Tilting the Balance w-2 Read online

  “Hai,” Teerts answered. “Honto.” Yes, that was the truth.

  Nakayama, a slim male on the small side for a Tosevite, asked another long question in his own tongue. Okamoto translated again: “He asks how you can hope to keep Tosev 3 with males alone.”

  “We don’t, of course,” Teerts answered. “We who are here make up the conquest fleet. Our task is to subjugate this world, not to colonize it. The colonization fleet will come. It was being organized even as we set out, and will arrive in this solar system about forty years from now.”

  So long a gap should have given the males of the conquest fleet plenty of time to get Tosev 3 into good running order for the colonists. It would have done just that, had the Big Uglies been the pre-industrial savages the Race thought they were. Teerts still thought they were savages, but, worse luck, they were anything but pre-industrial.

  All three Nipponese in white started talking volubly at one another. Finally one of them put a question to Teerts. “Dr. Higuchi wants to know whether you mean your years or ours.”

  “Ours,” Teerts said; would he waste his time learning Tosevite measurements? “Yours is longer-I don’t remember how much.”

  “So, then, this colonization fleet, as you call it, will arrive on our planet in fewer than forty years’ time as we reckon it?” Higuchi said.

  “Yes, superior sir.” Teerts suppressed a sigh. It should have been so easy: smash the Big Uglies, prepare the planet for full exploitation, then settle down and wait till the colonists arrived and were thawed out. When at last he smelled mating pheromones again, Teerts might even have sired a couple of clutches of eggs himself. Raising hatchlings, of course, was females’ work, but he liked thinking of passing on his genes so he could contribute to the future of the Race.

  The way things looked now, this world might still be troublesome when the colonization fleet got here. And even if it wasn’t, his own chance of being around to join the colony’s gene pool wasn’t big enough to be visible to the naked eye-he couldn’t see it, at any rate.

  He had a while to think of such things, because the Nipponese were chattering furiously among themselves again. Finally the male who hadn’t addressed him before spoke through Major Okamoto: “Dr. Tsuye wishes to know the size of the colonization fleet as opposed to that of the conquest fleet.”

  “The colonization fleet is not opposed to the conquest fleet,” Teerts said. Clearing up the idiom took a couple of minutes. Then he said, “The colonization fleet is larger, superior sir. It has to be: it carries many more males and females as well as what they will need to establish themselves here on Tosev 3.”

  His answer produced more sharp colloquy among the Nipponese. Then the one named Tsuye said, “This colonization fleet-is it, ah, as heavily armed as your invasion fleet?”

  “No, of course not. There would be no need-” Teerts corrected himself. “There was thought to be no need for including many weapons with the colonization fleet. It was assumed that you Tosevites would already be thoroughly subdued by the time the colonists arrived here. We hadn’t counted on your resisting so ferociously.” I hadn’t counted on being shot down, the pilot added to himself.

  His words seemed to please the Nipponese. They bared their flat, square teeth in the facial gesture they used to show they were happy. Major Okamoto said, “All Tosevites are brave, and we Nipponese the bravest of the brave.”

  “Hai,” Teerts said. “Honto.” The interrogation broke up not long after that. Okamoto and the guard, who had waited outside, escorted Teerts back, to his cell. That evening, he found small chunks of meat mixed in with his rice. That had only happened a couple of times before. Flattery, he thought as he gratefully swallowed them down, had got him something.

  Mutt Daniels looked at his hand: four clubs and the queen of hearts. He discarded the queen. “Gimme one,” he said.

  “One,” Kevin Donlan agreed. “Here you go, Sarge.” The new card was a diamond. None of the other soldiers in the game would have known it from Mutt’s face. He’d played countless hours of poker on trains and bus rides as a minor-league (and, briefly, major-league) catcher and as a longtime minor-league manager. He’d played in the trenches in France, too, in the last war. He didn’t care to risk a big roll of money when he gambled, but he won more often than he lost. Every so often he’d stolen a pot on a busted flush, too.

  Not tonight, though. One of the privates in his squad, a big hunkie named Bela Szabo who was universally called Dracula, had drawn three cards and raised big when it was his turn to bet. Mutt pegged him for at least three of a kind, maybe better. When the action came round to him, he tossed in his cards. “Can’t win ’em all,” he said philosophically.”

