The newsreel ended with a burst of patriotic music. Sam sighed; now he’d have “The Stars and Stripes Forever” noisily going around in his head for the next several days. It happened every time he heard the song.
“Here comes the real movie,” somebody near him said as the opening credits for You’re in the Army Now filled the screen. Yeager had seen it four or five times since it came out in 1941. New movies just weren’t getting out these days, and even if they did, they often couldn’t have been shown, because electricity was lost in so many places.
When he’d seen the antics of Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante and the horrified reactions of their superior officers before, they’d left him limp with laughter. Now that he was in the Army himself, they didn’t seem so funny any more. Soldiers like that would have endangered their buddies. He wanted to give both comics a swift kick in the rear.
Beside him, though, Barbara laughed at the capers they cut. Sam tried to enjoy the escape with her. The musical numbers helped: they reminded him this was Hollywood, not anything real. Getting angry at the actors for doing what was in the script didn’t do him any good. Once he’d figured that out, he was able to lean back and enjoy the movie again.
The house lights came up. Barbara let out a long sigh, as if she didn’t feel like coming back to the real world. Given its complications, Yeager didn’t much blame her. But the world was there, and you had to deal with it whether you wanted to or not.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s pick up our bikes and head back to the university.”
Barbara sighed again, then yawned. “I suppose so. When we get back there, I think I want to lie down for a while. I’m so tired all the time these days.” She managed a wan smile. “I’ve heard this is what being expecting is supposed to do to you, and boy, it sure does.”
“We’ll take it nice and easy on the way back,” said Yeager, who was still inclined to treat Barbara as if she were made of cut glass and liable to break if jostled. “You rest, and I’ll go round up Ullhass and Ristin.”
“Okay, Sam.”
Outside the theater, a herd of bicycles covered the sidewalk and the street by the curb. Keeping an eye on them, in lieu of a sheepdog, was a large, burly fellow with a .45 on his hip. With no gas available for private cars, bikes had become the way of choice to get around, and stealing them as big a problem as horse theft in Denver’s younger days. As many people packed a gun now as they had in the old days, too; an unarmed guard wouldn’t have done much good.
Most of Denver was laid out on a north-south, east-west grid. The downtown area, though, nestled into the angle of the Platte River and Cherry Creek, turned that grid at a fortyfive-degree angle. Yeager and Barbara pedaled southeast down Sixteenth Street to Broadway, one of the main north-south thoroughfares.
The Pioneer Monument at the corner of Broadway and Colfax caught Sam’s eye. Around the fountain were three reclining bronzes: a prospector, a hunter, and a pioneer mother. At the top of the monument stood a mounted scout.
On him Yeager turned a critical gaze. “I’ve seen statues that looked realer,” he remarked, pointing.
“He does look more like an oversized mantelpiece ornament than a pioneer, doesn’t he?” Barbara said. They both laughed.
They turned left onto Colfax. Bicycles, people on foot, horse- and mule-drawn wagons, and quite a few folks riding horses made traffic, if anything, dicier than it had been when cars and trucks dominated. Then everything had moved more or less at the same speed. Now the ponderous wagons were almost like ambulatory roadblocks, but you went around them at your peril, too, because a lot of them were big enough to hide what was alongside till too late.
The gilded dome of the three-story granite State Capitol on Colfax dominated the city skyline. On the west lawn of the capitol building stood a Union soldier in bronze, flanked by two Civil War brass cannon.
Yeager pointed to the statue. He said, “Going up against the Lizards, sometimes I felt the way he would if he had to fight today’s Germans or Japs with his muzzle-loader and those guns.”
“There’s an unpleasant thought,” Barbara said. They pedaled along; on the east lawn of the capitol stood an Indian, also in bronze. She nodded to that statue. “I suppose he felt the same way when he had to fight the white man’s guns with nothing better than a bow and arrow.”
“Yeah, he probably did at that,” said Sam, who’d never thought to look at it from the Indian’s perspective. “He got guns of his own, though, and he hit us some pretty good licks, too—at least, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in General Custer’s boots.”
