Tilting the Balance

The tank and the Lizard infantry screening it slowly advanced together. The aliens had learned something since the winter before; they’d lost a lot of tanks then for lack of infantry support. Not any more.

Lucille Potter peered over the forward lip of the foxhole beside Mutt. “That’s trouble, ” she said. He nodded. It was big trouble. If he ran, the tank’s machine gun or the Lizard foot soldiers would pick him off. If he stayed, the tank would penetrate the position and then the Lizard infantry would get him.

Off to the right, somebody fired one of those new bazooka rockets at the Lizard tank. The rocket hit the tank right in the turret, but it didn’t penetrate. “Damn fool, ” Mutt ground out. Doctrine said you were supposed to shoot a bazooka only at the rear or sides of a Lizard tank; the frontal armor on the aliens’ machines was just too thick for you to kill one with a straight-on shot.

Being too eager cost the fellow who’d fired at the tank. It turned toward him and his buddies and opened up first with its machine gun and then its main armament. For good measure, the Lizard infantry moved in on the bazooka man, too-their job was to make sure nobody got a good shot at the armored fighting vehicle. By the time they were done, there probably wasn’t enough of the American and his buddies left to bury.

Which meant they forgot about Mutt. For a second, he didn’t think that would do him any good: if the line was overrun, he would be, too, in short order. Ever so cautiously, he raised his head again. There sat the tank, maybe a hundred feet away, ass end on to him, still pouring fire at a target more necessary to destroy than he was.

He ducked back down, turned to Lucille Potter. “Gimme that ether, ” he snapped.

“What? Why? ” She took a protective grip on the black bag. “The-stuff’ll burn, won’t it? ” His pa’s hard hand on his backside and across his face had taught him never to swear where a woman could hear, but he almost slipped that time. “Now gimme it! ”

Lucille’s eyes widened. She opened the bag, handed him the glass jar. It was about half full of a clear, oily-looking liquid. He hefted it thoughtfully. Yeah, it would throw just fine. His bat had kept him from having a decent big-league career; nobody’d ever complained about his arm. He’d been a good man with a grenade in France, too.

It wasn’t even as if he had to throw all of a sudden, as he would have with a runner breaking for second. He could take a few moments, think through what he was going to do, see every step of it in his mind before it actually happened.

Doing that took longer than the throw itself. He popped up as if exploding out of his crouch behind a batter, fired the jar for all he was worth, and ducked back down again. Nobody who wasn’t looking right at him would have known he’d appeared.

“Did you hit it? ” Lucille demanded.

“Miss Lucille, I tell you for a fact, I didn’t stay up long enough to find out. I tried to smash it off the back of the turret so it’d drip down into that nice, hot engine compartment. ” Mutt’s shoulder twinged; he hadn’t put that much into a snap throw in years. It had felt straight, but you never could tell. A little long, a little short, and he might as well not have bothered.

Then he heard hoarse yells from the Americans in other scattered foxholes. That encouraged him to take another cautious peek. When he did, he yelled himself, in sheer delight. Flames danced all over the engine compartment and were licking up the back of the turret. As he watched, an escape hatch popped open and a Lizard jumped onto the ground.

Mutt ducked down for his tommy gun. “Miss Lucille, that there is one Lizard tank that’s out stealing. ”

She pounded him on the back as any other soldier would have. He wouldn’t have tried to kiss another soldier, though. She let him do it, but she didn’t do much in the way of kissing back. He didn’t worry about that; he popped up out of the foxhole and started blazing away at the fleeing Lizard tank crew and the foot soldiers, who were much less terrifying without armor to back them up.

The Lizards fell back. The tank kept burning. A Sherman would have brewed up a hell of a lot faster than it did, but eventually its ammunition and its fuel tank went up in a spectacular blast.

Mutt felt as if he’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer. “Lord! ” he exclaimed. “You couldn’t make a fancier explosion in the movies. ”

“No, probably not, ” Lucille Potter agreed, “nor one that did more for us. We’ll hold Randolph a while longer now, I expect. That was a wonderful throw; I’ve never seen a better one. You must have been a very fine baseball player. ”

“You don’t make the majors unless you’re pretty fair, ” he said, shrugging. “You don’t stick there unless you’re better’n that, and I wasn’t. ” He brushed a hand across the front of his shirt, as if he’d been a pitcher shaking off a sign rather than a catcher; baseball wasn’t what he wanted to talk about at the moment. After a couple of tentative coughs, he said, “Miss Lucille, I hope you don’t think I was too forward there. ”

“When you kissed me, you mean? I didn’t mind, ” she said, but not in a way that encouraged him to try it again; by her tone, once had been okay but twice wouldn’t be. He kicked at the churned-up dirt inside the foxhole. Lucille added, “I’m not interested, Mutt, not that way. It’s not you-you’re a good man. But I’m just not. ”

“Okay, ” he said; he was too old to let his pecker do his thinking for him. But that didn’t mean he’d forgotten he had one. He pushed up his helmet so he could scratch his head above one ear. “If you like me, why-” He broke off there. If she didn’t want to talk about it, that was her business.

For the first time since he’d met her, he found her at a loss for words. She frowned, obviously not caring for that herself. Slowly, she said, “Mutt, it’s not something I can easily explain, or care to. I-”

Easily or not, she didn’t get the chance to explain. Following a cry of “Miss Lucille! ” a soldier from another squad in the platoon came scrambling over to the foxhole and gasped out, “Miss Lucille, we’ve got two men down, one hit in the shoulder, the other in the chest. Peters-the guy with the chest wound-he’s in bad shape. ”

“I’m coming, ” she said briskly, and climbed out of the hole she’d shared with Mutt. As she hurried away, he scratched his head again.