In the Balance (77 page)

Once, in a bureau drawer, he even found a pack of Philip Morrises. He hadn’t had a cigarette since he couldn’t remember when; he smoked himself light-headed and half-sick in an orgy of making up for lost time. “Worth it,” he declared as he coughed his way through the next day.

He saw few people as he rolled through central Indiana. That suited him fine. He saw even fewer Lizards, and that suited him better—how was he supposed to explain what he was doing a good many miles west of where he’d told Gnik he was going? Luck stayed with him; he didn’t have to.

The war between humans and aliens seemed far away from that nearly deserted winter landscape (although, of course, it wouldn’t have been deserted but for the war). A couple of times, though, off in the distance, he heard gunfire, the widely spaced barks of sporting or military rifles and the chatter of the Lizards’ automatic weapons. And, once or twice, Lizard planes screamed high overhead, scrawling trails—
ice crystals
, the physicist part of him said—across the sky.

Somewhere between Young America and Delphi, a new noise entered the mix: intermittent explosions. The farther west he traveled, the louder they got. Maybe half an hour after he first noticed them, his head went up like a hunted animal’s when it catches, a scent.

“That’s artillery, is what that is!” he exclaimed. Excitement coursed through him—artillery meant people still fighting the Lizards on a level higher than bushwhacking. It also meant danger, since it lay in the direction
he was riding.

The duel, he noticed as he drew near, was anything but intense. A few shells would come in, a few more go out. He rode past a Lizard battery. Instead of being towed, the guns were mounted on what looked like tank chassis. The Lizards serving them paid no attention to him.

Shortly after he passed the Lizard position, he started going by wrecked combat vehicles, most of them now just big shapes covered over with snow. The road, which had been pretty good, suddenly developed not just potholes but craters. The fighting hereabouts wasn’t intense now, but had been not too long before.

He got off his bike before he went headlong into a snow-filled hole. Frustration ate at him. After fairly flying through Lizard-held territory, was he going to get delayed by humans? He’d started believing he’d get home to Chicago again fairly soon. Getting hopes up and then having them dashed seemed cruel and unfair.

Then he came to the first belt of rusty barbed wire. It was like something out of a movie about World War I. “How am I supposed to get through that?” he demanded of an uncaring world. “How am I supposed to get my bike through that?”

A hiss, a whistle, a scream, a crash! Frozen earth flew through the air off to his left. So did fragments of steel. One tore through a couple of spokes of the bicycle’s rear wheel. It could have torn through Jens’ leg just as easily. All at once, the artillery duel turned real for him. It wasn’t just abstract shells flying back and forth on trajectories dictated by Newtonian mechanics and air resistance. If one of those shells hit a little nearer (or no nearer, but with an unlucky spray of fragments), he wouldn’t have to worry about getting to Chicago any more.

Another freight-train noise in the air. This time Larssen dove into the snow before the shell burst. It landed in the middle of the barbed-wire belt, and chunks of wire probably flew along with its own fragments. Getting hit by one sort of jagged metal would be about as bad as the other, Jens thought.

He cautiously raised his head, hoping the shell had cleared a way through the wire. A generation of young Englishmen who’d fought at the Somme—or, at any rate, the fraction of that generation which survived—could have told him he was wasting optimism. Tanks could crush wire, but shells couldn’t smash it aside.

How to cross, then? With shells still falling in the neighborhood every so often, he didn’t even want to get up and walk around to look for a path to the other side of the wire. He turned his head so he could see how far to the north and west the barrier ran. Farther than his ground-level Mark One eyeball carried, anyhow. Was it no-man’s-land all the way from here to
Chicago? With his luck, it might well be.

“Okay, pal, don’t even blink, or you’ll get yourself some .30 caliber ventilation.” The voice came from the direction in which Larssen wasn’t looking. He obediently froze. Lying in the snow, he already had a good start on freezing, anyhow. “Awright,” the voice said. “Turn toward me, nice and slow. I better see your hands every second, too.”

Jens turned, nice and slow. As if he’d sprouted there like a mushroom, a fellow in a khaki uniform and a tin hat sprawled not fifty feet away. His rifle pointed right about at Larssen’s brisket. “Jesus, it’s good to see a human being holding a gun again,” Jens said.

