Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

Now, though, Burkett waved them into his office, shut the door behind them. “Isn’t that dangerous?” the girl asked nervously.

“Shouldn’t be,” Yeager answered. “The Lizards aren’t troublemakers. Besides, Burkett’s window, is barred, so they can’t get away. And besides one more time”-he pulled out a chair-“I sit here until they come out, and I go in and get ’em if they don’t come out inside of a couple of hours.” He reached into his shirt pocket, drew out a pack of Chesterfields (not his brand, but you took what you could get these days) and a Zippo. “Would you like a cigarette, uh-?”

“I’m sorry. I’m Barbara Larssen. Yes, I’d love one, thanks.” She tapped it against the desk, put it in her mouth, leaned forward to let him light it. Her cheeks hollowed as she sucked in smoke. She held it, then blew a long plume at the ceiling. “Oh, that’s nice. I haven’t had one in a couple of days.” She took another long drag.

Yeager introduced himself before he lit his own smoke. “Don’t let me get in your way if you’re busy,” he said. “Just pretend I’m part of the furniture.”

“I’ve been typing nonstop since half past seven this morning, so I could use a break,” Barbara said, smiling again.

“Okay,” Yeager said agreeably. He leaned back in his chair, watched her. She was worth watching: not a movie-star beauty or anything like that, but pretty all the same, with a round, smiling face, green eyes, and dark blond hair that was growing out straight though its ends still showed permanent waves. To make conversation, he said, “Your husband off fighting?”

“No.” That should have been good news, but her smile faded anyhow. She went on: “He was working here at the university-at the Metallurgical Laboratory, as a matter of fact. But he drove to Washington a few weeks ago. He should have been back long since, but-” She finished the cigarette with three quick savage puffs, ground it out in a square glass ashtray that sat by her typewriter.

“I hope he’s all right.” Yeager meant it. If the fellow needed to travel bad enough to do it with the Lizards on the loose, he was up to something important. For that matter, Yeager wasn’t the sort to wish bad luck on anybody.

“So do I.” Barbara Larssen did a game best to hold fear out of her voice, but he heard it all the same. She pointed to the pack of Chesterfields. “I hope you won’t think I’m just scrounging off you, but could I have another one of those?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.” She nodded to herself as she started to smoke the second cigarette. “That is good.” She tapped ash into the ashtray. When she saw Yeager’s eyes follow the motion of her hand, she let out a rueful laugh. “Typing is hell on my nails; I’ve already broken one and chipped the polish on three others. But after a while I got to the point where I couldn’t stand just sitting around cooped up in my apartment any more, so I thought I’d try to do something useful instead.”

“Makes sense to me.” Yeager got up, stubbed out his own smoke. He didn’t light another for himself; he wasn’t sure where his next pack was coming from. He said, “I suppose keeping busy helps take your mind off things, too.”

“It does, some, but not as much as I hoped it would.” Barbara pointed to the door behind which Dr. Burkett was studying the Lizards. “How did you end up standing guard over those-things?”

“I was part of the unit that captured them, out west of here,” he answered.

“Good for you. But how did you get picked to stay with them, I mean? Did you draw the short straw, or what?”

Yeager chuckled. “Nope. Matter of fact, I broke an old Army rule-I volunteered.”

“You did?” Her eyebrows shot upward. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

Rather sheepishly, he explained about his fondness for science fiction. Her eyebrows moved again; this time, their inner ends came together in a tight little knot above her nose. He’d seen that expression before, more times than he could easily count. “You don’t care for the stuff,” he said.

“No, not really,” Barbara said. “I was doing graduate work in medieval English literature before Jens had to move here from Berkeley, so it’s not my cup of tea.” But then she paused and looked thoughtful. “Still, I suppose it’s done a better job of preparing you for what’s happening here than Chaucer has for me.”

“Mmm-maybe so.” Sam had been ready with his usual hot defense of what he read for pleasure; finding out he didn’t need it left him feeling like a portable phonograph that had been wound up and forgotten without a record on its turntable.

Barbara said, “As for me, if I couldn’t type, I’d still be stuck in that Bronzeville flat.”

“Bronzeville?” Now Yeager’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t know a lot about Chicago”- If I’d ever played here, I would (the thought was there and gone fast as a Lizard jet)-“but I do know that’s not the real good part of town.”

“Nobody’s ever bothered me,” Barbara said. “With the Lizards here, the differences between whites and Negroes look pretty small all of a sudden, don’t they?”

“I suppose so,” Yeager said, though he didn’t sound convinced even to himself. “But whatever color they are, you’ll find more than its share of crooks in Bronzeville. Hmm-tell you what. What time do you get off here?”

“Whenever Dr. Burkett feels like turning me loose, it sounds like,” she answered. “I already told you, I’m new on the job. Why?”

“I’d walk you home, if you like… Hey, what’s so darn funny?”

Laughing still, Barbara Larssen threw back her head and made a noise that might have been a wolf’s howl. Yeager’s cheeks turned hot. Barbara said, “I think my husband might approve of that idea in the abstract, but not walking along the concrete, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s not what I had in mind at all,” Yeager protested. Not until the words were out of his mouth did he realize he wasn’t telling the whole truth. The front of his mind had made the offer innocently enough, but some deeper part knew he might have kept quiet if he hadn’t found her attractive. He was embarrassed that she’d seen through him faster than he saw through himself.

“No harm in your asking, and I’m sure it was kindly meant,” she said, giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Men only turn really annoying when they can’t hear ‘no thank you’ or don’t believe it, and I see you’re not like that.”

“Okay,” he said, as noncommittal a noise as he could come up with.

Barbara put out her second cigarette, looked at her wristwatch (the electric clock on the wall wasn’t running), and said, “I’d better get back to work.” She bent over the typewriter. Her fingers flew; the keys made machine-gun bursts of noise. Yeager had known a few reporters who could crank more words a minute than Barbara was putting out now, but not many.

He leaned back in his chair. He couldn’t imagine an easier duty: unless something went wrong inside Dr. Burkett’s office, or unless Burkett needed to ask him something (not likely, since the scientist seemed convinced he already knew everything himself), he had nothing to do but sit around and wait.

A lot of people would have got bored in a hurry. Being a veteran of long hours on trains and buses, Yeager was made of tougher stuff than that. He thought about baseball, about the science fiction he read to kill time between one town and the next, about the Lizards, about his small taste of combat (plenty to last him a lifetime if he got his way, which he probably wouldn’t).

And he thought about Barbara Larssen. There she sat in front of him, after all. She wasn’t ignoring him, either; every so often, she’d look up from her work and smile. Some of his thoughts were the pleasant but meaningless ones with which any man will while away the time in the presence of a pretty girl. Others had a bitter edge to them: he wished his former wife had cared about him while he was traveling the way Barbara obviously cared about her husband. What was his name? Jens, that was it. Whether he knew it or not, Jens Larssen was one lucky fellow.