Upsetting the Balance

“It shall be done.” Pshing swung an eye turret to one side, evidently reading the words from another screen. “This Churchill demands that we begin evacuating our forces from Britain in no more than two days or face an unspecified type of warfare the Tosevites have not yet employed against us, but one which is asserted to be highly effective and dangerous.”

“If this Churchill uses nuclear arms against us, we shall not spare his capital,” Atvar said. “The island of Britain is so small, a few nuclear weapons would utterly ruin it.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, Churchill specifically denies the weapons he describes are nuclear in nature,” Pshing replied. “They are new, they are deadly. Past that, the British spokesmale declined detailed comment.”

“Having begun the conquest of Britain, we are not going to abandon it on the say-so of a Tosevite,” Atvar said. “You may tell Fzzek to relay that to Churchill. For all we know, the Big Ugly is but running an enormous bluff. We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived. Relay that to Fzzek as well.”

“It shall be done,” Pshing said. The screen holding his image went blank.

Atvar turned back to Kirel. “Sometimes the presumption Tosevites show astonishes me. They treat us as if we were fools. If they have a new weapon, which I doubt, advertising it will produce nothing from us, especially since we’ve seen for ourselves what liars they are.”

“Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said.

Mutt Daniels crouched in ruins, hoping the Lizard bombardment would end soon. “If it don’t end soon, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left of Chicago,” he muttered under his breath.

“What’s that, Lieutenant?” Dracula Szabo asked from the shelter of a shell hole not far away.

Before Mutt could answer, several Lizard shells came in, close enough to slam him down as if he’d been blocking the plate when a runner bowled him over trying to score. He thanked his lucky stars he’d been breathing out rather than in; a blast could rip your lungs to bits and kill you without leaving a mark on your body.

“Come on,” he said, and charged west across the ruined lawn of Poro College toward the rubble that had been shops and apartments on the other side of South Park Way. Szabo followed at his heels.

Somewhere close by, a Lizard opened up with an automatic rifle. Daniels didn’t know whether the bullets were intended for him, and didn’t wait to find out. He threw himself flat, ignoring the bricks and stones on which he landed. Bricks and stones could hurt his bones, but bullets… he shuddered, not caring for the parody on the old rhyme.

Bela Szabo returned five with his BAR. “Ain’t this a hell of a mess?” he called to Mutt.

“You might say that, yeah-you just might,” Mutt answered. Off to the west, some Americans still fought in the Swift and Armour plants; every so often, little spatters of gunfire rang out from that direction. The plants themselves were worse rubble than the Bronzeville wreckage amidst which he crouched. The Lizards had finally pushed around them and driven halfway toward Lake Michigan. That put them and Chicago’s American defenders smack in the middle of Bronzeville, Chicago’s Black Belt. Nobody had any real solid claim to the land between the packing plants and where Mutt now lay.

Dracula jerked a thumb back at what had been, in happier times, Poro College. “What the hell kind of place was that, anyways?” he asked. “I seen pictures of colored women all gussied up scattered along with all the other junk.”

“That there was what they call a beauty college,” said Mutt, who’d seen a sign on the ground. “I guess that’s where you went to learn how to gussy up colored folk, like you said.”

“Not me, Lieutenant,” Dracula said.

“Not me, neither, but somebody,” Mutt answered. Like most white men from Mississippi, he automatically thought of Negroes as ignorant sharecroppers who were fine as long as they kept to their place. Barnstorming against black ballplayers in the winter and endless travels through the north and west, where things worked a little differently, had softened his attitude without destroying it.

That complicated life at the moment, because Bronzeville held, along with Lizard assault troops and American defenders and counterattackers, a fair number of Negro civilians living in cellars and makeshift shelters cobbled together from the wreckage of what had once been fine houses. They were nonpareil scavengers; that they’d stayed alive in the hell Chicago had become proved as much. They found all sorts of goodies-canned food, medicine, sometimes even smokes and booze-for the Army units fighting hereabouts. But not for Mutt: as soon as they heard his drawl, they dummied up. One, more forthright than the rest, said, “Mistuh, we came no’th to git away from that kind o’ talk.”

As if picking the worry from Mutt’s mind, Dracula Szabo said, “Lieutenant, we gotta get some more help from the spooks around here. I mean, I ain’t the worst scrounger ever born-”