Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Barbara shrieked again, louder. Sam’s guts churned. For a man to have to listen to his wife in agony just wasn’t right. But the only other things that came to mind were charging into the delivery room, which he couldn’t do, and sneaking off somewhere like a yellow dog and holing up with a bottle of booze, which he couldn’t do, either. He just had to stay here and take it. Some ways, going into combat had been easier. Then, at least, the danger had been his personally, and he’d had some small control over it. Now he couldn’t do anything but pace.

  Maybe the worst was that he couldn’t hear anything the doctors or nurses were saying in there, only Barbara’s cries. He didn’t know whether she was supposed to be making noises like that. Were things going okay, or was she in trouble? He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

  He sat down in a hard chair and made a conscious effort to relax, as if he were stepping into the batter’s box against some kid pitcher who could fire a fasthall through the side of a barn—if he could hit the side of a barn. He blanked everything but the moment from his mind, took a couple of deep breaths. His heart stopped pounding so hard. That’s better, he thought.

  Barbara chose that moment to make a new noise, not a scream exactly, but cry and grunt and moan all mixed together. It was a sound of supreme effort, as if she were trying to lift the front axle of a car off somebody pinned underneath it. Sam bounced out of his seat, all efforts at relaxation out of the park like a line drive off the bat of Hank Greenberg.

  Barbara made that appalling noise again, and then once more. After that, for maybe a minute, Sam didn’t hear anything. “Please, God, let her be all right,” he mumbled. He wasn’t usually much of a praying man; when he asked God for something, it was something he really wanted.

  Then another cry came through the swinging doors: a thin, furious wail that said only one thing: what is this place, and what the devil am I doing here? Sam’s knees sagged. It was a good thing he was standing next to that chair, because he would have sat down whether or no.

  The swinging doors opened outward. A doctor came through them, gauze mask fallen down under his chin, a few splashes of blood on his white robe. In one hand he held a crudely rolled cigar, in the crook of his other elbow the littlest person Sam had ever seen.

  He handed Yeager the cigar. “Congratulations, Sergeant,” he said. “You’ve got yourself a fine baby boy here. Haven’t put him on the scales yet, but he’ll be around seven and a half pounds. He’s got all his fingers, all his toes, and a hell of a good set of lungs.” As if to prove that, the baby started crying again.

  “B-B-B-B—” Sam took one more deep breath and made himself talk straight: “Barbara? Is she all right?”

  “She’s doing just fine,” the doctor said, smiling. “Do you want to see her?” When Yeager nodded, the doctor held out the baby to him. “Here. Why don’t you take your son in, too?”

  Your son. The words almost made Sam’s legs buckle again. He stuffed the cigar into a trouser pocket and warily reached out for the baby. Seeing his inexperience, the doctor showed him how to hold it so its head wouldn’t flop around like a fish out of water.

  Now he could pass through the doors that had held him back before. The delivery room smelled of sweat and of the outhouse; a nurse was taking a bucket away from the table with the stirrups. Sam gulped. Birth was a process with no dignity to it.

  His son wiggled in his hands. He almost dropped the baby. “Bring him here,” Barbara said from the table. “They only showed him to me for a couple of seconds. Let me see him.”

  She sounded beat up. She looked it, too. Her face was pale and puffy, with big purple circles under her eyes. Her skin glistened with sweat, even though the delivery room wasn’t what you’d call warm. If a guy caught two doubleheaders back to back on the same day in ninety-degree heat and ninety-percent humidity, he’d look a little like that when it was finally over.

  Sam showed her the baby. The smile that spread over her face cut through her exhaustion like a sharp knife through tender steak. “Give him to me,” she said, and held out her hands.

  “You can nurse him now, if you like,” the doctor said from behind Sam. “In fact, it would be good if you did. There aren’t going to be many bottle babies, not any more.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Barbara said. “Before the war, of the people I knew who had babies, hardly any nursed theirs. Bottles seemed so much more modern and sanitary. But if there aren’t any bottles—” She drew aside the sheet that was draped over the top part of her body. For a moment, Sam was startled that she’d bare her breasts to the doctor. Then he told himself not to be an idiot. After all, the fellow had just helped guide the baby out from between her legs.