“You’re right.” But instead of cheering up, Barbara looked glum. “Even though the Indians hit us some good licks, they lost—look at the United States now, or the way it was before the Lizards came, anyway. Does that mean we’ll lose to the Lizards, even if we do hurt them in the fight?”
“I don’t know.” Sam chewed on that for the next block or so. “Not necessarily,” he said at last. “The Indians never did figure out how to make their own guns and gunpowder; they always had to get ’em from white men.” He looked around to make sure nobody was paying undue attention to their conversation before he went on, “But we’re well on our way to making bombs to match the ones the Lizards have.”
“That’s true.” Barbara did cheer up, but only for a moment. She said, “I wonder if there’ll be anything left of the world by the time we’re done fighting the Lizards.”
The science-fiction pulps had printed plenty of stories about worlds ruined one way or another, but Sam hadn’t really thought about living (or more likely dying) in one. Slowly, he said, “If the choice is wrecking the Earth or living under the Lizards, I’d vote for wrecking it. From what Ullhass and Ristin say, the Race has kept two other sets of aliens under their thumbs for thousands of years. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
“No, neither would I,” Barbara said. “But we sure do remind me of a couple of little kids quarreling over a toy: If I can’t have it, you can’t either!’—and smash! If we end up smashing a whole world … but what else can we do?”
“I don’t know,” Yeager answered. He did his best to think about something else. The end of the world wasn’t something he wanted to talk about with the woman he loved.
They turned right off Colfax onto University Boulevard. Traffic there was thinner and moved faster than it had in the center of town. Yeager looked around, enjoying the scenery. He’d been up at altitude now, in Wyoming and Colorado, that he could pedal along as readily as he had at sea level.
Just past Exposition Avenue, he saw a couple of cyclists speeding north up University: a skinny blond fellow in civvies followed closely by a burly man in uniform with a Springfield on his back. The skinny guy saw Sam and Barbara, too. He scowled as he whizzed by.
“Oh, dear,” Barbara said. “That was Jens.” She shook her head back and forth, hard enough to make her bike wobble. “He hates me now, I think.” Her voice had tears in it.
“He’s a fool if he does,” Sam said. “You had to choose somebody, honey. I wouldn’t have hated you if you’d gone back to him. I just thank God every day that you decided to pick me.” That she had still surprised and delighted him.
“I’m going to have your baby, Sam,” she said. “That changes everything. If it weren’t for the baby—oh, I don’t know what I’d do. But with things the way they are, I didn’t see that I had any other choice.”
They rode along in silence for a while. If I hadn’t knocked her up, she’d have gone back to Larssen, Sam thought. It made sense to him: she’d known Jens a lot longer, and he was, on paper, more her type. She was a brain and, while Yeager didn’t think of himself as stupid, he knew damn well he’d never make an intellectual.
Not quite out of the blue, Barbara said, “Both of you always treated me well—till now. If I’d chosen Jens, I don’t think you’d act the way he is.”
“I just said that,” he answered. “The thing of it is, I’ve had enough things go wrong in my life
that I’ve sort of learned to roll with the punches. That one would have been a Joe Louis right, but I would’ve gotten back on my feet and gone on the best I could.” He paused again; speaking ill of Larssen was liable to make Barbara spring to his defense. Picking his words carefully, he went on, “I’m not sure Jens ever had anything really tough happen to him before.”
“I think you’re right,” Barbara said. “That’s very perceptive of you. Even all his grandparents are still alive, or they were before the Lizards came—now, who can say? But he sailed through college, sailed through his graduate work, and had a job waiting for him at Berkeley when he finished. Then he got recruited for the Metallurgical Laboratory—”
“—which was every physicist’s dream,” Yeager finished for her. “Yeah.” Not a lot of people had jobs waiting for them when they finished school, not in the Depression they didn’t. So Larssen’s family had all been healthy, too? And he’d found this wonderful girl. Maybe he’d started getting the idea he was fireproof. “Nobody’s fireproof,” Yeager muttered with the conviction of a man who’d had to hustle for work every spring training since he turned eighteen.
