In the Balance (63 page)

“You say this. I not know this,” Gnik retorted. “You put on now your warm things. We take you to other Big Uglies we keep here.”

Putting on sweater, overcoat, and hat in the sweltering general store and then going outside reminded Jens of the runs from steam room to snow he’d shared with his grandfather when he was a kid. The only thing missing was his father standing out there to whack him with birch twigs. The Lizards didn’t seem invigorated when they left the store. They just seemed cold.

They took him over to the church. Lizard guards stood outside it. When they opened the closed door, he found it was heated to a more humanly tolerable level. He also found Gnik was using it as a holding pen for people who came through or near Fiat.

People sat up on the pews; turned around to look him over; and started talking, both at him and among themselves. “Look, another poor sucker.” “What did they get him for?” “What
did
they get you for, stranger?”

“Sstay—here,” one of the Lizards said to Jens, his words accented almost past comprehension. Then he left the church. As the door swung shut, Larssen saw him and his companion racing back toward the general store and what they thought of as a decent temperature.

“What
did
they get you for, stranger?” repeated the woman who’d asked the question before. She was a brassy blonde not far from Jens’ age; she might have been pretty if her hair (which showed dark roots) hadn’t been a
snaky mess and if she didn’t look as if she’d been wearing the same clothes for quite a while.

Everybody in the church had that same grubby look. The faces that turned toward Larssen were mostly clean, but a strong, almost barnyard odor in the air said no one had bathed lately. He was sure he contributed to that odor; he hadn’t seen a bar of Lifebuoy for a while himself. Without hot water, baths in winter were more likely to be next to pneumonia than to godliness.

He said, “Hello, folks. I don’t know just what they got me for. I don’t think they know, either. One of their patrols spotted me on my bicycle and pulled me in so they could ask me questions. Now they don’t want to let me go.”

“Sounds like the little bastards,” the woman said. She wore no lipstick (maybe she’d run out) but, as if to make up for it, had rouged her cheeks almost bloodred.

Her words touched off a torrent of abuse from the other involuntary churchgoers. “I’d like to squeeze their skinny necks till those horrible eyes of theirs pop,” said a man with a scraggly reddish beard.

“Put ’em in a cage and feed ’em flies,” suggested a skinny, swarthy gray-haired woman.

“I wouldn’t mind if they bombed us off the face of the Earth here, so long as the Lizards went with us,” added a stout, red-faced fellow. “The scaly sons of bitches won’t even let us go out to scrounge around for cigarettes.” Larssen missed his nicotine fix, too, but Redface sounded as though he’d forgive the Lizards anything, up to and including bombing Washington, if they’d only let him have a smoke. That struck Jens as excessive.

He gave his Pete Smith alias, and was bombarded with the others’ names. He wasn’t especially good at matching faces and monickers, and needed a while to remember that the gray-haired woman was Marie and the bleached blonde Sal, that the fellow with the red beard was Gordon and the man with the red face Rodney. Then there were also Fred and Louella and Mort and Ron and Aloysius and Henrietta to keep straight.

“Hey, we still have pews to spare,” Rodney said. “Make yourself at home, Pete.” Looking around, Larssen saw people had made nests of whatever clothes they weren’t wearing. Sleeping wrapped in an overcoat on a hard pew did not strike him as making himself at home, but what choice had he?

He asked, “Where’s the men’s room?”

Everyone laughed. Sal said, “Ain’t no such thing, or powder room neither. No running water, see? We’ve got—what do you call ’em?”

“Slop buckets,” Aloysius said. He wore a farmer’s denim overalls; by the matter-of-fact way he spoke, he was more than familiar with such appurtenances of rural life.

The buckets were set in a hall behind a door which stayed sensibly closed. Larssen did what he had to do and got out of there as fast as he could. “My father grew up with a two-seater,” he said. “I never thought I’d have to go back to one.”

“Wish it
was
a two-seater,” Aloysius said. “Dang sight easier on my backside than squattin’ over one o’ them buckets.”

“What do you folks—what do
we
, I mean—do to pass the time here?” Jens asked.

