The precious tobacco had disappeared into Daniels’ pack by the time he went outside again. He didn’t know whether Dracula was telling the truth, but if he tried putting the arm on him this time, he was liable never to see any more bounty.
“I want to jam a whole pack in my face all at once,” he said, “but I figure the first drag’ll be enough to do for me—or maybe do me in, I ain’t had one in so long.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Szabo said. “It’s been a while even for me.” Mutt gave him a sharp stare at that—had he been holding out on other finds?—but Szabo just gazed back, bland as a preacher. Mutt gave up.
Suddenly he grinned and headed off to a brick cottage a few hundred yards north of the front lines. The house had a big red cross painted inside a whitewashed circle on the roof and a red cross flag flying on a tall pole above it to show the Lizards what it was.
Before Mutt got halfway there, the grin evaporated. “She don’t even smoke,” he muttered to himself. “She said as much.” He stopped, kicking a stone in irresolution. Then he pressed on, even so. “I know what to do with ’em just the same.”
Perhaps because of the warning tokens, the house that held the aid station and several around it were more or less intact, though cattle could have grazed on their lawns. Here and there, untended zinnias and roses bloomed brightly. A medic on the front steps of the aid station nodded to Daniels. “Morning, Lieutenant.”
“Mornin’.” Mutt went on up the stairs past the tired-looking medic and into the aid station. Things had been pretty quiet the past couple of days the Lizards didn’t seem any too enthusiastic about the street fighting they’d have to do to take Chicago. Only a handful of injured men sprawled on the cots and couches packed into every available inch of floor space.
Lucille Potter bent over one of those men; changing a wound dressing. The fellow sucked in his breath to keep from crying out. When he was able to drive some of the rawness from his voice, he said carefully, “That hurt some, ma’am.”
“I know it did, Henry,” she answered, “but we have to keep the wound as clean as we can if we don’t want it to get infected.” Like a lot of nurses, she used the royal we when talking to patients. She looked up and saw Daniels. “Hello, Mutt. What brings you here?”
“Got a present for you, Miss Lucille,” Daniels said. Henry and a couple of the other guys in the aid station laughed. One of them managed a wheezing wolf whistle.
Lucille’s face froze. The look she gave Mutt said, You’re going to have to stay after school Charlie. She figured he was trying to get her into the sack with whatever his present turned out to be. As a matter of fact, he was, but he was smart enough to figure out that sometimes the indirect approach was the only one that stood a chance—if any approach stood a chance, which wasn’t nearly obvious.
He shrugged off his pack, reached into it, and pulled out one of the cigarette cartons. The wounded dogface who’d let out the wolf whistle whistled again, a single low, awed note. Mutt tossed the pack underhanded to Lucille. “Here you go. Share these out with the guys who come through here and want ’em.”
Flesh clung too close to the bony underpinnings of her face for it to soften much, but her eyes were warm as she surehandedly caught the carton of Pall Malls. “Thank you, Mutt; I’ll do that,” she said. “A lot of people will be glad you found those.”
“Don’t give me the credit for that,” he said. “Dracula found ’em.”
“I might have known,” she answered, smiling now. “But you were the one who thought to bring them here so I’ll thank you for that.”
“Me too, sir,” Henry said. “Ain’t seen a butt—uh, a cigarette—in a he—heck of a long time.”
“Got that right,” the whistler said. “Ma’am, can I have one now, please? I’ll be a good boy all the way till Christmas if I can, I promise.” He drew a bandaged hand over his chest in a crisscross pattern.
“Victor, you’re impossible,” Lucille said, but she couldn’t keep from laughing. She opened the carton, then opened a pack. The wounded men sighed as she took out a cigarette for each of them. Mutt could smell the tobacco all the way across the room. Lucille went through bet pockets. Her mouth twisted in annoyance. “Does anyone have a match?”
“I do.” Mutt produced a box. “Good for startin’ fires at night—and besides, you never can tell when you might come across somethin’.”
