Upsetting the Balance

“But after I do that, I’ll get even with all the people who fouled me up, too,” he said softly. “You just bet I will.” He got up from the streamside rock he’d been sitting on, walked over to the bicycle, climbed aboard, and started rolling north again.

Ludmila Gorbunova had seen more bomb craters, from closer range, than she’d ever imagined before the war began. But she’d never seen, never dreamt of, a crater like the one over which her little U-2 biplane skimmed now.

The burned area was most of a kilometer across, maybe more than a kilometer. The ground near the center had been baked into something that looked like glass, and gave back dazzling reflections of the sun. Well beyond that, trees, houses-essentially everything-had been knocked flat. It was as if God had decided to step on the land a few kilometers northeast of Kaluga.

Ludmila did not believe in God, not in the top part of her mind. She was a child of the Revolution, born in Kiev in the midst of civil war. But sometimes, in moments of stress, reactionary patterns of speech and thought emerged.

“We’ve not yet built true socialism,” she reminded herself. “Even with the German invasion, the generation born after the war might have lived to see it. Now-”

The air blowing in over the windscreen flung her words away. Having confessed her imperfection, if only to herself, she was willing to admit that stopping the Lizards’ drive on Moscow had taken something that looked very much like divine intervention.

She’d been flying back from a harassment mission against the Lizards when the bomb went off. Then she’d thought at first that the Lizards were visiting on the Soviet Union the same kind of destruction they’d meted out to Berlin and Washington. Only gradually had she realized her own country had matched the invaders at their murderous game.

TheKukuruznik — Wheatcutter-buzzed over the hulks of three Lizard tanks. Their guns slumped limply, as if they’d been made not of steel but of wax and left too close to the fire. Measuring the revenge the Soviet Union had finally taken on its tormentors filled her with fierce joy.

She fired a burst from her machine guns at the dead tanks, just to mark her own hatred. The recoil made her aircraft shudder for a moment. The U-2 had been a trainer before the war, but proved an excellent raider against the Germans and then against the Lizards. It was quiet-the Germans had dubbed it the Flying Sewing Machine-and flew at treetop height and below. Speed wasn’t everything.

“I’m still alive,” she remarked. Again, the slipstream blew her words away, but not the truth in them. The Lizards hacked higher-performance Red Air Force planes out of the sky as if they knew they were coming-no, notas if, for Intelligence was sure theydid know, with help from electronics of the kind that the Soviet Union was just beginning to acquire. The U-2, though, was small enough-maybe slow enough, too-to escape their notice.

Ludmila patted the fabric skin of the plane’s fuselage. She’d been in theOsoaviakhim, the Soviet pilot training organization, before the war. When she joined the Red Air Force after getting out of Kiev just before the Germans took it, she’d wanted to fly bombers or real fighters. Getting assigned toa Kukuruznik squadron had seemed a letdown: she’d flown in U-2s to learn to handle other, more deadly, aircraft.

Time changed her perspective, as time has a way of doing. She patted the U-2’s fabric skin again. It kept flying, kept fighting, no matter what. “Good old mule,” she said.

As she neared Kaluga, she grew alert once more. The Lizards still held the town, though they hadn’t tried to push north from it since the bomb went off. She knew only too well that she hadn’t been invulnerable till now, just lucky-and careful. If you stopped being careful, you wouldn’t stay lucky.

Far off in the distance, she spotted a couple of Lizard trucks stopped right out in the open by a haystack. Maybe one of them had broken down, and the other paused to help. Any which way, they made a tempting target. Her thumb slid to the firing button for the U-2’s machine guns.

A moment later, she used stick and pedals to twist the little biplane away from the trucks in as tight a turn as she could manage. That haystack didn’t have quite the right shape to be sitting in a Russian field-but it was just the right shape to serve asmaskirovka for one of the Lizards’ antiaircraft tanks.

She headed back toward the airstrip from which she’d taken off. If anything, dignifying the place with that description was flattery: it was just a stretch of field with underground shelters for the pilots and groundcrew, and with barley-draped camouflage nets to cover up the planes. A few hundred meters away, a false strip with dummy aircraft, tents, and occasional radio signals was much more prominent. The Lizards had bombed it several times. Sovietmaskirovka really worked.