Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “No, it won’t,” Tvenkel shouted. “We’re facing real landcruisers here, don’t you see that, with better guns and tougher armor than anybody else has to worry about. We need more ammunition to make sure we take them out.”

  “I can’t give you what I don’t have,” the truck driver answered. “Orders were to bring up twenty rounds per landcruiser and that’s what we brought, no more, no less.”

  The Race didn’t need to run out of landcruisers to find itself in trouble against the Big Uglies, Ussmak realized. Running out of supplies for the landcruisers it had was less dramatic, but would do the job just fine.

  VIII

  After darkness, light. After winter, spring. As Jens Larssen peered north from the third floor of Science Hall, he thought that light and spring had overtaken Denver all at once. A week before, the ground had been white with snow. Now the sun blazed down from a bright blue sky, men bustled across the University of Denver campus in shirtsleeves and without hats, and the first new leaves and grass were beginning to show their bright green faces. Winter might come again, but no one paid the possibility any mind-least of all Jens.

  Spring sang in his heart, not because of the warm weather, not for the new growth on lawns and trees, not even because of early arriving birds warbling in those trees. What fired joy in him was at first sight much more prosaic: a long stream of horse-drawn wagons making their slow way down University Boulevard toward the campus.

  He could wait up here no longer. He dashed down the stairs, his Army guard, Oscar, right behind him. When he got to the bottom, his heart pounded in his chest and his breath came short with exercise and anticipation.

  Jens started over to his bicycle. Oscar said, “Why don’t you just wait for them to get here, sir?”

  “Dammit, my wife is in one of those wagons, and I haven’t seen her since last summer,” Jens said angrily. Maybe Oscar didn’t breathe hard even in bed.

  “I understand that, sir,” Oscar said patiently, “but you don’t know which one she’s in. For that matter, you don’t even know if she’s in any of the ones coming in today. Isn’t the convoy broken into several units to keep the Lizards from paying too much attention to it?”

  The right way, the wrong way, and the Army way, Jens thought. This once, the Army way seemed to have something going for it. “Okay,” he said, stopping. “Maybe you’re smarter than I am.”

  Oscar shook his head. “No sir. But my wife isn’t on one of those wagons, so I can still think straight.”

  “Hmm.” Aware he’d lost the exchange, Larssen turned toward the wagons, the first of which had turned off University onto East Evans and was now approaching Science Hall. I’ll have the best excuse in the world for getting out of BOQ now, he thought.

  He didn’t recognize the only man aboard the lead wagon: just a driver, wearing olive drab. Oscar had had a point, he reluctantly admitted to himself. A lot of these wagons would just be carrying equipment, and the only people aboard them would be soldiers. He’d have felt a proper fool if he’d pedaled up and down the whole length of the wagon train without setting eyes on Barbara.

  Then he saw Leo Szilard sitting up alongside another driver. He waved like a man possessed. Szilard returned the gesture in a more restrained way: so restrained, in fact, that Jens wondered a little. The Hungarian physicist was usually as open and forthright a man as anyone ever born.

  Larssen shrugged. If he was going to read that much into a wave, maybe he should have chosen psychiatry instead of physics.

  A couple of more wagons pulled up in front of Science Hall before he saw more people he knew: Enrico and Laura Fermi, looking incongruous on a tarp-covered hay wagon. “Dr. Fermi!” he called. “Have you seen Barbara? Is she all right?”

  Fermi and his wife exchanged glances. Finally he said, “She is not that far behind us. Soon you will see her for yourself.”

  Now what the devil was that supposed to mean? “Is she all right?” Larssen repeated. “Is she hurt? Is she sick?”

  The Fermis looked at each other again. “She is neither injured nor ill,” Enrico Fermi answered, and then shut up.

  Jens scratched his head. Something was going on, but he didn’t know what. Well, if Barbara was just a few wagons behind the Fermis, he’d find out pretty soon. He walked up the stream of incoming wagons, then stopped dead in his tracks. Ice ran up his spine-what were two Lizards doing here attached to the Met Lab crew?