He handed the matches to Lucille. She lit cigarettes for her patients. The aroma of fresh tobacco had made his nose sit up and take notice. Real tobacco smoke, harsh and sweet at the same time, was almost too much to bear.
“Give the lieutenant one, too, ma’am,” Victor said. “Hadn’t’ve been for him, none of us’d have any.” The other wounded soldiers agreed loudly. A couple of them paused to cough in the middle of agreeing; after you hadn’t smoked for a while, you lost the knack.
Lucille brought the pack over to him. He took out a cigarette, tapped it against the palm of his hand to tamp down the tobacco, and stuck it in his mouth. He started to reach for the matches, too, but Lucille had already struck one. He bent down over it to get a light.
“Now this here’s livin’,” he said, sucking in a long, deep drag of smoke: “gettin’ your cigarette lit for you by a beautiful woman.”
The GIs whooped. Lucille sent him an I’ll-get-you-later look. He ignored it, partly on general principles, partly because he was busy coughing himself—the smoke tasted great, but it felt like mustard gas in his lungs. Spit flooded into his mouth. He felt dizzy, lightheaded, the same way he had when he first puffed on a corncob pipe back in the dying days of the last century.
“Cigarettes may be good for morale,” Lucille said primly, “but they’re extremely unhealthful.”
“What with everything out there that can kill me quick or chop me up, I ain’t gonna worry about somethin’ that’s liable to kill me slow,” Mutt said. He took another drag. This one did what it was supposed to do; his body remembered all the smoke he’d put into it after all.
The wounded soldiers laughed again. Lucille sent him that narrow-eyed stare again; if they’d been by themselves, she would have tapped her foot on the ground, too. Then a smile slowly stole across her face. “There is something to that,” she admitted.
Mutt beamed; any concessions he managed to get from her made him feel grand. He brought his right hand up to the rim of his helmet in a sketched salute. “I’m gonna get back to my platoon, Miss Lucille,” he said. “Hope those cigarettes last you a good long time, on account of that’ll mean not too many guys gettin’ hurt.”
“Thank you for your kindness, Mutt,” she answered. The soldiers echoed her. He nodded and waved and went outside. The cigarette was still hanging out of the corner of his mouth, but the medic taking a break on the front steps didn’t notice till he caught the smell of smoke. When he did, his head came up as if he were a bird dog taking a scent. He stared in disbelieving envy as Mutt smoked the Pall Mall down to where the coal singed his lips, then stubbed out the tiny butt on the sidewalk.
Everything stayed pretty quiet as Mutt made his way back to his unit. Off in the distance somewhere, artillery rumbled like far-off thunder. A couple of plumes of smoke rose, one over toward Lake Calumet, the other way off in the west. But for somebody who’d seen more close combat than he wanted to think about, that kind of stuff was hardly worth noticing.
When he got back, he discovered that a lot of his dogfaces had acquired cigarettes, too. Dracula Szabo was looking sleek and prosperous. Mutt suspected he hadn’t given his chums smokes for free. Keeping your lieutenant happy was part of the cost of doing business, but the rest of the soldiers were the guys you did business with. As long as nobody in the platoon beefed to Mutt about being gouged, he was willing to look the other way.
He sent scouts out well south of 111th Street to make sure the Lizards wouldn’t get away with pulling a fast one after darkness fell. He was sorting through ration cans to see what he’d have for supper when Lucille Potter cam
e up.
Everyone in the platoon who saw her greeted her like an older sister or a favorite aunt or even a mom: she’d been “theirs” for a long time before the shortage of anybody who knew anything about patching up the wounded forced her out of the front line. “Got some smokes for the guys you’re taking care of, Miss Lucille,” Dracula said.
“That’s been taken care of, Bela, thank you, though you’re kind to offer.” She turned to Mutt, raised one eyebrow. “The ones you brought came from your own supply?”
“Well, yeah, Miss Lucille.” Mutt kicked at bits of broken concrete from what had been a sidewalk.
“That just makes it nicer of you,” she said, and he felt he’d done his problem on the blackboard right. “To share what Dracula passed on to you in particular—I don’t think that that many people would have done as much.”
