In the Balance (30 page)

Then another roar announced that the Warhawks had returned. Their guns tore at the new autogiro. This time they did the job right. The aircraft slammed the ground sideways and became a fireball. Smoke rose into the blue sky. It was less, smoke than would have come from a human-built
plane; the Lizards used cleaner fuel. But fuel wasn’t all that burned in there. Seats, paint, ammunition, the bodies of the crew … they all went up.

Cheering, the Americans moved forward against the Lizards. “Careful there, you God-damned fools!” Sergeant Schneider bellowed, trying to shout over battlefield din. “You want to stay low.” As if to underscore the advice, someone who hadn’t stayed low enough suddenly pitched forward onto his face.

The Warhawks came back to strafe the Lizards on the ground. Something rose on a pillar of fire from behind a boulder in the middle of a Main Street lawn that marked a spot where Lincoln had spoken. The P-40 fled, twisting with all the skill the pilot had. It was not enough. The rocket tumbled it from the sky.

“Damn if it didn’t look like a Fourth of July skyrocket, right down to the big boom at the end,” Daniels said.

“It flew like it had eyes,” Yeager said, thinking of the turning path the rocket had scrawled across the sky. “I wonder how they make it do that.”

“Right now I got more important things to wonder about, like if I’m gonna be alive this time tomorrow,” Mutt said.

Yeager nodded, but his bump of curiosity still itched. Writers in
Astounding
and the other pulps had talked about detection devices for as long as he’d been reading them, and likely longer than that. He’d discovered on the night the Invaders from Space descended on the world that living through science fiction was a lot stranger—and a lot more deadly—than just reading it.

A hiss in the sky, a whistle, a noise like a train pulling into a station—an artillery shell burst among the embattled Lizards, then another and another. Dirt fountained skyward. The enemy’s fire slackened. Yeager didn’t know whether the Lizards were killed or hurt or just playing possum, but he used the lull to slide closer to them … and also closer to where the shells were landing. He wished he hadn’t thought of that, but kept crawling ahead.

A Lizard plane shot past, heading east. Yeager cringed, but the pilot wasted no time on a target as trivial as infantry. No doubt he wanted that battery of field guns. The shells kept coming for about another minute, maybe two, then abruptly stopped.

By that time, though, Yeager and the other Americans were on top of the Lizard position. “Surrender!” Sergeant Schneider shouted. Yeager was sure he was wasting his breath; where would the Lizards have learned English? And even if they had, would they quit? They seemed more like Japs than any other people Yeager knew of—at least, they were small and liked sneak attacks. Japs didn’t surrender for hell, so would the Lizards?

One of them had got some English, God knew where. “No—ssrenda,”
came the reply, a dry hiss that made the hair stand up on Yeager’s arms. A burst of machine-rifle fire added an exclamation point.

The burst was close, close. Yeager grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, lobbed it as if he were aiming for a cutoff man. It flew toward the concrete block fence behind which he thought the Lizard who didn’t want to surrender was hiding. He didn’t see it go over. By the time it did, he was behind his own cover once more. He hadn’t needed more than one or two bullets snapping past his head to learn that lesson forever.

The grenade went off with a crash. Before the echoes died, Yeager sprinted up to the gray fence. He fired over it, once, twice, blindly. If the Lizard wasn’t badly hurt, he wanted to rattle it as much as he could. Then, gulping, he vaulted over the fence into the alleyway on the other side.

The Lizard was down and thrashing and horribly wounded; its red, red blood stained the gravel of the alley. Yeager’s stomach did a slow, lazy loop. He’d never expected the agony of a creature from another world to reach him, but it did. The Lizard yammered something in its own incomprehensible language. Yeager had no idea whether it was defiance or a plea for mercy. All he wanted to do was put the alien out of its misery and make it be quiet. He raised his rifle, shot it through the head.

It twitched once or twice, then lay still. Yeager let out a whistling sigh of relief; he’d thought too late that it didn’t necessarily have to store its brains in its head. He wondered if that would have occurred to any of the men fighting around him. Probably not; science-fiction readers were thin on the ground. As things worked out, it hadn’t mattered anyway.

