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“Yeah,” Mutt answered absently. Advancing against the Lizards! He hadn’t heard orders like that since outside Shabbona, halfway across the state. That had been a disaster. This time, though… “Maybe we really are hurting ’em out there. God damn, I hope we are.”
General Patton’s personal vehicle was a big, ungainly Dodge command and reconnaissance car, one of the kind that had been nicknamed jeeps until the squarish little Willys vehicles took the name away from them. This one had been altered with a .50 caliber machine-gun mount that let Patton blaze away as well as command.
To Jens Larssen, who munched on crackers in the backseat and tried to stay inconspicuous, the gun seemed excessive. No one had asked his opinion. As far as he could see, no one ever asked anyone’s opinion in the Army. You either gave orders or you went out and did what you were told.
Patton turned to him and said, “I do regret that you were thrust into the front line, Dr. Larssen. You bear too much value to your country for you to have been so cavalierly risked.”
“It’s all right,” Larssen said. “I lived through it.” Somehow, he added to himself. “Where are we now, anyhow?”
“D’you see that hill there, the one with the tall building sprouting from it?” Patton asked, pointing through the Dodge jeep’s windshield. On the flat prairie country of central Illinois, any rise, no matter how slight, stood out. Patton went on, “The building is the State Farm Insurance headquarters, and the town”-he paused for dramatic effect-“the town, Dr. Larssen, is Bloomington.”
“The objective.” Larssen hoped General Patton would not take offense at the surprise in his voice. The Lizards had seemed so nearly invincible ever since they came to Earth. He hadn’t dared believe Patton could not only force a breakthrough but exploit it once made.
“The objective,” Patton agreed proudly. As if answering the thought Jens hadn’t spoken, he added, “Once we broke through their crust, they were hollow behind it. No doubt we were confused and scared, attacking such a formidable foe. But they showed confusion and fright themselves, sir, not least because they were being attacked.”
The bulky radio console set into the space behind the rear seat of the Dodge jeep let out a squawk. Patton grabbed for the earphones and mike. He listened for a minute or so, then softly breathed one word: “Outstanding.” He stowed the radio gear, gave his attention back to Larssen: “Our scouts, sir, have met advance parties from General Bradley’s army north of Bloomington. We now have the force which was attacking Chicago trapped within our ring of steel.”
“That’s-wonderful,” Larssen said. “But will they stay trapped?”
“A legitimate question,” Patton said. “We will learn soon: reports indicated that the armor they had been using to spearhead their advance into Chicago has now reversed its direction.”
“It’s bearing down on us?” Jens felt some of the bladder-loosening fear he’d known while diverting the Lizard tank so the fellow with the bazooka could stalk and kill it. He remembered the gaggle of American tanks the monster had taken out, and the wrecked fighting vehicles that littered the snowy plains of Indiana and Illinois. If lots of those tanks were heading this way, how was Second Armor supposed to stop them?
Patton said, “I understand your concern, Dr. Larssen, but fighting aggressively while holding the strategic defensive should let us inflict heavy losses on them. And infantry teams firing antitank rockets from ambush will present a challenge they have not previously experienced,”
“I sure hope so,” Larssen said. He went on, “If they’re coming from Chicago, sir, when will I be able to go into the city to find out what’s become of the Metallurgical Laboratory?” And even more important, what’s become of Barbara, he thought. But he’d learned he was more likely to get what he wanted from Patton by leaving personal concerns out of the equation.
“As soon as we have destroyed the Lizard tank forces, of course,” Patton said grandly. “We’ll do to them what Rommel did to the British time and again in the desert: make them charge down lines of fire we’ll already have preregistered. Not only that, our forces farther east have gone over to the attack and are pursuing them out of Chicago. It should be a slaughter.”
Of whom? Jens wondered. The Lizard tanks were not the slow, balky, unreliable machines England used. Would any defenses be enough to hold them back when they wanted to go somewhere?
As if to underscore his concern, half a mile ahead a helicopter skimmed low over the ground like a mechanized shark. A rocket lanced out to obliterate an American halftrack and however many men it was carrying. Patton swore and started hammering away with his heavy machine gun. The noise was overpowering, like standing next to a triphammer. Tracers showed he was scoring hits, but the tough machine ignored them.
