Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” Sam explained as he and the new Mrs. Yeager, accompanied by cheering well-wishers from the Met Lab and from Chugwater, made their way to the house where they’d spend their first night as man and wife. He spoke a little louder, a little more earnestly, than he might have earlier in the day: when they found they were going to host a wedding, the townsfolk had pulled out a good many bottles of dark amber and other fluids.

  “You’re right,” Barbara said, also emphatically. Her cheeks glowed brighter than could be accounted for by the chilly breeze alone.

  She let out a squeak when Sam picked her up and carried her over the threshold of the bedroom they’d use, and then another one when she saw the bottle sticking out of a bucket on a stool by the bed. The bucket was ordinary galvanized iron, straight out of a hardware store, but inside, nestled in snow—“Champagne!” she exclaimed.

  Two wineglasses—not champagne flutes, but close enough—rested alongside the bucket. “That’s very nice,” Yeager said. He gently lifted the bottle out of the snow, undid the foil wrap and the little wire cage, worked the cork a little—and then let it fly out with a report like a rifle shot and ricochet off the ceiling. He had a glass ready to catch the champagne that bubbled out, then finished filling it the more conventional way.

  With a flourish, he handed the glass to Barbara, poured one for himself. She stared down into hers. “I don’t know if I ought to drink this,” she said. “If I have a whole lot more, I will fall asleep on you. That wouldn’t be right. Wedding nights are supposed to be special.”

  “Any night with you is special,” he said, which made her smile. But then he went on more seriously, “We ought to drink it, especially now that we’ve opened it. Nobody has enough of anything any more to let it go to waste.”

  “You’re right,” she said, and sipped. An eyebrow rose. “That’s pretty good champagne. I wonder how it got to the great metropolis of Chugwater, by God, Wyoming.”

  “Beats me.” Yeager drank, too. He didn’t know much about champagne; he drank beer by choice and whiskey every so often. But it did taste good. The bubbles tickled the inside of his mouth. He sat down on the bed, not far from the stool with the bucket.

  Barbara sat down beside him. Her glass was already almost empty. She ran a hand along his arm, let it rest on his corporal’s chevrons. “You were in uniform, so you looked fine for the wedding.” She made a face. “Getting married in a gingham blouse and a pair of dungarees isn’t what I had in mind.”

  He slid an arm around her waist, then drained his glass of champagne and pulled the bottle from its bed of snow. It held just enough to fill them both up again. “Don’t worry about it. There’s only one proper uniform for a bride on her wedding night.” He reached behind her, undid the top button of her blouse.

  “That’s the proper uniform for bride and groom both,” she said. Her fingers fumbled as she worked at one of his buttons. She laughed. “See—I told you I shouldn’t have had that champagne. Now I’m having trouble getting you out of soldier’s uniform and into bridegroom’s.”

  “No hurry, not tonight,” he said. “One way or another, we’ll manage.” He drank some more, then looked at the glass with respect. “That takes me to a happier place than I usually go when I’ve had a few. Or maybe it’s the company.”

  “I like you Sam!” Barbara exclaimed. For some reason—maybe it was the champagne that made him feel better than if she’d said I love you.

  Presently, he asked, “Do you want me to blow out the candles?”

  Her eyebrows came together in thought for a moment. Then she said, “No, let them burn, unless you’really want it to be dark tonight.”

  He shook his head. “I like to look at you, honey.” She wasn’t a Hollywood movie star or a Vargas girl: a little too thin, a little too angular, and, if you looked at things objectively, not pretty enough. Sam didn’t give two whoops in hell about looking at things objectively. She looked damn good to him.

  He ran his hands over her breasts, let one of them stray down her belly toward where her legs joined. She stretched luxuriously and made a noise like a purring cat, down deep in her throat. His tongue teased a nipple. She grabbed the back of his head, pulled him against her.

  After his mouth had followed his hand downward, she rubbed at the soft flesh of her inner thighs. “I wish there were more razor blades around,” she said in mock complaint. “Your face chafes me when you do that.”

