In the Balance

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.

The four unwounded Lizards did what they could for the two who were hurt. It wasn’t much; the humans had stripped them of the belts that along with their helmets were all they wore-no telling what deadly marvels they might have concealed inside.

Yeager had never thought about how Invaders from Space might feel if they were wounded and captured by humans who were as alien to them as they were to people. They didn’t look all-powerful or supremely evil. They just looked worried. In their shoes (if they’d worn shoes), he would have been worried, too.

He picked up one of the belts, started opening pouches. Before long, he found what looked like a bandage, wrapped in some clear stuff smoother and more pliable than cellophane. If it concealed a deadly marvel, he decided, he’d eat his helmet He pushed past the rest of the Americans-who still had their rifles leveled at the Lizards-and held out the bandage pack.

“What the hell you doing?” Otto Chase growled. “Who cares whether them damn things live or die?”

“If they’re prisoners of war, we’re supposed to treat ’em decent,” Yeager answered. “Besides, they hold a lot more of our kind than we do of theirs. Tormenting ’em might not be what you call smart.”

Chase grunted and subsided. The Lizards’ eyes swiveled from Yeager’s face to the bandage and back again. They reminded him of the chameleon he’d seen at the zoo in-was it Salt Lake? Maybe Spokane. Whichever, it was a long time ago now.

One of the Lizards took the bandage pack in its small hand. As it used its claws to tear open the wrapping, it hissed something at Yeager. It and all its companions, even the two injured ones, lowered their turreted eyes to the floor of the bus for a second or two. Then it deftly began to bandage a gash in a wounded Lizard’s flank.

“Paw through those belts,” Yeager said over his shoulder. “See if you can find some more bandages.” He was afraid the others would argue more, but they didn’t. He heard their feet shift. Somebody-he didn’t look back to see who-handed him another pack and then another. He passed them on to the Lizards.

By the time the bus pulled up in front of the Mills and Petrie Memorial Center in Ashton, the injured Lizards were swathed in enough gauze to make them look like something halfway between real wounded soldiers and Boris Karloff as the Mummy. Men in Army khaki, civilian denim and plaid flannel, and every possible combination thereof milled around in front of the stone and yellow brick building.

Through the open driver’s window, Mutt Daniels yelled, “We got Lizard prisoners in here. What the devil we supposed to do with ’em?”

That drew all the attention he wanted and then some. People converged on the school bus at a dead run. Some pushing and elbowing followed, as men of higher rank made those below them give way. The first officer who actually got into the bus was a full colonel, the highest-ranking fellow Yeager had seen in Ashton (when he’d joined up a couple of weeks before, Sergeant Schneider had been the highest-ranking soldier in Ashton).

“Tell me how you took them, soldier,” he said in a drawl almost as thick as Mutt’s. “They’re some of the very first Lizard captives we’ve managed to get our hands on.”