Upsetting the Balance (39 page)

She expected Bagnall to take all he could get from the shameless sniper. For one thing, men were like that. For another, he was an Englishman, therefore a capitalist, therefore an exploiter. But he broke the kiss as soon as he decently could, and looked as embarrassed about it as Ludmila felt.

She scratched her head. Bagnall wasn’t behaving the way school had taught her Englishmen were supposed to behave. What did that say about her lessons? She didn’t really know, but the more you looked at things, the more complicated they got.

Jens Larssen pedaled wearily into Hanford, Washington. He stopped in the middle of the main street. “God, what a dump,” he muttered. He could see why the physicists back at the Met Lab had been hot for the place. He could hear the murmur and splash of the Columbia as it flowed by next to the town. It was all the river anybody could ask for, and he knew what the Mississippi was like.

Not only that, the place already had a railroad line coming into it from the north: the train station was much the biggest building in town. No tracks came out of Hanford going south; it was the end of the line.
In more ways than one,
Jens thought. But the railroad line was a point in favor of the place. With it, you could conveniently move stuff in and out. Without it, that wouldn’t have been so easy.

River and railroad: two big pluses. Everything else, as far as Jens could see, was a minus. Hanford couldn’t have held more than a few hundred people. Any major industrial activity here would stand out like a sore thumb. Hanford didn’t have any major industries. Just to make up for it, Hanford didn’t have any minor industries, either. If it suddenly developed some, the Lizards couldn’t help but notice.

Jens looked around. Both the pile and the plant to get the plutonium out of its fuel elements would have to go underground; there were no buildings big enough to conceal them. Could you do that much digging and keep it a secret? He had his doubts.

“It’s too damn little,” he said, as if someone were arguing with him. The only reason Hanford existed was to act as a market town for the nearby farmers. Some of the fields to the north, south, and west were still green; more, thanks to the job the Lizards had done on pumping stations, lay brown and dry under the sun.

Besides the railhead, Hanford’s amenities were of the basic sort: a couple of general stores (one of them now closed), a gas station (also closed), a school (it being summer vacation, Jens couldn’t tell if that was closed or not), and a doctor’s office. The doctor’s office was open; Jens saw a pregnant woman walk into it.

He scratched absently at a flake of peeling skin on his wrist. Back in Ogden, Utah, that doctor—Sharp, that was his name—had said some small-town doc might have some sulfa to give him to get rid of the clap. He’d tried once or twice on his way here, but no sawbones had had any, or been willing to use it on somebody just passing through. As long as he was here, he figured he might as well ask this one, too. If he heard no, he heard no. He’d heard it before.

He walked his bike over in front of the doctor’s office, put down the kickstand with his foot. On second thought, he shook his head and carried the bike upstairs. If a local absconded with it, everyone else would pretend he hadn’t seen a thing. Jens had grown up in a small town. He knew what they were like.

The waiting room was clean and pleasant. All the magazines were more than a year old, but that might have been true even if the Lizards hadn’t come. Behind the desk sat a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman in a gingham dress. If the arrival of an unkempt, rifle-toting, bike-hauling stranger fazed her, she didn’t show it. “Good morning, sir,” she said. “Dr. Henry will be able to see you soon.”

“Okay, thanks.” Jens sat down. He hadn’t paid any attention to the name on the sign outside. As long as it had M.D. after it, that would do. He leafed through a
Life
with pictures of Germans retreating through the snow of the fierce Russian winter. Worse things than Nazis were loose in the world these days, even if that hadn’t seemed possible in the early days of 1942.

“Uh, sir,” the receptionist asked, “what’s your name?” Larssen gave it, then spelled it for good measure. People always fouled up either his first name or his last one, sometimes both of them.

The door by the receptionist opened. The pregnant woman came out. Except for being big as a blimp, she looked fine. She was smiling, too, so the doc had probably told her she was fine.

A woman a few years younger than the receptionist poked her head out the door. “Come in, Mr. uh, Larssen,” she said. She wore a frayed but clean white coat and had a stethoscope slung round her neck.

Jens went into the room to which she waved him. She weighed him, stuck a blood-pressure cuff on his arm, and asked him what his trouble was. He felt his ears get hot. “I’d sooner talk about that with the doctor,” he mumbled.

