In the Balance

“It’s the Army,” one of the other passengers explained. “The next time something goes just according to plan will be the first.” The fellow wore a major’s gold oak leaves so no one presumed to argue with him. Besides he was obviously right.

After a minute or so, the bus started rolling again, more slowly now. Yeager leaned out into the aisle to peer through the front windows. At the corner of Michigan and Eleventh soldiers waved vehicle after vehicle onto the latter street.

The driver opened the front door with a hiss of compressed air. “What got screwed up now?” he called to one of the men on traffic-cop duty. “Why you movin’ us offa Michigan?”

The soldier jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “You can’t get through no more on Michigan. The goddamn Lizards knocked down the Stevens Hotel this morning, and they’re still clearin’, the bricks and shit away.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

“Go over a block, then up Wabash to Lake. You can get back onto Michigan there.”

“Okay,” the driver said, and swung through the turn. No sooner had he rolled past the Woman’s Club Building than more soldiers waved him right onto Wabash, one block west. St. Mary’s Church there had had its spire blown off; the cross that had topped it lay half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter.

Since Wabash hadn’t been cleared to let the convoy get through, the going was slow and bumpy. Once the bus had to jounce up onto the sidewalk to get around a crater in the road. Two empty gas stations, one Shell, the other Sinclair, stood across the street from each other at Wabash and Balbo. A dusty sign in front of the Sinclair station advertised its regular gasoline, six gallons for ninety-eight cents, tax paid. A fifteen-foot-tall plywood cutout of a waving man in a parking attendant’s uniform plugged the parking lot next to the gas station: twenty-five cents for one hour or less (SAT. NITE 50? AFTER 6 P.M). But for parked cars and rubble, the lot was empty.

Yeager shook his head. Up until the Lizards came, life in the United States had been within shouting distance of normal, war or no war. Now… He’d seen newsreel film of wreckage in Europe and China, seen black-and-white images of stunned people trying to figure out how to go on with their lives after they’d lost everything-and often everybody-that mattered to them. He thought they’d sunk in. But the difference between seeing pictures of war and having war brought home to you was like the difference between seeing a picture of a pretty girl and going to bed with her.

The elevated train curled round the corner of Wabash and Lake. Lizard bombs had torn great gaps in the steel-and-wood superstructure. The trains in Chicago did not run on time, not any more.

Back onto Michigan Avenue. Half a block north of Lake, the forty-story Carbide and Carbon Building had been a Chicago landmark with its black marble base, dark green terra-cotta walls, and gilded trim. Now scorch marks ran up its flanks. Piles of the wall-hell, pieces of the building-were chewed out by bomb hits, as if a dog the size of King Kong had tried it for taste. The glass from hundreds of windows had been swept out of Michigan Avenue, but still glittered on the sidewalk.

The bus driver was evidently a native Chicagoan. Just past the Carbide and Carbon Building, he pointed to the opposite side of the street and said, “This here used to be the 333 North Michigan Building. Now it ain’t.”

Now it ain’t. A mournful pronouncement, but accurate enough. The pile of debris-marble facings, wood floors, endless cubic yards of reinforced concrete, twisted steel girders beginning to be mangy with rust now that they were open to the snow and rain-had been a building once. It wasn’t any more.

Nor was the double-decked Michigan Avenue Bridge a bridge any more. Army engineers had run a temporary pontoon bridge across the Chicago River to get the convoy to the other side. It would come down again as soon as the last truck rattled over it. If it didn’t, the Lizards would blast it in short order.

Armchair strategists said the Lizards didn’t really understand what all human beings used boats for. Yeager hoped they were right. He’d been strafed in a train the night the aliens came crashing down on Earth. Getting strafed on board ship would be ten times worse-no place to run, no place to hide.

But if the Lizards didn’t understand boats, they sure knew what bridges were all about. Looking west as he bounced over the steel plates of the makeshift span the engineers had thrown up, Yeager saw that bridges had leapt over the Chicago River at every block. They didn’t overleap it now. Every one of them, like the Michigan Avenue Bridge, had been bombed into oblivion.

“Ain’t it a bitch?” the driver said, as if reading his mind. “This here bridge was only about twenty, twenty-five years old-my old man was back from France to watch ’em open it up. Fuckin’ waste, if you ask me.”