Tilting The Balance (83 page)

Leo Morton looked alarmed. Roundbush threw back his head and roared laughter. “You are a cheeky bugger, and you skewered me as neatly there as if you were Errol Flynn in one of those Hollywood cinemas about pirates.” He assumed a fencing stance and made cut-and-thrust motions that showed he had some idea of what he was about. He suddenly stopped and held up one finger “I have it! Best way to rid ourselves of the Lizards would be to challenge them to a duel. Foil, epee, saber – makes no difference. Our champion against theirs, winner take all.”

From one of the tables strewn with jet engine parts, Wing Commander Julian Peary called, “One of these days, Basil, you’really should learn the difference between simplifying a problem and actually solving it.”

“Yes, sir,” Roundbush said, not at all respectfully. Then he turned wistful: “It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it, to take them on in a contest where we might have the advantage.”

“Something to that,” Peary admitted.

Leo Morton bent over a scrap of paper, sketched rapidly. In a minute or two, he held up a creditable drawing of a Lizard wearing a long-snouted knight’s helmet (complete with plume) and holding a broadsword. Prepare to die. Earthling varlet, the alien proclaimed in a cartoon-style speech bubble.

“That s not bad,” Roundbush said. “We ought to post it on a board here.”

“That’s quite good,” Goldfarb said. “You should think of doing portrait sketches for the girls.”

Morton eyed him admiringly. “No flies on you. I’ve done that a few times. It works awfully well.”

“Unfair competition, that’s what I call it,” Basil Roundbush grumped. “I shall write my MP and have him propose a bill classing it with all other forms of poaching.”

As helpful as he’d been before, Peary said, “You couldn’t poach an egg, and I wouldn’t give long odds about your writing, either.”

About then, Goldfarb noticed Fred Hippie standing in the doorway and listening to the back-and-forth. Roundbush saw the diminutive group captain at the same moment. Whatever hot reply he’d been about to make died in his throat with a gurgle. Hippie ran a forefinger along his thin brown mustache. “A band of brothers, one and all,” he murmured as he came inside.

“Sir, if we can’t rag one another, half the fun goes out of life,” Roundbush said.

“For you, Basil, more: than half, unless I’m sadly mistaken,” Hippie said, which made the flight officer blush like a child. But Hippie’s voice held no reproof; he went on, “So long as it doesn’t interfere with the quality of our work, I see no reason for the badinage not to continue.”

“Ah, capital,” Roundbush said in relief. “That means I can include my distinguished gray-haired superior in that letter to my MP; perhaps I can arrange to have his tongue ruled a noxious substance and shipped out of the country, or at least possibly rabid and so subject to six months’ quarantine.”

Julian Peary was not about to let himself be upstaged: “If we inquire at all closely into what your tongue has been doing, Basil old boy, I dare say we’d find it needs more quarantine than a mere six months.” Roundbush had turned pink at Hippie’s gibe; now he went brick-red.

“Torpedoed at the waterline,” Goldfarb whispered to Leo Morton. “He’s sinking fast.” The other radarman grinned and nodded.

Hippie turned to the two of them. Goldfarb was afraid he’d overheard, but he just said, “How are we coming at fitting a radar set into the Meteor fuselage, gentlemen?”

“As long as we don’t fly with fuel tanks in there, we’ll be fine, sir,” Goldfarb answered, deadpan. Hippie gave him a fishy stare, then laughed-

warily – and nodded. Goldfarb went on, “Morton, though, has made some exciting finds about which part of the circuitry controls signal amplitude.”

He’d expected that to excite Hippie, who had been almost as eager to learn about radar as he had been to tinker with his beloved jet engines. But Ripple just asked, “Is it something we can apply immediately?”

“No, sir,” Horton answered. “I know what they do, but not how they do it.”

“Then we’ll just have to leave it,” Ripple said. “For now, we must be as utilitarian as possible.”

Goldfarb and Horton exchanged glances. That didn’t sound like the Fred Ripple they’d come to know. “What’s up, sir?”’ Goldfarb asked. Roundbush and the other
RAF
officers who worked directly under the group captain also paid close attention.

