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Her breath caught. “How in God’s name did you know I’m in trouble?”
He laughed again, pulling pain and mirth from his chest at the same time. “If you weren’t, darling, you sure as hell wouldn’t be calling me.”
That should have struck her funny, too, but it didn’t. “Well, I’d be a liar if I said you was wrong.” Every word she spoke seemed chiseled from stone. Auerbach had grown very used to the lazy sounds of Texas English. Hearing those Kansas r’s again made the hair prickle up at the back of his neck.
He knew he had to say something. “Where are you calling from?” he asked. The question was innocuous enough that he didn’t have to deal with the larger one of whether he hated her for helping to keep him alive.
“I’m in Fort Worth,” she answered.
“Thought so,” he said. “The connection’s too good for a longdistance call. What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know.” She sounded harried and worn. “I don’t know if anybody can do anything. But I didn’t know who else to call.”
“That’s too bad,” Rance said. If, after so much time, she hadn’t been able to find anybody on whom she could rely… “You’re as big a loser as I am,” he blurted. He wouldn’t have said that to many people, no matter how down-and-out they might have seemed, not after he’d made the acquaintance of the Lizard machine gun. But the Lizards had blasted her father to red rags right before her eyes, and she didn’t sound as if she’d gone uphill since.
“Maybe I am,” she said. “Can I see you? I didn’t want to just knock on your door, but-” She broke off, then resumed: “Christ, I hate this.” She’d come a long way from the farm girl she’d been before the Lizards swept through western Kansas, and most of it down roads she wouldn’t have dreamt of traveling then.
More than anything else, that bitterness decided Auerbach. “Yeah, come on ahead,” he said: like called to like. “You know where I’m staying?”
“You’re in the phone book-if I found your number, I found your address, too,” Penny answered, which left him feeling foolish. “Thanks, Rance. I’ll be there in a little bit.” The line went dead.
Auerbach listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, then hung up the phone. “Jesus Christ,” he said, with more reverence than he was accustomed to using. In similar tones, he went on, “What the hell have I gone and done?”
He made his slow, creaky way out into the living room, where he stopped and looked around. The place wasn’t in the worst shape in the world. It wasn’t in the best, though, nor anywhere close. He shrugged. Penny didn’t sound as if she was in the best shape, either. And if she didn’t like the way he kept house, she could damn well leave.
Hobbling into the kitchen, he checked there, too. Bread on the counter, cold cuts in the refrigerator. He could make Penny sandwiches. If it meant he lived on oatmeal for a bit, till he had a hot day at the poker table or his next pension check came, then it did, that was all. And he had whiskey. He had plenty of whiskey. He didn’t need to check to be sure of that.
He waited. “Hurry up and wait,” he murmured, a phrase from his Army days. It still held truth. His heart thudded in his chest: more in the way of nerves than he’d known in years. He sat down. Maybe she wouldn’t come. Maybe she’d get lost. Maybe she’d change her mind, or maybe she was playing some sort of practical joke.
Footsteps in the hall: sharp, quick, authoritative. The whole building shook slightly; it had been run up after the fighting stopped, and run up as quickly and cheaply as possible. He doubted they were her footsteps. She hadn’t walked that way when he’d known her. But he hadn’t known her for a long time. The footsteps stopped in front of his door. The knock that followed had the same abrupt, staccato quality to it.
Auerbach heaved himself up and opened the door. Sure enough, Penny Summers stood in the hall, impatiently tapping her foot on the worn linoleum and sucking on a cigarette. He stared at her with a surprise that he realized was completely absurd. Of course she wouldn’t be the fresh-faced farm girl he’d more or less loved when he was young.
Her hair was cut short and dyed a brassy version of the blond it had been. Her skin stretched tight across her cheekbones and over her forehead. Powder didn’t hide crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and couldn’t cover the harsh lines that ran like gullies from beside her nose to the corners of her mouth. The flesh under her chin sagged. Her pale eyes were faded and wary.
