Upsetting the Balance (22 page)

Now he said, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, lad. I tried to get back into it, too—if they’d take Tin-Legs Bader to fly a Spit with both legs gone, why wouldn’t they take me to fight with just one? Blighters said I’d best serve His Majesty by keeping an eye on air pressure and wind direction.”

“It’s a filthy job, Ralph, but someone’s got to do it,” Roundbush said. “I just wish I’d never heard of turbines. Teach me to be an engineer—”

Goldfarb couldn’t make complaints like that. If he hadn’t been mad for wireless sets and the like before the war, he wouldn’t have become a radarman in the first place; he’d have gone straight into the infantry. He might have come back from Dunkirk, but then again he might not have. So many good chaps hadn’t.

He stuck a lead onto one of the subunits he and Leo Horton had salvaged from the radar of a crashed Lizard fighter. Little by little, they were figuring out what the unit did, if not always how it did it.

Just as he was about to take his first reading, the air-raid alarm began to wail. Swearing in English and Yiddish, he dashed for the trench right outside the Nissen hut and jumped down into it.

Basil Roundbush landed almost on top of him. The flight officer clattered as he dove into the trench; on the way out, he’d grabbed several Sten guns and enough ammunition to fight a small war. When the first Lizard plane screamed overhead, he fired off a long burst. “Just on the off chance, don’t you know,” he shouted to Goldfarb through the hellish din.

Bombs slammed down all around, jerking them and the other men in the trench around like so many rag dolls. “Odd pattern,” Goldfarb remarked; he’d become something of a connoisseur of bombing runs. “Usually they go after the runways, but it sounds more as though they were hitting the buildings today.” He stuck up his head. “That’s what they were doing, all right.”

Most of the huts and barracks and other buildings of the Bruntingthorpe Experimental Air Station had just taken a dreadful pounding. The Nissen hut from which he’d fled was still intact, but all its windows had blown in.

Roundbush also peered this way and that. “You’re right—not a scratch on the runways,” he said. “That isn’t like the Lizards, not even a little bit. It’s almost as if they wanted them—” His voice faded before the last word: “—intact.”

No sooner had that passed his lips than Goldfarb’s battered ears caught a thuttering roar from out of the south. It seemed to be coming from the air, but he’d never heard anything like it. Then he caught sight of something that reminded him of a tadpole slung beneath an electric fan. “Helicopter!” he yelled.

“Helicopters,” Roundbush corrected grimly. “And they’re coming this way—probably want to seize the airstrip.”

Goldfarb kept his head up another moment. Then one of the helicopters let loose with a salvo of rockets. He threw himself flat again. Several of them tore into the Nissen hut; a piece of hot corrugated iron landed on him like an overaggressive player in a rugby scrum. “Oof!” he said. A couple of precious Meteors blew up in their revetments.

The radarman started to shake the slab of metal off and get up, but Roundbush sat on him. “Stay low, you bloody fool!” the flight officer shouted. As if to underscore his words, machine-gun bullets kicked up dirt all around. When a fighter plane strafed you, it made its pass and flew on. The helicopters hung in the air and kept shooting and shooting.

Over the racket of the guns, Goldfarb said, “I think Group Captain Hipple’s research team has just broken up.”

“Too bloody right it has,” Roundbush answered.

“Here, give me one of those Sten guns,” Ralph Wiggs said. “If they’re going to shoot us, we may as well shoot back as long as we can.” The middle-aged, one-legged meteorologist sounded a great deal calmer than Goldfarb felt. After the Somme, Wiggs might not have found a mere airborne invasion worth showing excitement over. Roundbush passed him a submachine gun. Wiggs pulled the bolt back, stuck his head up, and started shooting regardless of the bullets still raking the trench. The Somme had been machine-gun hell, hundreds of them firing at the overburdened British troops slogging toward their positions. Next to that, what the Lizards were throwing at Bruntingthorpe had to seem negligible.

If Wiggs could get up and fight, Goldfarb supposed he could also manage it. He peered over the lip of the trench. The helicopters still hovered above the runway, covering the Lizards who skittered along the tarmac, shooting as they ran. Goldfarb blazed away at them. Several of them went down, but whether he’d hit them or they were just taking cover he could not say.

All at once, one of the helicopters turned into a blue-white fireball. Goldfarb whooped like a Red Indian. Antiaircraft guns ringed Bruntingthorpe. Nice to know that, aside from almost shooting down British jet fighters, they could also do some damage to the enemy.

