In th Balance

by neetha Napew

  Right on cue, pieces of antiaircraft shell casing panttered down like hail. Barbara scurried inside Eckhart Hall— you didn't want to be under one when it landed. She said, "Those were between here and Navy Pier. I hope they don't fubar the evacuation route."

  "I hope they don't, too." Sam stopped and stared. "You," he said severely, "have been listening to too many soldiers."

  "What? Oh." Barbara's eyes widened in a good simulation of innocence. "It means 'fouled up beyond all recognition,' doesn't it?"

  "Fouled up. Yeah. Right. Among other things." The noise Yeager made was half cough, half chuckle. Barbara stuck out her tongue at him. Laughing, they climbed the stairs together.

  More Lizard planes hit Chicago that afternoon, and more again after night fell. They hadn't pounded the city so hard in a while. Yeager wished for bad weather, which sometimes kept the enemy away. Faint in the distahce, he heard the wailing siren of a fire engine that still had fuel. He wondered if the firemen would find any water pressure when they got where they were going.

  By the next morning, the loading was done. Yeager was crammed into a bus along with a bunch of boxes that could have held anything, a couple of other soldiers— and with Ullhass and Ristin. The two Lizard POWs were coming along to Denver for whatever help they could give the Met Lab project. Though swaddled in Navy peacoats that hung like tents on their slight frames, they still shivered. The bus had several broken windows; it was as cold inside as out.

  All over the lawn, men grumbled about the cut fingers and mashed toes they'd gotten loading the convoy. Then, one after another, engines started up. The roar and yibration sank deep into Yeager's bones. Soon he'd be on the road again. After God only knew how many trips between towns, getting rolling felt good, felt normal. Maybe he was a nomad by nature.

  Diesel and gasoline fumes wafted into the bus. Yeager coughed. He didn't remember the

  stink being so bad. But then, lately he hadn't smelled it much. Not a lot was on the roads these days to make a stink.

  Inside of two gear changes, Yeager was convinced he had more business behind the wheel than the clod driving the bus. No, he thought with a touch of pride, any fool can drive. Guarding the Lizards was more important to the war effort.

  The convoy rumbled north up University to Fifty-first, then swung left one vehicle at a time. The streets were mostly clear of debris and not too bumpy; rammed earth and rubble filled bomb craters and the subsidence caused by ruptured water mains. The sidewalks were something else again— bulldozers and pick-and-shovel crews had shoved up onto them all the garbage that had clogged the streets. These trucks were going to get through no matter what.

  To help make sure it got through, soldiers had machine gun nests in the rubble and stood menacingly at streetcorners. Here and there, colored faces, eyes huge and white within them, stared at the passing traffic from windows of houses and apartment buildings. Bronzeville, Chicago's black belt, began bare blocks from the university and indeed almost lapped around it. The government feared its Negro citizens only a little less than it feared the Lizards.

  Before the aliens came, a quarter of a million people had been jammed into Bronzeville's six square miles. A lot fewer than that were there now, but the district still showed the signs of crowding and poverty: the storefront churches, the shops advertising mystic potions and charms, the little lunch counters whose windows (those that hadn't blown out) advertised chitlins and sweet potato pie, hot fish and mustard greens. Poor man's fare, yes, and poor black man's fare to boot, but the

  thought of fresh greens and hot fish was plenty to set Yeager's stomach rumbling. He'd been living out of cans too long. That was even worse than the greasy spoons he'd haunted as he bounced from one minor-league town to the next. Some of those diners — He hadn't thought anything could be worse.

  "Why we leave this place where we so long stay?" Ristin said. "I like this place, as much as can like any place on this cold, cold world. Where we go now is warmer?" He and Ullhass both swiveled their eyes toward Yeager, waiting hopefully on his reply.

  They squeaked in disappointment when he said, "No, I don't think it will be much warmer." He didn't have the heart to tell them it would be colder for a while: once on the Great Lakes, they'd almost certainly sail north and then west, because the Lizards held big stretches of Indiana and Ohio and controlled most of the Mississippi valley. The colder the

  country, the better, as far as evading them went.

