Tilting The Balance (48 page)

“Yes,” Yeager whispered back. He had no love for the Nazis, but if they were hurting the Lizards, more power to ‘em. He hadn’t loved the Russian Reds last year, either, but he’d been damn glad they were in the fight against Hitler.

Another card flashed,
MOSCOW
. There stood Stalin, shaking hands with a factory worker in a cloth cap. Behind them, a row of almost-completed airplanes stretched as far as the eye – or the camera – could see. Yet another card said,
THE
SOVIET
UNION
STAYS
IN
THE
FIGHT
. More cheers echoed through the movie theater.

The next segment had sound; a fellow with a flat midwestern accent said, “Outside of Bloomington, the Lizards banged their snouts into tough American resistance as they tried to push north toward Chicago again.” Another picture of a wrecked Lizard tank was followed by shots of tired-looking but happy GIs around a campfire.

Yeager almost bounced out of his chair. “There’s Mutt, by God!” he told Barbara. “My old manager, I mean. Jesus, I wonder how he lived through all the fighting. He’s got sergeant’s stripes, too – did you see?”

“I wouldn’t have recognized him, Sam. He wasn’t my manager,” she answered, which made him feel foolish. She added, “I’m glad he’s all right.”

“Boy, so am I,” he said, “I’ve played for some real hard cases in my day, but he was one of the other kind, the good ones. He-” People to either side and behind made shushing noises. Yeager subsided, abashed.

The newsreel cut to a card that said,
SOMEWHERE
IN
THE
U.S.A. “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!” the announcer said.

In the black-and-white film, Franklin D. Roosevelt sat behind a desk in what looked like a hotel room. The drapes were drawn behind him, perhaps merely to give him a backdrop, perhaps to keep the Lizards from figuring out where he was by what the camera showed out the window.

Roosevelt was in his shirtsleeves, his collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He looked tired and worn, but kept the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle in his mouth. He still had cigarettes, Yeager noted without resentment:
FDR
was working hard enough to be entitled to them.

The President took the holder from his mouth, stubbed out the cigarette instead of letting it smolder to add a picturesque plume of smoke to the scene. He leaned toward the microphone in front of him. “My friends,” he said (and Yeager felt Roosevelt was speaking straight to him), “the fight goes on.”

Applause rippled through the theater, then quickly faded so people could listen to what the President had to say. Even his first half-dozen words gave Sam fresh hope.
FDR
had always had that gift. He hadn’t always made things better, but he’d always made people feel they would get better, which was half the battle by itself – it made people go to work to improve their own lot instead of moaning about how dreadful everything was.

Roosevelt said, “The enemy is on our soil and in the air above our homes. These creatures from another world believe they can frighten us into surrender by raining destruction down on our heads. As our gallant British allies did with the Germans in 1940, we shall prove them wrong.

“Every day we have more new weapons to hurl against the Lizards. Every day they have less with which to resist. Those of you who still live free, everything you do to help the war effort helps ensure that your children, and your children’s children, will grow up in freedom, too. And to those of you in occupied territory who may see this, I say:

do not collaborate with the enemy in any way. Do not work in his factories, do not grow crops for him, do nothing you can possibly avoid. Without human beings to be his slaves, sooner or later he will be helpless.

“For we have hurt him, in America, in Europe, and in Asia as well. He is not superhuman, he is merely inhuman. Our united nations – now all the nations on this planet – will surely triumph in the end. Thank you and God bless you.”

The next news segment showed ways to conserve scrap metal. It had a soundtrack, but Yeager didn’t pay much attention to it. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Just hearing FDR’s voice was a tonic. Roosevelt made you think everything would turn out okay, one way or another.

The newsreel ended with a burst of patriotic music. Sam sighed; now he’d have “The Stars and Stripes Forever” noisily going around in his head for the next several days. It happened every time he heard the song.

“Here comes the real movie,” somebody near him said as the opening credits for You’re in the Army Now filled the screen. Yeager had seen it, four or five times since it came out in 1941. New movies just weren’t getting out these days, and even if they did, they often couldn’t have been shown, because electricity was lost in so many places.

