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“Huh?”
“The herons,” Schneider explained. “They usually head south for the winter earlier in the year than this, anyhow. They come in in April and fly out when fall starts.”
“Just like ballplayers,” Daniels said. He flipped up more dirt with his entrenching tool. “I got a bad feeling this grove ain’t gonna be the same when they come north after spring training next year. Us and the Lizards, we’re kind of rearranging the landscape, you might say.”
He didn’t find out whether Sergeant Schneider would say that or not. A whole salvo of shells crashed down around them. Both men huddled in their holes, heads down so they tasted mud. Then, from east of the larches, American artillery opened up, pounding back at the Lizard positions along the line of Highway 51. As he had in France, Mutt wished the big guns on both sides would shoot at one another and leave the poor damned infantry alone.
Tanks, rumbled past the grove under cover of the American barrage, trying to push back the Lizard vanguard still moving on Chicago. Daniels raised his head for a moment. Some of the tanks were Lees, with a small turret and a heavy gun mounted in a sponson on the front corner of the hull. More, though, were the new Shermans; with their big main armament up in the turret, they looked like the Lizard tanks from which Daniels had been retreating since the Lizards came down from beyond the sky.
“The closer they get to Chicago, the more stuff we’re throwin’ at ’em,” he called to Schneider.
“Yeah, and a fat lot of good it’s doing us, too,” the other veteran answered. “If they weren’t spread thin trying to conquer the whole world at once, we’d be dead meat by now. Or maybe they don’t really care whether they get into Chicago or not, and that’s why they’ve moved slower than they might have.”
“What do you mean, maybe they don’t care? Why wouldn’t they?” Mutt asked. When he thought about strategy, he thought about the hit-and-run play, when to bunt, and the right time for a pitchout. Since he got home after the Armistice, he’d done his best to forget the military meaning of the word.
Schneider, though, was a career soldier. Though only a noncom, he had a feel for the way annies functioned. He said, “What good is Chicago to us? It’s a transportation hub, right, the place where all the roads and all the railroads and all the lake and river traffic come together. Just by being this close, and by their air power, the Lizards have smashed that network to smithereens.”
Daniels pointed to the advancing American tanks. “Where’d those come from, then? They must’ve got into Chicago some kind of way, or they wouldn’t be here.”
“Probably by ship,” Sergeant Schneider said. “Things I’ve heard, they don’t quite understand what ships are all about and how much you can carry on one. That probably says something about wherever they come from, wouldn’t you think?”
“Damned if I know.” Mutt looked at Sergeant Schneider with some surprise. He might have expected that remark from Sam Yeager, who’d enjoyed reading about bug-eyed monsters before people knew there were any such things. The sergeant, though, seemed to have a one-track military-mind. What was he doing wondering about other planets or whatever you called them?
As if to answer the question Mutt hadn’t asked, Schneider said, “The more we know about the Lizards, the better we can fight back, right?”
“I guess so,” said Daniels, who hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms.
“And speaking of fighting back, we ought to be moving up to give those tanks some support.” Schneider scrambled out of his foxhole, shouted and waved one arm so the rest of the troops in the grove would know what he meant, and dashed out into the open.
Along with the others, Daniels followed the sergeant. He felt naked and vulnerable away from his hastily dug shelter. He’d seen more than enough shelling, both in 1918 and during the past weeks, to know a foxhole often gave only the illusion of safety, but illusions have their place, too. Without them, most likely, men would never go to war at all.
Westbound American shells tore through the air. Their note grew fainter and deeper as they flew away from Mutt. When he heard a rising scream, he threw himself into a ditch several seconds before he consciously reasoned that it had to spring from an incoming Lizard round. His body was smarter than his head. He’d seen that in baseball often enough-when you had to stop and think about what you were doing, you got yourself in trouble.