“Shut up,” the soldier told him. The Springfield never wavered. “Likeliest guess is, you’re a God-damned Lizard-spy.”

“A what? Are you crazy?”

“We shot two last week,” the soldier said flatly.”

Ice grew inside Larssen, to go with the snow all around. The fellow meant every word of it. Jens tried again: “I’m no spy, and I can prove it, by God.”

“Tell it to the Marines, Mac. I’m a harder sell than that.”

“Goddammit, will you listen to me?” Jens shouted, furious now as well as frightened. “I’m on my way back from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Jesus, I talked with General Marshall while I was there. He’ll vouch for me, if he’s still alive.”

“Yeah, pal, an’ I was in Rome last week, for lunch with the Pope.” But the unwashed, unshaven soldier did move his rifle so it wasn’t aimed at Larssen’s midriff. “Awright, I’ll take you in. You can peddle your papers to my lieutenant. If he buys, what you’re pushin’, that’s his business. C’mere … No, dummy, leave the bike.”

Sans
bicycle, Larssen came. He wondered how he was supposed to get through that impenetrable-looking mass of barbed wire. But a path was cut, with strands looking as if they were firmly attached to their support posts but in fact just hanging from them. He didn’t have much trouble crawling along after his captor, though he never could have navigated by himself. Although he tried to be careful, he got punctured a couple of times. He tried to remember when his last tetanus shot had been.

More dirty faces peered out at him from the zigzagging trenches behind the wire. The lieutenant, instead of a British-style tin hat, wore a domed steel helmet that looked very modern and martial. He listened to Larssen’s story, reached into a shirt pocket, then laughed at himself. “I still want a butt to help me think, but I haven’t seen one in weeks. Hellfire, buddy, I don’t know what to do with you. I’ll bump you on up the line, see if somebody else can figure you out.”

Escorted by the soldier who’d found him—the fellow’s name turned out
to be Eddie Wagner—Larssen made the acquaintance of a captain, a major, and a lieutenant colonel. By then, he expected to be kicked on to a bird colonel, but the lieutenant colonel short-circuited the process, saying, “I’m going to send you to General Patton’s headquarters, bud. If you say you’ve met Marshall, he’s the one to decide what to do with you.”

General Patton’s headquarters proved to be in Oxford, something like twenty miles west. The march there, starting at dawn the next day, ended near dark and left Larssen footsore, weary, and mourning his lost bike. Little by little, as he tramped along, he began to notice how many field guns were disguised as tree trunks with branches wired onto their upright barrels, how many tanks inhabited barns or crouched under haystacks, how many airplanes rested beneath nets that hid them from the sky.

“You guys have a lot of stuff built up here,” he remarked some time in the afternoon. “How’d you manage to do it right under the Lizards’ snouts?”

“Wasn’t easy,” Wagner answered, who’d apparently decided he might not be a spy after all. “We been movin’ it in a little at a time, just about all of it at night. The Lizards, they’ve let us do it. We hope to Jesus that means they ain’t really noticed what we’re up to. They’ll find out, they sure as hell will.”

Larssen started to ask what the Lizards would find out, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to stir up his guide’s suspicions again. Not only that, he could make a good stab at figuring it out for himself. Some sort of big push had to be in the offing. He wondered in which direction it would go.

General Patton’s headquarters was in a white frame house on the outskirts of Oxford (though the town, with fewer than a thousand people, was barely big enough to have outskirts). The sentries on the covered porch—like everything else military hereabouts, they were concealed from aerial observation—were well shaved and wore neater uniforms than any Jens had seen for a while.

One of them nodded politely to him. “We’ve been expecting you, sir: Lieutenant Colonel Tobin telephoned to say you were on your way. The general will see you at once.”

“Thanks,” Larssen said, feeling more draggled than ever in the presence of such all-but-forgotten spit and polish.

That feeling intensified when he went into the house. Major General Patton—he wore two stars on each shoulder of a sheepskin-collared leather jacket—was not only clean-shaven and neat, he even had creases in his trousers. The buttery light of a kerosene lamp left black shadows at the corners of his mouth, in the lines that grooved their way up alongside his nose, and beneath his pale, intense eyes. He had to be getting close to sixty, but
Jens would not have cared to take him on.

He ran a hand through his short brush of graying sandy hair, then stabbed a finger out at Larssen. “I risked a radio call on you, mister,” he growled, his raspy voice lightly flavored by the South. “General Marshall told me to ask you what he said to you about the Lizards in Seattle.”

