Striking the Balance

Almost any man. Leslie Groves was an engineer to the core. “Mud,” he said. “Dust Lap robes, so you wouldn’t be filthy by the time you got where you were going. More horse manure than you could shake a stick at. More flies, too. Give me a nice, enclosed Packard with a heater on a good, flat, straight stretch of highway any old time.”

Bradley chuckled. “You have no respect for the good old days.”

“To hell with the good old days,” Groves said. “If the Lizards had come in the good old days, they’d have smashed us to bits so fast it wouldn’t even have been funny.”

“There I can’t argue with you,” Bradley said. “And going out to a two-hole Chick Sale with a half-moon window wasn’t much fun in the middle of winter.” He wrinkled his nose. “Now that I think back on it, it wasn’t much fun in hot weather, either.” He laughed out loud. “Yeah, General, to hell with the good old days. But what we’ve got now isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, either.” He pointed ahead to show what he meant.

Groves hadn’t been out to the refugee camp before. He knew of such places, of course, but he’d never had occasion to seek them out. He didn’t feel guilty about that; he’d had plenty to do and then some. If he hadn’t done what he’d done, the U.S.A. might well have lost the war by now, instead of sitting down with the Lizards as near equals at the bargaining table.

That didn’t make the camp any easier to take. He’d been shielded from just how bad war could be for those who got stuck in the gears. Because the Met Lab was so important, he’d always had plenty to eat and a roof over his head. Most people weren’t so lucky.

You saw newsreels of things like this. But newsreels didn’t usually show the worst The people in newsreels were black and white, too. And you didn’t smell them. The breeze was at his back, but the camp smelled like an enormous version of the outhouses Bradley had mentioned all the same.

People in newsreels didn’t come running at you like a herd of living skeletons, either, eyes enormous in faces with skin stretched drum-tight over bones, begging hands outstretched. “Please!” came the call, again and again and again. “Food, sir?” “Money, sir?” “Anything you’ve got, sir?” The offers the emaciated women made turned Groves’ ears red.

“Can we do anything more for these people than we’re doing, sir?” he asked.

“I don’t see what,” Bradley answered. “They’ve got water here. I don’t know how we’re supposed to feed them when we don’t have food to give.”

Groves looked down at himself. His belly was still ample. What there was went to the Army first, not to refugees and to people from Denver whose jobs weren’t essential to the war effort. That made good, cold, hard logical sense. Rationally, he knew as much. Staying rational wasn’t easy, not here.

“With the cease-fire in place, how soon can we start bringing in grain from up north?” he asked. “The Lizards won’t be bombing supply trains the way they used to.”

“That’s so,” Bradley admitted, “but they gave the railroads a hell of a pasting when they made their big push on the city. The engineers are still trying to straighten things out. Even when the trains start rolling, though, the other question is where the grain’ll come from. The Lizards are still holding an awful lot of our bread-basket. Maybe the Canadians’ll have some to spare. The scaly bastards haven’t hit them as hard as they did us, seems like.”

“They like warm weather,” Groves said. “There are better places to find it than north of Minnesota.”

“You’re right about that,” Bradley said. “But watching people starve, right here in the middle of the United States, that’s a damned hard thing to do, General. I never thought I’d live to see the day when we had to bring in what little we do have with armed guards to keep it from being stolen. And this is on our side of the line. What’s it like in territory the Lizards have held for the last couple of years? How many people have died for no better reason than that the Lizards didn’t give a damn about trying to feed them?”

“Too many,” Groves said, wanting to quantify that but unable to with any degree of certainty. “Hundreds of thousands? Has to be. Millions? Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

Bradley nodded. “Even if the Lizards do pull out of the U.S.A. and leave us alone for a while-and that’s the most we can hope for-what kind of country will we have left? I worry about that, General, quite a lot. Remember Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the Technocrats? A man with nothing in his belly will listen to any sort of damn fool who promises him three square meals a day, and we’ve got a lot of people with nothing in their bellies.”

As if to underscore his words, three horse-drawn wagons approached the refugee camp. Men in khaki who wore helmets surrounded the supply wagons on all sides. About half of them carried tommy guns; the rest had rifles with fixed bayonets. The surge of hungry people toward the wagons halted at a respectful distance from the troops.