  He relaxed a bit when he saw the rifle-toting corporal in the wagon with the Lizards. Prisoners might be useful; the Lizards certainly knew how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus. Then all such merely practical thoughts blew out of his head. Sitting next to the corporal was-

  “Barbara!” he yelled, and sprinted toward the wagon. Oscar the guard followed more sedately.

  Barbara waved and smiled, but she didn’t jump down and run to him. He noticed that, but didn’t think much of it. Just seeing her again after so long made the fine spring day ten degrees warmer.

  When he fell into step beside the wagon, she did get out. “Hi, babe, I love you,” he said, and took her in his arms. Squeezing her, kissing her, made him forget about everything else.

  “Jens, wait,” she said when lack of oxygen forced him to take his mouth away from hers for a moment.

  “The only thing I want to wait for is to get us alone,” he said, and kissed her again.

  She didn’t respond quite the way she had the first time. That distracted him enough to let him notice the corporal saying, “Ullhass, Ristin, you two just go on along. I’ll catch up with you later,” and then getting down from the wagon himself. His Army boots clumped on the pavement as he walked back toward Jens and Barbara.

  Jens broke off the second kiss in annoyance that headed rapidly toward anger. Oscar had enough sense to keep his distance and let a man properly greet his wife. Why couldn’t this clodhopper do the same?

  Barbara said, “Jens, this is someone you have to know. His name is Sam Yeager. Sam, this is Jens Larssen.”

  Not, my husband, Jens Larssen? Jens wondered, but, trapped in the rituals of politeness, he grudgingly stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you,” Yeager said, though a dark blond eyebrow quirked up as he spoke. He was a handful of years older than Larssen, but considerably more weathered, as if he’d always spent a lot of time outdoors. Gary Cooper type, Jens thought, not that the corporal was anywhere near so good-looking.

  “Pleased to meet you, too, pal,” he said. “Now if you’ll excuse us-” He started to steer Barbara away.

  “Wait,” she said again. He stared at her, startled. She was looking down at the ground. When she raised her eyes, she looked not to him but to this Yeager character, which not only startled Jens but made him mad. The corporal nodded. Now Barbara turned toward Jens. In a low voice, she went on, “There’s something you have to know. You and Sam have-something in common.”

  “Huh?” Jens gave Yeager another look. The soldier was human, male, white, and, by the way he talked, might well have sprung from the Midwest. Past that, Larssen couldn’t see any resemblance between them. “What is it?” he asked Barbara.

  “Me.”

  At first, he didn’t understand. That lasted only a heartbeat, maybe two; the way she said it didn’t leave much room to doubt what she meant. Numbness filled him, to be replaced in an instant by all-consuming rage.

  He almost threw himself blindly at Sam Yeager. He’d always been a peaceable man, but he wasn’t afraid of a fight. After attacking a Lizard tank when Patton’s troops drove the aliens back from Chicago, the idea of taking on somebody carrying a rifle didn’t faze him.

  Then he took another look at Yeager’s face. The corporal wasn’t toting that rifle just for show. Somewhere or other, he’d done some work with it. The way his eyes narrowed as he watched Jens said that louder than words. Jens hesitated.

  “It wasn’t the way it sounds,” Barbara said. “I thought you were dead; I was sure you had to be dead. If I hadn’t been, I never would have-”

>   “Neither would I,” Yeager put in. “There’s names for people who do stuff like that. I don’t like ’em.”

  “But you did,” Jens said.

  “We did it the right way, or the best way we knew how.” Yeager’s mouth twisted; those weren’t the same, not here. He went on, “Up in Wyoming a little while back, we got married.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Larssen’s eyes went to Barbara, as if begging her to tell him it was all some dreadful joke. But she bit her lip and nodded. Something new washed over Jens then: fear. She wasn’t just telling him she’d made a mistake with this miserable two-striper. She really had a thing for him.

  “There’s more,” Yeager said grimly.

  “How could there be more?” Jens demanded.

