“I wouldn’t exactly call Elgin the country.” To illustrate what he meant, Captain Stan Szymanski waved his arm to take in the factories that checked the town’s grid of streets. The wave took in what had been factories, anyhow. They were ruins now, jagged and broken against the gray sky. Every one of them had been savagely bombed. Some were just medium-sized hills of broken bricks and rubble. Walls and stacks still stood on others. Whatever they had made, though, they weren’t making it any more. The seven-story clock tower of the Elgin Watch factory, which had made a prime observation post, was now scarcely taller than any other wreckage.
Mutt pointed westward, across the Fox River. “But that’s farm country out there yonder, sir,” he said. “Ain’t seen nothin’ but houses and skyscrapers and whatnot when I look out for a long time. It’s right nice, you ask me.”
“What it is, Lieutenant, is damn fine tank country,” Szymanski said in a voice that brooked no argument. “Since the Lizards have damn fine tanks and we don’t, I can’t get what you’d call enthusiastic about it.”
“Yes, sir,” Daniels said. It wasn’t that Szymanski wasn’t right-he was. It was just the way these young men, born in this century, looked at the world. Born in this century, hell-odds were Szymanski’d still been pissing his drawers when Mutt climbed on a troopship to head Over There.
But no matter how young the captain was on the outside, he had a cold-blooded way of evaluating things. The farmland over across the river was good tank country and the Lizards had good tanks, so to hell with the whole landscape. One of these days, there might not be a war going on. When Mutt looked at farmland, he thought about that, and about what kind of crops you’d get with this soil and climate, and how big your yield was liable to be. Szymanski didn’t care.
“Where they gonna billet us, sir?” Muldoon asked.
“Just off of Fountain Square, not far from the watch factory,” Szymanski answered. “We’re taking over a hotel that hasn’t been bombed to smithereens: the three-story red brick building over there.” He pointed.
“Fountain Square? Yeah, I been there.” Sergeant Muldoon chuckled. “It’s a triangle, and it ain’t got no fountain. Great little place.”
“Give me a choice between a hotel an’ the places we been stayin’ at in Chicago, an’ I ain’t gonna carry on a whole lot,” Mutt said. “Nice to lie down without worryin’ about whether a sniper can pick up where you’re sleepin’ and blow your head off without you even knowin’ the bastard was there.”
“Amen,” Muldoon said enthusiastically. “ ‘Sides which-” He glanced over at Captain Szymanski, then decided not to go on. Mutt wondered what that was all about. He’d have to wander over to Fountain Square himself and see what he could see.
Szymanski didn’t notice Muldoon’ s awkward pause. He was still looking westward. “No matter what they do and what kind of armor they might bring up, the Lizards would have a tough time forcing a crossing here,” he observed. “We’re nicely up on the bluffs and well dug in. No matter how hard they pasted us from the air, we’d still hurt their tanks. They’d have to try flanking us out if they wanted to take this place.”
“Yes, sir,” Muldoon said again. The brass didn’t think the Lizards would be trying to take Elgin any time soon, or they wouldn’t have sent the company here to rest and recuperate. Of course, the brass wasn’t always right about such things, but for the moment no bullets were flying, no cannon bellowing. It was almost peaceful enough to make a man nervous.
“Come on, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “I’ll show that there hotel and__” Again, he didn’t go on; he made a production of not going on. What the devil had he found over by Fountain Square? A warehouse full of Lucky Strikes? A cache of booze that wasn’t rotgut or moonshine? Whatever it was, he sure was acting coy about it.
For a Midwest factory town, Elgin looked to be a pretty nice place. The blasted plants didn’t make up a single district, as they did so many places. Instead, they were scattered among what had been pleasant homes till war visited them with fire and sword. Some of the houses, the ones that hadn’t been bombed or burned, still looked comfortable.
Fountain Square hadn’t been hit too badly, maybe because none of the town buildings was tall enough to draw Lizard bombers. God only knew why it had the name it did, because, as Muldoon had said, it was neither square nor overburdened with fountains. What looked to be a real live working saloon greeted GIs with open doors-and with a couple of real live working MPs inside those open doors to make sure rest and recuperation didn’t get too rowdy.
Was that what Muldoon had had in mind? He could have mentioned it in front of Szymanski; the captain didn’t mind taking a drink now and then, or even more often than that.
