Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Sergeant Schneider yelled again: “Surrender, you Lizards! Throw down your guns! Give up and we won’t hurt you.”

Yeager thought he was wasting his breath, but the bursts of enemy fire quickly ceased. Schneider came out in the open with something white-it was a by-God pillowcase, Yeager saw-tied to his rifle. He waved toward the houses and stores in which the last few Lizards were holed up, then made a peremptory gesture no human could have misunderstood: come out.

From behind Yeager, Mutt Daniels said, “He oughta get the Medal of Honor for that.” Yeager nodded, trying not to show how shaken he was; he hadn’t heard his manager-no, his ex-manager now, he supposed-come up at all.

Sergeant Schneider simply stood and waited, his big feet splayed apart, his belly hanging over his belt. He looked as though he would have made three of the dead Lizard sprawled by Yeager; he looked hard and tough and quintessentially human. Seeing him defy the Lizards’ machine rifles, Yeager felt tears sting under the lids of his eyes. He was proud to belong to a people that could produce such a man.

After the hammering racket of baffle, silence seemed strange, wrong, almost frightening. The eerie pause hung in the balance for almost half a minute. Then a door opened in one of the houses from which the Lizards had been fighting. Without conscious thought on Yeager s part his rifle snapped toward it Schneider held up a hand, ordering the Americans not to shoot.

A Lizard came slowly through the doorway. He hadn’t dropped his weapon, but held it reversed, by the barrel. Like Sergeant Schneider, he’d fastened something white to the other end. The shape was familiar to Yeager, but he needed a moment to place it. All at once he bent double in a guffaw.

“What is it?” Mutt Daniels asked.

Between chuckles, Yeager wheezed, “First time I ever saw anybody make a flag of truce out of a pair of women’s panties.”

“Huh?” Mutt stared, then started laughing, too.

If the improvised white flag amused Sergeant Schneider he didn’t let on. He gestured again: come here. The Lizard came moving with careful deliberation rather than his kind’s usual quick skitter. When he got within about twenty feet of Schneider, the sergeant pointed to his machine rifle, then to the ground. He did it two or three times before the Lizard, even more hesitantly than before, set the weapon down.

Schneider made another come here gesture. The Lizard came. It flinched when he put an arm around it, but it did not flee. It came up to only the middle of his chest. Schneider turned to where the rest of the Lizards were holed up. “You see? No harm will come to you. Surrender!”

“Jesus, they’re really doing it,” Yeager whispered.

“Looks that way, don’t it?” Mutt Daniels whispered back.

The Lizards emerged from their hiding places. There were only five more of them, Yeager saw, and two of those were wounded, leaning on their fellows. The Lizard who had surrendered first called something to them all. The three with machine rifles set them down.

“What are we going to do with hurt Lizards?” Yeager asked. “If they’re proper prisoners of war, we have to try and take care of them, but do we yell for a medic or a vet? Hell, I don’t even know if they can eat our food.”

“I don’t know either, and frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Round and pudgy and filthy, Mutt made a most unlikely Rhett Butler. He shifted the plug in his cheek, spat, and went on, “It’s right nice, though, havin’ prisoners of their’n, not so much on account of what they can tell us but to keep ’em honest with all of our people they got.”

“Something to that.” Yeager wondered what had happened to the rest of the Decatur Commodores. Nothing good, he feared, remembering how the Lizards had strafed their train. The invaders could do whatever they pleased throughout big stretches of the United States. If holding prisoners-hostages-would help restrain them, Yeager was all for it.

Along with the rest of the Americans, he hurried forward at Sergeant Schneider’s waved command to take charge of the alien POWs. Having surrendered, the Lizards seemed abjectly submissive, hurrying to obey the soldiers’ gestures as best they could. Even to Invaders from Space, come along and this way were easy enough to put across.

Schneider seemed convinced the band he led-with everything from officers to weapons to organization in short supply, slapping a more formally military name than that on it was optimistic-had done something important. “We want to get these scaly sons of bitches out of here and back up to Ashton just as fast as we can, before more of ’em come along.” He told off half a dozen men: “You, you, you, you, you, and you.” Yeager was the fourth “you,” Mutt Daniels the fifth. “Get back to the bus that brought us here and take ’em away on it. The rest of us’ll dig in and hope we see more men before the Lizards decide to push harder. Good Lord willing, you can drop ’em off and head down this way again inside a couple of hours. Now get your butts in gear”

Flanked by men with loaded, bayonet-tipped rifles, the Lizards picked their way through and over debris toward the yellow school bus that had been pressed into service as a troop hauler. Yeager would have preferred the dignity of a proper khaki Army truck, but up at Ashton, a school bus was what they had.

The key was still in the bus ignition. Otto Chase looked at it with a certain amount of apprehension. “Anybody here able to drive this big honking thing?” the onetime cement-plant worker asked.

“I reckon Sam and I just might be able to handle it,” Mutt Daniels said with a sidelong glance at Yeager. The ballplayer puffed up his cheeks like a chipmunk to hold in his laughter. Alter half a lifetime bouncing around in buses, helping to repair them by the side of the road, pushing them when they broke down, there wasn’t a whole lot about them he didn’t know.

Mutt, moreover, had been bouncing around in buses essentially ever since there were buses. If there was anything about them he didn’t know, Yeager had no idea what it was. Daniels waited for the rest of the men to herd the Lizards to the wide rear seat, then started the engine, turned the bus around in a street most people would have thought too narrow for turning around a bus, and headed back to Ashton.

He stayed off Highway 52 and Highway 30, preferring the back-country roads less likely to draw attention from the air. Raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the motor, he said, “Reminds me of the country just back of the front line in France in 1918, right where the Boches got farthest. Parts of it are all tore, up, but you go fifty yards on and you’d swear nobody ever heard o’ war.”

The description was apt, Yeager thought. Most of the farms that sprawled among belts of forest between Amboy and Ashton were untouched. Men wearing wide-brimmed hats and overalls worked in several fields; cows grazed here and there, black and white splotches vivid against the cheerful green of grass and growing crops. By the calm way life went on, the nearest Lizard might have been ten billion light-years off.

But every so often, the bus would rattle past a bomb or shell crater, an ugly brown scar on the land’s smooth green skin. There were cattle by those craters, too, cattle on their sides bloating under the warm summer sun. And a couple of the neat frame farm buildings were neither neat nor buildings any longer, but more like a giant’s game of pick-up-sticks. Fat crows, startled by the bus’ racket, flapped into the air, cawing resentment at having their feasting interrupted.

Still, as Mutt had said, the eye could mostly forget the war whose border the bus had just left behind. The nose had a harder time. Yeager wondered if the faint reek of smoke and corruption simply clung to him, the other Americans, and the Lizards; if it came in through the open windows of the bus from the lightly damaged countryside through which they were driving; or if the breeze, which was out of the west, swept it along the front line.