He bent over the scaly corpse, scooped up the machine rifle the Lizard had carded. He was amazed at how light it was. Somebody, he thought, would have to take it apart and figure out how it worked.

Sergeant Schneider yelled again: “Surrender, you Lizards! Throw down your guns! Give up and we won’t hurt you.”

Yeager thought he was wasting his breath, but the bursts of enemy fire quickly ceased. Schneider came out in the open with something white—it was a by-God pillowcase, Yeager saw—tied to his rifle. He waved toward the houses and stores in which the last few Lizards were holed up, then made a peremptory gesture no human could have misunderstood:
come out
.

From behind Yeager, Mutt Daniels said, “He oughta get the Medal of Honor for that.” Yeager nodded, trying not to show how shaken he was; he hadn’t heard his manager—no, his ex-manager now, he supposed—come up at all.

Sergeant Schneider simply stood and waited, his big feet splayed apart, his belly hanging over his belt. He looked as though he would have made three of the dead Lizard sprawled by Yeager; he looked hard and tough and quintessentially human. Seeing him defy the Lizards’ machine rifles,
Yeager felt tears sting under the lids of his eyes. He was proud to belong to a people that could produce such a man.

After the hammering racket of baffle, silence seemed strange, wrong, almost frightening. The eerie pause hung in the balance for almost half a minute. Then a door opened in one of the houses from which the Lizards had been fighting. Without conscious thought on Yeager’s part his rifle snapped toward it Schneider held up a hand, ordering the Americans not to shoot.

A Lizard came slowly through the doorway. He hadn’t dropped his weapon, but held it reversed, by the barrel. Like Sergeant Schneider, he’d fastened something white to the other end. The shape was familiar to Yeager, but he needed a moment to place it. All at once he bent double in a guffaw.

“What is it?” Mutt Daniels asked.

Between chuckles, Yeager wheezed, “First time I ever saw anybody make a flag of truce out of a pair of women’s panties.”

“Huh?” Mutt stared, then started laughing, too.

If the improvised white flag amused Sergeant Schneider he didn’t let on. He gestured again:
come here
. The Lizard came moving with careful deliberation rather than his kind’s usual quick skitter. When he got within about twenty feet of Schneider, the sergeant pointed to his machine rifle, then to the ground. He did it two or three times before the Lizard, even more hesitantly than before, set the weapon down.

Schneider made another
come here
gesture. The Lizard came. It flinched when he put an arm around it, but it did not flee. It came up to only the middle of his chest. Schneider turned to where the rest of the Lizards were holed up. “You see? No harm will come to you. Surrender!”

“Jesus, they’re really doing it,” Yeager whispered.

“Looks that way, don’t it?” Mutt Daniels whispered back.

The Lizards emerged from their hiding places. There were only five more of them, Yeager saw, and two of those were wounded, leaning on their fellows. The Lizard who had surrendered first called something to them all. The three with machine rifles set them down.

“What are we going to do with hurt Lizards?” Yeager asked. “If they’re proper prisoners of war, we have to try and take care of them, but do we yell for a medic or a vet? Hell, I don’t even know if they can eat our food.”

“I don’t know either, and frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Round and pudgy and filthy, Mutt made a most unlikely Rhett Butler. He shifted the plug in his cheek, spat, and went on, “It’s right nice, though, havin’ prisoners of their’n, not so much on account of what they can tell us but to keep ’em honest with all of our people they got.”

“Something to that.” Yeager wondered what had happened to the rest of the Decatur Commodores. Nothing good, he feared, remembering how the
Lizards had strafed their train. The invaders could do whatever they pleased throughout big stretches of the United States. If holding prisoners—hostages—would help restrain them, Yeager was all for it.

Along with the rest of the Americans, he hurried forward at Sergeant Schneider’s waved command to take charge of the alien POWs. Having surrendered, the Lizards seemed abjectly submissive, hurrying to obey the soldiers’ gestures as best they could. Even to Invaders from Space,
come along
and
this way
were easy enough to put across.

