In the Balance

He saw few people as he rolled through central Indiana. That suited him fine. He saw even fewer Lizards, and that suited him better-how was he supposed to explain what he was doing a good many miles west of where he’d told Gnik he was going? Luck stayed with him; he didn’t have to.

The war between humans and aliens seemed far away from that nearly deserted winter landscape (although, of course, it wouldn’t have been deserted but for the war). A couple of times, though, off in the distance, he heard gunfire, the widely spaced barks of sporting or military rifles and the chatter of the Lizards’ automatic weapons. And, once-or twice, Lizard planes screamed high overhead, scrawling trails-ice crystals, the physicist part of him said-across the sky.

Somewhere between Young America and Delphi, a new noise entered the mix: intermittent explosions. The farther west he traveled, the louder they got. Maybe half an hour after he first noticed them, his head went up like a hunted animal’s when it catches, a scent.

“That’s artillery, is what that is!” he exclaimed. Excitement coursed through him-artillery meant people still fighting the Lizards on a level higher than bushwhacking. It also meant danger, since it lay in the direction he was riding.

The duel, he noticed as he drew near, was anything but intense. A few shells would come in, a few more go out. He rode past a Lizard battery. Instead of being towed, the guns were mounted on what looked like tank chassis. The Lizards serving them paid no attention to him.

Shortly after he passed the Lizard position, he started going by wrecked combat vehicles, most of them now just big shapes covered over with snow. The road, which had been pretty good, suddenly developed not just potholes but craters. The fighting hereabouts wasn’t intense now, but had been not too long before.

He got off his bike before he went headlong into a snow-filled hole. Frustration ate at him. After fairly flying through Lizard-held territory, was he going to get delayed by humans? He’d started believing he’d get home to Chicago again fairly soon. Getting hopes up and then having them dashed seemed cruel and unfair.

Then he came to the first belt of rusty barbed wire. It was like something out of a movie about World War I. “How am I supposed to get through that?” he demanded of an uncaring world. “How am I supposed to get my bike through that?”

A hiss, a whistle, a scream, a crash! Frozen earth flew through the air off to his left. So did fragments of steel. One tore through a couple of spokes of the bicycle’s rear wheel. It could have torn through Jens’ leg just as easily. All at once, the artillery duel turned real for him. It wasn’t just abstract shells flying back and forth on trajectories dictated by Newtonian mechanics and air resistance. If one of those shells hit a little nearer (or no nearer, but with an unlucky spray of fragments), he wouldn’t have to worry about getting to Chicago any more.

Another freight-train noise in the air. This time Larssen dove into the snow before the shell burst. It landed in the middle of the barbed-wire belt, and chunks of wire probably flew along with its own fragments. Getting hit by one sort of jagged metal would be about as bad as the other, Jens thought.

He cautiously raised his head, hoping the shell had cleared a way through the wire. A generation of young Englishmen who’d fought at the Somme-or, at any rate, the fraction of that generation which survived-could have told him he was wasting optimism. Tanks could crush wire, but shells couldn’t smash it aside.

How to cross, then? With shells still falling in the neighborhood every so often, he didn’t even want to get up and walk around to look for a path to the other side of the wire. He turned his head so he could see how far to the north and west the barrier ran. Farther than his ground-level Mark One eyeball carried, anyhow. Was it no-man’s-land all the way from here to Chicago? With his luck, it might well be.

“Okay, pal, don’t even blink, or you’ll get yourself some.30 caliber ventilation.” The voice came from the direction in which Larssen wasn’t looking. He obediently froze. Lying in the snow, he already had a good start on freezing, anyhow. “Awright,” the voice said. “Turn toward me, nice and slow. I better see your hands every second, too.”

Jens turned, nice and slow. As if he’d sprouted there like a mushroom, a fellow in a khaki uniform and a tin hat sprawled not fifty feet away. His rifle pointed right about at Larssen’s brisket. “Jesus, it’s good to see a human being holding a gun again,” Jens said.

“Shut up,” the soldier told him. The Springfield never wavered. “Likeliest guess is, you’re a God-damned Lizard-spy.”

“A what? Are you crazy?”

“We shot two last week,” the soldier said flatly.

Ice grew inside Larssen, to go with the snow all around. The fellow meant every word of it. Jens tried again: “I’m no spy, and I can prove it, by God.”

“Tell it to the Marines, Mac. I’m a harder sell than that.”