  Kevin Donlan, who couldn’t possibly have been as young as he looked, hadn’t learned that yet. Calling Szabo was okay if you had two little pair, but raising back struck Mutt as foolhardy. Sure as hell, Dracula was holding three kings. He scooped up the folding money.

  “Son, you gotta watch what the other guy’s doin’ better’n that,” Daniels said. “Like I told you, you ain’t gonna win ’em all.” If nothing else, years of managing in the minors had pounded that home as a law of nature. Mutt chuckled. The life he’d lived beat the hell out of the one he’d have had if he hadn’t played ball. Likely he’d still be watching a mule’s hind end on the Mississippi farm where he’d been born and raised.

  Like trains in the distance, shells rumbled by overhead. Everybody looked up, though the roof of the barn where they sheltered held the sky at bay. Szabo cocked his head, gauging the sound. “Southbound,” he said. “Those are ours.”

  “Probably landing on the Lizards in Decatur right now,” Kevin Donlan agreed. A moment later, he added, “What’s funny, Sarge?”

  “I reckon I’ve said I was managing the Decatur team in the Three-I League when the Lizards came,” Mutt answered. “Matter of fact, I was on the train from Madison to Decatur when we got strafed right outside o’ Dixon, upstate. This here’s the closest I’ve come to makin’ it to where I was goin’ since, and most of a year’s gone by now.”

  “This here”-the barn-was on a farm just south of Clinton, Illinois, about halfway between Bloomington and Decatur. The Americans had taken Bloomington in an armored blitz. Now it was slow, tough work again, trying to push the Lizards farther back from Chicago.

  More shells hissed through the sky, these from the south. “Goddamn, the Lizards are quick with counterbattery fire,” Donlan said.

  “They’re dead on, too,” Mutt said. “I hope our boys moved their guns before those little presents came down on ’em.”

  The poker game went on by lantern light, shelling or no shelling. Mutt won a hand with two pair, lost expensively to a straight when he was holding three nines, didn’t waste money betting on a couple of others. Another American battery opened up, this one a lot closer. The, thunder of the big guns reminded Mutt of bad weather back home.

  “Hope they blow all the Lizards in Decatur straight to hell,” Szabo said.

  “Hope one of ’em lands on second base at Fan’s Field and blows the center-field fence out to where it belongs,” Daniels muttered. It was 340 down each foul line at the Decatur ball-park, a reasonable poke, but dead center was only 370, a pain in the ERA to every Commodore pitcher who took the mound.

  Small-arms fire rattled only a few hundred yards away, some M-Is and Springfields, some from the automatic rifles the Lizards carried. Before Mutt could say a word, everybody in the latest hand grabbed his money from the pot, stuffed it into a pocket, and reached for his weapon. Someone blew out the lantern. Someone else pushed the barn door open. One by one, the men emerged.

  “You want to be careful,” Mutt said quietly. “The Lizards have those damn night sights, let ’em see like cats in the dark.”

  Dracula Szabo laughed, also softly. “That’s why I got me this here Browning Automatic Rifle, Sarge. Put out enough lead and some of it’ll hit somebody.” He wasn’t much older than Donlan, young enough to be gut-sure
no bullet could possibly find him. Mutt knew better. France had convinced him he wasn’t immortal, and several months fighting the Lizards drove the lesson home again.

  “Spread out, spread out,” Daniels called in an urgent whisper. To his ear, the men sounded like a herd of drunken rhinos. Several were new recruits; by virtue of having lived through several encounters with the Lizards, Mutt was reckoned suitable for showing others how to do likewise.

  “How many Lizards you think there are, Sarge?” Kevin Donlan asked. Donlan wasn’t eager any more; he’d been through enough of the tough defensive fighting outside Chicago to be sure his number could come up. The question came in a tone of intelligent professional concern.

  Daniels cocked his head, listened to the firing. “Damfino,” he said at last. “Not a whole bunch, but I wouldn’t peg it tighter’n that. Those rifles o’ theirs shoot so fast, just a couple can sound like a platoon.”

