Liu Han pointed to an advertisement for an Olympia typewriter. “What?” she said in English, adding the Lizard interrogative cough.
Fiore had more trouble explaining it than he’d expected. After a while, he figured out that she couldn’t read or write. He’d known a few ballplayers, mostly from the South, who had the same trouble, but it wasn’t something that automatically occurred to him.
Now he wished more than ever that the Signal was in English; he would have started teaching her on the spot. He thought about showing her the alphabet—despite crossed o’s and a’s with little circles above them, the ABCs didn’t change much. But if he didn’t understand what he was reading, how was she supposed to? He gave it up as a bad job and turned to the next page.
It showed a flight of German bombers over some Russian city. In spite of the sweltering heat, she shivered and pressed herself against him. She might not know what a typewriter was for, but she recognized bombers when she saw them. Fiore clicked his tongue between his teeth. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?
They came to the article about Marshal Pétain. Fiore thought he was going to have trouble putting across what Vichy France was all about, me more so as he didn’t understand all the details himself. But as soon as he managed to convey to her that it was a German puppet state, she nodded and exclaimed, “Manchukuo!”
“That’s right, the Japs have puppets, too, don’t they?” he said.
“Puppets?” She had the concept, but the word eluded her. He resorted to pantomime again until she got the idea. He hammed up his dumb show as much as he could; she always enjoyed that. She did smile now, but only for a moment. Then she said, “The scaly devils have made puppets of us all.”
He blinked; that was as serious an idea as she’d ever gotten across. She was also dead right. If it weren’t for the Lizards, he’d be…doing what? The answer he arrived at brought him up short. If it weren’t for the Lizards, all he’d be doing was trying to keep a floundering minor-league career alive, getting an off-season job, and waiting for Uncle Sam to send him a draft notice. When you stepped back and looked at it, none of that was worth writing home about.
“Maybe we were already puppets before the Lizards came,” he said harshly. His voice grew softer as he added, “if they hadn’t come, I never would have known you, so I guess I’m glad they did.”
Liu Han did not answer right away. Her face was unreadable as she studied Fiore. He flinched from that quiet scrutiny, wondering how badly he’d just stuck his foot in his mouth. He knew she’d been through hard times, and it was a lot rougher for a, woman to have to lie down with a strange man than the other way around. He suddenly wondered exactly what she thought of him. Was he something good, or simply something better than she’d known in captivity before?
How much the answer mattered surprised him. Till now, he hadn’t asked himself what Liu Han meant to him, either. Sure, getting laid was fine, and he’d found out more about that from her than he’d thought he needed to learn until the Lizards brought him up here. But there was more to it. In spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to her, she remained good people. He wanted to take care of her. But did she want him for anything more than an insurance policy?
She never did answer, not in words. She put her head on his chest, smoothing away the hairs with her hand so they wouldn’t tickle her nose. His arms closed around her back. He could have rolled over on top of her, but it didn’t cross his mind, not now. They held each other for a while.
He wondered what his mother would say if he told her he was falling in love with a Chinese girl. He hoped he’d have the chance to find out.
Then he wondered how he’d say “I love you” to Liu Han. He didn’t know the Chinese for it, she didn’t know the English, and it was one place where the Lizards’ language helped not at all. He patted her bare shoulder. One way or another, he’d get the idea across.
13
The latest storm had finally blown out of Chicago leaving a fine dusting of snow on the ground. The Lizards stared at it in swivel-eyed wonder as Sam Yeager marched them along toward the Metallurgical Laboratory. He was comfortable enough in a wool sweater, but they shivered in too-large peacoats scrounged from the Great Lakes Naval Base Their breath, hotter than his made puffs of steam in the crisp air.
