In the Balance (18 page)

The long barrel lifted a degree or two. A crane was already lifting the expended shell casing out Of the breech. “Clear be-low!” the crane operator shouted. Men scattered. The casing thudded to the ground beside the gun carriage. That wasn’t the way the manuals said to get rid of such casings, but it was the fastest way. The crane swung to pick up a new shell.

Karl Becker kept an eye on his watch. Twenty-nine minutes after Dora spoke for the first time, the great gun spoke again.

Krefak felt the heat from the burning
67th Emperor Sohrheb
, though his missile battery was posted a good ways away from the luckless starship. He was heartily glad of that; the blast when the ship went up had taken out several units closer to it.

Krefak also felt the heat from his own commander, who’d waxed eloquent over his failure to shoot down, the Big Uglies’ missile. He’d done everything right; he knew he had. The battery had intercepted the Tosevite projectile at least twice. Tapes from the radars proved it. But how was he supposed to say so, with only smoking rubble left where a proud starship had stood mere heartbeats before?

One of the males at a radar screen let out a frightened hiss. “The eggless creatures launched another one!” he exclaimed.

Krefak gaped in shocked surprise. Once was catastrophe enough, but twice—He couldn’t imagine twice. He didn’t
want
to imagine twice. His voice rose to a most-unofficerlike screech:

“Shoot it down!”

Roars from the launchers showed him that the computers hadn’t waited for his orders. He ran, to the screen, watched the missiles fly. As they had before, they went straight to the mark, exploded … and were gone. So far as the Tosevite missile was concerned, they might as well never have been fired. It proceeded inexorably on its ordained course.

Below the radar screen that marked its track through the air was another that evaluated the ground target at which it was aimed. “No,” he said softly. “By the Emperors, launch more missiles!”

“The battery has expended all the ones we had on launchers, superior sir,” the male answered helplessly. “More are coming.” Then he too took a look at where the Tosevite missile was heading. “Not the
56th Emperor Jossano.”
His eye turrets quivered with fright as he stared at Krefak.

“Yes, with most of our nuclear weapons on board. To treachery with colonizing this stinking planet; we should have sterilized it to be rid of the Tosevites once and for all. We—” His voice was lost in the roar of the exploding missile, and in the much, much bigger roar that subsumed it.

The
56th Emperor Jossano
went up in the same sort of blast as had taken the
67th Emperor Sohrheb
. The fission and fusion weapons were stored in the very heart of the ship, in a strongly armored chamber. It did not save them. As the
56th Emperor Jossano
blew to pieces and burned, the explosives that triggered the rapid joining of precisely machined chunks of plutonium began going off, as if they were rounds of ammunition in a flaming tank.

The bombs themselves did not go off; the triggering charges did not ignite in the precise order or at the precise rate that required. But the casings were wrecked, the chunks of plutonium warped out of shape and broken and, indeed, scattered over a goodly part of the Tosevite landscape as explosion after explosion wracked the
56th Emperor Jossano
.

They were very likely the most valuable pieces of metal on the face of the Earth, or would have been had any human being known they were there or what to do with them. No human being did, not then.

More screams of glee rose from Dora’s firing crew. They did not waste motion dancing at the sight of this new flame on the distant horizon, but immediately set to work reloading the 80-centimeter cannon.

Michael Arenswald bellowed in Becker’s ear. “Six! Didn’t I tell you we’d get off six?”

“We’ve been lucky twice,” Becker said. “That’s more than I expected right there. Maybe we’ll go again—third time’s the charm, they say.”

For an instant too long, he thought the scream in the sky was part of the way his head rang after the second detonation of the monster gun. The
locomotive had just finished hauling Dora to its next marked firing position. Becker started over to the gun carriage to see if it had stayed level yet again.

The first bomb blast, a few meters behind him, hurled him facefirst into that great mountain of metal. He felt things break—his nose, a cheekbone, several ribs, a hip. He opened his mouth to scream. Another bomb went off, this one even closer.

Jens Larssen’s apartment lay a few blocks west of the Union Stockyards. The neighborhood wasn’t much, but he’d still been surprised at how cheap he got the place. The incessant Chicago wind came from the west that day. A couple of days later, it started blowing off Lake Michigan, and he understood. But it was too late by then—he’d already signed the lease.