  Barbara held up a hand. “Sam-” she began.

  Yeager cut her off. “Hon, he’s gotta know. The sooner all the cards are on the table, the sooner we can start figuring out what the hand looks like. Are you gonna tell him, or shall I?”

  “I’ll do it,” Barbara said, which surprised Jens not at all: she’d always been one to take care of her own business. Still, she had to gather herself before she brought out a blurted whisper: “I’m going to have a baby, Jens.”

  He started to say, “Oh, Lord,” again, but that wasn’t strong enough. The only things that were, he didn’t want to say in front of Barbara. He thought he’d been afraid before. Now-how could Barbara possibly want to come back to him if she was carrying this other guy’s child? She was the best thing he’d ever known, most of the reason he’d kept going across Lizard-held Ohio and Indiana… and now this.

  He wished they’d started their family before the Lizards came. They’d talked about it, but he kept reaching for the rubbers in the nightstand drawer-and times he hadn’t (there were some), nothing happened. Maybe he was shooting blanks. Yeager sure as hell wasn’t.

  Jens also wished, suddenly, savagely, that he’d screwed the ears off the brassy blond waitress named Sal when the Lizards held them and a bunch of other people in that church in Fiat, Indiana. She’d done everything but send up a flare to let him know she was interested. He’d stayed aloof, figuring he’d be back with Barbara soon, but when he finally got back to Chicago, she was already gone, and now that he’d finally caught up with her-she was pregnant by somebody else. Wasn’t that a kick in the nuts? It sure was. And he’d gone and wasted his chance.

  “Jens-Professor Larssen, I guess I mean-what are we gonna do about this?” Sam Yeager asked.

  He was being as decent as he could. Somehow, that made things worse, not better. Worse or better, though, he’d sure found the sixty-four-dollar question. “I don’t know,” Jens muttered with a helplessness he’d never felt while confronting the abstruse equations of quantum mechanics.

  Barbara said, “Jens, I guess you’ve been here a while.” She waited for him to nod before she went on, “Do you have some place where we could talk for a while, just the two of us?”

  “Yeah.” He pointed back toward Science Hall. “I’ve got an office on the third floor there.”

  “Okay, let’s go.” He wished she’d headed off with him without a backwards glance, but she didn’t. She turned back to Sam Yeager and said, “I’ll see you later.”

  Yeager looked as unhappy about her going with Jens as Jens felt about her looking back at the corporal, which oddly made him feel a little better. But Yeager shrugged-what else could he do? “Okay, hon,” he said. “You’ll probably find me riding herd on the Lizards.” He mooched after the wagon that had held him and Barbara and the aliens.

  “Come on,” Jens said to Barbara. She fell into step beside him, their strides matching as automatically as they always did. Now, though, as he watched her legs move, all he could think of was them locked around Sam Yeager’s back. That scene played over and over in his mind, in vivid Technicolor-and brought pain just as vivid.

  Neither of them said much as they walked back to Science Hall, nor as they climbed the stairs. Jens sat down behind his cluttered desk, waved Barbara to a chair. The minute he did that, he knew it was a mistake: it felt more as if he was having a conference with a colleague than talking with his wife. But getting up and coming back around the desk would have made him look foolish, so he stayed where he was.

  “So how did this happen?” he asked.

  Barbara looked at her hands. Her hair tumbled over her face and down past her shoulders. He wasn’t used to it so long and straight; it made her look different. Well, a lot of things had suddenly turned different.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said quietly. “You went off across country, you never wrote, you never telegraphed, you never called-not that the phones or anything else worked very well. I tried and tried not to believe it, but in the end-what was I supposed to think, Jens?”

  “They wouldn’t let me get hold of you.” His voice shook with fury ready to burst free, like a U-235 nucleus waiting for a neutron. “First off, General Patton wouldn’t let me send a message into Chicago because he was afraid it would foul up his attack on the Lizards. Then they wouldn’t let me do anything to draw attention to the Met Lab. I went along. I thought it made sense; if we don’t make ourselves an atomic bomb, our goose is probably cooked. But, Jesus-”

  “I know,” she said. She still would not look at him.

