In the Balance

20

Jens Larssen’s neck muscles tensed under the unaccustomed weight of the tin hat on his head. He was developing a list to the right from the slung Springfield he’d been issued. Like most farm kids, he’d done some plinking with a.22, but the military rifle had a mass and heft to it unlike anything he’d ever known.

Technically, he still wasn’t a soldier. General Patton hadn’t impressed him into the Army-“Your civilian job is more important than anything you can do for me,” he’d rumbled-but had insisted that he be armed: “We’ve got no time to coddle noncombatants.” Jens knew an inconsistency when he heard one, but hadn’t had any luck convincing the major general.

He looked at his watch. The greenly glowing hands showed it was just before four A.M. The night was dark and cloudy and full of blowing snow, but it was anything but peaceful. More engines added their roar and the stink of their exhaust to the air every moment. The second hand ticked round the dial. A minute before four… half a minute…

His watch was synchronized pretty well, but not perfectly. At-by his reckoning-3:59:34, what seemed like every cannon in the world cut loose. The low clouds glowed yellow for a few seconds from all the muzzle flashes packed together. The three-inch howitzers and the 90mm antiaircraft cannon pressed into service as field guns roared again and again, as fast as their crews could keep the shells coming.

As he’d been told, Jens yelled as loud as he could, to help equalize the pressure on his ears. The noise was lost in the overwhelming cacophony of the guns.

Lizard counterbattery fire began coming in a couple of minutes later. By then the tanks and men of Patton’s force were already on the move. The American artillery barrage eased up as abruptly as it had begun. “Forward to the next firing position!” an officer near Larssen screamed. “The Lizards zero in on you fast if you stay, in one place too long.”

Some of the howitzers were on their own motorized chassis. Halftracks towed most of the rest of the artillery pieces. A few were either horse-drawn or pulled by teams of soldiers. If the advance went as Patton planned (hoped, Jens amended to himself), those would soon fall behind. For the moment, every shell counted.

“Come on, you lugs-get your butts in gear!” a sergeant yelled with the dulcet tones of sergeants all through history.

“You think you’re scared, just wait’ll you see the goddamn Lizards when we hit ’em.” That was the gospel according to Patton. Whether it was the gospel truth remained to be proved. Along with, the men around him, Jens tramped off toward the west.

Airplanes roared low overhead carefully husbanded against this day of need and now to be expended, win or die Larssen waved at the planes as they darted past; he didn’t think many of the pilots would be coming back. If attacking Lizard positions in the snowy dark wasn’t a suicide mission he didn’t know what was.

Of course, he realized a few seconds later, that was what he was doing too even if he wasn’t in a fighter. Off to one side a soldier with a voice that still cracked exclaimed, “Ain’t this exciting!”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Larssen said.

Artillery Supervisor Svallah shouted into his field telephone: “What do you mean, you can’t send me any more ammunition right now? The Big Uglies are moving, I tell you! We haven’t faced large-scale combat like this since just after we landed on this miserable ball of muddy ice.”

The voice that came out of the speaker was cold: “I am also receiving reports of heavy fighting on the northwestern flank of our thrust toward the major city by the lake. Supply officers are still evaluating priorities.”

Had Svallah possessed hair like a Big Ugly, he would have pulled great clumps of it from his head. Supply still seemed to think they were back Home, where a delay of half a day never mattered and one of half a year wasn’t always worth getting excited about, either. The Tosevites, worse luck, didn’t operate that way.

“Listen,” he yelled, “we’re low on cluster bombs, our landcruisers are short of both high-explosive and antiarmor rounds, we don’t have enough antilandcruiser missiles for the infantry… By the Emperor, though it’s not my province, I hear we’re even short on small-arms rounds!”

“Yours is not the only unit in this predicament,” replied the maddeningly dispassionate voice on the other end of the line. “Every effort will be made to resupply to the best of our ability as quickly as possible. Shipments may not be full resupplies; shortages do exist, and expenditures have been too high for too long. I assure you, we shall do the best we can under the circumstances.”

“You don’t understand!” Svallah wasn’t yelling any more-he was screaming. He had reason: Tosevite shells had started feeling for his position. “Do you hear those bursts? Do you hear them? May you be cursed with an Emperorless afterlife, those aren’t our guns! The stinking Big Uglies have ammunition. It’s not as good as ours, but if they’re shooting and we’re not, what difference does it make?”

“I assure you, Artillery Supervisor, resupply will reach you as expeditiously as is practicable,” answered the male in Supply, who wasn’t being shot at (not yet, Svallah thought bitterly). “I also assure you that yours is not the only unit urgently requesting munitions. We are making every effort to balance demands-”

The Tosevites’ shells were walking closer, fragments of brass and steel rattled off tree trunks and branches. Svallah said, “Look, if you don’t get me some shells pretty quick, my request won’t matter, because I’m about to be overrun here. Is that plain enough for you? By the Emperor, it’d probably make you happy, because then you’d have one thing fewer to worry about.”

“Your attitude is not constructive, Artillery Supervisor,” the male safe in the rear said in hurt tones.

“Ask me if I care,” Svallah retorted. “Just so you know, I’m going to order a retreat before I get chopped to pieces. Those are my only two choices, since you can’t get me ammunition. I-”

A Tosevite round landed within a male’s length of him. Between them, blast and fragments left him hardly more than a red rag splashed across the snow. By a freak of war, the field telephone was undamaged. It squawked, “Artillery Supervisor? Are you there, Artillery Supervisor? Respond, please. Artillery Supervisor…?”

For the first couple of days, it was easier than Larssen would have imagined possible. Patton really had managed to catch the Lizards napping, and to hit them where their defenses were thin. How the soldiers cheered when they crossed from Indiana into Illinois! Instead of running or desperately holding on like a stunned boxer in a clinch, they were advancing. It made new men of them-got their peckers up, was the way one sergeant had put it.

