In the Balance (57 page)

Then he wondered how he’d say “I love you” to Liu Han. He didn’t know the Chinese for it, she didn’t know the English, and it was one place where the Lizards’ language helped not at all. He patted her bare shoulder. One way or another, he’d get the idea across.

13

The latest storm had finally blown out of Chicago leaving a fine dusting of snow on the ground. The Lizards stared at it in swivel-eyed wonder as Sam Yeager marched them along toward the Metallurgical Laboratory. He was comfortable enough in a wool sweater, but they shivered in too-large peacoats scrounged from the Great Lakes Naval Base. Their breath, hotter than his, made puffs of steam in the crisp air.

In spite of intermittent Lizard air raids, a couple of students were playing catch on the dying grass by the walk.
Doing their best to pretend everything’s normal
, Yeager thought. He envied them their determination

As athletes, they weren’t much. One of them flat-out missed the ball when it came to him. It skidded through the slush and stopped almost at Yeager’s feet. He set down the rifle he was still required to carry scooped up the baseball and fired it back to the student who’d thrown it. If the kid hadn’t caught it, it would have hit him right in the middle of the chest. He stared at Yeager, as if to say
Who is this old guy?
Yeager just grinned, picked up his piece, and started shepherding the Lizards down the walk again.

Ristin said, “You”—he followed it with a Lizard word Yeager didn’t know—“very well.”

As best he could, Yeager echoed the croaked word. “Not understanding,” he added in the Lizards’ language. Ristin obligingly gestured while repeating the word. A light went on in Yeager’s head. He dropped back into English. “Oh, you mean
throw.”
He made as if to throw again, this time without a baseball. “Throw.”

“Ssrow,” Ristin agreed. He tried English himself: “You—ssrow—good.”

“Thanks,” Yeager said, and let it go at that. How was he supposed to explain to an alien that he’d made a living (not much of a living, sometimes, but he’d never gone hungry) because he could throw and hit a baseball? If he didn’t have a better arm than a couple of half-assed college kids, he’d better leave town.

It wasn’t much warmer inside Eckhart Hall than it had been outside. Heat was as hard to come by as electricity these days. Army engineers did a marvelous job of repairing bomb damage, but the Lizards could wreck things faster than they could fix them. Since the elevator wasn’t running, Yeager took Ristin and Ullhass up the stairs to Enrico Fermi’s office. He didn’t know about them, but the exercise made him warmer.

Fermi bounced up out of his chair when Yeager walked the Lizards through his open door. “So good to see you and your friends here,” he said effusively. Yeager nodded, hiding a smile at the physicist’s heavy accent. He would have bet Bobby Fiore’s father sounded the same way.

Fermi had a glass coffeepot set up above a tin of canned heat. Heavy china mugs, cafeteria-style, stood beside the Sterno. The physicist gestured for Yeager to take one. “Thank you, sir,” Yeager said. He hadn’t noticed little things like cigarettes and coffee until he couldn’t get them whenever he wanted. Scarcity made them precious—and besides, the coffee was hot.

He glanced at Ullhass and Ristin. They’d tried coffee, too, but found it too bitter to stand. That was their tough luck, he thought; it cut them off from something that could heat them up from the inside out. He took another sip from his cup, felt his eyes opening wider. Coffee hit harder when you couldn’t have it every day. So did tobacco; he remembered how Barbara Larssen had reacted to her first smoke in a while.

At Fermi’s gesture, the Lizards perched themselves on a couple of chairs in front of the desk. Their feet barely touched the ground; human furniture was too big for them. Yeager sat down too, off to one side, his Springfield resting in his lap. He was still on guard duty, though that wasn’t his chief reason for being here. Enrico Fermi had more important things to do than learning the Lizards’ language, so Yeager interpreted whenever Ristin and Ullhass ran out of English.

Till the past few weeks, everything he knew about nuclear physics had come from the pages of
Astounding
. If stories like “Blowups Happen” and “Nerves” hadn’t had good science in them as well as good fiction, he would have been no use to Fermi—not because he couldn’t understand the Lizards, but because he wouldn’t have been able to understand the physicist.

Fermi asked the Lizards, “How long have your people known how to control and release the energy contained within the atomic nucleus?”

Yeager translated. He knew he didn’t do perfectly for
nucleus;
the word he used actually meant something closer to
center
. But the Lizards understood him well enough. They chattered back and forth between themselves for a few seconds before Ullhass said, “Somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand years, we think.”

Ristin added, “That’s our years, of course. Yours are about twice as long.”

Yeager did the arithmetic in his head. Even after dividing by two, it was still an ungodly long time. If Ristin and Ullhass were telling the truth, the Lizards had known about atomic power since humanity’s newest superweapon was fire against cave bears. If—He turned to Fermi. “Do you believe them, Professor?”

“Let me say that I know of no reason for them to lie,” Fermi answered. He looked like the fellow you’d find behind the counter of a delicatessen in half the medium-sized towns in the United States. He sounded like him, too, until you listened to what he had to say. Now he went on, “I think if we had had this power for so long, we would have accomplished more with it than they have.”

What the Lizards
had
done looked like plenty to Yeager. They’d crossed space to land on Earth, they’d kicked the tar out of every army they’d come up against, and they’d blown Berlin and Washington clean off the map. What did Fermi want, egg in his beer?