When he’d seen the antics of Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante and the horrified reactions of their superior officers before, they’d left him limp with laughter. Now that he was in the Army himself, they didn’t seem so funny any more. Soldiers like that would have endangered their buddies. He wanted to give both comics a swift kick in the rear.

Beside him, though, Barbara laughed at the capers they cut. Sam tried to enjoy the escape with her. The musical numbers helped: they reminded him this was Hollywood, not anything real. Getting angry at the actors for doing what was in the script, didn’t do him any good. Once he’d figured that out, he was able to lean back and enjoy the movie again.

The house lights came up. Barbara let out a long sigh, as If she didn’t feel like coming back to the real world. Given its complications, Yeager didn’t much blame her. But the world was there, and you had to deal with it whether you wanted to or not.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s pick up our bikes and head back to the university.”

Barbara sighed again, then yawned. “I suppose so. When we get back there, I think I want to lie down for a while. I’m so tired all the time these days.” She managed a wan smile. “I’ve heard this is what being expecting is supposed to do to you, and boy, it sure does.”

“We’ll take it nice and easy on the way back,” said Yeager, who was still inclined to treat Barbara as if she were made of cut glass ad liable to break if jostled, “you’rest, and I’ll go round up Ullhass and Ristin.”

“Okay, Sam.”

Outside the theater, a herd of bicycles covered the sidewalk and the street by the curb. Keeping an eye on them, in lieu of a sheepdog, was a large, burly fellow, with a .45 on his hip. With no gas available for private cars, bikes had become the way of choice to get around, and stealing them as big a problem as horse theft in Denver’s younger days. As many people packed a gun now as they had in the old days, too; an unarmed guard wouldn’t have done much good.

Most of Denver was laid out on a north-south, east-west grid. The downtown area, though, nestled into the angle of the Platte River and Cherry Creek, turned that grid at a forty-five-degree angle. Yeager and Barbara pedaled southeast down Sixteenth Street to Broadway, one of the main north-south thoroughfares.

The Pioneer Monument at the corner of Broadway and Colfax caught Sam’s eye. Around the fountain were three reclining bronzes: a prospector, a hunter, and a pioneer mother. At the top of the monument stood a mounted scout.

On him Yeager turned a critical gaze. “I’ve seen statues that looked realer,” he remarked, pointing.

“He does look more like an oversized mantelpiece ornament than a pioneer, doesn’t he?” Barbara said. They both laughed.

They turned left onto Colfax. Bicycles, people on foot, horse and mule-drawn wagons, and quite a few folks riding horses made traffic, if anything, dicier than it had been when cars and trucks dominated. Then everything had moved more or less at the same speed. Now the ponderous wagons were almost like ambulatory roadblocks, but you went around them at your peril, too, because a lot of them were big enough to hide what was alongside till too late.

The gilded dome of the three-story granite State Capitol on Colfax dominated the city skyline. On the west lawn of the capitol building stood a Union soldier in bronze, flanked by two Civil War brass cannon.

Yeager pointed to the statue. He said, “Going up against the Lizards, sometimes I felt the way he would if he had to fight today’s Germans or Japs with his muzzleloader and those guns.”

“There’s an unpleasant thought,” Barbara said. They pedaled along; on the east lawn of the capitol stood an Indian, also in bronze. She nodded to that statue. “I suppose he felt the same way when he had to fight the white man’s guns with nothing better than a bow and arrow.”

“Yeah, he probably did at that,” said Sam, who’d never thought to look at it from the Indian’s perspective. “He got guns of his own, though, and he hit us some pretty good licks, too – at least, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in General Custer’s boots.”

“You’re right.” But instead of cheering up, Barbara looked glum. “Even though the Indians hit us some good licks, they lost – look at the United States now, or the way it was before the Lizards came, anyway. Does that mean we’ll lose to the Lizards, even if we do hurt them in the fight?”

“I don’t know.” Sam chewed on that for the next block or so. “Not necessarily,” he said at last. “The Indians never did figure out how to make their own guns and gunpowder; they always had to get ‘em from white men.” He looked around to make sure nobody was paying undue attention to their conversation before he went on, “But we’re well on our way to making bombs to match the ones the Lizards have.”

