Upsetting the Balance

He was dressing again when he realized he hadn’t put on a rubber.Too bad for her, he thought coldly. If you were in her line of work, you took your chances with things like the clap.

She said, “You want another round, half price?”

“No, that’s all right,” he answered; what he was thinking about was going back to the YMCA for another shower. He probably had time, but he didn’t feel like explaining himself to the desk clerk-or not explaining himself, but bearing up under the guy’s fishy stare.

“You want a drink downstairs, then?” Edie asked. “We got home-brew beer, moonshine, even a little real whiskey if you feel like payin’ for it.”

She should have been peddling used cars instead of her ass and related amenities. “That’s all right,” Jens said again; all he wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Edie’s look saidcheapskate. He ignored it.

When he went back into Chung’s laundry, the proprietor asked, “You have a nice lunch, sir?” and giggled louder than he had the first time. Then he called something in Chinese into the back room. A woman’s laugh floated out. Jens’ ears felt on fire. He thought seriously about abandoning his clothes and riding west as fast as he could go.

In the end, he decided to stay. But as soon as Horace Chung handed him the hot laundry, he shoved it into his knapsack and fled without changing and getting the clothes he had on cleaned, as he’d intended to do.

The steel suspension bridge over the Snake River was history-the Lizards hadn’t missed it, as they had the sawmill. The only way across the river was by rowboat. The oarsmen all wanted fifteen bucks for the trip, too. Jens flashed his letter that said he was on important government business. One of the boatmen said, “I’m as patriotic as the next guy, Mac, but I gotta feed my face.” Jens paid.

Eastern Washington, as seen from US 410, reminded him of Utah: very fertile when next to a river or irrigated, otherwise pale alkali flats with not much more than sagebrush growing on them. He’d always thought of Washington as full of pines and moss and ferns, with water dripping everywhere all the time. This part of the state didn’t live up to the description.

The roads hereabout hadn’t been badly bombed. Most of the bridges over rivers smaller than the Snake remained intact. Timber makeshifts let light traffic cross some of the spans that had been destroyed from the air. A couple of times, he had to pay his way across.

He got his ashes hauled again in Walla Walla, on the third day after he’d crossed into Washington. Again he picked a dark blond girl; again he didn’t think anything of it. This time, he didn’t have any laundry to reclaim when he left the bordello. He knew nothing but relief that that was so.

About thirty miles west of Walla Walla, US 140 swung north along the eastern bank of the Columbia toward its junction with the Snake. The country had been irrigated farmland once upon a time. Some of it looked to have been abandoned for quite a while; maybe the farmers hadn’t been able to pay their water bills.

Other stretches, though, especially where the two big rivers joined, were just now fading. Irrigation ditches were nothing but muddy, weed-choked grooves in the ground. Here and there, farmers still cultivated small orchards and berry patches, but big stretches of land between them baked brown under the summer sun. Jens wondered what had gone wrong till he pedaled past the ruins of a pumping station, and then of another. If the water couldn’t reach land, the land wouldn’t bear.

The town nearest the Snake River bridge (not that Jens expected to find it standing) was called Burbank. Just before he got into it, he pulled off the highway to contribute his own bit of irrigation to the roadside plants. No sooner had he started to piss than he stopped again with a snarl of pain. Now he knew without having to think about it what that burning meant.

“Anotherdose of clap?” he howled to the sky, though that was not where he’d got it. The next week or two, till things calmed down in there, were going to be anything but fun.

Then, half to his own surprise, he started to laugh. From everything he’d heard, the clap didn’t usually make a woman as sore as it did a man, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have it. And this time, there was every chance he’d given as good-or as bad-as he’d got.

When Nikifor Sholudenko poked his head unannounced into the underground chamber where Ludmila Gorbunova slept and rested between missions, her first thought was that the NKVD man hoped to catch her half dressed. But Sholudenko said, “Comrade Pilot, you are ordered to report to Colonel Karpov’s office at once.”

That was different. That was business. Ludmila jumped to her feet. “Thank you, Comrade. Take me to him at once, please.”