  Yeager continued, "As for why we're leaving, we're tired of having your people drop bombs on us, that's why."

  "We tired of that, too," Ullhass said. He'd learned to nod like a human being to emphasize his words. So had Ristin. Their heads bobbed up and down together.

  "I wasn't real fond of it myself," Yeager said, adding the Lizards' emphatic cough; he liked the way it served as a vocal exclamation point. His two charges let their mouths fall open. They thought his accent was funny. It probably was. He laughed a little, too. He and Ullhass and Ristin had rubbed off on one another more than he would have imagined possible back when he became their link to humankind.

  The convoy chugged past the domed

  Byzantine bulk of Temple Isaiah Israel, then past Washington Park, bare-branched and brown and dappled with snow. It swung right onto Michigan Avenue, picking up speed as it went. There were advantages to being the only traffic on the road and not having to worry about stop lights.

  Though it was winter, though the Lizards had cut off most rail and truck transport into Chicago, the stink of the stockyards lingered. Wrinkling his nose, Yeager tried to imagine what it had been like on a muggy summer afternoon. No wonder colored folk had taken over Bronzeville—they usually ended up settling in places no one else much wanted.

  He also wondered that Jens and Barbara Larssen had chosen to get an apartment somewhere near here. Maybe they hadn't known Chicago well when they moved, maybe they wanted to live close to the university, for the sake of his work, but Yeager still thought

  Barbara lucky to have had no trouble getting back and forth each day.

  At the corner of Michigan and Forty-seventh, a sign proudly proclaimed, MICHIGAN BOULEVARD GARDEN APARTMENTS. The brick buildings looked as if they held, more people than some of the towns Yeager had played for. One of them had taken a bomb hit and fallen in on itself. More bomb craters scarred the gardens and courts around the apartments. Skinny colored kids ran back and forth, running like banshees.

  "What they do?" Ristin asked.

  "Probably playing Lizards and Americans," Sam answered. "It could be cowboys and Indians, though" He spent the next few minutes trying to get the alien to understand what cowboys and Indians were to say nothing of why they were part of a game. He didn't think he had much luck.

  The convoy kept rolling north up Michigan Avenue. Before long though the bus Yeager was riding slowed then stopped. "What the hell s goin' on?" the driver said "This was supposed to be a straight shot."

  "It's the Army," one of the other passengers explained. "The next time something goes just according to plan will be the first." The fellow wore a major's gold oak leaves so no one presumed to argue with him. Besides he was obviously right.

  After a minute or so, the bus started rolling again, more slowly now. Yeager leaned out into the aisle to peer through the front windows. At the corner of Michigan and Eleventh soldiers waved vehicle after vehicle onto the latter street.

  The driver opened the front door with a hiss of compressed air. "What got screwed up now?" he called to one of the men on traffic-cop

  duty. "Why you movin' us offa Michigan?"

  The soldier jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. "You can't get through no more on Michigan. The goddamn Lizards knocked down the Stevens Hotel this morning, and they're still clearin', the bricks and shit away."

  "So what am I supposed to do now?"

  "Go over a block, then up Wabash to Lake. You can get back onto Michigan there."

  "Okay," the driver said, and swung through the tur
n. No sooner had he rolled past the Woman's Club Building than more soldiers waved him right onto Wabash, one block west. St. Mary's Church there had had its spire blown off; the cross that had topped it lay half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter.

  Since Wabash hadn't been cleared to let the convoy get through, the going was slow and

  bumpy. Once the bus had to jounce up onto the sidewalk to get around a crater in the road. Two empty gas stations, one Shell, the other Sinclair, stood across the street from each other at Wabash and Balbo. A dusty sign in front of the Sinclair station advertised its regular gasoline, six gallons for ninety-eight cents, tax paid. A fifteen-foot-tall plywood cutout of a waving man in a parking attendant's uniform plugged the parking lot next to the gas station: twenty-five cents for one hour or less (SAT. NITE 500 AFTER 6 P.M). But for parked cars and rubble, the lot was empty.

