Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

When he said that out loud, Mutt Daniels grunted and answered, “Reckon you’re right, boy, but we’re gonna have the devil’s own time stoppin’ ’em.”

A roar in the sky-Yeager automatically threw himself flat. He’d learned that even before he took the soldier’s oath, and had it reinforced when a fellow a few feet from him got smashed to a red smear for being a split second too slow to hit the dirt.

But the roar came from two piston-engined fighters that streaked west toward the autogiro. The machine guns of the P-40 Warhawks hammered. Yeager stuck his head up again. The autogiro was firing back, and turning in midair to try to flee. The Lizards’ jets far outclassed anything humanity could make, but their flying troop carriers were vulnerable.

The Warhawks whizzed past the autogiro, one to the right, the other to the left. They banked into tight turns for another firing pass, but no need. The Lizard machine, spurting smoke from just below the rotor, settled to the ground in what was half landing, half crash. The fighters darted away before anything more dangerous appeared over the horizon.

Yeager scowled to see live Lizards scuttling out of the autogiro. “They left too soon,” he growled. “It wasn’t a clean kill.”

Mutt Daniels worked the bolt on his Springfield to chamber a new round. “Means it’s up to us, don’t it?” Moving with a grace that belied his fleshy form, he scuffled forward.

Yeager followed. He also had a rifle now, taken from a man who would never need one again. Back on the farm where he’d grown up, he’d shot at tin cans and gophers and the occasional crow with his father’s.22. The military weapon he carried now was heavier and kicked harder, but that wasn’t the main difference from those vanished days. When he shot at tin cans or gophers or crows, they didn’t shoot back.

A heavy machine gun began to bark, up near the intersection of Main Street and Highway 52. Pieces flew off the Lizards’ autogiro and sparkled in the sunlight as they twirled through the air. As for the Lizards themselves, they took cover with the speed and alacrity of their small reptilian namesakes. One by one, they opened fire. Their weapons chewed out short bursts, not the endless racket of a belt-fed machine gun, but not single. shots, either.

Was that a flicker of motion, over there behind the ornamental hedge? Yeager didn’t care to find out the hard way. He threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired. He scurried away to a new position before he looked toward the hedge again. Nothing moved there now.

Another rumble in the air, this one from the southwest…Yeager fired at the incoming autogiro, but it stayed out of rifle range. Flame shot from under its stubby wings. With a cry of fear, Yeager buried his face in grass and mud.

The rockets burst all around him, lances of fire that lashed the American position. The heavy machine gun fell silent. Through stunned ears, Yeager heard the Lizards on the ground moving forward.

Then another roar announced that the Warhawks had returned. Their guns tore at the new autogiro. This time they did the job right. The aircraft slammed the ground sideways and became a fireball. Smoke rose into the blue sky. It was less, smoke than would have come from a human-built plane; the Lizards used cleaner fuel. But fuel wasn’t all that burned in there. Seats, paint, ammunition, the bodies of the crew… they all went up.

Cheering, the Americans moved forward against the Lizards. “Careful there, you God-damned fools!” Sergeant Schneider bellowed, trying to shout over battlefield din. “You want to stay low.” As if to underscore the advice, someone who hadn’t stayed low enough suddenly pitched forward onto his face.

The Warhawks came back to strafe the Lizards on the ground. Something rose on a pillar of fire from behind a boulder in the middle of a Main Street lawn that marked a spot where Lincoln had spoken. The P-40 fled, twisting with all the skill the pilot had. It was not enough. The rocket tumbled it from the sky.

“Damn if it didn’t look like a Fourth of July skyrocket, right down to the big boom at the end,” Daniels said.

“It flew like it had eyes,” Yeager said, thinking of the turning path the rocket had scrawled across the sky. “I wonder how they make it do that.”

“Right now I got more important things to wonder about, like if I’m gonna be alive this time tomorrow,” Mutt said.

Yeager nodded, but his bump of curiosity still itched. Writers in Astounding and the other pulps had talked about detection devices for as long as he’d been reading them, and likely longer than that. He’d discovered on the night the Invaders from Space descended on the world that living through science fiction was a lot stranger-and a lot more deadly-than just reading it.

A hiss in the sky, a whistle, a noise like a train pulling into a station-an artillery shell burst among the embattled Lizards, then another and another. Dirt fountained skyward. The enemy’s fire slackened. Yeager didn’t know whether the Lizards were killed or hurt or just playing possum, but he used the lull to slide closer to them… and also closer to where the shells were landing. He wished he hadn’t thought of that, but kept crawling ahead.

A Lizard plane shot past, heading east. Yeager cringed, but the pilot wasted no time on a target as trivial as infantry. No doubt he wanted that battery of field guns. The shells kept coming for about another minute, maybe two, then abruptly stopped.

By that time, though, Yeager and the other Americans were on top of the Lizard position. “Surrender!” Sergeant Schneider shouted. Yeager was sure he was wasting his breath; where would the Lizards have learned English? And even if they had, would they quit? They seemed more like Japs than any other people Yeager knew of-at least, they were small and liked sneak attacks. Japs didn’t surrender for hell, so would the Lizards?

One of them had got some English, God knew where. “No-ssrenda,” came the reply, a dry hiss that made the hair stand up on Yeager’s arms. A burst of machine-rifle fire added an exclamation point.

The burst was close, close. Yeager grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin, lobbed it as if he were aiming for a cutoff man. It flew toward the concrete block fence behind which he thought the Lizard who didn’t want to surrender was hiding. He didn’t see it go over. By the time it did, he was behind his own cover once more. He hadn’t needed more than one or two bullets snapping past his head to learn that lesson forever.

The grenade went off with a crash. Before the echoes died, Yeager sprinted up to the gray fence. He fired over it, once, twice, blindly. If the Lizard wasn’t badly hurt, he wanted to rattle it as much as he could. Then, gulping, he vaulted over the fence into the alleyway on the other side.

The Lizard was down and thrashing and horribly wounded; its red, red blood stained the gravel of the alley. Yeager’s stomach did a slow, lazy loop. He’d never expected the agony of a creature from another world to reach him, but it did. The Lizard yammered something in its own incomprehensible language. Yeager had no idea whether it was defiance or a plea for mercy. All he wanted to do was put the alien out of its misery and make it be quiet. He raised his rifle, shot it through the head.

It twitched once or twice, then lay still. Yeager let out a whistling sigh of relief; he’d thought too late that it didn’t necessarily have to store its brains in its head. He wondered if that would have occurred to any of the men fighting around him. Probably not; science-fiction readers were thin on the ground. As things worked out, it hadn’t mattered anyway.

He bent over the scaly corpse, scooped up the machine rifle the Lizard had carded. He was amazed at how light it was. Somebody, he thought, would have to take it apart and figure out how it worked.