Tilting the Balance

“Every day we have more new weapons to hurl against the Lizards. Every day they have less with which to resist. Those of you who still live free, everything you do to help the war effort helps ensure that your children, and your children’s children, will grow up in freedom, too. And to those of you in occupied territory who may see this, I say: do not collaborate with the enemy in any way. Do not work in his factories, do not grow crops for him, do nothing you can possibly avoid. Without human beings to be his slaves, sooner or later he will be helpless.

“For we have hurt him, in America, in Europe, and in Asia as well. He is not superhuman, he is merely inhuman. Our united nations-now all the nations on this planet-will surely triumph in the end. Thank you and God bless you.”

The next news segment showed ways to conserve scrap metal. It had a soundtrack, but Yeager didn’t pay much attention to it. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Just hearing FDR’s voice was a tonic. Roosevelt made you think everything would turn out okay, one way or another.

The newsreel ended with a burst of patriotic music. Sam sighed; now he’d have “The Stars and Stripes Forever” noisily going around in his head for the next several days. It happened every time he heard the song.

“Here comes the real movie,” somebody near him said as the opening credits for You’re in the Army Now filled the screen. Yeager had seen it, four or five times since it came out in 1941. New movies just weren’t getting out these days, and even if they did, they often couldn’t have been shown, because electricity was lost in so many places.

When he’d seen the antics of Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante and the horrified reactions of their superior officers before, they’d left him limp with laughter. Now that he was in the Army himself, they didn’t seem so funny any more. Soldiers like that would have endangered their buddies. He wanted to give both comics a swift kick in the rear.

Beside him, though, Barbara laughed at the capers they cut. Sam tried to enjoy the escape with her. The musical numbers helped: they reminded him this was Hollywood, not anything real. Getting angry at the actors for doing what was in the script, didn’t do him any good. Once he’d figured that out, he was able to lean back and enjoy the movie again.

The house lights came up. Barbara let out a long sigh, as If she didn’t feel like coming back to the real world. Given its complications, Yeager didn’t much blame her. But the world was there, and you had to deal with it whether you wanted to or not.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s pick up our bikes and head back to the university.”

Barbara sighed again, then yawned. “I suppose so. When we get back there, I think I want to lie down for a while. I’m so tired all the time these days.” She managed a wan smile. “I’ve heard this is what being expecting is supposed to do to you, and boy, it sure does.”

“We’ll take it nice and easy on the way back,” said Yeager, who was still inclined to treat Barbara as if she were made of cut glass ad liable to break if jostled. “you’rest, and I’ll go round up Ullhass and Ristin.”

“Okay, Sam.”

Outside the theater, a herd of bicycles covered the sidewalk and the street by the curb. Keeping an eye on them, in lieu of a sheepdog, was a large, burly fellow, with a.45 on his hip. With no gas available for private cars, bikes had become the way of choice to get around, and stealing them as big a problem as horse theft in Denver’s younger days. As many people packed a gun now as they had in the old days, too; an unarmed guard wouldn’t have done much good.

Most of Denver was laid out on a north-south, east-west grid. The downtown area, though, nestled into the angle of the Platte River and Cherry Creek, turned that grid at a forty-five-degree angle. Yeager and Barbara pedaled southeast down Sixteenth Street to Broadway, one of the main north-south thoroughfares.

The Pioneer Monument at the corner of Broadway and Colfax caught Sam’s eye. Around the fountain were three reclining bronzes: a prospector, a hunter, and a pioneer mother. At the top of the monument stood a mounted scout.

On him Yeager turned a critical gaze. “I’ve seen statues that looked realer,” he remarked, pointing.

“He does look more like an oversized mantelpiece ornament than a pioneer, doesn’t he?” Barbara said. They both laughed.

They turned left onto Colfax. Bicycles, people on foot, horse and mule-drawn wagons, and quite a few folks riding horses made traffic, if anything, dicier than it had been when cars and trucks dominated. Then everything had moved more or less at the same speed. Now the ponderous wagons were almost like ambulatory roadblocks, but you went around them at your peril, too, because a lot of them were big enough to hide what was alongside till too late.