Upsetting the Balance (33 page)

“If we’re real lucky, we’ll hold the place a while,” Lieutenant Magruder said quietly. Auerbach nodded, grateful the Virginian didn’t trumpet that thought. If everything went perfectly, they might push the Lizard-human frontier a few miles back toward the distant Mississippi and make the push stick. But how often did things go perfectly in war?

He swung himself down from his own horse, tossing the reins to one of the troopers who was staying behind. Only about twenty or twenty-five men would hold horses today; the cottonwoods’ trunks and low branches made convenient tethering points for the animals. He wanted to get as many soldiers into the fight as he could.

The troopers and the packhorses carrying what passed for their heavy firepower spread out into a broad skirmish line as they advanced on Lakin. Some of the sweat that darkened the armpits of Auerbach’s olive-drab tunic had to do with the weather and the hike. Some came from worry—or rather, fear. If the Lizards hadn’t taken the bait and reinforced Lydia at Lakin’s expense, a lot of good young men weren’t going to make it home to Lamar.

Lots of L’s,
he thought. if the similarity in names had confused the Lizards, they wouldn’t have reacted as he’d hoped. And if they hadn’t, his two companies were going to get massacred. Then, a few days or a few weeks or a few months from now, some hotshot captain back in Lamar would have some new brilliant idea about how to drive the Lizards out of Lakin. Maybe Colonel Nordenskold would let him try it out—assuming the Lizards weren’t in Lamar by then, or in Denver.

From way off to the left of the advancing skirmish line came a loud, flat
bang!
and a shriek. “Oh, hell,” Auerbach muttered under his breath. He raised his voice: “They’ve laid some mines since we were here last, boys. Watch where you put your feet.” Not that that would do much good, as he knew only too well.

The Lizards inside Lakin hadn’t been asleep at the switch, either. As soon as that mine went off, a siren in town began to wail. The Kearny County consolidated high school looked like hell from the last time the cavalry had come to call, but the Lizards were still using it for their base. Off in the distance, Auerbach saw little skittering shapes heading for cover. He bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip. He’d counted on being able to get closer to town before his plan started going to pot.

But what you counted on in war and what you got weren’t always the same critter. Sometimes they weren’t even the same kind of critter. A machine gun started chattering in one of the battered high school buildings. Auerbach threw himself flat amid dark green beet tops. He pounded a fist into the dirt. Cries here and there said his command was taking casualties. If they spent the next hour crawling toward Lakin on their bellies, the Lizards would be able to bring back whatever forces they’d moved up to Lydia.

“Tell Schuyler’s mortar crew to take out that machine gun!” he shouted. The man to his left passed on the message. No radios here—they were all part of the simulated attack on Lydia. Now for the first time Auerbach missed them desperately. He shrugged. His great-grandfathers’ C.O.’s had managed to run battles under conditions like these, so he figured he could do it, too, if he had to.

And he had some pretty good people playing on his team, as had those officers in Confederate gray. Long before any order could have reached him, Schuyler—or maybe one of the other mortar men—opened up with his stovepipe. A bomb fell behind the place from which the machine gun was sending forth its firefly flashes, then another in front. The third bomb was long again, but by less than half as much as the first. The fourth was a hit. The machine gun fell silent.

Cheers rolled up and down the skirmish line. But when some of the troopers got up and started to run toward town, the machine gun began its hateful stutter once more. The mortar went
whump, whump, whump
—three rounds in quick succession. The machine gun stopped firing again. This time, it didn’t start up when the Americans came to their feet.

Auerbach let out a Rebel yell as he advanced. Quite a few of his men echoed him; cavalry units drew a disproportionate number of Southerners. Some of the Lizards in the consolidated high school opened up with their automatic rifles. Those were bad, but didn’t have the reach or sustained firepower of the machine gun.

Mortar bombs began stalking the rifle positions, one by one. Some were silenced, some weren’t. At worst, though, not a whole lot of Lizards were shooting at the cavalrymen.

Auerbach’s confidence rose. “Boys, I think most of ’em have gone off to visit up in Lydia,” he yelled. That brought fresh cheers and more Rebel yells. Getting through the razor wire around the high school wasn’t going to be any fun, but once they managed it—

Manage they did. The Lizards lacked the defenders to prevent it. They shot a couple of men attacking the wire with cutters, but others kept up such a heavy stream of fire on their positions that they probably lost as many fighters as they wounded.

