In the Balance (84 page)

“We’ve got more than we know what to do with, when it comes to livestock,” the fellow answered. “We used to ship all the way to the East Coast before the damned Lizards came. Now everything’s just bottled up here.
We’ll run short of feed before too long, and have to really start slaughtering, but for now we’re still fat. Happy to share with you folks. It’s a Christian thing to do … even for those critters.”

With undisguised curiosity, the local watched Ristin and Ullhass eat. The Lizards had manners, though not identical to those of Earthlings. Their technique for eating a drumstick was to stab it with a fork, hold it up to their snouts, and then nibble off bits. Every so often, their forked tongues would come out to clean grease off their hard, immobile lips.

Wagons kept coming into Detroit City every fifteen or twenty minutes; they’d been widely spread out to minimize damage from any air strikes that did descend on them (so far, none had, for which Yeager was heartily grateful—coming under air attack once was a thousand times too many). The natives greeted each one as if it held the Prodigal Son.

When shelters were assigned, Yeager found himself with a double cabin that had been altered in advance for use by him and his alien charges. Each of the two rooms had its own wood-burning stove and a bountiful supply of fuel—by now, Ullhass and Ristin knew how to keep a fire going. The windows on the Lizards’ side had boards nailed across them to prevent escape (though Yeager was willing to bet they wouldn’t have tried to run away from their heater). The connecting door between the rooms opened only from his side.

He got Ullhass and Ristin settled for the evening, then went back to his own half of the cabin. It wasn’t luxuriously furnished a table with a kerosene lantern, clothes tree, slop bucket (better that, he thought, than going to an outhouse in the middle of the night—it’d probably freeze right off), cot piled high with extra blankets.
So it isn’t the Biltmore
, he thought.
It’ll do
.

He sat down on the cot. He wished he had something to read—an
Astounding
, by choice. He wondered what had happened to
Astounding
since the Lizards came; the last issue he’d seen was the one he’d been reading the day the train down from Madison got shot up. But science fiction wouldn’t be the same now that real live bug-eyed (or at least chameleoneyed) monsters were loose on Earth and bent on conquest.

He bent down to untie his shoes, the only item of clothing he intended to take off tonight. He’d grown so used to sleeping in his uniform to stay warm that doing anything else was starting to seem unnatural.

He’d just grabbed a shoelace when someone scratched at the door. “Who’s that?” Yeager wondered out loud. It had to be something to do with the Lizards, he thought, but whatever it was, couldn’t it wait till morning? The scratching came again. Evidently it couldn’t. Muttering under his breath, he got up and opened the door. “Oh,” he said. It wasn’t anything to do with the Lizards. It was Barbara Larssen.

“May I come in?” she asked.

“Oh,” he said again, and then, “Sure. You’d better, in fact, or all the heat will get out.”

There was no place to sit but the cot, so that was where she sat. After what had happened on the
Caledonia
and the way she’d acted since, Yeager didn’t know if he ought to sit down beside her. With the instincts of a man who automatically moved back a few steps to prevent the extra-base hit in the late innings, he decided to play safe. He paced back and forth in front of the stove.

Barbara watched him for a few seconds, then said, “It’s all right, Sam. I don’t think you’re going to molest me. That’s what I wanted to talk about with you, anyway.”

Yeager perched cautiously near the head of the cot, at the opposite end from Barbara. “What is there to talk about?” he said. “It was just one of those crazy things that happens sometimes. if you want to pretend it never did—” He started to finish with
that’s all right
. But it wasn’t, not quite. He tried a different phrase: “You can.” That was better.

“No. I owe you an apology.” She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the worn, grayish-yellow boards of the floor. “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did afterward. I’m sorry. It’s just that after we—did it, I really realized Jens is, is dead, he has to be dead, and that all came down on me at once. I am sorry.” She covered her face with her hands. After a few seconds, he realized she was crying.

He slid down the cot toward her, put a hesitant hand on her shoulder. She stiffened at his touch, but then spun half around and buried her face against his chest. His arms could hardly help folding around her. “It’s okay,” he said, not knowing whether it was okay or not, not even knowing whether she heard him or not. “It’s okay.”

