In the Balance

“Goddammit, will you listen to me?” Jens shouted, furious now as well as frightened. “I’m on my way back from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Jesus, I talked with General Marshall while I was there. He’ll vouch for me, if he’s still alive.”

“Yeah, pal, an’ I was in Rome last week, for lunch with the Pope.” But the unwashed, unshaven soldier did move his rifle so it wasn’t aimed at Larssen’s midriff. “Awright, I’ll take you in. You can peddle your papers to my lieutenant. If he buys,what you’re pushin’, that’s his business. C’mere… No, dummy, leave the bike.”

Sans

bicycle, Larssen came. He wondered how he was supposed to get through that impenetrable-looking mass of barbed wire. But a path was cut, with strands looking as if they were firmly attached to their support posts but in fact just hanging from them. He didn’t have much trouble crawling along after his captor, though he never could have navigated by himself. Although he tried to be careful, he got punctured a couple-of times. He tried to remember when his last tetanus shot had been.

More dirty faces peered out at him from the zigzagging trenches behind the wire. The lieutenant, instead of a British-style tin hat, wore a domed steel helmet that looked very modern and martial. He listened to Larssen’s story, reached into a shirt pocket, then laughed at himself. “I still want a butt to help me think, but I haven’t seen one in weeks. Hellfire, buddy, I don’t know what to do with you. I’ll bump you on up the line, see if somebody else can figure you out.”

Escorted by the soldier who’d found him-the fellow’s name turned out to be Eddie Wagner-Larssen made the acquaintance of a captain, a major, and a lieutenant colonel. By then, he expected to be kicked on to a bird colonel, but the lieutenant colonel short-circuited the process, saying, “I’m going to send you to General Patton’s headquarters, bud. If you say you’ve met Marshall, he’s the one to decide what to do with you.”

General Patton’s headquarters proved to be in Oxford, something like twenty miles west. The march there, starting at dawn the next day, ended near dark and left Larssen footsore, weary, and mourning his lost bike. Little by little, as he tramped along, he began to notice how many field guns were disguised as tree trunks with branches wired onto their upright barrels, how many tanks inhabited barns or crouched under haystacks, how many airplanes rested beneath nets that hid them from the sky.

“You guys have a lot of stuff built up here,” he remarked some time in the afternoon. “How’d you manage to do it right under the Lizards’ snouts?”

“Wasn’t easy,” Wagner answered, who’d apparently decided he might not be a spy after all. “We been movin’ it in a little at a time, just about all of it at night. The Lizards, they’ve let us do it. We hope to Jesus that means they ain’t really noticed what we’re up to. They’ll find out, they sure as hell will.”

Larssen started to ask what the Lizards would find out, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to stir up his guide’s suspicions again. Not only that, he could make a good stab at figuring it out for himself. Some sort of big push had to be in the offing. He wondered in which direction it would go.

General Patton’s headquarters was in a white frame house on the outskirts of Oxford (though the town, with fewer than a thousand people, was barely big enough to have outskirts). The sentries on the covered porch-like everything else military hereabouts, they were concealed from aerial observation-were well shaved and wore neater uniforms than any Jens had seen for a while.

One of them nodded politely to him. “We’ve been expecting you, sir: Lieutenant Colonel Tobin telephoned to say you were on your way. The general will see you at once.”

“Thanks,” Larssen said, feeling more draggled than ever in the presence of such all-but-forgotten spit and polish.

That feeling intensified when he went into the house. Major General Patton-he wore two stars on each shoulder of a sheepskin-collared leather jacket-was not only clean-shaven and neat, he even had creases in his trousers. The buttery light of a kerosene lamp left black shadows at the corners of his mouth, in the lines that grooved their way up alongside his nose, and beneath his pale, intense eyes. He had to be getting close to sixty, but Jens would not have cared to take him on.

He ran a hand through his short brush of graying sandy hair, then stabbed a finger out at Larssen. “I risked a radio call on you, mister,” he growled, his raspy voice lightly flavored by the South. “General Marshall told me to ask you what he said to you about the Lizards in Seattle.”

Panic quickly swamped relief that Marshall lived. “Sir, I don’t remember him saying anything about the Lizards in Seattle,” he blurted.