Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

He turned and asked one of the men who’d got stuck behind him in a stairway traffic jam. The fellow said, “It’s graphite, to moderate the pile, slow down neutrons so uranium atoms have a better chance of capturing them.”

“Oh.” The answer left Yeager less than enlightened. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Not for the first time, he found that reading science fiction, while it put him ahead of where he would have been without it, didn’t magically turn him into a physicist. Too bad.

Barbara came outside with another load of file folders. Yeager went back and gave the graphite blocks another look so he could walk back upstairs with her. If she noticed what he was doing, she didn’t complain, but let him fall into step beside her.

They’d just got to the doorway when antiaircraft guns began to pound off to the west. In moments, the noise spread through the city. Above it, through it, came the scream of Lizard planes’ jet engines, and then the flat, hard cruump! of bombs going off. Barbara bit her lip. “Those are close,” she said.

“Mile, maybe two, north,” Yeager said. Like everyone else in Chicago, he’d become a connoisseur of explosions. He put a hand on Barbara’s shoulder, happy for the excuse to touch her. “You get under a roof. Shrapnel’ll start falling any minute, and you aren’t wearing a tin hat.” He rapped his own helmet with his knuckles.

Right on cue, pieces of antiaircraft shell casing panttered down like hail. Barbara scurried inside Eckhart Hall-you didn’t want to be under one when it landed. She said, “Those were between here and Navy Pier. I hope they don’t fubar the evacuation route.”

“I hope they don’t, too.” Sam stopped and stared. “You,” he said severely, “have been listening to too many soldiers.”

“What? Oh.” Barbara’s eyes widened in a good simulation of innocence. “It means ‘fouled up beyond all recognition,’ doesn’t it?”

“Fouled up. Yeah. Right. Among other things.” The noise Yeager made was half cough, half chuckle. Barbara stuck out her tongue at him. Laughing, they climbed the stairs together.

More Lizard planes hit Chicago that afternoon, and more again after night fell. They hadn’t pounded the city so hard in a while. Yeager wished for bad weather, which sometimes kept the enemy away. Faint in the distahce, he heard the wailing siren of a fire engine that still had fuel. He wondered if the firemen would find any water pressure when they got where they were going.

By the next morning, the loading was done. Yeager was crammed into a bus along with a bunch of boxes that could have held anything, a couple of other soldiers-and with Ullhass and Ristin. The two Lizard POWs were coming along to Denver for whatever help they could give the Met Lab project. Though swaddled in Navy peacoats that hung like tents on their slight frames, they still shivered. The bus had several broken windows; it was as cold inside as out.

All over the lawn, men grumbled about the cut fingers and mashed toes they’d gotten loading the convoy. Then, one after another, engines started up. The roar and yibration sank deep into Yeager’s bones. Soon he’d be on the road again. After God only knew how many trips between towns, getting rolling felt good, felt normal. Maybe he was a nomad by nature.

Diesel and gasoline fumes wafted into the bus. Yeager coughed. He didn’t remember the stink being so bad. But then, lately he hadn’t smelled it much. Not a lot was on the roads these days to make a stink.

Inside of two gear changes, Yeager was convinced he had more business behind the wheel than the clod driving the bus. No, he thought with a touch of pride, any fool can drive. Guarding the Lizards was more important to the war effort.

The convoy rumbled north up University to Fifty-first, then swung left one vehicle at a time. The streets were mostly clear of debris and not too bumpy; rammed earth and rubble filled bomb craters and the subsidence caused by ruptured water mains. The sidewalks were something else again-bulldozers and pick-and-shovel crews had shoved up onto them all the garbage that had clogged the streets. These trucks were going to get through no matter what.

To help make sure it got through, soldiers had machine gun nests in the rubble and stood menacingly at streetcorners. Here and there, colored faces, eyes huge and white within them, stared at the passing traffic from windows of houses and apartment buildings. Bronzeville, Chicago’s black belt, began bare blocks from the university and indeed almost lapped around it. The government feared its Negro citizens only a little less than it feared the Lizards.

Before the aliens came, a quarter of a million people had been jammed into Bronzeville’s six square miles. A lot fewer than that were there now, but the district still showed the signs of crowding and poverty: the storefront churches, the shops advertising mystic potions and charms, the little lunch counters whose windows (those that hadn’t blown out) advertised chitlins and sweet potato pie, hot fish and mustard greens. Poor man’s fare, yes, and poor black man’s fare to boot, but the thought of fresh greens and hot fish was plenty to set Yeager’s stomach rumbling. He’d been living out of cans too long. That was even worse than the greasy spoons he’d haunted as he bounced from one minor-league town to the next. Some of those diners-He hadn’t thought anything could be worse.

“Why we leave this place where we so long stay?” Ristin said. “I like this place, as much as can like any place on this cold, cold world. Where we go now is warmer?” He and Ullhass both swiveled their eyes toward Yeager, waiting hopefully on his reply.

They squeaked in disappointment when he said, “No, I don’t think it will be much warmer.” He didn’t have the heart to tell them it would be colder for a while: once on the Great Lakes, they’d almost certainly sail north and then west, because the Lizards held big stretches of Indiana and Ohio and controlled most of the Mississippi valley. The colder the country, the better, as far as evading them went.

Yeager continued, “As for why we’re leaving, we’re tired of having your people drop bombs on us, that’s why.”

“We tired of that, too,” Ullhass said. He’d learned to nod like a human being to emphasize his words. So had Ristin. Their heads bobbed up and down together.

“I wasn’t real fond of it myself,” Yeager said, adding the Lizards’ emphatic cough; he liked the way it served as a vocal exclamation point. His two charges let their mouths fall open. They thought his accent was funny. It probably was. He laughed a little, too. He and Ullhass and Ristin had rubbed off on one another more than he would have imagined possible back when he became their link to humankind.

The convoy chugged past the domed Byzantine bulk of Temple Isaiah Israel, then past Washington Park, bare-branched and brown and dappled with snow. It swung right onto Michigan Avenue, picking up speed as it went. There were advantages to being the only traffic on the road and not having to worry about stop lights.

Though it was winter, though the Lizards had cut off most rail and truck transport into Chicago, the stink of the stockyards lingered. Wrinkling his nose, Yeager tried to imagine what it had been like on a muggy summer afternoon. No wonder colored folk had taken over Bronzeville-they usually ended up settling in places no one else much wanted.

He also wondered that Jens and Barbara Larssen had chosen to get an apartment somewhere near here. Maybe they hadn’t known Chicago well when they moved, maybe they wanted to live close to the university, for the sake of his work, but Yeager still thought Barbara lucky to have had no trouble getting back and forth each day.