She took a last drag on the cigarette, threw it down, and ground it out under the sole of her shoe. Then she leaned forward and pecked Rance on the lips. Her mouth tasted of smoke. “For God’s sake, darling, get me a drink,” she said.
“Water?” Auerbach asked as he limped back to the kitchen. She wasn’t young any more. She wasn’t sweet any more. Neither was he, but that had nothing to do with anything. He knew what he was. She’d just ruined some of his memories.
“Just ice,” she said. The couch creaked as she sat down. He carried the glass out to her, with one of his own in his other hand. Her skirt was short and tight and had ridden up quite a ways. She still had good legs, long and smooth and muscular.
“Mud in your eye,” he said, and drank. She knocked back her whiskey at a gulp. He looked at her. “What’s going on? And what do you think I can do about it? I can’t do much about anything.”
“You know people in the RAF.” It wasn’t a question; she spoke with assurance. “I got involved in a… business deal that didn’t quite turn out the way it was supposed to. Some folks are mad at me.” She gave an emphatic cough. Maybe some of the folks she meant had scales, not hair.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” But that wasn’t really what Auerbach wanted to ask. He wasn’t shy about coming out with it. He wasn’t shy about anything these days. “Come on, Penny-why should I give a damn? You walked out on me a long time ago, remember?”
“Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I should have been,” she said. Maybe she was buttering him up now, too, but he didn’t say anything. He just waited. She went on, “Once I did, though, I couldn’t make it like it never happened. So-will you let a couple of your friends over in England know I’m trying to make things right? And will you let me stay here for a little while, till the heat in Detroit dies down?”
He hadn’t known she’d been in Detroit. “You know who you want me to write to?” he asked, and wasn’t surprised when she nodded. She knew about him, whether he knew about her or not. “Okay, I can write the letters,” he said, “if you’re not lying to me, and you really will fix this up.” He stuck his tongue in the palm of his hand, as if he were a Lizard tasting ginger.
“Good guess,” Penny said. “All I need is a little time to straighten it out. I swear to God that’s the truth.”
Once upon a time, she’d read the Bible a lot. Now… now he judged she’d swear whatever was convenient, same as most people. He shrugged, which hurt a little, then came to the point again: “Only one bed in the bedroom.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “That’s what I’m paying for, isn’t it? — room and broad, I mean?” Her smile was a lot harder, a lot more knowing, than it had been in the old days. Auerbach laughed even so.
“I hate this,” Fotsev said. “How are we supposed to find one male Big Ugly among all the ones who live here? For all we know, the miserable fanatic does not live here any more. If he has any sense, he does not.”
“If he had any sense, he would not be a miserable fanatic,” his friend Gorppet pointed out, a point with which Fotsev could hardly disagree. “For that matter, if he had any sense, he would not be a Tosevite.”
Fotsev couldn’t disagree with that, either, and didn’t. His eye turrets swept the Basra street along which he and his small group were advancing-a narrow, stinking, muddy track between two rows of buildings, some whitewashed, more not, made from mud themselves. They showed only slits for windows, and had the look, though not really the strength, of fortresses.
“He is a crazy Big Ugly for preaching the way he do
es,” Fotsev said, “and the rest of the Big Uglies are just as crazy for listening to him. And I can tell you somebody else who is crazy, too.”
“Who is that?” Gorppet asked.
Before Fotsev could answer, sudden movement from around a corner made him swing the muzzle of his personal weapon to cover it. A moment later, he relaxed. It was only one of the four-legged hairy creatures, part scavenger, part companion, that the Big Uglies kept as symbionts. It sat back on its haunches and yapped at him and his comrades.
“Miserable creature,” Gorppet said. “I do not like dogs at all. Up in the SSSR, they used to train them to run under landcruisers with explosives on their backs. Nasty to use animals that way. They do not know what they are doing.” He paused. “But you were going to tell me who else is crazy. That is always worth hearing.”
“Truth,” one of their comrades said. “Who else is crazy, Fotsev?”
“The shiplord of the colonization fleet,” Fotsev answered. “With the Big Uglies on this part of the planet all stirred to a boil, why does he think he needs to bring any ships from the colonization fleet down here?”
