Striking the Balance Read online

  “That it has,” Roundbush answered. “Seeing as we’ve been here for something on the close order of thirteen hours, I’d say we’ve earned the chance to knock off, too. How say you?”

  “I’d like to see what the rest of these platters are first,” Goldfarb said. “After that, I’ll worry about things like food.”

  “Such devotion to duty,” Roundbush said, chuckling. “Among the things like food you’ll be worrying about, unless I’m much mistaken, would be a pint or two at the White Horse Inn.”

  Goldfarb wondered whether his ears were hot enough to glow on their own if he turned out the lights. He tried to keep his voice casual as he answered, “Now that you mention it, yes.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed, old man.” Now Roundbush laughed out loud. “Believe me, I’m jealous of you. That Naomi of yours is a lovely girl, and she thinks the sun rises and sets on you, too.” He poked Goldfarb in the ribs. “We shan’t tell her any different, what?”

  “Er—no,” Goldfarb said, embarrassed still. He fed the remaining video platters he’d picked into the player, one at a time. He hoped none of them would prove to be about the care and feeding of radars. He even hoped none of them would be blue movies featuring Roundbush’s probably legendary Chinese woman. He didn’t tell his colleague that; Roundbush would have claimed someone was sprinkling saltpeter on his food.

  He was in luck; a couple of minutes’ watching was plenty to show him none of the platters was either relevant to his work or pornographic. As the player ejected the last of them, Basil Roundbush gently booted him in the backside. “Go on, old man. I’ll keep the fires burning here, and try not to burn down the building while I’m about it.”

  With England on Double Summer Time, the sun was still in the sky when Goldfarb got outside. He swung aboard his bicycle and pedaled north toward the White Horse Inn. Like a lot of establishments these days, the pub had a bicycle guard outside to make sure the two-wheelers didn’t pedal off of their own accord while their owners were within.

  Inside, torches blazed in wall sconces. A hearty fire roared in the hearth. Since the place was packed with people, that left it hot and smoky. As it didn’t have a generator chugging away, though, the blazes were necessary to give it light. A couple of chickens roasted above the hearth fire. Their savory smell made spit rush into Goldfarb’s mouth.

  He made his way toward the bar. “What’ll it be, dearie?” Sylvia asked. Naomi was carrying a tray of mugs and glasses from table to table. She spotted Goldfarb through the crowd and waved to him.

  He waved back, then said to Sylvia, “Pint of bitter, and are all the pieces from those birds spoken for yet?” He pointed toward the fireplace.

  “No, not yet,” the redheaded barmaid answered. “Which d’you fancy—legs or breasts?”

  “Well, I think I’d like a nice, juicy thigh,” he answered—and then caught the double entendre. Sylvia laughed uproariously at the look on his face. She poured him his beer. He raised the pint pot to his mouth in a hurry, not least to help mask himself.

  “You’re blushing,” Sylvia chortled.

  “I am not,” he said indignantly. “And even if I was, you’d have the devil’s own time proving it by firelight.”

  “So I would, so I would,” Sylvia said, laughing still. She ran her tongue over her upper lip. Goldfarb was urgently reminded—as he was intended to be reminded—they’d been lovers not that long before. She might as well have been telling him, See what you’re missing? She said, “I’ll get you that chicken now.” When she headed toward the fireplace, she put even more sway in her walk than she usually did.

  Naomi came over a minute later. “What were you two laughing about?” she asked. To Goldfarb’s relief, she sounded curious, not suspicious. He told her the truth; if he hadn’t, Sylvia would have. Naomi laughed, too. “Sylvia is very funny,” she said, and then, in a lower voice, “Sometimes, maybe, too much for her own good.”

  “Whose own good?” Sylvia asked, returning with a steaming chicken leg on a plate. “Has to be me. I tell too many jokes for my own good? Likely I do, by Jesus. But I’m not joking when I tell you that chicken’s going to cost you two quid.”

  Goldfarb dug in his pocket for the banknotes. Prices had climbed dizzyingly high since the Lizard invasion, and his radarman’s pay hadn’t come close to keeping up. Even so, there were times when the rations he got grew too boring to stand.

