In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Lucille Potter scrambled up a minute later, maybe less. In dirty fatigues and a helmet, she looked like a man except that she didn’t need a shave. The helmet bore a Red Cross on a white circle; the Lizards had learned what that mark meant, and weren’t any worse than people about respecting it.

  She looked at the way blood was soaking through the bandage, clicked her tongue between her teeth. “We’ve got to get a tourniquet on that wound, Sergeant.”

  Mutt looked down at Donlan. The kid’s eyes had rolled up in his head. Mutt said, “You do that, Miss Lucille, he’s gonna lose the foot.”

  “I know,” she said. “But if we don’t do it, he’s going to bleed to death. And he’d lose the foot anyhow; no way to save it with a wound like that.” Her sharp stare dared him to argue. He couldn’t; he’d seen enough wounds in France and Illinois to know she was right.

  She cut Donlan’s torn trousers, took out a length of bandage and a stick, and set the tourniquet. “Hell of a thing,” Daniels said, to himself and her both: another young soldier on crutches for the rest of his life.

  “It’s hard, I know,” Lucille Potter answered. “But would you rather have him dead? Ten years from now, if this war ever ends, would he rather we’d let him die?”

  “I reckon not,” Daniels said. In his younger days in Mississippi, a lot of the older white men he’d known were shy an arm or a leg or a foot from the States War. They weren’t glad of it, naturally, but they got on better than you’d expect. When you got right down to it, people were pretty tough critters.

  He sent a runner over to Captain Maczek. Where the captain was, the company field telephone would be, too. After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Donlan seemed pretty shocky. When Mutt remarked on it, Lucille Potter said, “It’s probably a blessing in disguise—he won’t feel that foot as much.”

  The forward aid station wasn’t much more than a quarter of a mile back of the line. A four-man litter team got to Donlan in less than fifteen minutes. The boss of the team, a corporal, looked at the youngster’s ruined foot and shook his head. “Nothing much we’ll be able to do about that,” he said. “They’ll have to take him back into Bloomington, and I expect they’ll chop it off there.”

  “You’re almost certainly right,” Lucille said. All the litter bearers stared when she spoke. She stared right back, daring them to make something out of it. None of them did. She went on, “The sooner he goes back, the sooner they can treat him.”

  The team got Donlan onto the stretcher and carried him away. “Too stinkin’ bad,” Mutt said. “He’s a good kid. Ain’t this war a—” He stopped, inhibited in his language by a woman’s presence. After a sigh, he resumed, “Lord, I wish I had me a cigarette, or even a chaw.”

  “Filthy habits, both of them,” Lucille Potter said, her voice so sharp he turned to give her an irritated look. Then, with a wry chuckle, she added, “I wish I had a smoke, too. I ran out of tobacco months ago, and I miss it like anything.”

  “Might be some back in Bloomington,” Mutt said. “We ever get a real lull, could be I’d send Szabo back there to see how the foraging is. You want to liberate somethin’ from where it rightly belongs, ol’ Dracula’s the man for the job.”

  “He’s certainly good at coming up with home brew and moonshine,” Lucille said, “but people make those around here. Illinois isn’t tobacco country, so we can’t get hold of bootleg cigars.”

  “Can’t get hold of much of anything these days,” Mutt said. “I’m skinnier’n I’ve been for close to thirty years.”

  “It’s good for you,” she answered, which made him give her another resentful glance. She was on the lean side, and looked to have always been that way: not an ounce of excess flesh anywhere. What did she know about what felt comfortable and what didn’t?

  He wasn’t in a mood to argue, though, so he said, “I just hope Donlan’s gonna make out okay. He’s a good kid. Hell of a thing to be crippled so young.”

  “Better than dying. I thought we already settled that,” Lucille Potter answered. “I’m just glad the field telephone was working and the litter crew was on the ball. If they hadn’t gotten here inside of about another ten minutes, I was going to take his foot off myself.” She tapped her little black bag. “I’ve got some ether in here. He wouldn’t have felt anything.”

