“Ah, that’s better,” Hessef said as the ginger began to take hold of him once more.
“Why is it better?” Ussmak wondered aloud. “The world is still the same as it was before you tasted, so how have things really changed?”
“They’ve changed because now I have this lovely powder inside of me. No matter how ugly the Big Uglies outside the landcruiser are, I don’t have to worry about it. All I have to do is sit here in my seat and not think about a thing.”
And if some Tosevite chooses this moment to sneak up on us with a satchel charge, we’re all liable to die because you’re not thinking. Ussmak held that to himself. Despite all he’d been through, despite the herb coursing through him, the subordination drilled into him since his hatchling days remained strong.
In any case, he didn’t think the Big Uglies had pursued the Race’s retreating landcruisers. Why should they have? They’d kept the Race from pushing north, which was what they’d had in mind. They didn’t have to conquer, they just had to resist. For how long? Ussmak wondered. The answer slammed into him like a cannon shell: till we have no equipment left.
Five landcruisers gone today in this engagement alone. Hessef was right: they would be gnashing their teeth in Besançon over that news. Ussmak wondered how many landcruisers the Race had left, all over Tosev 3. In the first heady days of the invasion, it hadn’t seemed to matter. They advanced as they would, and swept all before them. They didn’t sweep any more; they had to fight. And when they fought, they got hurt.
Oh, so did the Tosevites. Though his ginger euphoria was starting to ebb, Ussmak still acknowledged that. Even in the botched engagement from which the Race’s landcruisers had just retreated, they’d killed many more enemy vehicles than they’d lost themselves. When transcribing his after-action report onto disk, the unit commander would probably be able to present the engagement as a victory.
But it wasn’t a victory. The clarity of thought the drug brought to Ussmak let him see that only too well. The Big Uglies were losing landcruisers at a prodigal rate, yes, but they were still making them, too, and making them better than they had before. Ussmak wondered how many landcruisers remained aboard the freighters that had fetched them from Home. Even more than that, he wondered what the Race would do when no more landcruisers were left on those freighters.
When he said that aloud, Hessef answered, “That’s why we’d better conquer quickly: if we don’t, we’ll have nothing left to do the job with.” Even the landcruiser commander’s new taste of ginger didn’t keep him from seeing as much for himself.
“We’ll beat them. It’s our destiny—we are the Race,” Tvenkel said. The herb left him confident still. He gave his gun’s autoloader an affectionate slap.
Thus reminded of the device, Hessef said, “We ought to perform maintenance on that gadget. We expended a lot of rounds today. It goes out of adjustment easily, and then we’re left with main armament that won’t shoot.”
“It’ll be all right, superior sir,” Tvenkel said. “If it hasn’t gone wrong, odds are it won’t.”
Ussmak expected Hessef to come down angrily on the gunner for that: maintenance was as much a part of a landcruiser crew’s routine as eating. But Hessef kept quiet—the ginger made him more confident than he should have been, too. Ussmak didn’t like that. If the autoloader wouldn’t feed shells into the cannon, what good was the landcruiser? Good for getting him killed, that was all.
Though the gunner outranked him, Ussmak said, “I think you ought to service the autoloader, too.”
“It’s working fine, I tell you,” Tvenkel said angrily. “All we need is to top up on ammunition and we’ll be ready to go out and fight some more.”
As if on cue, a couple of ammunition carriers rolled up to the landcruisers. One was a purpose-built vehicle made by the Race, but the other sounded like a Tosevite rattletrap. Ussmak went back to the driver’s position, undogged the hatch, and peered out. Sure enough, it was a petroleum-burning truck; its acrid exhaust made him cough. When the driver—a male of the Race—got out, Ussmak saw he had wooden blocks taped to the bottoms of his feet to let him reach the pedals from a seat designed for bigger beings.
Tvenkel climbed out through the turret, hurried over to the ammunition carriers. So did the gunners from the rest of the landcruisers in the unit. After a low-voiced comment from one of the resupply drivers, one of them shouted, “What do you mean, only twenty rounds per vehicle? That’ll leave me less than half full!”
“And me!” Tvenkel said. The rest of the gunners echoed him, loudly and emphatically.
“Sorry, my friends, but it can’t be helped,” the male driving the Tosevite truck said. His foot blocks made him tower over the angry gunners but, instead of dominating them, he just became the chief target of their wrath. He went on, “We’re a little short all over the planet right now. We’ll share what we have evenly, and it’ll come out well in the end.”
“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 land-cruiser 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 tr
ain 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 t
here.”
“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—”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 97
