In the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  He rolled past a burned-out farmhouse and the twisted wreckage of a couple of cars. Snow covered but did not erase the scars of bomb craters in the fields. There had been fighting here, not so long ago. Jens wondered how far west into Indiana the Lizards’ control reached, and how hard crossing back into American-held territory would be.

  (Down deep, he wondered if Chicago was still free; if Barbara was still alive; if this whole frozen trek wasn’t for nothing. He seldom let those thoughts rise to the surface of his mind. Whenever he did, the urge to keep going faltered.)

  He peered ahead, shielding his eyes against snow glare with the palm of his hand. Yes, those were houses up there—either Fiat or, if he’d botched his navigation, some other equally unimpressive little hamlet.

  Off to one side of the road, he saw little dark figures moving against the white-splashed background. Hunters, he thought In hard times, anything you could add to your larder was all to the good. A deer might mean the difference between starving and getting through the winter.

  He was not a great outdoorsman (though he’d learned a lot lately), but one good glance at how the dark figures moved warned him his first hasty thought was wrong. Hunters, at least of the human variety, did not walk like that. It was some sort of Lizard patrol.

  And, worse luck, they’d seen him, too. They broke off whatever they were doing and came toward the road. He thought about diving off his bike and running away from them, but no surer way to get himself shot came to mind. Better to assume the air of an innocent traveler out and about.

  One of the Lizards waved to him. He waved back, then stopped his bicycle and waited for them to come up. The closer they got, the more motley and miserable they looked. That struck him as somehow wrong; bug-eyed monsters weren’t supposed to have troubles of their own. At least, they never did in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials.

  But a couple of the Lizards were tricked out in their own kind’s shiny cold-weather gear, while the rest had draped themselves with a rummage sale’s worth of stolen human coats, mufflers, hats, snow pants, and boots. They looked like sad little tramps, and they also looked frozen in spite of everything they had on. They were, in fact, so many Winter Fritzes in the scaly flesh.

  The one who had waved led the squad out onto the roadway, which was hardly less snow-covered than the surrounding fields. “Who you?” he asked Larssen in English. His exhaled breath steamed around him.

  “My name is Pete Smith,” Jens answered. He’d been questioned by Lizard patrols before, and never gave his real name on the off chance that they’d somehow compiled a list of nuclear physicists. He didn’t give the same alias twice, either.

  “What you do, Pete Ssmith? Why you out?” The Lizard turned the first sound in Larssen’s assumed surname into a long hiss and pronounced the th at the end as a Cockney’s ff.

  “I’m going to visit my cousins. They live a little past Montpelier,” Jens said, naming the small town just west of Fiat on his map.

  “You not cold?” the Lizard said. “Not cold on that—that thing?” He’d evidently forgotten the word bicycle.

  “Of course I’m cold,” Larssen answered; he had the feeling the Lizard would have shot him if he’d dared deny it. Hoping he sounded properly indignant, he went on, “Have to go by bike if I want to go, though. Don’t have any gas for my car.” That was true for everybody these days. He didn’t mention that his dead car was back in eastern Ohio.

  The Lizards sounded like steam engines as they talked among themselves. The one who’d been questioning Larssen said, “You come with us. We ask you more things.” He gestured with his gun to make sure Jens got the point.

  “I don’t want to do that!” Larssen exclaimed, which was true for both his Pete Smith persona and his very own self. If the Lizards did any serious questioning, they’d find out he didn’t know much about his alleged cousins west of Montpelier. They might even find out he didn’t have any cousins west of Montpelier. And if they found that out, they’d likely start doing some serious digging about who he really was and why he was biking across eastern Indiana.

  “Not care what you want,” the Lizard said. “You come with us. Or you stay.” He brought the rifle up to point straight at the middle of Larssen’s chest The message was clear: if he stayed here, he’d stay forever. The Lizard spoke in his own language, maybe translating for his friends what he’d told Jens. Their mouths fell open. Larssen had seen that before, often enough to figure out what it meant. They were laughing at him.

