Tilting The Balance (33 page)

“So how did this happen?” he asked. Barbara looked at her hands. Her hair tumbled over her face and down past her shoulders. He wasn’t used to it so long and straight; it made her look different. Well, a lot of things had suddenly turned different.

“I thought you were dead,” she said quietly. “You went off across country, you never wrote, you never telegraphed, you never called – not that the phones or anything else worked very well. I tried and tried not to believe it, but in the end – what was I supposed to think, Jens?”

“They wouldn’t let me get hold of you.” His voice shook with fury ready to burst free, like a U-235 nucleus waiting for a neutron. “First off, General Patton wouldn’t let me send a message into Chicago because he was afraid it would foul up his attack on the Lizards. Then they wouldn’t let me do anything to draw attention to the Met Lab. I went along. I thought it made sense; if we don’t make ourselves an atomic bomb, our goose is probably cooked. But, Jesus-”

“I know,” she said. She still would not look at him. “What about Yeager?” he demanded.

More rage came out in his voice. Another mistake: now Barbara did look up, angrily. If he attacked the bum, she was going to defend him. Why shouldn’t she? Larssen asked himself bitterly. If she hadn’t had a feel for him, she wouldn’t have married him (God), wouldn’t have let him get her pregnant (God oh God).

“After you – went away, I got a job typing for a psychology professor at the university,” Barbara said. “He was studying Lizard prisoners, trying to figure out what makes them tick. Sam would bring them around – he helped capture them, and he’s sort of their keeper, I guess you’d say. He’s very good with them.”

“So you got friendly,” Jens said

“So we got friendly,” Barbara agreed.

“How did you get – more than friendly?” With an effort, Larssen kept his voice steady, neutral.

She looked down at her hands again. “A Lizard plane strafed the ship that was taking us out of Chicago.” She gulped. “A sailor got killed – horribly killed – right in front of us. I guess we were both so glad just to be alive that – that – one thing led to another.”

Jens nodded heavily. Things like that could happen. Why do they have to happen to me. God? he asked, and got no answer. As if twisting the knife in his own flesh, he asked, “And when did you get married to him?”

“Not even three weeks ago, up in Wyoming,” Barbara answered. “I needed to be as sure as I could that that was something I really wanted to do. I figured out I was expecting the evening we got into Fort Collins.” Her face twisted. “A soldier on horseback brought your letter the next morning.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Jens groaned.

“What’s the matter?” Barbara asked, worry in her voice.

“Nothing anybody can help now,” he said, though he wanted to twist a knife, not in his own flesh, but in Colonel Hexham’s. If the miserable blunder-brained, brass-bound, regulation-and security-crazy son of a bitch had let him write a letter when he first asked, most of this mess never would have happened.

Yeah, she and Yeager still would have had their fling, but he could deal with that – she’d thought he was dead, and so had Yeager. She wouldn’t have married the guy, or got pregnant by him. Life would have been a hell of a lot simpler.

Jens asked himself a new and unsettling question: how would things go between Barbara and him if she decided to give Yeager the brush and come back to him forever? How would he handle her giving birth to the other man’s kid and then raising it? It wouldn’t be easy; he could see that much.

He sighed. So did Barbara, at almost the same moment. She smiled. Jens stayed stony-faced. He asked, “Have the two of you been sleeping together since you found out?”

“In the same bed, you mean?” she said. “Of course we have. We traveled all the way across the Great Plains like that – and it still gets cold at night.”

Though he habitually worked with abstractions, he wasn’t deaf to what people said, and he sure as hell knew evasion when he heard it. “That’s not what I meant,” he told her.

“Do you’really want to know?” Her chin went up defiantly. Pushing her made her angry, all right; he’d been afraid it would, and he was right. Before he could answer what might have been a rhetorical question, she went on, “As a matter of fact, we did, night before last. And so?”

Jens didn’t know and so. Everything he’d looked forward to – everything except work, anyhow – had crumbled to pieces inside the last half hour. He didn’t know whether he wanted to pick up those pieces and try to put them together again. But if he didn’t, what did he have left? The answer to that was painfully obvious: nothing.