The shell burst a few hundred yards ahead of him, among the advancing Lees and Shermans. It had an odd sound. Again, Daniels didn’t stop to think, for more rounds followed the first. Cursing himself and Schneider both for breaking cover, he tried once more to dig in while flat on his belly. The barrage walked toward him. He wished he were a mole or a gopher-any sort of creature that could burrow far underground and never have to worry about coming up for air.
His breath sobbed in his ears. His heart thudded inside his chest, so hard he wondered if it would burst. “I am too old for this shit,” he wheezed. The Lizard barrage ignored him. He remembered that the Boche artillery hadn’t paid any attention when he cursed it, either.
The shells rained down for a while, then stopped. The one blessing about going through Lizard barrages was that they didn’t last for days on end, the way German pounding sometimes had in 1918. Maybe the invaders didn’t have the tubes or the ammunition dumps to raise that kind of hell.
Or maybe they just didn’t need to do it. Their fire was more accurate and deadly than the Boches had ever dreamed of being. When Daniels ever so cautiously raised his head, he saw that the field he’d been crossing was churned into a nearly lunar landscape. Up ahead, two or three tanks were burning, As he watched, smoke and flame burst from under another one. A tread thrown, it ground itself into the mud.
“How’d they do that?” Mutt asked the air. No new shell had struck the Lee; he was sure of that. It was almost as if the Lizards had a way to pack antitank mines inside their artillery rounds. Before the invaders came down from Mars or wherever, he would have laughed at the idea He wasn’t laughing now; the Lizards were nothing to laugh about.
A couple of feet in front of his new foxhole, half hidden in yellowing grass, lay a shiny blue spheroid a little smaller than a baseball. Daniels was sure it hadn’t been there before the shelling started He reached out to pick it up and see what it was then jerked back his hand as if the thing had snarled at him.
“Don’t fool around with what you don’t know nothin’, about” he told himself, as if he were more likely to obey a real spoken order. Just because that little blue thing didn’t look like a mine didn’t mean it wasn’t one. He was certain the Lizards hadn’t shot it at him out of the goodness of their hearts, assuming they had any. “Let a sapper screw around with it. That’s his job.”
Mutt gave the spheroid a wide berth as he started moving forward again. He didn’t go as fast as he wanted to; he kept looking down to see if any more of them had been scattered about. A flat bang! and a shriek off to his right told him his caution wasn’t wasted.
Ahead and to his left, Sergeant Schneider trotted westward, steady as a machine. Daniels started to call out a warning to him, then noticed that even though the sergeant was making better time than he (not surprising, since Schneider was both taller and trimmer), he was also carefully noting where he planted his feet. Soldiers in wartime didn’t necessarily live to grow old, but Schneider was not about to die from doing something stupid.
Farther up ahead, another tank rolled over a mine. This one, a Sherman, started to burn. The five-man crew bailed out seconds before the tank’s ammunition began cooking off. The rest of the American armor, fearful of meeting a like fate, slowed almost to a crawl.
“Come on!” Sergeant Schneider shouted, perhaps to the suddenly lagging tanks, perhaps to the infantrymen whose advance had also slowed. “We’ve got to keep moving. If we bog down in the open, they’ll slaughter us.”
That held enough truth to keep Mutt slogging forward after the sergeant. But he soon began looking for a good place in which to
dig in. Despite Schneider’s indomitable will, the advance was running out of steam. Even the sergeant recognized that after another couple of hundred yards. When he stopped and took out his entrenching tool, the rest of the men followed his example. Trench lines began to spiderweb their way across the field.
Daniels worked for half an hour extending his hole toward the one nearest to him on the right before he realized the Lizards had halted the American counterattack without ever once showing themselves. That did not strike him as encouraging.
Atvar studied the situation map of the northern part of Tosev 3’s secondary continental map. “This does not strike me as encouraging,” he said. “I find it intolerable that the Big Uglies continue to thwart us in this way. We must do a more effective job of destroying their industrial base. I have repeatedly spoken of this concern, yet nothing seems to be accomplished. Why?”
