Upsetting the Balance

“Yes, it is,” she said, the weight of the pistol reassuring in her hand. “Look, if you want to come down here again, move one of the rocks that holds down the netting so it’s just off the edge instead of just on. I had no idea anyone was down with the aircraft, and when I did hear noise, I thought it was wreckers, not-not lovers.”

Somewhat mollified, Schultz nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said, adding gloomily, “if there is a next time.”

“There probably will be.” Ludmila surprised herself at how cynical she sounded. She asked, “Why was Tatiana so upset at the idea of anyone finding out she’s with you? She didn’t care who knew she was sleeping with the Englishman-Jones, his name is.”

“Ja,”Schultz said. “But he’s an Englishman. That’s all right. Me, I’m a German. You may have noticed.”

“Ah,” Ludmila said. It did make sense. The fair Tatiana used her sniping talents against the Lizards these days, but she’d honed them against the Nazis. She made no secret of her continued loathing for Germans in general-but not, evidently, for one German in particular. If word got out, she would be compromised in a whole unpleasant variety of ways. “If she hates Germans so much, what does she see in you?”

“She says we’re both killers.” Georg Schultz shuffled his feet, as if unsure whether he liked the sound of that or not.

As far as Ludmila was concerned, it not only had a lot of truth in it, it also confirmed her earlier guess, which made her feel clever. She said, “Well,Gospodin Killer-you, a German, would be angry if I called youTovarishch Killer, Comrade instead of Mister-I think we had both better go now.”

She was nervous as she got out from under the netting. If Schultz wanted to try anything, that was the moment he’d do it. But he just emerged, too, and looked back toward the place where the U-2 was hidden. “Damnation,” he said. “I thought sure nobody would ever bother us there.”

“You never can tell,” Ludmila said, which would do as a maxim for life in general, not just trying to fornicate with an attractive woman.

“Ja.”Georg Schultz grunted laughter. After the fact, he’d evidently decided what had happened was funny, too. He hadn’t thought so at the time. Nor had Tatiana. Ludmila didn’t think she would find it funny, not if she lived another seventy-five years.

Ludmila glanced over at Schultz out of the corner of her eye. She chuckled softly to herself. Though she’d never say it out loud, her opinion was that he and Tatiana deserved each other.

David Goldfarb sat up in the hay wagon that was taking him north through the English Midlands toward Nottingham. To either side, a couple of other men in tattered, dirty uniforms of RAF blue sprawled in the hay. They were all blissfully asleep, some of them snoring enough to give a creditable impression of a Merlin fighter engine.

Goldfarb wished he could lie back and start sawing wood, too. He’d tried, but sleep eluded him. Besides, looking at countryside that hadn’t been pounded to bits was a pleasant novelty. He hadn’t seen much of that sort, not lately.

The only thing he had in common with his companions was the grubby uniforms they all wore. When the Lizards invaded England, nobody had thought past fighting them by whatever means came to hand. After Bruntingthorpe got smashed up, he’d been made into a foot soldier, and he’d done his best without a word of complaint.

Now that the northern pocket was empty of aliens and the southern one shrinking, though, the Powers That Be were once more beginning to think in terms longer than those of the moment. Whenever officers spied an RAF man who’d been dragooned into the army, they pulled him out and sent him off for reassignment. Thus Goldfarb’s present situation.

Night was coming. As summer passed into autumn, the hours of daylight shrank with dizzying speed. Even Double Summer Time couldn’t disguise that. In the fields, women and old men labored with horses, donkeys, and oxen to bring in the harvest, as they might have during the wars against Napoleon, or against William the Conqueror, or against the Emperor Claudius. People would be hungry now, too, as they had been then.

The wagon rattled past a burnt-out farmhouse, the ground around it cratered with bombs. The war had not ignored the lands north of Leicester, it merely had not been all-consuming here. For a moment, a pile of wreckage made the landscape seem familiar to Goldfarb. He angrily shook his head when he realized that. Finding a landscape familiar because the Lizards had bombed it was like finding a husband familiar because he beat you. Some women were supposed to be downtrodden enough to do just that. He thought it madness himself.

“How long till we get to Watnall?” he called to the driver: softly, so he wouldn’t wake his comrades.