In spite of intermittent Lizard air raids, a couple of students were playing catch on the dying grass by the walk Doing their best to pretend everything’s normal, Yeager thought. He envied them their determination
As athletes, they weren’t much. One of them flat-out missed the ball when it came to him It skidded through the slush and stopped almost at Yeager’s feet. He set down the rifle he was still required to carry scooped up the baseball and fired it back to the student who’d thrown it. If the kid hadn’t caught it, it would have hit him right in the middle of the chest. He stared at Yeager, as if to say Who is this old guy? Yeager just grinned, picked up his piece, and started shepherding the Lizards down the walk again.
Ristin said, “You”—he followed it with a Lizard word Yeager didn’t know—“very well.”
As best he could, Yeager echoed the croaked word. “Not understanding,” he added in the Lizards’ language. Ristin obligingly gestured while repeating the word. A light went on in Yeager’s head. He dropped back into English. “Oh, you mean throw.” He made as if to throw again, this time without a baseball. “Throw.”
“Ssrow,” Ristin agreed. He tried English himself: “You—ssrow—good.”
“Thanks,” Yeager said, and let it go at that. How was he supposed to explain to an alien that he’d made a living (not much of a living, sometimes, but he’d never gone hungry) because he could throw and hit a baseball? If he didn’t have a better arm than a couple of half-assed college kids, he’d better leave town.
It wasn’t much warmer inside Eckhart Hall than it had been outside. Heat was as hard to come by as electricity these days. Army engineers did a marvelous job of repairing bomb damage, but the Lizards could wreck things faster than they could fix them. Since the elevator wasn’t running, Yeager took Ristin and Ullhass up the stairs to Enrico Fermi’s office. He didn’t know about them, but the exercise made him warmer.
Fermi bounced up out of his chair when Yeager walked the Lizards through his open door. “So good to see you and your friends here,” he said effusively. Yeager nodded, hiding a smile at the physicist’s heavy accent. He would have bet Bobby Fiore’s father sounded the same way.
Fermi had a glass coffeepot set up above a tin of canned heat. Heavy china mugs, cafeteria-style, stood beside the Sterno. The physicist gestured for Yeager to take one. “Thank you, sir,” Yeager said. He hadn’t noticed little things like cigarettes and coffee until he couldn’t get them whenever he wanted. Scarcity made them precious—and besides, the coffee was hot.
He glanced at Ullhass and Ristin. They’d tried coffee, too, but found it too bitter to stand. That was their tough luck, he thought; it cut them off from something that could heat them up from the inside out. He took another sip from his cup, felt his eyes opening wider. Coffee hit harder when you couldn’t have it every day. So did tobacco; he remembered how Barbara Larssen had reacted to her first smoke in a while.
At Fermi’s gesture, the Lizards perched themselves on a couple of chairs in front of the desk. Their feet barely touched the ground; human furniture was too big for them. Yeager sat down too, off to one side, his Springfield resting in his lap. He was still on guard duty, though that wasn’t his chief reason for being here. Enrico Fermi had more important things to do than learning the Lizards’ language, so Yeager interpreted whenever Ristin and Ullhass ran out of English.
Till the past few weeks, everything he knew about nuclear physics had come from the pages of Astounding. If stories like “Blowups Happen” and “Nerves” hadn’t had good science in them as well as good fiction, he would have been no use to Fermi—not because he couldn’t understand the Lizards, but because he wouldn’t have been able to understan
d the physicist.
Fermi asked the Lizards, “How long have your people known how to control and release the energy contained within the atomic nucleus?”
Yeager translated. He knew he didn’t do perfectly for nucleus; the word he used actually meant something closer to center. But the Lizards understood him well enough. They chattered back and forth between themselves for a few seconds before Ullhass said, “Somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand years, we think.”
Ristin added, “That’s our years, of course. Yours are about twice as long.”
Yeager did the arithmetic in his head. Even after dividing by two, it was still an ungodly long time. If Ristin and Ullhass were telling the truth, the Lizards had known about atomic power since humanity’s newest superweapon was fire against cave bears. If—He turned to Fermi. “Do you believe them, Professor?”