  Yeager shook his head. Up until the Lizards came, life in the United States had been within shouting distance of normal, war or no war. Now... He'd seen newsreel film of wreckage in Europe and China, seen black-and-white images of stunned people trying to figure out how to go on with their lives after they'd lost everything— and often everybody—

  that mattered to them. He thought they'd sunk in. But the difference between seeing pictures of war and having war brought home to you was like the difference between seeing a picture of a pretty girl and going to bed with her.

  The elevated train curled round the corner of Wabash and Lake. Lizard bombs had torn great gaps in the steel-and-wood superstructure. The trains in Chicago did not run on time, not any more.

  Back onto Michigan Avenue. Half a block north of Lake, the forty-story Carbide and Carbon Building had been a Chicago landmark with its black marble base, dark green terra-cotta walls, and gilded trim. Now scorch marks ran up its flanks. Piles of the wall— hell, pieces of the building—were chewed out by bomb hits, as if a dog the size of King Kong had tried it for taste. The glass from hundreds of windows had been swept

  out of Michigan Avenue, but still glittered on the sidewalk.

  The bus driver was evidently a native Chicagoan. Just past the Carbide and Carbon Building, he pointed to the opposite side of the street and said, "This here used to be the 333 North Michigan Building. Now it ain't."

  Now it ain't. A mournful pronouncement, but accurate enough. The pile of debris— marble facings, wood floors, endless cubic yards of reinforced concrete, twisted steel girders beginning to be mangy with rust now that they were open to the snow and rain— had been a building once. It wasn't any more.

  Nor was the double-decked Michigan Avenue Bridge a bridge any more. Army engineers had run a temporary pontoon bridge across the Chicago River to get the convoy to the other side. It would come down again as soon as the last truck rattled over it. If it didn't, the

  Lizards would blast it in short order.

  Armchair strategists said the Lizards didn't really understand what all human beings used boats for. Yeager hoped they were right. He'd been strafed in a train the night the aliens came crashing down on Earth. Getting strafed on board ship would be ten times worse— no place to run, no place to hide.

  But if the Lizards didn't understand boats, they sure knew what bridges were all about. Looking west as he bounced over the steel plates of the makeshift span the engineers had thrown up, Yeager saw that bridges had leapt over the Chicago River at every block. They didn't overleap it now. Every one of them, like the Michigan Avenue Bridge, had been bombed into oblivion.

  "Ain't it a bitch?" the driver said, as if reading his mind. "This here bridge was only about twenty, twenty-five years old— my old man

  was back from France to watch 'em open it up. Fuckin' waste, if you ask me."

  On the north side of the river, the gleaming white Wrigley Building looked intact but for broken windows. Across the street, though, the Tribune Tower had been gutted. Yeager found a certain amount of poetic justice in that. Even when reduced to a skinny weekly by paper shortages, the Chicago Tribune hadn't stopped laying into Roosevelt for not Doing Something about the Lizards. Just what he was supposed to be Doing was never quite clear— but he obviously' wasn't Doing it, so the paper piled scorn on him.

  Yeager felt like thumbing his nose at the ruined building. About all anyone could do about the Lizards was fight them as hard as he could for as long as he could. The United States was doing as well as any other country on Earth, and better than most. But Sam wondered if that would be enough.

  Along with the rest of the convoy, the bus turned right on Grand Avenue toward the Navy Pier. The morning sun gleamed off Lake Michigan, which seemed illimitable as the sea.

  The pier stretched more than half a mile into the lake. The bus rattled past sheds once full of merchandise, now mostly bombed-out shells. At the east end of the pier were playgrounds, a dance hail, an auditorium, a promenade— all reminders of happier times. Waiting at what had been the excursion landing was a rusty old freighter that looked like the maritime equivalent of the beat-up buses Yeager had been riding all his adult life.

