Worldwar_ Upsetting The Balance Part 37

"Attention, landcruiser crews." The voice of the transporter pilot filled the audio b.u.t.ton taped to Ussmak's hearing diaphragm. "Attention, landcruiser crews. We are beginning our descent to the landing. Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft. Thank you."

"Thank you you-very much," Ussmak muttered, having first made sure he was not transmitting even to his crewmales. Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft, Please be alert for possible abrupt motions of the aircraft, indeed! He'd flown into Britain in a landcruiser aboard a heavy transporter. He knew too well what that innocent-sounding euphemism meant. Had the pilot wanted to be honest, he would have said something like, indeed! He'd flown into Britain in a landcruiser aboard a heavy transporter. He knew too well what that innocent-sounding euphemism meant. Had the pilot wanted to be honest, he would have said something like, We may have to dodge like maniacs because the stinking Big Uglies are doing everything they can to shoot us down. We may have to dodge like maniacs because the stinking Big Uglies are doing everything they can to shoot us down.

What Ussmak didn't know was how much the local Big Uglies could could do to shoot him down. Britain had been a dreadful place to fly into or out of. Not only was it a cramped little island, but the locals had a great many killercraft, some of them jet-powered, and radar to help guide those killercraft to their targets. No wonder, then, the transporters had taken such a beating over British skies. do to shoot him down. Britain had been a dreadful place to fly into or out of. Not only was it a cramped little island, but the locals had a great many killercraft, some of them jet-powered, and radar to help guide those killercraft to their targets. No wonder, then, the transporters had taken such a beating over British skies.

Here in the eastern portion of the SSSR, that part of the mission was supposed to be easier, although Ussmak had grown heartily tired of experts telling him things about the Tosevites that soon turned out not to be so. But he'd fought in the SSSR before, if farther west, and knew that the Soviets, while they made good landcruisers by Big Ugly standards, lagged behind in other areas of the military art and lacked the doctrine to get the best results from the equipment they did have.

Or rather, he knew the Soviets had lagged had lagged behind in other areas of the military art and behind in other areas of the military art and had lacked had lacked proper doctrine. He hadn't fought them in two of his years, one of Tosev 3's. Against his own people, or the Rabotevs, or the Hallessi, that wouldn't have mattered. For the mutable Big Uglies, it was as good as an age. Fearfully, he wondered what new destructive skills the Soviets had learned while he was busy elsewhere on this planet. Suddenly he shuddered. They were the ones who had used atomic weapons. proper doctrine. He hadn't fought them in two of his years, one of Tosev 3's. Against his own people, or the Rabotevs, or the Hallessi, that wouldn't have mattered. For the mutable Big Uglies, it was as good as an age. Fearfully, he wondered what new destructive skills the Soviets had learned while he was busy elsewhere on this planet. Suddenly he shuddered. They were the ones who had used atomic weapons.

Nejas said, "Pilot, how bad is the weather in the area to which we're flying?"

"It's cold, landcruiser commander," the pilot answered. "There's frozen water on the ground already, for instance."

"That seems to happen a great deal on this planet," Nejas said, his tone halfway between weary resignation and making the best of things. "I don't suppose this Siberia place can be too much worse than the rest."

"Last Tosevite winter, we were on duty in the southwestern part of the great land ma.s.s, what the Big Uglies call Africa," s...o...b..said. "That would have been downright pleasant if it hadn't been so damp. It was warm enough, anyhow, which is more than you can say for a lot of Tosev 3."

Ussmak had spent most of the previous winter in a hospital s.h.i.+p, recovering from radiation poisoning after he'd had to bail out of his landcruiser into plutonium-contaminated muck when the Big Uglies raided the area for metal for their nuclear devices. The climate inside the s.h.i.+p had been salubrious enough. Getting there by way of radioactive mud was not a route he recommended, though.

Even through the steel and ceramic armor of the landcruiser in which he rode now, Ussmak could hear the roaring whine of the transporter's turbofans. He listened closely for any abrupt change in their tone, and braced himself in his seat. Especially on its landing descent, the huge, clumsy aircraft wasn't much faster than a Tosevite killercraft. Instead of feeling safe within the twin eggsh.e.l.ls of transporter and landcruiser, he felt doubly trapped.

A swing to the side set his heart pounding. A moment later, the pilot came on to say, "We are experiencing some violent crosswinds, you males in there who can't see out. Nothing to worry about; radar reports no Tosevite killercraft airborne in our vicinity. We'll be on the ground shortly."

