In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “We’re in trouble,” Georg Schultz said in German. Ludmila wondered at his naïveté in speaking so freely: the Nazis might not have the NKVD, but they certainly did have the Gestapo. Didn’t Schultz know you weren’t supposed to open your mouth where people you couldn’t trust were listening?

  Sholudenko gave him an odd look. “The Soviet Union is in trouble,” he conceded. “No more so than Germany, however, and no more so than any of the rest of the world.”

  Before Schultz could answer, Colonel Karpov came running up the airstrip, shouting, “Get out! Get out! Lizard armor has broken through west of Sukhinichi, and they’re heading this way. We have maybe an hour to get clear—maybe not, too. Get out!”

  Wearily, Ludmila climbed back into the little Kukuruznik. Groundcrew men turned the plane into the wind; Georg Schultz spun the two-bladed wooden prop. The engine, reliable even if puny, caught at once. The biplane rattled down the runway and hopped into the air. Ludmila swung it northeast, toward Collective Farm 139.

  Schultz, Sholudenko, and Karpov stood on the ground waving to her. She waved back, wondering if she would ever see them again. Suddenly, instead of being the one who flew dangerous combat missions, she was the one who could escape the oncoming Lizards. If they were only an hour away, they had a good chance of overrunning the humans trying to escape from the air base.

  She checked her airspeed indicator and her watch. At the U-2’s piddling turn of speed, Collective Farm 139 was about half an hour away. She hoped she’d be able to spot the new base, and then hoped she wouldn’t: if the maskirovka was bad, the Lizards would notice it.

  Of course, if the maskirovka was good, she’d fly around and around and probably have to set down in the wrong place because she was running out of fuel. Airspeed indicator, watch, and compass were not the most sophisticated navigational instruments around, but they were what she had.

  A Lizard warplane shot by, far overhead. The howl of its jet engines put her in mind of wolves deep in the forest baying at the moon. She patted the fabric sides of her U-2. It was also an effective combat aircraft, no matter how puny and absurd alongside the jet. It had seemed puny and absurd alongside an Me-109, too.

  She was still flying along when the Lizard plane came shrieking back on the reciprocal to its former course. She wasn’t even done shifting bases, and it had already finished its mission of destruction.

  Speed. The word tolled in Ludmila’s mind, a mournful bell. The Lizards had more of it at their disposal than people did: their tanks rolled faster, their planes flew faster. Because of that, they held the initiative, at least while the weather was good. Fighting them was like fighting the Germans, only worse. Nobody ever won a war by reacting to what the other fellow did.

  A bullet cracked past her head, rudely slaughtering that line of thought. She shook her fist at the ground, not that it would do any good. The stupid muzhik down there was no doubt convinced that anything so clever as an airplane had to belong to the enemy. Had Stalin had the chance to continue peacefully building socialism in the Soviet Union, such ignorance might have become a thing of the past in a generation’s time. As it was …

  A peasant working in a newly sown field of barley took off his jacket and waved it as she buzzed over him. The jacket had a red lining. Ludmila started to fly on by, then exclaimed, “Bozhemoi, I’m an idiot!” The Red Air Force wouldn’t send up a flare, literally or figuratively, to let her know exactly where the new base was. If they did, the Lizards would make sure said base didn’t last long. She could credit good navigation—or more likely good luck—for finding her target at all.

  She wheeled the Kukuruznik through the sky. As she bled off speed and what little altitude she had, she spotted marks that cut across plowed furrows. They told her where planes were landing and taking off. She brought the U-2 around one more time, landed it in more or less the same place.

  As if by magic, men appeared where she had been willing to swear only grain grew. They sprinted toward the biplane, bawling, “Out! Out! Out!”

  Ludmila scrambled out. As her booted feet dug into the stillmuddy ground, she began, “Senior Lieutenant Gorbunova reporting as—”

  “Tell us all that shit later,” said one of the fellows who was hauling the U-2 away toward concealment, though of what sort Ludmila couldn’t imagine. He turned to a comrade. “Tolya, get her under cover, too.”