  “What about Yeager?” he demanded.

  More rage came out in his voice. Another mistake: now Barbara did look up, angrily. If he attacked the bum, she was going to defend him. Why shouldn’t she? Larssen asked himself bitterly. If she hadn’t had a feel for him, she wouldn’t have married him (God), wouldn’t have let him get her pregnant (God oh God).

  “After you-went away, I got a job typing for a psychology professor at the university,” Barbara said. “He was studying Lizard prisoners, trying to figure out what makes them tick. Sam would bring them around-he helped capture them, and he’s sort of their keeper, I guess you’d say. He’s very good with them.”

  “So you got friendly,” Jens said.

  “So we got friendly,” Barbara agreed.

  “How did you get-more than friendly?” With an effort, Larssen kept his voice steady, neutral.

  She looked down at her hands again. “A Lizard plane strafed the ship that was taking us out of Chicago.” She gulped. “A sailor got killed-horribly killed-right in front of us. I guess we were both so glad just to be alive that-that-one thing led to another.”

  Jens nodded heavily. Things like that could happen. Why do they have to happen to me, God? he asked, and got no answer. As if twisting the knife in his own flesh, he asked, “And when did you get married to him?”

  “Not even three weeks ago, up in Wyoming,” Barbara answered. “I needed to be as sure as I could that that was something I really wanted to do. I figured out I was expecting the evening we got into Fort Collins.” Her face twisted. “A soldier on horseback brought your letter the next morning.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jens groaned.

  “What’s the matter?” Barbara asked, worry in her voice.

  “Nothing anybody can help now,” he said, though he wanted to twist a knife, not in his own flesh, but in Colonel Hexham’s. If the miserable blunder-brained, brass-bound, regulation- and security-crazy son of a bitch had let him write a letter when he first asked, most of this mess never would have happened.

  Yeah, she and Yeager still would have had their fling, but he could deal with that-she’d thought he was dead, and so had Yeager. She wouldn’t have married the guy, or got pregnant by him. Life would have been a hell of a lot simpler.

  Jens asked himself a new and unsettling question: how would things go between Barbara and him if she decided to give Yeager the brush and come back to him forever? How would he handle her giving birth to the other man’s kid and then raising it? It wouldn’t be easy; he could see that much.

  He sighed. So did Barbara, at almost the same moment. She smiled. Jens stayed stony-faced. He asked, “Have the two of you been sleeping together since
you found out?”

  “In the same bed, you mean?” she said. “Of course we have. We traveled all the way across the Great Plains like that-and it still gets cold at night.”

  Though he habitually worked with abstractions, he wasn’t deaf to what people said, and he sure as hell knew evasion when he heard it. “That’s not what I meant,” he told her.

  “Do you’really want to know?” Her chin went up defiantly. Pushing her made her angry, all right; he’d been afraid it would, and he was right. Before he could answer what might have been a rhetorical question, she went on, “As a matter of fact, we did, night before last. And so?”

  Jens didn’t know and so. Everything he’d looked forward to-everything except work, anyhow-had crumbled to pieces inside the last half hour. He didn’t know whether he wanted to pick up those pieces and try to put them together again. But if he didn’t, what did he have left? The answer to that was painfully obvious: nothing.

  Barbara was still waiting for her answer. He said, “I wish to God it had been me instead.”

  “I know,” she said, which was not the same as I wish it had, too. But something-maybe the naked longing in his voice-seemed to soften her. She continued, “It’s not that I don’t love you, Jens-don’t ever think that. But when I thought you were gone forever, I told myself life went on, and I had to go on with it. I can’t turn off what I feel about Sam as if it were a light switch.”

  “Obviously,” he said, which made her angry again. “I’m sorry,” he added quickly, though he wasn’t sure he meant it. “The whole thing is just fubar.”

  “Fubar? What’s that?” Barbara’s eyes lit up. She lived for words. When she found one she didn’t know, she pounced.