Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

And, of course, they all had the war-or rather the wars-to talk about. “With the Lizards here are we still fighting the Germans and the Japs?” Yeager asked, adding, “But for Roosevelt’s speech, I haven’t heard much in the way of news till I got here yesterday.”

“Me neither.” Mutt Daniels ran a hand over his ragged pants and filthy jacket. “We been on the move the last few days, you might say.”

That got him a few wry chuckles. Several of the men standing there were a lot more bedraggled than he was. Fred Walters, by contrast, was clean and well-creased; he lived in Ashton. He said, “Fact of it is, nobody really knows what the hell is going on. I did hear tell, though, that a Jap fleet heading for Hawaii hightailed it back to the Land of the Rising Sun when the Lizards bombed Tokyo.”

“They hit Tokyo,” Yeager said. “First good thing I heard about ’em.”

“They hit Berlin, too,” Walters said, “and a lot of other places besides.”

“One thing this does,” said somebody whose name Yeager hadn’t caught, “is shoot Lend-Lease right in the head. With the damned Lizards right here in the middle of the United States, we don’t have enough for ourselves, let alone for anybody else.”

“Gonna be hard on the Limies and the Russians,” Daniels observed.

“We gotta worry about ourselves first,” the other man said. Heads bobbed up and down, Yeager’s among them. The fellow went on, “Plain fact is, we’re short, too. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be going through this folderol of separating out the ones who know how to fight to make sure they get guns first.”

“Sergeant Schneider over there as much as told me we don’t have enough guns for all the men who’re joining up here,” Yeager said.

“Plain fact is, gentlemen, we got trouble,” Daniels said. “That’s what the plain fact is, and nothing else but.” Heads bobbed up and down again.

Something moving swiftly through the air-Alarm coursed through David Goldfarb as he caught the motion. He whipped his binoculars up to his eyes, took a longer look, relaxed. “Only a sea gull,” he said, relief in his voice.

“Which kind?” Jerome Jones asked with interest. The events of the past few days had turned him into an avid bird-watcher.

“One of the black-headed ones,” Goldfarb answered indifferently; his interest in birds began and ended with poultry.

He sat in a rickety folding chair of canvas and wood a few feet from the edge of the cliffs of Dover, where England dropped straight down into the sea. An observer might have sat thus a quarter of a century before, with the self-same binoculars, maybe even in the self-same folding chair, peering toward Europe in hope of spotting zeppelins. Only the field telephone by the chair was of a model impossible in 1917.

Jerome Jones laughed when he said that aloud. “Likely is the same folding chair; the forms for a new one won’t have got to the proper office yet.” He laughed again, this time mirthlessly. “Like the bloody Pixie Reports.”

“I told you the flaw wasn’t in the radar,” Goldfarb said.

“That you did-and if you keep up with ‘I told you so,’ you’ll make some nice girl very unhappy one day,” Jones retorted. “Besides, don’t you wish you’d been wrong?”

Having taken two solid hits in as many sentences, Goldfarb answered only with a grunt. His eyes traveled back to what had been the radar station that had superseded observers armed with nothing better than field glasses. Nothing there now but rubble and a faint stench, as of meat gone bad. The only reason Goldfarb could sit out here looking at those ruins was that he’d been off duty when the Lizard rockets struck home.

Up and down the English coast, the story was the same: wherever there’d been an active radar, a rocket came along and took it out. That meant only one thing: rockets able to home in on radar beams, even the new shortwave ones Jerry still hadn’t figured out.

“Who’d have thought the Lizards could be so much smarter than the Germans?” Goldfarb said; no matter how much he loathed Hitler and the Nazis, he had a solid respect for the technical ability of the enemy across the Channel.

“Wireless says we knocked down a couple of their planes over London,” Jones remarked hopefully.

“Good,” Goldfarb said; any news of that sort was encouraging. “How many did we lose?”

“The commentator did not announce the full score of the match,” Jones said. “Military security, don’t you know?”

“Oh indeed,” Goldfarb said. “I wonder if their batsman made his century; no doubt it s a cricket score set against one footballers might make. God help us all.”

“They’ve not tried a landing here,” Jones said, still looking on the bright side.

“It’s only a very small island.” Goldfarb pictured a world globe in his mind, and realized all at once just how small England had to look from space.

Not small enough to keep them from bombing us Jones said bitterly. He and Goldfarb both shook their heads. They’d helped their country beat back the most savage air assault the world had ever known, then helped start paying the Germans back. Now they were under attack again. It hardly seemed fair.

“There’s something!” Goldfarb exclaimed, pointing. He and Jones both swung their field glasses toward, the moving specks in the sky. The specks-even through binoculars, they were little more than that-were southbound. “Ours, I think,” Goldfarb said, “bound for the Lizards’ lair in France.”

“Lizards and Frogs.” Jones laughed at his own wit, but quickly sobered. “I wonder how many of the poor brave buggers’ll fly back north again after their run. Worse than the flak over Berlin, they say.”

“I wonder if Jerry’s hitting back at the Lizards, too.” Something else occurred to Goldfarb. “If his planes and ours are both trying to hit them at the same time, do we shoot at each other, too?”

“I hope not,” Jones exclaimed. “Wouldn’t that be a balls-up?”

“It would indeed,” Goldfarb said. “I hope not, too.” He laughed, not altogether comfortably. “First time in donkey’s years I’ve wished the Germans anything but a fast trip to the devil.”

“The Germans, they’re human beings. Stack ’em against things from Mars and I know where my choice lies,” Jones said.

Goldfarb answered with a grunt. He was reluctant to concede anything to the Nazis; he agreed completely with Churchill’s quip that, should Satan declare war on Hitler, he would at least give the Devil a favorable mention in the House of Commons. But quips came easy. Now the whole world faced devils it didn’t know. Britain had allied with Red Russia when Germany invaded: Germany was worse. If the Lizards were worse than Germany, would alliances swing again?

He scowled. “I’m damned if I want to see us in bed with the Nazis.” He wondered again at the fate of his cousins in Poland.

“Would you rather end up in bed with the Lizards?” Jones demanded. Before it could turn into an argument, he added, “Me, I’d rather end up in bed with the barmaid down at the White Horse Inn.”

That sufficed to distract Goldfarb. “Which one?” he asked. “Daphne or Sylvia?”

“Daphne by choice. I’m rather keen on blondes, and she has more to hold on to.” Jones’s hands illustrated just which parts he had in mind. “But, of course, were Sylvia to smile at me in exactly the proper fashion-redheads are interesting because they’re unusual, what?”

“They both fancy pilots,” Goldfarb said morosely. Along with, no doubt, a great many other nonflying RAF men, he’d had his advances turned into retreats by both girls. For that matter, so had Jerome Jones.

The other radar man said, “Now there’s something to say for the Lizards, at any rate.” Goldfarb raised an interrogative eyebrow. Jones explained: “if they keep on as they’ve been doing, we’ll soon have no pilots left.”