  Off to one side lay the concrete ribbon of US 51. A couple of soldiers charged straight down it. Daniels yelled at them, but they kept going. He wondered why they didn’t paint big red-and-white bull’s-eyes on their chests, too. He dodged from bush to upended tractor to hedgerow, making himself as tough a target as he could.

  That wasn’t the only reason he fell behind most of the squad. He had fifty-odd years and a pot belly under his belt, though he was in better shape now than he had been before the Lizards came. Even in his long-gone playing days, he’d been a catcher, so he’d never moved what anybody would call fast.

  He was panting and his heart thudded in his chest by the time he half jumped, half fell into a shell hole at the edge of the American firing line. Somebody not far away was screaming for a medic and for his mother; his voice was ebbing fast.

  Cautiously, Mutt raised his head and peered into the night to see if he could pick up muzzle flashes from the Lizards’ rifles. Over there, a yellow-white flicker… He raised his Springfield to his shoulder, squeezed off a round, worked the bolt, fired again. Then he threw himself flat again.

  Sure enough, bullets cracked by, just above the hole where he hid. If he could pick up the Lizards’ muzzle flashes, they could find his as well. And if he fired again from here, he was willing to bet some turret-eyed little scaly sharpshooter would punch his ticket for him. The Lizards weren’t human, but they were pretty fair soldiers.

  He scrambled out of the hole and crawled across cold ground over to something made of bricks-a well, he realized when he got behind it. Szabo was making a hell of a racket with that BAR; if he wasn’t hitting the Lizards, he was sure making them keep their heads down. Even more warily than before, Daniels looked south again.

  He saw a flash, fired at it. In the night, it was the next closest thing to shooting blind. No more flickers of light came from that spot, but he never found out whether it was because he’d scored a hit or the Lizard moved to a new firing spot, as he’d done himself.

  After fifteen or twenty minutes, the firing faded. The Americans slowly moved forward to discover the Lizards had pulled out. “Just a recon patrol,” said another sergeant who, like Mutt, was trying to round up his squad and not having much luck.

  “Don’t rightly recall the Lizards doin’ a whole lot o’ that, not at night and not on foot,” Daniels said with a thoughtful frown. “Ain’t been their style.”

  “Maybe they’re learning,” the other noncom answered. “You don’t really know what the other fellow’s doing till you sneak around and see it with your own eyes.”

  “Yeah, sure, but the Lizards, they mostly fight one way,” Mutt said. “Don’t know as how I like ’em learnin’ how to do their job better. That’ll mean they got more chance of shootin’ my personal, private ass off.”

  The other sergeant laughed. “Somethin’ to that, pal. I don’t know what we can do about it, though, short of giving their patrols enough lumps to make ’em try something else instead.”

  “Yeah,” Mutt said again. He blew air out through his lips to make a whuffling noise. This hadn’t been too bad-just a little skirmish. As far as he could tell, he didn’t have anybody dead or even hurt. But if the Lizards were skirmishing outside of Clinton, it was liable to be a good long while yet before he saw Decatur.

  III

  Clip-clop, clip-clop. Colonel Leslie Groves hated slowness, hated delay, with the restless passion of an engineer who’d spent a busy lifetime fighting inefficiency wherever it reared its head. And here he was, coming into Oswego, New York, in a horse-drawn wagon because the cargo he had in his charge was too important to risk putting it on an airplane and having the Lizards shoot it down. Clip-cop, Clip-clop.

  Rationally, he knew this slow, safe trip didn’t stall anything. The Met Lab team, traveling by the same archaic means he was using himself, wasn’t close to Denver yet and couldn’t work with the uranium or whatever it was that the British had fetched over to the United States from eastern Europe.

  Clip-clop, clip-cop. Riding alongside the wagon was a squadron of horse cavalry, an antique arm Groves had long wished would vanish from the Army forever. The horsemen were useless against the Lizards, as they had been for years against any Earthly mechanized force. But they did a first-class job of overawing the brigands, bandits, and robbers who infested the roads in these chaotic times.

  “Captain, will we reach the Coast Guard station by sunset?” Groves called to the commander of the cavalry unit.

