Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Seeing him, the trooper snapped to attention. “Captain Auerbach!” she said.

  “At ease, Private,” Rance answered. “We’re both off duty right this minute.” He shook his head in bemusement. “And since we are off duty, do you mind if I still call you Rachel?”

  “No, sir, not at all,” Rachel Hines answered, smiling.

  Auerbach shook his head again. He could have picked her up with one hand, but somehow she still looked like a cavalry trooper, even if she wasn’t exactly a cavalryman. She lacked the devil-may-care relish for danger some of his men had, but she didn’t look as if she’d flinch from it, and she did look as if she wouldn’t lose her head while it was going on. But all of those things, in a way, were beside the point. He came to the point: “How the devil did you talk Colonel Nordenskold into letting you enlist?”

  She smiled again. “You promise you won’t tell anybody else?” When Auerbach nodded, she lowered her voice and went on, “He tried putting his hand where it didn’t belong, and I told him that if he did it again I’d kick him right in the nuts-if he had any, that is.”

  Auerbach knew he was gaping, but couldn’t help it. That wasn’t the way he’d imagined Rachel Hines persuading the colonel to sign her up: just the opposite, in fact. If she’d been smart enough to study the ground and change her plan of attack after she saw that a blatant come-on hadn’t worked with Auerbach, she had more brains than he’d figured. “My hat’s off to you,” he said, and fit action to word. “It took a little more than that, though, didn’t it?”

  “I showed him I could ride, I showed him I could shoot, I showed him I could shut up and take orders,” she answered. “He was looking for people who could do those things, and we’re so short of the ones who can that he didn’t much care if I had to go at my uniform with scissors and needle and thread before it’d fit right.”

  He looked her up and down. “If you don’t mind my saying so-if it won’t make you kick like a bronc-it fits you just fine.”

  “Captain, you can say whatever you please,” she answered. “You got me out of Lakin, out from under the Lizards’ thumbs. I owe you more than I can figure out how to pay you back for that.”

  Back when she’d offered him a roll in the hay to get what she wanted, he hadn’t been interested. Now he was-now she sounded interested in him as a person, not a stepping stone. But if she was bound and determined to be a soldier, she’d be a hell of a lot better off not going to bed with an officer. If women were going to fight, the fewer the rules that got bent out of shape, the better for everybody, women and men.

  Instead of making any suggestions, then, Auerbach asked, “How’s Penny getting along these days? I hadn’t seen you since I came back here, and I haven’t seen her, either.”

  Rachel Hines’ sunny face clouded. “She’s not so good, Captain. She’s moved to a room in the rooming house off the street here, and she mostly just stays in it. Even when she does come out, it’s almost like you’re watching a ghost, not a real person, if you know what I mean. Like she’s here but not quite really all here.”

  “That’s what I saw before,” Auerbach said glumly. “I was hoping she’d started to snap out of it by now.”

  “Me, too,” Rachel said. “She was so much fun to be with when we were in high school together.” She came to an abrupt halt. Nothing much was left of the Kearny County Consolidated High School, not after the Lizards set up their local base there, the Americans drove them out of it, and then they came back and pushed the Americans back toward the Kansas-Colorado line.

  As he had before, Rance wondered what would happen to the generation of kids whose schooling the Lizards had interrupted. Even if mankind won, making up for lost time wouldn’t be easy. If the Lizards won, odds were that nobody would have an education ever again.

  He didn’t care to think about that. He didn’t care to think about a lot of the ways the war was going. “Maybe I ought to go over there and see her,” he said after a moment. “It’s my fault she’s here, after all-my fault you’re here, too, come to that.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a fault, Captain,” Rachel Hines said. “If we hadn’t come with you, we’d still be back in Lakin, doing what the Lizards told us. Anything is better than that.”

  “Tell it to-what was his name? — Wendell Summers,” Auerbach answered harshly. “He hadn’t tried to get out of Lakin, he’d be alive back there today.”