Once through the barriers, the Americans fanned out and went Lizard hunting. “Always wanted to do this to my old high school,” one trooper said, chucking a grenade into a likely looking doorway. No Lizard came out. Ever so cautiously, Auerbach peered into the room. Desks and tables were randomly scattered over the dirty floor, some of them overturned. Dust and cobwebs covered the blackboard, but he could still read the social studies lesson some teacher had chalked there the day before the world changed forever. The corners of his mouth turned down. Whatever the kids had learned in that lesson, it wasn’t helping them now.

The snarl of a Lizard automatic rifle said the fighting wasn’t done yet. Auerbach hurried toward the sound of the shooting. The Lizard was holed up in what had been a girls’ bathroom. “Surrender!” he shouted to it. Then he made a noise that reminded him of bread popping out of an electric toaster. That was supposed to mean the same thing in Lizard talk.

He didn’t think it would do any good. But then the door to the rest room opened. The Lizard slid out its rifle. “Hold fire!” Auerbach called to his men. He made the popping-toast noise again. The door opened wider. The Lizard came out. He knew enough to stand there with his hands high. All he was wearing was body paint; he’d left his equipment behind in the john. He repeated the Lizard word Auerbach had repeated, so it probably did mean
surrender
after all.

“Hagerman! Calhoun! Take charge of him,” Auerbach said. “They really want Lizard POWs; we’ll get a pat on the fanny for bringing him in, if we can do it.”

Max Hagerman gave the Lizard a dubious look. “How we gonna keep him on a horse all the way back to Lamar, sir?”

“Damned if I know, but I expect you’ll figure something out,” Auerbach said cheerfully, which meant Hagerman was stuck with it. Turning to Jack Calhoun, the captain went on, “Go in there and gather up his gear. The intelligence staff’ll want that, too.” The cavalryman assumed a dubious expression, too, his on account of the
GIRLS
sign on the battered door. “Go on,” Auerbach told him. “They aren’t in there now.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Calhoun said, as if reminding himself.

That seemed to be the last combat inside the school grounds. Auerbach hurried to the northern edge of the school. The mortar teams and the .50-caliber machine-gun crew were already digging themselves in. “You boys don’t need me,” Auerbach said. “You could run this show by yourselves.”

The troopers just grinned and went on setting up. The mortar teams began lobbing bombs up Highway
25,
getting the range and zeroing in on the highway itself. “They’ll have to work to get past us,” a sergeant said. “We’ve each got a different stretch of road to cover, from long range to almost right down on top of us. And as they pass the longer-range weapons, those’ll drop down to keep the pressure on.”

“That’s how we set it up,” Auerbach agreed. “Now we find out if we’re as smart as we think we are.” If the Lizards sent a tank or two west from Garden City, instead of bringing the garrison back from Lydia to Lakin, his men were in big trouble. Sure, they’d packed the bazooka launcher and a dozen or so rounds for it, but you needed to be lucky to take out a Lizard tank with a bazooka, and you didn’t need to be lucky to smash up some cavalrymen with a tank.

One of his troopers let out a yell and pointed north. Auerbach took his field glasses out of their case. The little specks on the road swelled into one of the Lizards’ armored personnel carriers and a couple of trucks. They were southbound, coming fast.

“Get ready, boys,” he said, stowing the binoculars again. “That APC is gonna be tough.” A Lizard APC could give a Lee tank a tough fight. A bazooka would make it say uncle, though.

He shouted for more troopers to come up and find cover in the buildings and ruins of the school. For once the Lizards were doing the dirty work, attacking Americans in a fortified position. Outside of Chicago, that didn’t happen often enough.

The sergeant dropped a finned bomb down the tube of his mortar.
Bang!
Off it flew, quite visible against the sky. It was still airborne when he fired the second. He got off the third before either of the first two hit. Then dirt and asphalt fountained up from Highway 25, right behind the APC. The second bomb hit between two trucks, the third alongside one of them.

The trucks and the APC came on harder than ever, into the next mortar’s zone. That crew was already firing. Screams of delight rose from the Americans when a bomb landed on top of a truck. The truck slewed sideways, flipped over, and started to burn. Lizards spilled out of it. Some lay on the roadway. Others skittered for cover. The .50-caliber machine gun opened up on them, and on the other truck.