But Hippie just said, “Time is not running in our favor at the moment,” and buried his nose in an engineering drawing. Time for what?” Goldfarb asked Morton in a tiny voice. The other radarman shrugged. One more thing to worry about Goldfarb thought, and went back to work Except for being illuminated only by sunlight, Dr. Hiram Sharp’s office in Ogden didn’t seem much different from any other Jens Larssen had visited. Dr. Sharp himself, a round little man with gold-rimmed glasses, looked at Jens over the-tops of them and said, “Son, you’ve got the clap.”

“I knew that, thanks,” Jens said. Somehow he hadn’t expected such forthrightness from a doctor in Mormon, Utah. He supposed doctors saw everything, even here. After that hesitation, he went on, “Can you do anything about it?”

“Not much,” Dr. Sharp answered, altogether too cheerfully for Jens’ taste. “If I had sulfa, I could give you some of that and cure you like nobody’s business. If I had acriflavine, I could squirt it up your pipe in a bulb syringe. You wouldn’t like that for beans, but it would do you some good. But since I don’t, no point fretting over it.”

The mere thought of somebody squirting medicine up his pipe made Larssen want to cover his crotch with both hands.

“Well, what do you have that will do me some good?” he demanded.

Dr. Sharp opened a drawer, pulled out several little foil-wrapped packets, and handed them to him. “Rubbers,” he said, as if Jens couldn’t figure that out for himself. “Keep you from passing it along for a while, anyway.” He pulled out a fountain pen and a book full of ruled pages. “Where’d you get it? You know? Have to keep records, even with everything all gone to hell these days.”

“A waitress named Mary, back in Idaho Springs, Colorado.”

“Well, well.” The doctor scribbled a note. “You do get around, don’t you, son? You know this here waitress’ last name?”

“It was, uh, Cooley, I think.”

“You think? You got to know her pretty well some ways, though, didn’t you?” Dr. Sharp whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Okay, never mind that for now. You screw anybody else between there and here?”

“No.” Jens looked down at the rubbers in his hand. Next time he did end up in the sack with a woman, he might use one… or he might not. After what the bitches had done to him, he figured he was entitled to get some of his own back. “Just been a Boy Scout since you got your dose, have you?” Sharp said. “Bet you wish you were a Boy Scout when you got it, too.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Larssen said dryly. The doctor chuckled. Jens went on, “Truth is, I’ve been moving too much to spend time chasing skirt. I’m on government business.”

“Who isn’t, these days?” Dr. Sharp said. “Government’s just about the last thing left that’s working – and it isn’t working what you’d call well. God only knows how we’re supposed to hold an election for President next year, what with the Lizards holding down half the country and beating the tar out of the half.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jens admitted. It was an interesting problem from a theoretical point of view: as a theoretical physicist, he could appreciate that. The only even remotely similar election would have been the one of 1864, and by then North had pretty much won the Civil War; it wasn’t invaded itself. “Maybe
FDR
has volunteered for the duration.”

“Maybe he has,” Sharp said. “Damned if I know who’d run against him anyhow, or how he’d campaign if he did.”

“Yeah,” Jens said. “Look, Doc, if you don’t have any medication that’ll help me, what am I supposed to do about what I’ve got?”

Dr Sharp sighed. “Live with it as best you can. I don’t know what else to tell you. The drugs we’ve been getting the past few years, they’ve let us take a real bite out of germs for the first time ever. I felt like I was really doing something worthwhile. And now I’m just an herb-and-root man again, same as my grandpa back before the turn of the century. Oh, maybe a better surgeon than Gramps was, and, I know about asepsis and he didn’t, but that’s about it. I’m sorry, son, I don’t have anything special to give you.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Larssen said. “Do you think I’m likely to find any other doctors who have the drugs you were talking about?” Even if the acriflavine treatment sounded worse than the disease it was supposed to help, at least it would be over pretty soon. You got gonorrhea for keeps.

“Nobody else here in Ogden, that’s for damn sure,” Dr Sharp answered. “We share what we have, not that it’s much. Your best bet would be some fellow in a little town who hasn’t used up all his supplies and doesn’t mind sharing them with strangers passing through. A lot of that kind, though, won’t treat anybody but the people they live with. It’s like we’re going back to tribes instead of being one country any more.”

Jens nodded. “I’ve seen that, too. I don’t much like it, but I don’t know what to do about it, either.” Before the Lizards came, he’d taken for granted the notion of a country stretching from sea to shining sea. Now he saw it was an artificial construct, built on the unspoken agreement of citizens and on long freedom from internal strife. He wondered how many other things he’d taken for granted weren’t as self-evident as they seemed to be.