After a while, her sobs subsided to hiccups. She pushed herself away from him, then reached into her purse and dabbed at herself with a hanky. She ruefully shook her head. “I must look like hell.”

Sam considered that. Tears still glistened on her cheeks and brimmed in her eyes. She wasn’t wearing any mascara or shadow to streak and run. If her face was puffy from crying, it didn’t show in the lantern light. But even if it had, so what? “Barbara, you, look real good to me,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought so for a long time.”

“Have you?” she said. “You didn’t really let on, not until—”

“Wasn’t my place to,” he answered, and stopped there.

“Not as long as there was any hope Jens was still alive, you mean,” she said, filling it in for him. He nodded. Her face twisted, but she forced it back to steadiness. “You’re a gentleman, Sam, do you know?”

“Me? I don’t know anything about that. All I know is—” He stopped
again. What had started to come out of his mouth was,
All I know is baseball, and I’ve spun my wheels there for too damn many years
. That was true, but it wasn’t what Barbara needed to hear right now. He gave another try: “All I know is, I’ll try to be good for you if that’s what you want me to do.”

“Yes, that’s what I want,” she said seriously. “Times like these, nobody can get through by himself. If we don’t help each other, hold onto each other, what’s the use of anything?”

“You’ve got me.” He’d been on the road by himself for a lot of years. But he hadn’t really been alone: he’d always had the team, the pennant race, the hope (though that had faded) of moving up—substitutes for family, goal, and dreams.

He shook his head. No matter how deeply baseball had dug its claws into his soul, this was not the time to be thinking about it. Still wary, still a little unsure, he put his arms around Barbara again. She looked at the floor and let out such a long sigh, he almost let go. But then she shook her head; he had a pretty good idea what she was telling herself to forget. She tilted her face up to his.

Later, he asked, “Do you want me to blow out the lamp?”

“Whichever way you’d like,” she answered. She was probably less shy about undressing with it burning than he was; he reminded himself she was used to being with a man. They got under the covers together, not for modesty but for warmth.

Later still, after they’d warmed themselves enough to kick most of the blankets onto the floor, they lay with their arms wrapped around each other. The cot was so narrow it gave them little choice about that. Yeager ran a hand down Barbara’s back, learning the shape and feel of her. There hadn’t been time for that aboard the
Caledonia;
there hadn’t been time for anything except raw, driving lust. He’d never known anything to match that, maybe not even the night he lost his cherry, but this was pretty fine, too. It felt somehow more certain, as if he could be sure it would last.

Barbara’s breasts slid against his chest as she leaned up on one elbow. She lay between him and the lamp, so her face was full of shadow. When she spoke, though, her words weren’t quite what he thought of as romantic: “Do you want to see if you can buy some rubbers tomorrow, Sam? This place seems in good shape; the drugstore may still have a supply.”

“Uh, okay,” he said, taken aback. She was indeed used to being with a man, he thought. He did his best to sound matter-of-fact as he went on, “Probably a good idea.”

“Certainly a good idea,” she corrected. “We’re all right about the first time—I know—and I don’t mind taking a chance now and again, but if we’re going to be making love a lot, we’d better be careful. I don’t want to
be expecting going cross-country in a wagon train.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’ll try and find some. Uh—what happens if I don’t?” He wished he hadn’t said that. It would make her think he only wanted to lay her. He did want to lay her, but he’d learned you seldom got anywhere treating a woman like a piece of meat, especially not a woman like this, who’d been married to a physicist and had plenty of brains herself.

He was in luck—she didn’t get mad. Her hand wandered now, or rather moved, for she knew where it was going. It closed on him. “if you don’t,” she said, “we’ll just have to figure out something else to do.” She squeezed gently.

He couldn’t decide whether he wanted some Detroit Lakes drugstore to have rubbers or not.

Behind Mutt Daniels, the Preemption House was burning. His heart felt like breaking for several reasons. It was always sad to see history go up in smoke, and the two-story Greek Revival frame building had been one of Naperville, Illinois’ prides since 1834. More immediately, it was far from the only burning building in Naperville. Mutt didn’t see how the Army could hold the town—and there wasn’t a hell of a lot behind Naperville but Chicago. itself.