Barbara was still waiting for her answer. He said, “I wish to God it had been me instead.”

“I know,” she said, which was not the same as I wish it had. too. But something – maybe the naked longing in his voice – seemed to soften her. She continued, “It’s not that I don’t love you, Jens – don’t ever think that. But when I thought you were gone forever, I told myself life went on, and I had to go on with it. I can’t turn off what I feel about Sam as if it were a light switch.”

“Obviously,” he said, which made her angry again. “I’m sorry,” he added quickly, though he wasn’t sure he meant it. “The whole thing is just fubar.”

“Fubar? What’s that?” Barbara’s eyes lit up. She lived for words. When she found one she didn’t know, she pounced.

“I picked it up from the Army guys I was with for a while,” he answered. “It stands for ‘fouled’ – but that’s not what they usually say-’up beyond all recognition.’”

“Oh, like snafu,” she said, neatly cataloging it.

After that, silence stretched between them. Jens wanted to ask the one question he hadn’t put to her -”Will you come back to me?” – but he didn’t. Part of him was afraid she’d say no. A different part was just as much afraid she’d say yes.

When he didn’t say anything, Barbara said: “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, which was honest enough to make her nod soberly. He went on, “In the end, it’s more or less up to you, isn’t it?”

“Not altogether.” Her left hand spread over her belly; he wondered if she knew it had moved. “For instance, do you want me back – under the circumstances?”

Since he’d been asking himself the same thing, he couldn’t exclaim Yes! the way he probably should have. When a couple of seconds passed without his saying anything, Barbara looked away. That frightened him. He didn’t want to throw her out, either. He said, “I’m sorry, dear. Too much landing on me all at once.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” She shook her head wearily, then got to her feet. “I’d better get downstairs and help with the work, Jens. I’ve sort of turned into assistant Lizard liaison person.”

“Wait.” He had work, too, a load that was going to quadruple now that the Met Lab was finally here. But that didn’t have to start at this precise instant. He got up, too, hurried around the desk and took her in his arms. She held him tight; her body molded itself to his. It felt so familiar, so right. He wished he’d had the sense to lock his office door: he might have tried to drag her down to the floor then and there. It had been so long… He remembered the last time they’d made love on the floor, with Lizard bombs falling all over Chicago.

She tilted her face up, kissed him with more warmth than she’d shown down on East Evans. But before he could try dragging her down to the floor even with the door unlocked, she pulled away and said, “I really should go.”

“Where will you stay tonight?” he asked. There. That brought it out in the open. If she said she’d stay with him, he didn’t know what he’d do – not go back to the
BOQ
, that was for sure.

But she just shook her head and answered, “Don’t ask me that yet, please. Right now I don’t even know which end is up.”

“All right,” he said reluctantly; he’d been up when they held each other.

Barbara walked out of the office. He listened to her footsteps receding down the hallway and then in the stairwell. He went back to his desk, looked out the window behind it. There she came, out, of Science Hall.

And there she went, over to Sam Yeager. No doubt who he was, even from three floors up: plenty of men in Army uniforms standing around, but only one of them stayed by the two Lizard prisoners. Jens felt like a Peeping Tom as he watched his wife hug and kiss the tall soldier, but he couldn’t make himself tear his eyes away. When he compared the way she held Yeager to how she’d embraced him, a cold, inescapable conclusion formed in his mind: wherever she slept tonight, it wouldn’t be with him.

At last Barbara broke free of the other man, but her hand lingered affectionately at his waist for an extra few seconds. Jens made himself turn away from the window and look at his desk. No matter what happens to the rest of my life, there’s still a war on and I have a ton of work to do, he told himself.

He could make himself lean forward in the chair. He could make himself pull a report from the varnished pine IN basket and set it on the blotter in front of him. But, try as he would, he couldn’t make the words mean anything. Misery and rage strangled his brains.

If that was bad, pedaling back to the
BOQ
with a silent Oscar right behind him felt ten times worse. “I won’t take it,” he whispered again and again, not wanting the guard to hear. “I won’t.”