"What do you know?" s...o...b..said. "Good news for a change."

"The Emperor knows we could use some, after the fiasco in Britain," Nejas said. He sounded like a male who needed a taste of ginger. When you hadn't had any for a while, the world seemed a grim place indeed. Ussmak had slowly learned that it was the herb-or rather, the lack of it-talking, not the world itself. Some tasters took a long time to figure that out. Some never did.

The transporter jet jerked in the air. Ussmak jerked in his seat. You didn't want to try to sit bolt upright; you'd smash your head against the roof of the driver's compartment. He remembered just in time. The pilot said, "Flaps are down. We'll be landing momentarily. Landcruiser crews prepare to roll out the cargo bay."

Another jolt announced the landing gear coming down. Then the transporter hit the runway. Despite its bulk, it bounced back into the air for an instant, then rolled to a stop. The turbofans screamed as they reversed thrust to help slow the enormous aircraft.

Ussmak was eager to escape from the transporter. Tosev 3 had too much water and not enough land, but they'd just flown one of the longest all-overland routes possible on the planet. He wanted to get out, look around at his new duty area (or as much of it as he could see through the vision slits of a landcruiser), and, more important still, meet some of the males here and find out where he could get some more ginger after his present supply ran out.

The nose of the transporter swung up, filling the cargo bay with light other than that of its own fluorescents. The light was white and very cold. "Driver, start your engine," Nejas said.

"It shall be done, superior sir," Ussmak said, and obeyed.

No sooner had he obeyed than Nejas slammed the lid of the cupola down with a clang. "It's a freezer out there," he exclaimed. "Worse than a freezer! You'd go into a freezer to warm up." As if to support him, the landcruiser's heating elements came on, hissing gently as they blew warm air through the interior of the machine.

When Ussmak saw the male with a light wand who came up to direct the landcruiser out of the aircraft, he believed every word Nejas had said. The poor guide had an electrically heated suit of the sorts pilots used in the chilly air of high alt.i.tudes, and over it a hooded coat and boots made from the furry hides of Tosevite animals. In spite of all that, he looked desperately cold as he waved the landcruiser ahead.

Ussmak put the machine in gear and rumbled down the ramp. Snow blowing almost horizontally greeted him. The landcruiser's heater hummed as it worked harder. He hoped it was made to withstand a challenge like this. Snow also started clogging his vision slits. He flicked the b.u.t.ton that sent a stream of cleaning liquid onto them. It got rid of the snow, but froze in place, so it was as if he were trying to see out through a pane of ice.

"Careful!" Nejas shouted. "You almost ran down the guide."

"Sorry, superior sir," Ussmak answered. "If you have vision out your cupola, command me." He explained what had gone wrong with his own optics.

Between them, the male with the light wand and Nejas directed Ussmak to a point in front of a building he saw only as a large, solid lump of snow in the midst of all the swirling stuff. A door opened in the side of the solid lump. The guide gestured. "We're supposed to bail out and go in there, I think," Nejas said. "I just hope we don't freeze to death before we make it"

With a single convulsive motion, Ussmak threw open the hatch above his head and scrambled out. The cold was stunning. His nict.i.tating membranes drew over the surface of his eyes to protect them from the icy blast of the wind, but he had to blink hard to make them return to where they belonged; they had started to freeze in place. His lungs felt as if he were breathing fire. His skin burned for a moment, too, but then went cold and numb.

"This way! This way!" the guide shouted. Stumbling, Ussmak and his crewmales threw themselves at the entrance to the building. It was only a couple of his own bodylengths away, but he wondered if he would freeze into a solid block of ice before he got to it.

As soon as the landcruiser crew was inside, the male who had guided them off the transporter slammed the door and dogged it shut. Then he opened the inner door to the chamber. Delicious warmth flowed out. The chamber between the blizzard outside and the oasis of comfort within might almost have been a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p airlock. As far as Ussmak was concerned, the environment from which he'd just escaped was far more hostile than the unchanging vacuum of s.p.a.ce.

"New hatchlings!" the guide called as he went into the barracks room that seemed a tiny piece of Home magically transported to Tosev 3. "I've got some new hatchlings here-poor fools don't know they've just been stuck up the cloaca of this miserable world."

