In th Balance

by neetha Napew

  Larssen remembered the murdered Lees and Shermans in the front of the Lizard tank-he'd helped stalk. "A lot of ours ended up that way, too, sir. Do you know what the ratio was?"

  "About a dozen to one," Patton answered easily. Jens' mouth fell open in dismay; he hadn't thought the butcher's bill as high as that. Patton held up a hand. "Before you expostulate, Dr. Larssen, let me remind you: that is far and away the best ratio we have yet achieved in combat with the Lizards. If we can maintain it, the ultimate triumph will be ours."

  "But—" A Lizard tank had a crew of three. A

  Sherman carried five men, a Lee six; the casualty ratio had to be even worse than the one for vehicles.

  "I know, I know." Patton cut off his objection before it could get started. "We are still manufacturing tanks; so far as we know, the Lizards cannot make good their losses. The same applies to crews: our pool replenishes itself, while theirs does not."

  A couple of men with technical sergeants' stripes climbed onto the dead Lizard tank. One peered down into the turret through the open cupola. He called to his companion, who scrambled over to take his own look.

  Patton beamed at them. "And, you see, with every vehicle of theirs we examine, we learn more about how to defeat them. I tell you, Dr. Larssen, we are tilting the balance in our favor."

  "I hope you're right." Jens decided to strike while the iron was hot: "Since we've won this battle, sir, may I finally have permission to go into Chicago and see what's become of the Metallurgical Laboratory?"

  The general frowned; he looked like a poker player deciding whether to play a hand or throw it in. At last he said, "I don't suppose I can in justice object, Dr. Larssen, and no doubt your country needs your services with that project." He wouldn't say what the Met Lab was about, even with only his driver listening. Security, Jens thought. Patton went on, "I also want to thank you for the good nature with which you have borne your stay with us."

  Larssen nodded politely, though there hadn't been anything good-natured about it, not from his end. He'd simply had to yield to superior force. Whining about it afterward would only have put him further into the doghouse.

  "I will provide you with an escort to take you into the city," Patton said. "Lizard holdouts still infest the territory through which you'll have to pass."

  "Sir, if it's all the same to you, that's an honor I'd really like to decline," Larssen said. "Wouldn't traveling with an escort just make me a likelier target rather than safer? I'd sooner hunt up a bicycle and go by myself."

  "You are a national resource, Dr. Larssen, which in some measure gives me continued responsibility for your well-being." Patton chewed on his lower lip. "You may be right, though; who can say? Will you also decline help in the form of, ah, hunting up a bicycle and a letter of /a/ssez-passerfrom me?"

  "No, sir," Jens answered at once. "I'd be very grateful for both those things."

  "Good." Patton smiled his wintry smile. Then

  he waved to draw the attention of some soldiers not far away. They came trotting over to find out what he wanted. When he'd explained, they grinned and scattered in all directions to do his bidding. While he waited for them to return, he pulled out a sheet of stationery embossed with two gold stars (Jens marveled that he'd still have a supply of such a thing) and a fountain pen. Shielding the paper from blowing snow with his free hand, he wrote rapidly, then handed the sheet to Larssen. "Will this suffice?"

  Jens' eyebrows rose. It was more than a laissez-passer: it not only ordered the military, to feed him, but nearly conferred on him the power to bind and to loose. Larssen wouldn't have cared to be a soldier who ignored it and had word of that get back to Patton. He folded it, stuck it in a trouser pocket. "Thank you, sir. That's very generous."

  "I've given you a hard time since you turned up

  on my doorstep. I don't apologize for it; military necessity took precedence over your needs. But I will make such amends for it as I can."

  Inside half an hour, the soldiers had come up with four or five bikes for Jens to choose from. Nobody said anything about giving back the Springfield he'd been issued, so he kept it. He swung onto a sturdy Schwinn and pedaled off toward the northeast.

  "Chicago," he said under his breath as he rolled along. But the grin he wore at being at last free of the army soon fell from his lips. The country between Bloomington and Chicago had been fought over twice, first when the Lizards pushed toward Lake Michigan and then when they tried to break back through the ring Patton and Bradley had thrown around them. Larssen found out firsthand how ugly the aftermath of war could be.