“That’s true.” Barbara did cheer up, but only for a moment. She said, “I wonder if there’ll be anything left of the world by the time we’re done fighting the Lizards.”

The science-fiction pulps had printed plenty of stones about worlds ruined one way or another, but Sam hadn’t really thought about living (or more likely dying) in one. Slowly, he said, “If the choice is wrecking the Earth or living under the Lizards, I’d vote for wrecking it. From what Ullhass and Ristin say, the Race has kept two other sets of aliens under their thumbs for thousands of years. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”

“No, neither would I,” Barbara said. “But we sure do remind me of a couple of little kids quarreling over a toy: ‘If I can’t have it, you can’t either!’ – and smash! If we end up smashing a whole world… but what else can we do?”

“I don’t know,” Yeager answered. He did his best to think about something else. The end of the world wasn’t something he wanted to talk about with the woman he loved.

They turned right off Colfax onto University Boulevard. Traffic there was thinner and moved faster than it had in the center of town. Yeager looked around, enjoying the scenery. He’d been up at altitude now, in Wyoming and Colorado, that he could pedal along as readily as he had at sea, level Just past Exposition Avenue, he saw a couple of cyclists speeding north up University: a skinny blond fellow in civvies followed closely by a burly man in uniform with a Springfield on his back The skinny guy saw Sam and Barbara, too. He scowled as he whizzed by.

“Oh, dear,” Barbara said. “That was Jens.” She shook her head back and forth, hard enough to make her bike wobble. “He hates me now, I think.” Her voice had tears in it.

“He’s a fool if he does,” Sam said. “You had to choose somebody, honey. I wouldn’t have hated you if you’d gone back to him. I just thank God every day that you decided to pick me.” That she had still surprised and delighted him.

“I’m going to have your baby, Sam,” she said. “That changes everything. If it weren’t for the baby – oh, I don’t know what I’d do. But with things the way they are, I didn’t see that I had any other choice.”

They rode along in silence for a while. If I hadn’t knocked her up, she’d have gone back to Larssen, Sam thought. It made sense to him: she’d known Jens a lot longer, and he was, on paper, more her type. She was a brain and, while Yeager didn’t think of himself as stupid, he knew damn well he’d never make an intellectual.

Not quite out of the blue, Barbara said, “Both of you always treated me well – till now. If I’d chosen Jens, I don’t think you’d act the way he is.”

“I just said that,” he answered. “The thing of it is, I’ve had enough things go wrong in my life that I’ve sort of learned to roll with the punches. That one would have been a Joe Louis right, but I would’ve could.” He paused again; speaking ill of Larssen was liable to make Barbara spring to his defense. Picking his words carefully, he went on, “I’m not sure Jens ever had anything really tough happen to him before.”

“I think you’re right,” Barbara said. “That’s very perceptive of you. Even all his grandparents are still alive, or they were before the Lizards came – now, who can say? But he sailed through college, sailed through his graduate work, and had a job waiting for him at Berkeley when he finished. Then he got recruited for the Metallurgical Laboratory-”

“ – which was every physicist’s dream,” Yeager finished for her. “Yeah.” Not a lot of people had jobs waiting for them when they finished school, not in the Depression they didn’t. So Larssen’s family had all been healthy, too? And he’d found this wonderful girl. Maybe he’d started getting the idea he was fireproof. “Nobody’s fireproof,” Yeager muttered with the conviction of a man who’d had to hustle for work every spring training since he turned eighteen.

“What did you say, honey?” Barbara asked.

The casual endearment warmed him. He said, “I was just thinking things go wrong for everybody sooner or later.”

“Count no man lucky before the end,” Barbara said. It sounded like a quotation, but Yeager didn’t know where it was from. She continued, “I don’t think Jens has ever had to deal with anything like this before, and I don’t think he’s dealing with it very well.” Again Sam heard unshed tears. “I wish he were.”

“I know, hon. I do, too. It would make everything a lot easier.” But Sam didn’t expect things would always be easy. He was, as he’d said, ready to ride them out when they got tough. And If Jens Larssen wasn’t, that was his lookout.

Yeager carried his bicycle upstairs to the apartment he and Barbara had taken across the street from the University of Denver campus. Then he went down and carried hers up, too.