Striking the Balance

Captain Rance Auerbach thought about that as he watched mutton chops sizzle on the grill of a local cafe. The fire that made them sizzle was fueled by dried horse dung: not much in the way of timber around Lamar, and coal was in short supply and natural gas unavailable. There were, however, plenty of horses around-Auerbach himself wore a cavalry captain’s bars.

A waitress with a prizefighter’s beefy arms set down three mugs of home brew and a big bowl of boiled beets-beets being one of the leading local crops. She too glanced at the chops. “Uh-huh,”she said, as much to herself as to Auerbach. “Timed that about right-those’ll be ready in just a couple minutes.”

Auerbach slid one of the mugs of beer down the counter to Rachel Hines, who sat on his left, and the other to Penny Summers, who sat on his right He raised his own mug. “Confusion to the Lizards!” he said.

“Hell with ’em,” Penny agreed, and gulped down half of what her mug held. With her flat Midwestern accent, she could have been a native of Lamar; Auerbach’s Texas drawl proclaimed him an outsider every time he opened his mouth. Neither Penny nor Rachel was from Lamar, though. Auerbach and his men had rescued both of them from Lakin, Kansas, when his company raided the base the Lizards had set up there.

After a moment’s hesitation, Penny Summers softly echoed, “Confusion to the Lizards,” and also sipped at her beer. She did everything softly and slowly these days. In the escape from Lakin, her father had been blown to sloppily butchered raw meat before her eyes. She’d never been quite the same since.

The waitress went around the counter, stabbed the mutton chops with a long-handled fork, and slapped them onto plates. “There y’go, folks,” she said. “Eat hearty-y’never know when you’ll get another chance.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Rachel Hines said. She attacked the mutton with knife and fork. Her blue eyes glowed as she gulped down a big bite. She hadn’t been the same since she got out of Lakin, either, but she hadn’t withdrawn into herself the way Penny had. These days, she wore the same khaki uniform Auerbach did, though with a PFC’s single chew on rather than his captain’s badges. She made a pretty fair trooper; she could ride, she could shoot, she didn’t mouth off (too much), and the rest of the company paid her what had to be the ultimate compliment: for the most part, they treated her like one of the boys.

She cut off another bite, frowning a little as she transferred the fork to her left hand so she could use the knife. “How’s your finger doing?” Auerbach asked.

Rachel looked down at her hand. “Still missing,” she reported, and spread the hand so he could see the wide gap between middle finger and pinkie. “Now if I’d been shot by a Lizard, it would have been one thing,” she said. “Having that crazy son of a bitch nail me, though, that just makes me mad. But it could have been worse, I expect, so I’ve got no real kick coming.”

Few men Auerbach knew could have talked about a wound so dispassionately. If Rachel was one of the guys, she was a better one than most. Auerbach said, “That Larssen fellow was supposed to be going over to the Lizards with stuff they weren’t supposed to know. He’d shot two men dead, too. He had what he got when we caught up with him coming, you ask me. I’m just sorry we took casualties bringing him down.”

“Wonder what it was he knew,” Rachel Hines said.

Auerbach shrugged. His troopers had been asking that question since the order to hunt down Larssen came out of Denver. He didn’t know the answer, but he could make some pretty fair guesses, ones he didn’t share. Back a while before, he’d led the cavalry escort that got Leslie Groves into Denver, and Groves had been carrying something-he wouldn’t say what-he treated as just a little more important than the Holy Grail. If it didn’t have something to do with the atomic bombs that had knocked the Lizards for a couple of loops, Auerbach would have been mightily surprised.

Penny Summers said, “I spent a lot of time praying everyone would come through the mission safe. I do that every time people ride out of here.”

“It’s not the worst thing to do,” Auerbach said, “but coming out and cooking or nursing or whatever you want wouldn’t hurt, either.” Since she’d come to Lamar, Penny had spent a lot of time in a little furnished room in an overcrowded apartment house, brooding and reading the Bible. Getting her out for mutton chops was something of a triumph.

Or so he thought, till she shoved her plate away and said, “I don’t like mutton. It tastes funny and it’s all greasy. We never had it much back in Lakin.”

“You should eat,” Auerbach told her, knowing he sounded like a mother hen. “You need it” That was true; Penny was rail-thin. She hadn’t been that way when she came to Lamar, but she hadn’t been the same in a lot of ways since Wendell Summers got himself messily killed.