Jens Larssen most cordially cursed the United States Army, first in English and then in the fragmentary Norwegian he’d picked up from his grandfather. Even as the oaths fell from his lips, he knew he was being unfair: if the Army hadn’t scooped him up as he was making his way across Indiana, he might well have got himself killed trying to sneak into Chicago as the Lizard attacks on the city rose to a climax.

And even now, after General Patton and General Bradley had pinched off the neck of that attack, nobody would let him fly out to join the rest of the Met Lab team in Denver. Again, the brass had their reasons-save for combat missions, aviation had almost disappeared in the United States. Human aviation had almost disappeared, anyhow. The Lizards dominated the skies.

“Hellfire,” he muttered, clinging to the rail of the steamer Duluth Queen, “the damn Army wouldn’t even tell me where they’d gone. I had to go into Chicago and find out for myself.”

That rankled; it struck him as security gone mad. So did everyone’s refusal to let him send on any word to the Met Lab crew. He couldn’t even let his wife know he was alive. Once more, though, the mucky-mucks had a point he couldn’t honestly deny: the Met Lab was America’s only hope of producing an atomic bomb like the ones the Lizards had used on Berlin and Washington, D.C. Without that bomb, the war against the aliens would probably fail. Nobody, then, could afford to draw any sort of attention toward the Metallurgical Laboratory or communicate with it in any way, for fear the Lizards would intercept a message and draw the wrong-or rather, the right-conclusions from it.

The orders he’d been given made just enough sense for him not to try disobeying. But oh, how he hated them!

“And now I can’t even get into Duluth,” he grumbled.

He could see the town, which lay by the edge of Lake Superior where it narrowed to its westernmost point.