In the Balance

Fiore had more trouble explaining it than he’d expected. After a while, he figured out that she couldn’t read or write. He’d known a few ballplayers, mostly from the South, who had the same trouble, but it wasn’t something that automatically occurred to him.

Now he wished more than ever that the Signal was in English; he would have started teaching her on the spot. He thought about showing her the alphabet-despite crossed o’s and

a’s with little circles above them, the ABCs didn’t change much. But if he didn’t understand what he was reading, how was she supposed to? He gave it up as a bad job and turned to the next page.

It showed a flight of German bombers over some Russian city. In spite of the sweltering heat, she shivered and pressed herself against him. She might not know what a typewriter was for, but she recognized bombers when she saw them. Fiore clicked his tongue between his teeth. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?

They came to the article about Marshal Petain. Fiore thought he was going to have trouble putting across what Vichy France was all about, the more so as he didn’t understand all the details himself. But as soon as he managed to convey to her that it was a German puppet state, she nodded and exclaimed, “Manchukuo!”

“That’s right, the Japs have puppets, too, don’t they?” he said.

“Puppets?” She had the concept, but the word eluded her. He resorted to pantomime again until she got the idea. He hammed up his dumb show as much as he could; she always enjoyed that. she did smile now, but only for a moment. Then she said, “The scaly devils have made puppets of us all.”

He blinked; that was as serious an idea as she’d ever gotten across. She was also dead right. If it weren’t for the Lizards, he’d be… doing what? The answer he arrived at brought him up short. If it weren’t for the Lizards, all he’d be doing was trying to keep a floundering minor-league career alive, getting an off-season job, and waiting for Uncle Sam to send him a draft notice. When you stepped back and looked at it, none of that was worth writing home about.

“Maybe we were already puppets before the Lizards came,” he said harshly. His voice grew softer as he added, “if they hadn’t come, I never would have known you, so I guess I’m glad they did.”

Liu Han did not answer right away. Her face was unreadable as she studied Fiore. He flinched from that quiet scrutiny, wondering how badly he’d just stuck his foot in his mouth. He knew she’d been through hard times, and it was a lot rougher for a, woman to have to lie down with a strange man than the other way around. He suddenly wondered exactly what she thought of him. Was he something good, or simply something better than she’d known in captivity before?

How much the answer mattered surprised him. Till now, he hadn’t asked himself what Liu Han meant to him, either. Sure, getting laid was fine, and he’d found out more about that from her than he’d thought he needed to learn until the Lizards brought him up here. But there was more to it. In spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to her, she remained good people. He wanted to take care of her. But did she want him for anything more than an insurance policy?

She never did answer, not in words. She put her head on his chest, smoothing away the hairs with her hand so they wouldn’t tickle her nose. His arms closed around her back. He could have rolled over on top of her, but it didn’t cross his mind, not now. They held each other for a while.

He wondered what his mother would say if he told her he was falling in love with a Chinese girl. He hoped he’d have the chance to find out.

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 deternunation.