  The only thing he'd known about Pontiac, Illinois, was that the phrase "out at Pontiac" meant somebody was at the state penitentiary on the southern edge of town. The penitentiary was a bombed-out ruin now. The wreckage of an American fighter plane lay just outside the prison gates, the upright tail the only piece intact. It was also probably the only cross the pilot who'd been inside would ever get.

  The rest of the town was in no better shape. Machine-gun bullet scars pocked the soot-stained walls of the county courthouse. Larssen almost rode over a crumpled bronze tablet lying in the street. He stopped to read it. It had, he found, been mounted on a cairn of glacial stones as a monument to the Indian chief who'd given Pontiac its name. He looked at the courthouse lawn. No cairn stood, only scattered and broken stones. He pedaled out of town as fast as he could.

  Every so often he'd hear gunfire. From a distance, it sounded absurdly cheerful, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Now that he'd been on the receiving end of it, though, it made the hair on the back of his neck rise. Those little popping noises meant somebody was trying to kill someone else.

  The next day he came to Gardner, a little town dominated by slag piles. Gardner couldn't have been lovely before war raked it coming and going; it was a lot less lovely now. But the Stars and Stripes fluttered from atop one of the piles. When Larssen saw soldiers moving around up there, he decided to test Patton's letter.

  It worked like a charm. The men fed him a big bowl of the mulligan stew they were eating, gave him a slug of what he presumed to be highly unofficial whiskey to wash it down, and plied him with questions about the general whose signature he flourished.

  The squad leader, a worn-looking, chunky sergeant whose thinning gray hair said he was surely a First World War veteran, summed up the soldiers' view of Patton by declaring, "Shitfire there, pal, sure is fine to see somebody, goin' for'ards instead o' back. We done went back too much." His drawl was thick and rich as coffee heavily laced with chicory; he seemed to go by the name Mutt.

  "It cost us a lot," Larssen said quietly.

  "Goin' back toward Chicago wasn't what you'd call cheap, neither," the sergeant said, to which Jens could only nod.

  He got into Joliet just before dark. Joliet had had a prison, too, with thick corbeled limestone walls. It was just rubble; it had been made into a fortress to try to halt the Lizards— the twisted barrel of a field gun still stuck out through a window— and then bombed and shelled into oblivion. Jens wondered what had

  become of the prisoners.

  As he had so often in his wandering through war-torn America, he found a ruined, empty house in which to sleep. Only after he'd already unrolled his sleeping bag did he notice the bones scattered across the floor. A caved-in skull left no doubt they were human. Before the Lizards came, he wouldn't have stayed there for a minute. Now he just shrugged. He'd seen worse than bones lately. Thinking again of the prisoners, he made sure his Springfield had a round in the chamber and the safety off when he set it beside the sleeping bag.

  No one murdered him in the night. When he woke up, he flipped on the safety but left the round chambered. Chicago lay straight ahead.

  He took longer to get there than he'd expected. The heaviest, most sustained fighting had been in the suburbs right on the

  edge of town. He'd never seen devastation like that, nor had to try to pick his way through it. Long stretches were impassable by bike; he h
ad to lug the two-wheeler along with him, which also made him slower afoot.

  Scavengers were out poking through the ruins. Some, who wore Army uniform, were busy examining disabled Lizard vehides and aircraft to see what they could learn from them, or else salvaging as much American gear from the field as they could. Others were in no uniform at all, and plainly out for whatever they could get their hands on. Jens flipped the Springfield's safety off again.

  Once he actually got into Chicago, the going improved. Rubble still spilled onto roads, but on the whole you could tell where the roads were. Some of the buildings had signs painted across them: WHEN SHELLS COME IN, THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS SAFER. A lot of shells had come in.

  Along with rubble, the streets also had people in them. Except for soldiers, Jens hadn't seen so many people in a long time. Where there'd been fighting, the civilians were mostly either dead or fled. Many were dead or fled in Chicago, too, but the town had had three million to start out with, and a good many were left, too.