  Also waiting were a couple of companies of troops. Antiaircraft guns poked their noses into the sky. If Lizard planes swooped down on the convoy, they'd get a warm reception. Even so, Yeager wished the guns were someplace else—from everything he'd seen, they were better at attracting the Lizards than

  shooting them down.

  But he wasn't the one who gave the orders— except to his Lizardy charges. "Come on, boys," he told them, and let them precede him, off the bus and onto the pier. At his urging, Ullhass and Ristin headed toward the freighter, on whose side was painted the name Caledonia.

  The gathered soldiers swarmed onto the convoy vehicle like army ants— Yeager smiled as the comparison struck him. One truck after another was emptied and sped back down Navy Pier toward Chicago. Working transport of any sort was precious these days. Watching them head west, Yeager got an excellent view of the proud city skyline— and of the gaps the Lizards had torn in it.

  Barbara Larssen came over and stood by him. "They just want us small fry out of the way,"

  she said unhappily. "They put the physicists on board first, and now the equipment they need. Afterward, if there's any room and any time, they'll let people like us get on."

  Given the military needs of the moment, those priorities made sense to Yeager. But Barbara wanted sympathy, not sense. He said, "You know what they say— there's the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way."

  She laughed, maybe a little more than the tired joke deserved. A chilly gust of wind off the lake tried to flip up her pleated skirt, she defeated it with the quick two-hand clutch women seem to learn as a tribal gesture, but shivered just the same. "Brr! I wish I were wearing pants."

  "Why don't you?" he said. "With all the heaters to hell and gone, I bet you'd be a lot more comfortable. I wouldn't want to freeze my — well, I wouldn't want to freeze myself in a

  skirt just on account of fashion."

  If she'd noticed what he started to say, she didn't let on. "If I find some that fit me, I think I will," she said. "Long Johns, too."

  Yeager let himself indulge in the fantasy of peeling her out of a pair of long Johns until somebody bawled, "Come on, get those goddamn Lizards on board. We ain't got all day."

  He urged Ullhass and Ristin ahead of him, then had a happy afterthought. Grabbing Barbara's hand, he said, "Make like you're a Lizard-keeper, too?" She caught on fast and fell into step behind him. she didn't shake off his hand, either.

  The two Lizard POWs hissed in alarm as the gangplank swayed under their weight. "It's all right," Barbara reassured them, playing her part to the hilt. "If humans carrying heavy

  equipment didn't break this, you won't." Yeager had come to know Ullhass and Ristin well enough to tell how unhappy they were, but they kept walking.

  They hissed again when they got up onto the deck of the Caledonia and discovered the ship was still shifting slightly to and fro. "It will fall over and put us all at the bottom of th
e water," Ristin said angrily. He didn't know nautical English, but got his meaning across.

  Yeager looked around at the faded paint, the rust that streaked down from rivets, the worn woodwork, the grease-stained dungarees and old wool sweaters the crew wore. "I don't think so," he told the Lizards. "This boat's done a lot more sailing in its day. I expect it's good for some more yet."

  "I think you're right, Sam," Barbara said, perhaps as much to reassure herself as to console Ristin.

  "Out of the way, there," an officer in Navy uniform yelled at Yeager. "And get those damned things into the cabin we've set up for them."

  "Yes, sir," Yeager said, saluting. "Uh, sir, where is this cabin? Nobody told me before I got here."

  The Navy man rolled his eyes. "Why doesn't that surprise me?" He grabbed a passing sailor by the arm. "Virgil, take this guy and his pet Lizards up to cabin nine. That one can be locked from the outside— here's the key." He turned to Barbara. "Who are you, ma'am?" When she gave him her name, he checked a list, then said, "You can go along if you like, since you don't seem to mind being around these things— they give me the creeps. Anyway, you're in cabin fourteen, just up the corridor. I hope that's all right."