Panic quickly swamped relief that Marshall lived. “Sir, I don’t remember him saying anything about the Lizards in Seattle,” he blurted.

Patton’s fierce expression melted into a grin. “Good thing for you that you don’t. If you did, I’d know you were just another lying son of a bitch. Sit down, son.” As Larssen sank into a chair, the general went on, “Marshall says you’re important, too, though he wouldn’t say how, not even in code. I’ve known General Marshall a lot of years now. He doesn’t use words like
important
just for show. So who and what the devil are you?”

“Sir, I’m a physicist attached to the Metallurgical Laboratory project at the University of Chicago.” Jens saw that didn’t mean anything to Patton. He amplified: “Even before the Lizards came, we were working to build a uranium weapon—an atomic bomb—for the United States.”

“Lord,” Patton said softly. “No, General Marshall wasn’t kidding, was he?” His laugh could have sprung from the throat of a much younger man. “Well, Mr. Larssen—no, you’d be Dr. Larssen, wouldn’t you?—if you want to get back to Chicago, you’ve come to the right place, by God.”

“Sir?”

“We are going to grab the Lizards by the nose and kick ’em in the ass,” Patton said with relish. “Come over here to the table and have a look at this map.”

Larssen came and had a look. The thumbtack-impaled map had come from an old
National Geographic
. “We’re here,” Patton said, pointing. Larssen nodded. Patton went on, “I’ve got Second Armored here, other assets, infantry, air support. And up
here”—his
finger moved to an area west of Madison, Wisconsin—“is General Omar Bradley with even more than I’ve got. Now all we’re doing is waiting for a good, nasty blizzard.”

“Sir?” Jens said again.

“We’ve found the Lizards don’t like fighting in winter conditions, not even a little bit.” Patton snorted. “Like any pansies, they wilt when it’s cold. The bad weather’ll help keep their aircraft on the ground. When the snow flies, my forces move northwest while Bradley comes southeast. God willing, we join hands somewhere not far from Bloomington, Illinois, and put the spearhead of the Lizard forces attacking Chicago in a pocket—a
Kessel
, the Nazis were calling it in Russia.”

He shaped the movements of the two American forces with his hands, made Larssen see them, too. A real chance to hit back at the invaders from outer space … that made Jens catch fire, too. But a lot of people, all over the world, had tried to hurt the Lizards. Not many had much luck. “Sir, I’m
no soldier and I don’t pretend to be one, but—can we really pull this off?”

“It’s a gamble,” Patton admitted. “But if we don’t, the United States is washed up, because we won’t get another chance to make troop concentrations like these. And I refuse to believe my country is washed up. We’ll be confused and scared in the attack, I don’t doubt it for a second, but the enemy’ll be more confused and scared than we are, because we’ll be taking the fight to him, not the other way round.”

A gamble. A chance. Larssen slowly nodded. A real victory against the Lizards would lift morale around the world. A defeat … well, humanity had known a lot of defeats. Why should one more be noticed?

Patton said, “You’ll have to stay here now, till the attack goes in. We can’t let you head through Lizard-held territory, not knowing what you do.”

“Why not? Their truth drug doesn’t work,” Larssen said.

“Dr. Larssen, you are a gentle soul and have led what is, I fear, a sheltered life,” Patton answered. “There are methods far more basic than drugs for extracting truth from a man. I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot afford the risk. In any case, hard fighting will start soon. You’ll be far safer with us than traveling on your own.”

Jens wasn’t sure about that, either. Trucks and tanks were far more likely to draw more fire than a lone man on a bicycle—or, now, afoot. But he was in no position to argue the point. Besides, just then an orderly brought in a tray with a roasted chicken and several baked potatoes and a bottle of wine along with it.

“You’ll take supper with me?” Patton asked.

“Yes, thank you.” Larssen had, all he could do not to grab the savory, golden-brown chicken and tear at it like a starving wolf. After cans in the church and a fast but hungry trip across Indiana, it looked wonderful beyond belief.

A little later, sucking the last scrap of meat off a drumstick, he said, “All I want to do is get back to my work, get back to my wife. Lord, she probably thinks I’m dead by now.” For that matter, he could only hope Barbara was still alive.