“What did you say, honey?” Barbara asked.
The casual endearment warmed him. He said, “I was just thinking things go wrong for everybody sooner or later.”
“‘Count no man lucky before the end,”’ Barbara said. It sounded like a quotation, but Yeager didn’t know where it was from. She continued, “I don’t think Jens has ever had to deal with anything like this before, and I don’t think he’s dealing with it very well.” Again Sam heard unshed tears. “I wish he were.”
“I know, hon. I do, too. It would make everything a lot easier.” But Sam didn’t expect things would always be easy. He was, as he’d said, ready to ride them out when they got tough. And if Jens Larssen wasn’t, that was his lookout.
Yeager carried his bicycle upstairs to the apartment he and Barbara had taken across the street from the University of Denver campus. Then he went down and carried hers up, too.
“I’m going to go take my little hissing chums off Smitty’s hands,” he said. “Have to see what he’ll want from me later on for baby-sitting them so I could get free for my Saturday matinee with you.”
Barbara glanced at the electric clock on the mantel. It showed a quarter to four. So did Sam’s watch; he was having to get reused to the idea of clocks that kept good time. She said, “It’ll still be afternoon for a little while longer, won’t it?”
As he took her in his arms, Yeager wondered if she just needed reassurance after the brief, wordless, but unpleasant encounter with Jens Larssen. If she did, he was ready to give it. If you couldn’t do that, you didn’t have much business being a husband, as far as he was concerned.
Liu Han felt like a trapped animal with the little scaly devils staring at her from all sides. “No, superior sirs, I don’t know where Bobby Fiore went that night,” she said in a mixture of the little devils’ language and Chinese. “These men wanted him to teach them to throw, and he went with them to do that. He didn’t come back.”
One of the scaly devils showed her a photograph. It was not a plain black-and-white image, she’d seen those before, and even the color pictures the foreign devils printed in some of their fancy magazines. But this photograph was of the sort the little scaly devils made: not only more real than any human could match, but also with the depth the scaly devils put into their moving pictures. It made her feel as if she could reach in and touch the man it showed.
“Have you seen this male before?” the scaly devil holding the picture demanded in vile but understandable Chinese.
“I—may have, superior sir,” Liu Han said, gulping. Just because she felt she could reach into the picture didn’t mean she wanted to. The man it showed was obviously dead, lying in a bean field with his blood and brains splashing the plants and ground around his head. He had a neat hole just above his left eye.
“What do you mean, you may have?” another scaly devil shouted. “Either you have or you have not. We think you have. Now answer me!”
“Please, superior sir,” Liu Han said desperately. “People dead look different from people alive. I cannot be certain. I am sorry, superior sir.” She was sorry Lo—for the dead man in the picture was undoubtedly he—had ever wanted Bobby Fiore to show him how to throw. She was even sorrier he and his henchmen had come to the hut and taken Bobby Fiore away.
But she was not going to tell the little scaly devils anything she didn’t have to. She knew they were dangerous, yes, and they had her in their power. But she also had a very healthy respect—fear was not too strong a word—for the Communists. If she spilled her guts to the little devils, she knew she would pay: maybe not right now, but before too long.
The scaly devil holding the picture let his mouth hang open: he was laughing at her. “To you, maybe. To us, all Big Uglies look alike, alive or dead.” He translated the joke into his own language for the benefit of his comrades. They laughed, too.
But the little devil who had shouted at Liu Han said, “This is no joke. These bandits injured males of the Race. Only through the mercy of the watchful Emperor”—he cast down his eyes, as did the other little devils—“was no one killed.”
No one killed? Liu Han thought. What of Lo and his friends? She was reminded of signs the European devils were said to have put up in their parks in Shanghai: NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED. To the little scaly devils, all human beings might as well have been dogs.