All of a sudden, it wasn’t easy any more. In the open fields in front of a grim little town called Cissna Park stood a Lizard tank. It was defiantly out in the open, with a view that reached for miles. In front of it, burning or by now burnt out, lay the hulks of at least half a dozen Lees and Shermans. Some had been killed at close to three miles. They didn’t have a prayer of touching the Lizard tank at that range, let alone killing it.

The tank crew had high-explosive shells as well as armor-piercers. Larssen had been on the receiving end of bombardments back in Chicago. He preferred giving them out. He couldn’t do anything about it, though, except throw himself flat when the big gun spoke again.

“That son of a whore’s gonna hold up the whole brigade all by his lonesome,” somebody said with sick dread in his voice. The soldiers’ peckers might be up now, but how long would they stay that way if the onslaught failed?

A fellow who looked much too young to be wearing a major’s gold oak leaves began ticking off men on his fingers. “You, you, you, you, and you, head off to the right flank and make that bastard notice you. I’m coming, too. We’ll see what we can do about him.”

Jens was the second of those yous. He opened his mouth to protest: he was supposed to be a valuable physicist, not a dog-face. But he didn’t have the nerve to finish squawking, not when the rest of the party was heading out, not when everybody was looking at them-and at him. Legs numb with fear, he lurched after the others.

The tank seemed almost naked out there. If it had any infantry support, the Lizards on the ground were holding their fire. Larssen watched the distant turret. It got less distant all the time, which meant it got more and more able to kill him. If it swings this way, I know I’m going to run, he thought. But he kept trotting forward.

One of the soldiers lay flat on the ground, opened up with a Browning automatic rifle. He had about as much chance of hurting the tank with it as a mosquito did blowing holes in an elephant. “Come on, keep moving!” the kid who was a major bawled. Jens kept moving. The farther he got from the brave maniac with the BAR, the better he liked it.

A couple of hundred yards farther on, another fellow, also armed with a BAR, took cover in some bushes that wouldn’t have been there if the field had been tended since last summer. He too started firing short bursts at the Lizard tank. Now Larssen was close enough to see a couple of sparks as bullets spanged off its turret. Again, he couldn’t see that they did any good.

“The rest of you, spread out, find what cover you can, and start shooting,” the major said. “We are a diversion. We have to make that gunner pay attention to us.”

Diversion indeed, Jens thought. The Lizard gunner ought to have extraordinarily good sport chewing up humans who couldn’t do him any damage in return.

But there was another tall patch of snow-covered dead weeds just ahead. He dropped down behind them. Even through several layers of clothes, the snow chilled his belly. He drew a bead on the tank, squeezed the Springfield’s trigger.

Nothing happened. Scowling, he checked the rifle. He’d left the safety on. “You idiot!” he snarled to himself as he clicked it off. He aimed again, fired. The kick hammered his shoulder, a lot harder than he remembered from when he’d fooled around with a.22.

The physicist part of him took over: You’re sending a heavier slug out at a higher velocity-of course it’ll kick harder. Newton’s Second Law, remember-good old F = ma? He adjusted the sight for long range; his first shot, with it set for four hundred yards, couldn’t have come close. He pulled the trigger again. This time he was better braced against the recoil. He still couldn’t tell whether he hit it or not.

As he’d been ordered, he banged away. The rest of the detachment was making a lot of noise, too. If somebody got real lucky with a round, he might mess up a sight or a periscope. Past that, the major’s diversion wasn’t doing anything more than standing out in the open with a SHOOT ME sign would have accomplished.

After a while, though, the Lizard commanding the tank must have got tired of just sitting there in a target suit. The turret skewed toward one of the BAR men. Having seen American tank turrets in action, Larssen was appalled at how fast this one traversed.

Fire spurted from the turret, not the main armament-why swat flies with a sledgehammer? — but the coaxial machine gun by it. Snow and dirt spurted up all around the soldier with the automatic rifle. It wasn’t a long burst-the gunner was flung for effect. After a few seconds’ silence, the BAR man shifted his weapon on its bipod, sent back.a few defiant rounds. Here I am! he seemed to be saying. Nyaah, nyaah!

The tank gunner squeezed off an answering burst, longer this time. Another silence fell after he stopped. The fellow with the Browning automatic rifle did not reply now. Wounded or dead, Larssen thought grimly. The tank turret turned on to the other BAR man.

He had a better spot from which to shoot back, and lasted quite a bit longer than the first gunner had. The firefight between him and the tank gunner went on through several exchanges. But the fellow, with the BAR was under orders to keep the tank busy, and brave enough to carry out those orders with exactitude. That meant he had to keep exposing himself to fire and in any case, the dirt and bushes behind which he lay were no match for the inches of armor that sheltered the Lizard in the tank turret.

When the second BAR fell silent, the tank turret traversed through another few degrees. Larssen watched it with fearful fascination-for now it bore on him. He was lying in what had been a plowed furrow. When the machine gun began to chatter again, he flattened himself out like a snake, hoping-praying-the hard earth would offer some protection. The second BAR man had lived a little while, after all.

Bullets lashed the ground all around him. Freezing dirt spattered onto his coat and the back of his neck. He could not force himself to get up and shoot back; not in the face of a machine gun behind armor. Did that make him a coward? He didn’t know or care.

The burst from the tank broke off. He lifted his head out of the dirt. If by some miracle the turret had moved on to take up the hunt for someone else, he thought, he might start firing again, and then scoot for new cover. But no. The cannon-and, therefore, the machine gun, too-still bore on him.

He saw motion on the far side of the Lizard tank: more human soldiers, men who’d snuck close to the monster while he and his comrades occupied its attention. He wondered if they’d leap aboard and throw explosives into the turret through the cupola. Lizard tanks had died that way, but an awful lot more soldiers had died trying to kill them.

One of the Americans raised something to his shoulder. It wasn’t a gun: it was longer and thicker. Flame spurted from its rear end. Trailing fire all the way, some kind of rocket round shot across the couple of hundred yards that separated the soldiers from the Lizard tank. It slammed into the engine compartment at the rear, right where the armor was thinnest.