  Tolya needed a shave and smelled as if he hadn’t seen soap and water in a long time. Ludmila didn’t hold it against him; she was probably just as rank, but didn’t notice it on herself any longer. “Come on, Comrade Pilot,” Tolya said. If he noticed she was a woman, or cared, he didn’t let on.

  Some of his friends unrolled a broad stretch of matting that so cunningly mimicked the surrounding ground, she hadn’t even noticed it (she was glad she hadn’t tried taxiing across it). It covered a trench wide and deep enough to swallow an airplane. As soon as the Kukuruznik vanished into the trench, the mats went back on.

  Tolya led Ludmila toward some battered buildings perhaps half a kilometer away. “We don’t have to do anything special for people,” he explained, “not with the stuff for the kolkhozniki still standing.”

  “I’ve flown from bases where people lived underground, too,” Ludmila said.

  “We didn’t have much digging time here,” her guide said, “and machines come first.”

  Somebody unrolled another strip of matting and ducked under it carrying a lighted torch. “Is he starting a fire down there?” Ludmila asked. Tolya nodded. “Why?” she said.

  “More maskirovka,” he answered. “We found out the Lizards like to paste things that are warm. We don’t know how they spot them, but they do. If we give them some they can’t really hurt—”

  “They waste munitions.” Ludmila nodded. “Ochen khorosho—very good.”

  Even though they were alone in the middle of a field, Tolya looked around and lowered his voice before he spoke again: “Comrade Pilot, you’ve flown over the front south of Sukhinichi? How did it look to you?”

  It was coming to pieces, Ludmila thought. But she didn’t want to say that, not to someone she didn’t know or trust: who knew what he might be under his baggy, peasant-style tunic and trousers? Yet she didn’t want to lie to him, either. Carefully, she replied, “Let me put it this way: I’m glad you don’t have much in the way of heavy, permanent installations here.”

  “Huh?” Tolya’s brow furrowed. Then he grunted. “Oh. I see. We may have to move in a hurry, is that it?”

  Ludmila didn’t answer; she just kept walking toward what was left of the collective farm’s buildings. Beside her, Tolya grunted again and asked no more questions; he’d understood her not-answer exactly as she meant it.

  Alone on a bicycle with a pack on his back and a rifle slung over his shoulder: Jens Larssen had spent a lot of time and covered a lot of miles that way. Ever since his Plymouth gave up the ghost back in Ohio, he’d gone to Chicago and then all around Denver on two wheels rather than four.

  This, though, was different. For one thing, he’d been on flat ground in the Midwest, not slogging his way up through a gap in the Continental Divide. More important, back then he’d had a goal: he’d been riding toward the Met Lab and toward Barbara. Now he was running away, and he knew it.

  “Hanford,” he said under his breath. As far as he could tell, they all just wanted an excuse to get him out of their hair. “You’d think I was a goddamn albatross or something.”

  All right, so he’d made it real clear he wasn’t happy about his wife shacking up with this Yeager bum. The way everybody acted, it was his fault, not hers. She’d run out on him, and she got the sympathy when he tried to put some sense into her thick head.

  “It just isn’t right,” he muttered. “She bailed out, and I’m the one who’s stuck in the plane wreck.” He knew his work had suffered since the Met Lab crew got to Denver. That was another reason everybody was glad to get him out of town, on a bike if not on a rail. But how was he supposed to keep
his eyes on calculations or oscilloscope readings if they were really seeing Barbara naked and laughing, her legs wrapped around that stinking corporal as he bucked above her?

  He reached back over his right shoulder with his left hand to touch the hard, upthrust barrel of the Springfield. He’d thought about lying in wait for Yeager, ending those terrible visions for good. But he had enough sense left to realize he’d probably get caught and, even if he didn’t, blowing Yeager’s head off, however delightful that might be, wouldn’t bring Barbara back to him.

  “It’s a good thing I’m not stupid,” he told the asphalt of US 40 under his wheels. “I’d be in a whole heap of trouble if I were.”

  He looked back over his shoulder. He was thirty miles out of Denver now, and had gained a couple of thousand feet; he could see not only the city, but the plain beyond it that sloped almost imperceptibly downward toward the Mississippi a long way away. Down in the flatlands, the Lizards held sway. If he hadn’t gone away from the city heading west, he might have left heading east.