“We should give her the drug that makes her tell the truth,” the scaly devil with the picture said. “Then we will find out what she really knows.”
Liu Han shivered. She was ready to believe the scaly devils had such a drug. They were devils, after all, with powers effectively unlimited. If they gave it to her, they would find out she hadn’t told them everything, and then … then they would do something horrible to her. She didn’t care to think about that.
But then Ttomalss spoke up. The—what had Bobby Fiore named his calling?—the psychologist, that was it, said, “No, Ssamraff, for two reasons. No first because the drug is not as effective as we believed it would be when we first made it. And no second because this female Big Ugly has a hatchling growing inside her.”
Most of that was in Chinese, so Liu Han could follow it. Ssamraff replied in the same language: “Who cares what she has growing inside her?”
“This growth is disgusting, yes, but it is part of a research study,” Ttomalss insisted. “Having the Big Ugly male who sired it disappear is bad enough. But drugs could do to Big Ugly hatchlings what they sometimes do to our own as they grow in the egg before the female lays it. We do not want this hatchling to emerge defective if we can avoid it. Therefore I say no to this drug.”
“And I say we need to learn who is trying to foully murder males of the Race,” Ssamraff retorted. “This, to me, is more important.” But he spoke weakly; his body paint was less ornate than Ttomalss’, which, Liu Han had gathered, meant he was of lower rank.
The little devils had made her give her body to strange men in their experiments. They had watched her pregnancy with the same interest she would have given to a farrowing sow, and no more. Now, though, because she was pregnant, they wouldn’t give her the drug that might have made her betray Lo and the other Reds. About time I got some good out of being only an animal to them, she thought.
Ssamraff said, “If we cannot drug the female, how can we properly question her, then?” He swung his turreted eyes toward Liu Han. She still had trouble reading the scaly devils’ expressions, but if that wasn’t a venomous stare, she’d never seen one. “I am sure she is telling less than she knows.”
“No, superior sir,” Liu Han protested, and then stopped in some confusion: not only Ssamraff, but all the devils were staring at her. She realized he’d spoken in his tongue—as had she when she answered.
“You know more of our words than I thought,” Ttomalss said in Chinese.
Liu Han gratefully returned
to the same language: “I am very sorry, superior sir, but I did not realize I was not supposed to learn.”
“I did not say that,” the psychologist answered. “But because you know, we have to be more careful with what we say around you.”
“Because she knows, we should be trying to find oút what she knows,” Ssamraff insisted. “This male she was mating with had something to do with the attack on our guard station. I think she is lying when she says she knows nothing of these other males we killed. They are dead, and the one she mates with is missing. Is this not a connection that hisses to be explored?”
“We are exploring it,” Ttomalss answered. “But, as I said, we shall not use drugs.”
Ssamraff turned one eye turret toward Liu Han to see how she would react as he spoke in his own language: “What about pain, then? The Big Uglies are very good at using pain when they have questions to ask. Maybe this once we should imitate them.”
A lump of ice formed in Liu Han’s belly. The Communists and the Kuomintang—to say nothing of local bandit chiefs—routinely used torture. She had no reason to doubt the little scaly devils would be devilishly good at it.
But Ttomalss said, “No, not while the hatchling grows inside her. I told you, you may not disturb the conditions under which this experiment is being conducted.”
This time, even the little devil who’d shouted at Liu Han supported Ttomalss: “Using pain to force our will even on a Big Ugly is—” Liu Han didn’t understand the last word he used, but Ssamraff sputtered in indignation almost laughably obvious, so it must have been one he didn’t care for.
When he could speak instead of sputtering, he said, “I shall protest this interference with an important military investigation.”
“Go ahead,” Ttomalss said. “And I shall protest your interference with an important scientific investigation. You have no sense of the long term, Ssamraff. We are going to rule the Big Uglies for the next hundred thousand years. We need to learn how they work. Don’t you see you are making that harder?”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 110