The physicist gave his attention back to the aliens. “How do you proceed in separating the useful
U-235
from the much more abundant U-238?” In one form or another, he’d been asking that same question since he first set eyes on the Lizards.

As usual, they left him frustrated. Ullhass spread his clawed hands in a very human-seeming gesture of frustration. “You keep pestering us about this. We have told you before—we are soldiers. We do not know all the fine details of our technology.”

This time, Fermi turned to Yeager. “Can you credit what they say?”

Not for the first time, Yeager wondered why the devil the experts were asking him questions. All at once, though, he realized he too was an expert of sorts: an expert on the Lizards. That made him chuckle; the only thing on which he’d been an expert before was hitting the cutoff man. He certainly hadn’t been an expert at hitting a curve ball, or he’d have played at fields a lot fancier than the ones in the Three-I League.

He still didn’t believe he had much expertise, but he did know more about the Lizards than most people. Mixing what he did know with his common sense (which, except for keeping him at a baseball career, had always been pretty good), he answered, “Professor, I think maybe I do believe them. You yank a couple of privates out of the American army and they might not be able to tell you everything you want to know about how an electrical generator works.”

Fermi’s sigh was melodramatic.
“Si
, this may be so. And yet I have learned a great deal from what they do know: they take for granted so many things which are for us on the cutting edge of physics—or beyond it. Just
by examining what they know ‘of course’ to be true, we have tremendously refined our own lines of investigation. This will help us a great deal when we relocate our program.”

“I’m glad you’ve—” Yeager broke off. “When you what?”

“When we move away from here,” Fermi said. Sadness filled his liquid brown eyes. “It will be very hard, this I know. But how are we to do physics in a city, where we have not even electricity most of the day? How are we to proceed when the Lizards may bomb us at any time, may even capture Chicago before long? The line, I hear, is nearly to Aurora now. Under these circumstances, what is there to do but go?”

“Where will you go to?” Yeager asked.

“It is not yet decided. We will leave the city by ship, surely—much the safest way to go, as your little friends”—Fermi nodded toward Ullhass and Ristin—“do not seem to have grasped the importance of travel by water on this world. But where we shall try to set down new roots, that is still a matter for debate.”

Yeager looked at the Lizards, too. “Are you going to want to take them with you?” he asked. If the answer was yes, he’d have to figure out whether he should try to finagle a way to come, too. He supposed he should; he couldn’t think of any way in which he’d be more useful to the war effort.

But he seemed to have taken Fermi by surprise. The physicist rubbed his chin. Like most men’s in Chicago, it was poorly shaven and had a couple of nicks; no new razor blades had made it into town for a long time. Yeager felt smug for using a straight razor, which required only stropping to keep its edge. That also endeared him to his sergeant, who was an old-time graduate of the cleanliness-is-one-step-ahead-of-godliness school.

After a moment, Fermi said, “It may well be that we shall.” He glanced at Yeager. In a lot of science fiction, scientists were supposed to be so involved in research that they took no notice of the world around them. Yeager’s little while at the University of Chicago had shown him it didn’t usually work that way in real life. Now Fermi confirmed that yet again, saying, “This affects you, no?”

“This affects me, yes,” Yeager said.

“We do not leave tomorrow, or even the day after,” Fermi said. “You will have time to make whatever arrangements you must. Ah! Would you like me to send a request for your services to your commanding officer? This will help you with your military formalities, not so?”

“Professor, if you’d do that, it would save me from a lot of red tape,” Yeager said.

“I will see to it.” To make sure he did see to it, Fermi jotted a note to himself. His head might have been in the clouds much of the time, but his
feet were firmly on the ground. He also shifted gears as smoothly as a chauffeur. “At our last session, Ullhass was telling what he knew of the cooling systems employed by the Lizards’ atomic power plants. Perhaps he will elaborate a little more on these.” His poised his pencil above a fresh sheet of paper. Questions flew, one after another.

Finally Yeager had to call time. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I’ve got to take our friends here on to their next appointment.”

“Sì, sì,”
Fermi said. “I understand. You do what you must do, Mr. Yeager. You have been helpful to us here. I want you to know that, and know you will be very welcome to come with us as we depart to—who knows where we are to depart to?”

“Thank you, sir. That means a lot to me.” A proud smile stretched itself across Yeager’s face. He gave Ullhass and Ristin a grateful look—if it hadn’t been for them, he’d have been reading about scientists for the rest of his life without ever meeting one, let alone being useful to one. He got up, gestured with the rifle that had lain half-forgotten across his lap. “Come on, you two. Let’s go. Time for us to be on our way.”

One nice thing about the Lizards was that, unlike most people he knew, they didn’t give him any back talk. Ullhass said, “It shall be done, superior sir,” and that was that. They preceded him out the door. He’d long since been convinced that his standing orders never to let them get behind him were foolish, but he obeyed anyhow. Army orders were like baseball fundamentals: you couldn’t go far wrong with them and you couldn’t do anything right without them.

He almost bumped into Andy Reilly, the custodian, when he came out the door, and he and his charges hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps down the hall when someone else called, “Hi, Sam!”

He couldn’t just turn around; that would have put the Lizards at his back. So he went around behind them before he answered, “Hi, Barbara. What are you doing up here?”