Turtledove: World War
Page 70
More wagons from the convoy came into town, some carrying people but more loaded down with the equipment that had filled much of Eckhart Hall back at the University of Chicago. Not all the wagons would stop here tonight, they were spread out for miles along the highway and back roads that ran parallel to it, both to avoid looking interesting to the Lizards and to keep from taking too much destruction from an air attack if they did.
Enrico Fermi helped his wife Laura down from their wagon, then waved to Yeager. He waved back. He still felt a rush of pride at hanging around with scientists and even helping them when they had questions for the Lizard prisoners. Till a few months ago, his closest brush with scientists had been with the near-supermen who populated the pages of Astounding.
The real ones, while bright enough, weren’t a lot like their fictional counterparts. For one thing, a lot of the best ones—Fermi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner—were dumpy foreigners with funny accents. Fermi talked like Bobby Fiore’s father (he wondered what had happened to his old roommate, the second baseman on the Decatur Commodores). For another; just about all of them, foreign and American, were much more human than their fictional analogs; they’d have a drink (or more than one), they’d tell stories, and they’d argue with their wives. Yeager liked them more for it, not less.
Steaks there proved to be, cooked over open flames and eaten by the fireside—no gas and no electricity in New Salem. Yeager cut his into very small pieces as he ate it: though he wouldn’t be thirty-six for another couple of months, he had full upper and lower plates. He’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and his teeth had rotted in his head. The only teeth of his own he had were the ones that gave everybody else trouble: seven or eight years after the epidemic, his wisdom teeth had come in fine.
Ullhass and Ristin, by contrast, held big chunks of meat up to their mouths and worried bites off them. The Lizards didn’t chew much; they’d get a gobbet in and then gulp it down. The locals watched with undisguised curiosity—these were the first Lizards they’d ever seen. Yeager had watched that at every stop all the way across Minnesota and North Dakota.
“Where you going to put those critters tonight?” a man asked him. “We sure as hell don’t want them getting loose.”
“They’re not critters. They’re people—funny kind of people, but people,” Yeager said. With small-town politeness, the man didn’t argue, but obviously didn’t believe him, either. Yeager shrugged; he’d seen that happen before, too. He asked, “Do you have a jail here?”
The local hooked a thumb into the strap of his denim overalls. “Yah, we do,” he said. Yeager hid a smile—he’d heard “yah” for “yes” at every stop in North Dakota. Grinning, the local went on, “We’ll put a drunk Indian in there every now and again—or sometimes a drunk squarehead, too. Hell, I’m an eighth Sioux myself, even if my name is Thorkil Olson.”
“That’d be perfect,” Yeager said, “especially if you can put a board or a blanket or something over the window, if there is one. Lizards can’t take as much cold as people can. Can you take us there, let me look it over?”
With Ristin and Ullhass safely behind bars, Yeager figured he had the night off. A lot of times, he’d had to stay alert because they were in the next room of a private house. He didn’t think they’d try to escape; they risked both freezing and getting shot on a world not their own. You couldn’t afford to take chances, though.
He and Barbara went home with Olson and his wife Louise, a pleasant, red-cheeked woman in her late forties. “Take the spare bedroom for the night, and welcome,” Louise said. “We’ve rattled around the house since our boy George and his wife headed down to Kansas City so he could work in a defense plant.” Her face clouded. “The Lizards are in Kansas City. I pray he’s all right.”
“So do I, ma’am;” Yeager said. Barbara’s hand tightened on his; her husband Jens, a Met Lab physicist, had never come back from a cross-country trip that had skirted Lizard-held territory.
“Plenty of blankets on the bed, folks, and Grandma’s old thundermug under it,” Thorkil Olson boomed as he showed them the spare room. “We’ll feed you breakfast when you get up in the morning. Sleep tight, now.”
There were plenty o. blankets, heavy wool ones from Sears, with a goose-down comforter on top. “We can even get undressed,” Yeager said happily. “I’m sick of sleeping in three, four layers of clothes.”
