Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Hitler said, “You will of course take lunch with me.”

“Thank you,” Molotov said resignedly. The meal proved as abstemious as he’d expected: beef broth, a dry breast of pheasant (Hitler did not touch his portion), and a salad. The Fuhrer kept his personal life simple. That did not, however, make him any more comfortable to deal with.”

“I haven’t ridden on a hay wagon, since I got off the farm,” Sam Yeager said as the wagon in question rolled west on U.S. 10 into the outskirts of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. “And I haven’t been through here since-was it ’27? ’28? something like that-when I was in the Northern League and we’d swing through on the way from Fargo to Duluth.”

“Duluss I know, for we get off horrible boat thing there,” said Ristin, who huddled in the wagon beside him, “but what is-Fargo?” The Lizard POW made the name sound like a Bronx cheer.

“Medium-sized town, maybe fifty miles west of where we are,” Yeager’ answered.

Barbara Larssen rode in the wagon, too, though she sat as far away from him as she could. Still, her voice was casual as she asked, “Is there any place in the United States you haven’t been, one time or another?”

“I haven’t been up through the Northeast much-New York, New England. The towns there, they either belong to the International League or the bigs, and I never made it there.” Yeager spoke without bitterness, simply stating a fact.

Barbara nodded. Yeager cautiously watched her. After those frenzied couple of minutes in her cabin on the Caledonia, he hadn’t touched her, not even to help her in or out of a wagon. She hadn’t spoken to him at all the first three days they were on the ship, and only in monosyllables the fourth. But since they’d unloaded at Duluth and started the slow plod west, she’d traveled in the same part of the wagon convoy as he did, and the last couple of days in the same wagon. Yesterday she’d talked more with Ullhass and Ristin than with him, but today everything seemed-well, not quite all right, but at least not too bad.

He looked around. The low, rolling hills were white with snow; it also covered the ice that sealed northern Minnesota’s countless lakes. “It’s not like this in summer,” he said. “Everything’s smooth and green, and the lakes sparkle like diamonds when the sun hits them at the right angle. The fishing is good around these parts-walleyes, pike, pickerel. I hear they fish here in the wintertime, too, cut holes in the ice and drop a line down. I don’t see much sport in going out and freezing when you don’t have to, myself.”

“So much water,” Ullhass said, turning one eye turret to the left and the other to the right. “It seems not natural.”

“It seems not natural to me, too,” Barbara said, “I’m from California, and the idea of fresh water just lying around all over the place strikes me as very strange. The ocean is all right, but fresh water? Forget it.”

“Ocean is not natural, too,” Ullhass insisted. “Have seen pictures of Tosev 3-this world-from-what do you say-outer space, yes? Looks all water, sometimes. Looks wrong.” He emphasized the last word with the emphatic cough.

“Seeing Earth from space,” Yeager said dreamily. How long would it have been before men managed that? In his lifetime? Maybe.

On the north shore of Detroit Lake, a little south of the actual town of Detroit Lakes, stood a tourist camp with cabins and picnic benches and a couple of bigger resort hotels, all looking much forlorn half a year out of the season for which they were built. “This place just buzzes in July,” Yeager said. “They have themselves a summer carnival that won’t quit, with floats and swimming and diving, races for canoes, races for speedboats, bathing beauties-”

“Yes, you’d like that,” Barbara murmured.

Sam’s ears got hot, but he gamely went on with what he’d been about to say: “-and all the beer a man could drink, even though it was still Prohibition when I went through here. I don’t know if they brought it down from Canada or brewed it themselves, but the whole team got blitzed-’course, we didn’t call it that back then. Good thing the road back to Fargo ran straight and flat, or the bus driver would’ve killed us all, I expect.”

Though the cabins were intended for summer use, several of them were open now, with wagons pulled up alongside. Barbara pointed. “Some of those aren’t from our convoy; they’re in the group that came by way of Highway 34.”

“Good to see they’ve made it here,” Yeager said. The refugees from the Met Lab hadn’t traveled west across Minnesota all together, for fear such a large wagon train would bring Lizard aircraft down on them. In some places, though, the roads came together. Detroit Lakes was a scheduled layover point.

The wagon driver looked back from his team of plodding horses and said, “Look at all the firewood the people round about here got chopped for us. It’s like, if they’d known we were coming, they’d’ve baked a cake.”

When he got down from the wagon, Yeager discovered the locals had baked a cake. In fact, they’d baked a lot of cakes-though some, he noted, were made from potato flour, and none had any frosting. But such details were soon lost in a great profusion of eggs and turkey, steaks and fried chickens, legs of lamb… he lost track of what he was eating as he stuffed himself. “After so long living out of tin cans in Chicago, I almost forgot they made spreads like this,” he said to a Detroit Lakes man who carried around yet another platter of drumsticks.

“We’ve got more than we know what to do with, when it comes to livestock,” the fellow answered. “We used to ship all the way to the East Coast before the damned Lizards came. Now everything’s just bottled up here. We’ll run short of feed before too long, and have to really start slaughtering, but for now we’re still fat. Happy to share with you folks. It’s a Christian thing to do… even for those critters.”

With undisguised curiosity, the local watched Ristin and Ullhass eat. The Lizards had manners, though not identical to those of Earthlings. Their technique for eating a drumstick was to stab it with a fork, hold it up to their snouts, and then nibble off bits. Every so often, their forked tongues would come out to clean grease off their hard, immobile lips.

Wagons kept coming into Detroit City every fifteen or twenty minutes; they’d been widely spread out to minimize damage from any air strikes that did descend on them (so far, none had, for which Yeager was heartily grateful-coming under air attack once was a thousand times too many). The natives greeted each one as if it held the Prodigal Son.

When shelters were assigned, Yeager found himself with a double cabin that had been altered in advance for use by him and his alien charges. Each of the two rooms had its own wood-burning stove and a bountiful supply of fuel-by now, Ullhass and Ristin knew how to keep a fire going. The windows on the Lizards’ side had boards nailed across them to prevent escape (though Yeager was willing to bet they wouldn’t have tried to run away from their heater). The connecting door between the rooms opened only from his side.

He got Ullhass and Ristin settled for the evening, then went back to his own half of the cabin. It wasn’t luxuriously furnished a table with a kerosene lantern, clothes tree, slop bucket (better that, he thought, than going to an outhouse in the middle of the night-it’d probably freeze right off), cot piled high with extra blankets. So it isn’t the Biltmore, he thought. It’ll do.

He sat down on the cot. He wished he had something to read-an Astounding, by choice. He wondered what had happened to Astounding since the Lizards came; the last issue he’d seen was the one he’d been reading the day the train down from Madison got shot up. But science fiction wouldn’t be the same now that real live bug-eyed (or at least chameleon-eyed) monsters were loose on Earth and bent on conquest.