Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

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-”