Jäger got on the field telephone to the nearest Luftwaffe base. “Can you give me air support?” he asked. “When their damned helicopter gunships show up, I lose panzers I can’t spare.”
“When I go after those gunships, I lose aircraft I can’t spare,” the Luftwaffe man retorted, “and aircraft are just as vital to the defense of the Reich as panzers. Guten Tag.” The phone line went dead. Jäger concluded he was not going to get his air support.
He didn’t. The attack went on nonetheless. It even had a moment of triumph, when Meinecke incinerated a Lizard infantry fighting vehicle with a well-placed round from the Panther’s long 75mm gun. But, on the whole, the Germans suffered worse than they had in the first diversionary assault. That had put the Lizards’ wind up, and they were ready and waiting this time. Maybe that meant they’d pulled some troops from the western section of their line. Jäger hoped so; it would mean he was doing what he was supposed to.
When he’d soaked up enough casualties and damage to make the Lizards believe (with luck) he’d really tried to accomplish something, he retreated once more. No sooner had he returned to the jumping-off point than a runner came panting up and said, “Sir, there’s a Lizard panzer advancing on our front line about five kilometers west of here.”
“A Lizard panzer?” Jäger said. The messenger nodded. Jäger frowned. That wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but even one Lizard panzer made a formidable foe. Poor Skorzeny, he thought: they must have caught on to his scheme this time. Then anger surged through him at having to mount diversionary attacks in support of a plan that hadn’t been likely to succeed anyhow.
“Sir, that’s not all,” the messenger said.
“What else, then?” Jäger asked.
“The panzer has a white flag flying from above the driver’s station, sir,” the fellow answered, with the air of a man reporting something he doesn’t expect to be believed. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
“This I must see with my own eyes,” Jäger said. He hopped into a little Volkswagen light army car, waved the messenger in beside him as a guide, and headed west. He hoped he had enough petrol to get where he was going. The light army car’s engine put out less than twenty-five horsepower and didn’t use much petrol, but the Wehrmacht had little to spare, either.
As Jäger dróve, a suspicion began to form in the back of his mind. He shook his head. No, he told himself. Impossible. Not even Skorzeny could—
But Skorzeny had. When Jäger and the messenger pulled up in front of the Lizard panzer, the driver’s hatch came open and the SS man squeezed out, wriggling and twisting like a circus elephant inching through a narrow doorway.
Jäger gave him a formal military salute. That didn’t seem good enough, so he also took off his cap, which made Skorzeny grin his frightening grin. “I give up,” Jäger said. “How the devil did you manage this?” Just standing in front of the Lizard panzer was frightening to a man who’d faced its like in battle. Its smooth lines and beautifully sloped armor made every German panzer save possibly the Panther seem not merely archaic but ugly to boot. Staring down the barrel of its big main armament was like looking into a tunnel of death.
Before answering, Skorzeny writhed and twisted; Jäger heard his back and shoulders crunch. “Better,” he said. “By God, I felt like a tinned sardine cooped up in there, except they don’t have to bend sardines to get ’em into the tin. How did I get it? I tell you, Jäger, I didn’t think I was going to get anything in Besançon. The Lizards just cleaned out every ginger-fresser they could catch.”
“I gather they didn’t catch them all,” Jäger said, pointing to the panzer.
“Nobody ever does.” Skorzeny grinned again. “I made contact with one they’d missed. When I showed him all the ginger I had, he said, ‘You just want a rangefinder? I’d give you a whole panzer for that.’ So I took him up on it.”
“But how did you get it out of the city?” Jäger asked plaintively.
“There were only two dicey bits,” Skorzeny said with an airy wave. “First was getting me into the vehicle park. We did that in dead of night. Second was seeing if I’d fit into the driver’s compartment. I do, but just barely. After that, I up and drove it away. It steers on the same principles as our machines, but it’s a lot easier to drive: the steering is power assisted and the gearbox shifts automatically.”
“Didn’t any of them challenge you?” Jäger said.