“Cuss the Lizards,” Sal answered promptly, which brought a chorus of loud, profane agreement. “Tell lies.” She batted her eyes at him. “I can make like I was in Hollywood so good I almost believe it myself.” He found that more pathetic than alluring, and wondered how long she’d been cooped up here.

Gordon said, “I’ve got a deck of cards, but poker’s no damn good without real money. I’ve won a million dollars three or four times and thrown it away again on nothing better than a pair of sevens.”

“Do we have four for bridge?” Larssen was an avid contract player. “You don’t need to have money to enjoy bridge.”

“I know how to play,” Gordon admitted. “I think poker’s a better game, though.” A couple of other people also said they played. At first, Jens was as close to ecstatic as a prisoner could be; study and work had never left him as much time for cards as he would have liked. Now he could play to his heart’s content without feeling guilty. But the men and women who didn’t know bridge looked so glum that his enthusiasm faded. Was it really fair for some people to enjoy themselves when others couldn’t?

The church door opened. A tall, thin woman with her hair pulled back in a tight bun and her face set in disapproving lines put down a box of canned goods. “Here’s your supper,” she said, each word clipped as precisely as if by scissors. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

“What’s eating her?” Larssen said.

“Eating’s the word.” Sal tossed her head in fine contempt. “She says we’re eating the people who live in this miserable little town out of house and home. As if we asked to get stuck here!”

“You notice we’re eating out of tin cans,” Rodney added, his features darkening even more with anger. “Nothing but farms around here, but they save all the good fresh food for themselves. We haven’t seen any of it, anyhow, that’s for sure.”

There weren’t enough spoons to go around; the town woman either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared that the church held a new arrival. Jens ate with somebody else’s, washed in cold water and dried on a trouser leg. Even
though he’d given up on hygiene since leaving White Sulphur Springs, that was a new low.

As he chewed on tasteless beef stew, he worried what—if anything—Chicago was eating these days. Rather more to the point, he worried about Barbara. Fiat had at the outside a couple of hundred people for the surrounding countryside to feed. Chicago had three million, and was under Lizard attack, not safely under the Lizards’ thumb.

He wished he’d never left for Washington. He’d thought he was going into the worse danger himself, not leaving his wife behind to face it. Like most Americans under the age of ninety, he’d thought of war as something that happened only to unfortunate people in far-off lands. He hadn’t thought through all the implications of its coming home to roost.

Something strange happened as he was getting to the bottom of the can of stew. A Lizard skittered into the church, peered down into the box of food the grim-faced woman had brought. The alien looked up in obvious disappointment, hissed something that could equally well have been English or its own language. Whatever it was, Larssen didn’t understand it.

The people who’d been stuck in church longer did. “Sorry,”

Marie said. “No crabapples in this batch.” The Lizard let out a desolate hiss and slunk away.

“Crabapples?” Larssen asked. “What does a Lizard want with crabapples?”

“To eat ’em,” Sal said. “You know the spiced ones in jars, the ones that go so nice with a big ham at Christmas time? The Lizards are crazy about ’em. They’d give you the shirt off their backs for a crabapple, except they mostly don’t wear shirts. But you know what I mean.”

“I guess so,” Larssen said. “Crabapples. Isn’t that a hell of a thing?”

“Gingersnaps, too,” Gordon put in.
“I
saw a couple of ’em damn near get into a fight one time over a box of gingersnaps.”

Marie said, “They look a little like gingerbread men, don’t they? They’re not all that far from the right color, and the paint they wear could do for icing, don’t you think?”

It was, without a doubt, the first time a Baptist church had ever resounded to the strains of “Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me—I’m the gingerbread man!” Laughing and cheering one another on, the prisoners made up verses of their own. Some were funny, some were obscene, some—the best ones—were both.

Jens flogged his muse, sang, “I’ve blown up your cities, and I’ve shot up your roads, and I can take your crabapples, too, I can!” He knew it wasn’t very good, but the chorus roared out: “Run, run, as fast as you can! You can’t catch me—I’m the gingerbread man!”

When at last they ran out of verses, Sal said, “I hope that sour old prune who brings us our food is listening. ’Course, she probably thinks having a good time is sinful, especially in church?”