  “I’ll come,” he said, as he had to. The Lizards formed up on either side of his bicycle and escorted him into Fiat.

  The town wasn’t even a wide spot on Highway 18, just a few houses, a general store, an Esso station (its pumps now snow-covered mounds), and a church along the side of the road. The store was probably the main reason the town existed. A couple of children ran shouting across the empty pavement of the highway, pelting each other with snowballs. They didn’t even look up when the Lizards went past; by now they were used to them. Kids adapt fast, Larssen thought. He wished he did.

  The Lizards had turned the general store into their headquarters. A razor-wire fence ringed the building to keep anyone from getting too close. A portable pillbox sat in front of the store. Larssen wouldn’t have envied a human on duty in there. It had to seem even chillier for one of the invaders.

  A blast of heat hit him in the face when the Lizards opened the store’s front door. He went from too cold to too hot in the space of a few seconds. Sweat glands he’d thought dormant till summer suddenly returned to life. In his wool hat, overcoat, and sweater, he felt like a main dish in a covered kettle that had just been moved from the icebox to the oven.

  “Ahh!” The Lizards all said it together. As one, they stripped off their layers of insulation and drank in the heat they loved so well. They did not object when Larssen shed his own coat and hat and, a moment later, his sweater. Even in shirt and trousers, he was too warm. But while the Lizards took nudity in stride, the last time he’d been naked in public was at a swimming hole when he was thirteen years old. He left the rest of his clothes on.

  The Lizard who spoke English led him to a chair, then sat down across a table from him. The alien reached forward and poked a knob on a small Lizardy gadget that lay on the table. Behind a small, transparent window, something inside the machine began to spin. Jens wondered what it was for.

  “Who you?” the Lizard asked, as if seeing him for the first time. He repeated his Pete Smith alias. “What you do?” the alien said, and he gave back his story about the mythical cousins west of Montpelier.

  The Lizard picked up another contraption and spoke into it. Larssen jumped when the contraption hissed back. The Lizard spoke again. He and the machine talked back and forth for a couple of minutes, in fact. Larssen thought at first that it was some kind of funny-looking radio or telephone, but the more the Lizard used it, the more he got the feeling the device itself was doing the talking. He wondered what it was saying, especially when it spoke his name.

  The Lizard turned one of its turreted eyes toward him. “We have of you no record, Pete Smith.” It might have been pronouncing sentence. “How you explain this?”

  “Well, uh, sir, uh—what is your name?”

  “I am Gnik,” the Lizard said. “You call me superior sir.”

  “Well, superior sir, Gnik, I guess the reason you don’t have any record of me is that till now I’ve just stayed on my own little farm and not bothered anybody. If I’d known I’d run into you, I’d have stayed there longer, too.” That was the best excuse Larssen could come up with on the spur of the moment. He wiped his forehead with a sleeve.

  “It could be,” Gnik said neutrally. “These cousins of you—who, what they are?”

  “They’re my father’s brother’s son and his wife. His name is Olaf Smith, hers is Barbara. They have two children, Martin and Josephine.” By naming the imaginary cousins (what’s the square root of minus one cousin? flashed across his mind) aft
er his father, wife, brother, and sister, he hoped he’d be able to remember who they were.

  Gnik talked to his gadget again, listened while it talked back. “No record of these Big Uglies,” he. said, and Larssen thought he was doomed. Then the Lizard went on, “Not have all records yet,” and he breathed again. “One day soon, put in machine here.” Gnik tapped the talking box with a clawed forefinger.

  “What is that thing, anyway?” Larssen asked, hoping to get the Lizard to stop asking him questions about relatives he didn’t have.

  But Gnik, though too short for basketball and too little for football, was too smart to go for a fake. “You not ask questions at I. I ask questions at you.” Lizards didn’t have much in the way of facial expressions, but what Gnik had, Larssen didn’t like. “You ask questions at me to spy out secrets of Race, yes?”

  Yes, Jens thought, though he didn’t think coming out and admitting it would be the smartest thing he’d ever done. He didn’t have to fake a stammer as he answered, “I don’t know anything about your secrets and I don’t want to know anything about them. I just never saw a box that talked back to somebody before, that’s all.”