The APC had a heavy machine gun, too, or a light cannon. Whatever it was, it put a lot of rounds in the air, and in a hurry. Auerbach threw himself flat behind what had been a wall and was now a substantial pile of rubble. With the Lizards’ gun chewing at it, he hoped it was substantial enough.

He swore when the
.
50 fell silent. The mortar teams were shooting up and over cover, but the machine gunners had to be more exposed, and their weapon’s muzzle flash gave the Lizards a dandy target. The Americans needed that gun. Auerbach crawled toward it on his belly. As he’d feared, he found both gunners down, one with the top of his head blown off, the other moaning with a shoulder wound. He quickly helped bandage the wounded man, then peered out over the long gun’s sights.

Fire spurted from the second truck. It stopped but didn’t roll onto its side. Lizards bailed out into the fields on either side of Highway 25. Auerbach fired at them. He came to the end of a belt and bent to fasten on another one from the ammunition box.

“I’ll take care of that, sir,” a trooper said. “I’ve done it with a .30-caliber weapon often enough. This here one’s just bigger, looks like.”

“That’s about right,” Auerbach agreed. He squeezed the triggers. The heavy machine gun felt like a jackhammer in his hands, and made a racket like a dozen jackhammers all going flat out. Even with the flash hider at the end of the muzzle, he blinked against the spearhead of flame that spat from the barrel. A stream of hot brass cartridge cases, each as big as his thumb, spewed from the breech and clattered down onto the growing pile at his feet.

He swore again when the APC’s weapon, which had gone on to other targets after wrecking the machine-gun crew, now swung back his way. “Get down!” he yelled to the corporal feeding him ammo. Bullets slammed into the wreckage all around him. Flying concrete chips bit into the back of his neck.

All at once, the shells stopped coming. Auerbach looked up, wondering if a sniper was waiting to put one through his head. But no—smoke poured from the APC. A mortar bomb had pierced the armor over the engine compartment. With the enemy machine dead in the water, all the mortar teams poured fire on it. In seconds, another bomb tore through the roof. The APC went up in a Fourth of July display of exploding ammunition.

A few Lizards out in the field kept up a rattle of small-arms fire. Next to what had been going on, it was Easy Street now. The mortar teams and Auerbach on the .50-caliber shot back whenever they found decent targets. The Lizards couldn’t hit back, not at long range.

“We beat ’em.” Lieutenant Magruder sounded as if he couldn’t believe it.

Auerbach didn’t blame him; he was having trouble believing it himself. “Yeah, we did,” he said. “We’ll send a pigeon back to Lamar, let ’em know we did it. And we’ll send back our prisoner with a guard. Otherwise, though, we’ll bring the horses forward into town.”

“Yes, sir,” Magruder said. “You aim to stay in Lakin, then?”

“Till I get orders otherwise or till the Lizards come up from Garden City and run me out, you bet I do,” Auerbach answered. “Why the hell not? I won it, and by God I’m going to keep it.”

Leslie Groves stared at the telephone in disbelief, as if it were a snake that had just bitten him. “I’m sorry, General,” the voice on the other end said, “but I don’t see how we’re going to be able to get those tubes and explosives and detonator wiring to you.”

“Then you’d better look harder, Mister,” Groves growled. “You’re in Minneapolis, right? You still have a working railroad, for God’s sake. Get ’em across the Dakotas or up through Canada; our track north by way of Fort Greeley is still open most of the time. You get moving, do you hear me?”

The fellow from Minneapolis—Porlock, that’s what his name was—said, “I don’t know whether we’ll be able to make that shipment. I’m aware your priority is extremely high, but the losses we’ve suffered on rail shipments make me hesitate to take the risk. Transporting the goods by wagon would be much more secure.” His voice trailed away in a sort of a peevish whine.

“Fine. Send us a set by wagon,” Groves said.

“Oh, I’m so glad you see my difficulty,” Porlock said, now in tones full of bureaucratic relief.

Porlock, Groves reflected, should have been named Morlock, after one of the subterranean creatures in
The Time Machine.
Then he shook his head. Morlocks were machine tenders; they would have had a proper appreciation for the uses of technology, no matter how lamentable their taste in entrées had grown over the millennia.