“Why should they? If you were a Lizard, you’d never think a human could take off in one of your panzers, now would you?”
“God in heaven, no,” Jäger answered honestly. “You’d have to be out of your mind even to dream such a thing.”
“Just what I thought,” Skorzeny agreed. “And just what the Lizards thought, too, evidently. Since they weren’t looking for me to try any such thing, I was able to bring it off right under their snouts. You couldn’t pay me enough to try it twice, though. Next time, they’ll be watching and—” He made a chopping motion with his right hand.
Jäger still couldn’t believe the axe hadn’t fallen during this first mad escapade. He nervously glanced up at the sky. If a Lizard plane spotted them now, gunships and fighter-bombers would be on the way here in bare minutes to destroy their own panzer.
As if picking the thought from his head, Skorzeny said, “I’d better move along. I need to get this beast under cover as quick as I can, then arrange to ship it back to Germany so the lads with the high foreheads and the thick glasses can figure out what makes it tick.”
“Can you wait long enough for me to look inside?” Without waiting for an answer, Jäger scrambled up onto the upper deck of the fighting compartment and stuck his head through the driver’s hatch. He envied the Lizards the compactness their smaller body size allowed; Skorzeny must have been bent almost double in there.
The driver’s controls and instruments were a curious mix of the familiar and the strange. The wheel, the foot pedals (though there was no clutch), and the shift lever might have come from a German panzer. But the driver’s instrument panel, with screens and dials full of unfamiliar curlicues that had to be Lizard letters and numbers, looked complicated enough to have belonged in the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190.
In spite of that, the space wasn’t cluttered: very much on the contrary. Refined was the word that crossed Jäger’s mind as he contemplated the layout. In any German panzer—any human panzer—not everything was exactly where it would most efficiently belong. Sometimes you couldn’t see a dial without moving your head, or reach for your submachine gun without banging your wrist against a projecting piece of metal. None of that here—all such tiny flaws had been designed out of the area. He wondered how long the Lizards had been making little progressive changes to get everything both perfect and perfectly finished. A long time, he suspected.
He climbed up onto the top of the turret, undogged the commander’s cupola. Ignoring Skorzeny’s impatient growl, he slithered down into the turret. This was where he belonged in a panzer, where he could most easily judge what was similar and what was different about the way the Lizards did things.
Again, he noticed refinement. No sharp edges, no outthrust chunks of metal anywhere. You could, if you were Lizardsized, move around without fear of banging your head. Then he noticed the turret had no loader’s seat, just as there’d been no hull gunner’s position in the Lizard panzer’s forward compartment. Did the gunner or commander have to load shells, then? He couldn’t believe it. That would badly slow the panzer’s rate of fire, and he knew from bitter experience the Lizards could shoot quicker than their German counterparts.
Some of the gadgetry that filled the turret without crowding it had to be an automatic loader, then. He wondered how it worked. No time to wonder, not now, except to hope German engineers could copy it. The gunner’s station, like the driver’s instrument panel, was a lot more complex than he was used to. He wondered how the Lizard who sat there could figure out what he needed to do in time to do it. Pilots managed, so maybe the gunner
could, too. No—again from experience, certainly the gunner could, too.
Skorzeny’s voice, peremptory now, came down through the open cupola: “Get your arse out of there, Jäger. I’m going to drive this beast away right now.”
Regretfully—he hadn’t seen all he wanted—Jäger slithered out and dropped down to the ground. The SS man climbed up onto the deck of the Lizard panzer and got back into the forward compartment. He was thicker through the waist than Jäger and had a devil of a time squeezing in, but he managed.
Back when the Wehrmacht first ran into the Russian T-34, there’d been talk of building an exact copy. In the end, the Germans didn’t do that, although the Panther incorporated a lot of the T-34’s best features. If the Reich copied this Lizard panzer, Jäger thought, they’d have to train ten-year-olds to crew it. Nobody else really fit.
