Upsetting the Balance

“Looking at this, I’d say he was right.” That England had resorted to poison gas in the fight against the Lizards bothered Goldfarb, and not just because he’d had the bad luck to get hurt by it. His cousin Moishe Russie had talked about the camps the Nazis had built in Poland for gassing Jews. How anyone could reckon gas a legitimate weapon of war after that was beyond Goldfarb.

But Fred Stanegate said, “If it shifts the bloody Lizards, Ah don’t care how filthy it is. Manure’s filthy, too, but you need it for your garden.”

“That’s so,” Goldfarb admitted. And itwas so. If you were invaded, you did whatever you could to beat back the invaders, and worried about consequences later. If you lost to the Lizards now, you lost forever and you never had the chance to worry about being moral again. Wouldn’t that make gas legitimate? Churchill had thought so. Goldfarb sighed. “Like you said, it’s a rum world.”

Fred Stanegate pointed. “Isna that the Three Swans there?”

“That used to be the Three Swans, looks more like to me,” Goldfarb answered. The inn had boasted a splendid eighteenth-century wrought-iron sign. Now a couple of finger-length chunks of twisted iron lay in the gutter. A shell hit had enlarged the doorway and blown glass out of the windows. “Bloody shame.”

“They’re not dead yet, seems to me,” Stanegate said. Maybe he was right, too. The building hadn’t been abandoned; somebody’d hung blankets over the doorway. And, as Goldfarb watched, a man in a publican’s leather apron slipped out between two of those blankets and looked around in wonder at what Market Harborough had become.

Spying Goldfarb’s and Stanegate’s draggled uniforms, he waved to the two military men. “Come in and have a pint on me, lads.”

They looked at each other. They were on duty, but a pint was a pint. “Let me buy you one, then, for your kindness,” Goldfarb answered. The innkeeper did not say no, but beckoned them into the Three Swans.

The fire crackling in the hearth was welcome. The innkeeper drew three pints with professional artistry. “Half a crown for mine,” he said. Given what England was enduring, it was a mild price. Goldfarb dug in his pockets, found two shillings. He was still rummaging for a sixpence when Fred slapped one on the bar.

Goldfarb leered at him. “Pitching in on the cheap, are you?”

“That Ah am.” Stanegate sipped his beer. One blond eyebrow rose. So did his mug, in salute to the publican. “Better nor I looked for. Your own brewing?”

“Has to be,” the fellow said with a nod. “Couldn’t get delivery even before the bloody Lizards crashed in on us, and now-Well, you’ll know more about now than I do.”

A good number of tavern keepers were brewing their own beer these days, for just the reasons this one had named. Goldfarb had sampled several of their efforts. Some were ambrosial; some were horse piss. This one… He thoughtfully smacked his lips. Fred Stanegate’s “Better nor I looked for” seemed fair.

Someone pushed his way between the blankets that curtained off the Three Swans. Goldfarb’s gulp had nothing to do with beer: it was Major Smithers, the officer who’d let him embark on his infantry career.

Smithers was a short, chunky man who probably would have run to fat had he been better fed. He ran a hand through thinning sandy hair. His forward-thrusting, beaky face was usually red. Goldfarb looked for it to get redder on his discovering two of his troopers in a public house.

But Smithers had adaptability. Without it, he would have taken Goldfarb’s RAF uniform more seriously. Now he just said, “One for me as well, my good man,” to the innkeeper. To Goldfarb and Stanegate, he added, “Drink up quick, lads. We’re moving forward.”

David Goldfarb downed his pint in three long swallows and set it on the cigarette-scarred wood of the bar, relieved not to be placed on report. Stanegate finished his at a more leisurely pace, but emptied it ahead of Major Smithers even so. He said, “Moving forward. By gaw, Ah like the sound o’ that.”

“On to Northampton,” Smithers said in tones of satisfaction. He sucked foam from his mustache. “That won’t be an easy push; the Lizards are there in force, protecting their perimeter, and they have outposts north of town-their line runs through Spratton and Brixworth and Scaldwell.” He swallowed the last of his pint, did that foam-sucking trick again, and shook his head. “Just a pack of bloody little villages nobody’d ever heard of except the people who lived in ’em. Well, they’re on the map now, by God.”