“If she had her way, the Lizards would shoot us for having a good time in here,” Mort said.

Sal chuckled. “One thing is, the Lizards don’t pay no more attention to what she wants than we do. Other thing is, she don’t know what all goes on in here, neither.”

“Got to make our own fun,” Aloysius agreed. “Ain’t nobody gonna do it for us. Never thought how much I liked my radio till I didn’t have it no more.”

“That’s true; that’s a fact,” several people said together, as if they were echoing a preacher’s amens.

The short winter day wore on. Darkness poured through the windows and seemed to puddle in the church. Rodney walked over to the box the local woman had brought. “God damn her,” he said loudly. “She was supposed to bring us more candles.”

“Have to do without,” Marie said. “No use complaining about it. We’ll get by as long as we don’t run out of coal for the furnace.”

“And if we do,” Aloysius said, “we’ll be frozen hard enough that we won’t start to stink till they get around to buryin’ us.”

That cheerful thought pretty well halted conversation. Sitting huddled in his overcoat in the darkness, Larssen thought how important the discovery of fire had been, not just because it heated Neanderthal man’s caves but because it lit them as well. A man with a torch could go out at midnight unafraid, knowing it would show him any lurking danger. And electricity had all but banished night altogether. Now the age-old fears proved not dead but merely sleeping, ready to rouse whenever precious light was lost.

He shook his head. The best way he could think of to fight the night terrors was to sleep through them. Sleep was what day-loving animals did in the dark—stay cozy and quiet so nothing dangerous could find them. He stretched out on the hard pew. It wouldn’t be easy.

After a long spell of tossing and turning and twisting—and once almost rolling onto the floor—he managed at last to fall asleep. When he woke, he almost fell off the pew again before he remembered where he was. He looked at his wrist. The luminous dial on his watch said it was half past one.

The inside of the church was absolutely dark. It was not, however, absolutely quiet. He needed a few seconds to identify the noises floating up from a few rows behind him. When he did, he was surprised his ears didn’t glow brighter than his watch. People had no business doing that in church!

He started to sit up and see who was screwing on the pews, but paused before he’d even leaned onto one elbow. For one thing, it was too dark for
him to tell anyway. And was it any of his business? His first shock had sprung straight from the heart of his upper Midwestern Lutheran upbringing. But when he thought about it a little, he wondered how long most of these people had been cooped up together and where else they were supposed to go if they wanted to make love. He lay back down.

But sleep would not return. The whispered gasps and moans and endearments, the small creaking of the pew itself, shouldn’t have been enough to keep him awake. They weren’t, not really, not by themselves. Listening to them, though, smote him with the realization of how long it had been since he’d slept with Barbara.

He hadn’t even looked at another woman in his erratic journey back and forth across the eastern half of the United States. Pedaling a bicycle a good many hours a day, he thought wryly, was liable to take the edge off other physical urges. Besides, it was
cold
. But if just then Sal or one of the other women in here had murmured a suggestion to him, he knew he would have pulled his pants down (if not off) without a moment’s hesitation.

Then he wondered what Barbara was doing about such matters. He’d been gone a long time, a lot longer than he’d thought when he set out in: the late, lamented Plymouth. She might think he was dead. (For that matter, she might be dead herself, but his mind refused to dwell on that).

He’d never imagined he needed to worry about whether she’d stay faithful. But then, he’d never thought he needed to worry about whether he would, either. The middle of the night on a cold, hard pew was hardly the time or place for such thoughts. That didn’t keep him from having them.

It did keep him from going back to sleep for a long, long lime.

“So,” Zolraag said. Moishe Russie knew the Lizard’s accent was the main thing that stretched the word into a hiss, but the knowledge didn’t make it sound any less menacing. The governor went on, “So,
Herr
Russie, you will no longer for us speak on the radio? This is your measure of—what is the Deutsch word—gratitude, is that it?”

“Gratitude is the word, yes, Excellency,” Russie said, sighing. He’d known this day was coming. Now it had arrived. “Excellency, not a Jew in Warsaw is ungrateful that the Race delivered us from the Germans. Had you not come when you did, there might be no Jews left in Warsaw. So I have said on the radio for your benefit. So much I would say again.”