Upsetting the Balance

The hatchling made a noise astonishingly loud and deep for something its size. It stopped thrashing, a sign its distress was eased. The sour odor that reached Ttomalss’ chemoreceptors said it had indeed spit up some of the nutrient fluid he’d given it. He was glad he’d draped himself with the cloth; not only did the fluid smell bad, it also dissolved his body paint.

He was about to lay the hatchling back on the mat when it made another noise with which he was intimately familiar: a throaty grunt. He felt sudden warmth against the arm under the hatchling’s hindquarters. With a weary, hissing sigh, he carried it over to the cabinet, undid the fastenings that held the cloth round the hatchling’s middle closed, and tossed that cloth into a sealed bin along with several others he’d put there that day.

Before he could put another cloth under the hatchling, it dribbled out a fair quantity of liquid waste to accompany the solid (or at least semisolid) waste it had just passed. He mopped that off the hatchling and off the cabinet top, reminding himself to disinfect the latter. While he was cleaning up, the hatchling almost rolled off the cabinet.

He caught it with a desperate lunge. “You are the most troublesome thing!” he exclaimed. The hatchling squealed and made Tosevite laughing noises. It thought his displays of temper were very funny.

He noticed the skin around its anus and genitals looked red and slightly inflamed. That had happened before; luckily, one of the Race’s topical medications eased the problem. He marveled at an organism whose wastes were toxic to its own integument. His scaly hide certainly never had any such difficulties.

“But then,” he told the hatchling, “I don’t make a habit of smearing waste all over my skin.” The hatchling laughed its loud Tosevite laugh. Fed, deflated, and cleaned, it was happy as could be. Tired, bedraggled Ttomalss wished he could say the same.

Clouds rolled across the sky, more and more of them in bigger and bigger masses as the day wore on. The sun peeked through in ever-shorter blinks. Ludmila Gorbunova cast a wary eye upwards. At any moment the autumn rain would start falling, not only on Pskov but all over the western Soviet Union. With the rains would come mud-the fallrasputitsa. When the mud came, fighting would bog down for a while.

And Pskov still remained in human hands. She knew a certain amount of pride in that, even if some of those hands were German. She’d done her part in the battle to hold up the Lizards, and the alien imperialist aggressors were not pushing attacks with the elan they’d shown the year before. Maybe, when snow replaced rain and mud, the human forces in Pskov (yes, even the fascist beasts) would show them the proper meaning of the word.

The Lizards didn’t like winter. The whole world had seen that the year before. She hoped this winter would bring a repetition of the pattern. She’d already proved aKukuruznik would fly through almost anything. Its radial engine was air-cooled; she didn’t have to fret about coolant turning to ice, as happened in liquid-cooled engines forced to endure Russian winter. As long as she had fuel and oil, she could fly.

With Georg Schultz as her mechanic, she sometimes wondered, not quite jokingly, whether she might not be able to fly even without fuel and oil. The more he worked his magic on the little U-2, the more she wondered how the planes she’d flown had kept from falling apart before they enjoyed his ministrations.

She opened and closed her hands. She had black dirt and grease under her nails and ground into the folds of skin on her knuckles; not even a steam bath could sweat the dirt out of her. She did a lot of work on her own aircraft, too, and knew she made a better mechanic than most Russian groundcrew men. But Schultz had an artist’s touch with spanner and pliers, to say nothing of an instinct for where trouble lay, that made Ludmila wonder if he was part biplane on his mother’s side.

Houses thinned as she walked toward the airstrip just east of Pskov. It lay between the city and the great forest where partisans had sheltered until they and the Germans made uneasy common cause against the Lizards.

If you didn’t know where the airstrip was, you’d walk right past it. The Russian passion formaskirovka made sure of that. The Lizards had repeatedly bombed a dummy strip a couple of kilometers away, but they’d left the real one alone. TheKukuruzniks all rested in shelters covered by netting with real sod laid over them. More sod replaced ruts in the grass the aircraft made on takeoff and landing. No sentries paced nearby, though several marched at the dummy airstrip.

Ludmila reached into her pocket and pulled out a compass. She didn’t trust the one on her instrument panel, and wondered if some idiot groundcrew man had somehow got near it with a magnet. Whether or not that was so, now she’d have one against which to check it.