Upsetting the Balance

“Yes, sir.” With a happy grunt, Gus slipped from his shoulders the heavy pack that contained a field telephone and batteries. He cranked the telephone and spoke into it. After a couple of minutes, he told Szymanski, “They’re on their way.” He closed up the phone pack and, sighing, redonned it.

Mutt scrambled to his feet and walked over toward the bomb. It wasn’t bravado: if the stupid thing went off, it would kill him just as dead in his shelter as out in the open. “Don’t touch it!” Captain Szymanski called sharply.

“Touch it? Captain, I may be a damn fool sometimes, but I ain’t crazy. I just want to look at it-I thought it had my name on it.”

“You and me both,” Szymanski said. “Okay, Mutt, go ahead.”

The bomb looked like a bomb: sheet metal casing painted olive drab, a boxy tail section for aerodynamics. If it hadn’t been for the complicated gadget that replaced a normal twirl fuse, and for the wires that ran back from the gadget to flaps attached to the tail section, he would have taken it for an American weapon, not one the Lizards had made at all.

“Goddamn,” Mutt said quietly after he’d walked all the way around the bomb. “That don’t just look like one of ours, itis one of ours, wearin’ a Lizard vest and spats.” He raised his voice: “Captain, I think maybe you want to take a good close look at this thing your own self.”

Szymanski came; nothing was wrong with the size of his balls. As Mutt had, he walked around the bomb. By the time he’d got back to where he’d started from, he looked as bemused as Daniels did. “That’s a U.S. Army Air Force 500-pounder, either that or I’m Queen of the May. What the hell have the Lizards gone and done to it?”

“Damfino,” Mutt answered. “But you’re right, sir, that’s what it is, all right. Seems to me somebody ought to know about this.” He reached under his helmet to scratch above one ear. “Reckon those bomb disposal people’ll be able to say more about it than we can-if they make it here alive, that is.”

They did. There were four of them, all quiet and unhurried men who didn’t look as if anything got on their nerves, If you were nervous when you started out disposing of bombs, odds were you wouldn’t last long enough to get good at it.

Their leader, a first lieutenant in his middle thirties, nodded when he saw the bomb. “Yeah, we’ve run into a fair number of these,” he said. He’d stuck a toothpick in one corner of his mouth, maybe in lieu of a cigarette. “It’s one of ours, but the fixtures there make it nastier than it used to be.” He pointed to the Lizards’ additions at the nose and tail of the bomb. “Some way or other-don’t quite know how-they can guide these things right into a target. You fellas are lucky to be here.”

“We figured that out, thanks,” Szymanski said dryly. “Can you pull its teeth for us?”

The toothpick waggled. “Sir, if we can’t, you won’t be around to complain about it.” The first lieutenant turned around and studied the bomb. With his back to Mutt and Szymanski, he said, “Now that I think about it, we’ve run into too damn many of these. I used to think the Lizards had raided an arsenal or something, but now my guess is that they’re making bombs for themselves-or having us make ’em for them, I mean.”

“I don’t even like to think about it,” Mutt said. “How can you go to a weapons plant, work all day, know the Lizards are going to use whatever you make to blow up other Americans, and then go home at night and look at yourself in the mirror?”

“Beats me,” the bomb disposal man said. He and his companions stooped beside the bomb and got to work. Their talk reminded Mutt of what you heard in movie operating rooms, except they asked one another for wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers instead of scalpels and forceps and sutures. The real doctors and medics in the aid station he’d just escaped had been a gamier crew; they’d sounded more like ballplayers than anybody’s conventional notion of medical men. On the other hand, if they made a mistake on one of their patients, they wouldn’t blow themselves sky high. That might have a way of concentrating the mind on the job at hand.

One of the men grunted soffly. “Here we go, sir,” he said to the first lieutenant. “The fuse assembly in the nose is fouled up eight ways till Sunday. We could use this one for a football and it still wouldn’t go off.”

The first lieutenant’s sigh was long and heartfelt. “Okay, Donnelly. We’ve seen a fair number of those, too.” He turned back to Mutt and Szymanski. Sweat was pouring down his face. He didn’t seem to notice. “I think maybe the guys who work the bomb factory do a little bit of sabotage when they can get away with it. When the Lizards were using all their own ordnance, they hardly ever had duds.”

“So are they all out of theirs?” Mutt asked.

“Don’t know,” the bomb disposal man answered, with a shrug to dramatize it “If it blows up, who can say who made it?”