  He touched her, gently. Her breath sighed out. She was wet. “I thought you liked it while it was going on,” he said, grinning. “Shall I get that rubber now?”

  “Wait.” She sat up, bent over him, and lowered her head. It was the first time she’d ever done that without being asked. Her hair spilled down and tickled his hipbones.

  “Easy, there,” he gasped a minute later. “You do much more and I won’t need to bother with a rubber.”

  “Would you like that?” she asked, looking up at him from under her bangs. She still held him. He could feel the warm little puffs of breath as she spoke.

  He was tempted, but shook his head. “Not on our wedding night. Like you said, it ought to be perfect. And it’s for something else.”

  “All right, let’s do something else,” she said agreeably, and lay back on the bed. He leaned over the side and pulled a rubber out of the back pocket of his chinos. But before he could peel it open, she grabbed his wrist and repeated, “Wait.” He gave her a quizzical look. She went on, “I know you don’t like those all that much. Don’t bother tonight—if we’re going to make it perfect, that will help. It should be okay.”

  He tossed the rubber onto the floor. He wasn’t fond of them. He wore them because she wanted him to, and because he could see why she didn’t want to get pregnant. But if she felt like taking a chance, he was eager to oblige.

  “It does feel better without overshoes,” he said. He guided himself into her. “Oh, God, does it!” Their mouths met, clung. Neither of them said anything then, not with words.

  “I always said you were a gentleman, Sam,” Barbara told him as he rolled off her: “You keep your weight on your elbows.” He snorted. She said, “Don’t go away now.”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere, not without you.” He put an arm around her, drew her close. She snuggled against him. He liked that. In some ways, it seemed more intimate than making love. You could make love with a stranger; he’d done it in a fair number of minor-league whorehouses in minor-league towns. But to snuggle with somebody, it had to be somebody who really mattered to you.

  As if she’d picked the thought out of his head, Barbara said, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, hon.” His arms tightened around her. “I’m glad we’re married.” That seemed just the right thing to say on a wedding night.

  “So am I.” Barbara ran the palm of her hand along his cheek. “Even if you are scratchy,” she added. He tensed, ready to grab her; sometimes when she made jokes in bed, she’d poke him in the ribs. Not tonight—she turned serious instead. “You made exactly the right toast this afternoon. ‘Life goes on’ . . . It has to, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what I think, anyhow.” Yeager wasn’t sure whether she was asking him or trying to convince herself. She still couldn’t be easy in her mind about her first husband. He had to be dead, but still . . .

  “You have the right way of looking at things,” Barbara said, serious still. “Life isn’t always neat; it’s not orderly; you can’t always plan it and make it come out the way you think it’s supposed to. Things happen that nobody would expect—”

  “Well, sure,” Yeager said. “The war made the whole world crazy, and then the Lizards on top of that—”

  “Those are the big things,” she broke in. “As you say, they change the whole world. But little things can turn your life in new directions, too. Everybody reads Chaucer in high-school English, but when I did, he just seemed the most fascinating writer I’d ever come across. I started trying to learn more abo
ut his time, and about other people who were writing then . . . and so I ended up in graduate school at Berkeley in medieval literature. If I hadn’t been there, I never would have met Jens, I never would have come to Chicago—” She leaned up and kissed him. “I never would have met you.”

  “Little things,” Sam repeated. “Ten, eleven years ago, I was playing for Birmingham down in the Southern Association. That’s Class A-1 ball, the second highest class in the minor leagues. I was playing pretty well, I wasn’t that old—if things had broken right, I might have made the big leagues. Things broke, all right. About halfway through the season, I broke my ankle. It cost me the rest of the year, and I wasn’t the same ballplayer afterwards. I kept at it—never found anything I’d rather do—but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere any more. Just one of those things.”

  “That’s just it.” She nodded against his chest. “Little things, things you’d never expect to matter, can turn up in the most surprising ways.”

