Upsetting the Balance

He didn’t care to think about that. He didn’t care to think about a lot of the ways the war was going. “Maybe I ought to go over there and see her,” he said after a moment. “It’s my fault she’s here, after all-my fault you’re here, too, come to that.”

“I wouldn’t call it a fault, Captain,” Rachel Hines said. “If we hadn’t come with you, we’d still be back in Lakin, doing what the Lizards told us. Anything is better than that.”

“Tell it to-what was his name? — Wendell Summers,” Auerbach answered harshly. “He hadn’t tried to get out of Lakin, he’d be alive back there today.”

“We all knew there was a chance of that when we went with you people-it was a chance we all wanted to take.” Auerbach didn’t know whether Rachel had seen action, but she talked and shrugged like a veteran. She continued, “Penny has taken that hard, I will say.”

“I know.” Auerbach kicked at the sidewalk. “Maybe she won’t want to see me at all. God knows I couldn’t blame her for that.”

“The worst thing she can tell you is no,” Rachel said. “If she does, how are you worse off? But if she doesn’t, you may do her some good.” She saluted again and headed up the street. Auerbach turned to watch her go, then laughed at himself. He didn’t remember admiring a cavalry trooper’s backside before.

“And a good thing, too,” he said with a snort. He walked over to the rooming house where Penny Summers was staying. The place was always packed, but with a shifting population: refugees who had been there for a while headed farther west into more securely held territory, while a continuous stream of newcomers from Kansas took their place. Penny had kept her room since not long after she’d come from Lakin, which made her well-nigh unique.

Auerbach’s nose twitched as he walked upstairs. The rooming house smelled of unwashed bodies, garbage, and stale piss. If you bottled the odor, you’d call it something like Essence of Despair. No sergeant worth his stripes would have tolerated a tenth of it for a second. But the Army had all it could handle fighting the Lizards and trying to keep itself on its feet. The civilian part of Lamar had been left to sink or swim on its own. He didn’t think that was good management, but he didn’t feel like belling the cat, either.

He knocked on Penny Summers’ door. He didn’t know whether she’d be there or not. A lot of civilians in Lamar spent their days working for the Army, one way or another. He hadn’t seen Penny busy with any of that, though, and Lamar was small enough that he thought he would have if she’d been doing it.

Somewhere down the hall, a baby started to scream. The sound ground at Auerbach’s nerves like a dentist’s drill digging into a molar. You had to be crazy to want to bring up a kid in times like these. Of course, just because you were bringing up a kid didn’t necessarily mean you wanted one, only that you had one.

He knocked on the door again. He was about to turn and go (a prospect not altogether unwelcome, because the baby was doing a pretty good impression of the noise that came from a Lizard jet fighter engine) when Penny Summers opened it. She looked surprised to see him. He got the idea she would have looked surprised to see anyone.

“Captain Auerbach,” she said, and gestured vaguely. “Come in.”

The room was cramped and, even with the window open, stiflingly hot. Dust lay thick on every surface. Auerbach thought about shouting at her like a tough sergeant, but decided it would do more harm than good. Shouting wouldn’t snap her out of the state she was in. He didn’t know what would, but he was sure of that.

He said, “I’m worried about you. You should be out and doing things, not sitting here cooped up like a canary in a cage. What do you do all day, anyhow?”

That vague gesture again. “I sit, I sew sometimes. I read my Bible.” She pointed to the book with the limp leatherette covers and gold leaf that sat on the little table next to the bed.

“It’s not enough,” he said. “There’s a whole big world out there.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” she answered, laughing. “There are all sorts of worlds out there. The Lizards showed us that, didn’t they?” He’d never heard her laugh, not since her father was blown to bits before her eyes, but this was so bitter he’d sooner never have heard it, either. “I don’t want any part of them. I just want to be left alone.”

Two things ran through Auerbach’s mind. First was Greta Garbo. Second, Texan that he was, was the defiant rallying cry of the Confederacy against the damnyankees: all we want is to be left alone. But neither one fit Penny Summers, not really. What she’d wanted was to grow up in Lakin, marry a farmer who lived nearby, raise a flock of kids, and get as old as she was going to get, all without going fifty miles from where she was born.