Striking the Balance

Then the Lizards, sallying out of Karval against the cavalry raiders he’d led, got close. He remembered blood bubbling from his nose and mouth as he’d croaked-he’d tried to yell-for Rachel to get the hell out of there. He’d figured he was done for anyhow, and why should they get her, too?

The one good memory he had from that dreadful time was the kiss on the cheek she’d given him: not an attention he would have wanted from most cavalry troopers. He hoped she’d got away. He didn’t know whether she had or not; his lights had gone out again right about then.

Next thing he knew, he was in Karval, which was a hell of a mess after the shelling the Americans had given it. A harassed-looking human doctor was sprinkling sulfa powder into the wound in his thigh, while a Lizard who had red crosses in white circles added to his Lizardly body paint watched with two-eye-turreted fascination.

Auerbach had tried to raise his right arm to let the doc-and the Lizard who looked to be a doctor, too-know he was among those present. That was when he noticed the needle stuck in his vein and the tubing that led up to the plasma bottle a young woman was holding.

The motion was feeble, but the girl noticed it and exclaimed. He’d been too woozy to notice her face, which was masked anyhow, but he recognized her voice. He’d lost Rachel Hines, but now he’d found Penny Summers.

“You understand me?” the human doctor had asked. When he’d managed a quarter-inch’s worth of nod, the fellow had gone on, “Just in case you’re wondering, you’re a POW, and so am I. If it weren’t for the Lizards, odds are you’d be dead. They know more about asepsis than we’ll learn in a lifetime. I think you’re gonna make it. You’ll walk again, too-after a while.” At that moment, walking hadn’t been the biggest thing on his mind. Breathing had seemed plenty hard enough.

Now that the Lizard armor had moved out of Karval, the aliens were using it as a center for wounded prisoners they’d taken. Pretty soon, the few battered buildings left in town weren’t enough to hold everybody. They’d run up tents of a briliant and hideous orange, one to a patient. Auerbach had been in one for several days now.

He didn’t see the doctor as often as he had at first. Lizards came by to look him over several times a day. So did human nurses, Penny Summers as often as any and maybe more often than most. The first couple of times he needed it, he found the bedpan mortifyingly embarrassing. After that, he stopped worrying about it: it wasn’t as if he had a choice.

“How’d they get you?” he asked Penny. His voice was a croaking whisper, he hardly had breath enough to blow out a match.

She shrugged. “We were evacuating wounded out of Lamar when the Lizards were comin’ in. You know how that was-they didn’t just come in, they rolled right on through. They scooped us up like a kid netting sunfish, but they let us go on takin’ care of hurt people, and that’s what I’ve been doin’ ever since.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, they seem to play by the rules, pretty much, anyhow.” He paused to get some more air, then asked. “How’s the war going?”

“Can’t hardly tell,” she answered. “Ain’t no people around here with radios, none I know about, anyways. I’ll say this much, though-they been shippin’ a whole lot o’ POWs back here lately. That’s liable to mean they’re winning, isn’t it?”

“Liable to, yeah,” he said. He wanted to cough, but held what little breath he had till the urge went away. He’d coughed once or twice already, and it felt as if his chest was going to rip to pieces. When he could speak again, he went on, “Do you know what kind of casualties they’re taking?”

She shook her head. “No way for me to tell. They ship their own wounded back somewheres else.”

“Ah,” he said, then shook his head-carefully, because that pulled at the stitches that were holding him together. Boris Karloff might have had more when he played inFrankenstein, but not a whole lot. “Darned if I know why I’m even bothering to ask. It’s going to be a long time before I’m able to worry about that kind of stuff.”

He said it that way to keep from thinking it would never matter to him again. If his chest healed. If his leg healed, he’d eventually go to a real POW camp, and maybe there, however many months away that was, he could start planning how to escape. If his chest healed but his leg didn’t, he wouldn’t be going anywhere-nowhere fast, anyhow. If his leg healed but his chest didn’t… well, in that case, they’d stick a lily in his hand and plant him.

Penny looked at him, looked down at the shiny stuff-it was like thick cellophane, but a lot tougher-the Lizards had used to cover the dirt on which they’d set up the tent, then back at him again. In a low voice, she said, “Bet you wish now you would have laid me when you had the chance.”