Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

“They’d better,” Yeager said, and added the emphatic cough.

He laughed at himself. To Ristin, he said, “That’s what I get for hanging around with the likes of you.”

“What, a civilized language?” Ristin said, laughing his kind of laugh once more. He turned civilized into a long hiss.

Despite his accent, he gave as good as he got. Yeager didn’t fire back at him. Instead, he asked Barbara, “Why did they let you go early?”

“I turned green, I guess,” she answered. “I don’t know why they call it morning sickness. It gets me any old time of day it feels like.”

“You look okay now,” he said.

“I got rid of what ailed me,” Barbara said bleakly. “I’m just glad the plumbing works. If it didn’t, somebody-probably me-would have a mess to clean up.”

“You’re supposed to be eating for two, not throwing up what one has,” Sam said.

“If you know a secret way to make lunch stay down, I wish you’d tell me what it is,” Barbara answered, now with a snap in her voice. “Everybody says this is supposed to go away after I get further along. I hope to heaven that’s true.”

Another knock, this one on the frame of the open door. “Here you go, Corporal,” said a kid in dungarees with a pistol holster on his belt. “I’ve brought your pet Lizard back for you.” Ullhass walked in and exchanged sibilant greetings with Ristin. The kid, who except for the pistol looked like a college freshman, nodded to Yeager, gave Barbara a quick once-over and obviously decided she was too old for him, nodded again, and trotted off down the hall.

“I am not a pet I am a male of the Race,” Ullhass said with considerable dignity.

Yeager soothed him: “I know, pal. But haven’t you noticed that people don’t always say exactly what they mean?”

“Yes, I have seen this,” Ullhass said. “Because I am a prisoner, I will not tell you what I think of it.”

“If you ask me, you just did,” Yeager answered. “You were very polite about it, though. Now come on, boys; I’ll take you home.”

Home for the Lizards was an office converted into an apartment. Maybe cell block was a better word for it, Yeager thought: at least, he’d never seen any apartments with stout iron bars across the windows and an armed guard waiting outside the door. But Ristin and Ullhass liked it. Nobody bothered them in there, and the steam radiator let them heat the room to the bake-oven level they enjoyed.

Once they were safely ensconced, Yeager walked Barbara out onto the lawn. Unlike Ristin, she didn’t complain it was too cold. All she said was, “I wish I had some cigarettes. Maybe they’d keep me from wanting to toss my cookies.”

“Now that you haven’t smoked in a while, they’d probably just make you sicker.” Sam slipped an arm around Barbara’s waist, which was still deliciously slim. “As long as you are off early, you want to go back to the place and…?” He let his voice trail away, but squeezed her a little.

Her answering smile was wan. “I’d love to go back to the place, but if you don’t mind, all I want to do is lie down, maybe take a nap. I’m tired all the time, and my stomach isn’t what you call happy right now, either. Is it okay?” She sounded anxious.

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Yeager answered. “Fifteen years ago, I probably would have fussed and sulked, but I’m a grown-up now. I can wait till tomorrow.” My dick doesn’t think for me the way it used to, he thought, but that wasn’t something he could say to a new-wed wife.

Barbara let her hand rest on his. “Thanks, hon.”

“First time I ever got thanked for getting old,” he said.

She made a face at him. “You can’t have it both ways. Are you a grown-up and saying it’s okay because it really is, or are you just getting old and saying it’s okay because you’re all feeble and tired?”

“Ooh.” He mimed a wound. When she wanted to, she could get him chasing his tail like nobody’s business. He didn’t think of himself as dumb (but then, who does?), but he hadn’t had formal training in logic and in fencing with words. Trading barbs with ballplayers in his dugout and the ones on the other side of the field wasn’t the same thing.

Barbara let out a loud, theatrical groan as she got to the top of the stairs. “That’s going to be even less fun when I’m further along,” she said. “Maybe we should have looked for a place on the ground floor. Too late to worry about it now, I suppose.”

She groaned again, this time with pleasure, when she flopped onto the sofa in the front room. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the bed?” Yeager asked.

“Actually, no. I can put my feet up this way.” The overstuffed sofa had equally overstuffed arms, so maybe that really was comfortable. Sam shrugged. If Barbara was happy, he was happy, too.

Somebody knocked on the door. “Who’s that?” Sam and Barbara said in the same breath. Why doesn’t he go away? lay beneath the words.

Whoever it was didn’t go away, but kept on knocking. Yeager strode over and threw open the door, intending to give a pushy Fuller Brush man a piece of his mind. But it wasn’t a Fuller Brush man, it was Jens Larssen. He looked at Sam like a man finding a cockroach in his salad. “I want to talk to my wife,” he said.

“She’s not your wife any more. We’ve been through this;” Yeager said tiredly, but his hands bunched into fists at his sides. “What do you want to say to her?”

“It’s none of your damn business,” Jens said, which almost started the fight then and there. But before Yeager quite decided to knock his block off, he added, “But I came to tell her good-bye.”

“Where are you going, Jens?” In her stocking feet, Barbara came up behind Sam so quietly that he hadn’t heard her.

“Washington State,” Larssen answered. “I shouldn’t even tell you that much, but I figured you ought to know, in case I don’t come back.”

“That sounds as if I shouldn’t ask when you’re going,” Barbara said, and Larssen nodded to show she was right. Coolly, she told him, “Good luck, Jens.”

He turned red. Because he was so fair, the process was easy to watch. He said, “For all you care, I could be going off to desert to the Lizards.”

“I don’t think you’d do that,” she said, but Larssen was right: she didn’t sound as if she much cared. Yeager had all he could do to keep from breaking into a happy grin. Barbara went on, “I told you good luck and I meant it. I don’t know what more you want that I can give you.”

“You know good and well what I want,” Jens said, and Yeager gathered himself again. If Larssen wanted that fight bad enough, he’d get it.

“That I can’t give you, I said,” Barbara answered.

Jens Larssen glared at her, at Sam, at her again, as if he couldn’t decide which of them he wanted to belt more. With a snarl of curses, some in English, others in throaty Norwegian, he stomped off. His furious footfalls thundered on the stairs. He slammed the front door of the apartment building hard enough to rattle windows.

“I wish that hadn’t happened,” Barbara said. “I wish-oh, what difference does it make what I wish now? If he’s going away for a while, that may be the best thing that could happen. We’ll get some peace and quiet, and maybe by the time he gets back he’ll have figured out he can’t do anything about this.”

“God, I hope so,” Yeager said. “What he’s put you through ever since we got here isn’t right.” He’d been riding the roller coaster himself, but he kept quiet about that. Barbara was the one who’d had the tough time, because she’d been in love with Jens-right up to the minute she found out he was still alive, Sam thought. Since then, since she’d chosen to stay Barbara Yeager instead of going back to being Barbara Larssen, Jens had done his best to act about as unlovable as a human being could.