Upsetting the Balance (35 page)

Major Smithers folded the map and returned it to the pocket whence it had emerged. “Let’s be off,” he said. Reluctantly, Goldfarb followed him out of the Three Swans.

Not far outside Market Harborough, they passed a battery of 17-pounders bombarding the Lizards farther south. The men serving the three-inch field guns were bare-chested in the summer sun, but wore gas masks. “Gas shells,” Goldfarb said, and took a couple of steps away from the guns. If one of those shells went off by accident, that wouldn’t do much good, but he couldn’t help it.

The 17-pounders barked and bucked, one after another. As soon as they’d fired three shells each, their crews hitched them to the backs of the lorries from which the shells had come and rattled off across the crater-pocked meadow to a new firing position.

They hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred yards when incoming shells tore fresh holes in the greensward where they’d been. Goldfarb dove for a hole. Fred Stanegate, half a step slower, chose the same hole and landed on top of him. “Ow!” he said; Stanegate’s knee dug into his left kidney.

“Sony,” Stanegate grunted. “Blighters are quick to shoot back, aren’t they?”

“Too bloody accurate, too,” Goldfarb answered, wriggling toward greater comfort, or at least less discomfort. “They always have been. I shouldn’t wonder if they don’t slave their guns to radar somehow.” He had no idea how to do such a thing, but it would account for both speed and accuracy in the Lizards’ response.

Fred Stanegate shifted, too, and not in the right direction. “What’s radar?” he asked.

“Never mind. I talk too bloody much, that’s all.” The shells stopped falling. Goldfarb scrambled out of the hole. So did Stanegate. He looked to the radarman curiously. Goldfarb felt himself flushing. He muttered, “Trust me, Fred, you don’t Need to Know.”

Stanegate heard the capital letters. “It’s like that, is it? All right, Ah’ll say nowt further.”

Three clanking, smoking, rumbling monsters clattered south on iron tracks: two Cromwell tanks and a heavy Churchill. The Cromwells were a vast improvement over the Crusaders they supplanted, but not as good as the tanks the Nazis were turning out these days. The Churchill had thick armor, but a weak engine and a popgun 2-pounder for a cannon. Against Lizard armor, either model was woefully inadequate. They were, however, what Britain had, and into the fight they went.

Fred Stanegate waved to the commander of a Cromwell, who was standing up and peering out his hatch to get a better view. The tankman waved back. In his gas mask, he looked as alien as any Lizard. Stanegate said, “An didn’t know we had so many cards left in t’hand.”

“If we don’t play them now, we’ll never get to use them,” Goldfarb said. “They’ll do some good against Lizard infantry, I hope. From all I’ve heard, gas is the only thing that really does much against their tanks, unless somebody climbs on top and tosses a Molotov cocktail down a hatch.”

The farther south they went, the more chewed up the ground became. They passed the hulks of several burned-out British tanks, as well as tin hats hung on rifles stuck bayonet-first into the ground to mark hastily dug graves. Then, not much later, they came on a Lizard tank in the middle of a field.

Had it not been for the men in masks climbing in and out of the monster machine, Goldfarb would have expected to die in the next moments. The Lizard tank was not much bigger than its English foes, but looked more formidable. Its armor was smooth and beautifully sloped, so that it brought to mind the “cars of the future” magazines sometimes hired artists to draw. As for its cannon—“If that’s not a four-inch gun, or maybe a five-, I’m a Lizard,” Goldfarb said. “I wonder if the shell would even notice one of our tanks on the way through.”

“We knocked it out some kind of way,” Stanegate said. “Don’t look like it’s burned—could be they got a mite too much mustard in their sandwiches.” He laughed at his own wit.

“I don’t care why it’s dead. I’m just glad it is.” Goldfarb set his gas mask on his head, made sure the seal was tight. “Time to start using ’em, I’m afraid.” His voice sounded muffled and alien, even to himself.

Fred Stanegate understood him. “Right y’are,” he said, and put on his own mask. “Hate this bloody thing,” he remarked halfway through the process, although without much rancor. When the mask was in place, he added, “Better nor breathing that stinkin’ mustard, now, mind tha.” Goldfarb’s burned leg twinged, perhaps in sympathy.

Off to the north, British field guns opened up again, pounding the Lizard defenses between Brixworth and Scaldwell. “Not going to be much of a surprise, with them hammering away so,” Goldfarb said, after first glancing around to make sure Major Smithers was out of earshot.

