He could see the gray granite bluffs that dwarfed man’s houses and buildings, and felt he could almost reach out and touch some of the homes atop these bluffs, the taller business buildings that climbed the steep streets toward them. But the feeling was an illusion; a sheet of blue-gray ice held the Duluth Queen away from the Minnesota town that had given it its name.

Jens turned to a passing sailor. “How far out on the lake are we?”

The man paused to think. His breath came out thick as smoke as he answered, “Can’t be more than four, five miles. Up to less than a mouth ago, it was open water all the way in.” He chuckled at Larssen’s groan. “Some years the port stays open all winter long. More often, though, it’ll freeze for twenty miles out, so this ain’t so bad.” He went on his way, whistling a cheery tune.

He’d misunderstood why Jens groaned. It wasn’t at the cold weather; Jens had grown up in Minnesota, and spent enough time skating on frozen lakes to take for granted that water-even as massive a body of water as Lake Superior-turned to ice when winter came. But a month before, he could have gone straight into town. That ate at him. Probably the same blizzard that let Patton launch his attack against the Lizards had also finally frozen the lake.

In any other year, the Duluth Queen would have stopped sailing for the winter. The Lizards, though, had paid much more attention to knocking out road and rail traffic than to knocking out ships. Jens wondered what that meant about their home planet-maybe it didn’t have enough water for them to take shipping seriously as a way of getting things from, one place to another.

If that was so, the aliens were missing a trick. The Duluth Queen carried ball bearings, ammunition, gasoline, and motor oil to keep resistance to the Lizards’ strong in Minnesota; it would take back steel from Duluth and milled grain from Minneapolis to forge into new weapons and feed the people who fought and built.