Striking the Balance

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.

Pe

“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, Pe

Or so he thought, till she shoved her plate away and said, “I don’t like mutton. It tastes fu

“You should eat,” Auerbach told her, knowing he sounded like a mother hen. “You need it” That was true; Pe

“Hey, it’s food,” Rachel Hines said. “I don’t even mind the beets, not any more. I just shovel it all down; I quit worrying about it as soon as I put on the uniform.”

She filled out that uniform in a way the Army bureaucrats who’d designed it hadn’t had in mind. Despite her talk of gluttony, she wasn’t the least bit fat. If she hadn’t been so all-around good-natured, she would have had half the men in the company squabbling over her. There were times when Auerbach had been tempted to pull rank himself. Even if she’d been interested, though, that would have created as many problems as it solved, maybe more.

He glanced over to Pe

To his surprise, she did take back the plate and start eating again, not with any great enthusiasm but doggedly, as if she were fueling a car. With what she’d been giving herself lately, a car would long since have run out of gas. He didn’t say anything. That might have broken the spell.

Rachel Hines shook her head. She’d cropped her hair into a short bob, the better to have it fit under a helmet. She said, “Going off and giving secrets to the Lizards. I purely can’t fathom that, and there’s a fact. But plenty of people in Lakin got on with ’em just fine and dandy, like they were the new county commissioners or something.”

“You’re right.” Pe

“That’s so,” Rachel said, nodding. “It sure is. And Mel Six-killer, I guess he got sick of folks calling him half-breed all the time, on account of he’d even make up tales to take to the Lizards, and they’d believe ’em, too. He got a lot of people in trouble like that. Yeah, some people were mean to him, but you don’t go getting even by hurting ’em that kind of way.”

“And Miss Proctor, the home economics teacher at the high school,” Pe

“Yeah, she sure did,” Rachel said. “And… ”

They went on for another five or ten minutes, talking about the collaborators back in their little hometown. Auerbach sat quietly, drinking his beer, finishing his supper (he didn’t mind mutton, but he could have lived for a long time without looking another beet in the eye) and listening. He’d never seen Pe

The brawny waitress came by. “Get you folks some more beer, or are you go

“I’ll have another one, thanks,” Auerbach said. To his surprise, Pe

“You’ve raided Lakin since you got us out, haven’t you, Captain?” Rachel asked.

“Sure we have,” Auerbach answered. “You weren’t along for that, were you? No, you weren’t-I remember. We hurt ’em, too; drove ’em clean out of town. I thought we’d be able to keep it, but when they threw too much armor at us-” He spread his hands. “What can you do?”

“That’s not what she meant,” Pe

Auerbach stared at her. She surely hadn’t been this animated before. “What did she mean?” he asked, hoping to keep her talking-and, more than that, hoping to keep her involved with the world beyond the four walls within which she’d chosen to shut herself away.

It worked, too; Pe

“No, I don’t think we did,” Auerbach said. “We didn’t know just who needed settling back then, and we were too busy with the Lizards to risk putting anybody’s nose out of joint by getting the locals mad at us for giving the wrong people a hard time.”

“We’re not going back to Lakin any time soon, are we?” Rachel asked.

“Not that I know of, anyhow,” Auerbach said. “Colonel Nordenskold might have a different idea, but he hasn’t told me about it if he does. And if he gets orders from somewhere up the line-” He spread his hands again. Above the regimental level, the chain of command kept getting broken links. Local commanders had a lot more autonomy than anybody had figured they would before the Lizards started plastering communications.