Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

Bagnall didn’t care a pin for fine points of translation. “We’re stuck here in bloody Pskov and there’s bloody nothing to be done about it?” he burst out, his voice rising to a shout. “ Nichevo,” Jones said.

Science Hall was a splendid structure, a three-story red brick building on the northwest corner of the University of Denver campus. It housed the university’s chemistry and physics departments, and would have made a fine home for the transplanted Metallurgical Laboratory from the University of Chicago. Jens Larssen admired the facility intensely.

There was only one problem: he had no idea when the rest of the Met Lab team would show up.

“All dressed up with no place to go,” he muttered to himself as he stalked down a third-floor corridor. From the north-facing window at the end of that corridor, he could see the Platte River snaking its way south and east through town, and beyond it the state capitol and other tall buildings of the civic center. Denver was a pretty place, snow still on the ground here and there, the air almost achingly clear. Jens delighted in it not at all.

Everything had gone so perfectly. He might as well have been riding the train in those dear, vanished pre-Lizard days. He wasn’t bombed, he wasn’t strafed, he had a lower Pullman berth more comfortable than any bed he’d slept in for months. He had heat on the train and electricity; the only hint there was a war on was the blackout curtain on the window and a sign taped alongside it: USE IT. IT’S yourNECK.

An Army major had met him when the train pulled into Union Station, had taken him out to Lowry Field east of town, had arranged a room for him at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. He’d almost balked at that-he was no bachelor. But Barbara wasn’t with him, so he’d gone along.

“Stupid,” he said aloud. Going along even once had got him tangled up again in the spiderweb of military routine. He’d had a taste of that in Indiana under George Patton. The local commanders were less flamboyant than Patton, but no less inflexible.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Larssen, but that will not be permitted,” a bird colonel named Hexham had said. The colonel hadn’t sounded sorry, not one bit. By that he meant Larssen’s going out of town to find out where the rest of the Met Lab team was.

“But why?” Jens had howled, pacing the colonel’s office like a newly caged wolf. “Without the other people, without the equipment they have with them, I’m not much good to you by myself.”

“Dr. Larssen, you are a nuclear physicist working on a highly classified project,” Colonel Hexham had answered. He’d kept his voice low, reasonable; Jens supposed he’d got on the fellow’s nerves as well as the other way round. “We cannot let you go gallivanting off just as you please. And if disaster befalls your colleagues, who better than you to reconstruct the project?”

Larssen hadn’t laughed in his face, but he’d come close. Reconstruct the work of several Nobel laureates-by himself? He’d have to be Superman, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. But there was just enough truth in it-he’d been part of the project, after all-to keep him from taking off on his own.

“Everything is fine,” Hexham had told him. “They’re heading this way; we know that much. We’re delighted you’re here ahead of them. That means you can help get things organized so they’ll be able to hit the ground running when they arrive.”

He’d been a scientist at the Met Lab, not an administrator. Administration had been a headache for other people. Now it was his. He went back to his office, wrote letters, filled out forms, tried the phone three or four times, and actually got through once. The Lizards hadn’t hit Denver anywhere near the way they’d plastered Chicago; to a large degree, it still functioned as a modern city. When Jens turned the switch on the gooseneck lamp on his desk, the bulb lit up.

He worked a little longer, then said the hell with it and went downstairs. His bicycle waited there. So did a glum, unsmiling man in khaki with a rifle on his back. He had a bike, too. “Evening, Oscar,” Jens said.

“Dr. Larssen.” The bodyguard nodded politely. Oscar wasn’t his real name, but he answered to it. Jens thought it amused him, but his face didn’t show much Oscar had been detailed to keep him safe in Denver-and to keep him from leaving town. He was depressingly good at his job.

Larssen rode north up University, turned right toward Lowry Field. Oscar stuck to the physicist like a burr. Jens was in good shape. His bodyguard, he was convinced, could have made the Olympic team. All the way back to BOQ, he sang, “I’m Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” Oscar joined in the choruses.

But in the next morning, instead of biking back to the University of Denver, Larssen (Oscar in his wake) reported to Colonel Hexham’s office. The colonel looked anything but delighted to see him. “Why aren’t you at work, Dr. Larssen?” he said in a tone that probably turned captains to Jell-O.

Jens, however, was a civilian, and a fed-up civilian at that. “Sir, the more I think about my working conditions here, the more intolerable they look to me,” he said. “I’m on strike.”

“You’re what?” Hexham chewed toothpicks, maybe in lieu of scarce cigarettes. The, one he had in his mouth jumped. “You can’t do that!”

“Oh yes I can, and I’m going to stay on strike until you let me get in touch with my wife.”

“Security-” Hexham began. Up and down, up and down went the toothpick.

“Stuff security!” Jens had wanted to say that-he’d wanted to scream it-for months. “You won’t let me go after the Met Lab. Okay, I guess I can see that, even if I think you’re pushing it too far. But you as much as told me the other day you know where the Met Lab wagon train is, right?”

“What if I do?” the colonel rumbled. He was still trying to intimidate Larssen, but Larssen refused to be intimidated any more.

“This if you do: unless you let me send a letter-just an ordinary, handwritten letter-to Barbara, you get no more work out of me, and that’s that.”

“Too risky,” Hexham said. “Suppose our courier is captured-”

“Suppose he is?” Jens retorted. “I’m not going to write about uranium, for God’s sake. I’m going to let her know I’m alive and in one piece and that I love her and I miss her. That’s all. I won’t even sign my last name.”

“No,” said Hexham.

“No,” said Larssen. They glared at each other. The toothpick twitched.

Oscar escorted Larssen back to BOQ. He lay down on his cot. He was ready to wait as long as it took.

The fat man in the black Stetson paused in the ceremony first to spit a brown stream into the polished brass spittoon near his feet (not a drop clung to his handlebar mustache) and then to sneak another glance at the Lizards who stood in one corner of his crowded office. He half shrugged and resumed: “By the authority vested in me as justice of the peace of Chugwater, Wyoming, I now pronounce you man and wife. Kiss her, boy.”

Sam Yeager tilted Barbara Larssen’s-Barbara Yeager’s- face up to his. The kiss was not the decorous one first post-wedding kisses are supposed to be. She molded herself against him. He squeezed her tight.

Everybody cheered. Enrico Fermi, who was serving as best man, slapped Yeager on the back. His wife Laura stood on tiptoe to kiss Sam’s cheek. Seeing that, the physicist made a Latin production out of kissing Barbara on the cheek. Everybody cheered again, louder than ever.

Just for a second, Yeager’s eyes went to Ullhass and Ristin. He wondered what they made of the ceremony. From what they said, they didn’t mate permanently-and to them, human beings were barbarous aliens.