  “Besides,” he said as he set the money on the bar, “what better have I got to spend it on?”

  “Me,” Naomi answered. Had that been Sylvia talking, the response would have been frankly mercenary. Naomi didn’t really care that he couldn’t spend like an air vice marshal. That was one of the things that made her seem wonderful to him. She asked, “Have you got more word of your cousin, the one who did the wireless broadcasts for the Lizards?”

  He shook his head. “My family found that he lived through the invasion: that much I do know. But not long after that, he and his wife and their son might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody knows what’s become of them.”

  “Somebody knows,” Naomi said with conviction as Goldfarb dug into the chicken leg. “No one may be talking, but someone knows. In this country, people do not disappear for no reason. Sometimes I think you do not know how lucky you are that this is so.”

  “I know,” Goldfarb said, and after a moment Naomi nodded, conceding the point. He smiled at her, even if crookedly. “What’s the matter? Did you take me for an Englishman again?” Looking a little flustered, she nodded once more. He dropped into Yiddish to say, “If we win the war, and if I have children, or maybe grandchildren, they’ll take that for granted. Me—” He shook his head.

  “If you have children, or maybe grandchildren—” Naomi began, and then let it drop. The war had loosened everyone’s standards, but she still wasn’t what you’d call forward. Sometimes Goldfarb regretted that very much. Sometimes he admired it tremendously. Tonight was one of those nights.

  “Let me have another pint, would you please?” he said. Sometimes quiet talk—or what they could steal of it while she was also busy serving other customers—was as good as anything else, maybe better.

  He hadn’t thought that with Sylvia. All he’d wanted to do with her was to get her brassiere off and her panties down. He scratched his head, wondering where the difference was.

  Naomi brought him the bitter. He took a pull, then set the pot down. “Must be love,” he said, but she didn’t hear him.

  Artillery was harassing the Race in a push north from their Florida base. The Big Uglies were getting smart about moving their guns before counterbattery fire found them, but they couldn’t do much about attack from the air. Teerts had two pods of rockets mounted under his killercraft. They were some of the simplest weapons in the arsenal of the Race. They weren’t even guided: if you saturated an area with them, that did the job. And, because they were so simple, even Tosevite factories could turn them out in large quantities. The armorers loved them these days, not least because they had plenty.

  “I have acquired the assigned target visually,” Teerts reported back to his commanders. “I now begin the dive on it.”

  Acceleration pressed him back in his seat. The Big Uglies knew he was there. Antiaircraft shells burst around his killercraft. Many more, he guessed, were bursting behind him. Try as they would, the Tosevites rarely gave jet aircraft enough lead when they fired at them. That helped keep the Race’s pilots alive.

  He fired a pod of the rockets. A wave of fire seemed to leap from the killercraft toward the artillery positions. The killercraft staggered slightly in the sky, then steadied. The autopilot pulled it out of the dive. He swung it around so he could inspect the damage he’d done. If he hadn’t done enough, he’d make another pass with the second rocket pod.

  That wouldn’t be necessary, not today. “The target is destroyed,” he said in some satisfaction. An antiaircraft gun was still popping away at him, but that didn’t much matter. He went on, �
��Request new target.”

  The voice that answered wasn’t his usual flight controller. After a moment, he recognized it all the same: it belonged to Aaatos, the male from Intelligence. “Flight Leader Teerts, we have a . . . bit of a problem.”

  “What’s gone wrong now?” Teerts demanded. What felt like an eternity in Nipponese prisons—to say nothing of the ginger habit he’d developed there—had left him with no patience for euphemism.

  “I’m glad you’re airborne, Flight Leader,” Aaatos said, apparently not wanting to give a straight answer. “Do you remember our talk not so long ago in that grassy area not far from the runways?”

  Teerts thought back. “I remember,” he said. Sudden suspicion blossomed in him. “You’re not going to tell me the dark-skinned Big Uglies have mutinied against us, are you?”

  “Evidently I don’t have to,” Aaatos said unhappily. “You were correct at the time to distrust them. I admit this.” For a male from Intelligence to admit anything was an enormous concession. “Their unit was placed in line against American Big Uglies, and, under cover of a masking firefight, has allowed enemy Tosevites to infiltrate.”

