In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “I wish I could,” he said, regretfully for two different reasons. “I haven’t seen one in months.”

  “Yeah, me neither.” She let out a long, mournful sigh. “Don’t even know why I bothered to ask. If you had smokes, I’d’ve smelled ’em on you minute you walked in.” She took another bite, then said, “Mind if I ask you what your name is?”

  He told her, and discovered in turn that her last name was Cooley. Black Irish, he thought. That fit; her eyes were very, very blue and her skin even fairer than his, transparent white rather than pink.

  She might not have been able to smell tobacco smoke on him, but he was sure she could smell sweat—getting the bike here from Denver had been work, no two ways about it. It didn’t worry him the way it would have a year before. He could smell her, too, and it was amazing how fast you got used to bodies that weren’t as clean as they might have been. If most everybody needed a bath, things evened out.

  He finished the stew, scraped up gravy with his fork until the plate was damn near clean again. He didn’t want to up and leave; he felt full and happy and more nearly homey than he had since he’d found out he didn’t really have a home any more. To give himself an excuse to stay a while longer, he pointed to the mug and said, “Could I have another one of those, please? That one hit the spot, but it didn’t quite fill it up.”

  “Sure thing, pal. I’ll get me one, too.” She headed for the back room again. This time, Jens thought she might have noticed him eyeing her as she walked, but if she had, she didn’t let on. She soon came back with the beer.

  “Thanks,” he said as she sat down once more. The scritch of the chair legs on the bricks of the café floor was almost the only sound. Jens asked, “How do you keep this place open with no customers?”

  “What do you mean, no customers? You’re here, aren’t you?” Her face was full of impudent amusement. “But yeah, it’s pretty quiet at dinnertime. Supper, now, folks come for supper. And I reckon the Army would shoot me if I closed up shop; I feed a lot of their people goin’ in and out of Denver. But then, you said you’re one of them, right?”

  “Yeah.” Jens took another pull at his beer. He eyed her over the top of the mug. “Bet you have to keep a shotgun by the till to keep some of the Army guys from getting too friendly.”

  Mary laughed. “Spilling something hot on ’em mostly does the trick.” She drank, too. “‘Course, the other thing is, there’s passes and then there’s passes.”

  Was that an invitation? It sure sounded like one. Jens hesitated, not least because the memory of his ignominious failure with that chippie back in Denver still stung. If he couldn’t get it up twice running, what was he supposed to do? Ride his bike off a cliff? He’d have plenty of chances, pedaling along US 40 through the mountains. Sometimes, though, leading with your chin was also a test of manhood. He stretched out his foot under the table. As if by accident, the side of his leg brushed against hers.

  If she’d pulled away, he would have risen from the table feeling foolish, paid whatever she asked for the stew and the beer, and headed west. As it was, she stretched, too, slowly and languorously. He wondered if that sinuous motion came naturally or if she’d seen it in the movies and practiced. Either way, it made his heart thump like a drum.

  He got up, walked around the table, and went down on one knee beside her. It was a position in which he could have proposed, although he had propositioning more in mind. He got the idea, though, that she didn’t want a lot of talk.

  When he leaned forward and kissed her, she grabbed his head and pulled him to her hard enough to mash his lips against her teeth. He broke away for a moment, partly to breathe and partly to let his mouth glide to her earlobe and then down the smooth side of her neck. She arched her back like a cat and sighed deep in her throat.

  His hand slid under her skirt. Her legs parted for him. He was gently rubbing at the crotch of her cotton panties when he remembered that plate-glass window. Idaho Springs wasn’t much of a town, but anybody walking by could see in. Hell, anybody walking by could walk in. “Is there someplace we can go?” he asked hoarsely.

  That seemed to remind her of the big window, too. “Come on back to the kitchen with me,” she said. He didn’t want to take his hand away, but she couldn’t stand up unless he did.

  She paused only a moment, to scoop up an old Army blanket from behind the counter on which the cash register sat. The stove in the kitchen, a coal-burner burning wood these days, made the place hot, but Jens didn’t care. He was plenty hot himself.