“Let me say that I know of no reason for them to lie,” Fermi answered. He looked like the fellow you’d find behind the counter of a delicatessen in half the medium-sized towns in the United States. He sounded like him, too, until you listened to what he had to say. Now he went on, “I think if we had had this power for so long, we would have accomplished more with it than they have.”
What the Lizards had done looked like plenty to Yeager. They’d crossed space to land on Earth, they’d kicked the tar out of every army they’d come up against, and they’d blown Berlin and Washington clean off the map. What did Fermi want, egg in his beer?
The physicist gave his attention back to the aliens. “How do you proceed in separating the useful U-235 from the much more abundant U-238?” In one form or another, he’d been asking that same question since he first set eyes on the Lizards.
As usual, they left him frustrated. Ullhass spread his clawed hands in a very human-seeming gesture of frustration. “You keep pestering us about this. We have told you before—we are soldiers. We do not know all the fine details of our technology.”
This time, Fermi turned to Yeager. “Can you credit what they say?”
Not for the first time, Yeager wondered why the devil the cxperts were asking him questions. All at once, though, he realized he too was an expert of sorts: an expert on the Lizards. That made him chuckle; the only thing on which he’d been an expert before was hitting the cutoff man. He certainly hadn’t been an expert at hitting a curve ball, or he’d have played at fields a lot fancier than the ones in the Three-I League.
He still didn’t believe he had much expertise, but he did know more about the Lizards than most people. Mixing what he did know with his common sense (which, except for keeping him at a baseball career, had always been pretty good), he answered, “Professor, I think maybe I do believe them. You yank a couple of privates out of the American army and they might not be able to tell you everything you want to know about how an electrical generator works.”
Fermi’s sigh was melodramatic. “Si, this may be so. And yet I have learned a great deal from what they do know: they take for granted so many things which are for us on the cutting edge of physics—or beyond it. Just by examining what they know ‘of course’ to be true, we have tremendously refined our own lines of investigation. This will help us a great deal when we relocate our program.”
“I’m glad you’ve—” Yeager broke off. ‘When you what?”
“When we move away from here,” Fermi said. Sadness filled his liquid brown eyes. “It will be very hard, this I know. But how are we to do physics in a city, where we have not even electricity most of the day? How are we to proceed when the Lizards may bomb us at any time, may even capture Chicago before long? The line, I hear, is nearly to Aurora now. Under these circumstances, what is there to do but go?”
“Where will you go to?” Yeager asked.
“It is not yet decided. We will leave the city by ship, surely—much the safest way to go, as your little friends”—Fernii nodded toward Ullhass and Ristin—“do not seem to have grasped the importance of travel by water on this world. But where we shall try to set down new roots, that is still a matter for debate.”
Yeager looked at the Lizards, too. “Are you going to want to take them with you?” he asked. If the answer was yes, he’d have to figure out whether he should try to finagle a way to come, too. He supposed he should; he couldn’t think of any way in which he’d be more useful to the war effort.
But he seemed to have taken Fermi by surprise. The physicist rubbed his chin. Like most men’s in Chicago, it was poorly shaven and had a couple of nicks; no new razor blades had made it into town for a long time. Yeager felt smug for using a straight razor, which required only stropping to keep its edge. That also endeared him to his sergeant, who was an old-time graduate of the cleanliness-is-one-step-ahead-of-godliness school.
After a moment, Fermi said, “It may well be that we shall.” He glanced at Yeager. In.a lot of science fiction, scientists were supposed to be so involved in research that they took no notice of the world around them. Yeager’s little while at the University of Chicago had shown him it didn’t usually work that way in real life. Now Fermi confirmed that yet again, saying, “This affects you, no?”
“This affects me, yes,” Yeager said.
“We do not leave tomorrow, or even the day after,” Fermi said. “You will have time to make whatever arrangements you must. Ah! Would you like me to send a request for your services to your commanding officer? This will help you with your military formalities, not so?”
“Professor, if you’d do that, it would save me from a lot of red tape,” Yeager said.
