Upsetting the Balance

It might not have happened even if the Lizards hadn’t come. The war could have put her in a factory somewhere in a city, and who could guess what she might have done after that? Once you saw a city, going back to a small town or a farm often didn’t look the same. But he couldn’t tell her that her life might not have gone as she’d planned it, because here and now her life sure as hell hadn’t gone as she’d planned it.

He said, “Miss Penny, sitting here like a broody hen on a nest doesn’t do you any good. Things won’t get better on account of it. The more you go out and do things, the sooner you’ll be able to put what’s past behind you and go on with the rest of your life.”

“What difference does it make?” she answered dully. “The world can go on without me just fine, it looks like. And I don’t like what the world’s turned into. I’d sooner stay here and let things happen. If a bomb lands on this place this minute or tomorrow or a week from now, I’ll be sorry for the other people who live here, but not for me.”

He’d had troopers who talked like that after they’d been through more battle than a man could stand. Shell shock, they’d called it back in the First World War; combat fatigue was the name it went by these days. Penny had been in only that one fight, but how many troopers got to watch their fathers turned to raw meat right before their eyes? You couldn’t guess beforehand what would send any one person over the edge.

You couldn’t tell what would snap anybody out of it, either. Sometimes nothing would. Some of his men weren’t fit for anything better than taking care of horses here in Lamar. A couple had seemed well enough to ride, but didn’t bother taking any precautions when they went up against the Lizards. They weren’t around any more. And a couple of others had been through the worst of it and got better again. No way to know who would do what.

He took her by the shoulders and hugged her, hard. She was an attractive girl, but it wasn’t like holding a woman in his arms. It reminded him more of the embraces he’d given his grandfather after the old man’s wits started to wander: the body was there, but the will that directed it wasn’t minding the store.

He let her go. “You’ve got to do this for yourself, Miss Penny. Nobody on God’s green earth can do it for you.”

“I think you’d best go now,” she said. Her face hadn’t changed, not even a little bit.

Defeated, he opened the door to her room and started for the stairs. In the room down the hall, the baby was still screaming bloody murder. A couple of doors farther down, a man and a woman shouted angrily at each other.

Almost too soft for Auerbach to hear, Penny Summers called after him, “Be careful, Captain.”

He spun around. Her door was already closed. He wondered if he should go back. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed down the stairs instead. Maybe he hadn’t lost, or not completely, after all.

Since the British army was swinging southward anyhow, the better to fight the remaining Lizard forces on English soil, Moishe Russie got to go into London for a day to see if he could find his family.

The instant he reached the outskirts of the great city, he realized he could throw off his Red Cross armband and desert, and no one would ever be the wiser. London had been battered before; now it seemed nothing but ruins. A man might hide in there for years, coming out only to forage for food. By the filthy, furtive look of a good many people on the street, that was just what they did. A lot of them in better condition carried guns. Russie got the idea those weren’t only for defense against possible Lizard paratroopers.

Making his way through the rubble toward his family’s Soho flat was anything but easy. Street signs had been missing since the Nazi threat in 1940; now whole streets had disappeared, so choked with rubble and cratered by bombs as to be impassable. Worse, a lot of the landmarks he’d used to orient himself as he went about the city were no longer standing: the tower of Big Ben, the Marble Arch in Hyde Park, the Queen Victoria Memorial near Buckingham Palace. On a cloudy day like this one, even knowing which way was south was a tricky business.

He’d walked along Oxford Street for a couple of blocks before he realized where he was: no more than a block from the BBC Overseas Services studio. The brick building that housed it had not been wrecked by bomb or shell. A man with a rifle stood outside. At first Russie thought he was one of the soldiers who had guarded the studio. He needed a moment to realize Eric Blair wore a tin hat and bandolier of cartridges.

Blair took even longer to recognize Russie. As Moishe approached, the Englishman brought the rifle up in unmistakable warning. He handled the Lee-Enfield with assurance; Moishe remembered he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War. Then Blair let the stock of the rifle fall to the grimy sidewalk. “Russie, isn’t it?” he said, still not quite sure.