Upsetting the Balance

“Here, give me one of those Sten guns,” Ralph Wiggs said. “If they’re going to shoot us, we may as well shoot back as long as we can.” The middle-aged, one-legged meteorologist sounded a great deal calmer than Goldfarb felt. After the Somme, Wiggs might not have found a mere airborne invasion worth showing excitement over. Roundbush passed him a submachine gun. Wiggs pulled the bolt back, stuck his head up, and started shooting regardless of the bullets still raking the trench. The Somme had been machine-gun hell, hundreds of them firing at the overburdened British troops slogging toward their positions. Next to that, what the Lizards were throwing at Bruntingthorpe had to seem negligible.

If Wiggs could get up and fight, Goldfarb supposed he could also manage it. He peered over the lip of the trench. The helicopters still hovered above the runway, covering the Lizards who skittered along the tarmac, shooting as they ran. Goldfarb blazed away at them. Several of them went down, but whether he’d hit them or they were just taking cover he could not say.

All at once, one of the helicopters turned into a blue-white fireball. Goldfarb whooped like a Red Indian. Antiaircraft guns ringed Bruntingthorpe. Nice to know that, aside from almost shooting down British jet fighters, they could also do some damage to the enemy.

The remaining helicopter whirled in the air and fired more rockets at the ack-ack gun that had brought down its companion. Goldfarb couldn’t imagine anyone living through such a barrage, but the gun kept pounding away. Then the helicopter lurched in the air. Goldfarb screamed louder than he had before. The helicopter did not explode, but did flee, trailing smoke.

Basil Roundbush bounded out of the trench and fired at the Lizards on the ground, who had halted in dismay. “We have to wipe them out now,” he shouted, “before they get their air cover back.”

Goldfarb got up onto the greensward, too, though he felt horribly naked outside the trench. He fired a burst, went down on his belly, wriggled forward, and fired again.

Other men came up and started shooting, too, from their slit trenches, from others, and from the wreckage of the buildings the Lizards had bombed. Ralph Wiggs limped straight toward the Lizards, as if this were 1916 all over again. A bullet caught him. He went down but kept on shooting.

“You hurt badly?” Goldfarb asked.

Wiggs shook his head. “I took one through the knee there, so I can’t walk, but otherwise I’m right as rain.” He fired again.

He didn’t sound like a man who’d just been shot. Goldfarb stared for a moment, then realized the Lizard bullet must have wrecked the knee of Wiggs’ artificial leg. Even out in the open, with precious little cover and bullets whistling all around, he burst out laughing.

“They can’t have more than two squads on the ground,” Roundbush said. “We can take them, I really think we can.”

As if to underline his words, the antiaircraft gun the helicopters hadn’t been able to silence opened up on the Lizard infantry. Using ack-ack as regular artillery was unconventional, although the Germans were supposed to have started doing it as far back as their blitzkrieg through France in 1940. It was also deucedly effective.

Goldfarb scurried forward toward some wreckage strewn over the runway. He got in behind it with a grateful belly flop; any bit of cover was welcome. He poked the barrel of his Sten gun up over the edge of the torn wood and metal and blazed away.

“Hold fire!” somebody yelled from across the runway. “They’re trying to give up.”

One weapon at a time, the insane rattle of small-arms fire died away. Goldfarb ever so cautiously raised his head and peered toward the Lizards. He’d seen them as blips on a radar screen, and briefly in the raid on the prison in Lodz that had freed his cousin, Moishe Russie. Now, as the survivors of the force threw down weapons and raised hands high, he got his first good look at them.

They were only the size of kids. He’d known that intellectually; he’d even seen it for himself. But it hadn’t really registered on an emotional level. The Lizards’ technology was so good that they seemed nine feet tall. Except for size, they didn’t remind him of children. With their forward-slanting posture and scaly skins, they looked something like dinosaurs, but their helmets and armored jackets gave them a martial air-probably a better martial air than he had himself right now, he thought, glancing down at his grimy RAF uniform.

Basil Roundbush tramped up beside him. “By Jove, we did it,” he said.

“So we did.” Goldfarb knew he sounded surprised, but couldn’t help it. He was surprised to be alive, much less victorious. Musingly, he went on, “I wonder if one of those bulletproof waistcoats would fit me.”