In the Balance

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?

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.