Males in the body paint of landcruiser and fighting vehicle crews crowded round Ussmak and his companions. "Welcome to Siberia," one of them called. "This place is so bad, they say even Big Uglies got exiled here."

"The ground is frozen half the year," another male added.

"The atmosphere doesn't freeze-it just seems that way," said a third.

Ussmak had never run into such a cynical band of males. They had to be ginger tasters, he decided, and felt better for a moment.

Nejas waved his hands, trying to get a word in edgewise. "Where is this railroad we're supposed to be interdicting? How can we even move about in this hideous weather, let alone fight?"

"The railroad's south of here, but not far enough to do us any good," their guide answered. "We've broken it; the trick is to keep the Russkis from hauling anything across the break and s.h.i.+pping it one way or the other. They have all sorts of animals, and sometimes they even use motor transport. When we come on one of their convoys, it's usually a ma.s.sacre."

"Coming on them is the problem, though," another male said. "Even radar has trouble seeing through these storms-when it's not frozen up, that is."

Yet another male said, "And we don't even have it too bad-when we're out there, we're in our vehicles. It's the poor infantrymales I really pity. They have to head out without a nice, warm eggsh.e.l.l around them."

"Infantrymales!" s...o...b..exclaimed. "How could you possibly go out there and fight on foot in-that? And even if you could, why would you?"

"Because the Russkis can," said the male who'd guided them. "If we didn't have infantry patrols out there, the cursed Big Uglies would sneak within mortar range and start dropping their stinking bombs right down on top of our heads. Either that or they'd get into our vehicle parks and work the Emperor knows how much havoc there. They've done both, and they probably will again."

Ginger or no ginger, Ussmak wanted to hide. "I thought nothing could be worse than Britain and all that poison gas. Maybe I was wrong."

In a ragged chorus, the guide and the other males in the barracks sang out: "Welcome to Siberia!"

Rance Auerbach looked to the cloudy skies, hoping for snow. Thus far, his prayers had gone unanswered. Low, dirty-gray clouds hung over the prairie of eastern Colorado, but whatever snow or even rain-he would gladly have taken rain-they held refused to fall.

He waved to the troopers of his company, urging them to spread out farther. If a Lizard helicopter spotted them, they were on the way to becoming raw meat. The winter before, from all he'd heard, the Lizards hadn't got so frisky so late in the year. This time, they'd sent a force west by helicopter to occupy Cheyenne Wells, and were pus.h.i.+ng infantry west along US 40 to try to consolidate their position. If they did, that would put Lamar, due south of Cheyenne Wells down US 385, in a h.e.l.l of a bind.

Worse still, the next town west of Cheyenne Wells on US 40 was called First View: it was the place where the Rockies first poked up over the horizon of the Great Plains. In the Rockies lay Denver. Because he'd traveled with Leslie Groves, Auerbach got the idea something important was going on in Denver, even if he didn't know-and had no business knowing-what. Lizard thrusts that headed toward Denver needed stopping, no matter what.

The prairie seemed utterly empty but for his men and their horses. Turn those into buffalo and you'd have things back the way they were before the white man came-before the red man, too, come to that.

He turned in his saddle and called to Bill Magruder. "Now I know what the Indians must have felt like, going up against the U.S. Cavalry back in my grandpa's day."

His second-in-command nodded. "Sitting Bull licked General Custer, but look at all the good it did him in the end. We can't just win fights now and again. We have to win the whole shootin' match."

Auerbach nodded. He'd been trained to think in terms of campaigns, which Sitting Bull certainly hadn't. He wondered what sort of global strategy the Lizards were trying to maintain. They'd plainly had one at the start of their invasion, but it seemed to have broken down in the face of unexpected human resistance.

As soon as his company pa.s.sed Sheridan Lake, Auerbach waved them off US 385. No tracked vehicle could match a horse for cross-country performance. So he told himself, anyhow, although the rule applied more in mountains and marshes than on the rolling plains near the Kansas border. But his troopers and their mounts would be harder to spot in the mix of stubble and unharvested crops than on the asphalt of the highway.

"Sir, will you want to strike US 40 east or west of Arapahoe?" Magruder asked.

Auerbach's orders gave him discretion. Arapahoe lay about ten miles east of Cheyenne Wells, close to the Kansas line. If he came to the highway west of the little town, he risked drawing notice from the Lizards who'd been helicoptered into Cheyenne Wells. If he reached the highway on the Kansas side of Arapahoe, though, he was closer to what had been the Lizards' main forward bases.

