Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

He’d seen a lot of parks in Illinois, and knew what to expect: rolling grass, plenty of trees, places where you could start a fire for a cookout, probably a place to rent a fishing boat, too, since the park was on a river. The grass would be hay length now, most likely; he didn’t figure anybody would have mowed it since the Lizards came.

Lucille Potter found Riverview Park without any trouble. Whether it was worth finding was another question. Once, in one of those crazy magazines Sam Yeager used to read, Mutt had seen a picture of the craters of the moon. Add in mud and the occasional tree that hadn’t been blown to pieces and you’d have a pretty good idea of what the park was like.

Daniels wondered if enough trees still stood to offer his squad decent cover from Lizard air attack. The rain wouldn’t stop the scaly sons of bitches; he’d already seen that They weren’t a whole lot less accurate in bad weather than in good, either. He didn’t know how they managed that. He just wished to the dripping heavens that they weren’t able to do it.

From up ahead Freddie Laplace called, “There’s bones stickin’ up outta the ground.”

“Yeah? So what?’ Mutt answered. “This here place been fought over two-three times, in case you didn’t notice.”

“I know that, Sarge,” Laplace answered in an injured voice. “Thing of it is, some of ’em look like they’re Lizard bones.” He sounded half intrigued, half sick.

“What’s’ that?” Lucille Potter said sharply. “Let me see those, Frederick.”

Mutt went over to have a look at what Freddie had found, too. Lizard bones were the most interesting thing Riverview Park had to offer, as far as he was concerned. If he didn’t take a gander at them, he’d have to get out his entrenching tool and start digging himself a hole in the torn-up mud.

Squelch, squelch, squelch. His boots threatened to come off at every step. The rain kept pattering down. Mutt sighed. Too damn bad you couldn’t call a war on account of rain. Or on second thought, maybe not. On the ground if not in the air, the storm probably slowed down the Lizards worse than it did the Americans. “Course, we were slower to start with,” he muttered under his breath.

Freddie Laplace, a skinny little guy with a highly developed sense of self-preservation, pointed down into a shell hole that was rapidly turning into a pond. Sure enough, white bones stuck out of the dirt. “Those never came from no human bein’, Sarge,” Freddie said.

“You’re right,” Lucille, Potter answered. “Those never came from any creature on Earth.”

“Just look like arm bones to me,” Mutt said. “Yeah, they got claws ‘stead of fingers, but so what?” He wrinkled his nose. “Still got some old meat on ’em, too.” The rain banished the worst of the after-the-battle stench, but not all of it.

Lucille let out an impatient sniff. “Use your eyes, Mutt. You must know that people have two long bones in their forearms and one in their upper arms. See for yourself-with the Lizards it’s just the opposite.”

“Well, I’ll be a-” The memory of his father’s callused hand kept Mutt from saying what he’d be. Now that Lucille pointed it out, though, he saw she was right. His knowledge of anatomy came from no formal study, but from farming and from dealing with players who hurt themselves on the field-and with his own injuries, back when he was playing himself. Now that his attention was focused, he added, “I never seen any wrist bones like those, neither.”

“They have to be different from ours,” Lucille said. “A human wrist pivots the hand off two bones, these off only one. The muscle attachments would be very different, too, but we can’t see much of them any more.”

Freddie Laplace worked at the mud with his entrenching tool, not to dig in but to expose more of the dead Lizard’s skeleton. In spite of the rain, the dead-meat stink grew bad enough to make Mutt cough. He’d already seen that Lizards bled red. Now he learned they had no more dignity in death than men slain the same way.

“Lord, I wonder what happens to ’em come Judgment Day?” he said, very much as if he were asking the Deity. He’d been raised a hardshell Baptist, and never bothered to question his childhood faith after he grew to manhood. But if God had made the Lizards at some time or other during Creation (and on which day would that have been?), would He resurrect them in the body come the Last Day? Mutt figured preachers somewhere were getting hot and bothered about that.

Freddie exposed some of the alien corpse’s ribcage. “Ain’t that peculiar?” he said. “More like latticework than a proper cage.”

“How come you know so much about it?” Mutt asked him. “My old man, he runs a butcher shop up in Bangor, Maine,” Laplace answered. “There’s one thing I seen a lot of, Sarge, it’s bones.”

Mutt nodded, conceding the point Lucille Potter said, “That latticework arrangement is very strong-the English used it for the skeletons of their Blenheim and Wellington bombers.”

“Is that a fact?” Daniels said. He was just making talk, though; if Miss Lucille said something was so, you could take it to the bank.

She asked Freddie, “Do you think you can dig out his skull for me?”

“I’ll give it a try, ma’am,” Laplace said, as If she’d asked him up to the blackboard for a tough multiplication problem he thought he could do. He started scraping away more mud with the folding shovel. Lucille Potter made little eager noises, as if he were digging up a brand-new Chevy (not that there were any brand-new Chevies) and enough gas to run it for a year.

Try and figure women, Mutt thought, as he watched Lucille take a scalpel from her little case of instruments. A dead Lizard interested her… but a live sergeant didn’t.

Mutt sighed. He thought Lucille liked him well enough. He knew he liked her well enough, and then some. He knew she knew that, too; she could hardly have doubted it after the kiss he’d given her when he used her bottle of ether to take out the Lizard tank. But the spark that jumped one way didn’t come back the other.

He wondered if she’d left a sweetheart behind when she signed up as an Army nurse. He had his doubts about that; she had maiden lady written all over her. Just my luck he thought.

He was not a man to spend a lot of time brooding over what he couldn’t help. If he had been that sort of man, years of catching and then of managing would have changed him into a different sort: too many decisions to let any one reach earthshaking proportions, even if it didn’t work. If you couldn’t understand that down in your guts, you were liable to end up like Willard Hershberger, the Reds’ catcher who’d cut his throat in a New York hotel room after he called the pitch Mel Ott hit into the Polo Grounds stands for a ninth-inning game-winning homer.

And so Mutt went around to see that the rest of his squad was well dug in and that Dracula Szabo had picked a spot with a good field of fire for his BAR Daniels didn’t expect to be attacked here, but you never could tell.

“We got anything decent for chow tonight, Sarge?” Szabo asked.

“C-rations, I expect, and damn lucky to have those,” Mutt answered. “Better’n what we ever saw in France; you can believe that.” The only real thing Daniels had against the canned rations was that the supply boys had trouble getting enough of them into the field to keep him from being hungry more than he liked. With the Lizards controlling the air, logistics got real sticky.

Szabo had what Mutt thought of as a city slicker’s face: controlled, knowing, often with an expression that seemed to say he’d be laughing at you if only you were worth laughing at. It was a face that ached for a slap. Whether it did or whether it didn’t, though, Dracula had his uses. Now he reached under his poncho and showed Mutt three dead chickens. “Reckon we can do some better than C-rats,” he said smugly, grinning like a fox who’d just raided the hen coop.