  “We all knew there was a chance of that when we went with you people-it was a chance we all wanted to take.” Auerbach didn’t know whether Rachel had seen action, but she talked and shrugged like a veteran. She continued, “Penny has taken that hard, I will say.”

  “I know.” Auerbach kicked at the sidewalk. “Maybe she won’t want to see me at all. God knows I couldn’t blame her for that.”

  “The worst thing she can tell you is no,” Rachel said. “If she does, how are you worse off? But if she doesn’t, you may do her some good.” She saluted again and headed up the street. Auerbach turned to watch her go, then laughed at himself. He didn’t remember admiring a cavalry trooper’s backside before.

  “And a good thing, too,” he said with a snort. He walked over to the rooming house where Penny Summers was staying. The place was always packed, but with a shifting population: refugees who had been there for a while headed farther west into more securely held territory, while a continuous stream of newcomers from Kansas took their place. Penny had kept her room since not long after she’d come from Lakin, which made her well-nigh unique.

  Auerbach’s nose twitched as he walked upstairs. The rooming house smelled of unwashed bodies, garbage, and stale piss. If you bottled the odor, you’d call it something like Essence of Despair. No sergeant worth his stripes would have tolerated a tenth of it for a second. But the Army had all it could handle fighting the Lizards and trying to keep itself on its feet. The civilian part of Lamar had been left to sink or swim on its own. He didn’t think that was good management, but he didn’t feel like belling the cat, either.

  He knocked on Penny Summers’ door. He didn’t know whether she’d be there or not. A lot of civilians in Lamar spent their days working for the Army, one way or another. He hadn’t seen Penny busy with any of that, though, and Lamar was small enough that he thought he would have if she’d been doing it.

  Somewhere down the hall, a baby started to scream. The sound ground at Auerbach’s nerves like a dentist’s drill digging into a molar. You had to be crazy to want to bring up a kid in times like these. Of course, just because you were bringing up a kid didn’t necessarily mean you wanted one, only that you had one.

  He knocked on the door again. He was about to turn and go (a prospect not altogether unwelcome, because the baby was doing a pretty good impression of the noise that came from a Lizard jet fighter engine) when Penny Summers opened it. She looked surprised to see him. He got the idea she would have looked surprised to see anyone.

  “Captain Auerbach,” she said, and gestured vaguely. “Come in.”

  The room was cramped and, even with the window open, stiflingly hot. Dust lay thick on every surface. Auerbach thought about shouting at her like a tough sergeant, but decided it would do more harm than good. Shouting wouldn’t snap her out of the state she was in. He didn’t know what would, but he was sure of that.

  He said, “I’m worried about you. You should be out and doing things, not sitting here cooped up like a canary in a cage. What do you do all day, anyhow?”

  That vague gesture again. “I sit, I sew sometimes. I read my Bible.” She pointed to the book with the limp leatherette covers and gold leaf that sat on the little table next to the bed.

  “It’s not enough,” he said. “There’s a whole big world out there.”

  “I don’t want any part of it,” she answered, laughing. “There are all sorts of worlds out there. The Lizards showed us that, didn’t they?” He’d never heard her laugh, not since her father was blown to bits before her eyes, but this was so bitter he’d sooner never hav
e heard it, either. “I don’t want any part of them. I just want to be left alone.”

  Two things ran through Auerbach’s mind. First was Greta Garbo. Second, Texan that he was, was the defiant rallying cry of the Confederacy against the damnyankees: all we want is to be left alone. But neither one fit Penny Summers, not really. What she’d wanted was to grow up in Lakin, marry a farmer who lived nearby, raise a flock of kids, and get as old as she was going to get, all without going fifty miles from where she was born.

  It might not have happened even if the Lizards hadn’t come. The war could have put her in a factory somewhere in a city, and who could guess what she might have done after that? Once you saw a city, going back to a small town or a farm often didn’t look the same. But he couldn’t tell her that her life might not have gone as she’d planned it, because here and now her life sure as hell hadn’t gone as she’d planned it.