More fire, some blue, some orange, spurted from the stricken vehicle. Hatches popped open in the turret; three Lizards bailed out. Now, yelling like a savage, Jens fired with ferocious glee. Suddenly the tables were turned, the tormentors all but helpless against those they had bedeviled. One Lizard fell, then another.

Then the tank brewed up as the fire reached the main fuel storage. Flame washed over the whole chassis; a smoke ring spurted up from the turret. Pops and booms marked ammunition starting to cook off. The last Lizard who’d made it out of the hatch went down under a fusillade of bullets.

The kid major was up on his feet, waving like a madman. Off to the east, the distant roar of engines marked new motion from the tanks and self-propelled guns the Lizard tank had stalled. Then the major ran back to see how the two BAR men were. Jens ran with him.

One of them was gruesomely dead, the top of his skull clipped off by a Lizard round and gray-red brains splashed in the snow. The other had a belly wound. He was unconscious but breathing. The major pulled aside clothes, dusted the bleeding wound with sulfa powder, slapped on a field dressing, and waved for a medic.

He turned to Larssen: “You know what? I think we’re really gonna do this!”

“Maybe.” Jens knew his voice wasn’t everything it should be; he hadn’t hardened himself against human beings looking like selections from the butcher’s. Trying not to think of that, he asked, “What did they use to take out the tank?” As if to punctuate his words, more rounds went up inside the blazing hulk.

“The rocket? Wasn’t that great?” When the major grinned, he didn’t look a day over seventeen. “The fancy name is 2.36-inch Rocket Launcher, but all the teams I know are calling it after that crazy instrument Bob Burns plays on the radio.”

“A bazooka?” Larssen grinned, too. “I like that.”

“So do I.” The major’s grin slipped a little. “I just wish we had a hell of a lot more of ’em. They were brand new last year, and of course we’ve had the devil’s own time building ’em since the damned Lizards came. But what we’ve got, we’re using.” All at once, he went from informant back to officer. “Now we’ve got to get moving. Bust your hump, there!”

“Shouldn’t they go ahead, sir?” Jens pointed to the Lees and Shermans just now rattling past the carcass of the Lizard tank.

“They need us, too,” the major answered. “They make the hole, we go through it and we support them. If the Lizards had had some infantry on the ground to support that vehicle, we couldn’t have stalked it the way we did. Their machines are marvelous and you can’t say they’re not brave, but their tactical doctrine stinks.”

Colonel Groves, Larssen remembered, had said the same thing. At the. time, it hadn’t seemed to matter; the aliens’ machines were carrying everything before them. But it seemed they might be fought successfully after all.

The major was already moving west again. Jens trotted heavily after him, giving the pyre of the Lizard tank a wide berth.

Assault Force Commander Relhost said, “No, I can’t send you more landcruisers up there in your sector.”

On the radio, the voice of Zingiber, the Northern Flank Commander, was anguished. “But I need them! The Big Uglies have so much of their garbage coming at me that they’re pushing me back. And it’s not alI garbage any more, either: I lost three landcruisers today to those stinking rockets they’ve started using. Our crews aren’t trained to regard infantry as a tactical threat, and we can’t pull them out for training sessions now.”

“Hardly.” Relhost didn’t want to know whether Zingiber was serious or not. He might have been; some males still hadn’t adjusted to the pace war required on Tosev 3. Relhost went on, “I say again, I have no more landcruisers to send. We’ve lost seven on the southern flank as well, and the rocket threat is making us deploy them more cautiously there, too.”

“But I need them,” Zingiber repeated, as if his need would conjure landcruisers out of thin air. “I say again, superior sir, that as things stand we are losing ground. The two Big Ugly attacks may even succeed in joining.”

“Yes, I know. I am also looking at a map screen.” Relhost didn’t like what he saw there, either if the Big Uglies did manage to link their thrusts, they’d cut support for his principal assault force, which was finally pounding into the suburbs of Chicago. That was expensive, too; in the rubble of their towns, the Tosevites fought like ssvapi on Rabotev 2 protecting their burrows.

Zingiber said, “If you can’t send landcruisers, send helicopters to help me take out some more of the Tosevites’ armor.”

Relhost made up his mind that if Zingiber made one more such idiotic request, he’d relieve him. He hissed angrily before he pressed the TRANSMIT button. “We have fewer helicopters than landcruisers to spare. The miserable Tosevites have learned something new.” They’re faster at that than we are. The thought worried him. He made himself continue: “They’ve brought their antiaircraft artillery as far forward as they can, towing it with light armor or sometimes even with soft-skinned vehicles. The helicopters are armored against rifle-caliber bullets. To armor them against these shells would make them too heavy to fly.”

“Let them ship us landcruisers from elsewhere on this stinking planet, then,” Zingiber said.

“The logistics!” Relhost cringed. “Landcruisers are so big and heavy only two will fit onto even our biggest hauler aircraft. And we brought few of those aircraft to Tosev 3, not anticipating so large a need. Besides, the haulers are unarmed and vulnerable to the upsurge in Tosevite air activity lately. It takes only one of those nasty little machines slipping through a killercraft screen to bring down the hauler and the landcruiser both.”

“But if we don’t get reinforcements from somewhere, we’ll lose this battle,” Zingiber said. “Let them put the landcruisers on a starship if they must, so long as we get them.”

“Land a starship in the middle of a combat zone, vulnerable to artillery and the Emperor only knows what ingenious sabotage the Big Uglies can devise? You must be joking.” Relhost made a bitter decision. “I’ll pull a few landcruisers back from the principal assault force… maybe more than a few. They can return once they rectify the situation.”

I hope, he thought. The landcruisers didn’t run without fuel, and the Tosevites were doing everything they could to interfere with supply lines. No one loved logistics, but armies that ignored logistics died.

Of course, the Tosevites had fuel problems of their own. They’d stockpiled the noxious stuff their machines burned for this campaign, but the facilities that produced it were vulnerable to assault. Relhost looked at the map again. He hoped the Race would assault them soon.