"We'll go in to the east of Arapahoe," he decided after a few seconds' thought. "The farther east we can damage them, the more we draw their attention away from moving west, which is what we want to try to do." That operating as far east as possible made it easier for the Lizards to damage him was something he tried not to think about.

He and his men camped for the night on an abandoned farm not far south of US 40. When they set out the next morning, they left their horses behind, toting on their backs the supplies they needed, as if they were infantrymen.

Auerbach had scouts out. He and most of his men sprawled in tall, yellow gra.s.s while the scouts advanced to make sure no Lizard patrols were on the highway. He watched through field gla.s.ses as the scouts crept forward, their khaki uniforms almost invisible against the brown earth and dying plants.

Only when they waved did he go forward with the demolition team. Two men laid charges on the surface of the road, connecting each one with the electrical detonator. They ran wire back to a little gully a couple of hundred feet away and then, crouching in it, blew the charges.

The earth shook under Auerbach. Chunks of asphalt rained down on the improvised trench. Somebody swore: "G.o.dd.a.m.n thing hit me right in the a.s.s, Howard. Whose side you on, anyway?"

Howard was the trooper who'd pushed down the detonator plunger. He said, "I'm on the good guys' side. Reckon that leaves you out, Maxwell."

"Let's see what we've done." Auerbach got up and trotted over to US 40. He nodded in solemn approval. Through swirling dust, he saw they'd blown a crater across both lanes of blacktop. Anybody who sent a tracked vehicle down into it would get his teeth rattled. n.o.body would try to send a wheeled vehicle into it-you'd have to go around.

The demolition team finished their job in the area, then became ordinary cavalrymen-turned-foot soldiers like the rest of the company. Auerbach positioned his men on the north side of US 40, although that put the highway between them and their horses. The ground rose toward the low ridge of the Smoky Hills there, and offered better firing positions.

Once the men had dug in, there was nothing to do but wait. He gnawed jerked beef and fidgeted. He hadn't wanted to blow the road too close to Cheyenne Wells, not least for fear the Lizards there would respond before all his preparations were ready. Now he began to worry that they hadn't noticed the explosion at all.

Bill Magruder let out a hiss, then said, "Sir, something coming down the road from the east."

Auerbach peered in that direction. "Something" was a motor vehicle-no, a couple of motor vehicles. That meant they were Lizards, all right. He raised the field gla.s.ses to his eyes. The vehicles leaped closer: a couple of armored personnel carriers. He grimaced. He'd hoped for one of those and a truck. Well, you didn't always get everything you hoped for.

The carriers-he would have thought of them as half-tracks, but the Lizards fully tracked their machines-slowed when they saw the crater ahead. Auerbach kept a wary eye on their turrets. They mounted light cannon, not machine guns like American half-tracks.

A Lizard crawled out of a hatch and went up to the edge of the broken asphalt. No one fired at him. He got back into the machine. Auerbach waited to see what would happen next. If the Lizards decided to wait and send for a road repair crew, a mighty good plan would have gone up in smoke.

After a moment, several Lizards emerged from the lead armored personnel carrier. A couple of them scrambled up onto the deck behind the turret and uns.h.i.+pped a dozer blade, which the others helped them fit to the front of the personnel carrier's hull. They were going to do a hasty job of road repair themselves. The waiting cavalrymen did not interfere.

The Lizards got back into the carrier. It rolled off onto the soft shoulder of the road. The dozer blade dug in to pick up dirt to fill in the hole in the road. The engine's note, though quiet to anyone used to American armor, got louder.

Hunkered down behind a tumbleweed, Auerbach bit his lip and waited, fingers crossed. When the explosion came, it wasn't as loud as the one that had blasted the crater in US 40, but far more satisfying. Ant.i.tank mines carried a charge big enough to wreck a Sherman. That didn't always suffice to take out the tougher Lizard tanks, but it was plenty to ruin an armored personnel carrier. Smoke and flame spurted up from the vehicle, which slewed sideways and stopped, the right track blown off the road wheels.

Hatches flew open. Like popcorn jumping up in a popper, Lizards started bailing out of the stricken machine. Now Auerbach's cavalry company opened up with almost everything they had. The Lizard infantry men fell, one after another, although a couple made it to the ground unhurt and started shooting back.