  “I’ll say.” Yeager nodded, too. “If I hadn’t read science fiction, I wouldn’t have gotten chosen to take our Lizard POWs back to Chicago or turned into their liaison man—and I wouldn’t have met you.”

  To his relief, she didn’t make any cracks about his choice of reading; someone who dove into Chaucer for fun was liable to think of it as the literary equivalent of picking your nose at the dinner table. Instead, she said, “Jens always had trouble seeing that the little things could make—not a big difference, but a surprising difference. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Yeager kept his answer to a grunt. He didn’t have anything against Jens Larssen, but he didn’t want his ghost coming between them on their wedding night, either.

  Barbara went on, “Jens wanted things just so, and thought they always had to be that way. Maybe it was because his work was so mathematically precise—I don’t know—but he thought the world operated that way, too. That sort of need for exactitude could be hard to live with sometimes.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Sam grunted again, but something loosened in his chest even so. He never remembered her criticizing Jens before.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than she said, “I guess what I’m trying to tell you, Sam, is that I’m glad I’m with you. Taking things as they come is easier than trying to fit everything that happens into some pattern you’ve worked out.”

  “That calls for a kiss,” he said, and bent his head down to hers. She responded eagerly. He felt himself stirring, and knew a certain amount of pride: if you couldn’t wear yourself out on your wedding night, when were you supposed to?

  Barbara felt him stirring, too. “What have we here?” she said when the kiss finally broke. She reached between them to find out. Yeager’s lips trailed down her neck toward her breasts again. Her hand tightened on him. His found the dampness between her legs.

  After a while, he rolled onto his back: easier to stay hard for a second round that way, especially if you weren’t in your twenties any more. He’d learned Barbara didn’t mind getting on top every so often.

  “Oh, yes,” he said softly as she straddled him. He was glad she hadn’t made him put on a rubber tonight; you could feel so much more without one. He ran his fingers lightly down the smooth curve of her back. She shivered a little.

  Afterwards, she didn’t pull away, but sprawled down on top of him. He kissed her cheek and the very corner of her mouth. “Nice,” she said, her voice sleepy. “I just want to stay right here forever.”

  He put his arms around her. “That’s what I want, too, hon.”

  Oscar appeared in the doorway of Jens Larssen’s BOQ room. “Colonel Hexham wants to see you, sir. Right away.”

  “Does he?” Larssen had been sprawled out on the cot, reading the newest issue of Time—now getting on toward a year old—he could find. He got up in a hurry. “I’ll come.” He hadn’t been “sir” to Oscar since he’d gone on strike, not till now. Maybe that was a good sign.

  He didn’t think so when the guard escorted him back into the colonel’s office. Hexham’s toothpick was going back and forth like a metronome, his bulldog face pinched and sour. “So you won’t do any work unless you write your miserable letter, eh?” he ground out, never opening his mouth wide enough for the toothpick to fall out.

  “That’s right,” Jens said—not defiantly, but more as if stating a law of nature.

  “Then write it.” Hexham looked more unhappy than ever. He shoved a sheet of paper and a pencil across the desk at Jens.

  “Thank you, sir,” Larssen exclaimed, taking them gladly. As he started to write, he asked, “What made you change your mind?”

  “Orders.” Hexham bit the word off. So you’ve been overruled have you? Jens thought as he let the pencil race joyously across the paper. Trying to get a little of his own back, the colonel went on, “I will read that letter when you’re done with it. No last names, no other breaches of security will be permitted.”

  “That’s fine, sir. I’ll go back to Science Hall the minute I’m done here.” Larssen scrawled Love, Jens and handed the paper back to Colonel Hexham. He didn’t bother waiting for Hexham to read it, but started out to keep his end of the bargain. If you worked at it, he thought, you could make things go the way they were supposed to.

  IV

  Bobby Fiore almost wished he was still on the Lizards’ spaceship. For one thing, as far as he was concerned, the food had been better up there. For another, all the human beings on the spaceship had been aliens, guinea pigs. Plopped down in the middle of God only knew how many Chinamen, he was the alien in this refugee camp.