The remaining helicopter whirled in the air and fired more rockets at the ack-ack gun that had brought down its companion. Goldfarb couldn’t imagine anyone living through such a barrage, but the gun kept pounding away. Then the helicopter lurched in the air. Goldfarb screamed louder than he had before. The helicopter did not explode, but did flee, trailing smoke.

Basil Roundbush bounded out of the trench and fired at the Lizards on the ground, who had halted in dismay. “We have to wipe them out now,” he shouted, “before they get their air cover back.”

Goldfarb got up onto the greensward, too, though he felt horribly naked outside the trench. He fired a burst, went down on his belly, wriggled forward, and fired again.

Other men came up and started shooting, too, from their slit trenches, from others, and from the wreckage of the buildings the Lizards had bombed. Ralph Wiggs limped straight toward the Lizards, as if this were 1916 all over again. A bullet caught him. He went down but kept on shooting.

“You hurt badly?” Goldfarb asked.

Wiggs shook his head. “I took one through the knee there, so I can’t walk, but otherwise I’m right as rain.” He fired again.

He didn’t sound like a man who’d just been shot. Goldfarb stared for a moment, then realized the Lizard bullet must have wrecked the knee of Wiggs’ artificial leg. Even out in the open, with precious little cover and bullets whistling all around, he burst out laughing.

“They can’t have more than two squads on the ground,” Roundbush said. “We can take them, I really think we can.”

As if to underline his words, the antiaircraft gun the helicopters hadn’t been able to silence opened up on the Lizard infantry. Using ack-ack as regular artillery was unconventional, although the Germans were supposed to have started doing it as far back as their blitzkrieg through France in 1940. It was also deucedly effective.

Goldfarb scurried forward toward some wreckage strewn over the runway. He got in behind it with a grateful belly flop; any bit of cover was welcome. He poked the barrel of his Sten gun up over the edge of the torn wood and metal and blazed away.

“Hold fire!” somebody yelled from across the runway. “They’re trying to give up.”

One weapon at a time, the insane rattle of small-arms fire died away. Goldfarb ever so cautiously raised his head and peered toward the Lizards. He’d seen them as blips on a radar screen, and briefly in the raid on the prison in Lodz that had freed his cousin, Moishe Russie. Now, as the survivors of the force threw down weapons and raised hands high, he got his first good look at them.

They were only the size of kids. He’d known that intellectually; he’d even seen it for himself. But it hadn’t really registered on an emotional level. The Lizards’ technology was so good that they seemed nine feet tall. Except for size, they didn’t remind him of children. With their forward-slanting posture and scaly skins, they looked something like dinosaurs, but their helmets and armored jackets gave them a martial air—probably a better martial air than he had himself right now, he thought, glancing down at his grimy RAF uniform.

Basil Roundbush tramped up beside him. “By Jove, we did it,” he said.

“So we did.” Goldfarb knew he sounded surprised, but couldn’t help it. He was surprised to be alive, much less victorious. Musingly, he went on, “I wonder if one of those bulletproof waistcoats would fit me.”

“Now there’s a thought!” Roundbush exclaimed. He appraised Goldfarb with his eyes. “You’re smaller and leaner than I am, so you stand a chance. I hope for your sake one does, because the time for research in merry old England, I fear, is past.” He kicked at a broken slide rule lying on the tarmac. “Till we throw those scaly buggers out, there’s nothing but fighting left.”

6

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

What the devil was that from?
Macbeth? Hamlet? King Lear?
Jens Larssen was damned if he could remember, but it was something out of Shakespeare, sure as hell. The lines came floating up into his conscious mind the moment he reached the top of Lewiston Hill.

Looking west from the hilltop, he could certainly count himself a king of infinite space. Even in a land full of spectacular scenic vistas, this one stood out. There was the endless rolling sagebrush prairie of Washington State—desert might have been a more accurate name for it, if less kind.

Nearer, though, were the towns of Clarkston, Washington, and, on this side of the Snake River, Lewiston, Idaho, itself nestled between the Snake and the Clearwater, with mountains pinching it off north and south so that at first glance it seemed to consist of nothing but one long street.

Rafts of logs floated on the Snake, to head downstream to be made into who could say what to help fight the Lizards. As if the clock had turned back a generation, more and more aircraft parts were wood these days.

But did Jens really care these days how the war against the aliens went? Having the Lizards conquer the world was a nightmare of a bad dream. But when the people who had the best chance of stopping them were also the people who’d done him the most dirt, how was he supposed to feel?

“Like hell,” he announced to the air, and kicked his bicycle into motion to roll down into Lewiston.