“Wasn’t so much of a much,” he said, though under dirt and stubble he knew he was turning red. He held out a can of beef stew to Lucille. “Care to stay for some supper?”
“All right.” She pulled a can opener out of a pistol-style holster on her belt and made short work of the lid to the stew. She dug in with a spoon, then sighed. “Another cow that died of old age—and the potatoes and carrots with it.”
Mutt opened an identical can. He sighed, too, after his first taste. “You’re right about that, sure enough. But it does stick to your ribs. Better food than they gave us in France, I’ll tell you that. The trick in France was getting the Frenchies to feed you. Then you ate good. They could make horse meat taste like a T-bone.” He didn’t know what all he’d eaten Over There, but he remembered it fondly.
Before Lucille answered, Lizard artillery opened up, off to the east. Shells whistled in maybe half a mile away—not close enough to make him dive for cover. He looked over to see if they’d done any damage. At first, he didn’t notice anything new, but then he saw that the ornate water tower that had towered over the Pullman car factory wasn’t there any more.
Lucille saw that, too. She said, “I don’t think there are many people—civilian people, I mean—left in Chicago to feed us. This was the second biggest city in the United States a year ago. Now it might as well be a ghost town out West somewhere.”
“Yeah, I been by some o’ those, places like Arizona, Nevada. Whatever they used to be for isn’t around any more, and they aren’t, either. Chicago is—or was—about bringing’ things in and shippin’ ’em out, or makin’ ’em here and shippin’ ’em out. What with the Lizards, that isn’t around any more, either,” Mutt said.
As if to punctuate his words, more shells thumped in, these a little closer than the ones before. “They’re working over the front line,” Lucille Potter observed. “But, Mutt, those ghost towns out West never had more than a few hundred people, a few thousand at most. Chicago had more than three million. Where is everybody?”
“A lot of ’em are dead,” he answered bleakly, and she nodded. “A lot of ’em run off, either scared away by the fighting or on account of their factories couldn’t go on working because of the Lizards or ’cause nobody could get food to ’em here. So one way or another, they ain’t here no more.”
“You’re right,” she said. “You have a sensible way of looking at things.”
“Yeah?” Mutt glanced around. None of his men was real close; they were all going about their own business. He lowered his voice even so: “I’m so all-fired sensible, how come I got stuck on you?”
“Most likely just because we lived in each other’s pockets for too long.” Lucille shook her head. “If things were different, Mutt, it might have worked both ways. Even the way things are, I sometimes wonder—” She stopped and looked unhappy, plainly thinking she’d said too much.
Mutt unwrapped a chocolate bar. Like smoking, the simple action gave him something to do with his hands while he thought. He broke the bar in half and gave Lucille a piece. Then, ever so cautiously, he said, “You mean you might be lookin’ at—tryin’ a man?” He wasn’t sure how to phrase that to keep from offending her, but did his best.
Lucille’s face was wary, but she nodded. “Might be looking at it is about right, Mutt. I’m closer to it, I think, than I’ve ever been in my life, but I’d be lying if I said I was ready yet. I hope you can understand that and be patient.”
“Miss Lucille, you get as old as I am, some things you ain’t in a hurry about like you was when you were younger. It’s just that—” Mutt was going to say something about the uncertainty of war arguing against delay, but he never got the chance: the uncertainty of war came to him.
The hideous whistle in the air rose to a banshee shriek. His body realized the Lizard shells were aimed straight at him before his mind did. Without conscious thought, he flattened out just as they landed.
The cluster of explosions—three in all—left him stunned. They picked him up from the ground and threw him back down as if a professional wrestler had body-slammed him. The blast tore at his ears and at his insides; somebody might have been reaching in through his nose and trying to rip out his lungs. Shell fragments whistled and whined all around him.
More shells crashed home, these not quite so close. Through the ringing in his ears and the crazy hammering of his heart, Mutt heard somebody scream. Somebody else—was that Dracula’s voice?—shouted, “Miss Lucille!”
Mutt dug his face out of the dirt. “Aw, heck,” he said. “They tagged somebody.”