She raised an eyebrow. She had a long, rather horsey face, and wore her dark hair pulled back from it and caught behind in a short ponytail. “I
am
the doctor,” she said. “I’m Marjorie Henry. Did you think I was the nurse?” By the way she asked the question, a lot of people over a lot of years had thought she was the nurse.

“Oh,” Jens said, embarrassed now for a different reason. “I beg your pardon.” That new embarrassment was piled on top of the old one, which hadn’t gone away. How was he supposed to tell a woman, even a woman doctor, he had the clap? He wished to Jesus he’d read the sign out front. Gonorrhea wouldn’t kill you, and he could have looked for a different doctor to do something about it.

“What seems to be the trouble?” Dr. Henry repeated. When Larssen didn’t answer, that eyebrow went up again. “I assure you, Mr. Larssen, whatever it is, I’ve probably seen it and dealt with it before. And if I haven’t seen it before, I’ll just send you on your way, because with things as they are I won’t be able to do anything about it anyhow.”

She had a no-nonsense attitude Jens liked. That made things easier, but not enough. “I, uh, that is, well, I—” He gave up. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t make himself say it.

Dr. Henry got up and shut the door to her office. “There. Now Beulah can’t hear,” she said. “Mr. Larssen, am I to infer from this hemming and hawing that you are suffering from a venereal disease?” He gulped and nodded. She nodded, too, briskly. “Very good. Do you know which disease you are suffering from?”

“Gonorrhea,” he whispered, looking down at his Army boots. Of all the words he’d never imagined saying to a woman, that one was high on the list. Gathering courage, he went on, “I’ve, uh, heard that sulfa can cure it, but no doc I’ve talked to has had any to spare.”

“No one has anything to spare any more,” she said. “But you’re lucky here. Just before the Lizards came, I received a large shipment of sulfanilamide. I expect I can spare you a few grams. Believe me, actually being able to attack germs rather than just defending against them is quite an enjoyable sensation.”

“You really will give me some sulfa?” he said, happy and disbelieving at the same time. “That’s great!” His opinion of Hanford underwent a quick 180-degree shift.
Great town, friendly people,
he thought.

Dr. Henry unlocked a drawer full of medications. As she’d said, she had several large jars of sulfanilamide tablets in there. The tablets were small and yellowish-white. She said, “Take three of these five times a day your first day with them, four times a day the second day, three times a day the third day, and twice a day after that until you’ve taken them all. Do you have something to carry them in? I have plenty of pills, but I’m desperately short on jars and bottles and vials.”

“Here, I’ve got a spare sock,” he said, digging it out of his pack. Dr. Henry started to laugh, but she filled the sock full of pills. There were an awful lot of them. Larssen didn’t care. He would have swallowed a bowling ball if he could have got rid of the clap that way. When the doctor was done counting pills, he asked her, “What do I owe you?”

She pursed her lips. “Mr. Larssen, these days you can’t really buy medicine for money. You can still buy other things, though, so money has some use . . . A fair price, I’d say, would be about two hundred dollars. If you don’t have that, and you probably don’t—”

Jens reached into a hip pocket and pulled out a roll of bills fat enough to choke a horse. Dr. Henry’s eyes widened as he started peeling off twenties. “Here you go,” he said. “You may just be surprised about medicine, too.”

“Really?” she said. “Who are you, anyway?”

Who was that masked man?
ran through his head. It was a fair question, though. People who looked like unshaven bums didn’t often go around with enough loot to make them seem like apprentice John Dillingers. And people who did go around with that kind of loot probably weren’t in the habit of dropping in on small-town doctors to get their social diseases treated.

Instead of answering in words, he took out the fancy letter with which General Groves had equipped him and handed it to her. She carefully read it through, gave it back to him. “Where are you going, Mr. no, Dr. Larssen, on this important government mission of yours?” she asked. She didn’t add,
And where did you pick up the clap along the way?
—just as well, too, since he’d picked it up twice.

He grinned at her. “As a matter of fact, I was coming here. Now I have to get my bicycle out of your waiting room and head on back to make my report.”

“You were coming here? To Hanford?” Marjorie Henry burst out laughing. “Excuse me, Dr. Larssen, but what on earth does Hanford have that you couldn’t get ten times as much of somewhere—anywhere—else?”

