Page 26 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

“I know.” Nordenskold wore a small, precise gray mustache-too small and precise to fluff out when he sighed. “Captain, we’ll do the best we can under the circumstances: we’ll harass, we’ll counterattack when we can…” He sighed again. “Take away the Army guff, and a lot of us are going to get killed trying to hold them back. Any further questions, Auerbach?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Rance answered. Nordenskold had been more forthright than he’d expected. Things weren’t good, and they weren’t likely to get better any time soon. He’d known that, but having his superior come right out and say it made it feel as real and immediate as a kick in the teeth.

“Dismissed, then,” the colonel said. His desk was piled high with papers, some of them reports and notes handwritten on the backs of old bank forms. He bent to them once more before Auerbach was out of the office.

Without electric lights, the room where First National Bank customers would have stood was dark and gloomy. Rance blinked several times when he went out into the bright sunshine of the street. Then he blinked again, and touched the brim of his cap with a forefinger in what was more a polite gesture than a salute. “Hello, Miss Penny. How are you today?”

“I’m all right, I suppose,” Penny Summers answered indifferently. She’d been like that ever since Auerbach had brought her back to Lamar from Lakin, Kansas. Nothing seemed to matter much to her. He understood that; watching your father smashed to cat meat right before your eyes was plenty to leave you stunned for a while.

“You look mighty nice,” he offered gallantly. She was a nice-looking girl, true, but that wasn’t the same thing. Her face still had a wounded look to it and, like a lot of faces in Lamar, was none too clean. She still wore the overalls she’d had on when she and her father decided to pitch in and help the cavalry against the Lizards in Lakin. Under them she had on a man’s shirt that had seen better years-maybe better decades-and was also several sizes too big for her.

She shrugged, not because she didn’t believe him, he judged, but because she didn’t care one way or the other.

He tried again: “The folks you’re staying with here, are they treating you okay?”

“I guess so,” she said, still so flat that he started to give up hope of bringing her back into full contact with the world. But then her voice picked up a little as she went on, “Mr. Purdy, he tried peekin’ at me when I got undressed one night, but I told him I was your girlfriend and you’d whale the stuffing out of him if he ever did it again.”

“I ought to whale the stuffing out of him for doing it once,” Auerbach growled; he had definite, even vehement, notions about what you should and shouldn’t do. Taking advantage of somebody you were supposed to be helping fell with a thud into the second category.

“I told him I’d tell his wife on him, too,” Penny said. Was that amusement in her voice? Auerbach wasn’t sure, but it was something, and he hadn’t heard anything there since the Lizard plane swooped low over her father.

He decided to risk laughing. “That was a good idea,” he said. Then he asked, “Why did you say you were my girlfriend? Not that I wouldn’t like it if it were so, mind you, but-”

“On account of Mr. Purdy knows you brought me here, and he knows you’re half his age and twice his size,” Penny Summers answered. If she noticed the last sentence he’d politely tacked on, she didn’t show it.

He sighed. He wished he could do something for her, but had no idea what that something might be. When he said good-bye, Penny only nodded and went on down the street. He didn’t think she was going anywhere in particular, just wandering around-maybe she and the Purdys got on one another’s nerves in ways other than the one she’d mentioned, too.

He turned a corner and headed for the stables (funny to think of towns having stables again; they’d been going out of business since about the time he was born) to see to his horse: if you didn’t worry about your animal before you worried about yourself, you didn’t belong in the cavalry.

Somebody sang out, “Hello, Captain Rance, sir!”

Auerbach whirled. Only one person called him Captain Rance. To his men, he was Captain Auerbach. To his friends, he was just Rance-or rather, he’d been just Rance; the people he’d called friends were a lot of duty stations away from Lamar, Colorado. Sure enough, there stood Rachel Hines, grinning at him. He grinned back. “Hello yourself.”

Where Penny, weighed down by her father’s death, had withdrawn into herself since she came to Lamar, Rachel had blossomed. She was still wearing the dress in which she’d come to town, and it wasn’t any too clean, but she wore it with a flair Penny had forgotten-if she’d ever known it. From God knows where, Rachel had managed to come by makeup which highlighted her blond good looks. And, perhaps for no better reason than to keep life interesting, she still had her.22 slung over a shoulder.