A couple of Big Uglies in long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats pushed an ordnance cart toward the flight of killercraft. Gefron took no notice of them; Tosevites were doing a lot of menial work these days, to let males of the Race get on with the business of conquering Tosev 3.

Gefron gave Rolvar and Xarol, his fellow pilots in the flight, their last few instructions: “Remember, this one is important. We really have to plaster that Ploesti place; the Big Uglies of Deutschland draw much of their fuel from it.”

“It shall be done,” the other two males chorused together.

Gefron went on, “So much I have been ordered to tell you. But for myself, I would like to dedicate this mission to the spirit of my predecessor as head of this unit, Flight Leader Teerts. We shall aid in making it impossible for the Big Uglies to kill or capture-we still do not know his exact fate-any more brave males like Teerts. Thanks to us, the conquest of Tosev 3 shall grow nearer its completion.”

“It shall be done,” the pilots chorused again.

Mordechai Anielewicz walked along Nowolipie Street between closed armaments plants, listening to Nathan Brodsky. The Jewish fighting leader had long since grown used to taking promenades through Warsaw to listen to things he didn’t want to take the chance of having the Lizards overhear. This was one of those things: Brodsky, who worked as a laborer at the airport, had picked up a lot of the Lizards’ language.

“No doubt about it,” Brodsky was saying. The hem of his coat flapped around his ankles as be walked beside Anielewicz. “Their destination is Ploesti; they were talking about knocking out all the Nazis’ oil. Nu, I know that’s important, so I told the Lizard boss I was sick and came straight to you.”

“Nu, nu,” Anielewicz answered. “You’re not wrong; it is important. Now I have to figure out what to do about it.” He stopped. “Let’s head back toward my headquarters.”

Brodsky obediently turned. Now Anielewicz walked with his head down, hands jammed into his pockets against the cold. He was thinking very hard indeed. Cooperating with the Germans in any way still left the worst of bad tastes in his mouth. He kept having second thoughts about letting that damned panzer major through with even half his saddlebag of explosive metal.

And now again. If the Lizards wrecked Ploesti, the Nazi war machine was liable to grind to a halt; the Germans, without oil of their own, desperately needed what they got from Romania. The Nazis were still fighting hard against the Lizards; and even hurting them now and again: no one could deny they turned out capable soldiers and clever engineers.

Suppose in the end the Germans won. Would they rest content inside their own borders? Anielewicz snorted. Not bloody likely! But suppose the Germans-suppose mankind-lost. Would the Lizards ever use human beings as anything but hewers of wood and drawers of water? That wasn’t bloody likely, either.

The Jewish fighting leader came around the last corner before the office building his men occupied. Among many others, his bicycle stood out in front of it. Seeing it there helped him make up his mind. He slapped Brodsky on the back. “Thank you for letting me know, Nathan. I’ll take care of it.”

“What will you do?” Brodsky asked.

Anielewicz didn’t answer; unlike Brodsky, he’d come to appreciate the need for tight security. What the other Jew didn’t know, he couldn’t tell. Anielewicz hopped on his bicycle, rode rapidly to a house outside the ghetto. He knocked on the door. A Polish woman opened it. “May I use your telephone?” he said. “I’m sorry; I’m afraid it’s quite urgent.”

Her eyes went wide: few people who are part of contingency plans ever expect the contingencies to arrive. But after a moment she nodded. “Yes, of course. Come in. It’s in the parlor.”

Anielewicz knew where the phone was; his men had installed it. He cranked it, waited for an operator to answer. When she did, he said, “Give me Operator Three-Two-Seven, please.”

“One moment.” He heard clicks from the switchboard, then: “Three-Two-Seven speaking.”

“Yes. This is Yitzhak Bauer. I need to place a call to my uncle Michael in Satu Mare, please. It’s urgent.”

The operator was one of his people. The false name was one for which she was supposed to be alert. And she was. Without a second’s hesitation, she said, “I will try to put you through. It may take some time.”

“As fast as you can, please.” At full stretch from where he stood, Anielewicz could just reach a chair. He snagged it, sank into it. Polish long-distance phone service had been bad before the war started. It was worse now. He kept the receiver pressed to his ear. What he mostly heard was silence. Every so often, there would be more switchboard clicks or operators’ voices at the very limit of hearing.

Time crawled by. The Polish woman brought him a cup of coffee, or rather the burnt-kasha brew that substituted for it. He’d long since grown used to the ersatz, and besides, it was warm. But if the call didn’t get through pretty soon, he wouldn’t have needed to bother making it: the Lizards would have bombed Ploesti and headed back.

How long to finish arming their planes? he wondered. That was the biggest variable; the flight from here to a little north of Bucharest wouldn’t take long, especially not at the speeds the Lizards’ aircraft used.

More clicks, more distant chatter, and then, sounding almost as clear as if she were sitting in his lap, Operator Three-Two-Seven said, “I am through to Sate Mare, sir.” He heard another operator’s voice, more distant, speaking oddly accented German rather than Polish or Yiddish:. “Go ahead, Warsaw. To whom do you wish to speak?”

“My uncle Michael-Michael Spiegel, that is,” Anielewicz said. “Tell him it’s his nephew Yitzhak.” Lieutenant Colonel Michael Spiegel, he was given to understand, commanded the Nazi garrison at Sate Mare, the northernmost Romanian town still in German hands.

“I will connect you. Please wait,” the distant operator said.

Anielewicz listened to still more clicks, and then at last a ringing phone. Someone picked it up; he heard a brisk male voice say, “Bitte?” The operator explained who he claimed to be. A long pause followed, and then, “Yitzhak? Is that you? I hadn’t expected to hear from you.”

I hadn’t expected to call, either, you Nazi bastard Anielewicz thought; Spiegel’s clear German set his teeth on edge by conditioned reflex. But he made himself say, “Yes, it’s me, Uncle Michael. I thought you ought to know that our friends will want some cooking grease from your family-as much as you can spare.”