  He unbuttoned the buttons that ran down the back of Mary’s white blouse and unhooked her brassiere. Her breasts filled his hands. He squeezed, not too hard. She shivered in his arms. He fumbled at the button that held her skirt closed, undid it, and yanked down the zipper beneath. The skirt made a puddle on the floor. She stepped out of it, kicked off her shoes, and pulled down her panties. Her pubic hair was startlingly dark against her pale, pale skin.

  She spread the blanket on the floor while he tried not to tear his clothes getting out of them in excess haste. Everything would be all right this time—he was sure of it.

  Everything was better than all right. She moaned and gasped and called his name and squeezed him with those wonderful contractions of the inner muscles so he exploded in the same instant she did. “Lord!” he said, more an exclamation of sincere respect than a prayer.

  She smiled up at him, her face—probably like his—still a little slack with pleasure. “That was good,” she said. “And you’re a gentleman, you know that?”

  “How do you mean?” he asked absently, not quite listening: he was hoping he’d rise again.

  But she answered: “You keep your weight on your elbows.” That made him not only laugh but also slip and stop being a gentleman, at least by her standards. She squawked and wiggled, and he slid out of her. When he sat back on his knees, she reached for her discarded clothes, so she hadn’t been interested in a second round, anyhow.

  Jens dressed even faster than he’d undressed. Where before he’d thought of nothing but getting his ashes hauled, now he recalled how much a stranger he was here, and what could happen to strangers when they fooled around with small-town women.

  Another question formed in the back of his mind: did Mary expect to get paid? If he asked and the answer was no, he’d mortally offend her. If he didn’t ask and the answer was yes, he’d offend her a different way, one that might end up with his having a discussion he didn’t want with the gunman behind that curtained window.

  After a few seconds’ thought, he found a compromise that pleased him. “What do I owe you for lunch and everything?” he asked. If she wanted to interpret and everything to mean a couple of beers, fine. If she thought it meant more than that, well, okay, too.

  “Paper money?’ Mary asked. Jens nodded. She said, “Thirty bucks ought to cover it.”

  Given the way prices had gone crazy since the Lizards came, that wasn’t out of line for good chicken stew and two mugs of beer. Jens felt a surge of pride that she hadn’t been a pro. He dug in his pocket for a roll that would have astonished him in prewar days, peeled off two twenties, and gave them to her. “I’ll get your change,” she said, and started for the cash register.

  “Don’t be silly,” he told her.

  She smiled. “I said you were a gentleman.”

  “Listen, Mary, when I come back from where I’m going—” he began, with the sentimentality satiation and a bit of beer can bring.

  She cut him off. “If I ever see you again, tell me whatever you’re going to tell me. Till then, I’m not gonna worry about it. The war’s made everybody a little bit crazy.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” he said, and thought about Barbara for the first time since he decided to try playing footsie with Mary. Take that, bitch, he said to himself. Aloud, to Mary, he went on, “Thanks for everything—and I mean for everything. I’d better be heading out now.”

  She sighed. “I know. Nobody ever stays in Idaho Springs—ex
cept me.” She took a couple of quick steps forward, pecked him on the cheek, and moved back again before he could grab her. “Wherever it is you’re going to, you be careful, hear me?”

  “I will.” Suddenly he wanted to stay in Idaho Springs, a town he’d never heard of until he started planning the trip for Hanford. Amazing what a roll in the hay can do, he thought. But discipline held, aided by doubts whether Mary wanted anything more from him than that one roll, either.

  The doorbell jingled again as he walked out of the First Street Cafe. He climbed onto his bicycle. “Giddyap,” he muttered as he started to pedal. The world wasn’t such a bad old place after all.

  He held that view even though he needed a solid day to get to the top of Berthoud Pass, which wasn’t much more than twenty miles beyond Idaho Springs. He spent the night in the mining hamlet of Empire, then tackled the run to the pass the next morning. He didn’t think he’d ever worked so hard in this life. He’d gained a thousand feet between Idaho Springs and Empire, and picked up another three thousand in the thirteen miles between Empire and the top of the pass. Not only was he going up an ever-steeper grade, he was doing it in air that got thinner and thinner. Berthoud Pass topped out at better than eleven thousand feet: 11,315, said a sign that announced the Continental Divide.

