Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

“It’ll be all right, superior sir,” Tvenkel said. “If it hasn’t gone wrong, odds are it won’t.”

Ussmak expected Hessef to come down angrily on the gunner for that: maintenance was as much a part of a landcruiser crew’s routine as eating. But Hessef kept quiet-the ginger made him more confident than he should have been, too. Ussmak didn’t like that. If the autoloader wouldn’t feed shells into the cannon, what good was the landcruiser? Good for getting him killed, that was all.

Though the gunner outranked him, Ussmak said, “I think you ought to service the autoloader, too.”

“It’s working fine, I tell you,” Tvenkel said angrily. “All we need is to top up on ammunition and we’ll be ready to go out and fight some more.”

As if on cue, a couple of ammunition carriers rolled up to the landcruisers. One was a purpose-built vehicle made by the Race, but the other sounded like a Tosevite rattletrap. Ussmak went back to the driver’s position, undogged the hatch, and peered out. Sure enough, it was a petroleum-burning truck; its acrid exhaust made him cough. When the driver-a male of the Race-got out, Ussmak saw he had wooden blocks taped to the bottoms of his feet to let him reach the pedals from a seat designed for bigger beings.

Tvenkel climbed out through the turret, hurried over to the ammunition carriers. So did the gunners from the rest of the landcruisers in the unit. After a low-voiced comment from one of the resupply drivers, one of them shouted, “What do you mean, only twenty rounds per vehicle? That’ll leave me less than half full!”

“And me!” Tvenkel said. The rest of the gunners echoed him, loudly and emphatically.

“Sorry, my friends, but it can’t be helped,” the male driving the Tosevite truck said. His foot blocks made him tower over the angry gunners but, instead of dominating them, he just became the chief target of their wrath. He went on, “We’re a little short all over the planet right now. We’ll share what we have evenly, and it’ll come out well in the end.”

“No, it won’t,” Tvenkel shouted. “We’re facing real landcruisers here, don’t you see that, with better guns and tougher armor than anybody else has to worry about. We need more ammunition to make sure we take them out.”

“I can’t give you what I don’t have,” the truck driver answered. “Orders were to bring up twenty rounds per landcruiser and that’s what we brought, no more, no less.”

The Race didn’t need to run out of landcruisers to find itself in trouble against the Big Uglies, Ussmak realized. Running out of supplies for the landcruisers it had was less dramatic, but would do the job just fine.

After darkness, light. After winter, spring. As Jens Larssen peered north from the third floor of Science Hall, he thought that light and spring had overtaken Denver all at once. A week before, the ground had been white with snow. Now the sun blazed down from a bright blue sky, men bustled across the University of Denver campus in shirtsleeves and without hats, and the first new leaves and grass were beginning to show their bright green faces. Winter might come again, but no one paid the possibility any mind-least of all Jens.

Spring sang in his heart, not because of the warm weather, not for the new growth on lawns and trees, not even because of early arriving birds warbling in those trees. What fired joy in him was at first sight much more prosaic: a long stream of horse-drawn wagons making their slow way down University Boulevard toward the campus.

He could wait up here no longer. He dashed down the stairs, his Army guard, Oscar, right behind him. When he got to the bottom, his heart pounded in his chest and his breath came short with exercise and anticipation.

Jens started over to his bicycle. Oscar said, “Why don’t you just wait for them to get here, sir?”

“Dammit, my wife is in one of those wagons, and I haven’t seen her since last summer,” Jens said angrily. Maybe Oscar didn’t breathe hard even in bed.

“I understand that, sir,” Oscar said patiently, “but you don’t know which one she’s in. For that matter, you don’t even know if she’s in any of the ones coming in today. Isn’t the convoy broken into several units to keep the Lizards from paying too much attention to it?”

The right way, the wrong way, and the Army way, Jens thought. This once, the Army way seemed to have something going for it. “Okay,” he said, stopping. “Maybe you’re smarter than I am.”

Oscar shook his head. “No sir. But my wife isn’t on one of those wagons, so I can still think straight.”

“Hmm.” Aware he’d lost the exchange, Larssen turned toward the wagons, the first of which had turned off University onto East Evans and was now approaching Science Hall. I’ll have the best excuse in the world for getting out of BOQ now, he thought.

He didn’t recognize the only man aboard the lead wagon: just a driver, wearing olive drab. Oscar had had a point, he reluctantly admitted to himself. A lot of these wagons would just be carrying equipment, and the only people aboard them would be soldiers. He’d have felt a proper fool if he’d pedaled up and down the whole length of the wagon train without setting eyes on Barbara.

Then he saw Leo Szilard sitting up alongside another driver. He waved like a man possessed. Szilard returned the gesture in a more restrained way: so restrained, in fact, that Jens wondered a little. The Hungarian physicist was usually as open and forthright a man as anyone ever born.

Larssen shrugged. If he was going to read that much into a wave, maybe he should have chosen psychiatry instead of physics.

A couple of more wagons pulled up in front of Science Hall before he saw more people he knew: Enrico and Laura Fermi, looking incongruous on a tarp-covered hay wagon. “Dr. Fermi!” he called. “Have you seen Barbara? Is she all right?”

Fermi and his wife exchanged glances. Finally he said, “She is not that far behind us. Soon you will see her for yourself.”

Now what the devil was that supposed to mean? “Is she all right?” Larssen repeated. “Is she hurt? Is she sick?”

The Fermis looked at each other again. “She is neither injured nor ill,” Enrico Fermi answered, and then shut up.

Jens scratched his head. Something was going on, but he didn’t know what. Well, if Barbara was just a few wagons behind the Fermis, he’d find out pretty soon. He walked up the stream of incoming wagons, then stopped dead in his tracks. Ice ran up his spine-what were two Lizards doing here attached to the Met Lab crew?

He relaxed a bit when he saw the rifle-toting corporal in the wagon with the Lizards. Prisoners might be useful; the Lizards certainly knew how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus. Then all such merely practical thoughts blew out of his head. Sitting next to the corporal was-

“Barbara!” he yelled, and sprinted toward the wagon. Oscar the guard followed more sedately.

Barbara waved and smiled, but she didn’t jump down and run to him. He noticed that, but didn’t think much of it. Just seeing her again after so long made the fine spring day ten degrees warmer.

When he fell into step beside the wagon, she did get out. “Hi, babe, I love you,” he said, and took her in his arms. Squeezing her, kissing her, made him forget about everything else.

“Jens, wait,” she said when lack of oxygen forced him to take his mouth away from hers for a moment.

“The only thing I want to wait for is to get us alone,” he said, and kissed her again.

She didn’t respond quite the way she had the first time. That distracted him enough to let him notice the corporal saying, “Ullhass, Ristin, you two just go on along. I’ll catch up with you later,” and then getting down from the wagon himself. His Army boots clumped on the pavement as he walked back toward Jens and Barbara.