Like Barbara always loving you, for instance, he thought.

Dr. Sharp stuck out a hand. “Sorry I couldn’t help you more, son. No charge, not when I didn’t do anything. Good luck to you.”

“Thanks a bunch, Doc.” Larssen picked up the rifle he propped in a corner of the office, slung it over his should and left without shaking hands. Sharp stared after him, but you didn’t want to get huffy with somebody packing a gun.

Jens had chained his bicycle to a telephone pole outside the doctor’s office. It was still there when he went out to get it. Looking up and down Washington Boulevard (which US 89 turned into when it ran through Ogden), he saw quite a few bikes parked with no chains at all. The Mormons were still trusting people. His mouth twisted. He’d been trusting, too, and look where it had got him.

“In Ogden goddamn Utah, on my way to a job nobody else wants,” he muttered. A fellow, in overalls driving a horse-drawn wagon down the street gave him a reproachful stare. He glared back so fiercely that Mr. Overalls went back to minding his own business, which was a pretty good idea any way you looked at it.

A puff of breeze from the west brought the smell of the Great Salt Lake to his nostrils. Ogden lay in a narrow stretch of ground between the lake and the forest-covered Wasatch Mountains. Larssen had grown used to the tang of the sea his grad school days out in Berkeley, but the Great Salt Lake odor was a lot stronger, almost unpleasant.

He’d heard you floated there, that you couldn’t sink even if wanted to. Wish I could throw Yeagerin, and find out by experiment, he thought. And that waitress, too. I’d hold ‘em under if they didn’t drown on their own.

He stowed the chain, swung up onto his bike, and started pedaling north up Washington. He rolled past City Hall Park the three-story brick pile of the Broom Hotel, with its eighteen odd, bulging windows: Another three-story building, at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street, had the wooden statue of a horse atop it, complete with a tail that streamed in the breeze.

He had to stop there to let a convoy of wagons head west down Twenty-fourth. While he waited, he turned to a fellow on horseback and asked, “You live here?” When the man nodded, went on, “What’s the story of the horse?” He pointed to the statue.

“Oh, Nigger Boy?” the man said. “He was a local racehorse, he’d beat critters you couldn’t believe if you didn’t see it. Now he’s the best weather forecaster in town.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jens said. “How’s that?”

The local grinned. “If he’s wet, you know it’s raining; if covered with snow, you know it’s been snowing. And if tail’s blowin’ around like it is now, it’s windy out.”

“Walked into that one, didn’t I?” Jens said, snorting. The wagon of the convoy creaked by. He started rolling again, soon passed Tabernacle Park. The Ogden Latter Day Saints Tabernacle was one of the biggest, fanciest buildings in town. He’d seen that elsewhere in Utah, too, the temples much more the focus of public life than the buildings dedicated to secular administration.

Separation of church and state was another of the things I taken for granted that didn’t turn out to be as automatic as he’d thought. Here in Utah, he got the feeling they separated things to keep outsiders happy, without really buying into notion that that was the right and proper way to operate. He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. He had plenty of his own.

Just past the city cemetery, a concrete bridge took him over Ogden River. By then, he was just about out of town. The scrubby country ahead didn’t look any too appetizing. No wonder the Mormons settled here, he thought. Who else would be crazy enough to want land like this?

He lifted one hand to scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, what the Mormons believed was good only for a belly laugh. Even so, he’d never felt safer in all his travels than he did in Utah. Whether the doctrines were true or not, they turned out solid people.

Is that what the answer is? he wondered: as long as you seriously believe in something, almost no matter what you have a pretty good chance of ending up okay? He didn’t care for the idea. He’d dedicated his career to pulling objective truth out of the physical world. Theological mumbo-jumbo wasn’t supposed to stack up against that kind of dedication.

But it did. Maybe the Mormons didn’t know a thing about nuclear physics, but they seemed pretty much content with the lives they were living, which was a hell of a lot more than he could say himself.

Putting your faith in what some book told you, without any other evidence to show it was on the right track, struck him as something right out of the Middle Ages. Ever since the Renaissance, people had been looking for a better, freer way to live. Jesus loves me! This I know! ‘Cause the Bible!’ Tells me so. Jens’ lip curled derisively. Sunday school pap, that’s what it was.