In the Balance

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.

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.