In the Balance

“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.