  They were skinny and ragged and dirty; a lot of them had haunted eyes. They didn't look like the Americans Larssen was used to seeing. They looked like people you'd see in a newsreel, people who'd been through a war. He'd never expected to come across that in the United States, but here it was, like a kick in the teeth.

  A girl leaned against a streetcorner lamppost. Her dress was too short for the chilly weather. She twitched her hips at Jens as he rode by. No matter how long he'd been celibate, he kept riding— her face was as hard and

  merciless as any combat veteran's.

  "Cheap bastard!" she yelled after him. "Lousy fairy! I hope it rots off!" He wondered how she treated men who actually bought from her. Better than that, he hoped.

  If possible, the Negroes in the Bronzeville district looked even more miserable than the whites in the rest of town. Jens felt the glances he was drawing as he pedaled along, but no one seemed inclined to do more than glance at a man who wore an Army overcoat and carried an Army rifle.

  The apartment building where he'd lived with Barbara was on the edge of Bronzeville. He rounded the last corner, used the hand brake to slide to a stop... In front of a pile of bricks and tiles and broken glass that wasn't a building any more. Sometime after he'd left, it had taken a direct hit. A couple of colored kids were pawing through the ruins. One of them

  exclaimed in triumph over a foot-long board. He stuck it into a burlap bag.

  "Do you know what happened to Mrs. Larssen, the white lady who used to live here?" Jens called to the boys. Fear rose up in him like a choking cloud; he wasn't sure he wanted the answer.

  But both kids just shook their heads. "Never heard of her, mistuh," one of them said. They went back to looking for fuel.

  Larssen rode east, to the University of Chicago campus. If he couldn't find Barbara, the Met Lab crew was the next best bet— they might even know what had happened to her.

  Though bare of students, the university didn't seem as badly battered as the city around it, perhaps because its buildings were more widely scattered. Jens rode up Fifty-eighth and then across the lawns in the center of

  campus. They had been a lot more pleasant before they were pocked with bomb and shell craters.

  Off to the right, Swift Hall was a burnt-out ruin; God hadn't spared the university's divinity school. But Eckhart Hall still stood, and, but for broken windows, looked pretty much intact. Worn as he was, hope made Jens all but sprint the bike toward the entrance.

  He started to leave it outside, then thought better of that and brought it in— no use giving booters temptation they didn't need. "Where is everybody?" he called down the hallway. Only echoes answered. It's after quitting time, he told himself, but hope flickered all the same.

  He walked to the stairway, took the steps two at a time. No matter when the secretaries and such went home, the Met Lab scientists were busy almost around the clock. But the halls upstairs were empty and silent, the offices

  and labs not only vacant but methodically stripped. Wherever the Metallurgical Laboratory was, it didn't live at the University of Chicago any more.

  He trudged downstairs much more slowly than he'd gone up. Somebody was standing by his bicycle. He started to snatch his rifle off his shoulder, then recognized the man. "Andy!" he exclaimed

  The gray-haired custodian whirled in surprise. "Jesus and Mary, it's you, Dr. Larssen," he said, his voice still flavored with the Auld Sod though he'd been born in Chicago. "I tell you true, I never thought I'd see you again."

  "Plenty of tines I never thought I'd get here," Jens answered. "Where the devil has the Met Lab gone?"

  Instead of answering directly, Reilly fumbled in his shirt pocket, pulled out a creased and

  stained envelope. "Your wife gave me this to give to you if ever you came back. Like I said, I had my doubts you would, but I always hung on to it, just on the off chance—"

  "Andy, you're a wonder." Jens tore open the envelope. He let out a soft exclamation of delight as he recognized Barbara's handwriting. The note was stained and blurry — probably from the janitor's sweat— but the gist was still clear. Larssen shook his head in tired dismay. He'd come so far, been through so much.

  "Denver?" he said aloud. "How the devil am I supposed to get to Denver?" Like the war, his journey had a long way to go.