  “Yes. You Big Uglies are pri-mi-tive.” Gnik pronounced the three-syllable English word with obvious relish; Larssen guessed he’d learned it so he could score points off uppity humans. He was still suspicious, too. “Maybe you find this things out, pass on to other sneaky Big Uglies, eh?”

  “I don’t know anything about sneaky Big Uglies—I mean, people,” Larssen said, noticing that the Lizards had as unflattering a nickname for human beings as humans did for their kind. “I just want to go see my cousins, that’s all.” Now he wanted Gnik to ask questions about Olaf and his nonexistent family.

  That suddenly seemed safer than being grilled about spies who might very well be real.

  Gnik said, “We see more about this, Pete Smith. You not leave town called Fiat now. We keep your travel thing here”—he still couldn’t remember how to say bicycle—“ask more questions to you later.”

  Larssen started Jo exclaim, “You can’t do that!” He opened his mouth, but shut it again in a hurry. Gnik damn well could do that, and if he didn’t care for the cut of Jens’ jib, he could reslice it—and Jens—into a shape that better pleased his fancy. Losing a bicycle was the least of his worries.

  No, that wasn’t so. Along with the bike, he was also losing precious time. How long would he take to hike across Indiana in the dead of winter? How long before another Lizard patrol picked him up and started asking unanswerable questions? Not long, he feared. He wanted to ask Gnik where the Lizard-human frontier through Indiana ran, but didn’t think it wise. For all he knew, the invaders had conquered the whole state by now. And even if they hadn’t, Gnik almost certainly wouldn’t answer and almost certainly would get even more suspicious.

  He couldn’t fail to make some kind of protest, though, not if he wanted to keep his self-respect, so he said, “I don’t think you ought to take my bicycle when I haven’t done anything to you.”

  “You say this. I not know this,” Gnik retorted. “You put on now your warm things. We take you to other Big Uglies we keep here.”

  Putting on sweater, overcoat, and hat in the sweltering general store and then going outside reminded Jens of the runs from steam room to snow he’d shared with his grandfather when he was a kid. The only thing missing was his father standing out there to whack him with birch twigs. The Lizards didn’t seem invigorated when they left the store. They just seemed cold.

  They took him over to the church. Lizard guards stood outside it. When they opened the closed door, he found it was heated to a more humanly tolerable level. He also found Gnik was using it as a holding pen for people who came through or near Fiat.

  People sat up on the pews; turned around to look him over; and started talking, both at him and among themselves. “Look, another poor sucker.” “What did they get him for?” “What did they get you for, stranger?”

  “Sstay—here,” one of the Lizards said to Jens, his words accented almost past comprehension. Then he left the church. As the door swung shut, Larssen saw him and his companion racing back toward the general store and what they thought of as a decent temperature.

  “What did they get you for, stranger?” repeated the woman who’d asked the question before. She was a brassy blonde not far from Jens’ age; she might have been pretty if her hair (which showed dark roots) hadn’t been a snaky mess and if she didn’t look as if she’d been wearing the same clothes for quite a while.

  Everybody in the church had that same grubby look. The faces that turned toward Larssen were mostly clean, but a strong, almost barnyard odor in the air said no one had bathed lately. He was sure he contributed to that odor; he hadn’t seen a bar of Lifebuoy for a while himself. Without hot water, baths in winter were more likely to be next to pneumonia than to godliness.

  He said, “Hello, folks. I don’t know just what they got me for. I don’t think they know, either. One of their patrols spotted me on my bicycle and pulled me in so they could ask me questions. Now they don’t want to let me go.”

  “Sounds like the little bastards,” the woman said. She wore no lipstick (maybe she’d run out) but, as if to make up for it, had rouged her cheeks almost bloodred.

  Her words touched off a torrent of abuse from the other involuntary churchgoers. “I’d like to squeeze their skinny necks till those horrible eyes of theirs pop,” said a man with a scraggly reddish beard.

