Upsetting the Balance

“Wasn’t much of a ‘they’ left at Bruntingthorpe by the time the Lizards got through with it,” Goldfarb said, shrugging. After the first Lizard attack on the air base, Basil Roundbush had been recalled to piloting at once, but no orders had come for Goldfarb to return to a proper radar station. Then the Lizards started pounding Bruntingthorpe with pilotless aircraft, and after one of them hit the officers’ barracks in the middle of the night, nobody much was left in RAF blue who could give him orders.

The local army commander had been happy enough to take him on. He’d said, “You know how to handle a weapon and obey orders, and that gives you a leg up-two legs up-on a lot of the lads we’re giving the king’s shilling to these days.” Goldfarb pictured himself with two legs up, and crashing to earth immediately thereafter. He didn’t argue with the major, though. He’d wanted to get into the scrap firsthand.

Now he waved about him and said, “And so we find ourselves approaching the lovely metropolis of Market Harborough and all its amenities, which-”

“All its what?” Fred Stanegate broke in.

“All the good stuff it has in it,” Goldfarb said. Next to Bruntingthorpe, Market Harborough, a town of ten or fifteen thousand people, was indeed a metropolis, not that that in itself said much for Market Harborough. Goldfarb had pedaled into it a few times; it was no farther from Bruntingthorpe than Leicester was. “The Three Swans served some very fine bitter, even in wartime.”

“Aye, that’s so. Ah recall now.” Stanegate’s face grew beatific at the memory. “And in the market-you ken, the one by t’old school-you could get a bit o’ butter for your bread, if you knew the right bloke t’ask.”

“Could you?” Goldfarb hadn’t known the right bloke, or even that there was a right bloke. Too late to worry about it now, even if the margarine he’d been spreading on his bread had tasted like something that dripped from the crankcase of a decrepit lorry.

“Aye, y’could.” Fred Stanegate sighed. “Wonder how much of the place is left.” He shook his head gloomily. “Not much, I wager. Not much o’ anything left these days.”

“Pretty country,” Goldfarb said, waving again. Occasional shell holes marred the green meadows and fields or shattered fence gates, but the Lizards hadn’t quite moved up into Market Harborough itself, so it hadn’t been fought over house by house. “Can’t you just see the hounds and riders chasing a fox into those woods there?”

“Ah, weel, Ah always used t’pull for the fox, if tha kens what I mean, whenever the hunt went by my farm.”

“You’re one up on me, then,” Goldfarb said. “The only hunts I’ve ever seen were in the cinema.”

“Looked to me like it’d be a fair bit of a lark, if you had the brass to keep up the hounds and the horses and the kit and all,” Stanegate said. “Me, Ah was getting by on a couple o’ quid a week, so Ah wasn’t about t’go out ridin’ t’the hounds.” He spoke quite without malice or resentment, just reporting on how things had been. After a moment, he grinned. “So here Ah am in the army now, at a deal less than a couple o’ quid a week. Life’s a rum ‘un, ain’t it?”

“Won’t quarrel with you there.” Goldfarb reached up to straighten the tin hat on his head. His right index finger slid toward the trigger of his Sten gun. Houses were growing thicker on the ground as they got into Market Harborough. Even though the Lizards had never been in the town, they’d bombed it and shelled it, and a lot of their bombs and shells sprayed submunitions that stayed around waiting for some unlucky or careless sod to tread on them. Goldfarb did not intend to be careless.

A lot of people who had lived in Market Harborough had fled. A good many others, no doubt, were casualties. That did not mean the place was empty. Far from it: it bulged with refugees from the fighting farther south in the Midlands. Their tents and blankets filled the grassy square around the old grammar school-the place where, before the Lizards invaded England, Fred Stanegate had bought his butter.

Goldfarb had seen his share of refugees the past few weeks. These seemed at first glance no different from the men and women who’d streamed north before them: tired, pale, thin, filthy, many with blank faces and haunted eyes. But some of them were different. Nurses in white (and some ununiformed but for a Red Cross armband on a sleeve) tended to patients with burns like Goldfarb’s but worse, spreading over great stretches of their bodies. Others did what they could for people who wheezed and coughed and tried desperately to get air down into lungs too blistered and burned to receive it.

“Filthy stuff, gas,” Goldfarb said.

“Aye, that it is.” Stanegate nodded vigorously. “My father, he was in France the last war, and he said it were the worst of anything there.”