Skorzeny started up the motor. It was amazingly quiet, and didn’t belch clouds of stinking fumes—refinement again. Jäger wondered what it used for-fuel. Skorzeny put it in gear and drove off. Jäger stared after him, shaking his head. The man was an arrogant bastard, but he accomplished things nobody in his right mind would dream of trying, let alone pulling off.
Atvar glowered at the male who stood stiffly in front of his desk. “You did not clean out that clutch of ginger-lickers as thoroughly as you should have,” he said.
“The exalted fleetlord is correct,” Drefsab replied tonelessly. “He may of course punish me as he sees fit.”
Some of Atvar’s anger evaporated. Drefsab had himself been trapped in ginger addiction; that he worked at all against his corrupted colleagues gave the fleetlord a weapon he would otherwise have had to do without. Nevertheless, he snapped, “A landcruiser disappearing! I never would have thought it possible.”
“Which is probably just how it happened, Exalted Fleetlord,” Drefsab said: “No one else thought it was possible, either, and so no one took the precautions that would have kept it from happening.”
“That Big Ugly with the scar again,” Atvar said. “They all look alike, but that male’s disfigurement makes him stand out. He has given us nothing but grief—the landcruiser now, and spiriting Mussolini away from right under our muzzles … and I have some reason to believe he was involved in the raid where the Big Uglies hijacked our scattered nuclear material.”
“Skorzeny.” Drefsab turned the sibilants at the beginning and middle of the name into long hisses.
“That is what Deutsch propaganda called him after the Mussolini fiasco, yes,” Atvar said. “In spite of your unfortunate taste for ginger, Drefsab, you remain, I believe, the most effective operative I have available to me.”
“The exalted fleetlord is gracious enough to overestimate my capacities,” Drefsab murmured.
“I had better not be overestimating them,” Atvar said. “My orders for you are simple: I want you to rid Tosev 3 of this Skorzeny, by whatever means become necessary. Losing him will hurt the Deutsche more than losing a hundred landcruisers. And the Deutsche, along with the British and the Americans, are the most troublesome and ingeniously obstreperous Big Uglies there are, which, considering the nature of the Big Uglies, is saying a great deal. He must be eliminated, and you are the male to do it.”
Drefsab saluted. “Exalted Fleetlord, it shall be done.”
After several months’ living and travel in places mostly without electricity, Sam Yeager had all but forgotten how wonderful having the stuff could be. The reasons weren’t always the obvious ones, either. Keeping food fresh was great, sure. So was having light at night, even if you did need blackout curtains so the Lizards wouldn’t spot it. But he hadn’t realized how much he missed the movies till he got to see one again.
Part of the feeling sprang from the company he kept. Having Barbara on the plush seat beside him, her hand warm in his, would have put a warm glow on anything this side of going to the dentist (not a major concern for Yeager anyhow, not with his store-bought teeth). Later, his hand would probably drop to her thigh. In the dim cavern of the movie theater, nobody was likely to notice, or to care if he did notice.
But part of what Sam got from the movies had nothing to do with Barbara. For a couple of hours, he could forget how miserable the world outside this haven on Sixteenth Street looked and pretend what happened on the screen was what mattered.
“Funny,” he whispered to Barbara as they waited for the projectionist to start the newsreel: “I can get out of myself with a good story in a magazine or a book, but watching a show is more special somehow.”
“Reading lets me get away from things, too,” she answered, “but a lot of people can’t escape that way. I feel sorry for them, but I know it’s true. The other thing is, when you’re reading, you’re by yourself. Here you’re with lots of other people looking for the same release you’re after. It makes a difference.”
“I found what I was after,” Sam said, and squeezed her hand. She turned to smile at him. Before she could say anything, the lights dimmed and the big screen at the front of the theater came to sparkling life.
The newsreel wasn’t the smoothly professional production it would have been before the Lizards came. Yeager didn’t know whether the aliens held Hollywood itself, but the distribution system for new films coming out of California had completely broken down.
