Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

He had to stop there to let a convoy of wagons head west down Twenty-fourth. While he waited, he turned to a fellow on horseback and asked, “You live here?” When the man nodded, went on, “What’s the story of the horse?” He pointed to the statue.

“Oh, Nigger Boy?” the man said. “He was a local racehorse, he’d beat critters you couldn’t believe if you didn’t see it. Now he’s the best weather forecaster in town.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jens said. “How’s that?”

The local grinned. “If he’s wet, you know it’s raining; if covered with snow, you know it’s been snowing. And if tail’s blowin’ around like it is now, it’s windy out.”

“Walked into that one, didn’t I?” Jens said, snorting. The wagon of the convoy creaked by. He started rolling again, soon passed Tabernacle Park. The Ogden Latter Day Saints Tabernacle was one of the biggest, fanciest buildings in town. He’d seen that elsewhere in Utah, too, the temples much more the focus of public life than the buildings dedicated to secular administration.

Separation of church and state was another of the things I taken for granted that didn’t turn out to be as automatic as he’d thought. Here in Utah, he got the feeling they separated things to keep outsiders happy, without really buying into notion that that was the right and proper way to operate. He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. He had plenty of his own.

Just past the city cemetery, a concrete bridge took him over Ogden River. By then, he was just about out of town. The scrubby country ahead didn’t look any too appetizing. No wonder the Mormons settled here, he thought. Who else would be crazy enough to want land like this?

He lifted one hand to scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, what the Mormons believed was good only for a belly laugh. Even so, he’d never felt safer in all his travels than he did in Utah. Whether the doctrines were true or not, they turned out solid people.

Is that what the answer is? he wondered: as long as you seriously believe in something, almost no matter what you have a pretty good chance of ending up okay? He didn’t care for the idea. He’d dedicated his career to pulling objective truth out of the physical world. Theological mumbo-jumbo wasn’t supposed to stack up against that kind of dedication.

But it did. Maybe the Mormons didn’t know a thing about nuclear physics, but they seemed pretty much content with the lives they were living, which was a hell of a lot more than he could say himself.

Putting your faith in what some book told you, without any other evidence to show it was on the right track, struck him as something right out of the Middle Ages. Ever since the Renaissance, people had been looking for a better, freer way to live. Jesus loves me! This I know! ’Cause the Bible!’ Tells me so. Jens’ lip curled derisively. Sunday school pap, that’s what it was.

And yet… When you looked at it the right way, accepting your religion could be oddly liberating. Instead of being free to make choices, you were free from making them: they’d already been made for you, and all you had to do was follow along.

“Yeah, that’s what Hitler and Stalin peddle, too,” Larssen said as he left Ogden behind. Thinking was what he did best; the idea of turning that part of him over to somebody else sent the heebie-jeebies running up and down his spine.

People looked up from whatever they were doing when he rode past. He didn’t know how they did it, but they could tell he didn’t belong here. Maybe somebody’d pinned a sign to him: I AM A GENTILE. He laughed, partly at himself, partly at Utah. Hell, even Jews were gentiles here.

Up ahead on US 89, a fellow was riding a buckboard that had probably been sitting in the barn since his grandfather’s day. As Jens put his back into pedaling and whizzed past the gray mule drawing the buggy, the man called out to him: “You headin’ up toward Idaho, stranger?”

Stranger. Yeah, they could tell, all right. Larssen almost kept going without answering, but the question hadn’t sounded hostile or suspicious. He slowed down and said, “What if I am?”

“Just that you oughta be careful, is all,” the man on the buckboard answered. “Them Lizard things, there’s some of ’em up there, I hear tell.”

“Are there?” Jens said. If he wanted to abdicate responsibility for his life, that would be the way to do it. He had enough reasons for thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, either. He owed so many people so much… “Are there? Good.” He turned on the heat, and left the fellow in the buggy staring after him.

The only way Mutt Daniels had ever wanted to see the south side of Chicago was to bring in a big-league team to play the White Sox at Comiskey Park. He’d learned, though, that what you wanted and what life handed you all too often weren’t the same thing.

Take the gold bars he wore on his shoulders. He hadn’t even changed shirts when he got ’em, because he had only one shirt. He’d just taken off the stripes with somebody’s bayonet and. put on lieutenant’s insignia instead. People from his old squad still called him Sarge. He didn’t care. He felt like a sergeant, and the platoon he was leading now had taken enough casualties that it had only two squads worth of guys, anyway.

One nice thing about turning into an officer was that he got his orders with one less layer of manure on top, and that they gave him a bigger picture of what was going on. As now: Captain Sid Klein (who’d been Lieutenant Klein till Captain Maczek got hit) drew in the dirt between the ruins of, what hadn’t been fancy apartment buildings even before the Lizards came, saying, “It may not look that way, boys, but the brass says we’ve got these scaly bastards right where we want ’em.”

“Yeah, an’ we retreated through half of Illinois to get ’em here, too,” Mutt said.

The captain was half his age; damn near everybody in the Army, seemed like, was half his age. Klein said, “You may think you’re joking, but you’re not. When it comes to maneuver, they got us licked. Their tanks and trucks are faster than ours, and they’ve got those goddamn helicopters to give it to us in the rear when we’re bent over the wrong way. But that doesn’t count for much in city fighting. Here it’s just slugging, block by block, body by body.”

Mutt’s opposite number for the company’s first platoon was a skinny midwesterner named Chester Hicks. “Puts a lot, of bodies underground,” he observed.

“Lord, you can say that again,” Daniels said. “I did some of that block-by-block stuff last fall, and it’s ugly. Even for war, it’s ugly.”

Captain Klein nodded. “You bet it is. But the brass don’t think the Lizards can afford that kind of slugging any more. When the Germans were blitzing across Russia in ‘41, they got their noses bloody when they went into the towns, not out on the plains. Maybe it’ll be the same way here.”

“And if it ain’t, so what, ’cause the Lizards drove us back here anyways,” Mutt said.

“You’re right about that.” Captain Klein sighed and ran a hand through his short, curly red hair. “We gotta do all we can, though. Go on back to your boys and give ’em the word.”

Mutt’s platoon was defending a couple of blocks of East 111th Street. Off to the west was the Gothic ornateness of the Morgan Park Military Academy. Daniels wondered if the cadets were in the line somewhere, the way the boys from the Virginia Military Institute had marched out and fought during the States War. He didn’t see anybody who looked like a cadet, but he knew that didn’t mean anything. It was a hell of a big fight.

To the east was an American strongpoint on the high ground of Pullman, and then, east of that, the marsh around Lake Calumet. If the Lizards dislodged his boys, he aimed to fall back to the east if he could. North of 111th Street stood the low, ornate buildings that housed the Pullman car shops. He’d fought through blocks of factories before. That was even worse than the trenches had been back in France, but Captain Klein was right about one thing: digging determined troops out of a warren like that would cost the Lizards plenty.