Barbara looked at him sidelong. “Stay undressed, you mean,” she said, and blew out the candle Olson had set on the nightstand. The room plunged into darkness.
Afterwards, Sam peeled off his rubber, then groped around under the bed till he found the chamber pot. “Something for them to cluck over after we leave,” he said. He dove back under the covers as fast as he could; without them, the bedroom was a chilly place.
Barbara clung to him, for warmth, but for reassurance, too. He ran a hand down the velvety skin of her back. “I love you,” he said softly.
“I love you, too.” Her voice caught; she shoved herself against him. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. I’d have been so lost. I—” Her face was buried in the hollow of his shoulder. A hot tear splashed down on him. After a few seconds, she raised her head. “I miss him so much sometimes. I can’t help it.”
“I know. You wouldn’t be who you are if you didn’t.” Yeager spoke with the philosophy of a man who had spent his entire adult life playing bush-league ball and never come close to the majors: “You do the best you can with the cards you get dealt, even if some of them are pretty rotten. Me, I never got an ace before.” Now he squeezed her.
She shook her head; her hair brushed softly across his chest. “But it’s not fair to you, Sam. Jens is dead; he has to be dead. If I’m going to go on—if we’re going to go on, I have to look ahead, not backwards. As you said, I’ll do the best I can.”
“Can’t ask for more than that,” Yeager agreed. Slowly, he went on, “Seems to me, honey, that if you hadn’t loved your Jens a lot, and if he hadn’t loved you, too, you wouldn’t have been anybody I’d’ve wanted to fall in love with. And even if I had, just on account of you’re such a fine-looking woman”—he poked her in the ribs, because he knew she’d squeak—“you wouldn’t have loved me back. You wouldn’t have known how to.”
“You’re sweet. You make good sense, too. You seem to have a way of doing that.” Instead of clutching, now Barbara snuggled against him; he felt her body relax. The tip of her nipple brushed his arm, just above the elbow. He wondered if she felt like making love again. But before he could try to find out, she yawned enormously. Voice still blurry, she said, “If I don’t get some sleep, God only knows what kind of wreck I’ll be tomorrow.” In the darkness, her lips found his, but only for a moment. “Good night, Sam. I love you.” She rolled over onto her side of the bed.
“I love you, too. Good night.” Sam found himself yawning, too. Even if she had been interested, he wasn’t sure he could have managed two rounds so close together. He wasn’t a kid any more.
He rolled over onto his left side. His behind brushed against Barbara’s. They chuckled and moved a little farther apart. He popped out his dentures, set them on the nightstand. Inside a minute and a half, he was snoring.
Jens Larssen most cordially cursed the United States Army, first in English and then in the fragmentary Norwegian he’d picked up from his grandfather. Even as the oaths fell from his lips, he knew he was being unfair: if the Army hadn’t scooped him up as he was making his way across Indiana, he might well have got himself killed trying to sneak into Chicago as the Lizard attacks on the city rose to a climax.
And even now, after General Patton and General Bradley had pinched off the neck of that attack, nobody would let him fly out to join the rest of the Met Lab team in Denver. Again, the brass had their reasons—save for combat missions, aviation had almost disappeared in the United States. Human aviation had almost disappeared, anyhow. The Lizards dominated the skies.
“Hellfire,” he m
uttered, clinging to the rail of the steamer Duluth Queen, “the damn Army wouldn’t even tell me where they’d gone. I had to go into Chicago and find out for myself.”
That rankled; it struck him as security gone mad. So did everyone’s refusal to let him send on any word to the Met Lab crew. He couldn’t even let his wife know he was alive. Once more, though, the mucky-mucks had a point he couldn’t honestly deny: the Met Lab was America’s only hope of producing an atomic bomb like the ones the Lizards had used on Berlin and Washington, D.C. Without that bomb, the war against the aliens would probably fail. Nobody, then, could afford to draw any sort of attention toward the Metallurgical Laboratory or communicate with it in any way, for fear the Lizards would intercept a message and draw the wrong—or rather, the right—conclusions from it.