  Looked at rationally, that made as little sense as ambushing Sam Yeager, and Jens knew it. Knowing and caring were two different critters. Instead of just getting his own back from Yeager, selling out the Met Lab project gave him vengeance wholesale rather than retail, paying back all at once everybody who’d done him wrong. The idea had a horrid fascination to it, the way the sharp edge of a broken tooth irresistibly lures the tongue. Feel, it seems to say. This isn’t the way it should be, but feel it anyhow.

  Pushing the bike along at 7,500 feet took more out of him than making it go through the flat farming country of Indiana. He stopped every so often for a blow, and just to admire the scenery ahead. Now the Rockies loomed in every direction except right behind him. In the clear, thin air, the snowcapped peaks and the deep green cloak of pine forest below them looked close enough to reach out and touch. The sky was a deep, deep blue, with a texture to it he’d never known before.

  But for the sound of his own slightly winded breathing and the rustle of bushes in the breeze, everything was quiet: no buzz and wheeze of cars, no growling rumble of trucks. Jens had passed a patient convoy of horse-drawn wagons four or five miles back, and another coming into Denver just as he was leaving, but that was about it. He knew the Lizard-induced dearth of traffic meant the war effort was going to hell, but it sure worked wonders for the tourist business.

  “Except there’s no tourist business any more, either,” he said. The habit of talking to himself when he was alone on his bike had come back in a hurry.

  He swung his feet back up onto the pedals, got rolling again. In a couple of minutes, he came up to a sign: IDAHO SPRINGS, 2 MILES. That made him lift one hand from the handlebars to scratch his head. “Idaho Springs?” he muttered. “This was still Colorado, last I looked.”

  A few hundred yards ahead another sign said, HOT SPRINGS BATHING, 50¢. VAPOR CAVES, ONLY $1. That explained the springs, but left him still wondering how a chunk of Idaho had shifted south and east.

  The town might have had a thousand people before the Lizards came. It straggled along a narrow canyon. A lot of the houses looked deserted, and the doors to several shops hung open. Jens had seen a lot of towns like that. But if people had fled from everyplace, where had they all gone? His reluctant conclusion was that a lot of them were dead.

  Not everybody was gone from Idaho Springs. A bald man in black overalls came out of a dry-goods store and waved to Larssen. He waved back, slowed to a stop. “Where you from, mister?” the local asked. “Where you goin’?”

  Jens thought about replying that it was none of Nosy Parker’s business, but his eye happened to catch a bit of motion in a second-story window that the breeze couldn’t have caused: a curtain shifted slightly, perhaps from a rifle barrel stirring behind it. The folk of Idaho Springs were ready to take care of themselves.

  And so, instead of getting smart, Jens said carefully, “I’m out of Denver, heading west on Army business. I can show you a letter of authorization, if you’d like.” The letter wasn’t signed by Groves; the detested Colonel Hexham’s John Hancock was on it instead. Larssen had been tempted to wipe his backside with it; now he was glad he’d refrained.

  Black Overalls shook his head. “Nah, you don’t need to bother. If you was one of them bad guys, don’t reckon you’d be so eager to show it off.” The upstairs curtain twitched again as the not-quite-unseen watcher drew back. The bald guy went on, “Anything we can do for you here?”

  Jens’ stomach rumbled. He said, “I wouldn’t turn down some food—or even a drink, if you folks have some hooch you can spare. If you don’t, don’t put yourselves out on account of me,” he added hastily; in these times of scarcity, people got mighty touchy about sharing things like liquor.

  But the fellow in black overalls just grinned. “We can spare a bit, I expect. We’d always stock up for the folks who’d come to visit the springs, you know, and there ain’t been many o’ them lately. You just want to ride on up ahead for another long block to the First Street Cafe. Tell Mary there Harvey says it’s okay to get you fed.”

  “Thanks, uh, Harvey.” Jens started the bicycle rolling again. His back itched as he rode past the window where he’d seen the curtain move, but nothing at all stirred there now. If he’d satisfied Harvey, he must have satisfied the local hired gun, too.