  “Whew.” Jens paused for a well-earned rest. He was covered with sweat and his heart was beating harder than it had when he’d come atop Mary Cooley, a day before and most of a mile lower. Denver had taken some getting used to. He wondered if anybody this side of an Andean Indian could hope to get used to the thin air of Berthoud Pass.

  And yet signs on side roads pointed the way to ski resorts. People actually came up here for fun. He shook his head. “Me, I’m just glad it’s downhill from here on out,” he said, swigging from one of the canteens he’d filled back at Bards Creek in Empire. The kind folk there had also given him chunks of roast chicken to take along. He gnawed on a drumstick as he tried without much luck to catch his breath.

  He thought he’d sweated out every drop of water in him, but emptying the canteen proved him wrong. He went off behind a boulder—not that anybody would have seen him if he’d taken a leak right out in the middle of US 40—and unzipped his fly.

  The second he started to whiz, he hissed in sudden and unexpected pain; somebody might as well have lighted a match and stuck it up his joint. And along with the urine came thick yellow pus. “What the hell is that?” he burst out, and then, a moment later, as realization struck, “Jesus Christ, I’ve got the fucking clap!”

  And where he’d got it was painfully obvious, in the most literal sense of the word. Not from the palm of his own hand, that was for goddamn sure. Somebody who’d lie down with one stranger passing through Idaho Springs … he wondered how many strangers she’d lain down with. One of them had left her a present, and she’d been generous enough to give it to him.

  “That’s great,” he said. “That’s just wonderful.” Here he’d been on the point of rejoining the human race, and this had to happen. What he’d hoped would be his ticket out of the black gloom that had seized him ever since Barbara started laying that miserable ballplayer now turned out to be just another kick in the nuts—again, literally.

  He thought about turning the bicycle around and heading back toward Idaho Springs. Give that tramp a Springfield thank-you, he thought. It would be an easy ride, too—all downhill. Down that grade, I could do twenty miles in twenty minutes. He knew he was exaggerating, but not by that much.

  In the end, he shook his head. He didn’t quite have coldblooded murder in him. Revenge was something else. As far as he was concerned, the whole human race had given him a screwing that made the dose he’d got from Mary Cooley look like a pat on the back by comparison.

  Well, not quite like a pat on the back. As he climbed back onto the bicycle and started down the western slope of the Rockies, he was already dreading the next time he’d have to piss. Back before the war, sulfa had started knocking gonorrhea for a loop. If any doctor so much as had the stuff these days, he’d be saving it for matters more urgent than a case of VD.

  “Hanford,” Jens muttered. His breath smoked as the word escaped his lips; even now, the snow didn’t lie that far above Berthoud Pass. He pedaled harder to get warm again.

  He’d go on to Hanford. He’d see what there was to see. He’d head back for Denver and make his report. He wondered how much good it would do, or whether General Leslie hotshot Groves would pay the least bit of attention to it if he didn’t like what he said. None of the Met Lab people paid any attention to him these days. They were probably too busy laughing at him behind his back—and they’d laugh even harder when he came home with a drippy faucet. So would Barbara.

  He wondered why he was wasting so much effort on sons of bitches—and one proper bitch—who wouldn’t appreciate what he did if he went out and built a bomb singlehanded. But he’d said he’d go and he’d said he’d come back, and duty still counted for a lot with him.

  “Hell, hadn’t been for duty, I’d still be married—yes, sir, I sure would,” he said. They’d asked him to take word about the Met Lab from Chicago to the government-in-hiding in West Virginia, and he’d gone and done it. But getting back hadn’t been so easy—and nobody’d bothered to ask his wife to keep her legs closed while he was gone.

  So he’d do what he’d promised. He hadn’t made any promises about afterwards, though. He might take it into his head to ride east out of Denver after all.

