Upsetting the Balance

As promised, the hail of bullets stopped. By the noises in the trees, more Lizards were moving up on the side opposite the one from which the shooting had come. A helicopter thrummed overhead, sometimes visible through the leafy forest canopy, sometimes not.

Anielewicz weighed the odds. The Lizards didn’t know who he was. That counted for a great deal-what they didn’t know he knew, they couldn’t squeeze out of him. Wearily, he set down his Mauser and got to his feet, arms high over his head.

Five or ten meters behind him, Friedrich was doing the same thing. The German managed a wry grin. “Maybe we’ll get away, eh?”

“That would be good,” Anielewicz agreed. He’d managed to arrange it for other people (he wondered how Moishe Russie was getting along these days), and he’d managed to slip out of Warsaw right under the Lizards’ snouts. Whether he could get out of a prison camp once he was inside it was another question, though.

And it was going to be one he’d have to answer. Several Lizards, all of them with automatic rifles at the ready, approached him and Friedrich. He stood very still, not wanting to spook them and get himself shot. One of the Lizards gestured sharply with the barrel of his gun-this way.“Go!” he said in barely understandable Polish. Anielewicz and Friedrich shambled into captivity.

Rance Auerbach and his troopers rode into Lamar, Colorado, after another hit-and-run raid into Lizard-held Kansas. A couple of horses had bodies tied across their backs; nothing came easy when you fought the Lizards. But the company had done what it set out to do.

Auerbach turned to Bill Magruder. “Old Joe Selig won’t play footsie with the Lizards any more.”

“Sir, that’s a fact, and a good thing, too,” Magruder answered. His face was soot-grimy; he’d been one of the band that had torched Selig’s barn. The rest of the company had burned Selig’s farmhouse, and Selig inside it. Magruder leaned down and spat right in the middle of Main Street. “Goddamn collaborator. I never thought we’d see bastards like that, not in the United States.”

“Me, neither,” Auerbach said glumly. “Just goes to show there’s some bastards everywhere, I guess. Hate to say it-hate to see it, by God-but I reckon it’s true.”

Near the railroad station, right where Main Street crossed the Santa Fe tracks, stood the Madonna of the Trail monument, dedicated to all the pioneer mothers. Too bad some of those pioneer mothers had snakes in the grass for grandchildren.

A pigeon flew overhead, making a beeline for the county courthouse. Auerbach spotted the little aluminum tube fastened to its left leg. Spying it took some of the bitter taste out of his mouth. “I’d like to see the Lizards figure out a way to jam that,” he said.

Magruder hadn’t noticed the bird, but he figured out what the captain had to be talking about. “Homing pigeon, was it?” he said. At Auerbach’s nod, he went on, “Yeah, as long as we stick to the nineteenth century, the Lizards don’t have a clue about what we’re doing. Only trouble is, when we get up to the here and now, we get licked.”

“Isn’t it the truth?” Auerbach said ruefully. “And if we have the nineteenth-century stuff and they have the twentieth and the Buck Rogers gadgets, too, we’re going to keep right on getting licked unless we’re a damn sight smarter than we’ve been so far.” The beginning of an idea flickered across his mind, but was gone before he could capture it.

Before the war, Lamar had been a medium-sized town: four thousand people, maybe a few more. Unlike a lot of places, it was bigger now. A lot of the original inhabitants were dead or fled, but soldiers made up for a good many of them because it was an important forward base against the Lizards. And, because it remained firmly in American hands, it was a magnet for refugees from farther east.

Army headquarters was in the First National Bank building, not far from the courthouse (not that Lamar was a big enough town for anything to be real far from anything else). Auerbach dismissed his troopers to see to their horses, then went in to report.

Colonel Morton Nordenskold, the local commander, heard him out and made encouraging noises. “Well done,” he said. “Traitors need to know they’ll pay for treason.” Nordenskold had to be from somewhere in the upper Midwest; his voice held a trace of singsong Scandinavian intonation.

“Yes, sir.” Auerbach felt his own Texas drawl coming out more strongly in reaction to that very northern accent. “What are your orders for the company now, sir?”

“As usual,” Nordenskold answered: “Observe, patrol, raid. Given what we have, what else can we do?”

“Nothing much I can see, sir,” Auerbach said. “Uh, sir, what do we do if the Lizards push west with armor, the way they did last summer to get into Kansas? I’m proud to be a cavalryman-don’t get me wrong-but you go with horses against tanks once and you won’t do it again with the same horses. Probably not with the same men, either.”