Schneider seemed convinced the band he led—with everything from officers to weapons to organization in short supply, slapping a more formally military name than that on it was optimistic—had done something important. “We want to get these scaly sons of bitches out of here and back up to Ashton just as fast as we can, before more of ’em come along.” He told off half a dozen men: “You, you, you, you, you, and you.” Yeager was the fourth “you,” Mutt Daniels the fifth. “Get back to the bus that brought us here and take ’em away on it. The rest of us’ll dig in and hope we see more men before the Lizards decide to push harder. Good Lord willing, you can drop ’em off and head down this way again inside a couple of hours. Now get your butts in gear.”

Flanked by men with loaded, bayonet-tipped rifles, the Lizards picked their way through and over debris toward the yellow school bus that had been pressed into service as a troop hauler. Yeager would have preferred the dignity of a proper khaki Army truck, but up at Ashton, a school bus was what they had.

The key was still in the bus ignition. Otto Chase looked at it with a certain amount of apprehension. “Anybody here able to drive this big honking thing?” the onetime cement-plant worker asked.

“I reckon Sam and I just might be able to handle it,” Mutt Daniels said with a sidelong glance at Yeager. The ballplayer puffed up his cheeks like a chipmunk to hold in his laughter. Alter half a lifetime bouncing around in buses, helping to repair them by the side of the road, pushing them when they broke down, there wasn’t a whole lot about them he didn’t know.

Mutt, moreover, had been bouncing around in buses essentially ever since there were buses. If there was anything about them he didn’t know, Yeager had no idea what it was. Daniels waited for the rest of the men to herd the Lizards to the wide rear seat, then started the engine, turned the bus around in a street most people would have thought too narrow for turning around a bus, and headed back to Ashton.

He stayed off Highway 52 and Highway 30, preferring the back-country roads less likely to draw attention from the air. Raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the motor, he said, “Reminds me of the country just back of the front line in France in 1918, right where the Boches got farthest.
Parts of it are all tore, up, but you go fifty yards on and you’d swear nobody ever heard o’ war.”

The description was apt, Yeager thought. Most of the farms that sprawled among belts of forest between Amboy and Ashton were untouched. Men wearing wide-brimmed hats and overalls worked in several fields; cows grazed here and there, black and white splotches vivid against the cheerful green of grass and growing crops. By the calm way life went on, the nearest Lizard might have been ten billion light-years off.

But every so often, the bus would rattle past a bomb or shell crater, an ugly brown scar on the land’s smooth green skin. There were cattle by those craters, too, cattle on their sides bloating under the warm summer sun. And a couple of the neat frame farm buildings were neither neat nor buildings any longer, but more like a giant’s game of pick-up-sticks. Fat crows, startled by the bus’ racket, flapped into the air, cawing resentment at having their feasting interrupted.

Still, as Mutt had said, the eye could mostly forget the war whose border the bus had just left behind. The nose had a harder time. Yeager wondered if the faint reek of smoke and corruption simply clung to him, the other Americans, and the Lizards; if it came in through the open windows of the bus from the lightly damaged countryside through which they were driving; or if the breeze, which was out of the west, swept it along the front line.

The four unwounded Lizards did what they could for the two who were hurt. It wasn’t much; the humans had stripped them of the belts that along with their helmets were all they wore—no telling what deadly marvels they might have concealed inside.

Yeager had never thought about how Invaders from Space might feel if they were wounded and captured by humans who were as alien to them as they were to people. They didn’t look all-powerful or supremely evil. They just looked worried. In their shoes (if they’d worn shoes), he would have been worried, too.

He picked up one of the belts, started opening pouches. Before long, he found what looked like a bandage, wrapped in some clear stuff smoother and more pliable than cellophane. If it concealed a deadly marvel, he decided, he’d eat his helmet. He pushed past the rest of the Americans—who still had their rifles leveled at the Lizards—and held out the bandage pack.

“What the hell you doing?” Otto Chase growled. “Who cares whether them damn things live or die?”

“If they’re prisoners of war, we’re supposed to treat ’em decent,” Yeager answered. “Besides, they hold a lot more of our kind than we do of theirs. Tormenting ’em might not be what you call smart.”

Chase grunted and subsided. The Lizards’ eyes swiveled from Yeager’s face to the bandage and back again. They reminded him of the chameleon he’d seen at the zoo in—was it Salt Lake? Maybe Spokane. Whichever, it was a long time ago now.