Tilting the Balance

Groves grunted. Thirty-odd horses weighed maybe twenty tons all by themselves. They’d have to stay behind, no doubt about it. He watched Captain Auerbach unhappily making the same calculation and coming up with the same result. “Cheer up, Captain,” he said. “I’m sure the Canadians will furnish us with new mounts. They don’t know what we’re carrying, but they know how important it is.”

Auerbach reached out to stroke his mount’s velvety muzzle. He answered with a cavalryman’s cri de coeur. “Colonel if they took your wife away and issued you a replacement, would you be satisfied with the exchange?”

“I might, if they issued me Rita Hayworth.” Groves let both hands rest on his protuberant belly. “Trouble is, she probably wouldn’t be satisfied with me.” Auerbach stared at him, let out an amazingly horsey snort, and spread his palms in surrender.

Lieutenant van Alen said, “Okay, no horses. What about the wagon?”

“We don’t need that either, Lieutenant.” Groves walked over, reached in, and pulled out a saddlebag that had been fixed with straps so he could carry it on his back. It was heavier than it looked, both from the uranium or whatever it was the Germans had stolen from the Lizards and from the lead shielding that-Groves hoped-kept the metal’s ionizing radiation from ionizing him. “I have everything required right here.”

“Whatever you say, sir.” What van Alen’s eyes said was that the pack didn’t look important enough to cause such a fuss. Groves stared stonily back at the Coast Guardsman. Here, as often, looks were deceiving.

Regardless of what van Alen might have thought, he and his crew efficiently did what was required of them. Inside half an hour the Forward’s twin gasoline engines were thundering as the cutter pulled away from the dock and headed for the Canadian shore.

As Oswego receded, Groves strode up and down the Forward, curious as usual. The first thing he noticed was the sound of his shoes on the deck. He paused in surprise and rapped his knuckles against the cutter s superstructure. That confirmed his first impression. It s made out of wood’ he exclaimed, as if inviting someone to contradict him.

But a passing crewman nodded. “That’s us, Colonel-wooden ships and iron men just like the old saying.” He grinned impudently. “Hell leave me out in the rain and I rust.”

“Get out of here,” Groves said. But when he thought about it, it made sense. A Coast Guard cutter wasn’t built to fight other ships; it didn’t need an armored hull. And wood was strong stuff. Apart from its use in shipbuilding, the Russians and England both still used it to build highly effective aircraft (or so the Mosquito and LaGG were reckoned before the Lizards came). Even so, it had taken him aback here.

Lake Ontario had a light chop. Even Groves, hardly smooth on his feet, effortlessly adjusted to it. One of his cavalrymen, though, bent himself double over the port rail puking his guts out. Groves suspected the sailors’ ribbing would have been a lot more ribald had the luckless fellow’s friends not outnumbered them two to one and been more heavily armed to boot.

The Forward boasted a one-pounder mounted in front of the superstructure. “Will that thing do any good if the Lizards decide to strafe us?” Groves asked the Coast Guardsman in charge of the weapon.

“About as much as a mouse giving a hawk the finger when the hawk swoops down on it,” the sailor answered. “Might make the mouse feel better, for a second or two, anyhow, but the hawk’s not what you’d call worried.” In spite of that cold-blooded assessment, the man stayed at his post.

The way the Coast Guardsmen handled their jobs impressed Groves. They knew what they needed to do and they did it, without fuss, without spit and polish, but also without wasted motion. Lieutenant van Alen hardly needed to give orders.

The trip across the lake was long and boring. Van Alen invited Groves to take off his pack and stow it in the cabin. “Thank you, Lieutenant, but no,” Groves said. “My orders are not to let it out of my sight at any time, and I intend to take them literally.”

“However you like, sir,” the Coast Guardsman said. He eyed Groves speculatively. “That must be one mighty important cargo.”

“It is.” Groves let it go at that. He wished the heavy pack were invisible and weightless. That might keep people from jumping to such accurate conclusions. The more people wondered about what he was carrying, the likelier word was to get to the Lizards.

As if the thought of the aliens were enough to conjure them out of thin air, he heard the distant scream of one of their jet planes. His head spun this way and that, trying to spot the aircraft through scattered clouds. He saw the contrail, thin as a thread, off to the west.

“Out of Rochester, or maybe Buffalo,” van Alen said with admirable sangfroid.

“Do you think he saw us?” Groves demanded.