Tilting the Balance

“I think you’re right,” Barbara said. “That’s very perceptive of you. Even all his grandparents are still alive, or they were before the Lizards came-now, who can say? But he sailed through college, sailed through his graduate work, and had a job waiting for him at Berkeley when he finished. Then he got recruited for the Metallurgical Laboratory-”

“-which was every physicist’s dream,” Yeager finished for her. “Yeah.” Not a lot of people had jobs waiting for them when they finished school, not in the Depression they didn’t. So Larssen’s family had all been healthy, too? And he’d found this wonderful girl. Maybe he’d started getting the idea he was fireproof. “Nobody’s fireproof,” Yeager muttered with the conviction of a man who’d had to hustle for work every spring training since he turned eighteen.

“What did you say, honey?” Barbara asked.

The casual endearment warmed him. He said, “I was just thinking things go wrong for everybody sooner or later.”

“Count no man lucky before the end,” Barbara said. It sounded like a quotation, but Yeager didn’t know where it was from. She continued, “I don’t think Jens has ever had to deal with anything like this before, and I don’t think he’s dealing with it very well.” Again Sam heard unshed tears. “I wish he were.”

“I know, hon. I do, too. It would make everything a lot easier.” But Sam didn’t expect things would always be easy. He was, as he’d said, ready to ride them out when they got tough. And If Jens Larssen wasn’t, that was his lookout.

Yeager carried his bicycle upstairs to the apartment he and Barbara had taken across the street from the University of Denver campus. Then he went down and carried hers up, too.

“I’m going to go take my little hissing chums off Smitty’s hands,” he said. “Have to see what he’ll want from me later on for babysitting them so I could get free for my Saturday matinee with you.”

Barbara glanced at the electric clock on the mantel. It showed a quarter to four. So did Sam’s watch; he was having to get reused to the idea of clocks that kept good time. She said, “It’ll still be afternoon for a little while longer, won’t it?”

As he took her in his arms, Yeager wondered if she just needed reassurance after the brief, wordless, but unpleasant encounter with Jens Larssen. If she did, he was ready to give it. If you couldn’t do that, you didn’t have much business being a husband, as far as he was concerned.

Liu Han felt like a trapped animal with the little scaly devils staring at her from all sides. “No, superior sirs, I don’t know where Bobby Fiore went that night,” she said in a mixture of the little devils’ language and Chinese. “These men wanted him to teach them to throw, and he went with them to do that. He didn’t come back.”

One of the scaly devils showed her a photograph. It was not a plain black-and-white image; she’d seen those before, and even the color pictures the foreign devils printed in some of their fancy magazines. But this photograph was of the sort the little scaly devils made: not only more real than any human could match, but also with the depth the scaly devils put into their moving pictures. It made her feel as if she could reach in and touch the man it showed.

“Have you seen this male before?” the scaly devil holding the picture demanded in vile but understandable Chinese.

“I-may have, superior sir,” Liu Han said, gulping. Just because she felt she could reach into the picture didn’t mean she wanted to. The man it showed was obviously dead, lying in a bean field with his blood and brains splashing the plants and ground around his head. He had a neat hole just above his left eye.

“What do you mean, you may have?” another scaly devil shouted. “Either you have or you have not. We think you have. Now answer me!”

“Please, superior sir,” Liu Han said desperately. “People dead look different from people alive. I cannot be certain. I am sorry, superior sir.” She was sorry Lo-for the dead man in the picture was undoubtedly he-had ever wanted Bobby Fiore to show him how to throw. She was even sorrier he and his henchmen had come to the hut and taken Bobby Fiore away.

But she was not going to tell the little scaly devils anything she didn’t have to. She knew they were dangerous, yes, and they had her in their power. But she also had a very healthy respect-fear was not too strong a word-for the Communists. If she spilled her guts to the little devils, she knew she would pay: maybe not right now, but before too long.

The scaly devil holding the picture let his mouth hang open: he was laughing at her. “To you, maybe. To us, all Big Uglies look alike, alive or dead.” He translated the joke into his own language for the benefit of his comrades. They laughed, too.

But the little devil who had shouted at Liu Han said, “This is no joke. These bandits injured males of the Race. Only through the mercy of the watchful Emperor”-he cast down his eyes, as did the other little devils-“was no one killed.”