  Barbara set the baby on her breast. He knew what he was supposed to do. If he hadn’t known, people would long since have been as extinct as dinosaurs. He made little slurping noises, just like the calves and lambs and piglets on the farm where Sam had grown up.

  “What are you going to name him?” the doctor asked.

  “Jonathan Philip,” Barbara answered. Sam nodded. It wasn’t the most imaginative way to name a kid—after his father and hers—but it would do the job. Had it been a girl, they would have called it Carol Paulette, for her mother and his.

  He said, “I wish we had some kind of way to let our folks know we had a baby.” After a moment, he added, “Heck, I wish we had some kind of way to let our families know we’re married, or even that we’re alive. I wish I knew whether my folks were alive or dead, too; from what I hear, the Lizards have been in Nebraska just about since they landed.”

  “What I wish,” Barbara said, sitting up and draping the sheet over her like a toga, “is that I could have something to eat I feel as if I’d spent the last two weeks digging ditches.”

  “We can take care of that,” the doctor said. “In fact, we should be taking care of that right about now.” As if his words were a cue, a nurse came in carrying a tray that bore a huge steak, a couple of baked potatoes, a pumpkin pie, and two large mugs. Pointing at those, the doctor said, “I know they should be full of champagne, but that is the best homebrew we’ve made yet. Call it a wartime sacrifice.” He pushed a little wheeled table next to the one on which Barbara was lying.

  Since she was still nursing Jonathan, Sam did the honors with knife and fork, cutting alternate bites for her and himself. As far as he could remember, he’d never fed anybody like that before. He liked it. By the way Barbara smiled as she ate, so did she. She hadn’t been kidding about being hungry, either; food disappeared off the plate at an astonishing rate. The homebrew was as good, and as potent, as promised.

  Barbara said, “If the beer goes to my milk, will it make Jonathan drunk?”

  “Maybe,” the doctor answered. “If it does, it’ll probably make him sleep better, and I don’t think you’ll complain about that.”

  Sam wondered how they’d do: a man, a woman, and a baby, all in one room. People did manage, so he supposed they would. Then he remembered he’d be going back up to Missouri any day now. That didn’t seem fair, either to him or to Barbara, but he didn’t know what he could do about it No, that wasn’t true. He did know what he could do about it: nothing.

  When they were done eating, the nurse took away the tray. Sam waited for her to come back with a wheelchair for Barbara, then realized that wouldn’t do any good, not without the elevators running. “She can’t walk upstairs to our room,” he protested.

  “Oh, she probably could,” the doctor said. “One thing you find out pretty fast is that people are tougher than you’d imagine. But we’re not going to let her. You and I, Sergeant, we’ll get her up there.”

  They did, too, in a sort of modified fireman’s carry that had them both panting by the time they made it to the fourth floor. The nurse followed with Jonathan. When they finally came out into the hallway Barbara said, “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

  Walk she did, toward their room. It was more shamble than stride;
her feet were as wide apart as if she’d spent the last twenty years in the saddle. While that wasn’t true, she had spent a good long while in the stirrups.

  Straha came out of his room to see what was going on in the hall. He kept his body paint unsmeared and in the magnificent shiplord’s pattern he’d worn when defecting: no Official American Prisoner markings for him. He came skittering up to the nurse. She drew back a pace, as if to protect the baby from him. “It’s okay,” Sam said quickly. “We’re friends. Let him see Jonathan.”

  The nurse looked dubious, but held out the baby boy. As Straha examined it, he looked dubious, too. “This is a Tosevite hatchling?” he said in his own hissing language. “It is a Little Ugly, not a Big Ugly.” His mouth fell open in appreciation of his own wit.

  Barbara answered in the same tongue: “Shiplord, that is my hatchling, and it is not ugly.” For good measure, she tacked on an emphatic cough. Yeager added one of his own, to show he agreed. Among the Lizards, that was grammatically uncouth, but it got the message across.

  “Familial attachments,” Straha said, as if reminding himself. “No insult was intended, I assure you. For a Tosevite hatchling, this is undoubtedly a paragon.”

