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“Those can’t be games anything like what they’re used to,” Goldfarb said.
“They have dice, Mzepps tell me. The others, I suppose, help fill up the time. We don’t let them have any of their own amusements. Can’t. Most of those are electric-no, you’d say electronic, what? — devices of one sort or another, and who knows but what they might build some sort of wireless from them.”
“Mm, that’s so.” Goldfarb glanced over at Mzepps. “Is he happy?”
“I’ll ask him.” Mather did, then laughed “ ‘Are you crazy?’ he says.” Mzepps spoke some more. Mather went on, “He says he’s alive and fed and not being tortured, and all that’s more than he expected when he was captured. He may not be dancing in the daisies, but he’s got no kick coming.”
“Fair enough,” Goldfarb said, and went back to work.
Sergeant Herman Muldoon peered out through a glassless second-story window of the Wood House across Quincy, Illinois, down toward the Mississippi at the base of the bluffs. “That there,” he declared, “is one hell of a river.”
“This is a hell of a place, too,” Mutt Daniels said. “Yeah, the windows are blown to smithereens, but the house itself don’t hardly look no different than the way it did last time I was in this town, back about nineteen and seven.”
“They made the joint to last, all right,” Muldoon agreed. “You set stone blocks in lead, they ain’t goin’ anyplace. Bein’ shaped like a stop sign don’t hurt, neither, I guess: more chance to deflect a shell, less chance to stop one square.” He paused. “What were you doin’ here in 1907, Lieutenant, you don’t mind my askin’?”
“Playin’ ball-what else?” Mutt answered. “I started out number two catcher for the Quincy Gems in the Iowa State League-my first time ever in Yankee country, and Lord! was I lonesome. Number one catcher-his name was Ruddock, Charlie Ruddock-he broke his thumb second week in May. I hit 360 for a month after that, and the Gray’s Harbor Grays, out in Washington State, bought my contract. The Northwestern League was Class B, two notches up from Quincy, but I was kinda sorry to leave just the same.”
“How come?” Muldoon asked. “You ain’t the kind of guy to turn down a promotion, Lieutenant, and I bet you never was.”
Daniels laughed softly. He looked out toward the Mississippi, too. Itwas a big river here, but not a patch on what it would be when it got down to his home state, which shared its name. It hadn’t had the Missouri or the Ohio or the Tennessee or the Red or a zillion other rivers join it, not yet.
Only a quarter of him was thinking about the Mississippi, though. The rest looked not so much across Quincy as across almost two thirds of a lifetime. More to himself than to Herman Muldoon, he said, “There was this pretty little girl with curly hair just the color o’ ripe corn. Her name was Addie Strasheim, an’ I can see the little dimple in her cheek plain as if it was yesterday. She was a sweetie, Addie was. I’d’a stayed here all season, likely tell I woulda married her if I coulda talked her pa into it.”
“You get the chance, you oughta go lookin’ for her,” Muldoon said. “Town ain’t been fought over too bad, and this don’t look like the kind of place where a whole bunch of people pull up stakes and head for the big city.”
“You know, Muldoon, for a pretty smart guy, you can be a natural-born damn fool,” Mutt said. His sergeant grinned back at him, not in the least put out. Slowly, again half to himself, Daniels went on, “I was twenty-one then, she was maybe eighteen. Don’t think I was the first boy who ever kissed her, but I reckon there couldn’t have been more than a couple ahead of me. She’s alive now, she’s got old, same as me, same as you, same as everybody. I’d sooner think of her like she was, sweet as a peach pie.” He sighed. “Hell, I’d sooner think of me like I was, a kid who thought a kiss was somethin’ special, not a guy standin’ in line for a fast fuck.”
“World’s a nasty place,” Muldoon said. “You live in it, it wears you down after a while. War makes it worse, but it’s pretty bad any old way.”
“Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Mutt said.
“Here.” Muldoon took his canteen off his belt and held it out to Mutt. “Good for what ails you.”
“Yeah?” Nobody had ever offered Mutt water with a promise like that. He unscrewed the lid, raised the canteen to his lips, and took a swig. What came out was clear as water, but kicked like a mule. He’d had raw corn likker a time or three, but this stuff made some of the other moonshine he’d poured down feel like Jack Daniel’s by comparison. He swallowed, coughed a couple of times, and handed the canteen back to Muldoon. “Good thing I ain’t got me no cigarettes. I light a match and breathe in, I figure I’d explode.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit,” the sergeant said with a chuckle. He looked at his watch. “We better grab some sack time while we can. We start earnin’ our pay again at midnight.”