The orders he’d been given made just enough sense for him not to try disobeying. But oh, how he hated them!
“And now I can’t even get into Duluth,” he grumbled.
He could see the town, which lay by the edge of Lake Superior where it narrowed to its westernmost point. He could see the gray granite bluffs that dwarfed man’s houses and buildings, and felt he could almost reach out and touch some of the homes atop these bluffs, the taller business buildings that climbed the steep streets toward them. But the feeling was an illusion; a sheet of blue-gray ice held the Duluth Queen away from the Minnesota town that had given it its name.
Jens turned to a passing sailor. “How far out on the lake are we?”
The man paused to think. His breath came out thick as smoke as he answered, “Can’t be more than four, five miles. Up to less than a mouth ago, it was open water all the way in.” He chuckled at Larssen’s groan. “Some years the port stays open all winter long. More often, though, it’ll freeze for twenty miles out, so this ain’t so bad.” He went on his way, whistling a cheery tune.
He’d misunderstood why Jens groaned. It wasn’t at the cold weather; Jens had grown up in Minnesota, and spent enough time skating on frozen lakes to take for granted that water—even as massive a body of water as Lake Superior—turned to ice when winter came. But a month before, he could have gone straight into town. That ate at him. Probably the same blizzard that let Patton launch his attack against the Lizards had also finally frozen the lake.
In any other year, the Duluth Queen would have stopped sailing for the winter. The Lizards, though, had paid much more attention to knocking out road and rail traffic than to knocking out ships. Jens wondered what that meant about their home planet—maybe it didn’t have enough water for them to take shipping seriously as a way of getting things from, one place to another.
If that was so, the aliens were missing a trick. The Duluth Queen carried ball bearings, ammunition, gasoline, and motor oil to keep resistance to the Lizards’ strong in Minnesota; it would take back steel from Duluth and milled grain from Minneapolis to forge into new weapons and feed the people who fought and built.
Lots of little boats—boats small enough to haul across the ice, some of them even rowboats—clustered around the steamship. Deck cranes lowered crates to them and picked up others, with a lot of shouted warnings going back and forth with the goods. A quasi-harbor had sprung into being at the edge of the ice: crates from the Duluth Queen went back and forth toward town on man-hauled sledges, while others, outbound, were muscled onto the boats for transport out to the Queen.
Jens doubted the system was even a tenth as efficient as a proper harbor. But the proper harbor was icebound, and what the locals had worked out was a lot better than nothing. From his point of view, the only real trouble was that cargo was so much more important than passengers that he couldn’t get off the steamship.
The sailor came back down the deck, still whistling. Larssen felt like throttling him. “How much longer before you’ll be able to start moving actual real live people off?” he asked.
“Shouldn’t be more than another day or two, sir,” the fellow answered.
“A day or two!” Jens exploded. He wanted to dive into Lake Superior and swim the mile or so over to the edge of the ice. He knew perfectly well, though, that he’d freeze to death if he tried it.
“We’re doing the best we can,” the sailor said. “Everything’s screwed up since the Lizards, came, that’s all. Wherever you need to get to, people will understand that you’ve been held up.”
That this was true made it no easier to bear. Unconsciously, Larssen had assumed that because the Lizards had been beaten back from Chicago and he was free to travel again without the Army trying to tie him down, the world would automatically unfold at his feet. But the world was not in the habit of working that way.
The sailor went on, “Long as you’re stuck on, board, sir, you might as well enjoy yourself. The grub’s good here, and there aren’t many places ashore where you’ll find steam heat, running water, and electric lights.”
“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jens said. The Lizards’ invasion had badly disrupted the complex web the United States had become, and pointed out the hard way how much every part of the country depended on every other—and how ill-equipped most parts were to go it alone. Burning wood to keep warm and depending on muscles—animal or human—to move things about made America feel as if it had slipped back a century from 1943.
