Upsetting the Balance

Jager stood up in the cupola again, looked back over his shoulder. The spires of Rouffach’s church of Notre Dame still loomed against the sky; so did what the locals called the Witches’ Tower, crowned by a huge, disorderly storks’ nest. “Pretty country,” he said, lowering himself once more.

Klaus Meinecke grunted. “I wouldn’t know. All I get to see of it is a gunsight’s worth, except when we stop for the night.” He smacked his lips. “They make good wine around here, though; I’ll give them that much.”

“That they do,” Jager said. “They didn’t do badly farther south, either.”

He wouldn’t let himself venture any more in the way of reproach than that. When he’d left the panzer forces in the west to head for Croatia, they’d had the Lizards stopped in their tracks between Besancon and Belfort. Since then, Belfort had fallen, and Mulhouse, too; the Lizards had pushed all the way up to the Rhine.If I’d been here… Jager thought, and then shook his head. Almost certainly, the same thing would have happened. He knew he was a damn fine panzer officer. He also knew he wasn’t a panzer genius-and even a panzer genius might not have held the Lizards once they got rolling.

“Maybe we can push them out of Mulhouse again,” he said hopefully.

“That’s what they said we’d do back in Colmar, anyhow,” Meinecke answered. He was a veteran, all right; he understood that what they said and what actually happened could be two very different animals. He pursed his lips, then added quietly, as if afraid of being overheard by malignant fate, “Engine’s been behaving pretty well, knock wood.” He made a fist and tapped it against the side of his own head.

“Let’s hope it keeps up,” Jager agreed. Rushed into production, the Panther could be balky; among other things, fuel pump problems plagued it. But it was a great step forward from earlier German panzers, boasting a high-velocity 75mm gun and thick, well-sloped armor borrowed in concept from that of the Soviet T-34.

All of which meant you only had to be foolhardy to go up against the Lizards in a Panther, as opposed to clinically insane, which was about what opposing them in a Panzer III had required.

“Wish we had one of those bombs the Russians used to blow the Lizards to hell and gone,” Meinecke said. “When do you suppose we’ll get one of our own?”

“Damned if I know,” Jager said. “I wish to God I did.”

“If you don’t, who does?” the gunner asked.

Now Jager just grunted by way of reply. He wasn’t supposed to say anything about that to anybody. He’d been part of the band of raiders that had stolen explosive metal from the Lizards in Russia-like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods,said the part of him that, back before World War I, had planned on becoming a classical archaeologist. He’d taken Germany’s share of the material across Poland on horseback, only to have half of it hijacked by Jewish fighters there.

Only luck they didn’t kill me and take it all,he thought. In Russia and then in Poland, he’d learned what theReich had done to the Jews who’d fallen into their hands; it made him sick, so he understood why the Polish Jews had risen in favor of the Lizards and against their German overlords.

He’d also been involved in the German physicists’ efforts to build an atomic pile at Hechingen, although, again luckily, he’d been in combat in eastern France when the pile went out of control somehow and killed off a good many physicists, including Werner Heisenberg. How long the program would take to recover was anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, the unglamorous infantry and panzer troops would have to keep the Lizards from overrunning theVaterland. If they didn’t, the high foreheads would never get the chance to finish their research and make something that would goboom! In Hechingen, Jager had felt useless; he’d been too ignorant to contribute properly. Now he was back to doing what he did best.

Off to one side of the road, an artillery piece barked, then another and another. “Eighty-eights,” Jager said, identifying them by the report. “That’s good.”

Meinecke understood him without any more discussion than that: “So they can fire their salvo and then get the hell out of there, you mean?”

“Right the first time, Sergeant. They’re easy to shift to a new firing position-a lot easier than the bigger guns.” Jager paused meditatively. “And Lizard counterbattery fire is better than anything we ever dreamt of.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir?” Meinecke agreed with a mournful sigh. “They can drive nails into your coffin from halfway round the world, seems like sometimes. If there were more of them, and if they had the doctrine to go with all their fancy equipment-”