The wind blew off the lake the day his wife, Barbara, got into town, too. He still remembered the way her eyes got wide. She put the smell into one raised eyebrow and four words: “Essence of terrified cow.”

The wind was blowing off the lake tonight, but Larssen hardly noticed the rich manure stink. He could smell his own fear, and Barbara’s. Lizard planes were over Chicago again. He’d listened to Edward R. Marrow on crackling shortwave from England, listened to that deep, raspy voice and its trademark opening: “This is London.” Such was Murrow’s magic that he’d imagined he understood what being a Londoner in the Blitz was like. Now he knew better.

More planes screeched past; more bombs fell, some, by the way the windows rattled, quite close by. He clung to Barbara, and she to him, under the kitchen table. Chicago had no shelters. “Hitting the stockyards again,” she said into his ear.

He nodded. “Anything with rails.” The Lizards were inhumanly methodical about pasting transportation hubs, and Chicago was nothing else but. It was also close to the landing zone they’d carved out for themselves in downstate Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky. Thanks to both those things, the town was taking a heavy pounding.

Only a couple of candles lit the one-bedroom apartment. Their light did not get past the blankets tacked up to serve as blackout curtains. The blankets would not have contained electric lights, but the power had been off more often than it was on the past few days. It made Larssen glad for once that he had only an old-fashioned icebox; not a fancy electric refrigerator. As long as the ice man kept coming around—as long as the ice man still had ice—his food would stay fresh.

Antiaircraft guns, pitifully few and pitifully ineffective, added their barks to the cacophony. Shrapnel pattered down on rooftops like hot metal
hail. Air-raid sirens wailed, lost souls in the night.

After a while, Larssen noticed he heard no more Lizard planes, though the rest of the fireworks display continued as gunners blazed away at their imaginations. “I think it’s over,” he said.

“This time,” Barbara answered. He felt her tremble in his arms; for that matter, he felt pretty shaky himself. One by one, sirens fell silent. His wife went on, “I don’t know how much more of this I can handle.” Like a tight stretched wire, her voice vibrated with hidden stress.

“The English stuck it out,” he said, remembering Murrow again.

“God knows how,” she said. “I don’t.” She squeezed him even tighter than she had when the bombs were falling.

Being a thoroughly rational young man, he opened his mouth to explain to her how bad a beating London had taken, and for how long, and how the Lizards seemed, for the moment anyhow, to be much more selective than the Nazis about hitting civilian targets. But however thoroughly rational he was, the springy firmness of her body locked against his reminded him that he was young. Instead of explaining, he kissed her.

Her mouth came open against his; she moaned a little, deep in her throat, whether from fear or desire or both commingled he never knew. She pressed the warm palm of her hand against his hair. He rolled on top of her, careful even then not to knock his head on the underside of the table. When at last their kiss broke, he whispered, “Shall we go in the bedroom?”

“No,” she said, startling him. Then she giggled. “Let’s do it right here, on the floor. It’ll remind me of those times in the backseat of your old Chevy.”

“All right,” he said, by then too eager to care much where. He shifted his weight. “Raise up, just a little.” When she moved, he undid the buttons on the back of her blouse and unhooked her bra with one hand. He hadn’t tried that since they were married, but the ease with which he accomplished it said his hand remembered the backseat of the old Chevy, too.

He tossed the cotton blouse and bra aside. Presently, he said, “Lift up again.” He slowly slid her panties down her legs. Instead of pulling off her skirt, he hiked it up. That made her laugh again. She kissed him, long and slow. His hands wandered where they would.

So did hers, unbuckling his belt, opening his trouser button, and, with several delicious pauses, lowering his zipper. He yanked down his pants and jockey shorts, just far enough. They were both laughing by then. Laughing still, he plunged into her, leaving behind for a little while the terror outside the blacked-out apartment.

“I should have taken off my shirt,” he said when they were through. “Now it’s all sweaty.”

