In the Balance (74 page)

“The janitor, you mean? Sure. I know Andy. That’s a good idea; he’s reliable,” Yeager said. “Where
are
we going? Nobody’s bothered to tell me. Of course, I’m just a cook and bottle-washer around here, so it’s not surprising.”

“Denver,” Barbara said. “If we can get there.”

“Denver,” Sam repeated. “Yeah, I played there. I was with Omaha, I
think.” That had been in the days before he broke his ankle, when the Class A Western League was a step up on a road he hoped would lead to the big leagues. Somehow he’d stayed even when he knew the road went nowhere. He shook his head, forcing his thoughts back to the here-and-now. “Why Denver? We’ll have the devil’s own time getting there from here.”

“I think that’s part of the idea,” Barbara said. “The Lizards haven’t bothered it much, especially since winter started. We’ll be safer there, with a better chance to work … if, as I said, we can get there.”

Yeager noticed that
as I said
. From his lips, it would have come out
like I said
. But then, he hadn’t done graduate work in English. They probably ran you out of the university on a rail if you used bad grammar; it had to be a sin on the order of trying to go from second to third on a ball hit to short-stop. He snorted.

He still had baseball on the brain. Barbara said, “Listen, I’d better take these downstairs.” She hefted the folders.

“I’ve got to get back to it, too,” Yeager said. “You take care of yourself, you hear? I’ll see you on the convoy.”

“Okay, Sam. Thanks.” She walked down the corridor toward the stairway. Sam’s eyes followed her. Too bad about her husband, he thought. Now even she’d started admitting to herself that he wasn’t coming back. But even worn as she was, she remained too pretty, and too nice, to stay a widow forever. Yeager told himself he’d do something about that, if and when he got the chance.

Not now. Back to work. He taped up the second centrifuge box, then, grunting, piled both of them onto a dolly. He set the sole of his Army boot against the bar in the back, tilted the dolly into the carrying position. He’d learned the trick as a moving man one off-season. He’d learned how to get a loaded dolly downstairs, too: backward was slower, but a lot safer. And from what Fermi said, every gadget here had to be treated as irreplaceable.

He was sweating from effort and concentration both by the time he got down to ground level. Camouflage netting covered a large expanse of lawn in front of Eckhart Hall. Under it, with luck concealed from Lizard fighter-bombers, huddled a motley collection of Army trucks, moving vans, stakebed pickups, buses and private cars Uniformed guards with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets surrounded them, not so much to keep them from being stolen as from having their gas tanks siphoned dry. They were all full up, and in war-ravaged Chicago gasoline was more precious than rubies.

He didn’t begin to understand all the things people were stowing in them. One olive-drab Studebaker truck was full of nothing but blocks of black, smeary stuff, each with a number neatly stenciled onto the end. It was as if somebody had taken apart a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle and planned on putting it back together once he got to Colorado. But what was
the thing
for?

He turned and asked one of the men who’d got stuck behind him in a stairway traffic jam. The fellow said, “It’s graphite, to moderate the pile, slow down neutrons so uranium atoms have a better chance of capturing them.”

“Oh.” The answer left Yeager less than enlightened. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Not for the first time, he found that reading science fiction, while it put him ahead of where he would have been without it, didn’t magically turn him into a physicist. Too bad.

Barbara came outside with another load of file folders. Yeager went back and gave the graphite blocks another look so he could walk back upstairs with her. If she noticed what he was doing, she didn’t complain, but let him fall into step beside her.

They’d just got to the doorway when antiaircraft guns began to pound off to the west. In moments, the noise spread through the city. Above it, through it, came the scream of Lizard planes’ jet engines, and then the flat, hard
cruump!
of bombs going off. Barbara bit her lip. “Those are close,” she said.

“Mile, maybe two, north,” Yeager said. Like everyone else in Chicago, he’d become a connoisseur of explosions. He put a hand on Barbara’s shoulder, happy for the excuse to touch her. “You get under a roof. Shrapnel’ll start falling any minute, and you aren’t wearing a tin hat.” He rapped his own helmet with his knuckles.

Right on cue, pieces of antiaircraft shell casing panered down like hall. Barbara scurried inside Eckhart Hall—you didn’t want to be under one when it landed. She said, “Those were between here and Navy Pier. I hope they don’t fubar the evacuation route.”