Daniels sighed. “Yeah, I know. An’ if this goes just right, we push the Lizards back a quarter of a mile down the Mississippi. At that rate, we can have the whole damn river open about three weeks before Judgment Day.” Once he got the complaints out of his system, he rolled himself up in a blanket and fell asleep in a minute and a half, tops.
As he was dozing off, he figured Captain Szymanski would have to kick him awake, because he was down for the count. But he woke up in good time without the help of the company commander’s boot. Mosquitoes made sure of that. They came through the glassless windows of the Wood House buzzing like a flight of fighter planes, and they didn’t chew him up a whole lot less than getting strafed would have.
He slapped at his hands and his face. He wasn’t showing any other bare skin, but that was plenty for the mosquitoes. Come morning, he’d look like raw meat. Then he remembered the mission. Come morning, he was liable tobe raw meat.
Muldoon was awake, too. They went downstairs together, a couple of old-timers still hanging on in a young man’s world, a young man’s game. Back when he was a kid fighting to hook onto a big-league job even for a little while, he’d resented-he’d almost hated-old geezers who hung on and hung on and wouldn’t quit and give the new guys a chance. Now he was a geezer himself. When quitting meant going out feet first, you were less inclined to do it than when all you lost was your job.
Captain Szymanski was already down there in the big hall, telling the dogfaces what they were going to do and how they’d do it. They were supposed to know, but you didn’t get anywhere taking brains for granted. Szymanski finished, “Listen to your lieutenant and your sergeant. They’ll get you through.” That made Mutt feel pretty good.
More mosquitoes buzzed outside. Crickets chirped. A few spring peepers peeped, though most of them had already had their season. The night was warm and muggy. The platoon tramped south toward the Lizards’ forward positions. Boots clunked on pavement, then struck dirt and grass more quietly.
A couple of scouts halted the advancing Americans just north of Marblehead, the hamlet next down the river from Quincy. “Dig in,” Mutt whispered through the sticky darkness. Entrenching tools were already biting into dirt. Daniels missed the elaborate trench networks of the First World War, but fighting nowadays moved too fast to make those practical in most places. Even a foxhole quickly scraped out of the dirt was mighty nice to have sometimes, though.
He tugged back the cuff of his sleeve to look at his watch. A quarter to twelve, the glowing hands said. He held it up to his ear. Yes, it was ticking. He would have guessed it a couple of hours later than that, and something gone wrong with the attack “Time flies when you’re havin’ fun,” he muttered.
No sooner had he lowered his arm than artillery opened up, off to the east of Quincy. Shells started slamming into Marblehead, some landing no more than a couple of hundred yards south of where he crouched. Nothing had gone wrong after all; he’d just been too keyed up to keep track of time.
“Let’s go!” he shouted when his watch told him it was time. The barrage shifted at the same moment, plastering the southern half of Marblehead
instead of the northern part. Lizard artillery was busy, too, but mostly with counterbattery fire. Mutt was glad the Lizards were shelling the American guns, not him.
“Over here!” a scout yelled. “We’ve got paths cut through their wire.” The Lizards used stuff that was like nothing so much as a long, skinny double-edged razor blade. As far as he was concerned, it was even nastier than barbed wire. The plan had said there would be paths, but what the plan said didn’t always have a lot to do with reality.
Lizards in Marblehead opened up on the Americans as they were coming through the wire. No matter how many traps you set, you wouldn’t get all the rats. No matter how you shelled a place, you wouldn’t clear out all the fighters. Mutt had been on the receiving end of barrages a lot worse than this one. He’d expected opposition, and here it was.
He blazed away with his tommy gun, then threw himself flat behind the overturned hulk of an old Model A. Mike Wheeler, the platoon BAR man, hosed down the town with his Browning Automatic Rifle. Daniels wished for Dracula Szabo, the BAR man in his old platoon. Dracula would have got right up there nose-to-snout with the Lizards before he let ’em have it
His platoon’s attack developed the Lizard position. The company’s other platoon moved on the town from the east a couple of minutes later. They knew where the enemy was holed up, and winkled the aliens out house by house. Some Lizards surrendered, some fled, some died. One of their medics and a couple of human corpsmen worked side by side on casualties.
A little fight,Mutt thought wearily. A few men killed-even fewer Lizards, by the look of things. Marblehead hadn’t been heavily garrisoned. A few of the locals started sticking their heads out of whatever shelters they’d made to protect themselves from pieces of metal flying around with hostile intent.