“Exalted Fleetlord, the situation is not as black as you make it,” Kirel said soothingly. “True, not all the enemy’s factories are wrecked as completely as we might like, but we have damaged his road and rail networks to the point where both raw materials and finished goods move with difficulty if at all.”
Atvar refused to be mollified. “We ourselves are moving with difficulty if at all,” he said with heavy sarcasm as he stabbed a finger toward the representation of a lakeside city. “This place should have fallen some time ago.”
Kirel leaned forward to read the name of the town. “Chicago? Possibly so, Exalted Fleetlord, yet again we have rendered it essentially useless to the Big Uglies as a transport center. The deteriorating weather has not helped our cause, either. And in spite of all obstacles, we do continue to advance on it.”
“At a hatchling’s crawl,” Atvar sneered. “It should have fallen, I tell you, before the weather became a factor in any way.”
“Possibly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel repeated. “Yet the Big Uglies have defended it with unusual stubbornness, and now the weather is a factor. If I may…” He touched a button below the video screen in front of Atvar. The fleetlord watched as rain poured down from a soggy sky, turning the ground to thick brown porridge. The Big Uglies, evidently used to such deluges, were taking full advantage of this one. They’d destroyed a good many roads leading toward Chicago themselves, forcing the vehicles of the Race off into the muck. The vehicles didn’t like muck very well. The mechanics who tried to keep them running in it liked it even less.
“The same thing is happening in the SSSR, and against the Nipponese in-what do they call it? — in Manchukuo, that’s right,” Atvar said. “It’s even worse in those places than in the United States, because they don’t need to wreck their roads to make us go into the mud. As soon as it rains for more than two days straight, the roads themselves turn into mud. Why didn’t they pave them to begin with?”
The fleetlord knew Kirel could not possibly answer a question like that. Even if he could have answered it, responsibility still rested with Atvar. The Race’s landcruisers and troopcarriers, of course, were tracked. They managed after a fashion, even churning through sticky mud. Most supply vehicles, though, merely had wheels. Back before Atvar went into cold sleep, that had seemed sufficient, even extravagant. Against spear-carrying warriors riding on animals, it would have been.
“If this cursed planet were anything like what the stinking probes claimed it to be, we would have conquered it long since,” he growled.
“Without a doubt, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Should you care to use it, we still have one major advantage of the Big Uglies. A nuclear weapon exploded above Chicago would end its resistance once and for all.”
“I have considered this,” Atvar said. That he had considered it was the measure of his frustration. But he went on, “I am also obligated, however, to consider our occupation of Tosev 3 as well as our conquest of it. Chicago is a natural center of commerce for the region, and will be again when peace returns under our administration. Creating another such nexus after destroying this one would prove troublesome and expensive for those who come after us.”
“Let it be as you say, then, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel replied; he knew when to set a topic aside. In any event, he had plenty of other titbits with which to worry Atvar: “I have a report that the Deutsche launched two medium-range missiles against our forces in France last night. One was intercepted in flight; the other impacted and exploded, fortunately without damage worse than a large hole in the ground. Their guidance systems leave much to be desired.”
“What I would most desire is that they had no guidance systems,” the fleetlord said heavily. “May I at least hope we destroyed the launchers from which these missiles came?”
Kirel’s hesitation told him he could not so hope. The shiplord said, “Exalted Fleetlord, we scrambled killercraft and vectored them over the area from which the missiles were discharged. It is heavily forested terrain, and they failed to discover the launchers. Officers speculate the Deutsche used either launchers concealed in caves, portable launchers, or both. More information will become available upon subsequent firings.”
“More damage will become available, too, unless we are more careful than we have been,” Atvar said. “We have the capability to knock these things out of the sky; I expect us to live up to that capability.”
“It shall be done,” Kirel said.
Atvar relaxed, a little; when Kirel said something would be done, he meant it. “What other news of interest have you for me, Shiplord?”
“Some intriguing data have come in from the study we began when we learned the Tosevites were sexually active at all seasons of the year,” Kirel replied.
