Upsetting the Balance

Daniels laughed. “Back when I first started playin’ bush-league ball-this woulda been 1904, 1905, somethin’ like that-I had me this ugly little puppy I’d take on the train with me. You take one look at it, only thing you want to say is, ‘What a mutt.’ That’s what everybody said. Pretty soon they were sayin’ it about me instead of the dog, so I been Mutt now goin’ on forty years. If it wasn’t that, I figure they’d’ve called me somethin’ worse. Ballplayers, they’re like that.”

“Oh.” Szymanski shrugged. “Okay. I just wondered.” He’d probably figured there was a fancier story behind it.

“Sir, are we ever gonna be able to hold the Lizards around these parts?” Mutt asked. “Now that they done broke through to the lake-”

“Yeah, things are tough,” the captain said, as profound a statement of the obvious as Daniels had ever heard. “But they don’t have all of Chicago, not by a long shot. This is still the South Side. And if they want all of it, they’re going to have to pay the price. By the time they’re done here, they’ll have paid more than it’s worth.”

“Lord, I hope so,” Daniels said. “We’ve sure paid a hell of a price fightin’ ’em.”

“I know.” Szymanski’s face clouded. “My brother never came out of one of those meat-packing plants, not so far as I know, anyhow. But the idea is that the more they pour down the rathole here, the less they have to play with someplace else.”

“I understand that, sir. But whenyou’re at the bottom of the rathole and they keep pourin’ all that stuff down on top of you, it wears thin after a while, it really does.”

“You can sing that in church,” Szymanski said. “Eventually, though, they’re supposed to run out of stuff, and we’re still making more. The more we make ’em use, the faster that’ll happen.”

Mutt didn’t answer. He’d heard that song a lot of times before. Sometimes he even believed it: the Lizards did have a way of playing it close to the vest now and again, as if they were short of soldiers and ammunition. But you’d end up dead if you counted on them doing that all the time, or even any one time.

Szymanski went on, “Besides, if they’re still stuck in downtown Shytown when winter comes around again, we’ll give ’em a good kick in the ass, same way we did last year.”

“That’d be pretty fine,” Mutt said agreeably. “They don’t like cold weather, and that’s a fact. Course, now that you get right down to it, I don’t much like cold weather, neither. But what worries me is, the Lizards, they’re peculiar, but they ain’t stupid. You can fool ’em once, but you try foolin’ the same bunch again the same way and they’ll hand you your head.”

Captain Szymanski clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You may have something there. I’ll pass it on to Colonel Karl next time I talk with him, see if he wants to bump it up the line. Meanwhile, though-”

“We gotta stay alive. Yeah, I know.”

The Lizards weren’t going to make that easy, not if they could help it. Their artillery opened up; shells landed just west of the Chicago Coliseum. Chunks of masonry crashed down. Mutt huddled in his rubble shelter. So did his comrades. When the shelling slowed, they came out and dragged newly fallen boards and pieces of sheet metal back to their positions, strengthening them.

Mutt liked that. It meant he had a good bunch of veterans in his new platoon. He wondered how his old gang of thugs was getting on without him. He’d miss Dracula Szabo; he’d never known anybody else with such a nose for plunder. Somebody here would have a talent for scrounging, though. Somebody always did.

A Lizard jet shrieked past, not far above the Coliseum’s battered roof. A bomb hit just outside the building. The noise was like the end of the world. For anybody out there, it was the end of the world. More of the nineteenth-century facade crumbled and fell into the street.

Another bomb crashed through the roof and thudded down onto the bricks and boards and broken chairs strewn below. It landed maybe twenty feet from Mutt. He saw it fall. He buried his head against the rough wall of his shelter, knowing it would do no good.

But the explosion that would have thrown and torn and smashed him did not come. The Lizard plane dropped a couple of more bombs a little north of the Chicago Coliseum, close enough to make it shake, but the one inside lay inert where it had fallen.

“Dud!” Mutt shouted in glad relief, and sucked in as wonderful a breath of air as he’d ever enjoyed, even if it did smell like a cross between an outhouse and a forest fire. Then he realized that wasn’t the only possible explanation. “Or else a time bomb,” he added, his voice more subdued.

Captain Szymanski spoke to the company communications man: “Gus, call back to division headquarters. Tell ’em we need a bomb disposal unit fast as they can shag ass up here.”