“Water. Space. Privacy,” he answered. Those were absolutely the only things Hanford had going for it, with the possible exception of Dr. Henry, but Larssen had already changed his mind about the dreadful review he’d first thought he would give to the place.

“Yes, we have those things,” Dr. Henry admitted. “Why are they important enough for the government to send someone out looking for them?”

“I’m sorry; I really can’t tell you that.” Jens started to regret pulling out the letter. He said, “Please don’t spread it around, either. In fact, I’d be grateful if you just told Beulah—did I get her name right?—I won the money in a poker game or something like that.”

“All right,” she said. “I can do that. You can’t afford to gossip as a small-town doctor, anyway. If you do, you lose all your patients after about the first week. I will ask one question, though: are you going to put a hospital in here? You may be Dr. Larssen, but I don’t think you’re an M.D.”

“I’m not, and no, that’s not what’s planned,” Jens said, and let it go at that. Telling her what kind of doctorate he had might have told her other things, too, things she didn’t need to know. Now that he was here, security seemed to matter again. He hadn’t worried much about it while he was on the road.

Dr. Henry was visibly disappointed, but didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe she’d really meant what she said about not gossiping. She stuck out her hand and shook his, man-fashion. “Good luck to you,” she said. “I hope the sulfanilamide tablets do as well for you as they commonly do. I also hope you won’t need such medications again.” Before he could decide if that was patronizing, or get mad about it if it was, she went on, “Will we see you again in Hanford, then?”

“You may very well,” he answered. That didn’t seem to make her angry. In spite of her jab, she was a doctor, and didn’t think of gonorrhea as the end of the world. He nodded to her, opened the door, and walked down the hall to the waiting room.

Dr. Henry called after him, “Mr. Larssen has paid me for the visit, Beulah.” Jens nodded again, this time to himself. If she remembered to call him Mr. Larssen in public, she would probably remember not to talk about his letter. He could hope so, anyhow.

In the waiting room sat another pregnant woman, this one less rotund than the one who’d preceded Larssen, and a farmer with a hand wrapped in a blood-soaked rag. They both gave Jens a curious look as he recovered his bicycle. Beulah said, “Go on in, George. The doctor will clean that out and sew it up for you.”

“She got any o’ that tetanus stuff left?” George asked as he rose from his chair.

Jens didn’t find out whether or not Dr. Henry had antitetanus serum. He walked out of her office, lugging the bicycle. Sure enough, the sign outside gave her name in good-sized letters; he just hadn’t noticed. If he had, he wouldn’t have gone in, and he wouldn’t have got the sulfa tablets. Sometimes ignorance worked out pretty well.

He swung onto the bike and began to pedal, southbound now. Dr. Henry was also the first woman he’d met in a long time who hadn’t screwed him, one way or another. She knew what her job was and she went out and did it without any fuss or feathers.

“If she’d been waiting for me, she’d have
waited,
by Jesus,” Jens said as he rolled out of Hanford. “She wouldn’t have fallen into bed with some lousy ballplayer.” When he got back to Denver, he’d have some choice things to say to Barbara, and if Sam Yeager didn’t like it, well, there were ways to deal with Sam Yeager, and with Barbara, too.

He reached around behind his back and patted the wooden stock of his Springfield. Then he bent low over the bicycle handlebars and started pumping hard. Colorado was still a long way away, but he could hardly wait to get back.

Lugging a heavy picnic basket uphill on a hiking trail in Arkansas summer wasn’t Sam Yeager’s idea of fun. But getting away from the Army and Navy General Hospital for a while—to say nothing of getting away from the Lizards—was worth some discomfort. And he wasn’t about to let Barbara carry the picnic basket, not when her belly was starting to bulge.

She glanced over at him. “You’re red as a beet, Sam,” she said. “Really, nothing will happen if I take that for a few minutes. Just because I’m expecting doesn’t mean I’m made out of cut glass. I won’t break.”

“No,” Yeager answered stubbornly. “I’m all right.” The path rounded a corner. The pines to either side opened out onto a grassy meadow. “Besides,” he went on with a grin not altogether free of relief, “this looks like a perfect spot.”