The turret of the unhurt Lizard personnel carrier swung north with frightening speed. Both the cannon and machine gun coaxial with it opened up on the machine-gun position the Americans had dug for themselves. No, the Lizards weren't fools, Auerbach thought as he fired at one of the males who'd succeeded in escaping from his vehicle: they went after the most dangerous enemy weapon first.

Or rather, they went after what they thought thought was the most dangerous enemy weapon. Auerbach had posted a two-man bazooka crew as close to the road as he dared: about seventy-five yards away. Like ant.i.tank mines, bazookas were iffy against Lizard tanks; frontal armor defeated the rockets with ease, while even side or rear hits weren't guaranteed kills. But the ugly little rocket bombs were more than enough to crack open lesser vehicles. was the most dangerous enemy weapon. Auerbach had posted a two-man bazooka crew as close to the road as he dared: about seventy-five yards away. Like ant.i.tank mines, bazookas were iffy against Lizard tanks; frontal armor defeated the rockets with ease, while even side or rear hits weren't guaranteed kills. But the ugly little rocket bombs were more than enough to crack open lesser vehicles.

An American half-track would have become an instant fireball after a bazooka hit The hydrogen fuel the Lizards used was less explosive than gasoline, and they had better firefighting gear than the handheld extinguishers American half-tracks and tanks carried. That helped the Lizards, but not enough. After a couple of heartbeats, the Lizards the bazooka round hadn't killed or maimed began to try to escape their burning machine.

As with the males who'd left the first personnel carrier, most of them didn't get away from the vehicle, but some skittered off behind bushes and returned fire. At Auerbach's urgently shouted orders, flanking parties moved out on both wings to envelop the Lizards. They had to be wiped out quickly, or- Auerbach didn't want to believe he heard the rotor blades of a helicopter chewing their way through the air, not so soon. It was coming from out of the west, from Cheyenne Wells. His mouth went dry. Killing two infantry fighting vehicles was splendid, but a bad bargain if it cost him his whole company-and himself.

Fire rippled from the weapons pod under the belly of the flying beast. The Lizards didn't know exactly where his men were positioned, but a rocket salvo made precision anything but mandatory. Auerbach dug his face into the musty ground as the rockets flailed the prairie. Blast picked him up, flipped him onto his back, and slammed him down, hard. Through stunned ears, he heard screams amidst the explosions.

Nose-mounted Gatling twinkling like some malign star, the helicopter bored in to finish exterminating the humans who had presumed to challenge the might of the Lizards. Auerbach and his comrades-those still alive and unwounded-returned fire. He imagined the helicopter crew laughing in the c.o.c.kpit; their machine was armored against rifle-caliber rounds.

Perhaps because they were so close to US 40, the bazooka team had not drawn the helicopter's notice. As it hovered not far from the burning armored personnel carrier, an ant.i.tank rocket drew a trail of flame in the air toward it.

A bazooka was not supposed to be an antiaircraft weapon. If it hit, though, it was going to do damage. It hit. The helicopter staggered, as if it had run into an invisible wall up there in the air. Then it heeled over onto its side and crashed down on US 40. For good measure, the bazooka team put another round into its belly as it lay there. Ammunition started cooking off, tracer rounds going up like fireworks.

"Let's get the h.e.l.l out of here!" Auerbach yelled, his voice blurry even to himself. A few Lizards were still shouting, but the Americans made short work of them. Collecting the human wounded took longer and hurt more, spiritually as well as physically. Auerbach's driving urge was speed. He wanted to be away and under cover before the Lizards sent any more aircraft after his men.

"Even if they nail the whole lot of us, they won't have bought anything cheap today," he muttered. While that was undeniably true, he still wanted to escape. Victory was a lot sweeter if you lived to enjoy it. And once he go back to Lamar, he'd have some fine stories to tell Rachel Hines... and Penny Summers, too.

Returning to Dover made David Goldfarb feel he'd stepped back into an earlier time in the war. Things had been simpler then, with only the Jerries to worry about. And Hitler's finest, after all, hadn't managed to invade England in spite of all the Fuhrer Fuhrer's threats and promises: "Don't worry... he's coming." But he and the Wehrmacht Wehrmacht hadn't come. The Lizards had. hadn't come. The Lizards had.

Basil Roundbush came into the little room in the natural sciences building at Dover College where the radarman was working. The mustachioed pilot was whistling something whose words Goldfarb didn't recognize; whatever it was, it sounded as if it ought to be bawdy.