  “You know how?” Daniels asked. Battlefield wounds were one thing, but cutting into a man on purpose … He shook his head. He was sure he couldn’t do it.

  Lucille said, “I haven’t had to do an amputation yet, but I’ve read up on the technique. I—”

  “I know that,” Mutt broke in. “Every time I see you, you got a doctor’s book in your hand.”

  “I have to. Nurses don’t operate, and I wasn’t even a scrub nurse to watch doctors work. But a combat medic had better be able to do as much as she can, because we’re not always going to have a lull like this one to get our casualties back to the aid station. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Yeah,” Daniels said. “You usually do—” Off to the left, small arms began to chatter on both sides of the line. Mutt interrupted himself to scramble into the shell hole from which unlucky Kevin Donlan had emerged to relieve himself. Lucille Potter jumped in beside him. Her only combat experience was what she’d had in the past few weeks, but take cover was a lesson you learned in a hurry, at least if you wanted to keep on living.

  Then the artillery started up again, the Lizards firing steadily, the Americans in bursts of a few rounds here, a few rounds there, a few somewhere else. They’d learned the hard way that if their pieces stayed in one place for more than a short salvo, the Lizards would zero in on them and knock them out.

  The ground began tossing like the stormy sea, though Mutt had never been in a natural storm that made such a god-awful racket. He pushed Lucille down flat on her belly, then lay on top of her to protect her from splinters as best he could. He didn’t know whether he did it because she was a woman or because she was the medic. Either way, he figured, she needed to stay as safe as possible.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. Mutt stuck his head up right away. Sure as hell, Lizard ground troops were scurrying forward. He squeezed off a long burst with his tommy gun. The Lizards flattened out on the ground. He didn’t know whether he’d hit any of them; the tommy gun wasn’t accurate out past a couple of hundred yards.

  He wished he had one of the automatic weapons the Lizards carried. Their effective range was something like double that of his submachine gun, and their cartridges packed a bigger kick, too. He’d heard of dogfaces who toted captured specimens, but keeping them in the right ammo was a bitch and a half. Most of the weapons the Lizards lost went straight back to the high-forehead boys in G-2. With luck, the Americans would get toys just as good one of these days.

  That train of thought abruptly got derailed. He moaned, down deep in his throat. The Lizards had a tank with them. Now he understood what the poor damned Germans had felt like in France in 1918 when those monsters came clanking their way and they couldn’t stop them or even do much to slow them down.

  The tank and the Lizard infantry screening it slowly advanced together. The aliens had learned something since the winter before; they’d lost a lot of tanks then for lack of infantry support. Not any more.

  Lucille Potter peered over the forward lip of the foxhole beside Mutt. “That’s trouble,” she said. He nodded. It was big trouble. If he ran, the tank’s machine gun or the Lizard foot soldiers would pick him off. If he stayed, the tank would penetrate the position and then the Lizard infantry would get him.

  Off to the right, somebody fired one of those new bazooka rockets at the Lizard tank. The rocket hit the tank right in the turret, but it didn’t penetrate. “Damn fool,” Mutt ground out. Doctrine said you were supposed to shoot a bazooka only at the rear or sides of a Lizard tank; the frontal armor on the aliens’ machines was just too thick for you to kill one with a straight-on shot.

  Being too eager cost the fellow
who’d fired at the tank. It turned toward him and his buddies and opened up first with its machine gun and then its main armament. For good measure, the Lizard infantry moved in on the bazooka man, too—their job was to make sure nobody got a good shot at the armored fighting vehicle. By the time they were done, there probably wasn’t enough of the American and his buddies left to bury.

  Which meant they forgot about Mutt. For a second, he didn’t think that would do him any good: if the line was overrun, he would be, too, in short order. Ever so cautiously, he raised his head again. There sat the tank, maybe a hundred feet away, ass end on to him, still pouring fire at a target more necessary to destroy than he was.

  He ducked back down, turned to Lucille Potter. “Gimme that ether,” he snapped.

  “What? Why?” She took a protective grip on the black bag.