  He said, “Miss Penny, sitting here like a broody hen on a nest doesn’t do you any good. Things won’t get better on account of it. The more you go out and do things, the sooner you’ll be able to put what’s past behind you and go on with the rest of your life.”

  “What difference does it make?” she answered dully. “The world can go on without me just fine, it looks like. And I don’t like what the world’s turned into. I’d sooner stay here and let things happen. If a bomb lands on this place this minute or tomorrow or a week from now, I’ll be sorry for the other people who live here, but not for me.”

  He’d had troopers who talked like that after they’d been through more battle than a man could stand. Shell shock, they’d called it back in the First World War; combat fatigue was the name it went by these days. Penny had been in only that one fight, but how many troopers got to watch their fathers turned to raw meat right before their eyes? You couldn’t guess beforehand what would send any one person over the edge.

  You couldn’t tell what would snap anybody out of it, either. Sometimes nothing would. Some of his men weren’t fit for anything better than taking care of horses here in Lamar. A couple had seemed well enough to ride, but didn’t bother taking any precautions when they went up against the Lizards. They weren’t around any more. And a couple of others had been through the worst of it and got better again. No way to know who would do what.

  He took her by the shoulders and hugged her, hard. She was an attractive girl, but it wasn’t like holding a woman in his arms. It reminded him more of the embraces he’d given his grandfather after the old man’s wits started to wander: the body was there, but the will that directed it wasn’t minding the store.

  He let her go. “You’ve got to do this for yourself, Miss Penny. Nobody on God’s green earth can do it for you.”

  “I think you’d best go now,” she said. Her face hadn’t changed, not even a little bit.

  Defeated, he opened the door to her room and started for the stairs. In the room down the hall, the baby was still screaming bloody murder. A couple of doors farther down, a man and a woman shouted angrily at each other.

  Almost too soft for Auerbach to hear, Penny Summers called after him, “Be careful, Captain.”

  He spun around. Her door was already closed. He wondered if he should go back. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed down the stairs instead. Maybe he hadn’t lost, or not completely, after all.

  Since the British army was swinging southward anyhow, the better to fight the remaining Lizard forces on English soil, Moishe Russie got to go into London for a day to see if he could find his family.

  The instant he reached the outskirts of the great city, he realized he could throw off his Red Cross armband and desert, and no one would ever be the wiser. London had been battered before; now it seemed nothing but ruins. A man might hide in there for years, coming out only to forage for food. By the filthy, furtive look of a good many people on the street, that was just what they did. A lot of them in better condition carried guns. Russie got the idea those weren’t only for defense against possible Lizard paratroopers.

  Making his way through the rubble toward his family’s Soho flat was anything but easy. Street signs had been missing since the Nazi threat in 1940; now whole streets had disappeared, so choked with rubble and cratered by bombs as to be impassable. Worse, a lot of the landmarks he’d used to orient himself as he went about the city were no longer standing: the tower of Big Ben, the Marble Arch in Hyde Park, the Queen Victoria Memorial near Buckingham Palace. On a cloudy day like this one, even knowing which way was south was a tricky business.

  He’d walked along Oxford Street for a couple of blocks before he realized where he was: no more than a block from the BBC Overseas Services studio. The brick building that housed it had not been wrecked by bomb or shell. A man with a rifle stood outside. At first Russie thought he was one of the soldiers who had guarded the studio. He needed a moment to realize Eric Blair wore a tin hat and bandolier of cartridges.

  Blair took even longer to recognize Russie. As Moishe approached, the Englishman brought the rifle up in unmistakable warning. He handled the Lee-Enfield with assurance; Moishe remembered he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War. Then Blair let the stock of the rifle fall to the grimy sidewalk. “Russie, isn’t it?” he said, still not quite sure.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Moishe answered in his uncertain English. “And you are Blair.” If he could put a name to the other, Blair might be less inclined to shoot him. He pointed to the doorway. “Do we still work here?”