Working again with Roundbush brought the months at Bruntingthorpe back to the top of Goldfarb's mind. He looked up from his oscilloscope and said in mock disgust, "All the time I was playing at infantryman, I felt sure you'd be dead and out of my hair for good." After a moment too long, he added, "Sir."

Roundbush took the chaffing in good part. With a grin that made him look like a lion that had just brought down its zebra, he said, "Dead? Something even worse than that happened: I got promoted."

"Yes, sir, most ill.u.s.trious Flight Lieutenant Roundbush, sir!" Goldfarb cried, springing to his feet to deliver a salute so vehement it threatened to snap off his arm.

"Oh, put a sock in it," Roundbush said genially. "Let's get down to work, shall we?"

"Right," Goldfarb said. His sportiveness covered an admiration for the flier that fell only a little short of awe. He'd been through danger enough and to spare in his stint at ground combat His own fighting skill had had little to do with coming out the other side intact, though. Bullets and sh.e.l.l fragments flew through the air almost at random. If you were lucky, they missed you. If you weren't you ended up dead or crippled.

But Basil Roundbush had survived flying mission after mission against the Lizards while in an aircraft and with weapons far inferior to theirs. Luck undoubtedly had something to do with that. But a fighter pilot, unlike a ground-pounder, needed more than luck. You had to be good at what you did, or you wouldn't keep doing it long.

And Roundbush had not merely survived. The Distinguished Flying Cross he wore on the front of his tunic testified to that. He wasn't commonly given to boasting-most often when chatting up a barmaid-but Goldfarb had heath he'd brought down one of the Lizards' immense transport aircraft, the ones that, when roaring overhead, looked as if they could carry a regiment. They made the Dakotas the RAF had started getting from the Americans not long before the Lizards came seem like children's models of wood and paper by comparison-and the Dakotas had far outcla.s.sed anything the British had before them.

That kill had earned Roundbush his DFC. What he'd said about it was to the point: "Pack of ruddy fools back in London. The la.s.ses must hate them, one and all-they think size is more important than technique. Even if it was the size of a whale, the transport couldn't shoot back. Their fighter planes are another piece of business altogether."

Goldfarb looked out at the rain splas.h.i.+ng down from a leaden sky and said, "If the Lizards had been smart, they would have come now. We'd have been all but blind to them in the air, what with the autumn clouds and mist and rain, but their radars are good enough to let them carry on as if this were high summer."

"They don't fancy cold weather," Roundbush said, "and I've heard it said they invaded us to get some of their own back after the Reds lit off that explosive-metal bomb under their scaly snouts." He snorted. "Letting the politicians set strategy for their own reasons will make you sorry, no matter whether you're a human being or a Lizard."

"Now that we've won, I'm glad they did it." Goldfarb waved to the electronic apparatus filling the shelves and tables of the room in which he and Roundbush labored. Some of it, like the gear they'd been a.n.a.lyzing at Bruntingthorpe, was wreckage, but some was intact, taken from aircraft and vehicles either captured after minimal damage or else abandoned in the retreat.

Basil Roundbush's wave was similar but more extravagant, seeming to take in not just what was in the room but all the Lizard equipment the British had captured. He said, "As I see it, we have two jobs of work ahead of us. The first is putting to use the devices we've captured that are still in working order. After that comes cannibalizing the damaged ones for parts so that, say, we can build two working ones from the hulks of four."

"Understanding how the bleeding things work as well as what they do might also be a good notion," Goldfarb observed.

To his surprise, Roundbush shook his head. "Not necessary, not insofar as what we're about now. The Red Indians hadn't the faintest notion how to smelt iron or make gunpowder, but when they got muskets in their hands, they had no trouble shooting at the colonials in America. That's where we are right now: we need to use the Lizards' devices against them. Understanding can come at its own pace."

"The Red Indians never did understand how firearms work," Goldfarb said, "and look what became of them."

"The Red Indians didn't have the concept of research and development, and we do," Roundbush said. "For that matter, we were on the edge of our own discoveries in these areas before the Lizards came. We had radar: not so good as what the Lizards use, I grant you, but we had it-you'd know more of that than I. And both we and the Jerries seem to have been playing about with the notion of jet propulsion. I'd love to fly one of their Messerschmitts, see how it stands against a Meteor."