Striking the Balance

“Me,” Naomi answered. Had that been Sylvia talking, the response would have been frankly mercenary. Naomi didn’t really care that he couldn’t spend like an air vice marshal. That was one of the things that made her seem wonderful to him. She asked, “Have you got more word of your cousin, the one who did the wireless broadcasts for the Lizards?”

He shook his head. “My family found that he lived through the invasion: that much I do know. But not long after that, he and his wife and their son might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Nobody knows what’s become of them.”

“Somebody knows,” Naomi said with conviction as Goldfarb dug into the chicken leg. “No one may be talking, but someone knows. In this country, people do not disappear for no reason. Sometimes I think you do not know how lucky you are that this is so.”

“I know,” Goldfarb said, and after a moment Naomi nodded, conceding the point. He smiled at her, even if crookedly. “What’s the matter? Did you take me for an Englishman again?” Looking a little flustered, she nodded once more. He dropped into Yiddish to say, “If we win the war, and if I have children, or maybe grandchildren, they’ll take that for granted. Me-” He shook his head.

“If you have children, or maybe grandchildren-” Naomi began, and then let it drop. The war had loosened everyone’s standards, but she still wasn’t what you’d call forward. Sometimes Goldfarb regretted that very much. Sometimes he admired it tremendously. Tonight was one of those nights.

“Let me have another pint, would you please?” he said. Sometimes quiet talk-or what they could steal of it while she was also busy serving other customers-was as good as anything else, maybe better.

He hadn’t thought that with Sylvia. All he’d wanted to do with her was to get her brassiere off and her panties down. He scratched his head, wondering where the difference was.

Naomi brought him the bitter. He took a pull, then set the pot down. “Must be love,” he said, but she didn’t hear him.

Artillery was harassing the Race in a push north from their Florida base. The Big Uglies were getting smart about moving their guns before counterbattery fire found them, but they couldn’t do much about attack from the air. Teerts had two pods of rockets mounted under his killercraft. They were some of the simplest weapons in the arsenal of the Race. They weren’t even guided: if you saturated an area with them, that did the job. And, because they were so simple, even Tosevite factories could turn them out in large quantities. The armorers loved them these days, not least because they had plenty.

“I have acquired the assigned target visually,” Teerts reported back to his commanders. “I now begin the dive on it.”

Acceleration pressed him back in his seat. The Big Uglies knew he was there. Antiaircraft shells burst around his killercraft. Many more, he guessed, were bursting behind him. Try as they would, the Tosevites rarely gave jet aircraft enough lead when they fired at them. That helped keep the Race’s pilots alive.

He fired a pod of the rockets. A wave of fire seemed to leap from the killercraft toward the artillery positions. The killercraft staggered slightly in the sky, then steadied. The autopilot pulled it out of the dive. He swung it around so he could inspect the damage he’d done. If he hadn’t done enough, he’d make another pass with the second rocket pod.

That wouldn’t be necessary, not today. “The target is destroyed,” he said in some satisfaction. An antiaircraft gun was still popping away at him, but that didn’t much matter. He went on, “Request new target.”

The voice that answered wasn’t his usual flight controller. After a moment, he recognized it all the same: it belonged to Aaatos, the male from Intelligence. “Flight Leader Teerts, we have a… bit of a problem.”

“What’s gone wrong now?” Teerts demanded. What felt like an eternity in Nipponese prisons-to say nothing of the ginger habit he’d developed there-had left him with no patience for euphemism.

“I’m glad you’re airborne, Flight Leader,” Aaatos said, apparently not wanting to give a straight answer. “Do you remember our talk not so long ago in that grassy area not far from the runways?”

Teerts thought back. “I remember,” he said. Sudden suspicion blossomed in him. “You’re not going to tell me the dark-skinned Big Uglies have mutinied against us, are you?”

“Evidently I don’t have to,” Aaatos said unhappily. “You were correct at the time to distrust them. I admit this.” For a male from Intelligence to admit anything was an enormous concession. “Their unit was placed in line against American Big Uglies, and, under cover of a masking firefight, has allowed enemy Tosevites to infiltrate.”

“Give me the coordinates,” Teerts told him. “I still have a good supply of munitions, and adequate fuel as well. I gather I am to assume any Tosevites I see in the area are hostile to the Race?”