In the Balance

He changed direction. Hands reached out to help pull the wounded man behind a file cabinet that, between its metal and the reams of paper spilling from it, probably could have stopped a Lizard tank round. Mutt got in back of it himself and lay there, panting like a dog on a Mississippi summer day.

“Smitty still alive up there?” asked the soldier already under cover.

Daniels shook his head. “For all I know, he could’ve been dead when I picked him up. Goddamn shame.” He didn’t say anything about the Lizard who’d refrained from shooting him. He had the strange feeling that mentioning it would take the magic away, as if it were the seventh inning of a building no-hitter.

The other soldier-his name was Buck Risberg-pointed and said, “The fire’s holding the Lizards back.”

“Good to know somethin’ can.” Daniels made a sour face. He was turning cynical fast in this fight I’m gettin’ old, he thought, and then, Gettin’? Hell, I am old. But he was also in command. He dragged his mind back to what needed doing right now. “Get Hank here out of this mess,” he told Risberg. “There ought to be a medic a couple blocks north o’here, less’n the Lizards drove him out by now. But you gotta try.”

“Okay, Mutt.” Half dragging, half carrying the now-unconscious Hank, Risberg made his way out of the firing line. The burning beam helped light his way through the gloom, and also provided a barrier the Lizards hesitated to cross.

Shells screamed down on the factory and the street outside: not from Lizard tank cannon, these, but out of the west from American batteries still in place on Stolp’s Island in the middle of the Fox River. The gunners were bringing the fire right down onto the heads of their own men in the hope of hitting the enemy, too. Daniels admired their aggressiveness, and wished he weren’t on the receiving end of it.

The incoming artillery made the Lizards who were poking their snouts into the factory building stop shooting and hunker down. At least, that was what Mutt assumed they were doing-it was certainly what he was doing himself. But all too soon, even in the midst of the barrage, they started up again with nasty three and four-bullet bursts that would chew a man to rags. Mutt felt as inadequate with the Springfield jammed against his shoulder as Pappy Daniels must have if he’d ever tried to fight Yankees toting Henry repeaters with his single-shot, muzzle-loading rifle musket.

Then from in back of him came a long, ripping burst of fire that made him wonder for a dreadful instant how the Lizards had got round to his rear. But not only did the Lizards usually have better fire discipline than that, the weapon did not sound like one of theirs. When Daniels recognized it, he yelled, “You with the tommy gun! Get your ass up here!”

A minute later, a soldier flopped down beside him. “Where they at, Corporal?” he asked.

Mutt pointed. “Right over that way; leastways, that’s where they shot from last.”

The tommy gun chattered. The fellow with it-not a man from Daniels unit-went through a fifty-round drum as if he were going to have to pay for all the rounds he didn’t fire off. Another submachine gun opened up behind Daniels and to his left. Grinning at Mutt’s surprised expression, the soldier said, “Our whole platoon cathes ’em, Corporal. We got enough firepower to make these scaly sons of bitches think twice about messin’ with us.”

Daniels started to say, “That’s crazy,” but maybe it wasn’t. Out in open country it would have been; a tommy gun fired a.45-caliber pistol cartridge, and was accurate out to only a couple of hundred yards. But in street fighting or building-to-building combat like this, volume of fire counted for a lot more than accuracy. Since the U.S.A. couldn’t match the Lizards’ automatic rifles, submachine guns were probably the next best thing.

So instead of cussing the high command for a worthless brainstorm, Mutt said, “Yeah, some of the German assault troops in France carried those damn things, too. I didn’t much care to go up against ’em, either.”

The tommy-gunner turned his head. “You were Over There, were you? I reckon this is worse.”

Daniels thought about it. “Yeah, probably. Not that that was any fun, mind you, but it’s always easier bein’ on the long end of the stick. And this here fightin’ in factories-I didn’t used to think they made anything worse’n trenches, but I’m comin’ round to believe I was wrong.”

An airplane roared by, just above rooftop height. “Ours,” the tommy-gunner said in glad surprise. Daniels shared it; American planes were all too few these days. The aircraft pounded the advancing Lizards for a few seconds, machine guns bellowing. Then came another bellow, an almost solid wall of noise, from the ground. The airplane’s engine stopped screaming; the machine guns cut off at the same time. The plane crashed with a boom that would have broken windows had Aurora had any windows left to break.