Upsetting the Balance

“I am to propose that this time of not shooting will last for one tenth of a day of Tosev 3,” Wuppah said.

“I’m authorized to agree to anything up to three hours,” Daniels answered.

They looked at each other in some confusion. “How many of these ‘hours’ have you in your day?” Wuppah asked. “Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-four,” Mutt answered. Everybody knew that-everybody human, anyhow, which left Wuppah out.

The Lizard made hissing and popping noises. “This three hours is an eighth part of the day,” he said. “It is acceptable to us that this be so: my superiors have given me so much discretion. For an eighth part of a day we and you will do no shooting in this big and ruined building, but will recover our hurt males and take them back inside our lines. By the Emperor I swear the Race will keep these terms.” He looked down at the ground with both eyes when he said that.

Truces with theBoches hadn’t required anybody to do any swearing, but the Germans and Americans had had a lot more in common than the Lizards and Americans did. “We’ll keep ’em, too, so help me God,” he said formally.

“It is agreed, then,” Wuppah said. He drew himself up straight again, though the rounded crown of his head didn’t even come up to Mutt’s Adam’s apple. “I have dealt with you as I would with a male of the Race.”

That sounded as if it was meant to be a compliment. Mutt decided to take it as one. “I’ve treated you like a human being, too, Wuppah,” he said, and impulsively stuck out his right hand.

Wuppah took it. His grip was warm, almost hot, and, though his hand was small and bony, surprisingly strong. As they broke the clasp, the Lizard asked, “You have been injured in your hand?”

Mutt looked down at the member in question. He’d forgotten how battered and gnarled it was: a catcher’s meat hand took a lot of abuse from foul tips and other mischances of the game. How many split fingers, dislocated fingers, broken fingers had he had? More than he could remember. Wuppah was still waiting for an answer. Daniels said, “A long time ago, before you folks got here.”

“Ah,” the Lizard said, “I go to tell my superiors the truce is made.”

“Okay.” Mutt turned and shouted, “Three-hour ceasefire! No shootin’ till”-he glanced at his watch-“quarter of five.”

Warily, men and Lizards emerged from cover and went through the ruins, sometimes guided by the cries of their wounded, sometimes just searching through wreckage to see if soldiers lay unconscious behind or beneath it. Searchers from both sides still carried their weapons; one gunshot would have turned the Swift plant back into a slaughterhouse. But the shot did not come.

The terms of the truce forbade either side from moving troops forward. Mutt had every intention of abiding by that: if you broke the terms of an agreement, you’d have-and you’d deserve to have-a devil of a time getting another one. All the same, he carefully noted the hiding places from which the Lizards came. If Wuppah wasn’t doing the same with the Americans, he was dumber than Mutt figured.

Here and there, Lizards and Americans who came across one another in their searches cautiously fraternized. Some officers would have stopped it Mutt had grown up listening to his grandfathers’ stories of swapping tobacco for coffee during the War Between the States. He kept an eye on things, but didn’t speak up.

He was anything but surprised to see Dracula Szabo head-to-head with a couple of Lizards. Dracula was grinning as he came back to the American lines. “What you got?” Mutt asked.

“Don’t quite know, Lieutenant,” Szabo answered, “but the brass is always after us to bring in Lizard gadgets, and the scaly boys, they traded me some.”

He showed them to Mutt, who didn’t know what they were good for, either. But maybe some of the boys with the thick glasses would, or could find out. “What did you give for ’em?”

Dracula’s smile was somewhere between mysterious and predatory. “Ginger snaps.”

A blast of chatter greeted David Goldfarb when he walked into A Friend In Need. The air in the pub was thick with smoke. The only trouble was, it all came from the fireplace, not from cigarettes and pipes. Goldfarb couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a smoke.

He worked his way toward the bar. A Friend In Need was full of dark blue RAF uniforms, most of them with officers’ braid on the cuffs of their jacket sleeves. Just a radarman himself, Goldfarb had to be circumspect in his quest for bitter.

If it hadn’t been for the RAF uniforms, A Friend In Need couldn’t have stayed in business. Bruntingthorpe was a tiny village a few miles south of Leicester a greengrocer’s shop, a chemist’s, a few houses, the pub, and damn little else. But the RAF experimental station just outside the place brought hundreds of thirsty men almost to the door of A Friend In Need. The place not only survived, it flourished.

“Goldfarb!” somebody bawled in a loud, beery voice.