Or perhaps she did have a reason: perhaps she was trying to make a point. She walked up to Auerbach and said, “When am I going to get to ride out with your men against the Lizards?”

He didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, as he would have before the Lizards came. The position of the United States was, in a word, desperate. In a situation like that, whether you could take a leak standing up suddenly looked a lot less important than whether you could ride hard, shoot straight, and follow orders.

He studied Rachel Hines. She stared saucily back at him. He wasn’t sure about that last one, not where she was concerned. Some women wouldn’t be any trouble on campaign, but Rachel enjoyed flaunting what she had. That could make trouble. So Auerbach temporized, saying, “I can’t tell you yes or no yet. Colonel Nordenskold is still thinking that one over.” That had the additional virtue of being more or less true.

She took another step toward him; now she was so close, she made him want to take a step back. She ran her tongue over her lips, which made him notice again that she’d painted them red. “I’d do just about anything to get the chance to go along,” she murmured in a breathy little voice he wasn’t used to hearing anywhere outside the bedroom.

The sweat that sprang out on his forehead had nothing to do with the heat of Colorado summer. Women had been few and far between for him this past crazy summer, and, like a lot of guys, he always came back from action horny, probably because he was so relieved to be coming back alive.

But if Rachel would go to bed with him to get what she wanted, she’d do the same thing with somebody else. Politely, in case he’d somehow misunderstood her (though he knew damn well he hadn’t), he said, “I’m sorry, but it isn’t in my hands. Like I said, it’s up to the colonel.”

“Well, I’ll just have to talk withhim, then, won’t I?” She sashayed off toward the First National Bank. Auerbach wondered if Colonel Nordenskold would be able to resist her blandishments, and if he’d even try.

The cavalry captain went on to tend to his horse, also wondering how much he’d regret turning her down. “Damn, if she’d only wanted something easy from me,” he muttered under his breath. “Robbing the bank here, say…”

Leslie Groves did not pretend to be a combat general, even to himself. Engineers fought n

ature and they fought the efforts of ill-intentioned people in the wrong kinds of uniforms who wanted to knock down the things they ran up. They weren’t supposed to worry about fighting the bad guys, not directly.

On the other hand, engineers had to be able to fight in a pinch. You never could tell what might happen to the officers who made battle their proper business, if enough of them went down, you were liable to be the man on the spot for a while.

So Groves had plenty of experience reading situation maps. Just to keep himself in practice, he often tried to figure out strategy for each side. With pardonable pride, he thought he was pretty good at it.

When he looked at the situation map on the wall of his office, he grimaced. You didn’t have to be Napoleon to realize that, if the Lizards wanted to, they could stroll across Colorado and seize Denver without breathing hard, let alone slowing down.

“What’s going to stop them?” Groves snorted. “Cavalry, for God’s sake?” He hadn’t seen cavalry symbols on a map for a long time; he’d felt mild pride for remembering what they meant.

Cavalry, against the Lizards? Cavalry had had trouble with the Sioux Indians, and he didn’t see that the state of the art had improved enough in the past three generations to give the horse soldiers much of a chance of holding off creatures from another planet. If the Lizards took it into their toothy heads to go after Denver, cavalry wouldn’t be enough to hold them back.

More armored divisions than the U.S. Army owned might not be enough to hold them back, either, but Groves didn’t worry about might-have-beens. Whatwas posed quite enough difficulties.

“They can’t find out we’re working on the atomic bomb here,” he announced, as if he expected someone to materialize in an empty chair across the desk from him and nod at his wisdom.

Of course, if the Lizards did find out the Metallurgical Laboratory had settled down here, they probably wouldn’t bother mounting an armored drive across Colorado. They’d just do unto Denver what they’d done unto Tokyo: they’d blow it off the face of the earth. If they did that, and especially if they did that before the United States had made any bombs, the war would be as good as lost, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

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