  “The—stuff’ll burn, won’t it?” His pa’s hard hand on his backside and across his face had taught him never to swear where a woman could hear, but he almost slipped that time. “Now gimme it!”

  Lucille’s eyes widened. She opened the bag, handed him the glass jar. It was about half full of a clear, oily-looking liquid. He hefted it thoughtfully. Yeah, it would throw just fine. His bat had kept him from having a decent big-league career, nobody’d ever complained about his arm. He’d been a good man with a grenade in France, too.

  It wasn’t even as if he had to throw all of a sudden, as he would have with a runner breaking for second. He could take a few moments, think through what he was going to do, see every step of it in his mind before it actually happened.

  Doing that took longer than the throw itself. He popped up as if exploding out of his crouch behind a batter, fired the jar for all he was worth, and ducked back down again. Nobody who wasn’t looking right at him would have known he’d appeared.

  “Did you hit it?” Lucille demanded.

  “Miss Lucille, I tell you for a fact, I didn’t stay up long enough to find out. I tried to smash it off the back of the turret so it’d drip down into that nice, hot engine compartment.” Mutt’s shoulder twinged; he hadn’t put that much into a snap throw in years. It had felt straight, but you never could tell. A little long, a little short, and he might as well not have bothered.

  Then he heard hoarse yells from the Americans in other scattered foxholes. That encouraged him to take another cautious peek. When he did, he yelled himself, in sheer delight. Flames danced all over the engine compartment and were licking up the back of the turret. As he watched, an escape hatch popped open and a Lizard jumped onto the ground.

  Mutt ducked down for his tommy gun. “Miss Lucille, that there is one Lizard tank that’s out stealing.”

  She pounded him on the back as any other soldier would have. He wouldn’t have tried to kiss another soldier, though. She let him do it, but she didn’t do much in the way of kissing back. He didn’t worry about that; he popped up out of the foxhole and started blazing away at the fleeing Lizard tank crew and the foot soldiers, who were much less terrifying without armor to back them up.

  The Lizards fell back. The tank kept burning. A Sherman would have brewed up a hell of a lot faster than it did, but eventually its ammunition and its fuel tank went up in a spectacular blast.

  Mutt felt as if he’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer. “Lord!” he exclaimed. “You couldn’t make a fancier explosion in the movies.”

  “No, probably not,” Lucille Potter agreed, “nor one that did more for us. We’ll hold Randolph a while longer now, I expect. That was a wonderful throw; I’ve never seen a better one. You must have been a very fine baseball player.”

  “You don’t make the majors unless you’re pretty fair,” he said, shrugging. “You don’t stick there unless you’re better’n that, and I wasn’t.” He brushed a hand across the front of his shirt, as if he’d been a pitcher shaking off a sign rather than a catcher; baseball wasn’t what he wanted to talk about at the moment. After a couple of tentative coughs, he said, “Miss Lucille, I hope you don’t think I was too forward there.”

  “When you kissed me, you mean? I didn’t mind,” she said, but not in a way that encouraged him to try it again; by her tone, once had been okay but twice wouldn’t be. He kicked at the churned-up dirt inside the foxhole. Lucille added, “I’m not interested, Mutt, not that way. It’s not you—you’re a good man. But I’m just not.”

  “Okay,” he said; he was too old to let his pecker do his thinking for him. But that didn’t mean he’d forgotten he had one. He pushed up his helmet so he could scratch his head above one ear. “If you like me, why—” He broke off there. If she didn’t want to talk about it, that was her business.

  For the first time since he’d met her, he found her at a loss for words. She frowned, obviously not caring for that herself. Slowly, she said, “Mutt, it’s not something I can easily explain, or care to. I—”

  Easily or not, she didn’t get the chance to explain. Following a cry of “Miss Lucille!” a soldier from another squad in the platoon came scrambling over to the foxhole and gasped out, “Miss Lucille, we’ve got two men down, one hit in the shoulder, the other in the chest. Peters—the guy with the chest wound—he’s in bad shape.”

  “I’m coming,” she said briskly, and climbed out of the hole she’d shared with Mutt. As she hurried away, he scratched his head again.

