In the Balance (45 page)

“Makes sense to me.” Yeager got up, stubbed out his own smoke. He didn’t light another for himself; he wasn’t sure where his next pack was coming from. He said, “I suppose keeping busy helps take your mind off things, too.”

“It does, some, but not as much as I hoped it would.” Barbara pointed to the door behind which Dr. Burkett was studying the Lizards. “How did you end up standing guard over those—things?”

“I was part of the unit that captured them, out west of here,” he answered.

“Good for you. But how did you get picked to stay with them, I mean? Did you draw the short straw, or what?”

Yeager chuckled. “Nope. Matter of fact, I broke an old Army rule—I volunteered.”

“You did?” Her eyebrows shot upward. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

Rather sheepishly, he explained about his fondness for science fiction. Her eyebrows moved again; this time, their inner ends came together in a tight little knot above her nose. He’d seen that expression before, more times than he could easily count. “You don’t care for the stuff,” he said.

“No, not really,” Barbara said. “I was doing graduate work in medieval English literature before Jens had to, move here from Berkeley, so it’s not my cup of tea.” But then she paused and looked thoughtful. “Still, I suppose it’s done a better job of preparing you for what’s happening here than Chaucer has for me.”

“Mmm—maybe so.” Sam had been ready with his usual hot defense of what he read for pleasure; finding out he didn’t need it left him feeling like a portable phonograph that had been wound up and forgotten without a record on its turntable.

Barbara said, “As for me, if I couldn’t type, I’d still be stuck in that Bronzeville flat.”

“Bronzeville?” Now Yeager’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t know a lot about Chicago”—
If I’d ever played here, I would
(the thought was there and gone fast as a Lizard jet)—“but I do know that’s not the real good part of town.”

“Nobody’s ever bothered me,” Barbara said. “With the Lizards here, the differences between whites and Negroes look pretty small all of a sudden, don’t they?”

“I suppose so,” Yeager said, though he didn’t sound convinced even to himself. “But whatever color they are, you’ll find more than its share of crooks in Bronzeville. Hmm—tell you what. What time do you get off here?”

“Whenever Dr. Burkett feels like turning me loose, it sounds like,” she answered. “I already told you, I’m new on the job. Why?”

“I’d walk you home, if you like … Hey, what’s so darn funny?”

Laughing still, Barbara Larssen threw back her head and made a noise that might have been a wolf’s howl. Yeager’s cheeks turned hot. Barbara said, “I think my husband might approve of that idea in the abstract, but not walking along the concrete, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s not what I had in mind at all,” Yeager protested. Not until the words were out of his mouth did he realize he wasn’t telling the whole
truth. The front of his mind had made the offer innocently enough, but some deeper part knew he might have kept quiet if he hadn’t found her attractive. He was embarrassed that she’d seen through him faster than he saw through himself.

“No harm in your asking, and I’m sure it was kindly meant,” she said, giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Men only turn really annoying when they can’t hear ‘no thank you’ or don’t believe it, and
I
see you’re not like that.”

“Okay,” he said, as noncommittal a noise as he could come up with.

Barbara put out her second cigarette, looked at her wristwatch (the electric clock on the wall wasn’t running), and said, “I’d better get back to work.” She bent over the typewriter. Her fingers flew; the keys made machine-gun bursts of noise. Yeager had known a few reporters who could crank more words a minute than Barbara was putting out now, but not many.

He leaned back in his chair. He couldn’t imagine an easier duty: unless something went wrong inside Dr. Burkett’s office, or unless Burkett needed to ask him something (not likely, since the scientist seemed convinced he already knew everything himself), he had nothing to do but sit around and wait.

A lot of people would have got bored in a hurry. Being a veteran of long hours on trains and buses, Yeager was made of tougher stuff than that. He thought about baseball, about the science fiction he read to kill time between one town and the next, about the Lizards, about his small taste of combat (plenty to last him a lifetime if he got his way, which he probably wouldn’t).

And he thought about Barbara Larssen. There she sat in front of him, after all. She wasn’t ignoring him, either; every so often, she’d look up from her work and smile. Some of his thoughts were the pleasant but meaningless ones with which any man will while away the time in the presence of a pretty girl. Others had a bitter edge to them: he wished his former wife had cared about him while he was traveling the way Barbara obviously cared about her husband. What was his name? Jens, that was it. Whether he knew it or not, Jens Larssen was one lucky fellow.

