Striking the Balance

A couple of his men were taking a bath in a little creek not far away. Their bodies weren’t quite so white and pale as they had been when the cease-fire started. Nobody’d had a chance to get clean for a long time before that. When you were in the front lines, you stayed dirty, mostly because you were liable to get shot if you exposed your body to water and air. After a while, you didn’t notice what you smelled like: everybody else smelled the same way. Now Mutt was starting to get used to not stinking again.

From out of the north, back toward Quincy, came the sound of a human-made internal-combustion engine. Mutt turned around and looked up the road. Sure as hell, here came one of those big Dodge command cars officers had been in the habit of using till gas got too scarce for them to go gallivanting around. Seeing one again was a sure sign the brass thought the cease-fire would last a while.

Sure as hell, a three-star banner fluttered from the aerial of the command car. The fellow who stood in back of the pintle-mounted. 50 caliber machine gun had three stars painted on his helmet, too. He also had a bone-handled revolver on each hip.

“Heads up, boys,” Mutt called. “That there’s General Patton coming to pay us a call.” Patton had a name for being a tough so-and-so, and for liking to show off, to let everybody know how tough he was. Daniels hoped he wouldn’t prove it by squeezing off a couple of belts of ammo in the Lizards’ direction.

The command car rolled to a halt. Even before the tires had stopped turning, Patton jumped out and came up to Mutt, who happened to be standing closer to the Lizards than anybody else.

Mutt drew himself to attention and saluted, thinking the Lizards would be crazy if they didn’t have somebody with a head drawn on this aggressive-looking newcomer. Trouble was, if they started shooting at Patton, they’d be shooting at him, too.

“At ease, Lieutenant,” Patton said in a gravelly voice. He pointed across the lines toward a couple of Lizards who were busy doing whatever Lizards did. “So there is the enemy, face-to-face. Ugly devils, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Mutt said. “Of course, they say that about us, too, sir-call us Big Uglies, I mean.”

“Yes, I know. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or so they say. Inmy eye, Lieutenant, those are ugly sons of bitches, and if they think me ugly, well, by God, I take it for a compliment.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniels said again. Patton didn’t seem inclined to start shooting up the landscape, for which he was duly grateful.

“Are they adhering to the terms of the cease-fire in this area?” the general demanded-maybe hewould start the war up again if the answer turned out to be no.

But Mutt nodded. “Sure are, sir. One thing you got to give the Lizards: they make an agreement, they stick by it. More’n the Germans and the Japs and maybe the Russians ever learned.”

“You sound like a man who speaks from experience, Lieutenant…?”

“Daniels, sir.” Mutt almost laughed. He was Patton’s age, more or less. If you didn’t have experience by the time you were pushing sixty, when the devil would you? But that probably wasn’t what the general meant. “I went through the mill around Chicago, sir. Every time we dickered a truce with the Lizards for picking up wounded and such, they stuck right with it. They may be bastards, but they’re honorable bastards.”

“Chicago.” Patton made a sour face. “That wasn’t war, Lieutenant, that was butchery, and it cost them dear, even before we used our atomic weapon against them. Their greatest advantage over us was speed and mobility, and what did they do with it? Why, they threw it away, Lieutenant, and got bogged down in endless street fighting, where a man with a tommy gun is as good as a Lizard with an automatic rifle, and a man with a Molotov cocktail can put paid to a tank that would smash a dozen Shermans in the open without breaking a sweat. The Nazis fought the same way in Russia. They were fools, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Daniels felt like one of the kids he’d managed listening to him going on about the best time to put on the hit-and-run. Patton knew war the way he knew baseball.

The general was warming to his theme, too: “And the Lizards don’t learn from their mistakes. If they hadn’t come, and if the Germans had broken through to the Volga, do you suppose they would have been stupid enough to try and take Stalingrad house by house? Do you, Lieutenant?”

“Have to doubt it, sir,” said Mutt, who’d never heard of Stalingrad in his life.

“Of course they wouldn’t! The Germans are sensible soldiers; they learn from their mistakes. But after we drove the Lizards back from Chicago winter before last, what did they do? They slogged straight on ahead again, right back into the meat grinder. And they paid. That’s why. If these talks go the way they look to be going, they’re going to have to evacuate the whole U.S.A.”

“That’d be wonderful, sir. If it happens,” Mutt said.