  “Put ’em in a cage and feed ’em flies,” suggested a skinny, swarthy gray-haired woman.

  “I wouldn’t mind if they bombed us off the face of the Earth here, so long as the Lizards went with us,” added a stout, red-faced fellow. “The scaly sons of bitches won’t even let us go out to scrounge around for cigarettes.” Larssen missed his nicotine fix, too, but Redface sounded as though he’d forgive the Lizards anything, up to and including bombing Washington, if they’d only let him have a smoke. That struck Jens as excessive.

  He gave his Pete Smith alias, and was bombarded with the others’ names. He wasn’t especially good at matching faces and monickers, and needed a while to remember that the gray-haired woman was Marie and the bleached blonde Sal, that the fellow with the red beard was Gordon and the man with the red face Rodney. Then there were also Fred and Louella and Mort and Ron and Aloysius and Henrietta to keep straight.

  “Hey, we still have pews to spare,” Rodney said. “Make yourself at home, Pete.” Looking around, Larssen saw people had made nests of whatever clothes they weren’t wearing. Sleeping wrapped in an overcoat on a hard pew did not strike him as making himself at home, but what choice had he?

  He asked, “Where’s the men’s room?”

  Everyone laughed. Sal said, “Ain’t no such thing, or powder room neither. No running water, see? We’ve got—what do you call ’em?”

  “Slop buckets,” Aloysius said. He wore a farmer’s denim overalls; by the matter-of-fact way he spoke, he was more than familiar with such appurtenances of rural life.

  The buckets were set in a hall behind a door which stayed sensibly closed. Larssen did what he had to do and got out of there as fast as he could. “My father grew up with a two-seater,” he said. “I never thought I’d have to go back to one.”

  “Wish it was a two-seater,” Aloysius said. “Dang sight easier on my backside than squattin’ over one o’ them buckets.”

  “What do you folks—what do we, I mean—do to pass the time here?” Jens asked.

  “Cuss the Lizards,” Sal answered promptly, which brought a chorus of loud, profane agreement. “Tell lies.” She batted her eyes at him. “I can make like I was in Hollywood so good I almost believe it myself.” He found that more pathetic than alluring, and wondered how long she’d been cooped up here.

  Gordon said, “I’ve got a deck of cards, but poker’s no damn good without real money. I’ve won a million dollars three or four times and thrown it away again on nothing better than a pair of seve
ns.”

  “Do we have four for bridge?” Larssen was an avid contract player. “You don’t need to have money to enjoy bridge.”

  “I know how to play,” Gordon admitted. “I think poker’s a better game, though.” A couple of other people also said they played. At first, Jens was as close to ecstatic as a prisoner could be; study and work had never left him as much time for cards as he would have liked. Now he could play to his heart’s content without feeling guilty. But the men and women who didn’t know bridge looked so glum that his enthusiasm faded. Was it really fair for some people to enjoy themselves when others couldn’t?

  The church door opened. A tall, thin woman with her hair pulled back in a tight bun and her face set in disapproving lines put down a box of canned goods. “Here’s your supper,” she said, each word clipped as precisely as if by scissors. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

  “What’s eating her?” Larssen said.

  “Eating’s the word.” Sal tossed her head in fine contempt. “She says we’re eating the people who live in this miserable little town out of house and home. As if we asked to get stuck here!”

  “You notice we’re eating out of tin cans,” Rodney added, his features darkening even more with anger. “Nothing but farms around here, but they save all the good fresh food for themselves. We haven’t seen any of it, anyhow, that’s for sure.”

  There weren’t enough spoons to go around; the town woman either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared that the church held a new arrival. Jens ate with somebody else’s, washed in cold water and dried on a trouser leg. Even though he’d given up on hygiene since leaving White Sulphur Springs, that was a new low.

  As he chewed on tasteless beef stew, he worried what—if anything—Chicago was eating these days. Rather more to the point, he worried about Barbara. Fiat had at the outside a couple of hundred people for the surrounding countryside to feed. Chicago had three million, and was under Lizard attack, not safely under the Lizards’ thumb.