Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

“Wonder what it was he knew,” Rachel Hines said.

Auerbach shrugged. His troopers had been asking that question since the order to hunt down Larssen came out of Denver. He didn’t know the answer, but he could make some pretty fair guesses, ones he didn’t share. Back a while before, he’d led the cavalry escort that got Leslie Groves into Denver, and Groves had been carrying something-he wouldn’t say what-he treated as just a little more important than the Holy Grail. If it didn’t have something to do with the atomic bombs that had knocked the Lizards for a couple of loops, Auerbach would have been mightily surprised.

Penny Summers said, “I spent a lot of time praying everyone would come through the mission safe. I do that every time people ride out of here.”

“It’s not the worst thing to do,” Auerbach said, “but coming out and cooking or nursing or whatever you want wouldn’t hurt, either.” Since she’d come to Lamar, Penny had spent a lot of time in a little furnished room in an overcrowded apartment house, brooding and reading the Bible. Getting her out for mutton chops was something of a triumph.

Or so he thought, till she shoved her plate away and said, “I don’t like mutton. It tastes funny and it’s all greasy. We never had it much back in Lakin.”

“You should eat,” Auerbach told her, knowing he sounded like a mother hen. “You need it” That was true; Penny was rail-thin. She hadn’t been that way when she came to Lamar, but she hadn’t been the same in a lot of ways since Wendell Summers got himself messily killed.

“Hey, it’s food,” Rachel Hines said. “I don’t even mind the beets, not any more. I just shovel it all down; I quit worrying about it as soon as I put on the uniform.”

She filled out that uniform in a way the Army bureaucrats who’d designed it hadn’t had in mind. Despite her talk of gluttony, she wasn’t the least bit fat. If she hadn’t been so all-around good-natured, she would have had half the men in the company squabbling over her. There were times when Auerbach had been tempted to pull rank himself. Even if she’d been interested, though, that would have created as many problems as it solved, maybe more.

He glanced over to Penny again. He felt responsible for her, too. He also had the feeling more was there than met the eye. With Rachel, what you saw was what you got-he couldn’t imagine her holding anything back. With Penny, he got the feeling her present unhappiness masked something altogether different. He shrugged. The other possibility was that his imagination had gone and run away with him. Wouldn’t be the first time, he thought.

To his surprise, she did take back the plate and start eating again, not with any great enthusiasm but doggedly, as if she were fueling a car. With what she’d been giving herself lately, a car would long since have run out of gas. He didn’t say anything. That might have broken the spell.

Rachel Hines shook her head. She’d cropped her hair into a short bob, the better to have it fit under a helmet. She said, “Going off and giving secrets to the Lizards. I purely can’t fathom that, and there’s a fact. But plenty of people in Lakin got on with ’em just fine and dandy, like they were the new county commissioners or something.”

“You’re right.” Penny Summers’ face twisted into an expression both fierce and savage, one altogether unlike any Auerbach had seen on her since she’d come to Lamar. “Joe Bentley over at the general store, he sucked up to them for all he was worth, and when Edna Wheeler went in there and called them a bunch of goggle-eyed things from out of a freak show, you tell me he didn’t go trotting off to them fast as his legs could take him. And the very next day she and her husband and both their kids got thrown out of their house.”

“That’s so,” Rachel said, nodding. “It sure is. And Mel Six-killer, I guess he got sick of folks calling him half-breed all the time, on account of he’d even make up tales to take to the Lizards, and they’d believe ’em, too. He got a lot of people in trouble like that. Yeah, some people were mean to him, but you don’t go getting even by hurting ’em that kind of way.”

“And Miss Proctor, the home economics teacher at the high school,” Penny said. “What was it she always called the Lizards? ‘The wave of the future,’ that was it, like we couldn’t do anything about ’em no matter what. And then she’d go out and make sure we couldn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, she sure did,” Rachel said. “And… ”

They went on for another five or ten minutes, talking about the collaborators back in their little hometown. Auerbach sat quietly, drinking his beer, finishing his supper (he didn’t mind mutton, but he could have lived for a long time without looking another beet in the eye) and listening. He’d never seen Penny Summers so lively, and he’d never seen her finally clean her plate, either-she didn’t seem to notice she was doing it. Complaining about the old neighbors got her juices flowing as nothing else had.

The brawny waitress came by. “Get you folks some more beer, or are you gonna sit there takin’ up space?”

“I’ll have another one, thanks,” Auerbach said. To his surprise, Penny nodded before Rachel did. The waitress went away, came back with fresh mugs. “Thanks, Irma,” Auerbach told her. She glowered at him, as if doing her job well enough to deserve thanks showed she’d somehow failed at it.

“You’ve raided Lakin since you got us out, haven’t you, Captain?” Rachel asked.

“Sure we have,” Auerbach answered. “You weren’t along for that, were you? No, you weren’t-I remember. We hurt ’em, too; drove ’em clean out of town. I thought we’d be able to keep it, but when they threw too much armor at us-” He spread his hands. “What can you do?”

“That’s not what she meant,” Penny said. “I know what she meant.”

Auerbach stared at her. She surely hadn’t been this animated before. “What did she mean?” he asked, hoping to keep her talking-and, more than that, hoping to keep her involved with the world beyond the four walls within which she’d chosen to shut herself away.

It worked, too; Penny’s eyes blazed. “She meant, did you settle up scores with the quislings?” she said. Rachel Hines nodded to show her friend was right.

“No, I don’t think we did,” Auerbach said. “We didn’t know just who needed settling back then, and we were too busy with the Lizards to risk putting anybody’s nose out of joint by getting the locals mad at us for giving the wrong people a hard time.”

“We’re not going back to Lakin any time soon, are we?” Rachel asked.

“Not that I know of, anyhow,” Auerbach said. “Colonel Nordenskold might have a different idea, but he hasn’t told me about it if he does. And if he gets orders from somewhere up the line-” He spread his hands again. Above the regimental level, the chain of command kept getting broken links. Local commanders had a lot more autonomy than anybody had figured they would before the Lizards started plastering communications.

“The colonel needs to get word to the partisans,” Rachel said. “Sooner or later, those bastards ought to get what’s coming to ’em.” She brought out the word as casually as any cavalry trooper might have; Auerbach didn’t think of it as a woman swearing till he listened to the sentence over again inside his head. Even if she had curves, Rachel was a cavalryman, all right.

“That’s what needs doing,” Penny Summers said with a vigorous nod. “Oh yes indeed.”

“Seems funny, talking about American partisans,” Rachel said. “I mean, we saw the Russians hiding in the woods in the newsreels before the Lizards came, but to have to do that kind of stuff ourselves-”