“It? What about me?” Barbara brought both hands up to his chest, made
as if to push him vertically away from her. He raised up on his elbows and knees—and this time did catch the back of his head on the bottom of the kitchen table, hard enough to see stars. He swore, first in English, then in the fragments of Norwegian he’d picked up from his grandfather.

Barbara, whose maiden name was Baker and who had a couple of several-times-great-grandfathers who’d fought in the Revolution, always thought that was the funniest thing in the world. “You’re in no position to laugh now, wench,” he said, and tickled her conveniently bare ribs. The linoleum made moist squelching noises under her backside as she tried to wriggle away. That set him laughing, too. He grabbed her. They might have begun again, but the telephone chose that moment to ring.

Larssen jerked up in surprise—he hadn’t thought the phone was working—and, gave himself another crack in the head. This time he started out swearing in Norwegian. Trousers flopping around his ankles, he hobbled into the bedroom. “Hello?” he growled, annoyed as if it were the caller’s fault he’d knocked his brains loose.

“That is you, Jens? You are all right, you and Barbara?”

The accented voice on the other end of the line threw ice water on his steam. “Yes, Dr. Fermi,” he said, and made a hasty grab for his pants. Of course Fermi could not see him, but he was embarrassed even to be talking to the Italian physicist, a dignified man if ever there was one, with trousers at half-mast. “We came through safe again, thank you.”

“Safe?” Fermi echoed bitterly. “This is a word without meaning in the world today.
I thought it had one when Laura and I
came here four years ago, but I am wrong. But never mind that. Here is the reason I call: Szilard says—and he, is right—we must all meet tomorrow, and tomorrow early. Seven o’clock. He would say six if he could.”

“I’ll be there,” Larssen promised. “What’s up?”

“The Lizards, they are moving toward Chicago.”

The words seemed to hang on the wire. “But they can’t,” Jens said, though he knew perfectly well they could. What the devil was there to stop them?

Fermi understood what be meant. “You are right—they must not. If they come here, everything we do since we begin is lost. Too much time lost, time we have not to waste even against Germany, to say nothing of these creatures.”

“Germany.” Larssen kept his voice flat. He’d been relieved past all measure when the atomic bomb that exploded above Chicago proved not to have a swastika painted on its casing. He once more had no idea how far along the Nazis were on their own bomb program. It would be a hell of a note, though, for humanity to have to depend on them alone for a weapon with which to do the Lizards some real damage. He wondered if he would
sooner see Earth conquered than Adolf Hitler its savior.
Just maybe
, he thought. On the line, Fermi cleared his throat. That brought Larssen back to the here-and-now. “I’ll be there,” he said again.

“Good,” Fermi said. “I go, then—many others to call while phones are working. I see you in the morning.” He hung up without saying good-bye. Larssen sat down on the bed, thinking hard. His pants slid back down to his ankles. He didn’t notice.

His wife walked into the bedroom. She carried a candle to light her way. Outside, fire-engine sirens rang through the night as their crews fought to douse the fires the Lizards had started. “What’s up?” Barbara asked. She tossed her blouse and underwear into the wickerwork laundry hamper.

“Big meeting tomorrow,” he answered, then repeated Fermi’s grim news.

“That’s not good,” she said. She had no real notion of what he was working on under Stagg Field; she’d been studying medieval English literature when they met at Berkeley. But she knew the project was important. She asked, “How are we going to stop them?”

“You come up with the answer to that one and you win the sixty-four dollars.”

She smiled at that, then set the candle in a silver stick—a wedding present Larssen had never thought they’d use—on top of the dresser. With both hands, she took off her skirt and threw it at the hamper. She glanced over to him. “You still haven’t pulled up your pants.”

“I did so,” he said, then had to add lamely, “They must have fallen down again.”

“Well, shall I put on a nightgown now, or not?”

He considered. The meeting in the morning was early, but if he poured down enough coffee, he’d get through it okay … and Barbara, naked in the candlelight, made him want to forget tomorrow anyhow. “Not,” he said.

“Good. This time, take your shirt off, too.”

Nothing was running the next morning when Larssen headed for the University of Chicago, not the buses, not the elevated, nothing. Only a few cars crawled cautiously along the street, inhibited not only by the gas shortage but also now by the risk of rubble.