  “What’s he talking about?” the doctor asked.

  “He says we’ve got a cute kid,” Sam answered. He was skeptical about Straha’s sincerity, but the Lizard was too big a cheese for him to make a fuss over it. Besides, except for an exaggerated sense of his own brilliance and worth—hardly a trait unique to Lizards—he was a pretty good fellow.

  Barbara returned to English: “I may be able to walk, but I can’t stand in one place very long. I’m going inside and lying down.” She waddled the last few steps toward their door and started to go into the room. The nurse followed with the baby.

  Before she got there, Ristin and Ullhass came out to look over the new arrival. They were politer than Straha, but still curious. When Jonathan opened his mouth to squawk, Ristin exclaimed, “The hatchling has no teeth! How can it eat if it has no teeth?”

  Barbara rolled her eyes. “If the baby did have teeth, it wouldn’t eat from me,” she said feelingly.

  “That’s right—you Tosevites nourish your hatchlings yourself.” Ullhass was more thoughtful, less high-spirited than Ristin. “I am sure you will do everything you can to make this little—is it a male or a female?—this little male an upstanding member of your race.”

  “Thank you, Ullhass,” Barbara said, “but if I’m on my feet another minute, I’m going to be a downfalling member of my race.” She went into the room she and Sam would now share with their son.

  The nurse brought in the baby. “Y’all holier if there’s anything we can do,” she said as she gave it to Barbara. “Good luck to you, honey.” Then she left, and closed the door behind her. All at once, in spite of what the nurse had said, it seemed to Sam that he, his wife, and their child were the only people left in the world. He gulped. Could he handle responsibility like that? After a moment, he realized the question hardly mattered. He wouldn’t get that much chance to handle the responsibility of being a father, not when Jonathan was here and he’d be heading back up to Missouri.

  Barbara set Jonathan in the crib he’d bought at a secondhand store in Hot Springs. The crib wasn’t very large—even if it did crowd the already-crowded room—but the baby all but disappeared in it With a long, shuddering sigh, Barbara lay down. “You all right, hon?” Sam asked anxiously.

  “I think so,” she said. “I don’t know for sure, though. I’ve never done this before. Am I supposed to feel as if a steamroller just mashed me?”

  “I can’t tell you from what I know myself, but by everything my mother used to say, that is how you’re supposed to feel.”

  “That’s good. I’m going to sleep for a while, I think, while the baby’s resting, and then, if he’s still asleep, I’ll stagger down the hall and take a shower. Thank heavens the hot springs give us all the hot water we need, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt so . . . greasy in my whole life. That was hard work.”

  “I love you, honey.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek, then turned and shook a severe finger at Jonathan. “And you, buster, keep it quiet for a while.” He laughed. “There, I’m already showing our kid who’s boss.”

  “That’s easy—he is.” Barbara closed her eyes.

  Sam sat down in the one chair the room boasted. Barbara dropped off almost at once. Her slow, deep breaths mixed oddly with Jonathan’s quick, uncertain ones. The baby was a restless sleeper, wiggling and thrashing and sometimes trying to suck at the sheets or the blanket that covered him. Every so often, Yeager got up to peer at him. He tried to figure out whom the baby looked like. He couldn’t tell. What Jonathan mostly looked was squashed. Even his head almost came to a point at the top. None of the doctors or nurses had got upset about that, so Sam supposed it was normal.

  After an hour or so, Barbara woke up, stretched, and said. “Isn’t he a little angel, sleeping like that? I am going to get clean. I won’t be long. Pick him up and hold him if he fusses while I’m gone.”

  Sam hadn’t thought about that. He was going off and leaving Barbara on the spot for God only knew how long, but she was a woman—she was supposed to be able to take care of babies. What would he do if Jonathan started crying?

  Jonathan started crying. One minute he was quiet except for snorts and grunts, the next he sounded like an air-raid siren in the little room. Gulping, Sam picked him up, careful to support his head as the doctor had shown him. One thing immediately became obvious: the kid was wet.