He felt how crude the improvised code was. Spiegel, fortunately, proved quick on the uptake. Hardly missing a beat, the German said, “We’ll have to get it ready for them. Do you know when they’re coming?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if they’d already left,” Anielewicz answered. “I’m sorry, but I just found out they felt like getting it myself.”

“Such is life. We’ll do what we can. Hei-Good-bye.” The line went dead.

He started to say Heil Hitler, Anielewicz thought. Damn good thing he caught himself in case the Lizards are listening in.

As soon as he replaced the receiver, the Polish woman stuck her head into the parlor. “Is everything all right?” she asked anxiously.

“I-hope so,” he answered, but felt he had to add, “If you have relatives you can stay with, that might be a good idea.”

Her pale blue eyes went wide. She nodded. “I’ll arrange to have someone get word to my husband,” she said. “Now you’d better go.”

Anielewicz left in a hurry. He felt bad about endangering a noncombatant family, and even worse about endangering them to benefit the Nazis. I hope I did the right thing, he thought as he climbed onto his bicycle. I wonder if I’ll ever be sure.

Blips appeared on the head-up display that reflected into Gefron’s eyes from the inside of the killercraft’s windscreen. “Some of the Big Uglies on the ground must have spotted us,” the flight leader said. “They’re sending aircraft up to try to keep us away from Ploesti.” His mouth fell open in amusement at the absurdity of the idea.

The other two pilots in the flight confirmed that their electronics saw the Tosevite aircraft, too. Xarol observed, “They’re sending up a lot of aircraft.”

“This fuel is important to them,” Gefron answered. “They know they have to try to protect it. What they don’t know is that they can’t. We’ll have to show them.”

He studied the velocity vectors of the planes the Big Uglies were flying. A couple were the new jets the Deutsche had started throwing into the air. They were fast enough to have been troublesome if they were equipped with radar. As it was, he knew they were there while they still groped for him.

“I’ll take the jets,” he told the other males. “You two handle the ones with the revolving airfoils. Knock down a few and keep going; we haven’t any time to waste toying with them.”

He chose targets for his missiles, gave them to the computer.

When the tone from the speaker taped to his hearing diaphragm told him the computer had acquired them, he touched the firing button. The killercraft bucked slightly as the wingtip missiles leapt away.

One of the jets never knew what hit it. He watched electronically as a missile swatted it out of the air. The other Tosevite pilot must have spotted the missile meant for him. He tried to dive away from it, but his aircraft wasn’t fast enough for that. He went down, too.

Gefron’s wingmales salvoed all their missiles, wingtip and pylon both, at the Deutsch aircraft That blasted a gaping hole in their formation, through which the killercraft flew. Rolvar and Xarol shouted excitedly; they hadn’t seen so much opposition since the war was new.

Gefron was pleased, too, but also a little worried. The Big Ugly pilots weren’t fleeing; they were trying to regroup in the wake of the killercraft. Returning to base, only he would have missiles left to fire at them.

It shouldn’t matter, Gefron told himself. If we can’t get by them with our speed, altitude, radar and cannon, we don’t deserve to conquer this planet. But it was one more thing to worry about.

He studied the radar display. “Approaching target,” he said. “Remember, the Deutsche have set up a dummy target north of the real installation. If you bomb that one, by mistake, I promise that you’ll never get your, tailstumps into a killercraft again as long as you live.”

The real Ploesti lay in a little vale. Gefron had it on his radar set. He peered through the windscreen, ready to paint the assigned refineries with his laser to guide the bombs in. But instead of the towers of the refineries and petroleum wells, the big squat cylinders that stored refined hydrocarbons, all he saw was a spreading, thickening cloud of gray-black smoke. He hissed. The Deutsche weren’t playing fair.

His wingmales noticed the problem at the same time he did. “What are we stupposed to do now?” Rolyar asked. “How can we light up the targets through all that junk?”

Gefron wanted to abort the mission and fly back to base. But, because he was the flight leader, anything that went wrong would get blamed on him. “We’ll bomb anyway,” he declared. “Whatever in the smoke we hit will hurt the Deutsche somehow.”

“Truth,” Xarol declared. The flight went on. Gefron turned on the laser targeting system in the hope it would penetrate the smoke or find some clear patches through which to acquire accurate targets for the bombs his killercraft carried under its wings. No luck-instead of the steady tone he wanted to hear, all he got was the complaintng warble of a system that couldn’t lock on.

The Deutsch antiaircraft guns that lined the ridges on either side of the petroleum wells and refineries opened up with everything they had. More smoke dotted the sky, now in big black puffs around and mostly behind the flight of killercraft: the Big Uglies at the guns weren’t leading the Race’s aircraft quite enough.

Even so, the display of firepower was impressive. The bursts from exploding Tosevite shells seemed close enough together for Gefron to get out of his aircraft and walk across them. Once or twice he heard sharp rattles, like gravel bouncing off sheet metal. It wasn’t gravel, though; it was fragments of shell casing punching holes in his fuselage and wing. He anxiously scanned the instrument panel for damage lights. None came on.

The Deutsche were defending Ploesti every way they knew how. Above the clotted smoke floated balloons tethered to stout cables that might wreck an aircraft that ran into them. More antiaircraft guns, some cannons like those on the high ground to either side, others mere machine guns that spat glowing tracers, fired out of the smoke. They had no radar control and so could not see what they hoped to hit, but they added more metal to an already crowded sky.

“Does anyone have laser lock-on?” Gefron asked hopefully. Both wingmales denied it. Gefron sighed. The results would not be what his superiors had hoped for. “Proceed on purely visual bombing run.”

“It shall be done, Flight Leader,” Xarol and Rolvar chorused.

Then they were over the billowing smoke. Gefron poised a claw at the bomb-release button. The killercraft lost both weight and drag as the ordnance fell away. All at once it seemed a much better performer.

“We did hurt them, by the spirits of departed Emperors!” Xarol said exultantly.

The wingmale was right. Sudden new angry clouds of black, greasy smoke roiled up through the screen the Deutsche had stretched above Ploesti. Through new smoke and old, Gefron saw sullen orange fireballs blooming like so many huge, terrible flowers.

