Striking the Balance

Grenades and submachine-gun fire quickly suppressed the opposition. “Come on, hurry up!” Mutt yelled all the same. “If those scaly sons of bitches had a radio, we’re gonna get company up here pretty damn quick!”

Soldiers with wire cutters attacked the razor wire of the gateway. From inside the camp, men-and women-roused by the gunfire (Mutt hoped nobody, or at least not too many people, had stopped stray bullets) crowded up to the gate. As soon as there was a pathway out of the camp for them, they started pouring forth.

Captain Szymanski shouted, “Anybody who wants to go back to fighting the Lizards full time, come with us. Lord knows you’ll be welcome. Otherwise, folks, scatter as best you can. We can use guerrillas, too, and a lot of people round about here will give you shelter and share what they’ve got. Good luck to you.”

“God bless you, sir,” a man called. More echoed that. Some people stuck close to their rescuers; others melted away into the night.

Firing picked up off to the south, and rapidly started getting closer. “Skirmish line forward!” Mutt called. “We gotta hold ’em off as long as we can, give people a chance to get away.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than what sounded like a hell of a big bomb landed right next to the advancing Lizards. He looked around wildly; he hadn’t heard any airplanes in the neighborhood. He still didn’t, as a matter of fact. But a long rumble of cloven air came from the sky, then slowly faded: it was as if the explosive or whatever it was had arrived before word of its coming.

“That’s got to be an American long-range rocket bomb,” Captain Szymanski said. Whatever it was, the Lizards weren’t steaming forward now the way they had been.

A few minutes later, another one of those rocket bombs went off, this one, by the sound of it, a couple of miles away from any of the fighting around Havana. The missiles didn’t seem to be what you’d call accurate; they could have come down here as easily as on the Lizards.But try stopping them,

Daniels thought.Go ahead and try.

In the darkness, he found Szymanski. “Sir, I think it’s about time to get the hell out of here. We stay around tryin’ to do more than we can, a lot of us’ll end up dead.”

“You’re probably right, Lieutenant,” the company commander said. “No, you’re certainly right.” He raised his voice: “Back to the river, men!”

Piling into one of the boats-now crowded almost to sinking with rescued prisoners-felt very good to Mutt. Getting back across the Illinois, though, made him sweat big drops. If a Lizard helicopter came chattering by overhead just now, there wouldn’t only be fire on the water: there’d be blood in it, too. Everybody understood that; the men at the oars pulled like maniacs as they got over to the west bank of the river.

Stumbling out of the boat and away, Mutt wondered if Sam Yeager had made the acquaintance of these fancy rockets (he also wondered, as he had ever since they’d separated outside Chicago, whether Sam was still alive to have met them). What with all the funny pulp magazines he’d always read, he’d be in better shape to make sense of this crazy new world than damn near anybody else.

“Not that anything makes sense any more,” Daniels muttered, and set about getting his men under cover.

A coal-fired generator chugged, down in the basement of Dover College. David Goldfarb felt the throbbing in his bones. He could hear it, too, but didn’t unless he made a conscious effort to do so. As long as it went on, lightbulbs shone, wireless sets played, radar worked, and he could pretend the world was as it had been back before the Lizards came.

When he remarked on that, Basil Roundbush said, “In my humble opinion”-he was about as humble as the Pope was Jewish, but at least he knew it-“playing those games doesn’t much help. As soon as we leave the laboratory, the real world rudely steps up and kicks us in the teeth.”

“Too right it does,” Goldfarb said. “Even with every spare square inch of the island growing wheat and potatoes and mangelwurzels, heaven only knows how we’re going to feed everyone.”

“Oh, indeed.” Roundbush’s mustache fluffed as he blew air out through it. “Rations were dreary enough when we were just fighting the Jerries. It’s worse now-and the Yanks these days haven’t the wherewithal to ship their surpluses over to us. For that matter, they haven’t got surpluses any more, either, from all I’ve heard.”

Goldfarb grunted and nodded. Then he took a video platter-the name that seemed to have stuck for the shimmering disks on which the Lizards stored sounds and pictures-and fed it into the captured machine that played it.

“What have you got there?” Roundbush asked.