Page 47 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

Daniels laughed. “Back when I first started playin’ bush-league ball-this woulda been 1904, 1905, somethin’ like that-I had me this ugly little puppy I’d take on the train with me. You take one look at it, only thing you want to say is, ‘What a mutt.’ That’s what everybody said. Pretty soon they were sayin’ it about me instead of the dog, so I been Mutt now goin’ on forty years. If it wasn’t that, I figure they’d’ve called me somethin’ worse. Ballplayers, they’re like that.”

“Oh.” Szymanski shrugged. “Okay. I just wondered.” He’d probably figured there was a fancier story behind it.

“Sir, are we ever gonna be able to hold the Lizards around these parts?” Mutt asked. “Now that they done broke through to the lake-”

“Yeah, things are tough,” the captain said, as profound a statement of the obvious as Daniels had ever heard. “But they don’t have all of Chicago, not by a long shot. This is still the South Side. And if they want all of it, they’re going to have to pay the price. By the time they’re done here, they’ll have paid more than it’s worth.”

“Lord, I hope so,” Daniels said. “We’ve sure paid a hell of a price fightin’ ’em.”

“I know.” Szymanski’s face clouded. “My brother never came out of one of those meat-packing plants, not so far as I know, anyhow. But the idea is that the more they pour down the rathole here, the less they have to play with someplace else.”

“I understand that, sir. But whenyou’re at the bottom of the rathole and they keep pourin’ all that stuff down on top of you, it wears thin after a while, it really does.”

“You can sing that in church,” Szymanski said. “Eventually, though, they’re supposed to run out of stuff, and we’re still making more. The more we make ’em use, the faster that’ll happen.”

Mutt didn’t answer. He’d heard that song a lot of times before. Sometimes he even believed it: the Lizards did have a way of playing it close to the vest now and again, as if they were short of soldiers and ammunition. But you’d end up dead if you counted on them doing that all the time, or even any one time.

Szymanski went on, “Besides, if they’re still stuck in downtown Shytown when winter comes around again, we’ll give ’em a good kick in the ass, same way we did last year.”

“That’d be pretty fine,” Mutt said agreeably. “They don’t like cold weather, and that’s a fact. Course, now that you get right down to it, I don’t much like cold weather, neither. But what worries me is, the Lizards, they’re peculiar, but they ain’t stupid. You can fool ’em once, but you try foolin’ the same bunch again the same way and they’ll hand you your head.”

Captain Szymanski clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You may have something there. I’ll pass it on to Colonel Karl next time I talk with him, see if he wants to bump it up the line. Meanwhile, though-”

“We gotta stay alive. Yeah, I know.”

The Lizards weren’t going to make that easy, not if they could help it. Their artillery opened up; shells landed just west of the Chicago Coliseum. Chunks of masonry crashed down. Mutt huddled in his rubble shelter. So did his comrades. When the shelling slowed, they came out and dragged newly fallen boards and pieces of sheet metal back to their positions, strengthening them.

Mutt liked that. It meant he had a good bunch of veterans in his new platoon. He wondered how his old gang of thugs was getting on without him. He’d miss Dracula Szabo; he’d never known anybody else with such a nose for plunder. Somebody here would have a talent for scrounging, though. Somebody always did.

A Lizard jet shrieked past, not far above the Coliseum’s battered roof. A bomb hit just outside the building. The noise was like the end of the world. For anybody out there, it was the end of the world. More of the nineteenth-century facade crumbled and fell into the street.

Another bomb crashed through the roof and thudded down onto the bricks and boards and broken chairs strewn below. It landed maybe twenty feet from Mutt. He saw it fall. He buried his head against the rough wall of his shelter, knowing it would do no good.

But the explosion that would have thrown and torn and smashed him did not come. The Lizard plane dropped a couple of more bombs a little north of the Chicago Coliseum, close enough to make it shake, but the one inside lay inert where it had fallen.

“Dud!” Mutt shouted in glad relief, and sucked in as wonderful a breath of air as he’d ever enjoyed, even if it did smell like a cross between an outhouse and a forest fire. Then he realized that wasn’t the only possible explanation. “Or else a time bomb,” he added, his voice more subdued.

Captain Szymanski spoke to the company communications man: “Gus, call back to division headquarters. Tell ’em we need a bomb disposal unit fast as they can shag ass up here.”

“Yes, sir.” With a happy grunt, Gus slipped from his shoulders the heavy pack that contained a field telephone and batteries. He cranked the telephone and spoke into it. After a couple of minutes, he told Szymanski, “They’re on their way.” He closed up the phone pack and, sighing, redonned it.

Mutt scrambled to his feet and walked over toward the bomb. It wasn’t bravado: if the stupid thing went off, it would kill him just as dead in his shelter as out in the open. “Don’t touch it!” Captain Szymanski called sharply.

“Touch it? Captain, I may be a damn fool sometimes, but I ain’t crazy. I just want to look at it-I thought it had my name on it.”

“You and me both,” Szymanski said. “Okay, Mutt, go ahead.”

The bomb looked like a bomb: sheet metal casing painted olive drab, a boxy tail section for aerodynamics. If it hadn’t been for the complicated gadget that replaced a normal twirl fuse, and for the wires that ran back from the gadget to flaps attached to the tail section, he would have taken it for an American weapon, not one the Lizards had made at all.

“Goddamn,” Mutt said quietly after he

’d walked all the way around the bomb. “That don’t just look like one of ours, itis one of ours, wearin’ a Lizard vest and spats.” He raised his voice: “Captain, I think maybe you want to take a good close look at this thing your own self.”

Szymanski came; nothing was wrong with the size of his balls. As Mutt had, he walked around the bomb. By the time he’d got back to where he’d started from, he looked as bemused as Daniels did. “That’s a U.S. Army Air Force 500-pounder, either that or I’m Queen of the May. What the hell have the Lizards gone and done to it?”

“Damfino,” Mutt answered. “But you’re right, sir, that’s what it is, all right. Seems to me somebody ought to know about this.” He reached under his helmet to scratch above one ear. “Reckon those bomb disposal people’ll be able to say more about it than we can-if they make it here alive, that is.”

They did. There were four of them, all quiet and unhurried men who didn’t look as if anything got on their nerves, If you were nervous when you started out disposing of bombs, odds were you wouldn’t last long enough to get good at it.

Their leader, a first lieutenant in his middle thirties, nodded when he saw the bomb. “Yeah, we’ve run into a fair number of these,” he said. He’d stuck a toothpick in one corner of his mouth, maybe in lieu of a cigarette. “It’s one of ours, but the fixtures there make it nastier than it used to be.” He pointed to the Lizards’ additions at the nose and tail of the bomb. “Some way or other-don’t quite know how-they can guide these things right into a target. You fellas are lucky to be here.”

“We figured that out, thanks,” Szymanski said dryly. “Can you pull its teeth for us?”

The toothpick waggled. “Sir, if we can’t, you won’t be around to complain about it.” The first lieutenant turned around and studied the bomb. With his back to Mutt and Szymanski, he said, “Now that I think about it, we’ve run into too damn many of these. I used to think the Lizards had raided an arsenal or something, but now my guess is that they’re making bombs for themselves-or having us make ’em for them, I mean.”

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