Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Atvar hid his disgust. “Seize all you need to ensure your own stock for as long as you wish to continue your habit,” he said, reasoning that Drefsab on ginger was likely to make a better agent than he would pining for the herb, and was also likely to remain a better agent than any male, no matter how sober, he appointed in his place. To salve his conscience, Atvar added, “Our physicians will continue to seek a cure for this Tosevite herb. Spirits of dead Emperors grant they find it soon.”

“Aye, Exalted Fleetlord. Even now, I crave-” With a shudder, Drefsab broke off in the middle of the sentence. “Have I the Exalted Fleetlord’s gracious leave to depart?”

“Yes, go on, Drefsab, and may Emperors past look kindly on you.”

Drefsab’s salute was ragged, but the male seemed to pull himself together as he left the fleetlord’s office. If nothing else, Atvar bad imbued him with fresh purpose. The fleetlord himself was depressed as he returned to his paperwork. I hate this cursed world, he thought. One way or anothei it is made only for driving the Race mad.

His treatment of Drefsab left him no happier. Subordinate males owed their superiors obedience; superiors, in turn, were bound to grant those males under them support and consideralion. Instead, he’d treated Drefsab exactly as he would have handled a useful but inexpensive tool: he’d seen the cracks, but he’d go on using it till it broke, then worry about acquiring another one.

Back Home, he’d not have used a male so. Back Home, he had luxuries long forgotten on Tosev 3, not least among them time to think. The Race made it a point never to do anything without due reflection. When you planned in terms of millennia, what was a day-or a year-more or less? But the Big Uglies did not work that way, and forced haste and change on him because they were so cursedly mutable themselves.

“They’ve corrupted me along with Drefsab,” he said mournfully, and went back to work.

“What is this thing, anyway?” Sam Yeager asked as he lifted a piece of lab apparatus off a table and stuck it in a cardboard box.

“A centrifuge,” Enrico Fermi answered, which left Yeager little wiser than he had been before. The Nobel laureate crumpled old newspaper-not much in the way of new newspaper around these days-and padded the box with it.

“Don’t they have, uh, centrifuges where we’re going?” Yeager said.

Fermi threw his hands in the air in a gesture that reminded Yeager of Bobby Fiore. “Who knows what they have? The more we are able to bring, the less we shall have to rely on that which is and remains uncertain.”

“That’s true, Professor, but the more we bring, the slower we’re liable to move and the bigger the target we make for the Lizards.”

“What you say is so, but it is also a chance we must take. If, having relocated, we cannot perform the work required of us, we might as well have stayed here in Chicago. We flee not just as individuals, but as an operating laboratory,” Fermi said.

“You’re the boss.” Yeager closed the box, sealed it with masking tape, pulled a grease pencil out of his shirt pocket. “How do you spell ‘centrifuge?’ ” When Fermi told him, he wrote it on the top and two sides of the box in big black letters.

He ran out of tape while sealing another centrifuge, so he went down the hall to see if he could snag another roll. The supply room had plenty; these days, the Metallurgical Laboratory got the best of whatever was left in Chicago. He was heading back to give Fermi more help when Barbara Larssen came out of a nearby room. The frosted glass window in the door from which she emerged was striped with tape to keep splinters from flying if a bomb hit nearby.

“Hi, Sam,” Barbara said. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” he answered, pausing for a moment. “Tired. How about you?”

“About the same.” She looked tired. From somewhere, she’d got hold of some face powder, but it couldn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. The slump in her shoulders had nothing to do with the stack of file folders she carried. It spoke more of not enough sleep, too much work, too much fear.

Yeager hesitated, then asked, “Any good news?”

“About Jens, you mean?” Barbara shook her head. “I’ve just about given up. Oh, I still go through the motions: I just now left a note with Andy Reilly-do you know Andy? — saying where we were going to give to Jens in case he ever does come back.”

“The janitor, you mean? Sure. I know Andy. That’s a good idea; he’s reliable,” Yeager said. “Where are we going? Nobody’s bothered to tell me. Of course, I’m just a cook and bottle-washer around here, so it’s not surprising.”

“Denver,” Barbara said. “if we can get there.”

“Denver,” Sam repeated. “Yeah, I played there. I was with Omaha, I think.” That had been in the days before he broke his ankle, when the Class A Western League was a step up on a road he hoped would lead to the big leagues. Somehow he’d stayed even when he knew the road went nowhere. He shook his head, forcing his thoughts back to the here-and-now. “Why Denver? We’ll have the devil’s own time getting there from here.”

“I think that’s part of the idea,” Barbara said. “The Lizards haven’t bothered it much, especially since winter started. We’ll be safer there, with a better chance to work… if, as I said, we can get there.”

Yeager noticed that as I said. From his lips, it would have come out like I said. But then, he hadn’t done graduate work in English. They probably ran you out of the university on a rail if you used bad grammar; it had to be a sin on the order of trying to go from second to third on a ball hit to short-stop. He snorted.

He still had baseball on the brain. Barbara said, “Listen, I’d better take these downstairs.” She hefted the folders.

“I’ve got to get back to it, too,” Yeager said. “You take care of yourself, you hear? I’ll see you on the convoy.”

“Okay, Sam. Thanks.” She walked down the corridor toward the stairway. Sam’s eyes followed her. Too bad about her husband, he thought. Now even she’d started admitting to herself that he wasn’t coming back. But even worn as she was, she remained too pretty, and too nice, to stay a widow forever. Yeager told himself he’d do something about that, if and when he got the chance.

Not now. Back to work. He taped up the second centrifuge box, then, grunting, piled both of them onto a dolly. He set the sole of his Army boot against the bar in the back, tilted the dolly into the carrying position. He’d learned the trick as a moving man one off-season. He’d learned how to get a loaded dolly downstairs, too: backward was slower, but a lot safer. And from what Fermi said, every gadget here had to be treated as irreplaceable.

He was sweating from effort and concentration both by the time he got down to ground level. Camouflage netting covered a large expanse of lawn in front of Eckhart Hall. Under it, with luck concealed from Lizard fighter-bombers, huddled a motley collection of Army trucks, moving vans, stakebed pickups, buses and private cars. Uniformed guards with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets surrounded them, not so much to keep them from being stolen as from having their gas tanks siphoned dry. They were all full up, and in war-ravaged Chicago gasoline was more precious than rubies.

He didn’t begin to understand all the things people were stowing in them. One olive-drab Studebaker truck was full of nothing but blocks of black, smeary stuff, each with a number neatly stenciled onto the end. It was as if somebody had taken apart a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle and planned on putting it back together once he got to Colorado. But what was the thing for ?