After a while, the door to Dr. Burkett’s office opened. Out came Burkett, looking plump and pleased with himself. Out came Ristin and Ullhass. Yeager wasn’t so good at figuring out what their expressions meant, but they weren’t in any obvious distress. Burkett said, “I’ll want to see them again same time tomorrow, soldier.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Yeager, who was not sorry at all, “but they’re scheduled to spend all day tomorrow with a Doctor, uh, Fermi. You’ll have to try another time.”

“I know Dr. Fermi!” Barbara Larssen exclaimed. “Jens works with him.”

“This is most inconvenient,” Dr. Burkett said. “I shall complain to the appropriate military authorities. How is one to conduct a proper experimental program when one’s subjects are snatched away at inconvenient and arbitrary times?”

What that meant, Sam thought, was that Burkett hadn’t bothered to check the schedule before he made his list of experiments. Too bad for him. Aloud, Yeager said, “I’m sorry, sir, but since we have a lot more experts than we do Lizards, we have to spread the Lizards around as best we can.”

“Bah!” Burkett said. “Fermi is just a physicist. What can they possibly have to teach him?”

He plainly meant it as a rhetorical question, but Yeager answered it anyhow: “Don’t you think he might be a little interested in how they came to Earth in the first place, sir?” Burkett stared at, him; maybe he’d assumed joining the Army precluded a man from having a mind of his own.

Barbara said, “Shall I schedule you for another session with the Lizards as soon as they’re available, Dr. Burkett?”

“Yes, do that,” he answered, as if she were part of the furniture. He stamped back into his private chamber, slamming the door behind him. Barbara Larssen and Yeager looked at each other. He grinned; she started to giggle.

“I hope your husband comes home safe, Barbara,” he said quietly.

Her laughter stopped as abruptly as if cut by a knife. “So do I,” she answered. “I’m worried. He’s been gone longer than he said he would.” Her gaze settled on the two Lizards, who stood waiting for Yeager to tell them what to do next. He nodded. Everyone’s life would have been simpler without the Lizards.

“Anybody gives you a bad time because he’s not around, you let me know,” he said. He’d never had a reputation for being a hard case while he was playing ball, but he hadn’t carried around a bayonet-tipped rifle then, either.

“Thanks, Sam; I may do that,” she said. Her tone was just cool enough to let him know again that he shouldn’t be the one who gave her a bad time. He answered with a sober expression that let her know he got the message.

He turned to the Lizards, gestured with his gun. “Come on, you lugs.” He stood aside to let them precede him out of the office. Barbara Larssen picked up the telephone on her desk, made a face, put it down. No dial tone, Yeager guessed—everything was erratic these days. Burkett’s next goround with the Lizards would have to wait a while.

The Plymouth’s engine made a sudden, dreadful racket, as if it had just been hit by machine-gun fire. Jens Larssen knew a mechanical death rattle when he heard one. On the dashboard panel in front of him, the battery and
temperature lights both glowed red. He wasn’t overheated and he knew he still had juice. What he didn’t have any more was a car. It rolled forward another couple of hundred yards, until he pulled off onto the shoulder to keep from blocking Highway 250 for anyone else.

“Shit,” he said as he sat and stared at the dashboard lights. If he hadn’t had to use garbage for fuel so much of the time, if he hadn’t had to try to make his way over bombed-out roads or sometimes over no roads at all, if the damned Lizards had never come … he wouldn’t have been stuck here somewhere in eastern Ohio, two whole states away from where he was supposed to be.

He raised his eyes and looked out through the dusty, bug-splashed windshield. Up ahead, the buildings of a small town dented the skyline. Smalltown mechanics had helped keep the car going more than once before. Maybe they could do it again. He had his doubts—the, Plymouth had never made a noise like this one before—but it was something he had to try.

He left the key in the ignition when he got out—good luck to anybody who tried to drive the car away. Slamming the driver’s side door relieved his anger a little. He took off his jacket, slung it over his shoulder, and started up the road toward the town.

There wasn’t much traffic. In fact, there wasn’t any traffic. He tramped past a couple of cars that looked as if they’d been sitting on the shoulder a lot longer than his, and past a burnt-out wreck that must have been strafed from the air and then shoved over to the roadside, but no cars passed him. All he could hear was his own footfalls on asphalt.