“I will see to it.” To make sure he did see to it, Fermi jotted a note to himself. His head might have been in the clouds much of-the time, but his feet were firmly on the ground. He also shifted gears as smoothly as a chauffeur. “At our last session, Ullhass was telling what he knew of the cooling systems employed by the Lizards’ atomic power plants. Perhaps he will elaborate a little more on these.” His poised his pencil above a fresh sheet of paper. Questions flew, one after another.
Finally Yeager had to call time. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I’ve got to take our friends here on to their next appointment.”
“Sì, sì,” Fermi said. “I understand. You do what you must do, Mr. Yeager. You have been helpful to us here. I want you to know that, and know you will be very welcome to come with us as we depart to—who knows where we are to depart to?”
“Thank you, sir. That means a lot to me.” A proud smile stretched itself across Yeager’s face. He gave Ullhass and Ristin a grateful look—if it hadn’t been for them, he’d have been reading about scientists for the rest of his life without ever meeting one, let alone being useful to one. He got up, gestured with the rifle that had lain half-forgotten across his lap. “Come on, you two. Let’s go. Time for us to be on our way.”
One nice thing about the Lizards was that, unlike most people he knew, they didn’t give him any back talk. Ullhass said, “It shall be done, superior sir,” and that was that. They preceded him out the door. He’d long since been convinced that his standing orders never to let them get behind him were foolish, but he obeyed anyhow. Army orders were like baseball fundamentals: you couldn’t go far wrong with them and you couldn’t do anything right without them.
He almost bumped into Andy Reilly, the custodian, when he came out the door, and he and his charges hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps down the hall when someone else called, “Hi, Sam!”
He couldn’t just turn around; that would have put the Lizards at his back. So he went around behind them before he answered, “Hi, Barbara. What are you doing up here?”
She smiled as she came up; she wasn’t skittish about Ullhass and Ristin any more. “I’m here a lot. My husband works for the Met Lab, remember?”
“Yeah, you did tell me. I forgot.” Yeager wondered if Barbara Larssen knew how big a misnomer “Metallurgical Laboratory” was. Maybe, maybe not. Secrecy about atomic energy research wasn’t as tight as it had been before the Lizards proved it worked, but he�
��d been warned in no uncertain terms about what would happen to him if he talked too much. He didn’t want a cigarette bad enough to get a blindfold with it. He didn’t even want to think about that. He asked, “Any word?”
“Of Jens? No, none.” Barbara kept up a brave front, but it was getting tattered. Worry—no, fear—showed in her voice as she went on, “He should have been back weeks ago—you know he was long overdue the first time you brought these little fellows into Dr. Burkett’s office. And if he doesn’t get back soon—”
From the way she stopped short, he thought he scented the great god Security. He said, “Professor Fermi told me the project is going to pull out of Chicago.”
“I wasn’t sure if you knew, and I didn’t want to say too much if you didn’t,” Barbara answered: security, sure enough. “Wouldn’t it be awful if he did make it here, only to find out there isn’t any Met Lab to come hack to?”
“There may not be any Chicago to come back to,” Yeager answered. “From what Fermi said, the line’s just outside Aurora now.”
“I hadn’t heard that.” Her lips thinned; a small vertical worry line appeared between her eyes. “They’re—getting close.”
“What will you do?” he asked. “Will you go with the Met Lab people when they pull out?”
“I just don’t know,” Barbara said. “That’s what I came up here to talk about, as a matter of fact. They’re holding a slot for me, but I don’t know if I should use it. If I were sure Jens was coming back, I’d stay no matter what. But he’s been gone so long, I have trouble believing that anymore. I try, but—” She broke off again. This time, security had nothing to do with it. She groped in her purse for a hanky.
Yeager wanted to put an arm around her. With the two Lizards standing between them, that wasn’t practical. Even without them, it probably would have been stupid. She’d just think he was coming on to her, and she’d be at least half right. He didn’t even tell her Fermi had asked him to evacuate with the Metallurgical Lab staff. Feeling awkward and useless, he said, “I hope he makes it back soon, Barbara.”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 43