“Aye, well, if they don’t give ’em a nice dose o’ gas first off, the buggers’ll be waiting for us with all their nasty guns,” Stanegate said. Goldfarb smiled inside the mask where his companion couldn’t see him: the Yorkshire accent made the last sound like
nahsty goons.
But however rustic he sounded, that didn’t mean he was wrong.

Smithers’ Ordnance Survey map had shown a country road going northeast to southwest from Scaldwell down to Brixworth. The Lizards’ line ran just behind it. Or rather, the line had run there. Some Lizards still held their posts and fired on the advancing Englishmen, but others had fled the rain of mustard gas and still others lay in the trenches, blistered and choking. Goldfarb hadn’t been worse than moderately terrified by the time they forced their way through the foxholes and razor wire and pushed on.

“By gaw, if it’s this easy the rest o’ the way, we’ll roll right into Northampton, we will,” Fred Stanegate said.

Before Goldfarb could answer, a flight of Lizard warplanes roared low over the battlefield. Mustard gas didn’t bother them; they had their own independent oxygen supplies. They flailed the English with cannons and rockets. Everywhere men were down, dead or screaming. Several tanks sent greasy black pillars of smoke up into the sky. The Lizards on the ground raffled and peppered survivors with small-arms fire.

Digging himself in with his entrenching tool, Goldfarb panted, “I don’t think it’ll be this easy any more.” Digging just as hard beside him, Fred nodded mournfully.

Mutt Daniels huddled inside the Chicago Coliseum, waiting for the place to fall to pieces around him. The Coliseum had been built with the battlemented façade of Richmond’s Libby Prison, which had housed Union prisoners during the War Between the States. Mutt didn’t know how the hell the façade had got to Chicago, but here it was. He did know that, even if he thought of himself as a very mildly reconstructed Johnny Reb, he sure felt as if he were a prisoner in here, too.

Only bits and pieces of that battlemented façade were left; Lizard artillery and bombs had chewed holes in it and in the roof. The destruction didn’t bother Mutt. The wreckage scattered in the interior of the building made it a better place in which to fight. With any luck at all, the Americans could give the Lizards as much grief here as they had in the meat-packing plants off to the southwest. Rumor said some holdouts were still holed up in the ruins of the Swift plant, sniping at any Lizard dumb enough to show his snout inside rifle range.

“How you doing, Lieutenant?” asked Captain Stan Szymanski, Daniels’ new C.O. He couldn’t have been more than half Mutt’s age (these days, nobody seemed more than half Mutt’s age): blond as a Swede, but shorter, stockier, wider-faced, with gray eyes slanted almost like a Jap’s.

“I’m okay, sir,” Mutt answered, which was more or less true. He still didn’t get up and yell “whoopee” at the prospect of sitting on his ass, but he didn’t get much chance to sit on his ass these days, anyhow. Or maybe Szymanski was trying to find out if his new platoon leader was going to be able to stand the strain generally. Mutt said, “Captain, I been in this slat since the git-go. If I ain’t fallen to pieces by now, don’t reckon I’m gonna.”

“Okay, Mutt,” Szymanski said with a nod—yes, that was what he’d been worrying about. “Why do they call you Mutt, anyway?”

Daniels laughed. “Back when I first started playin’ bush-league ball—this woulda been 1904, 1905, somethin’ like that—I had me this ugly little puppy I’d take on the train with me. You take one look at it, only thing you want to say is, ‘What a mutt.’ That’s what everybody said. Pretty soon they were sayin’ it about me instead of the dog, so I been Mutt now goin’ on forty years. If it wasn’t that, I figure they’d’ve called me somethin’ worse. Ballplayers, they’re like that.”

“Oh.” Szymanski shrugged. “Okay. I just wondered.” He’d probably figured there was a fancier story behind it.

“Sir, are we ever gonna be able to hold the Lizards around these parts?” Mutt asked. “Now that they done broke through to the lake—”

“Yeah, things are tough,” the captain said, as profound a statement of the obvious as Daniels had ever heard. “But they don’t have all of Chicago, not by a long shot. This is still the South Side. And if they want all of it, they’re going to have to pay the price. By the time they’re done here, they’ll have paid more than it’s worth.”

“Lord, I hope so,” Daniels said. “We’ve sure paid a hell of a price fightin’ ’em.”

“I know.” Szymanski’s face clouded. “My brother never came out of one of those meat-packing plants, not so far as I know, anyhow. But the idea is that the more they pour down the rathole here, the less they have to play with someplace else.”