  “Not bloody likely,” the Englishman said with a shake of the head that threatened to throw off his helmet. “London’s had no power for a fortnight now, maybe longer. I’m here to ensure that no one steals the equipment, nothing more. If we were doing anything, they’d set out fitter guards than I.” He scowled. “If any fitter are left alive, that is.”

  Off to the south, artillery spoke, a distant mutter in the air. The Lizards in the northern pocket were dead, fled, or surrendered, but in the south they fought on. Moishe said, “My family-have you heard anything?”

  “I’m sorry.” Blair shook his head again. “I wish I could tell you something, but I can’t. For that matter, I can’t say with certainty whether my own kinsfolk are alive or dead. Bloody war.” He started to cough, held his breath till he swayed, and managed to calm the spasm. “Whew!” he said. “Those tear me to pieces when they get going-I might as well be breathing mustard gas.”

  Russie started to say something to that, but at the last minute held his peace. No one who hadn’t seen the effect of the gas at close range had any business talking about it. But, by the same token, no one who hadn’t seen it would believe it.

  To his surprise, Blair went on, “I know I shouldn’t be speaking of it so. Gas is a filthy business; the things we do to survive would gag Attila the Hun. But Attila, to be fair, never had to contend with invaders from another world.”

  “This is so,” Russie said. “Good luck to you. I go now, see if I can find my family.”

  “Good luck to you, too,” Blair said. “You should carry a weapon of some sort. The war has made beasts of us all, and some of the beasts are more dangerous to a good and decent man than the Lizards ever dreamt of being.”

  “It may be so,” Moishe answered, not meaning a word of it. Blair was a good and decent man himself, but he’d never been in the clutches of the Lizards-or the Germans, either, come to that.

  Russie walked south down Regent Street toward Soho. A Lizard plane darted overhead. Along with everyone else close by, he threw himself flat and rolled toward the nearest hole in the ground he could find. When the plane had passed over, he picked himself up and went on. He hardly thought about it. He’d been doing the same sort of thing since 1939.

  The only difference he could find between Soho and the rest of London was that misery was expressed in more languages in the cosmopolitan district. The Barcelona, a restaurant Eric Blair favored, was still open for business on Beak Street. Boards covered what had been a glass front; from the smoke that rose from the rear
of the place, the proprietor used more boards with which to cook. If London’s electricity was gone, surely no gas flowed through its mains, either.

  When Moishe trudged past the Barcelona, he knew his own block of flats was not far away. He picked up the pace, desperate to find out what had become of his wife and son and at the same time dreading what he might learn.

  He turned off Beak onto Lexington Street and then to Broadwick, in which his block of flats lay. No sooner had he done so than he let out a long sigh of relief: the building still stood. That did not necessarily prove anything. The neighborhood, like all London neighborhoods he’d seen, had taken heavy damage. If Rivka and Reuven had been outside at the wrong moment… He did his best not to think about that.

  In the street, strewn though it was with bricks, broken chunks of concrete, and jagged shards of glass, life went on. Boys shouted as they kicked around a football. The goal posts on the improvised pitch were upright boards undoubtedly scavenged from some wrecked house or shop. The boys played with the same combination of abandon and grim intensity their Polish counterparts would have shown, shouting and laughing as they ran. Not until later would they turn into the calm, undemonstrative Englishmen Moishe found so strange.

  A crowd of children, a few adults scattered through it, stood watching the football match and cheering on one team or the other. Moishe took no special notice of the adults. Seeing so many children idling on the sidewalks, though, left him sad. Even when things were worst in Warsaw, hundreds of schools had gone on under the Nazis’ noses. Children might die, but they would not die ignorant. He noted much less of that spirit here than he had in the ghetto.

  One of the football teams scored a goal. One of the watching men reached into a pocket and passed a coin to the fellow behind him. The English did like to gamble. Boys swarmed onto the pitch to pummel the lad who’d sent the ball past the opponents’ goalkeeper.