Roll down into
were the operative words; in the ten miles between Lewiston Hill and Lewiston itself, US 95 dropped two thousand feet, about a four percent average grade. Averages were tricky—it was a lot steeper than that in some places. And going downhill was the easy way; if he came back by this route, he’d have the long slog up to the summit of the hill. Just thinking about it made his thighs ache.

Lewiston bustled in a way he hadn’t seen since he left Denver, or maybe since he left Chicago. Loggers swaggered down the street. So did sawmill workers; not all the timber cut around here headed into Washington, not by a long shot. The bulk of what had to be one of the world’s biggest lumber plants was just a mile down the Clearwater. By the smoke that poured from its chimneys, it was going flat out, too. The world was a big place, too big for the Lizards to knock out every factory in it, no matter how thoroughly destructive they were.

The sawmill was interesting in the abstract, but it didn’t make Jens want to stop for a closer look. When he came up to a YMCA building, though, he stopped so hard he almost pitched himself over the handlebars of his bicycle. Several bikes were parked out front, with a pistol-toting guard to keep an eye on them. Larssen had seen that in Denver, and elsewhere, too. Bicycles now were what horses had been in the old days—come to that, there were also a good many horses on Lewiston’s streets.

Jens nodded to the guard as he let down the kickstand to his bike. When he went inside, he asked the clerk at the front desk, “You have hot water?”

“Yes, sir,” the man answered, unfazed by the sudden appearance of a grimy stranger with a knapsack and a rifle on his back. He’d probably seen a lot of such strangers, for he went on, “A hot shower is two dollars. If you want a shave, you can use a straight razor and—hmm—probably a scissors for you, too, for another fifty cents. If you’ll give me your goods there, you can have them back when you pay.”

Larssen passed him the Springfield and the knapsack. “Thanks, pal. I’ll take a miss on the razor; I’m used to the beard by now.”

“A lot of men say the same thing,” the clerk answered, nodding. “If you want your clothes washed, too, Chung’s laundry down the street does a first-class job.”

“I’m just passing through, so I don’t think I can stay for that, but thanks again,” Jens said. “But a hot shower! Hot dog!” He followed the signs back to the shower room.

As promised, the water was hot, almost hot enough to scald. The soap took off not only the dirt but part of his top layer of hide, too. It was obviously homemade, mushy and full of lye and strong-smelling. But when he turned off the water and toweled himself dry, he was pink again, not assorted grimy shades of brown.

Putting stale clothes over his clean body made him wrinkle his nose. He’d been rank for so long, he’d stopped noticing it. Maybe he’d stop at Chung’s after all. He combed back his hair and walked out to the front desk, whistling.

When he gave the clerk a couple of dollar bills, he got his chattels back. He checked the knapsack to make sure nothing was missing. The clerk looked pained, but said nothing. He’d probably seen that a hundred times, too.

Jens tossed the bike guard a dime, climbed onto his machine, and headed toward the bridge over the Snake that would lead into Washington State. A couple of blocks west of the YMCA, as the clerk had said, was Chung’s laundry, with Chinese characters below the English name of the shop. Jens was about to roll past it, however regretfully, when he saw the place simply called Mama’s next door.

He stopped. If this Chung worked fast, maybe he could get his clothes washed while he had a leisurely lunch. “Why the hell not?” he muttered. An hour this way or that wasn’t enough to worry about.

The laundryman—his first name, you learned inside, was Horace—spoke perfect English. He giggled when Larssen said he was going into Mama’s for lunch, but promised to have his clothes ready in an hour.

When Jens opened the door to Mama’s place, he didn’t smell the friendly odors of home-cooked food he’d expected. Perfume hit him in the nose instead. The joint reeked like a cathouse. After a moment, he realized the joint
was
a cathouse. It made sense. All those lumberjacks would want something to do besides chopping down trees all day. But no wonder Horace (lung had broken up when he said he was coming over here to eat.

A big, blowsy woman, maybe Mama herself, came out of a back room. Jens’ rifle didn’t seem to bother her, either. “Ain’t you squeaky clean?” she said, eyeing his just-washed face and damp hair. “Bet you been over to the Y. That’s right thoughtful of you, it sure is. Now come on back with me and pick yourself out a pretty girl.”

Jens opened his mouth to tell her he’d thought the place was a restaurant, but then he shut it again and followed her. He wasn’t going anywhere till the laundryman got done with his clothes, and this would be more fun than lunch.

The girls weren’t particularly pretty, no matter what Mama said, and most of them looked mean. The lingerie they were wearing had seen better years. He wondered again if he really wanted to do this. But then he found himself nodding to a girl with curly, dark blond hair. She looked a little like Barbara had back when they were married, but he didn’t notice that, he just thought she was the best-looking woman there.