“I understand that, sir. But when
you’re
at the bottom of the rathole and they keep pourin’ all that stuff down on top of you, it wears thin after a while, it really does.”

“You can sing that in church,” Szymanski said. “Eventually, though, they’re supposed to run out of stuff, and we’re still making more. The more we make ’em use, the faster that’ll happen.”

Mutt didn’t answer. He’d heard that song a lot of times before. Sometimes he even believed it: the Lizards did have a way of playing it close to the vest now and again, as if they were short of soldiers and ammunition. But you’d end up dead if you counted on them doing that all the time, or even any one time.

Szymanski went on, “Besides, if they’re still stuck in downtown Shytown when winter comes around again, we’ll give ’em a good kick in the ass, same way we did last year.”

“That’d be pretty fine,” Mutt said agreeably. “They don’t like cold weather, and that’s a fact. Course, now that you get right down to it, I don’t much like cold weather, neither. But what worries me is, the Lizards, they’re peculiar, but they ain’t stupid. You can fool ’em once, but you try foolin’ the same bunch again the same way and they’ll hand you your head.”

Captain Szymanski clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You may have something there. I’ll pass it on to Colonel Karl next time I talk with him, see if he wants to bump it up the line. Meanwhile, though—”

“We gotta stay alive. Yeah, I know.”

The Lizards weren’t going to make that easy, not if they could help it. Their artillery opened up; shells landed just west of the Chicago Coliseum. Chunks of masonry crashed down. Mutt huddled in his rubble shelter. So did his comrades. When the shelling slowed, they came out and dragged newly fallen boards and pieces of sheet metal back to their positions, strengthening them.

Mutt liked that. It meant he had a good bunch of veterans in his new platoon. He wondered how his old gang of thugs was getting on without him. He’d miss Dracula Szabo; he’d never known anybody else with such a nose for plunder. Somebody here would have a talent for scrounging, though. Somebody always did.

A Lizard jet shrieked past, not far above the Coliseum’s battered roof. A bomb hit just outside the building. The noise was like the end of the world. For anybody out there, it was the end of the world. More of the nineteenth-century façade crumbled and fell into the street.

Another bomb crashed through the roof and thudded down onto the bricks and boards and broken chairs strewn below. It landed maybe twenty feet from Mutt. He saw it fall. He buried his head against the rough wall of his shelter, knowing it would do no good.

But the explosion that would have thrown and torn and smashed him did not come. The Lizard plane dropped a couple of more bombs a little north of the Chicago Coliseum, close enough to make it shake, but the one inside lay inert where it had fallen.

“Dud!” Mutt shouted in glad relief, and sucked in as wonderful a breath of air as he’d ever enjoyed, even if it did smell like a cross between an outhouse and a forest fire. Then he realized that wasn’t the only possible explanation. “Or else a time bomb,” he added, his voice more subdued.

Captain Szymanski spoke to the company communications man: “Gus, call back to division headquarters. Tell ’em we need a bomb disposal unit fast as they can shag ass up here.”

“Yes, sir.” With a happy grunt, Gus slipped from his shoulders the heavy pack that contained a field telephone and batteries. He cranked the telephone and spoke into it. After a couple of minutes, he told Szymanski, “They’re on their way.” He closed up the phone pack and, sighing, redonned it.

Mutt scrambled to his feet and walked over toward the bomb. It wasn’t bravado: if the stupid thing went off, it would kill him just as dead in his shelter as out in the open. “Don’t touch it!” Captain Szymanski called sharply.

“Touch it? Captain, I may be a damn fool sometimes, but I ain’t crazy. I just want to look at it—I thought it had my name on it.”

“You and me both,” Szymanski said. “Okay, Mutt, go ahead.”

The bomb looked like a bomb: sheet metal casing painted olive drab, a boxy tail section for aerodynamics. If it hadn’t been for the complicated gadget that replaced a normal twirl fuse, and for the wires that ran back from the gadget to flaps attached to the tail section, he would have taken it for an American weapon, not one the Lizards had made at all.

“Goddamn,” Mutt said quietly after he’d walked all the way around the bomb. “That don’t just look like one of ours, it
is
one of ours, wearin’ a Lizard vest and spats.” He raised his voice: “Captain, I think maybe you want to take a good close look at this thing your own self.”

Szymanski came; nothing was wrong with the size of his balls. As Mutt had, he walked around the bomb. By the time he’d got back to where he’d started from, he looked as bemused as Daniels did. “That’s a U.S. Army Air Force 500-pounder, either that or I’m Queen of the May. What the hell have the Lizards gone and done to it?”