“The Big Uglies will be a long time repairing that,” the flight leader agreed happily. He radioed a report of success to the base from which he’d set out, then returned to the intraflight frequency: “Now we go home.”

“As if we had any real home on this cold ball of mud,” Rolvar said.

“Part of it-the more southerly latitudes-can be quite pleasant,” Gefron replied. “And even this area’s not too bad in local summer. Present conditions, of course, are something else again-I assure you, I find frozen water as revolting as does any other male in his right mind.”

He brought his killercraft onto the reciprocal of the course he’d flown to Ploesti. As he did so, his radar picked up the Big Ugly aircraft through which his flight had barreled on the way to the refinery complex. They hadn’t come straight after the killercraft; instead, they’d loitered along the likely return route and used the time while he and his wingmales were making their bombing run to gain altitude.

Gefron would have been just as glad to scoot past unnoticed, but one of the Big Uglies spotted him and his comrades. They might have been radarless, but they had radios. What one of them saw, the others learned in moments. Their aircraft turned toward the flight for an attack run.

The range closed frighteningly fast. The Big Uglies flew inadequate aircraft, but they flew them with panache and courage, darting straight at Gefron and his wingmales. The flight leader fired his next-to-last missile and then, a moment later, his last one. Two Tosevite planes tumbled in ruins. The rest kept coming.

On the head-up display, Gefron saw another enemy aircraft break up, and yet another: Rolvar and Xarol were using their cannon to good effect. But the Big Uglies were firing, too; through the windscreen, past the head-up display, the flight leader watched the pale flashes from their guns. He turned the nose of his killercraft toward the nearest Big Ugly, fired a short burst. Smoke poured from the enemy’s engine; the plane began to fall.

Then the flight was through the horde of Tosevites. Gefron let out a long sigh of relief: the Big Uglies could not hope to pursue. He keyed his radio: “All well, wingmales?”

“All well, Flight Leader,” Rolvar answered. But Xarol said, “Not all well, superior sir. I took several hits as we mixed it up with the Big Uglies. I’ve lost electrical power to some of my control surfaces, and I’m losing hydraulic pressure in the backup system. I am not certain I will be able to complete return to base.”

“I will inspect visually.” Gefron gained altitude and lost speed, letting Xarol pull ahead of him: What he saw made him hiss in dismay: part of the tail surface of his wingmale’s killercraft had been shot away, and two lines of dismayingly large holes stitched the right wing and fuselage. “You didn’t just take several hits; you got yourself chewed up. Can you keep it flying?”

“For the time being, superior sir, but altitude control grows increasingly difficult.”

“Do the best you can. If you are able to set down on one of our airstrips, the Race will have the opportunity to repair your aircraft rather than writing it off.”

“I understand, superior sir.”

The Race had lost far more equipment on Tosev 3 than even the most pessimistic forecasts allowed for. Keeping what was left operational was a priority that grew higher every day.

But luck was not with Xarol. He did manage to keep his killercraft airborne until the flight reached territory the Race controlled. Gefron had just radioed the nearest landing strip of his wingmale’s predicament when Xarol announced, “I regret, superior sir, that I have no choice but to abandon the aircraft.” Moments later, a blue-white fireball marked the machine’s impact point.

When Gefron landed back at Warsaw, he learned his wingmale had ejected safely and been rescued. That pleased him-but the next time Xarol needed to fly, what aircraft would he use?

Small-arms fire rattled through Naperville. Mutt Daniels crouched in the trench in front of the ruins of the Preemption House. Every so often, when the firing slackened, he’d stick his tommy gun up over the forward rim of the trench, squeeze off a short burst in the direction of the Lizards, and then yank it back down again.

“Kinda quiet today, isn’t it, Sarge?” Kevin Donlan said just as one such burst was answered by a storm of fire from the aliens, whose forward outposts were only a few hundred yards to the east.

Mutt pressed his face against the dirt wall of the trench as bullets whined just overhead. “You call this here quiet?” he said, thinking he’d chill the kid with sarcasm.

But Donlan wouldn’t chill. “Yeah, Sarge. I mean, it is, isn’t it. Just rifle fire right now-just rifle fire all day long, pretty much. I don’t miss the artillery one little bit, let me tell you.”

“Me neither. Rifles are bad enough, but that other stuff, that’s what slaughters you.” Daniels paused, played back the day’s action in his head. “You know, you’re right, and I didn’t even notice. They ain’t done much with their big guns today, have they?”

“I didn’t think so. What do you suppose it means?”

“Damfino.” Mutt wished he had a cigarette or a chew or even a pipe. “I ain’t sorry not to be on,this end of it either, though; don’t get me wrong about that. But why they’re off with it… son, I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

The more he thought about it, the more it worried him. The Lizards didn’t have numbers going for them; their strength had always lain in their guns: their tanks and self-propelled pieces; if they were easing off with those…

“Maybe our offensive really is putting the screws to them, making them pull back,” Donlan said.

“Mebbe.” Daniels remained unconvinced. He’d been falling back before the invaders ever since he got strafed out. of his train. The idea that other troops could move forward against them was galling; it seemed to say nothing he’d done, nothing Sergeant Schneicier-as fine a soldier as ever lived-had done, was good enough. He didn’t like believing that.

Behind him, back toward Chicago, an American artillery barrage opened up on the Lizard position. It was an odd, pawky sort of shelling, on again, off again, nothing like the endless rains of projectiles that had punctuated combat in France. If you kept a gun in the same place for more than two or three rounds, the Lizards would figure out where it was and blast it. Mutt didn’t know how they did it, but he knew they did. He’d seen too many dead artillerymen and wrecked guns to have any doubt left.

He waited for counterbattery fire to start. With the cynical senst of self-preservation soldiers soon develop, he would sooner have had the Lizards shelling positions miles behind him than lobbing their presents into his trench.

American shells kept falling on the Lizards. When half an hour went by without reply, Daniels said, “You know, kid, you might just be right. Feels mighty damn good to give it to ’em instead of taking it, don’t you reckon?”