“I hope they don’t, too.” Sam stopped and stared. “You,” he said severely, “have been listening to too many soldiers.”

“What? Oh.” Barbara’s eyes widened in a good simulation of innocence. “It means ‘fouled up beyond all recognition,’ doesn’t it?”

“Fouled up. Yeah. Right. Among other things.” The noise Yeager made was half cough, half chuckle. Barbara stuck out her tongue at him. Laughing, they climbed the stairs together.

More Lizard planes hit Chicago that afternoon, and more again after night fell. They hadn’t pounded the city so hard in a while. Yeager wished for bad weather, which sometimes kept the enemy away. Faint in the distance, he heard the wailing siren of a fire engine that still had fuel. He wondered if the firemen would find any water pressure when they got where they were going.

By the next morning, the loading was done. Yeager was crammed into a
bus along with a bunch of boxes that could have held anything, a couple of other soldiers—and with Ullhass and Ristin. The two Lizard POWs were coming along to Denver for whatever help they could give the Met Lab project. Though swaddled in Navy peacoats that hung like tents on their slight frames, they still shivered. The bus had several broken windows; it was as cold inside as out.

All over the lawn, men grumbled about the cut fingers and mashed toes they’d gotten loading the convoy. Then, one after another, engines started up. The roar and vibration sank deep into Yeager’s bones. Soon he’d be on the road again. After God only knew how many trips between towns, getting rolling felt good, felt normal. Maybe he was a nomad by nature.

Diesel and gasoline fumes wafted into the bus. Yeager coughed. He didn’t remember the stink being so bad. But then, lately he hadn’t smelled it much. Not a lot was on the roads these days to make a stink.

Inside of two gear changes, Yeager was convinced he had more business behind the wheel than the clod driving the bus.
No
, he thought with a touch of pride,
any fool can drive
. Guarding the Lizards was more important to the war effort.

The convoy rumbled north up University to Fifty-first, then swung left one vehicle at a time. The streets were mostly clear of debris and not too bumpy; rammed earth and rubble filled bomb craters and the subsidence caused by ruptured water mains. The sidewalks were something else again—bulldozers and pick-and-shovel crews had shoved up onto them all the garbage that had clogged the streets. These trucks were going to get through no matter what.

To help make sure it got through, soldiers had machine gun nests in the rubble and stood menacingly at streetcorners. Here and there, colored faces, eyes huge and white within them, stared at the passing traffic from windows of houses and apartment buildings. Bronzeville, Chicago’s black belt, began bare blocks from the university and indeed almost lapped around it. The government feared its Negro citizens only a little less than it feared the Lizards.

Before the aliens came, a quarter of a million people had been jammed into Bronzeville’s six square miles. A lot fewer than that were there now, but the district still showed the signs of crowding and poverty: the storefront churches, the shops advertising mystic potions and charms, the little lunch counters whose windows (those that hadn’t blown out) advertised chitlins and sweet potato pie, hot fish and mustard greens. Poor man’s fare, yes, and poor black man’s fare to boot, but the thought of fresh greens and hot fish was plenty to set Yeager’s stomach rumbling. He’d been living out of cans too long. That was even worse than the greasy spoons he’d haunted as he bounced from one minor-league town to the next. Some of those
diners—He hadn’t thought anything could be worse.

“Why we leave this place where we so long stay?” Ristin said. “I like this place, as much as can like any place on this cold, cold world. Where we go now is warmer?” He and Ullhass both swiveled their eyes toward Yeager, waiting hopefully on his reply.

They squeaked in disappointment when he said, “No, I don’t think it will be much warmer.” He didn’t have the heart to tell them it would be colder for a while: once on the Great Lakes, they’d almost certainly sail north and then west, because the Lizards held big stretches of Indiana and Ohio and controlled most of the Mississippi valley. The colder the country, the better, as far as evading them went.

Yeager continued, “As for why we’re leaving, we’re tired of having your people drop bombs on us, that’s why.”

“We tired of that, too,” Ullhass said. He’d learned to nod like a human being to emphasize his words. So had Ristin. Their heads bobbed up and down together.