  He picked up speed and he rolled downhill. The thin air that blew against his face was spicy with the smell of the pines from the Arapaho National Forest all around.

  “Or who knows?” he said. “I might even run into some Lizards on the way to Hanford. They’d listen to me, I bet. What do you think?” The breeze didn’t answer.

  XVII

  Atvar stood on sand, looking out to sea. “This is a most respectable climate,” the fleetlord said. “Decently warm, decently dry—” The wind blew bits of grit into his eyes. They bothered him not in the least; his nictitating membranes flicked them out of the way without conscious thought on his part.

  Kirel came crunching up beside him. “Even this northern Africa is not truly Home, though, Exalted Fleetlord,” he said. “It grows beastly cold at night—and winter here, by the reports, is almost as hideous as anywhere else on Tosev 3.”

  “Not winter now.” For a moment, Atvar turned an eye turret toward the star the Race called Tosev. As always, its light struck him as too harsh, too white, not quite like the mellow sunshine of Home. “I thought I would come down to the planet’s surface to see it at its best, not its worst.”

  “It is well-suited to us here,” Kirel admitted. “Reports say the Tosevites from Europe there”—he pointed north across the blue, blue water—“who were fighting here when we arrived, spent most of their time complaining about how hot and dry this part of their planet was. Even the natives don’t care for the area during summer.”

  “I have long since given up trying to fathom the Big Uglies’ tastes,” Atvar said. “I would call them revoltingly ignorant, except that, were they only a little more ignorant, our conquest would have been accomplished some time ago.”

  “With the return of good—well, bearable—weather to the lands of our principal foes, the optimism I felt at the outset of our campaign here begins to return as well,” Kirel said. “We’ve gained against the Deutsche from both east and west; we’re driving toward the capital of the SSSR, this Moskva being an important rail and transport center along with an administrative site; we continue to consolidate our hold on China despite bandits behind our lines; and the Americans fall back on the lesser continental land mass.”

  “All true,” Atvar agreed, more happily than he’d spoken of the military situation on Tosev 3 for some time. “I begin to hope the colonists may yet find a pacified world awaiting their settlement. During the past winter in this hemisphere, I wouldn’t have put much credit in that.”

  “Nor I, E
xalted Fleetlord. But if our munitions hold out, I think we can successfully complete the conquest and settle down to administering rather than fighting.”

  Atvar wished the shiplord hadn’t added that qualifying phrase. Munitions were a continuing problem. Provident as usual, the Race had given the conquest fleet far more supplies and weapons systems than it had expected the warriors to need against the animal-riding, sword-swinging savages the probes had shown inhabiting Tosev 3.

  The only trouble was that, while Atvar still reckoned the Big Uglies savages, these days they made landcruisers, fired automatic weapons, and were beginning to fly jet aircraft and launch missiles. What would have been lavish supplies against primitives had to be carefully rationed to keep from running out before the Tosevites did. Atvar knew such care slowed the war effort, but he lacked the munitions to shut down all the Big Uglies’ industrial areas and keep them shut down.

  “It does make things harder,” Kirel said when Atvar spoke of his concern. “Still, I count us ahead of the game in that we’ve not had to use nuclear weapons to any great degree. Wrecking the planet for the colonists would not leave our names in good odor in the annals of the Race.”

  Would not leave Atvar’s name in good odor, was what he meant, though he was too polite to say so. The fleetlord won the glory—if any glory was to be won. If not, he won the blame. Atvar didn’t intend to win any blame.

  “Some males—Straha, for instance,” he observed, “would destroy Tosev 3 in order to conquer it. They might as well be Big Uglies themselves, for all the care they give to the future.”

  “Truth in your words, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said; he didn’t care for Straha, either. But he was also a thoroughgoing and conscientious officer, so he added, “In truth, though, sometimes the Tosevites are exasperating enough to make me wonder if we shouldn’t exterminate them to keep them from troubling us later. Take this latest trouble with—what was that Big Ugly’s name?—Moishe Russie.”