“Hell yes, Sergeant,” Donlan said happily.

A runner came down heavily into the trench where the two men sheltered. He said, “Check your watches, Sergeant, soldier. We’re advancing against their lines in”-he glanced at his own watch-“nineteen minutes.” He ran down the trench toward the next knot of men. “You got a watch?” Donlan asked.

“Yeah,” Mutt answered absently. Advancing against the Lizards! He hadn’t heard orders like that since outside Shabbona, halfway across the state. That had been a disaster. This time, though… “Maybe we really are hurting ’em out there. God damn, I hope we are.”

General Patton’s personal vehicle was a big, ungainly Dodge command and reconnaissance car, one of the kind that had been nicknamed jeeps until the squarish little Willys vehicles took the name away from them. This one had been altered with a .50 caliber machine-gun mount that let Patton blaze away as well as command.

To Jens Larssen, who munched on crackers in the backseat and tried to stay inconspicuous, the gun seemed excessive. No one had asked his opinion. As far as he could see, no one ever asked anyone’s opinion in the Army. You either gave orders or you went out and did what you were told.

Patton turned to him and said, “I do regret that you were thrust into the front line, Dr. Larssen. You bear too much value to your country for you to have been so cavalierly risked.”

“It’s all right,” Larssen said. “I lived through it.” Somehow, he added to himself. “Where are we now, anyhow?”

“D’you see that hill there, the one with the tall building sprouting from it?” Patton asked, pointing through the Dodge jeep’s windshield. On the flat prairie country of central Illinois, any rise, no matter how slight, stood out. Patton went on, “The building is the State Farm Insurance headquarters, and the town”-he paused for dramatic effect-“the town, Dr. Larssen, is Bloomington.”

“The objective.” Larssen hoped General Patton would not take offense at the surprise in his voice. The Lizards had seemed so nearly invincible ever since they came to Earth. He hadn’t dared believe Patton could not only force a breakthrough but exploit it once made.

“The objective,” Patton agreed proudly. As if answering the thought Jens hadn’t spoken, he added, “Once we broke through their crust, they were hollow behind it. No doubt we were confused and scared, attacking such a formidable foe. But they showed confusion and fright themselves, sir, not least because they were being attacked.”

The bulky radio console set into the space behind the rear seat of the Dodge jeep let out a squawk. Patton grabbed for the earphones and mike. He listened for a minute or so, then softly breathed one word: “Outstanding.” He stowed the radio gear, gave his attention back to Larssen: “Our scouts, sir, have met advance parties from General Bradley’s army north of Bloomington. We now have the force which was attacking Chicago trapped within our ring of steel.”

“That’s-wonderful,” Larssen said. “But will they stay trapped?”

“A legitimate question,” Patton said. “We will learn soon: reports indicated that the armor they had been using to spearhead their advance into Chicago has now reversed its direction.”

“It’s bearing down on us?” Jens felt some of the bladder-loosening fear he’d known while diverting the Lizard tank so the fellow with the bazooka could stalk and kill it. He remembered the gaggle of American tanks the monster had taken out, and the wrecked fighting vehicles that littered the snowy plains of Indiana and Illinois. If lots of those tanks were heading this way, how was Second Armor supposed to stop them?

Patton said, “I understand your concern, Dr. Larssen, but fighting aggressively while holding the strategic defensive should let us inflict heavy losses on them. And infantry teams firing antitank rockets from ambush will present a challenge they have not previously experienced,”

“I sure hope so,” Larssen said. He went on, “If they’re coming from Chicago, sir, when will I be able to go into the city to find out what’s become of the Metallurgical Laboratory?” And even more important, what’s become of Barbara, he thought. But he’d learned he was more likely to get what he wanted from Patton by leaving personal concerns out of the equation.

“As soon as we have destroyed the Lizard tank forces, of course,” Patton said grandly. “We’ll do to them what Rommel did to the British time and again in the desert: make them charge down lines of fire we’ll already have preregistered. Not only that, our forces farther east have gone over to the attack and are pursuing them out of Chicago. It should be a slaughter.”

Of whom? Jens wondered. The Lizard tanks were not the slow, balky, unreliable machines England used. Would any defenses be enough to hold them back when they wanted to go somewhere?

As if to underscore his concern, half a mile ahead a helicopter skimmed low over the ground like a mechanized shark. A rocket lanced out to obliterate an American halftrack and however many men it was carrying. Patton swore and started hammering away with his heavy machine gun. The noise was overpowering, like standing next to a triphammer. Tracers showed he was scoring hits, but the tough machine ignored them.

Then, without warning, something heavier than a .50 caliber slug must have hit it. It heeled awkwardly in the air; Patton almost shot off his driver’s ear as he tried to keep a bead on it. The helicopter scurried away, back toward the west where the Lizards still held the countryside.

Maybe another shell found it then. Maybe the cumulative damage from all the bullets Patton and every other American in range poured into it took a toll. Or maybe the Lizard pilot, fleeing under heavy fire, just made a mistake. The helicopter’s rotor clipped a tree. The machine did a twisting somersault straight into the ground.

Patton yelled like a madman. So did Jens and the jeep driver. Patton pounded the physicist on the back. “Do you see, Dr. Larssen? Do you see?” he shouted. “They’re not invulnerable, not even slightly.”

“So they’re not,” Jens admitted. Lizard tanks, though, carried more firepower and more armor than their helicopters. They might not be invulnerable, but they sure had seemed close to it until that crazy bazooka thing took one out. Even then, the rocket round hadn’t wrecked it with a frontal hit, but with one to the less heavily protected engine compartment.

“Yes, sir, Larssen, it won’t be long before you can head into Chicago as a conqueror,” Patton boomed. “If you’re going to do, by God, do it with style!”

Jens didn’t care anything about style. He would gladly have gone into Chicago naked and in blackface if that was the only way to get there. And if Patton insisted on holding him away much longer, he’d damn well take French leave and head into town on his own. Why not? he thought. It’s not like I’m really a soldier.

