Upsetting the Balance

Somewhere up off the road, a cougar yowled. The wildlife was probably having a high old time these days. Not a lot of people were able to get up here and go hunting, as they had once. Thinking of the Lizards being good for something on Earth felt odd.

Jens’ hands tightened on the black rubber grips of the handlebars. The Lizards hadn’t been good for him, not even slightly. If they’d just stayed on the pages of the pulp magazines where they belonged, he and Barbara would still be married and happy. He meant to say a thing or two to her when he got back to Denver-and to Sam Yeager, too. He’d been thinking about that, on and off, ever since he headed west.

He reached back and patted the gun barrel again. That might end up doing some of his talking for him.

He didn’t quite make it into Idaho Springs before darkness descended like a cloak. A few minutes later, the snow started falling. Larssen kept rolling along until he came to a dead car in the middle of the road. “A Cadillac, no less,” he said as he came up to it. It would be roomier than a lot of the autos in which he’d taken refuge during his travels.

The Cadillac’s windows were rolled up and the doors locked, as if the fellow who’d been driving it had been sure he’d be back to get it pretty soon. Jens took savage pleasure in smashing the driver’s-side window with the butt of his rifle. He unlocked the door, opened it with a squeak of rusty hinges, and reached inside to unlock the back door. Then he shut the front door again. He wondered if he should have shot out the front-door lock instead, to keep cold air from blowing in, and thought about going on and finding another car.

“Hell with it,” he said. The window still had some glass in it, and he would have rolled it down a couple of inches for the fresh air anyhow. Even if the Cadillac was full of the musty smell of mildew, he wouldn’t find any better place to spread out his sleeping bag. The backseat was plenty long and plenty wide. It would have made a wonderful backseat for making out, though he doubted whether people who owned Cadillacs needed to use backseats for such purposes.

He unrolled the sleeping bag, and also took a couple of thick wool blankets from the pack he’d tied to the bicycle’s carrying rack. He still had bread and homemade butter he’d got in Tabernash. He ate some of that. He’d eaten like a pig all through this jaunt, and was skinnier now than he had been at the start of it.

With the sleeping bag around him and the blankets on top, he was plenty warm enough. He slid the rifle down into the space between the backseat and the front; the transmission hump made it stick up a little. “Anybody who tries messing with me for any reason at all will regret it,” he said.

He woke up, unmessed with, the next morning, to some of the most supernal quiet he’d ever known. It was as if the snow of the night before had coated the whole world with a thick blanket of muffling feathers. The shift of the car springs under him as he sat up was the only sound in the land.

Keeping on the road would be more interesting than it had been. No snow plows, not now, nor salt that let tires grip even as it rotted fenders. “Slow and easy,” he told himself again.

As it had when he came through westbound, Idaho Springs had sentries out to check on who entered their little town. When Jens started to produce his letter signed by General Groves, the men stood aside. “You go right on ahead, buddy,” one of them said. “I ‘member you and that there letter from back a few months, don’t I?”

Larssen pedaled through Idaho Springs and then struggled up to the top of Floyd Hill, which wasn’t that much lower than Berthoud Pass. After that, the road got better. Even if it wasn’t plowed, what looked from the marks like a wagon train had been through ahead of him, defining the roadway and shoving aside the worst of the snow. He made good time coming down into Denver.

Before the Lizards came, the town had held better than a quarter of a million people. What with evacuations, simple flight, and bombings, not nearly so many lived there nowadays. All the same, the sight of so many men and women on the streets felt strange and untoward, and made Larssen nervous. He’d got very used to his own company and nobody else’s on his travels. He wondered how he’d fit in the Met Lab team once he got back to the University of Denver.

“Hell with ’em,” he muttered. “If they can’t make room for me, that’s their problem.”

A man riding east alongside him on US 40-no, they called it Colfax Avenue here in town-overheard that and gave him a curious look. He stared back, so fiercely that the Nosy Parker found some business elsewhere in a hurry.

Jens swung south onto University Boulevard just as the sun, which had come out in the afternoon, sank behind the Rockies. That didn’t bother him. He knew just where he was going now, and he didn’t figure the Met Lab crew were working eight-hour days and then knocking off.