Upsetting the Balance

He meant that literally; he drew from a pocket of his battledress an Ordnance Survey map of the area and spread it on the bar so Goldfarb and Stanegate could see. Goldfarb peered at the map with interest; Ordnance Survey cartography, so clear and detailed, always put him in mind of a radar portrait of the ground it pictured. The map seemed to show everything this side of cow tracks in the fields. Brixworth lay along the main road from Market Harborough down to Northampton; Spratton and Scaldwell flanked that road to either side.

Major Smithers said, “We’ll feint at Spratton. The main attack will go in between Brixworth and Scaldwell. If we can roll them out of Northampton, their whole position north of London unravels.” He glanced at the gas masks hanging from the soldiers’ belts. “Canisters in there fresh?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb and Stanegate said together. Goldfarb clicked his tongue between his teeth. The question probably meant another mustard gas bombardment was laid on as part of the attack. After a moment, he asked, “Sir, how do things stand south of London?”

“Not as well, by what I’ve heard.” Smithers made a sour face, as if the admission tasted bad to him. “They put more men-er, more Lizards-into that one, and seized a broader stretch of territory. In spite of the gas, it’s still very much touch and go in the southeast and the south. I’ve heard reports that they’re trying to push round west of London, by way of Maidenhead and such, to link their two forces. Don’t know whether it’s so, but it would be bad for us if it is.”

“Just on account of you’re goin’ good one place, you think it’s the same all around,” Fred Stanegate said. He sighed. “Wish it were so, Ah do.”

Major Smithers folded the map and returned it to the pocket whence it had emerged. “Let’s be off,” he said. Reluctantly, Goldfarb followed him out of the Three Swans.

Not far outside Market Harborough, they passed a battery of 17-pounders bombarding the Lizards farther south. The men serving the three-inch field guns were bare-chested in the summer sun, but wore gas masks. “Gas shells,” Goldfarb said, and took a couple of steps away from the guns. If one of those shells went off by accident, that wouldn’t do much good, but he couldn’t help it.

The 17-pounders barked and bucked, one after another. As soon as they’d fired three shells each, their crews hitched them to the backs of the lorries from which the shells had come and rattled off across the crater-pocked meadow to a new firing position.

They hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred yards when incoming shells tore fresh holes in the greensward where they’d been. Goldfarb dove for a hole. Fred Stanegate, half a step slower, chose the same hole and landed on top of him. “Ow!” he said; Stanegate’s knee dug into his left kidney.

“Sony,” Stanegate grunted. “Blighters are quick to shoot back, aren’t they?”

“Too bloody accurate, too,” Goldfarb answered, wriggling toward greater comfort, or at least less discomfort. “They always have been. I shouldn’t wonder if they don’t slave their guns to radar somehow.” He had no idea how to do such a thing, but it would account for both speed and accuracy in the Lizards’ response.

Fred Stanegate shifted, too, and not in the right direction. “What’s radar?” he asked.

“Never mind. I talk too bloody much, that’s all.” The shells stopped falling. Goldfarb scrambled out of the hole. So did Stanegate. He looked to the radarman curiously. Goldfarb felt himself flushing. He muttered, “Trust me, Fred, you don’t Need to Know.”

Stanegate heard the capital letters. “It’s like that, is it? All right, Ah’ll say nowt further.”

Three clanking, smoking, rumbling monsters clattered south on iron tracks: two Cromwell tanks and a heavy Churchill. The Cromwells were a vast improvement over the Crusaders they supplanted, but not as good as the tanks the Nazis were turning out these days. The Churchill had thick armor, but a weak engine and a popgun 2-pounder for a cannon. Against Lizard armor, either model was woefully inadequate. They were, however, what Britain had, and into the fight they went.

Fred Stanegate waved to the commander of a Cromwell, who was standing up and peering out his hatch to get a better view. The tankman waved back. In his gas mask, he looked as alien as any Lizard. Stanegate said, “An didn’t know we had so many cards left in t’hand.”

“If we don’t play them now, we’ll never get to use them,” Goldfarb said. “They’ll do some good against Lizard infantry, I hope. From all I’ve heard, gas is the only thing that really does much against their tanks, unless somebody climbs on top and tosses a Molotov cocktail down a hatch.”

The farther south they went, the more chewed up the ground became. They passed the hulks of several burned-out British tanks, as well as tin hats hung on rifles stuck bayonet-first into the ground to mark hastily dug graves. Then, not much later, they came on a Lizard tank in the middle of a field.