Upsetting the Balance

A two-horse team pulling a covered wagon a lot like the one in which they’d traveled from Chicago to Denver left from the other side of the building. A moment later, so did another one, and a moment after that another one still. “What are those all about?” Barbara asked, pointing.

“Come on-you people and the POWs go in the next one,” the guard answered. “We send ’em out in all different directions to keep the Lizards from swooping down and tryin’ a rescue while we move the prisoners to their camp.”

“Where is this camp, anyway?” Yeager asked.

“Hot Springs, maybe sixty miles west and a little south of here,” the fellow answered.

“Haven’t ever been there,” Yeager said.

A gleam of mischief in her eye, Barbara said. “What with your baseball and all, I thought you’d been everywhere, Sam.”

Yeager shook his head. “I played in El Dorado in the Cotton States League back maybe ten years ago, the year after I broke my ankle. The league went under partway through the season. Hot Springs wasn’t in it then, though I hear it joined up after the league started up again a few years later.”

The Negroes had already stowed their suitcases in the back of the wagon and had made themselves invisible again. Yeager had forgotten what things were like in the South, how many colored people there were and how they mostly got the short end of the stick. He wondered if they wouldn’t have been just as well pleased to see the Lizards win the war. The Lizards would treat everybody, white and black, like niggers.

After flying more than nine hundred miles from Denver to Little Rock in a little over five hours, Sam and Barbara and the Lizards took two days to go the sixty miles from Little Rock to Hot Springs. All the same, Yeager didn’t complain. Till they got there, he was essentially on leave. It was pretty country, too: pine woods more than halfway to Hot Springs, after which black gum and sweet gum began to predominate in the bottomlands by the creeks. Everything smelled green and alive and growing.

Arkansas didn’t seem to have seen a lot of war. When he asked the wagon driver about that, the fellow said, “The Lizards bombed the aluminum plants over there by Bauxite pretty good when they first got here, but those are going again now. Otherwise it ain’t been too bad.”

“Just looking at the highway tells me that,” Barbara said, and Sam nodded. They’d passed only a few wrecked, rusted cars dragged off to the side of US 70. Most of them had their hoods gaping open, as if visiting an automotive dentist-whatever was useful in their engine compartments had been salvaged.

By the time the wagon got into Hot Springs, Sam envied Ristin and Ullhass their scaly hides. Mosquitoes had made him and Barbara miserable, but didn’t seem to bother the Lizards. “Maybe we do not taste good to them,” Ristin said.

“I wish I didn’t,” Yeager answered darkly.

Hot Springs was a medium-sized town, tucked in among the deep green slopes of the Ouachita Mountains. US 70 entered it from the northeast, and swung south past what the driver called Bathhouse Row, where in happier times people had come from all over the world to bathe in the springs that gave the town its name and its fame. The wagon rolled past the greensward of Arlington Park, the limestone-and-brick Fordyce Bathhouse, the plastered Quapaw Bathhouse with its red tile roof and mosaic dome, and the Hot Springs National Park administrative building before turning left on Reserve and stopping at the magnificent five-story towers of the Army and Navy General Hospital.

The wagon pulled past the one-story white stone front and up under an awning that led into one of the towers. “We’re here, folks,” he announced. He looked back over his shoulder at the Lizard POWs. “You’ll want to stay under the awning when you go inside.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Ristin answered, though whether he actually wanted to obey remained an open question. But Lizard aerial intelligence was uncannily good, so if you were smart you revealed as little as you could to the sky. Yeager wondered where the decoy wagons were unloading their feigned prisoners.

He left his bags in the wagon, helped Barbara down, and hurried after his charges into the hospital building. Barbara followed him. Inside there, Ullhass and Ristin were talking in a mixture of English and their own language with a bright-looking man some years younger than Sam who wore captain’s bars. Sam waited for the officer to notice him, then saluted and said, “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting from Denver as ordered, sir, with my wife Barbara and the Lizard prisoners Ristin and Ullhass.”

The captain returned the salute. “Pleased to meet you, Sergeant, Mrs. Yeager.” He had a New York accent. “I’m Benjamin Berkowitz.” He glanced down at some papers stuck in a clipboard. “General Groves speaks highly of your abilities with the Lizards, Yeager. From what I’ve heard, any praise from him is high praise. How did you get so good with them? Were you a translator or something like that before the war?”