  The Idaho Springs city hall was an adobe building with a couple of big millstones in the yard in front of it. A sign identified them as coming from an old Mexican arastra, a mule-powered gadget that ground ore as an ordinary mill ground grain. Colorado had more history than Jens had thought about.

  The First Street Cafe, by contrast, looked like a bank. It had its name spelled out in gold Old English letters across a plate glass window. Jens stopped in front of it, let down the kick-stand on his bike. He didn’t think bike rustlers would be as big a worry here as they were in Denver. All the same, he resolved not to eat with his back to the street.

  He opened the door to the café. A bell jingled above his head. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside, he saw the place was empty. That amazed him, because a wonderful smell filled the air. From the room in back, a woman’s voice called, “That you, Jack?”

  “Uh, no,” Jens said. “I’m a stranger here. Harvey was kind enough to say I could beg a meal from you, if you’re Mary.”

  Brief silence fell, then, “Yeah, I’m Mary. Just a second, pal; I’ll be right with you.” He heard footsteps back there, then she came out behind the counter and looked him over, hands on hips. Voice slightly mocking, she went on, “So Harvey says I’m supposed to feed you, huh? You’re skinny enough you could do with some feeding, that’s for sure. Chicken stew do you? It had better—it’s what I’ve got.”

  “Chicken stew would be swell, thank you.” That was what was making the wonderful smell, Jens realized.

  “Okay. Comin’ right up. You can sit anywhere; we ain’t what you’d call crowded.” With a laugh, Mary turned and disappeared again.

  Jens chose a table that let him keep an eye on his bicycle. Plates clattered and silverware jingled in the back room; Mary softly sang something to herself that, if he recognized the tune, was a scandalous ditty he’d last heard at the Lowry Field BOQ.

  From a lot of women, such lyrics would have scandalized him. Somehow they seemed to suit this Mary. On thirty seconds’ acquaintance, she reminded him of Sal, the brassy waitress with whom, among many others, the Lizards had cooped him up in a church in Fiat, Indiana. Her hair was midnight-black instead of Sal’s peroxided yellow, and they didn’t look like each other, either, but he thought he saw in Mary a lot of the same take-it-or-leave-it toughness Sal had shown.

  He still wished he’d laid Sal—especially considering the way everything else had turned out. It could have happened, but he’d figured Barbara was waiting for him, so he’d stayed good. Shows how much I know, he thought bitterly.

  “Here you go, pal.” Mary set knife and fork and a plate in front of him: falling-off-the-b
one chicken in thick gravy, with dumplings and carrots. The smell alone was enough to put ten pounds on him.

  He tasted. The taste was better than the smell. He hadn’t thought it could be. He made a wordless, full-mouth noise of bliss.

  “Glad you like it,” Mary said, sounding amused. A moment later she added, “Listen, it’s about dinnertime, and like I said, we ain’t exactly packed. You mind if I bring out a plate and join you?”

  “Please,” he said. “Why should I mind? This is your place and your terrific food—” He thought he was going to say more, but took another bite instead.

  “Be right with you, then.” She went back to get some stew of her own. Jens twisted his head to watch the way she walked. Like a woman, he thought: what a surprise. Her long gray wool skirt didn’t show much of her legs, but she had nice ankles. He wondered if she was older or younger than he. Close, either way.

  She came back with not only a plate, but two glass beer mugs filled with a deep amber fluid. “You look like you could use one of these,” she said as she sat down across the table from him. “Just homebrew, but it’s not bad. Joe Simpson who makes it, he used to work down at the Coors brewery in Golden, so he knows what he’s doin’.”

  Jens gulped at the beer. It wasn’t Coors—he’d drunk that in Denver—but it was a long way from bad. “Oh, Lord,” he said ecstatically. “Will you marry me?”

  She paused with a forkful of dumpling halfway to her mouth, gave him a long, appraising stare. He felt himself turning red; he’d just meant it for a joke. But maybe Mary liked what she saw. With a slightly wintry smile, she answered, “I dunno, but I’ll tell you this right now—it’s the best damn offer I had today, and that’s a fact. Hell, if you was to tempt me with a cigarette, who knows what I might up and do?”