  “Give me the coordinates,” Teerts told him. “I still have a good supply of munitions, and adequate fuel as well. I gather I am to assume any Tosevites I see in the area are hostile to the Race?”

  “That is indeed the operative assumption,” Aaatos agreed. He paused, then went on, “Flight Leader, a question. If I may? You need not answer, but I would be grateful if you did. Our estimates were that these dark-skinned Big Uglies would serve us well and loyally in the role we had assigned to them. These estimates were not casually made. Our experts ran computer simulations of a good many scenarios. Yet they proved inaccurate and your casual concern correct. How do you account for this?”

  “My impression is that our alleged experts have never had to learn what good liars the Big Uglies can be,” Teerts answered. “They have also never been in a situation where, from weakness, they have to tell their interrogators exactly what those males most desire to hear. I have.” Again, memories of his days in Nipponese captivity surged to the surface; his hand quivered on the killercraft’s control column. “Knowing the Tosevites’ capacity for guile, and also knowing the interrogators were apt to be getting bad data on which to base their fancy simulations, I drew my own conclusions.”

  “Perhaps you would consider transferring to Intelligence,” Aaatos said. “Such trenchant analyses would be of benefit to us.”

  “Flying a killercraft is also of benefit to the Race,” Teerts answered, “especially at a time such as this.”

  Aaatos made no reply. Teerts wondered whether the male from Intelligence was chastened or merely insulted. He didn’t much care. The analysts had made foolish assumptions, reasoned from them with undoubtedly flawless logic, and ended up worse off than if they’d done nothing at all. His mouth dropped open in a bitter laugh. Somehow, that left him unsurprised.

  Smoke from burning forests and fields showed him he was nearing the site of the treason-aided American breakthrough. He saw several blazing landcruisers of the Race’s manufacture, and more of the slower, clumsier ones the Big Uglies used. With those were advancing Tosevites, their upright gait and stiff motions making them unmistakable even as he roared past at high speed.

  He loosed the second pod of rockets at the biggest concentration of Big Uglies he could find, then gained altitude to come round for another pass at them. The ground seemed to blaze with the little yellow flames of small-arms fire as survivors tried to bring him down. No one had ever denied that the Tosevites showed courage. Sometimes, though, courage was not enough.

  Teerts dove for another firing run. Pillars of greasy black smoke marked the pyres of hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles; his first barrage had done some good. His fingerclaw stabbed the firing button at the top of the control column. He hosed down the area with cannon fire till warning lights told him he was down to his last thirty rounds. Doctrine demanded that he leave off at that point, in case he had to engage Tosevite aircraft on his way back to base. “The itch take doctrine,” he muttered, and kept firing until the cannon had no more ammunition to expend.

  He checked his fuel gauge. He was running low on hydrogen, too. Adding everything together, he wasn’t much use on the battlefield any more. He headed back to the air base to replenish fuel and munitions both. If the Tosevite breakthrough wasn’t checked by the time he got that done, they’d probably send him straight out again.

  A male of the Race drove the fuel truck up to his killercraft, but two Big Uglies unreeled the hose and connected it to the couplings in the nose of his machine. More Big Uglies loaded cannon shells into his killercraft and affixed fresh rocket pods to two of the hard-points below the wings.

  The Tosevites sang as they worked, music alien to his hearing diaphragms but deep and rhythmic and somehow very powerful. They wore only leg coverings and shoes; their dark-skinned torsos glistened with cooling moisture under a sun that even Teerts found comfortable. He watched the Big Uglies warily. Males just like them had shown they were traitors. How was he supposed to be sure these fellows hadn’t, say, arranged a rocket so it would blow up in the pod rather than after it was launched?

  He couldn’t know, not for certain, not till he used those rockets. There weren’t enough males of the Race to do everything that needed doing. If they didn’t have help from the Tosevites, the war effort would likely fail. If the Big Uglies ever fully realized that, the war effort would also likely fail.