Atvar increased the magnification on the situation map. The Race’s movements appeared in red arrows, those of the Big Uglies in rather fuzzier white ones that reflected the uncertainties of reconnaissance. The fleetlord hissed in discontent. “I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to extricate our forces there or not.”

Kirel peered at the situation map, too. “This is the pocket in which the Tosevites on the lesser continental map have trapped our assault units, Exalted Fleetlord?”

“Yes,” Atvar said. “They have taught us a lesson here: never be so concerned about the point of an attack as to neglect the flanks.”

“Indeed.” Kirel left one eye on the map, turned the other toward Atvar. “Forgive me, Exalted Fleetlord, but I had not looked for you to be so, ah, sanguine over our misfortunes in the, ah, not-empire called the United States.”

“You mistake me, Shiplord,” Atvar said sharply, and Kirel lowered his eyes in apology. Atvar went on, “I do not enjoy seeing our brave males endangered by the Big Uglies under any circumstances. Moreover, I have hope we shall still be able to get many of them out. If the beastly weather would let up, our aircraft ought to be able to blast an escape corridor through which we could conduct our retreat. Failing that, the landcruisers will have to do the job.”

“Landcruiser losses have been unusually heavy in this action,” Kirel said.

“I know.” That did pain Atvar; without those landcruisers, his ground-based forces were going to have ever more trouble conducting needed operations. He said, “The Big Uglies have come up with something new again.”

“So they have.” The disgust with which Kirel freighted his words made it sound as if he were cursing the Tosevites for their ingenuity. The Race had had plenty of cause to do that; had the Big Uglies been less fiendishly ingenious, all of Tosev 3 would long since have been incorporated into the Empire.

Atvar said, “As with most of their innovations, we will need a certain amount of time to develop appropriate countermeasures.” They should be in place about the time the Big Uglies invent their next new weapon, he thought. And of course, they won’t work against that. Aloud, he continued, “Still, considering how different this world is from what our probe predicted, we, should count ourselves lucky that we’ve not got our tailstumps pinched in the doorway more often.”

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord.” But Kirel sounded anything but convinced.

Atvar let his mouth fall open. “In case you’re wondering, Shiplord, I’ve not started tasting ginger; I don’t suffer from the insane self-confidence the drug induces. I have reason for being sanguine, as you termed it. Observe.”

He poked a control with a claw. The situation map vanished from the screen, to be replaced by images from a killercraft’s gun cameras. On the screen, bombs arced down into drifting, blowing smoke. Moments later, fireballs and more smoke mushroomed into the sky. The angle of the tape-jerked sharply as the killercraft dodged through desperate Tosevite efforts to shoot it down.

“That, Shiplord,” Atvar declared, “is a Tosevite petroleum refinery going up in flames. It happens to be the one that supplies Deutschland, but we have struck several in recent days. If we continue on that pattern, the embarrassments we have suffered around this town of Chicago should soon fade into insignificance as the Big Uglies run low on fuel.”

“How massive is this destruction when compared to the overall production of the facility?” Kirel asked.

Atvar replayed the tape. He enjoyed watching the enemy’s petroleum stocks going up in flames. “Do the images not speak for themselves? Smoke has shrouded this, ah, Ploesti place ever since our attack, which means the Big Uglies have yet to suppress the blazes we started.”

“But there was smoke around the facility before,” Kirel persisted. “Is this not part of the Tosevites’ ongoing camouflage efforts?”

“Infrared imaging indicates otherwise,” Atvar said. “Some of these hot spots have remained in place since our bombs ignited them.”

“That is good news,” Kirel admitted.

“It is the best possible news, and the story at other refineries is similar,” the fleetlord said. “They have gone down to destruction more easily even than I anticipated when I began this series of strikes against them. The war for Tosev 3 may have hung in the balance up until this time, but now we are tilting the balance decisively in our favor.”

“May it be so.” Ever cautious, Kirel accepted nothing new until it was proved overwhelmingly. “The future of the Race here depends on its being so. The colony ships are behind us, after all.”

“So they are.” Atvar played the tape. of the burning refinery yet again. “We shall be ready for them, by the Emperor.” He cast his eyes to the floor in reverence for his sovereign. So did Kirel.

George Patton aimed the jeep’s machine gun up in the air, squeezed the triggers. As the gun roared, he tried to outyell it. After a few seconds, he stopped firing and turned to Jens Larssen. He pummeled the physicist with his fists. “We’ve done it, by God!” he bawled. “We’ve held the sons of bitches.”

“We really have, haven’t we?” Larssen knew he sounded more amazed than overjoyed, but he couldn’t help it-that was how he felt.

Patton didn’t get angry; nothing, Jens thought, would have angered Patton this morning. He said, “This is the greatest victory in the war against the Lizards.” (It was also, for all practical purposes, the first and only victory in the war against the alien invaders, but Jens didn’t want to cut into Patton’s ebullience by pointing that out.) “Now that we know it can be done and how to do it, we’ll beat them again and again.”

If confidence had anything to do with anything, Patton would, too. He looked as if he’d just stepped off a recruiting poster. His chin, as usual, was naked of stubble, his uniform clean, his boots shiny. He smelled of Ivory soap and aftershave.

How he managed that right through a hard-driving campaign was beyond Larssen, whose own face was like a wire brush, whose splotched and spotted overcoat (he devoutly hoped) helped camouflage him, and whose shoes had broken laces and no finish whatsoever. Patton insisted spruced-up soldiers had better morale. Seeing the spruced-up Patton beside him only reminded Jens how grubby he was himself.

But victory kicked morale harder and higher than mere cleanliness ever could. Larssen said, “It’s a damn shame any of the Lizards broke out.”

“It is indeed,” Patton said. “I console myself by remembering that perfection is an attribute belonging only to God. This consolation comes easier because we closed off the breakout after the tanks punched through. Few foot soldiers managed to follow them.” He pointed to a burnt-out Lizard tank not far away. “And more of their armor ended up like that.”

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 laissez-passer from 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 had 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.