Upsetting the Balance

His discontent deepened when his panzer finally reached its new assigned position. The village just outside of Breslau that was the linchpin of the new German line might have held fifty people before the war. It was on flat ground and, as far as he could see, had no special reason for existing. Some rolls of barbed wire strung across the landscape and a few trenches for infantrymen didn’t constitute a line of defense as far as he was concerned, no matter how imposing the wire and trenches might seem on a map in a warm room out of the range of the guns.

His driver thought the same thing. “Sir, they made us pull back tothis?” he said in incredulous dismay.

“Johannes, believe you me, I wouldn’t have given you the order on my own,” Jager answered.

Somebody had at least some small sense of how to defend a position. A soldier in a white parka over black panzer coveralls directed the Panther to a barn with a doorway that pointed east: a good firing position if the Lizards broke out of Oels and stormed toward Breslau. A couple of hundred meters farther west lay a stone farmhouse behind which he could retreat after firing, and which would do for a second position. But if the Lizards broke out of Oels, nothing here, at least, was going to stop them from breaking into Breslau.

To give the artillery its due, it was trying to make sure the Lizards didn’t break out of Oels. Just west of the town, the ground jerked and quivered and shook like a live thing. Every gun the Germans had around Breslau must have been pounding that stretch of terrain. Jager hadn’t seen such a bombardment since his days in the trenches in World War I.

He didn’t see any shells fallingin Oels, though. TheWehrmacht had conceded the town to the Lizards, and for the life of him he didn’t understand why. They could consolidate there at their leisure for the next big push. They were taking advantage of everything the Germans gave them, too. Through field glasses, he watched panzers and lorries coming into Oels and gathering east of the town.

“What the hell’s going on?” Gunther Grillparzer demanded, out and out anger in his voice. “Why aren’t we throwing gas into Oels? The wind’s blowing in the right direction-straight out of the west. We’ve got a wonderful target there, and we’re ignoring it I’ve seen the high mucky-mucks do some really stupid things, but this takes the cake.”

Jager should have pounced on that open profession of heresy, but he didn’t. He couldn’t He felt the same way himself. He peered through the field glasses for another thirty seconds or so, then lowered them with a grunt of disgust. He’d risked his neck to throw nerve gas at the gas-mask factory in Albi. Why the devil wasn’t the artillery heaving it toward the Lizards now?

“Tear me off a chunk of that bread, will you, Gunther?” he said. When the gunner handed him a piece of the brown loaf, he dug out a tinfoil tube of meat paste and squeezed a blob onto the bread. Just because your commanders belonged in an institution for the feebleminded was no reason to starve. Die, yes; starve, no.

He was looking down at the bread and meat when the gloomy interior of the barn suddenly filled with a light as bright as-brighter than-day.

Johannes, the driver, let out a cry in his earphones: “My eyes!”

Jager looked up, just for an instant, then lowered his gaze once more. Like the sun, the fireball in what had been Oels was too brilliant to look at. The light that filled the barn went from white to yellow to orange to red, slowly fading as it did so. When Jager looked up again, he saw a great fiery pillar ascending toward the heavens, coloring the clouds red as blood.

The ground shook under the treads of the Panther. A wind tore briefly at the barn doors, then subsided. Stuck inside the turret, Grillparzer demanded, “What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know,” Jager said, and then, a moment later, “My God!” He knew what an explosive-metal bomb had done to Berlin; he’d heard about what had happened to Washington and Tokyo and south of Moscow. But knowing what such a bomb could do and seeing the bomb do it-the difference between those two was like the difference between reading a love poem and losing your virginity.

“They really did it,” he breathed in amazement.

“Who really did what, sir?” the panzer gunner asked indignantly.

“The physicists at-oh, never mind where, Gunther,” Jager answered; even in the midst of such awe as he’d not felt in church for years, he did not forget his worship of the great god Security. “The point is, we’ve just given the Lizards what they gave Berlin.”

The panzer crew shouted like men possessed. Jager joined the exultation, but more quietly. That sense of awe still filled him. Some of the explosive metal was what he’d snatched, Prometheus-like, from the Lizards. It was seldom given to a colonel of panzers to feel he’d personally turned the course of history. Jager had that feeling now. In an odd way, it seemed larger than he was.