  He did his best to push such thoughts out of his mind. All the electronics said the killercraft was ready in every way. “Flight Leader Teerts reporting,” he said. “I am prepared to return to combat.”

  Instead of the clearance and fresh orders he’d expected, the air traffic control male said, “Hold on, Flight Leader. We are generating something new for you. Stay on this frequency.”

  “It shall be done,” Teerts said, wondering what sort of brainaddled fit had befallen his superiors now. There was a job right in front of his snout that badly needed doing, so why were they wasting their time and his trying to come up with something exotic?

  Since he evidently wasn’t going straight back into action, he dug out his vial of ginger from the space between the padding and the cockpit wall and had a good taste. With the herb coursing through him, he was ready to go out and slaughter Big Uglies even without his aircraft.

  “Flight Leader Teerts!” The traffic control male’s voice boomed in the audio button taped to Teerts’ hearing diaphragm. “You are hereby detached from duty at this Florida air base and ordered to report to our forward base in the region known to the local Tosevites as Kansas, there to assist the Race in its attack on the center bearing the local name Denver. Flight instructions are being downloaded to your piloting computer as we speak. You will also require a drop tank of hydrogen. This will be provided to you.”

  Sure enough, a new truck came rolling up to Teerts’ killercraft. A couple of males got out, lowered the droplet-shaped tank onto a wheeled cart with a winch, and hooked it up under the belly of the killercraft. As he listened to their clattering, he was heartily glad the Race didn’t entrust that job to Big Ugly hirelings. The potential for disaster was much too high.

  He let out a puzzled hiss. The Tosevites had scored a breakthrough on this front; he knew perfectly well that his bombardment hadn’t halted them single-handedly. Yet the base commander was sending him away to serve on another front. Did that mean the Race was overwhelmingly confident of stopping the Big Uglies here, or that the attack on—what was the name of the place?—Denver, the traffic-control male had called it, stood in desperate need of help? He couldn’t very well ask, but he’d find out.

  He checked the computer. Sure enough, it had the course information for the flight to Kansas. A good thing, too, because he didn’t know where on this land mass the region was. The technicians finished installing the drop tank. They got back into their truck. It sped away.

 
“Flight Leader Teerts, you are cleared for takeoff,” the traffic control male said. “Report to the Kansas forward base.”

  “It shall be done.” Teerts gave the engine power and taxied down the runway toward the end.

  Whenever George Bagnall went into the gloom of the Krom at Pskov these days, he felt his own spirits sinking into darkness, too. He wished Aleksandr German had never mentioned the possibility of sending him, Ken Embry, and Jerome Jones back to England. Before, he’d resigned himself to going on here in this godforsaken corner of the Soviet Union. But with even the slightest chance of getting home again, he found both the place and the work he did here ever more unbearable.

  Inside the Krom, German sentries came to attention stiff as rigor mortis. Their Russian opposite numbers, most of them in baggy civilian clothes rather than uniforms that had been laundered too many times, didn’t look as smart, but the submachine guns they carried would chew a man to pieces in short order.

  Bagnall went up the stairs to Lieutenant General Kurt Chill’s headquarters. The stairwell was almost black; neither occasional slit windows nor tallow lamps right out of the fourteenth century did much to show him where to put his feet. Every time he got up to the first floor, he thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t broken his neck.

  He found Embry up there ahead of him, shooting the breeze with Captain Hans Dölger, Chill’s adjutant As far as Bagnall could tell, Dölger didn’t much fancy Englishmen, but he made a point of being correct and polite. As arguments in Pskov had a way of being settled with bullets as often as with words, politeness was a rarity worth noting.

  Dölger looked up when Bagnall came in. “Guten Tag,” he said. “For a moment, I thought you might be one of the partisan brigadiers, but I know that was foolish of me. As well expect the sun to set in the east as a Russian to show up when he is scheduled.”

  “I think being late—or at least not worrying about being on time—is built into the Russian language,” Bagnall answered in German. He’d done German in school, but had learned what Russian he had since coming to Pskov. He found it fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measure. “It has a verb form for doing something continuously and a verb form for doing something once, but pinning down the moment right now is anything but easy.”