And yet, if Jens ever made it to Denver, he’d get back to work on a project that seemed to belong at least a hundred years in the future. The world to come would spring into being amidst the obtrusive reemergence of the past. And where was the present? The present, thought Jens, who had a weakness for puns, is absent.
He went below, to get out of the cold and to remind himself the present still existed. The Duluth Queen’s galley boasted not only electric lights but a big pot of hot coffee (a luxury that grew rarer as stocks dwindled) and a radio. Jens remembered his parents saving up to buy their first set in the late twenties. It had felt like inviting the world into their parlor. Now, most places, you couldn’t invite the world in even if you wanted to.
But the Duluth Queen didn’t depend on distant power plants, now likely to be either wrecked or out of fuel, for electricity. It made its own. And so, static squawked and muttered as Hank Vernon spun the tuning knob and the red pointer slid across the dial. Music suddenly came out. The ship’s engineer turned to Larssen, who was getting a mug of coffee. “The Andrews Sisters suit you?”
“They’re okay, but if you can find some news, that would be even better.” Jens poured in cream. The Duluth Queen had plenty of that, but no sugar.
“Let’s see what I can do. I wish this was a shortwave set.” Vernon worked the knob again, more slowly now, pausing to listen to every faint station he brought in. After three or four tries, he grunted in satisfaction. “Here you go.” He turned up the volume.
Larssen bent his head toward the radio. Even through the waterfall of static, he recognized the newscaster’s deep, slow voice: “—three days of rioting reported from Italy, where people went into the streets to protest the government’s cooperation with the Lizards. Pope Pius XII’s radio appeal for calm, monitored in London, seems to have had little effect. Rioters are calling for the return of Benito Mussolini, who was spirited to Germany after being placed under arrest by the Lizards—”
Hank Vernon shook his head in bemusement. “Isn’t it a hell of a thing? A year ago, Mussolini was the enemy with a capital E because he was buddies with Hitler. Now he’s a hero because the krauts got him away from the Lizards. And Hitler’s not such a bad guy any more, since the Germans are still fighting hard. Just because you’re fighting the Lizards doesn’t make you a good guy in my book. Was Joe Stalin a good guy just on account of he was fighting the Nazis? People say so, yeah, but they can’t make me believe it. What do you think?”
“You’re probably right,” Larssen answered. He agreed with most of what the engineer had said, but wished Vernon hadn’t chosen just then to say it—his loud, nasal tones drowned out Edward R. Murrow, to whom Jens was trying to listen.
“Is that against the English or the Lizards?” he asked.
“If it’s all the way over in India, what the devil difference does it make?” the engineer said. On a cosmic scale, Larssen supposed he had a point, but for someone who was trying to catch up with what was going on in the world, losing any facts felt frustrating.
From the radio, Murrow said, “And for those who think the Lizard devoid of humor, consider this: outside of Los Angeles, the Army Air Force recently had occasion to build a dummy airport, complete with dummy planes. Two Lizard aircraft are said to have attacked it—with dummy bombs. This is Edward R. Murrow, somewhere in the United States.”
“Nobody on the radio admits where they are any more, you notice that?” Vernon said. “From FDR on down, it’s ‘somewhere in the United States.’ It’s like if anybody knows where you are, you can’t be a bigshot, ’cause if you were a bigshot and the Lizards knew where you are, they’d go after you. Am I right or am I right?”
“You’re probably right,” Jens said again. “You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?” Now that he didn’t get the chance to drink coffee often, one cup kicked the way three or four had in the good old days. The same was even more true of tobacco.
“Wish to hell. I did,” ‘Vernon answered. “I smoked cigars myself, but I wouldn’t turn down anything these days. I used to work on the rivers in Virginia, North Carolina, and we’d go right past the tobacco farms, never even think a thing about ’em. But when it can’t get from where they grow it to where you want to smoke it—”
“Yeah,” Larssen said. It was true of more than tobacco. That was why the Lizards didn’t have to conquer the whole country to make the United States stop working. It was why the Duluth Queen sat off the ice and unloaded: anything to keep the wheels turning.