had made him cocky. After wasting a curve down and away, he tried to bust Sam in on the fists with a fastball.

It wasn’t fast enough or far enough in. Sam’s eyes lit up as soon as he pulled the trigger. Thwack! When you hit the ball dead square, your hands hardly know it’s met the bat – but the rest of you does, and so does everybody else. The pitcher wheeled through one of those ungainly pirouettes pitchers turn to follow the flight of a long ball.

The ball would have been out of Fan’s Field or any other park in the Three-l League, but the field they were, playing on didn’t have fences. The left fielder and center fielder both chased after the drive. Sam ran like hell. He scored, standing up. His teammates pounded him on the back and slapped him on the butt.

Behind the backstop, Barbara bounced up and down. Beside her, Ullhass and Ristin hissed excitedly. They weren’t about to try going anywhere, not with so many soldiers around.

Yeager sat down on the park bench in the dugout. “Whew!” he said, panting. “I’m getting too old to work that hard.” Somebody found a threadbare towel and fanned him with it, as if he were between rounds in a fight with Joe Louis. “I’m not dead yet,” he exclaimed, and made a grab for it.

He got another hit his next time up, a line single to center stole second, and went to third when the catcher’s throw flew over the shortstop’s head. The next batter picked him up with a ground single between the drawn-in shortstop and third baseman; that was the last run in a 7-3 win.

“You beat them almost singlehanded,” Barbara said when he came around the wire fence to join her and the Lizard POWs.

“I like to play,” he answered. Lowering his voice, he added, “And this isn’t near as tough a game as I’m used to.”

“You certainly made it look easy,” she said. “Make the plays and it does look easy, like anything else,” he said. “Mess them up and you make people think nobody could ever play it right. God knows I’ve done that often enough, too – otherwise I wouldn’t have been in the bush leagues all those years.”

“How can you hit a round ball with a round stick and have it go so far?” Ristin asked. “It seems impossible.”

“It’s a bat, not a stick,” Yeager answered. “As to how you hit it, it takes practice.” He’d let the Lizards swing at easy tosses a few times. They choked way up on the bat; they were only about the size of ten-year-olds. Even so, they had trouble making contact.

“Come on,” somebody called. “Picnic’s starting.”

It wasn’t a proper picnic, to Yeager’s way of thinking: no fire for wieners, just sandwiches and some beer. But the MPs and air raid wardens would have come down on them like a ton of bricks

– if Lizard bombers hadn’t already used the point of flame as a target for some of their explosive goodies.

The sandwiches were tasty: ham and roast beef on home-baked bread. And the Coors brewery was close enough to Denver that even horse-drawn wagons brought enough into town to keep people happy. The beer wasn’t as cold as Sam would have liked, but he’d grown up in the days before iceboxes were universal, and falling back to those days wasn’t too hard for him.

The breeze kicked up as the sun went down. Yeager wouldn’t have minded a fire then, not at all: Denver nights got chilly in a hurry. Ullhass and Ristin felt it worse than he did; they put on the heavy wool sweaters they’d had knotted around their skinny, scaly waists. The sky got dark in a hurry, too, once the sun slipped behind the Rockies. Stars glittered brightly in the midnight-blue bowl of the heavens.

The ballplayers were used to having the Lizard POWs around. One of them pointed up to the points of light in the sky and asked, “Hey, Ristin, which one of those do you come from?”

“It is behind Tosev – your star for this world,” Ristin answered. “You cannot see it now.”

“The Lizards come from the second planet of Tau Ceti,” Yeager said. “They’ve got their hooks on the second planet of Epsilon Eridani and the first planet of Epsilon Indi. We were next on the list.”

“Those are the names of stars?” said the fellow who’d asked Ristin where he was from. “I’ve never heard of any of “em.”

“I hadn’t, either, not till the Lizards came,” Sam answered. “I grew up on a farm, too – I thought I knew stars like the back of my hand. I knew the Dippers and Orion and the Dogs and the zodiac and things like that, but there’s a lot more sky than I ever figured on. And Epsilon Indi’s like the Southern Cross – too far south to see from here.” “So what’re these places like?” the man asked.

“Tosev is hotter and brighter than the sun – the sun of Home, I mean,” Ristin said. “Rabotev – what you call Epsilon Eridani” – he hissed the name-”is like our sun, but Halless, Epsilon Indi” – another hiss-”is cooler and more orange. Next to any of the worlds the Race rules, Tosev 3 is cold and wet and not very comfortable.” He gave a theatrical shiver.

“The sun’s a type-G star, a yellow one,” Yeager added. “So is Tau Ceti but it’s at the cool end of the G range and the sun’s at the warm end. Epsilon Eridani’s at the warm end of the K range, which is the next one over from G, and Epsilon Indi’s a little fellow at the cool end of that range.”

“How much of this stuff did you know before you started riding herd on the Lizards there?” somebody asked slyly.

“Some; not all,” Yeager said. “If I hadn’t known some, I would have been lost – but then, if I hadn’t known some, I wouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place.” He added, “I’ve learned a heck of a lot since then, too.” He would have made that stronger if Barbara hadn’t been sitting on the grass beside him.

She reached out and squeezed his hand. “I’m proud of how much you know,” she said. He grinned like a fool. Till Barbara, he’d never known a woman who gave a damn how smart he was – and precious few men, either. If a ballplayer read books on the train or the bus, he got tagged “Professor,” and it wasn’t the sort of nickname you wanted to have.

He climbed to his feet. “Come on, Ullhass, Ristin – time to take you back to your nice heated room.” The adjective got the Lizards moving in a hurry, as it usually did. Sam chuckled under his breath. He’d always figured white men knew more than Indians, because Columbus had found America and the Indians hadn’t discovered Europe. By that standard, the Lizards knew more than people: Sam might have flown to far planets in his mind, but the Lizards had come here for real. All the same, though, the gap wasn’t so wide that he couldn’t manipulate them.

“So long, Sam.” “See you in the morning.” “Way to play today, Slugger.” The ballplayers said their goodbyes. The pitcher off whom he’d homered and singled added, “I’ll get you next time – or maybe we’ll be on the same side and I won’t have to worry about it.”

“They like you,” Barbara remarked as they picked their way across the dark University of Denver campus with Ristin and Ullhass.

Keeping an eye on them made his answer come slower than would have otherwise: “Why shouldn’t they like me? I’m a regular guy; I get along with people pretty well.”