“I wasn’t real fond of it myself,” Yeager said, adding the Lizards’ emphatic cough; he liked the way it served as a vocal exclamation point. His two charges let their mouths fall open. They thought his accent was funny. It probably was. He laughed a little, too. He and Ullhass and Ristin had rubbed off on one another more than he would have imagined possible back when he became their link to humankind.

The convoy chugged past the domed Byzantine bulk of Temple Isaiah Israel, then past Washington Park, bare-branched and brown and dappled with snow. It swung right onto Michigan Avenue, picking up speed as it went. There were advantages to being the only traffic on the road and not having to worry about stop lights.

Though it was winter, though the Lizards had cut off most rail and truck transport into Chicago, the stink of the stockyards lingered. Wrinkling his nose, Yeager tried to imagine what it had been like on a muggy summer afternoon. No wonder colored folk had taken over Bronzeville—they usually ended up settling in places no one else much wanted.

He also wondered that Jens and Barbara Larssen had chosen to get an apartment somewhere near here. Maybe they hadn’t known Chicago well when they moved, maybe they wanted to live close to the university, for the sake of his work, but Yeager still thought Barbara lucky to have had no trouble getting back and forth each day.

At the corner of Michigan and Forty-seventh, a sign proudly proclaimed,
MICHIGAN BOULEVARD GARDEN APARTMENTS
. The brick buildings looked as if they held. more people than some of the towns Yeager had played for. One of them had taken a bomb hit and fallen in on itself. More bomb craters scarred the gardens and courts around the apartments. Skinny
colored kids ran back and forth, running like banshees.

“What they do?” Ristin asked.

“Probably playing Lizards and Americans,” Sam answered. “It could be cowboys and Indians, though.” He spent the next few minutes trying to get the alien to understand what cowboys and Indians were to say nothing of why they were part of a game. He didn’t think he had much luck.

The convoy kept rolling north up Michigan Avenue. Before long though the bus Yeager was riding slowed then stopped. “What the hell’s goin’ on?” the driver said. “This was supposed to be a straight shot.”

“It’s the Army,” one of the other passengers explained. “The next time something goes just according to plan will be the first.” The fellow wore a major’s gold oak leaves so no one presumed to argue with him. Besides he was obviously right.

After a minute or so, the bus started rolling again, more slowly now. Yeager leaned out into the aisle to peer through the front windows. At the corner of Michigan and Eleventh soldiers waved vehicle after vehicle onto the latter street.

The driver opened the front door with a hiss of compressed air. “What got screwed up now?” he called to one of the men on traffic-cop duty. “Why you movin’ us offa Michigan?”

The soldier jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “You can’t get through no more on Michigan. The goddamn Lizards knocked down the Stevens Hotel this morning, and they’re still clearin’, the bricks and shit away.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?”

“Go over a block, then up Wabash to Lake. You can get back onto Michigan there.”

“Okay,” the driver said, and swung through the turn. No sooner had he rolled past the Woman’s Club Building than more soldiers waved him right onto Wabash, one block west. St. Mary’s Church there had had its spire blown off; the cross that had topped it lay half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter.

Since Wabash hadn’t been cleared to let the convoy get through, the going was slow and bumpy. Once the bus had to jounce up onto the sidewalk to get around a crater in the road. Two empty gas stations, one Shell, the other Sinclair, stood across the street from each other at Wabash and Balbo. A dusty sign in front of the Sinclair station advertised its regular gasoline, six gallons for ninety-eight cents, tax paid. A fifteen-foot-tall plywood cutout of a waving man in a parking attendant’s uniform plugged the parking lot next to the gas station: twenty-five cents for one hour or less
(SAT. NITE
50¢
AFTER
6
P.M)
. But for parked cars and rubble, the lot was empty.

Yeager shook his head. Up until the Lizards came, life in the United
States had been within shouting distance of normal, war or no war. Now … He’d seen newsreel film of wreckage in Europe and China, seen black-and-white images of stunned people trying to figure out how to go on with their lives after they’d lost everything—and often everybody—that mattered to them. He thought they’d sunk in. But the difference between seeing pictures of war and having war brought home to you was like the difference between seeing a picture of a pretty girl and going to bed with her.