  Captain Rance Auerbach glanced westward, gauged the sun through curdled clouds. “Yes, sir, I believe so. Only a couple more miles to the Jake shore.” His Texas drawl drew looks here in upstate New York. Groves thought he should be wearing Confederate gray and maybe a plume in his hat, too; he was too flamboyant for olive drab. That he called his horse Jeb Stuart did nothing to weaken that freewheeling image.

  The wagon rolled past a wooden ballpark with a sign that read, OTIS FIELD, HOME OF THE OSWEGO NETHERLANDS, CANADIAN-AMERICAN LEAGUE. “Netherlands,” Groves said with a snort. “Hell of a name for a baseball team.”

  Captain Auerbach pointed to a billboard across the street. In faded, tattered letters it proclaimed the virtues of the Netherland Ice Cream and Milk Company. “Bet you anything you care to stake they ran the team, sir,” he said.

  “No thank you, Captain,” Groves said. “I won’t touch that one.”

  Otis Field didn’t look as if it had seen much use lately. Planks were missing from the outer fence; they’d no doubt helped Oswegians stay warm during the long, miserable winter. The gaps showed the rickety grandstand and the dugouts where in happier-and warmer-times the opposing teams had sheltered. Stands and dugout roofs also had the missing-tooth effect from vanished lumber. If the Netherlands ever returned to life, they’d need somewhere new to play.

  From long experience, Groves reckoned Oswego a town, of twenty or twenty-five thousand. The few people out on the streets looked poor and cold and hungry. Most people looked that way these days. The town didn’t seem to have suffered directly in the war, though the Lizards were in Buffalo and on the outskirts of Rochester. Groves guessed Oswego wasn’t big enough for them to have bothered pulverizing it. He hoped they’d pay for the omission.

  On the east side of the Oswego River stood the U.S. Military Reservation, with the earthworks of Fort Ontario. The fort dated back even further than the French and Indian War. Holding enemies at bay now, unfortunately, wasn’t as simple as it had been a couple of centuries before.

  The Coast Guard station was a two-story white frame building at the foot of East Second Street, down by the cold, choppy gray waters of Lake Ontario. The cutter Forward was tied up at a pier out in the lake. A seaman policing up outside the station spied the wagon and its escort approaching. He ducked into the building, calling loudly, “The U.S. Cavalry just rode into town, sir!”

  Groves smiled at that, in amusement and relief. An officer came out of the station. He wore a U.S. Navy uniform; in time of war, the Coast Guard was subsumed into the Navy. Saluting, he said, “Colonel Groves?”

  “Righ
t here.” Groves ponderously descended from the wagon. Even with wartime privation, he carried well over two hundred pounds. He returned the salute and said, “I’m afraid I wasn’t given your name”-the Coast Guardsman had two broad stripes on his cuffs and shoulder blades-“Lieutenant, ah…?”

  “I’m Jacob van Alen, sir,” the Coast Guardsman said.

  “Well, Lieutenant van Alen, I gather the messenger got here ahead of us.”

  “From what Smitty yelled, you mean? Yes, sir, he did.” Van Alen had an engaging grin. He was a tall, skinny fellow some where close to thirty, very blond, with an almost invisible little mustache. He went on, “Our orders are to give you whatever you want, not to ask a whole lot of questions, and never, ever put your name on the radio. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what they boil down to.”

  “It sounds right,” Groves agreed. “You’d be better off forgetting we even exist once we’re gone. Impress that on your sailors, too; if they start blabbing and any word of us gets out, they’ll be arrested and tried as traitors to the United States. That comes straight from President Roosevelt, not from me. Make sure your people understand it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Van Alen’s eyes sparkled. “If they hadn’t told me to keep my big mouth shut, I’d have at least a million questions for you; you’d best believe that.”

  “Lieutenant, believe me-you don’t want to know.” Groves had seen the slagged ruin a single Lizard bomb had made of Washington, D.C. If the Lizards had that power, the United States had to have it, too, to survive. But the idea of a uranium bomb chilled him. Start throwing those things around and you were liable to end up with an abattoir instead of a world.

  “What you say has already been made very clear to me, Colonel,” van Alen said. “Suppose you tell me what it is you want me to do for you.”

  “If the Lizards weren’t in Buffalo, I’d have you sail me all the way to Duluth,” Groves answered. “As it is, you’re going to take me across to the Canadian side so I can continue on the overland route.”