Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

And then, to make his day complete, Barbara came strolling up the walk toward the apartment she and Sam Yeager were using. Sometimes she just ignored him; that his own behavior might have had something to do with that hadn’t crossed his mind. But Barbara wasn’t the sort to be rude in public. She nodded to him and slowed down a little.

He walked over to her. Oscar was good at sticking with him-all the physicists had bodyguards these days-but knew better than to follow real close this time. A small voice inside Jens warned him he’d only end up bruising himself, but two nips of Szilard’s good hooch made him selectively deaf.

“Hello, dear,” he said.

“Hello,” Barbara answered-the lack of a return endearment set a fire under his temper. “How are you today?”

“About the same as usual,” he said: “not so good. I want you back.”

“Jens, we’ve been over this a hundred times,” she said, her voice tired. “It wouldn’t work. Even if it might have right after I got to Denver, it wouldn’t any more. It’s too late.”

“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

Her eyes narrowed; she took half a step back from him. Instead of answering, she said, “You’ve been drinking.”

He didn’t explain that they were drinks of triumph. “What if I have?” he said. “You going to tell me Mr. Sam Walk-on-Water Yeager never takes a drink?”

He knew the words were a mistake as soon as he said them. That, of course, did him no good. Barbara’s face froze. “Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see you some other time.” She started walking again.

He reached out and grabbed her arm. “Barbara, you’ve got to listen to me-”

“Let me go!” she said angrily! She tried to twist away. He held on.

As if by malign magic, Oscar appeared. He stepped between Jens and Barbara. “Sir, the lady asked you to let go,” he said, quietly as usual, and detached Larssen’s hand from Barbara’s forearm. He wasn’t what you’d call gentle, but Jens got the feeling he could have been a lot rougher if he felt like it.

Sober he never would have swung on Oscar. With two whiskeys in him, he didn’t give a damn any more. He’d seen some action himself, by God-and, by God, Barbara was his wife… wasn’t she?

Oscar knocked his fist aside and hit him in the pit of the stomach. Jens folded up like a fan, trying to breathe and not having much luck, trying not to puke and doing a little better with that. Even as he went down on his knees, he was pretty sure Oscar had pulled that punch, too; with arms like those, Oscar could have ruptured his spleen if he really got annoyed.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Oscar asked Barbara.

“Yes,” she said, and then, a moment later, “Thank you. This has been hell on everybody, and on Jens especially. I know that, and I’m sorry, but I’ve done what I have to do.” Only then did her voice change: “You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

“No, ma’am, not like you mean. He’ll be okay in a minute or two. Why don’t you go on back to your place?” Jens kept his eyes on the pavement in front of him, but he couldn’t help listening to Barbara’s receding-rapidly receding-footsteps. Oscar hauled him to his feet with the same emotionless strength he’d shown before. “Let me dust you off, sir,” he said, and started to do just that.

Jens knocked his hands away. “Fuck you,” he gasped with all the air he had in him. He didn’t care if he turned blue and died after that, and what with the way he still couldn’t breathe, he thought he just might.

“Yes, sir,” Oscar said, tonelessly still. Just then, Jens’ motor finally turned over, and he managed a long, wonderful mouthful of air. Oscar nodded in approval. “There you go, sir. Not too bad. When you get on that bike, I’ll ride with you to BOQ, and tomorrow you can see about getting yourself a new guard.”

“Won’t be soon enough,” Jens said, louder now that his lungs were following orders again.

“If you’ll forgive me, sir, I feel the same way,” Oscar replied.

Snarling, Jens stalked back to his bicycle, Oscar right on his heels. Jens rocketed away from the university. Oscar stuck with him; he’d already found out he couldn’t shake the guard. He wasn’t really trying-he was just doing his best to get rid of his own rage.

Gravel kicked up under his wheels as he banked his weight to the side for the right turn from University to Alameda and on to Lowry Field. Of all the places in the world, Lowry Field BOQ was the last one he wanted to go. But where else was he supposed to sleep tonight?

For a moment, he didn’t care about that, either. As the air base approached, all he wanted to do was keep on going, past the BOQ, past the endlessly cratered, endlessly repaired runways, past everything-keep on going to somewhere better than this stinking place, this stinking life.

You keep on going the direction you’re headed in, you’ll end up in Lizard country, an interior voice reminded him. That was enough, for now, to make him swing the bike up toward BOQ like a good little boy.

But even as he and Oscar parked their bicycles side by side, he was looking east again.

“Come on, you mis’able lugs-get movin’,” Mutt Daniels growled. Rain ran off his helmet and down the back of his neck That never would’ve happened with an old limey-style tin hat, he thought resentfully. The anger put an extra snap in his voice as he added, “We ain’t on the newsreels today.”

“We ain’t south o’ Bloomington no more, neither,” Dracula Szabo put in.

“You are painfully, correct, Private Szabo,” Lucille Potter said in her precise, schoohmarmish voice. She pointed ahead to the complex of low, stout buildings just coming into view through the curtains of rain. “That looks to be Pontiac State Penitentiary up there.”

When they got a little closer, Szabo grunted. “Looks like somebody kicked the sh-uh, the tar out of it, too.”

“Us ‘n’ the Lizards must have done fought over this stretch of ground last year,” Mutt said. The penitentiary complex looked like any fortified area that had been a battleground a few times, which is to say, not a whole lot of it was left standing. A bullet-pocked wall here, half a building a hundred yards over that way, another wall somewhere else-the rest was rubble.

Bloomington lay thirty-five bloody miles behind Mutt now. Most of it was rubble, too, now that the Lizards had run the Army out again. That made three times the town had changed hands in the past year. Even If the lizards went home and the war ended tomorrow, Mutt thought, the U.S.A. would be years pulling itself back up on its pins. He’d never imagined his own country turning into something that looked like the worst he’d seen in France in 1918.

He did his best not to think about that. A sergeant, like a manager, had to keep his mind on what was happening now-you could lose the trees for the forest if you weren’t careful. Officers got paid to worry about forests. Mutt said, “Any place better’n this we can camp?”

From behind him, somebody said, “It’s got good protection, Sarge.”

“I know it does, from the ground, anyway,” Daniels said. “But If the Lizards bomb us, we’re sittin’ ducks.”

“There’s a park-Riverview Park, I think the name of it is,” Lucille Potter said. “I’ve been there once or twice. The Vermilion River winds around three sides of it. Plenty of trees there, and benches, and an auditorium, too, if anything is left of it. It’s not far.”

“You know how to get there from here?” Mutt asked. When Lucille nodded, he said, “Okay, Riverview Park it is.” He raised his voice: “Hey, Freddie, look alive up there. Miss Lucille’s comin’ up on point with you. She knows where a decent place for us to lay our bodies down is at.” I hope, he added to himself.