  His lips quirked wryly. “I’m the only guinea here, too,” he said out loud.

  Speaking English, even to himself, felt good. He didn’t get much chance to do it these days, even less than he’d had when he was up in space. Some of the Lizards there had understood him. Here nobody did; if the Lizard camp guards spoke any human language—not all of them did—it was Chinese. Only Liu Han knew any English at all.

  His face set in a frown. He hated depending on a woman; it made him feel as if he were eight years old again, and back in Pittsburgh with his mama. He couldn’t help it, though. Except for Liu Han, nobody for miles around could speak with him.

  He rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. The first thing he’d done when the Lizards dumped him here was get a razor and get rid of his beard. Not only did shaving make him stand out less from everybody else, a razor was a handy thing to have in a fight. He’d seen enough barroom brawls to know that; he’d been in a few, too.

  The funny thing was how little notice he drew. He wore wide legged pants and baggy shirts that reminded him of pajamas, the same as the Chinese (even with them, he was cold a lot of the time—and he wasn’t used to that after the spaceship, either), which helped him fit in. A lot of the locals were too busy to pay him any mind, too; they made stuff for the Lizards out of straw and wicker and leather and scrap metal and God only knew what all else, and they worked hard.

  But what really surprised him was that his looks weren’t so far out of place. Sure, he still had his big Italian nose; his eyes were too round and his hair was wavy. But eyes and hair were dark; a blond like Sam Yeager would have stood out like a sore thumb. And his olive skin wasn’t that different from the color of the people around him. As long as he stayed clean shaven, he wasn’t that remarkable.

  “I’m even tall,” he said, smiling again. Back in the States, five-eight was nothing. Even here he wasn’t huge, but for a change he was bigger than average.

  Sudden shouts not far away—even when he didn’t speak the language, Fiore knew fury and outrage when he heard them. He turned toward the sudden racket. Being taller than most let him see over the crowd. A man was running his way with a hen under each arm. Behind him, screeching like a cat with its tail stuck in a door, dashed a skinny woman. The chicken thief gained ground with every stride.

  Fiore looked down to the dirt of the street. A nice-sized rock lay there, just a couple of feet away
. He snatched it up, took a couple of shuffling steps sideways to get a clear shot at the man, and let fly.

  When he was playing second base for the Decatur Commodores, he’d had to get off accurate throws to first with a runner bearing down on him with spikes high. Here he didn’t even need to pivot. He hadn’t done any throwing since the Lizards took him up into space, but he’d played pro ball for a lot of years. The smooth motion was still there, automatic as breathing.

  The rock caught the fellow with the chickens right in the pit of the stomach. Fiore grinned; he couldn’t have placed it any better with a bull’s-eye to aim at. The would-be thief dropped the chickens and folded up like an accordion. His face was comically amazed as he fell—he had no idea what had hit him.

  The two chickens ran away, squawking. The screeching woman started kicking the fellow who’d swiped them. She might have been better advised to chase them, but she seemed to put revenge ahead of poultry. The chicken thief couldn’t even fight back. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, and had to lie there and take it.

  One of the chickens darted past Fiore. It disappeared between two huts before he could decide to grab it for himself. “Damn,” he said, kicking at the dirt. “I should’ve brought that home for Liu Han.” Somebody else—almost certainly not its proper owner—would enjoy it now.

  “Too bad,” he muttered. He’d eaten some amazing things since the Lizards stuck him here. He’d thought he knew what Chinese food was all about. After all, he’d stopped at enough chop suey joints on the endless road trips that punctuated his life. You could fill yourself up for cheap, and it was usually pretty good.

  The only familiar thing here was plain rice. No chop suey, no crunchy noodles, no little bowls of ketchup and spicy mustard. No fried shrimp, though that made sense, because he didn’t think the camp was anywhere near the ocean. Not even fried rice, for God’s sake. He wondered if the guys who ran the chop suey places were really Chinese at all.