In the Balance

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.”