  Next to the crib stood a pile of diapers; safety pins lay on top of the chest of drawers. Sam undid the diaper Jonathan had on, and discovered he was more than wet; he had a mess in there, too. Sam stared at it: was it supposed to be greenish black? He didn’t know, but figured he’d assume everything was normal there, too, till he heard otherwise.

  Growing up on a farm had inured him to dealing with messes of most sorts. He wiped his son’s bottom, which made Jonathan fuss more, then folded a diaper into a triangle and got it onto the kid. He stuck himself with a pin only once, which he reckoned a victory of sorts. The doctors hadn’t circumcised the baby. He wasn’t circumcised himself, so that didn’t bother him. One less thing to have to worry about, he thought.

  Jonathan kept fussing. “It’s okay, kid, it really is,” Sam said, rocking the baby in his arms. After a while, the cries subsided to whimpers. Jonathan drifted off to sleep. Ever so carefully, Sam put him back in the crib. He didn’t wake up. Sam felt as if he’d caught a fly ball that clinched a pennant.

  Barbara came back a couple of minutes later. “Is he still asleep?” she exclaimed, looking at the baby.

  Sam pointed to the galvanized bucket where he’d tossed the dirty diaper. “I managed,” he said, which, with his ballpark thought of a little while before, made him wonder how Mutt Daniels was doing these days. The news coming out of embattled Chicago lately was better than it had been earlier in the year, but still not good.

  “I wish you didn’t have to go back tomorrow,” Barbara said that evening as they got ready for bed.

  “So do I.” Sam passed her the cigar the doctor had given him: they were sharing it for a treat. “But I can’t do anything about that I’m just lucky Dr. Goddard was a good enough guy to let me get down here at all.”

  By the time he crawled out of bed the next morning, Sam wasn’t so sure he was sorry to go. He wondered if it might not be more like an escape. He’d expected Jonathan to wake several times in the night, and the baby did. Whenever he roused, Barbara nursed him. What he hadn’t expected—nor Barbara, either, by her increasingly haggard look—was that the baby could wake them without waking up him self. Every little snort or grunt or slurping noise Jonathan made would bring his parents alert, their eyes wide, wondering what they needed to do next. Often the answer was nothing, but they couldn’t know that in advance.

  As he put on his khakis, shirt, and jacket, Sam felt himself moving
as if underwater. Barbara looked to be in worse shape than he was.

  “Jesus,” he said, his voice a rusty croak, “I wish there was coffee.”

  “Oh, so do I,” Barbara said fervently. She managed a wan smile. “One thing about the shortages, though: I don’t have to worry about your falling asleep at the reins of your horse and driving him into a tree or a ditch.”

  “Something to that,” Sam said. “Not much, but something.” He hugged her, then smiled himself. “I don’t have to lean over your belly any more. That’s pretty good.”

  “I’m still all—” Barbara gestured. “I hope I’ll have my figure back when I see you again.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t, because that would mean I won’t see you for a while, and I want you back here as soon as you can come. I love you, Sam, and besides, Jonathan needs to know who his daddy is.”

  “Yeah.” The baby was asleep for the moment. Yeager kissed the tip of his own finger and brushed it against Jonathan’s cheek. “So long, kiddo.” He hugged Barbara again. “So long, hon. Love you, too.” Sighing, he lurched out the door and headed down the hall to the stairs.

  From behind him, Straha called in peremptory tones: “I must tell you that your hatchling’s howls last night disturbed me and, I have no doubt, other males of the Race on this floor. How long can we expect this unseemly cacophony to continue?”

  “Oh, about six months, more or less,” Sam answered cheerfully. “That’s one of your years, isn’t it? So long. I’m going back to Missouri, away from the noise.” He ducked down the stairway, leaving the shiplord staring after him.

  Georg Schultz spun the U-2’s prop. The five-cylinder Shvetsov radial engine caught at once. Being air-cooled, it was less susceptible to cold weather than a lot of aircraft powerplants. When the weather got cold enough, oil didn’t want to flow, but it wasn’t quite that bad today. It had been, on and off, and Ludmila Gorbunova had no doubt it would be again before long.