In the Balance

Finally Yeager had to call time. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I’ve got to take our friends here on to their next appointment.”

“Si, si,” Fermi said. “I understand. You do what you must do, Mr. Yeager. You have been helpful to us here. I want you to know that, and know you will be very welcome to come with us as we depart to-who knows where we are to depart to?”

“Thank you, sir. That means a lot to me.” A proud smile stretched itself across Yeager’s face. He gave Ullhass and Ristin a grateful look-if it hadn’t been for them, he’d have been reading about scientists for the rest of his life without ever meeting one, let alone being useful to one. He got up, gestured with the rifle that had lain half-forgotten across his lap. “Come on, you two. Let’s go. Time for us to be on our way.”

One nice thing about the Lizards was that, unlike most people he knew, they didn’t give him any back talk. Ullhass said, “It shall be done, superior sir,” and that was that. They preceded him out the door. He’d long since been convinced that his standing orders never to let them get behind him were foolish, but he obeyed anyhow. Army orders were like baseball fundamentals: you couldn’t go far wrong with them and you couldn’t do anything right without them.

He almost bumped into Andy Reilly, the custodian, when he came out the door, and he and his charges hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps down the hall when someone else called, “Hi, Sam!”

He couldn’t just turn around; that would have put the Lizards at his back. So he went around behind them before he answered, “Hi, Barbara. What are you doing up here?”

She smiled as she came up; she wasn’t skittish about Ullhass and Ristin any more. “I’m here a lot. My husband works for the Met Lab, remember?”

“Yeah, you did tell me. I forgot.” Yeager wondered if Barbara Larssen knew how big a misnomer “Metallurgical Laboratory” was. Maybe, maybe not. Secrecy about atomic energy research wasn’t as tight as it had been before the Lizards proved it worked, but he’d been warned in no uncertain terms about what would happen to him if he talked too much. He didn’t want a cigarette bad enough to get a blindfold with it. He didn’t even want to think about that. He asked, “Any word?”

“Of Jens? No, none.” Barbara kept up a brave front, but it was getting tattered. Worry-no, fear-showed in her voice as she went on, “He should have been back weeks ago-you know he was long overdue the first time you brought these little fellows into Dr. Burkett’s office. And if he doesn’t get back soon-”

From the way she stopped short, he thought he scented the great god Security. He said, “Professor Fermi told me the project is going to pull out of Chicago.”

“I wasn’t sure if you knew, and I didn’t want to say too much if you didn’t,” Barbara answered: security, sure enough. “Wouldn’t it be awful if he did make it here, only to find out there isn’t any Met Lab to come hack to?”

“There may not be any Chicago to come back to,” Yeager answered. “From what Fermi said, the line’s just outside Aurora now.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Her lips thinned; a small vertical worry line appeared between her eyes. “They’re-getting close.”

“What will you do?” he asked. “Will you go with the Met Lab people when they pull out?”

“I just don’t know,” Barbara said. “That’s what I came up here to talk about, as a matter of fact. They’re holding a slot for me, but I don’t know if I should use it. If I were sure Jens was coming back, I’d stay no matter what. But he’s been gone so long, I have trouble believing that anymore. I try, but-” She broke off again. This time, security had nothing to do with it. She groped in her purse for a hanky.

Yeager wanted to put an arm around her. With the two Lizards standing between them, that wasn’t practical. Even without them, it probably would have been stupid. she’d just think he was coming on to her, and she’d be at least half right. He didn’t even tell her Fermi had asked him to evacuate with the Metallurgical Lab staff. Feeling awkward and useless, he said, “I hope he makes it back soon, Barbara.”

“Oh, God, so do I.” Her hands shaped themselves into claws; her red nail polish made them look like bloody claws. Her face twisted. “God damn the Lizards for coming down here and wrecking everything people have tried to do for as long as there’ve been people. Even the bad things-they’re our bad things, nobody else’s.”

Ullhass and Ristin had picked up almost as much English as Yeager had learned of their language. They flinched away from Barbara’s fury. “It’s all right,” Yeager told them. “Nothing’s going to happen to you two.” He understood how Barbara felt; he knew much of that same rage himself. But constantly being around the Lizard POWs had made him start thinking of them as people, too-sometimes almost as friends. He hated the Lizards collectively but not individually. It got confusing.