“Tell me,” Atvar said. “Anything that will help me understand the Big Uglies’ behavior is an asset.”
“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord. You may recall that we took a fair number of Tosevites of each gender and had them mate with one another to confirm they did indeed lack a breeding season. This they have done, as you know. Even more interesting, however, is that several more-or-less-permanently mated male-female pairs have emerged from the randomly chosen individuals. Not all subjects in the experimental study have formed such pairs; we are currently investigating the factors which cause some to do so and others to abstain.”
“That is interesting,” the fleetlord admitted. “I remain not entirely sure of its relevance to the campaign as a whole, however.”
“Some may well exist,” Kirel said. “We have had instances all over the planet of Tosevites, some military personnel but others nominally civilians, attacking males and installations of the Race without regard for their own lives or safety. In those cases where the assailants survived for interrogation, a reason frequently cited for their actions was the death of a mate at our hands. This male-female bonding appears to be part of the glue which holds together Tosevite society.”
“Interesting,” Atvar said again. He felt faintly disgusted. When he smelled the pheromones of females in estrus, all he thought about was mating. At other seasons of the year-or indefinitely, if no females were around-not only was he not interested, he was smug about not being interested. Among the Race, the two words arousal and foolishness sprang from a common root. Trust the Big Uglies to build their societies based on a facet of foolishness, he thought. He asked, “Can we exploit this Tosevite aberration so it works to our advantage rather than against us?”
“Our experts are working toward this goal,” Kirel said. “They will test strategies both among our shipboard experimental specimens and, more cautiously, with select members of the populations of Big Uglies under our control.”
“Why more cautiously?” Atvar asked. Then he answered his own question: “Oh, I see. If the experiments down on Tosev 3 produce undesirable results, that might lead to situations where Big Uglies will seek to harm members of the Race in the manner you previously described.”
“Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered. “We have learned from painful experience that suicidal attacks are most difficult to guard agains
t. We can much more easily protect ourselves against dangers from rational beings than from fanatics who are willing, sometimes even eager, to die with us. Not even the threat of large-scale retaliation against the captive populace has proven a reliable deterrent.”
Half of Atvar heartily wished he’d been passed over for this command; he’d be living in peaceful luxury back on Home. But he had a duty to the Race, and knew somber pride at having been chosen the male best suited to the task of fostering the Empire’s growth. He said, “I hope our experts will soon be able to suggest ways in which we can use the Big Uglies’ perpetual randiness against them. And speaking of using things Tosevite against the Tosevites, how fare we in turning the captured portion of their industrial capacity to our benefit?”
Kirel did not let the change of subject fluster him. “Not as well as we would have liked, Exalted Fleetlord,” he replied, earning Atvar’s respect for unflinching honesty. “Part of the problem rests with the Tosevite factory workers we must necessarily employ in large numbers: many are apathetic and perform poorly, while others, actively hostile, sabotage as much of what they produce as possible. Another issue involved is the general primitiveness of their manufacturing plants.”
“By the Emperor, they’re not too primitive to keep from turning out guns and landcruisers and aircraft to use against us,” Atvar exclaimed. “Why can’t we use some of that capacity for ourselves?”
“The only way to do so, Exalted Fleetlord, is to adapt ourselves-resign ourselves might be a better way to put it-to arms and munitions at the Big Uglies’ current technological level. If we do so, we forfeit our chief advantage over them and the contest becomes one of numbers-wherein the advantage is theirs.”
“Surely some of these facilities, at any rate, can be upgraded to our standards,” Atvar said.
Kirel made an emphatic gesture of negation. “Not for years. The gap is simply too wide. Oh, there are exceptions. A bullet is a bullet. We may be able to adapt their factories to produce small arms to our patterns, though even that will not be easy, as hardly any of their individual infantry weapons are automatic. We have had some success reboring captured artillery tubes to fire our ammunition, and could perhaps manufacture more tubes to our own specifications.”
