Striking the Balance

Soldiers snapped to attention as he strode through the halls of the Kremlin. Civilian functionaries muted their conversations and gave him respectful nods. He did not acknowledge them. He barely noticed them. Had he failed to receive them, though, he would have made sharp note of that.

The devil’s cousin or some other malicious wretch had dumped a stack of papers on his desk while he went down to bring himself up to date on the talks with the mutinous Lizards. He had high hopes for those talks. The Soviet Union already had a good many Lizard prisoners of war, and had learned some useful things from them. Once Lizards surrendered, they seemed to place humans in the positions of trust and authority their own superiors had formerly occupied for them.

And to lay hold of an entire base full of the equipment the alien aggressors from the stars manufactured! Unless Soviet intelligence was badly mistaken, that would be a coup neither the Germans nor the Americans could match. The British had a lot of Lizard gear, but the imperialist creatures had done their best to wreck it after their invasion of England failed.

The first letter on the pile was from the Social Activities Committee ofKolkhoz 118: so the return address stated, at any rate. But the collective farm not far outside of Moscow was where Igor Kurchatov and his team of nuclear physicists were laboring to fabricate an explosive-metal bomb. They’d made one, out of metal stolen from the Lizards. Isolating more of the metal for themselves was proving as hard as they’d warned Molotov it would-harder than he’d wanted to believe.

Sure enough, Kurchatov now wrote, “The latest experiment, Comrade Foreign Commissar, was a success less complete than we might have hoped.” Molotov did not need his years of reading between the lines to infer that the experiment had failed. Kurchatov went on, “Certain technical aspects of the situation still present us with difficulties. Outside advice might prove useful.”

Molotov grunted softly. When Kurchatov asked for outside advice, he didn’t mean help from other Soviet physicists. Every reputable nuclear physicist in the USSR was already working with him. Molotov had put his own neck on the block by reminding Stalin of that; he shuddered to think of the risk he’d taken for therodina, the motherland. What Kurchatov wanted was foreign expertise.

Humiliating,Molotov thought. The Soviet Union should not have been so backwards. He would never ask the Germans for help. Even if they gave it, he wouldn’t trust what they gave. Stalin was just as well pleased that the Lizards in Poland separated the USSR from Hitler’s madmen, and there Molotov completely agreed with his leader.

The Americans? Molotov gnawed at his mustache. Maybe, just maybe. They were making their own explosive-metal bombs, just as the Nazis were. And if he could tempt them with some of the prizes the Lizard base near Tomsk would yield…

He pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper and began to draft a letter.

“Jesus, God, will you lookit this?” Mutt Daniels exclaimed as he led his platoon through the ruins of what had been Chicago’s North Side. “And all from one bomb, too.”

“Don’t hardly seem possible, does it, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Herman Muldoon agreed. The kids they were leading didn’t say anything. They just looked around with wide eyes and even wider mouths at their fair share of a few miles’ worth of slagged wreckage.

“I been on God’s green earth goin’ on sixty years now,” Mutt said, his Mississippi drawl flowing slow and thick as molasses in this miserable Northern winter. “I seen a whole lot o’ things in my time. I fought in two wars now, and I done traveled all over the U.S. of A. But I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this here.”

“You got that right,” Muldoon said. He was Daniels’ age, near enough, and he’d been around, too. The men alongside them in the ragged skirmish line didn’t have that kind of experience, but they’d never seen anything like this, either. Nobody had, not till the Lizards came.

Before they came, Daniels had been managing the Decatur Commodores, a Three-I League team. One of his ballplayers had liked reading pulp stories about rocketships and creatures from other planets (he wondered if Sam Yeager was still alive these days). Mutt pulled an image from that kind of story now: the North Side reminded him of the mountains of the moon.

When he said that out loud, Herman Muldoon nodded. He was tall and thick-shouldered, with a long, tough Irish mug and, at the moment, a chin full of graying stubble. “I heard that about France back in nineteen an’ eighteen, and I thought it was pretty straight then. Goes to show what I knew, don’t it?”

“Yeah,” Daniels said. He’d seen France, too. “France had more craters’n you could shake a stick at, that’s for damn sure. ‘Tween us and the frogs and the limeys and theBoches, we musta done fired every artillery shell in the world ’bout ten times over. But this here, it’s just the one.”

You could tell where the bomb had gone off: all the wreckage leaned away from it. If you drew a line from the direction of fallen walls and houses and uprooted trees, then went west a mile or so and did the same thing, the place where those lines met would have been around ground zero.

There were other ways of working out where that lay, though. Identfliable wreckage was getting thin on the ground now. More and more, it was just lumpy, half-shiny dirt, baked by the heat of the bomb into stuff that was almost like glass.

It was slippery like glass, too, especially with snow scattered over it. One of Mutt’s men had his feet go out from under him and landed on his can. “Oww!” he said, and then, “Ahh, shit!” As his comrades laughed at him, he tried to get up-and almost fell down again.

“You want to play those kind o’ games, Kurowski, you get yourself a clown suit, not the one you’re wearin’,” Mutt said.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Kurowski said in injured tones that had nothing to do with his sore fundament. “It ain’t like I’m doing it on purpose.”

“Yeah, I know, but you’re still doin’ it.” Mutt gave up ragging him. He recognized the big pile of brick and steel off to the left. It had come through the blast fairly well, and had shielded some of the apartment houses behind it so they weren’t badly damaged at all. But the sight of upright buildings in the midst of the wreckage wasn’t what made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “Ain’t that Wrigley Field?” he whispered. “Gotta be, from where it’s at and what it looks like.”

He’d never played in Wrigley Field-the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid’s dolly with its head blown off.

Muldoon’s eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. “Go

South of Wrigley Field, a big fellow with a sergeant’s stripes and a mean expression gave Daniels a perfunctory salute. “Come on, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’m supposed to get your unit into line here.”

“Well, then, go on and do it,” Mutt said. Most of his men didn’t have enough experience to wipe their asses after they went and squatted. A lot of them were going to end up casualties because of it. Sometimes all the experience in the world didn’t matter, either. Mutt had scars on his backside from a Lizard bullet-luckily, a through-and-through flesh wound that hadn’t chewed up his hipbone. A couple, three feet up, though, and it would have hit him right in the ear.

The sergeant led them out of the blast area, down through the Near North Side toward the Chicago River. The big buildings ahead stood empty and battered, as meaningless to what was happening now as so many dinosaur bones might have been-unless, of course, they had Lizard snipers in them. “We shoulda pushed ’em farther back,” the sergeant said, spitting in disgust, “but what the hell you go