Just outside the outskirts of town, he came to a signboard:
WELCOME TO STRASBURG, HOME OF GARVER BROTHERS-WORLD’S BIGGEST LITTLE STORE
. Below that, in smaller letters, it said
POPULATION (1930), 1,305
.

Jens blew air out between his lips to make a snuffling noise. Here was Smalltown U.S.A., all right: even though the “new” census was already two years old, the mayor or whoever hadn’t got around to fixing the numbers yet. Why bother, when they probably hadn’t changed by more than a couple of dozen?

He walked on. The first gas station he came to was closed and locked. A big fat spider was sitting in a web spun between two of the gas pumps, so it had likely been closed for a while. That didn’t look encouraging.

The drugstore half a block farther on had its door open. He decided to go in and see what they had at their soda fountain. At the moment, he wouldn’t have turned down anything cold and wet, or even warm and wet. He still had some money in his pocket; Colonel Groves had been generous down in White Sulphur Springs. Being treated as a national resource was something he’d have no trouble getting used to.

Gloom filled the inside of the drugstore; the electricity was out. “Anybody in here?” Larssen called, peering, down the aisles.

“Back here,” a woman answered. But that wasn’t the only answer he got. From much closer came startled hisses. Two Lizards walked around a display of Wildroot Creme Oil that was taller than they were. One carried a gun; the other had his arms full of flashlights and batteries.

Larssen’s first impulse was to turn around and run like hell. He hadn’t known he’d blundered into enemy-held territory. He felt as if he were carrying a sign that said
DANGEROUS HUMAN-NUCLEAR PHYSICIST
in letters three feet high. Fortunately, he didn’t give in to the impulse. As he realized after a moment, to the Lizards he was just another person: for all they knew, he might have lived in Strasburg.

The Lizards skittered out of the drugstore with their loot. “They didn’t pay for it!” Jens exclaimed. It was, on reflection, the stupidest thing he’d ever said in his life.

The woman back near the pharmacy had too much sense even to notice idiocy. “They didn’t shoot me, either, so I guess it’s square,” she said. “Now what can I do for
you?”

Confronted by such unshakable matter-of-factness, Larssen responded in kind: “My car broke down outside of town. I’m looking for somebody to fix it. And if you have a Coca-Cola or something like that, I’ll buy it from you.”

“I have Pepsi-Cola,” the woman said. “Five dollars.”

That was robbery worse than back at White Sulphur Springs, but Larssen paid without a whimper. The Pepsi-Cola, unrefrigerated and fizzy, went down like nectar of the gods. It tried to come up again, too; Jens wondered if you could explode from containing carbonation. When his eyes stopped watering, he said, “Now, about my car …”

“Charlie Tompkins runs a garage up on North Wooster, just past Garver Brothers.” The woman pointed to show him where North Wooster was. “If anybody can help you, he’s probably the one. Thank you for shopping at Walgreen’s, sir.”

He wondered if she’d have said that to the Lizards had he not come in and interrupted her. Very likely, he thought; nothing seemed to faze her.
When he handed her the empty soda bottle
, she rang up NO SALE on the cash register, reached in, and took out a penny, which she handed to him. “Your deposit, sir.”

Bemused, he pocketed the coin. Deposits hadn’t gone up with prices.
Of course not
, he thought—
shopkeepers have to pay out deposits
.

Strasburg wasn’t big enough to get lost in; he found North Wooster without difficulty. An enormous sign proclaimed the presence of the Garver Brothers store. The signboard outside of town, unlike a lot of smalltown signboards, hadn’t exaggerated: the store sprawled over a couple of acres. The parking lot off to one side had room for hundreds of cars. At the moment, it held none.

That did not mean it was empty. Trucks ignored the white lines painted on concrete. They were not trucks of a sort Jens had seen before: they were bigger, somehow smoother of outline, quieter. When one of them rolled away, it didn’t rattle or rumble or roar. No smoke belched from its exhaust.

The Lizards were plundering Garver Brothers.

A couple of them stood in front of the store, guns at the ready, in case the small crowd of people across the street got boisterous. In the face of that firepower, and of everything the Lizards had behind it, nobody seemed inclined toward boisterousness.