Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

Because he was a veteran of 1918, he got to his feet in a hurry when the curtain of Lizard shells moved from the southern edge of Danforth, where he was, to the middle and northern parts of town. He knew about walking barrages, and knew soldiers often walked right behind them.

Danforth looked as if it had gone through the meat grinder and then been overcooked since the last time he’d looked out the window. Now most of the houses were in ruins, the ground cratered, and smoke and dust rising everywhere. And through the smoke, sure enough, came the skittering shapes of Lizard infantry.

He aimed and sprayed a long burst through them, fighting to hold the tommy gun’s muzzle down. The Lizards went over like tenpins. He wasn’t sure how many-if any-he’d hit and how many were just ducking for cover.

Off to one side, the BAR opened up. “Might have known Dracula was too sneaky to kill,” Mutt said to nobody in particular. If the Lizards had any brains, they’d try a rush and support advance to flush him and Szabo out in the open. He aimed to throw a monkey wrench into that scheme. From a different window, he fired at the bunch he thought would be moving. He caught a couple of them on their feet. They went down, scrambling for cover.

“In the two-reelers, this is about the time the U.S. Cavalry gallops over the horizon,” Lucille Potter said as the Lizards started shooting back.

“Right about now, Miss Lucille, I’d be glad to see ’em, and that’s a fact,” Mutt said. Dracula’s BAR was stuttering away, and he had his tommy gun (though he didn’t have as many clips as he would have liked), but only a couple of rifles had opened up with them. Rifles didn’t add a whole lot as far as firepower went, but they covered places the automatic weapons couldn’t reach and denied the Lizards the cover they’d need to flank out Mutt and Szabo.

And then, just as if it had been a two-reeler, the cavalry did come riding to the rescue. A platoon of Shermans rumbled through the streets of Danforth, a couple of them so fresh off the assembly line that only dust, not paint, covered the bright metal of their armor. Machine guns blazing and cannon firing high explosive, they bore down on the Lizard infantry.

The Lizards didn’t have armor with them, they’d been more cautious about committing tanks to action since the Americans started using bazookas. They did have antitank rockets of their own, though, and quickly turned two Shermans into blazing wrecks. Then the tanks shelled the rocketeers, and after that they had the fight pretty much their own way. Most of the Lizards died in place. A few tried to flee and were cut down. A couple came out with their hands up; they’d learned the Americans didn’t do anything dreadful to prisoners.

Mutt let out the catamount screech his grandfathers had called the Rebel yell. The house in which he and Lucille Potter sheltered was pretty well ventilated, but the yell echoed in it just the same. He turned around and hugged her. This time he meant business; he kissed her hard and his hands cupped her backside.

As she had when he’d taken out the Lizard tank with her bottle of ether, she let him kiss her but she didn’t do anything in the way of kissing back “What’s the matter with you?” he growled. “Don’t you like me?”

“I like you fine Mutt,” she answered calmly. “I think you know it, too. You’re a good man. But that doesn’t mean I want to sleep with you-or with anybody else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Over the years, Mutt had done a fair number of things he’d enjoyed at the time but wasn’t proud of afterwards. Forcing a woman who said-and obviously meant-she wasn’t interested wasn’t any of them, though. Frustrated almost past words, he said, “Well, why the… dickens not? You’re a fine-lookin’ lady, it ain’t like you don’t have any juice in you-”

“That’s so,” she said, and then looked as if she regretted agreeing.

“By Jesus,” Mutt murmured. In a lifetime knocking around the United States, he’d seen and heard about a lot of things nobody who stayed on a Mississippi farm ever dreamt of. “Don’t tell me you’re one o’ them-what do they call ’em? — lizzies, is that right?”

“It’s close enough, anyhow.” Lucille’s face shut up as tight as a poker player’s-especially one who was raising on a busted flush. Poker-faced still, she said, “Okay, Mutt, what if I am?”

She hadn’t said she was, not quite, but she didn’t deny it, either, only waited to see what he’d say next He didn’t know what the hell to say. He’d run across a few queers in his time, but to find out somebody he liked not just because he wanted to lay her but on account of who she was-and he couldn’t be fooled on something like that, not when they’d been living in each other’s pockets through months of grinding combat-was one of these creatures almost as alien as a Lizard… that was a jolt, no doubt about it.

“I dunno,” he said at last. “Reckon I’ll keep my mouth shut. Last thing I want to do is cost us a medic as good as you are.”

She startled him immensely by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. An instant later, she looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Mutt. I don’t want to play games with you. But that’s one of the kindest things anybody ever said about me. If I’m good at what I do, why should the rest matter?”

Words like unnatural and perverted flashed across his mind. But he’d had plenty of chances to see that Lucille was good people-somebody you could trust your life to, in the most literal sense of the words.

“I dunno,” he repeated, “but it does, somehow.” Just then, the Lizards started shelling the front part of Danforth again, probably sowing their little artillery-carried mines to keep the Shermans from pushing farther south anytime soon. Mutt had never imagined he could be relieved to take cover from a bombardment, but right at that moment he was.

Liu Han hated going out to the market. People looked hard at her and muttered behind her back. Nobody had ever done anything to her-the little scaly devils were powerful protectors-but the fear was always there.

Little devils paced through the prison camp marketplace, too. They were smaller than people, but nobody got too close to them; wherever they went, they took open space with them. It was, more often than not, the only open space in the crowded market.

The baby in her belly gave her a kick. Even the loose cotton tunic she wore couldn’t disguise her pregnancy any longer. She didn’t know what to feel about Bobby Fiore: sadness that he was gone and worry about whether he was all right mingled with shame over the way the scaly devils had forced them together and a different sort of shame at conceiving by a foreign devil.

She let the market din wash over her and take her away from herself. “Cucumbers!”-a fellow pulled a couple of them from a wicker basket tied round his middle. They were long and twisty like snakes. A few feet away another man cried the virtues of his snake meat. “Cabbages!” “Fine purple horseradish!”

“Pork!” The man selling disjointed pieces of pig carcass wore shorts and an open jacket. His shiny brown belly showed through, and looked remarkably like one of the bigger cuts of meat he had on display.

Liu Han hesitated between his stall and the one next to it, which displayed not only chickens but fans made from chicken feathers glued to brightly painted horn frames. “Make up your mind, foolish woman!” somebody screeched at her. She hardly minded; that, at least, was an impersonal insult.

She went up to the man who sold chickens. Before she could say anything, he quietly told her, “Take your business somewhere else. I don’t want any money from the running dogs of the imperialist scaly devils.”