Lucille Potter didn’t answer. She didn’t move. One of those shell fragments that missed Mutt had neatly clipped off the top of her head. He could see her brain in there. Blood ran down into her graying hair. Her eyes were wide and staring. She’d never known what hit her, anyhow.
“Miss Lucille?” Yeah, that was Dracula calling. “We need you over here.”
Mutt didn’t say anything. He looked at her body, at the ruined Chicago neighborhood that had just had a little more ruin rained onto it. Without intending to, he started to cry. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. The tears rolled down his cheeks and made tiny damp spots on the chewed-up ground. Then they soaked in and were gone as if they’d never existed.
Just like Lucille, he thought, and cried even harder.
XX
“Assembled shiplords, I am pleased to report to you that progress in the conquest of Tosev 3, while slower than we hoped when we reached this planet, is nonetheless accelerating,” Atvar told the throng of high-ranking males aboard the 127th Emperor Hetto. After some time down on Tosev 3, being back on his bannership felt good.
“Some details would be appreciated,” Shiplord Straha called out.
“I have assembled the shiplords here this day to give those details,” Atvar said. He did not show Straha the dislike he felt. Straha was waiting for him to get into trouble, for the campaign to fail. If enough went wrong, the shiplords might turn Atvar out of power and set someone in his place. Straha wanted to be that someone.
Kirel had had such ambitions, too, but Kirel was a good male—he put the cause of the Race ahead of personal ambition. All Straha cared about was himself and the moment. For all the forethought and restraint he showed, he might as well we been a Big Ugly.
To Kirel, Atvar murmured, “The first situation map, please.”
“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel replied. He touched a button on the podium. A large hologram sprang into being behind the two males.
“This is the big northern land area of the main continental mass,” Atvar said by way of explanation. “As you will see, we have smashed through the line of defense centered on the town of Kaluga which the SSSR threw, up in a last desperate attempt to hold our forces away from their capital, Moskva.”
“The fall of this capital will give me, particular satisfaction, and not just from the military and strategic perspective,” Kirel said. ‘The regime currently ruling the SSSR came to power, assembled shiplords, as many of you know, after murdering their emperor.”
Although most of the males in the hall did know that
, a murmur of horror ran through it just the same. Impericide was not a crime the Race had imagined until the Big Uglies brought it to their notice.
“The military and strategic considerations are not to be taken lightly, either,” Atvar said. “Moskva being not only an administrative but also a communications hub, its capture will go a long way toward taking the SSSR out of the war. That accomplished, we shall be able to devote more of our resources to the defeat of Deutschland, and shall be able to attack the Deutsche from improved positions.”
He enjoyed the buzz of approval that rose from the shiplords; he had not heard that sound often enough while discussing Tosevite affairs. At his hand signal, Kirel pressed the button again and brought up another map.
Atvar said, “This is the island of Britain, which lies off the northwestern coast of Tosev 3’s main continental mass. The British have also made themselves into unmitigated nuisances to us. Because the island was so small, we did not reckon it of major significance in our opening attacks. We made the same error with the island empire of Nippon, on the eastern edge of this same land mass. Air strikes have harmed both empires, but not enough. The males and materiel freed up after the defeat of the SSSR will allow us to mount full-scale invasions of all these pestilential islands.”
“Permission to speak, Exalted Fleetlord?” Straha called.
“Speak,” Atvar said. Straha hadn’t asked for permission the last time. The list of successes and anticipated successes must have served notice to him that he wasn’t likely to be fleetlord any time soon.
Straha said, “With the Deutsche still holding northern—‘France’ is the proper geographic designation, is it not?—can we invade this Britain with reasonable hope of success, even assuming the SSSR drops out of the fight against us?”
“Computer models show our probability of success as being higher than seventy percent under the circumstances you describe,” Atvar answered. “With the SSSR still in. the war and forcing us to continue to expend resources to suppress it, chances for a successful invasion of Britain drop to slightly below fifty percent. Shall I send you a printout of the analysis, Shiplord?”
Turtledove: World War Page 135