What the moviegoers got instead was a U.S. Army production, probably put together right here in Denver. Some of the bits had sound added; some used cards with words on them, something Sam remembered from silent film days but had thought to be gone for good.
EASTERN FRANCE, one of those cards announced. The camera panned slowly, lovingly, across burned-out Lizard tanks. A tough-looking fellow in German uniform walked among the wreckage.
People cheered wildly. Barbara murmured, “Has everyone forgotten the Nazis were our worst enemies a year ago?”
“Yes,” Yeager whispered back. He had no love for the Nazis, but if they were hurting the Lizards, more power to ’em. He hadn’t loved the Russian Reds last year, either, but he’d been damn glad they were in the fight against Hitler.
Another card flashed: MOSCOW. There stood Stalin, shaking hands with a factory worker in a cloth cap. Behind them, a row of almost-completed airplanes stretched as far as the eye—or the camera—could see. Yet another card said, THE SOVIET UNION STAYS IN THE FIGHT. More cheers echoed through the movie theater.
The next segment had sound; a fellow with a flat midwestern accent said, “Outside of Bloomington, the Lizards banged their snouts into tough American resistance as they tried to push north toward Chicago again.” Another picture of a wrecked Lizard tank was followed by shots of tired-looking but happy GIs around a campfire.
Yeager almost bounced out of his chair. “There’s Mutt, by God!” he told Barbara. “My old manager, I mean. Jesus, I wonder how he lived through all the fighting. He’s got sergeant’s stripes, too—did you see?”
“I wouldn’t have recognized him, Sam. He wasn’t my manager,” she answered, which made him feel foolish. She added, “I’m glad he’s all right.”
“Boy, so am I,” he said, “I’ve played for some real hard cases in my day, but he was one of the other kind, the good ones. He—” People to either side and behind made shushing noises. Yeager subsided, abashed.
The newsreel cut to a card that said, SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S.A. “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!” the announcer said.
In the black-and-white film, Franklin D. Roosevelt sat behind a desk in what looked like a hotel room. The drapes were drawn behind him, perhaps merely to give him a backdrop, perhaps to keep the Lizards from figuring out where he was by what the camera showed out the window.
Roosevelt was in his shirtsleeves, his collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He looked tired and worn, but kept the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle in his mouth. He still had cigarettes, Yeager noted without resentment: FDR was working hard enough to be entitled to them.
The President took the holder from his mouth, stubbed out the
cigarette instead of letting it smolder to add a picturesque plume of smoke to the scene. He leaned toward the microphone in front of him. “My friends,” he said (and Yeager felt Roosevelt was speaking straight to him), “the fight goes on.”
Applause rippled through the theater, then quickly faded so people could listen to what the President had to say. Even his first half-dozen words gave Sam fresh hope. FDR had always had that gift. He hadn’t always made things better, but he’d always made people feel they would get better, which was half the battle by itself—it made people go to work to improve their own lot instead of moaning about how dreadful everything was.
Roosevelt said, “The enemy is on our soil and in the air above our homes. These creatures from another world believe they can frighten us into surrender by raining destruction down on our heads. As our gallant British allies did with the Germans in 1940, we shall prove them wrong.
“Every day we have more new weapons to hurl against the Lizards. Every day they have less with which to resist. Those of you who still live free, everything you do to help the war effort helps ensure that your children, and your children’s children, will grow up in freedom, too. And to those of you in occupied territory who may see this, I say: do not collaborate with the enemy in any way. Do not work in his factories, do not grow crops for him, do nothing you can possibly avoid. Without human beings to be his slaves, sooner or later he will be helpless.
“For we have hurt him, in America, in Europe, and in Asia as well. He is not superhuman, he is merely inhuman. Our united nations—now all the nations on this planet—will surely triumph in the end. Thank you and God bless you.”
The next news segment showed ways to conserve scrap metal. It had a soundtrack, but Yeager didn’t pay much attention to it. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Just hearing FDR’s voice was a tonic. Roosevelt made you think everything would turn out okay, one way or another.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 109