She got up and stretched. As she headed for the stairs, she said, “A straight screw is forty. Ten bucks more than that for half-and-half, another ten for French. You want anything else, find yourself a different gal.”

That bald announcement almost made Jens turn on his heel and walk out. If Horace Chung hadn’t had his clothes, he might have done it. As it was, he went after the hooker. The linen on the bed in the little upstairs room was frayed but clean. Larssen wondered if Horace did the laundry for Mama’s place and, if so, how he got paid.

The girl kicked off her shoes, pulled her nightgown up over her head, and stood impassively naked. “What’ll it be, buddy?”

“Tell me your name, at least,” Jens said, unnerved by such straightforward capitalism.

“Edie,” she answered, and didn’t bother asking his. Instead, she repeated, “What’ll it be?”

“Half-and-half, I guess,” he said with dull embarrassment.

“Show me the money first. You don’t pay, you don’t play.” She nodded when he tossed the bills onto the bed, then warned, “You come while I’m sucking you, you gotta pay the extra ten for full French, okay?”

“Okay, okay.” He shook his head, horny and disgusted with himself at the same time. This wasn’t what he’d been used to getting in his happier days. It bore about as much resemblance to love as the painting on an orange crate did to the Mona Lisa. But it was all he could find right now.

He shrugged out of his knapsack, set it and the Springfield in a corner by the bed. Then he undressed. Edie looked him over like somebody inspecting a slab of meat. As Mama had, she said, “You’re clean, anyhow. That’s something. Haven’t seen you round these parts before. You stop at the Y before you came here?”

“Yeah, I did,” he answered, cherishing any human contact between them: it was the first thing she’d said to him that wasn’t strictly business.

It was also the last. “Sit on the edge of the bed, will you?” she asked. When he did, she got down on her knees in front of him and went to work.

She knew what she was doing, no doubt about that. Presently he patted the mattress with one hand. She lay down on the bed, her legs open. She didn’t respond when he caressed her, but gave him a good professional ride after he got on top. Afterwards, the first thing she did was scoop up the money.

He was dressing again when he realized he hadn’t put on a rubber.
Too bad for her,
he thought coldly. If you were in her line of work, you took your chances with things like the clap.

She said, “You want another round, half price?”

“No, that’s all right,” he answered; what he was thinking about was going back to the YMCA for another shower. He probably had time, but he didn’t feel like explaining himself to the desk clerk—or not explaining himself, but bearing up under the guy’s fishy stare.

“You want a drink downstairs, then?” Edie asked. “We got home-brew beer, moonshine, even a little real whiskey if you feel like payin’ for it.”

She should have been peddling used cars instead of her ass and related amenities. “That’s all right,” Jens said again; all he wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Edie’s look said
cheapskate.
He ignored it.

When he went back into Chung’s laundry, the proprietor asked, “You have a nice lunch, sir?” and giggled louder than he had the first time. Then he called something in Chinese into the back room. A woman’s laugh floated out. Jens’ ears felt on fire. He thought seriously about abandoning his clothes and riding west as fast as he could go.

In the end, he decided to stay. But as soon as Horace Chung handed him the hot laundry, he shoved it into his knapsack and fled without changing and getting the clothes he had on cleaned, as he’d intended to do.

The steel suspension bridge over the Snake River was history—the Lizards hadn’t missed it, as they had the sawmill. The only way across the river was by rowboat. The oarsmen all wanted fifteen bucks for the trip, too. Jens flashed his letter that said he was on important government business. One of the boatmen said, “I’m as patriotic as the next guy, Mac, but I gotta feed my face.” Jens paid.

Eastern Washington, as seen from US 410, reminded him of Utah: very fertile when next to a river or irrigated, otherwise pale alkali flats with not much more than sagebrush growing on them. He’d always thought of Washington as full of pines and moss and ferns, with water dripping everywhere all the time. This part of the state didn’t live up to the description.

The roads hereabout hadn’t been badly bombed. Most of the bridges over rivers smaller than the Snake remained intact. Timber makeshifts let light traffic cross some of the spans that had been destroyed from the air. A couple of times, he had to pay his way across.

He got his ashes hauled again in Walla Walla, on the third day after he’d crossed into Washington. Again he picked a dark blond girl; again he didn’t think anything of it. This time, he didn’t have any laundry to reclaim when he left the bordello. He knew nothing but relief that that was so.

About thirty miles west of Walla Walla, US 140 swung north along the eastern bank of the Columbia toward its junction with the Snake. The country had been irrigated farmland once upon a time. Some of it looked to have been abandoned for quite a while; maybe the farmers hadn’t been able to pay their water bills.