  Even in these times, David Goldfarb had expected things to be handled with more ceremony. The Prime Minister, after all, did not visit the Bruntingthorpe Research and Development Test Flying Aerodrome every day.

  But there was no line of RAF men in blue serge standing to attention for Winston Churchill to inspect, no flyby of a squadron of Pioneers or Meteors to impress him with what Fred Hipple and his team had accomplished in jet propulsion. In fact, up until an hour before Churchill got to Bruntingthorpe, no one knew he was coming.

  Group Captain Hipple brought the news back from the administrative section’s Nissen hut. It produced a brief, startled silence from his subordinates, who were laboring mightily to pull secrets from the wreckage of the Lizard fighter-bomber that had been brought down not far from the aerodrome.

  Typically, Flight Officer Basil Roundbush was first to break that silence: “Generous of him to give us notice enough to make sure our flies are closed.”

  “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be confident yours is, dear boy,” Hipple returned. Roundbush covered his face with his hands, acknowledging the hit. The group captain might have been shorter than his subordinates, but gave away nothing in wit. He continued, “I gather no one knew until moments ago: quite a lot of security laid on, for reasons which should be plain enough.”

  “Wouldn’t do for the Lizards to pay us a visit just now, would it, sir?” Goldfarb said.

  “Yes, that would prove—embarrassing,” Hipple said, an understatement Roundbush might have coveted.

  And so, just as Goldfarb had, the Prime Minister came down from Leicester by bicycle, pedaling along on an elderly model like a grandfather out for a constitutional. He dismounted outside the meteorology hut, where Hipple and his team still labored after the latest Lizard bombing raid. When Goldfarb saw the round pink face and the familiar cigar through the window, he gulped. He’d never expected to meet the leader of the British Empire.

  Wing Commander Julian Peary’s reaction was more prosaic. In the big deep voice that went so oddly with his slight physique, he said, “I do hope he’s not damaged any of the beets.”

  It was only half a joke. Like everyone else at Bruntingthorpe—like everyone else in Britain, or so it seemed—Hipple’s team cultivated a garden. The British Isles held more people than they could easily feed, and shipments from America were down, not so much because the Lizards bombed them (they still took much less notice of ships than of air or rail or road transport) as because the Yanks, beset at home, had little to spare.

  So, gardens. Beets, potatoes, peas, beans, turnips, parsnips, cabbages, maize … whatever the climate would permit, people grew—
and sometimes guarded with cricket bats, savage dogs, or shotguns against two-legged thieves too big to be frightened by scarecrows.

  Everyone did come to attention when the Prime Minister, accompanied by a bodyguard who looked as if he never smiled, walked into the Nissen hut. “As you were, gentlemen, please,” Churchill said. “After all, officially I am not here, but speaking over the BBC in London. Because I am in the habit of speaking live, I can occasionally use the subterfuge of sound recordings to let myself be in two places at once.” He let out a conspiratorial chuckle. “I hope you won’t give me away.”

  Automatically, Goldfarb shook his head. Hearing Churchill’s voice without the static and distortion of a wireless set was to him even more intimate than seeing the Prime Minister in the tubby flesh rather than through photographs: pictures captured his image more accurately than the airwaves did his voice.

  Churchill strode over to Fred Hipple, who was standing beside a wooden table on which lay pieces of the turbine from the crashed Lizard fighter’s jet engine. Pointing to them, the Prime Minister asked, “How long before we shall be able to duplicate that engine, Group Captain?”

  “Duplicate it, sir?” Hipple said. “It won’t be soon; the Lizards are far ahead of us in control mechanisms for the engine, in machining techniques, and in the materials they employ: they do things with titanium and ceramics we’ve never dreamt of, much less attempted. But in determining how and why they make things as they do, we learn how to do better ourselves.”

  “I see,” Churchill said thoughtfully. “So even though you have the book in front of you”—he pointed to the disassembled chunks of turbine again—“you cannot simply read off what is on its pages, but must decode it as if it were written in a cipher.”