And more immediately still, the Preemption House had been Naperville’s leading saloon. Daniels hadn’t been in town long, but he’d managed to liberate a fifth of good bourbon. He wore three stripes on his sleeves these days; just as kids had looked to him on how to be ballplayers, now he had to show them how to be soldiers. These days he borrowed his precepts from Sergeant Schneider instead of his own old managers.

Every half a minute or so, another liquor bottle inside the Preemption House would cook off, like a round inside a burning tank. Looking back, Mutt saw little blue alcohol flames flickering among the big lusty red ones from the burning timbers. He sighed and said, “Hell of a waste.”

“You bet, Sarge,” said the private beside him, a little four-eyed fellow named Kevin Donlan, who, by his looks, would probably start shaving one day fairly soon. Donlan went on, “That building must be more than a hundred years old.”

Daniels sighed again. “I wasn’t thinkin’ so much about the building.”

A whistling roar in the sky, growing fast, made both men dive for the nearest trench. The shell went off above ground level fragments hissed through the air. So did other things that pattered and bounced off the hard ground like hailstones.

“You gotta watch where you put your feet now, son,” Daniels said. “That bastard just spit out a bunch o’ little bombs or mines or whatever you want to call ’em. First saw those out around Shabbona. You step on one, you’ll
walk like Peg-Leg Pete in the, Disney cartoons the rest of your days.”

More shells rained down; more of the little rolling mines scattered from them. A couple went off with short, unimpressive cracks, hardly louder than the screams that followed them, “They keep throwin’ those at us,
we
ain’t gonna be able to move around at all, Sergeant Daniels,” Donlan said.

“That’s the idea, son,” Mutt said dryly. “They pound on us for a while, freeze us in place like this, then they bring in the tanks and take the ground away from us. If they had more tanks, they’d’ve finished kickin’ our butts a long time ago.”

Donlan hadn’t seen close-up action yet, he’d joined the squad during the retreat from Aurora. He said, “How can those things beat on us like this? They ain’t even human.”

“One of the things you better understand right quick, kid, is that a bullet or a shell, it don’t care who shot it or who gets in the way,” Daniels said. “Besides, the Lizards got plenty o’ balls of their own. I know the radio keeps callin’ ’em ‘push-button soldiers’ to make it sound like all their gadgets is what’s whuppin’ us and keep the civilians cheerful, but don’t let anybody tell you they can’t fight.”

The artillery barrage went on and on. Mutt endured it, as he’d endured similar poundings in France. In a way, France had been worse. Each of the Lizards’ shells was a lot more deadly than the ones the
Boches
had thrown, but the Germans had thrown a
lot
of shells, so it sometimes seemed whole steel mills were falling out of the sky on top of the American trenches. Men would go mad from that—shell shock, they called it. This bombardment was more likely to kill you, but it probably wouldn’t drive you nuts.

Through a pause in the shelling, Daniels heard running feet behind him. He swung around with his tommy gun—maybe the Lizards had used their whirligig flying machines to land troops behind human lines again.

But it wasn’t a Lizard: it was a gray-haired colored fellow in blue jeans and a beat-up overcoat running along Chicago Avenue with a big wicker basket under one arm. A couple of shells burst perilously close to him. He yelped and jumped into the trench with Daniels and Donlan.

Mutt looked at him. “Boy, you are one crazy nigger, runnin’ around in the open with that shit fallin’ all around you.”

He didn’t mean anything particularly bad by his words; in Mississippi, he was used to talking to Negroes that way. But this wasn’t Mississippi, and the colored man glared at him before answering, “I’m not a boy and I’m not a nigger, but I guess maybe I am crazy if I thought I could bring some soldiers fried chicken without getting myself called names.”

Mutt opened his mouth, closed it again. He didn’t know what to do. He’d hardly ever had a Negro talk back to him, not even up here in the
North. Smart Negroes knew their place … but a smart Negro wouldn’t have braved shellfire to bring him food.
Braved
was the word, too; Daniels didn’t want to be anywhere but here under cover.

“I think maybe I’ll shut the fuck up,” he remarked to nobody in particular. He started to address the black man directly, but found himself brought up short—what did he call him?
Boy
wouldn’t do it, and
Uncle
wasn’t likely to improve matters, either. He couldn’t bring himself to say
Mister
. He tried something else: “Friend, I do thank you.”