Then, without warning, something heavier than a .50 caliber slug must have hit it. It heeled awkwardly in the air; Patton almost shot off his driver’s ear as he tried to keep a bead on it. The helicopter scurried away, back toward the west where the Lizards still held the countryside.
Maybe another shell found it then. Maybe the cumulative damage from all the bullets Patton and every other American in range poured into it took a toll. Or maybe the Lizard pilot, fleeing under heavy fire, just made a mistake. The helicopter’s rotor clipped a tree. The machine did a twisting somersault straight into the ground.
Patton yelled like a madman. So did Jens and the jeep driver. Patton pounded the physicist on the back. “Do you see, Dr. Larssen? Do you see?” he shouted. “They’re not invulnerable, not even slightly.”
“So they’re not,” Jens admitted. Lizard tanks, though, carried more firepower and more armor than their helicopters. They might not be invulnerable, but they sure had seemed close to it until that crazy bazooka thing took one out. Even then, the rocket round hadn’t wrecked it with a frontal hit, but with one to the less heavily protected engine compartment.
“Yes, sir, Larssen, it won’t be long before you can head into Chicago as a conqueror,” Patton boomed. “If you’re going to do, by God, do it with style!”
Jens didn’t care anything about style. He would gladly have gone into Chicago naked and in blackface if that was the only way to get there. And if Patton insisted on holding him away much longer, he’d damn well take French leave and head into town on his own. Why not? he thought. It’s not like I’m really a soldier.
Atvar increased the magnification on the situation map. The Race’s movements appeared in red arrows, those of the Big Uglies in rather fuzzier white ones that reflected the uncertainties of reconnaissance. The fleetlord hissed in discontent. “I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to extricate our forces there or not.”
Kirel peered at the situation map, too. “This is the pocket in which the Tosevites on the lesser continental map have trapped our assault units, Exalted Fleetlord?”
“Yes,” Atvar said. “They have taught us a lesson here: never be so concerned about the point of an attack as to neglect the flanks.”
“Indeed.” Kirel left one eye on the map, turned the other toward Atvar. “Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I had not looked for you to be so, ah, sanguine over our misfortunes in the, ah, not-empire called the United States.”
“You mistake me, Shiplord,” Atvar said sharply, and Kirel lowered his eyes in apology. Atvar went on, “I do not enjoy seeing our brave males endangered by the Big Uglies under any circumstances. Moreover, I have hope we shall still be able to get many of them out. If the beastly weather would let up, our aircraft ought to be able to blast an escape corridor through which we could conduct our retrea
t. Failing that, the landcruisers will have to do the job.”
“Landcruiser losses have been unusually heavy in this action,” Kirel said.
“I know.” That did pain Atvar; without those landcruisers, his ground-based forces were going to have ever more trouble conducting needed operations. He said, “The Big Uglies have come up with something new again.”
“So they have.” The disgust with which Kirel freighted his words made it sound as if he were cursing the Tosevites for their ingenuity. The Race had had plenty of cause to do that; had the Big Uglies been less fiendishly ingenious, all of Tosev 3 would long since have been incorporated into the Empire.
Atvar said, “As with most of their innovations, we will need a certain amount of time to develop appropriate countermeasures.” They should be in place about the time the Big Uglies invent their next new weapon, he thought. And of course, they won’t work against that. Aloud, he continued, “Still, considering how different this world is from what our probe predicted, we, should count ourselves lucky that we’ve not got our tailstumps pinched in the doorway more often.”
“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord.” But Kirel sounded anything but convinced.
Atvar let his mouth fall open. “In case you’re wondering, Shiplord, I’ve not started tasting ginger; I don’t suffer from the insane self-confidence the drug induces. I have reason for being sanguine, as you termed it. Observe.”
He poked a control with a claw. The situation map vanished from the screen, to be replaced by images from a killercraft’s gun cameras. On the screen, bombs arced down into drifting, blowing smoke. Moments later, fireballs and more smoke mushroomed into the sky. The angle of the tape-jerked sharply as the killercraft dodged through desperate Tosevite efforts to shoot it down.
“That, Shiplord,” Atvar declared, “is a Tosevite petroleum refinery going up in flames. It happens to be the one that supplies Deutschland, but we have struck several in recent days. If we continue on that pattern, the embarrassments we have suffered around this town of Chicago should soon fade into insignificance as the Big Uglies run low on fuel.”