Normal life. Moishe Russie had almost forgotten such a thing could exist. Certainly he’d known nothing of the sort for the past three and a half years, since the Stukas and broad-winged Heinkel 111s and other planes of the Nazi war machine began dropping death on Warsaw.

First the bombardment. Then the ghetto: insane crowding, disease, starvation, overwork – death for tens of thousands, served up a centimeter at a time. Then another spasm of war as the Lizards drove the Germans from Warsaw. And then that strange time as the Lizards’ mouthpiece. He’d thought that was close to normal; at least he and his family had had food on the table.

But the Lizards were as eager to put shackles on his spirit as the Nazis had been to squeeze work out of his body and then let it die… or to ship him away and just kill him, regardless of how much work was left in him.

Then God only knew how long underground in a dark sardine tin, and then the flight to Lodz. None of that had been even remotely normal. But now here he was, with Rivka and Reuven, in a flat with water and electricity (most of the time, at least), and with no sign the Lizards knew where he’d gone.

It wasn’t paradise – but what was? It was a chance to live like a human being instead of a starving draft horse or a hunted rabbit. This, by now, is my definition of normal? Russie asked himself as he strode down Zgierska Street to see what the market had to offer.

He shook his head. “Not normal,” he insisted aloud, as if someone had disagreed with him. Normal would have meant going back to medical school, where the worst he would hate had to endure was hostility from the Polish students. He itched to be able to start learning again, and to start practicing what he’d learned.

Instead, here he came, ambling along down a street in a town not his own, cleanshaven, doing his best to act like a man who’d never had a thought in his life. This was safer than the way he’d been living, but… normal? No.

As usual, the Balut Market square was packed. Some new posters had gone up on the dirty brick walls of the buildings surrounding the square. Bigger than life, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski looked down on the ragged men and women gathered there, his arms and hands outstretched in exhortation.
WORK
MEANS
FREEDOM! the poster cried in Yiddish, Polish, and German.

ARBEIT
MACHT
FREI
. A shiver ran down Russie’s back when he saw that in German. The Nazis had put the same legend above the gates of their extermination camp at Auschwitz. He wondered if Rumkowski knew.

He got in line to buy cabbage. More of Rumkowski’s posters stood behind the peddler’s cart. So did other, smaller ones with big red letters that announced
WANTED
FOR
THE
RAPE
AND
MURDER
OF A
LITTLE
GIRL
in the three most widely spoken languages of Lizardheld Poland.

Who could be such a monster? Russie thought. His eyes, drawn by those screaming red letters, looked to the picture on the poster. It was one of the fancy photographs the Lizards took, in full color and giving the effect of three dimensions. Moishe noticed that before he realized with horror that he recognized the face on the poster. It was his own.

The poster didn’t call him by his proper name – that would, have given the game away. Instead, it styled him Israel Gottlieb. It said he’d committed his ghastly crimes in Warsaw and was being sought all over Poland, and it offered a large reward for his capture.

His head whipped wildly back and forth. Were people staring at him, at the poster, getting ready to shout at him or grab him and drag him to the cobblestones? He’d never imagined the Lizards would come up with such a devilish way of trying to bring him back into their hands. He felt as if they’d set the mark of Cain on his forehead.

But none of the men in hats or caps, none of the women in head scarves, acted as if the mark were visible. Few even glanced at the poster, of those who did, none looked from it to Russie.

His eyes went to it once more. On that second examination he began to understand. The Lizards’ photo showed him as he had been when he was speaking on the radio for Zolraag: in other words, bearded and in a dark homburg rather than cleanshaven and with a flat gray cloth cap of the sort he wore these days. To him, the difference seemed minuscule: it was, after all, his own face. But nobody else seemed to have the faintest suspicion he was the alleged monster whose visage would undoubtedly be used to frighten children.

Bristles rasped under his fingers as he rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. From here on out, he’d shave every day, no matter what: putting it off till tomorrow was liable to make him resemble himself too much.

He finally reached the head of the line, bought a couple of cabbages, and asked the price of some green onions the peddler had in a little wicker basket on his cart. When the fellow told him, he clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed,” Ganef! You should grow like an onion – with your head in the ground.”