Tilting the Balance

“Where you going to put those critters tonight?” a man asked him. “We sure as hell don’t want them getting loose.”

“They’re not critters. They’re people-funny kind of people, but people,” Yeager said. With small-town politeness, the man didn’t argue, but obviously didn’t believe him, either. Yeager shrugged; he’d seen that happen before, too. He asked, “Do you have a jail here?”

The local hooked a thumb into the strap of his denim overalls. “Yah, we do,” he said. Yeager hid a smile-he’d heard “yah” for “yes” at every stop in North Dakota. Grinning, the local went on, “We’ll put a drunk Indian in there every now and again-or sometimes a drunk squarehead, too. Hell, I’m an eighth Sioux myself, even if my name is Thorkil Olson.”

“That’d be perfect,” Yeager said, “especially if you can put a board or a blanket or something over the window, if there is one. Lizards can’t take as much cold as people can. Can you take us there, let me look it over?”

With Ristin and Ullhass safely behind bars, Yeager figured he had the night off. A lot of times, he’d had to stay alert because they were in the next room of a private house. He didn’t think they’d try to escape; they risked both freezing and getting shot on a world not their own. You couldn’t afford to take chances, though.

He and Barbara went home with Olson and his wife Louise, a pleasant, red-cheeked woman in her late forties. “Take the spare bedroom for the night, and welcome,” Louise said. “We’ve rattled around the house since our boy George and his wife headed down to Kansas City so he could work in a defense plant.” Her face clouded. “The Lizards are in Kansas City. I pray he’s all right.”

“So do I, ma’am;” Yeager said. Barbara’s hand tightened on his; her husband Jens, a Met Lab physicist, had never come back from a cross-country trip that had skirted Lizard-held territory.

“Plenty of blankets on the bed, folks, and Grandma’s old thundermug under it,” Thorkil Olson boomed as he showed them the spare room. “We’ll feed you breakfast when you get up in the morning. Sleep tight, now.”

There were plenty o. blankets, heavy wool ones from Sears, with a goose-down comforter on top. “We can even get undressed,” Yeager said happily. “I’m sick of sleeping in three, four layers of clothes.”

Barbara looked at him sidelong. “Stay undressed, you mean,” she said, and blew out the candle Olson had set on the nightstand. The room plunged into darkness.

Afterwards, Sam peeled off his rubber, then groped around under the bed till he found the chamber pot. “Something for them to cluck over after we leave,” he said. He dove back under the covers as fast as he could; without them, the bedroom was a chilly place.

Barbara clung to him, for warmth, but for reassurance, too. He ran a hand down the velvety skin of her back. “I love you,” he said softly.

“I love you, too.” Her voice caught; she shoved herself against him. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. I’d have been so lost. I-” Her face was buried in the hollow of his shoulder. A hot tear splashed down on him. After a few seconds, she raised her head. “I miss him so much sometimes. I can’t help it.”

“I know. You wouldn’t be who you are if you didn’t.” Yeager spoke with the philosophy of a man who had spent his entire adult life playing bush-league ball and never come close to the majors: “You do the best you can with the cards you get dealt, even if some of them are pretty rotten. Me, I never got an ace before.” Now he squeezed her.

She shook her head; her hair brushed softly across his chest. “But it’s not fair to you, Sam. Jens is dead; he has to be dead. If I’m going to go on-if we’re going to go on, I have to look ahead, not backwards. As you said, I’ll do the best I can.”

“Can’t ask for more than that,” Yeager agreed. Slowly, he went on, “Seems to me, honey, that if you hadn’t loved your Jens a lot, and if he hadn’t loved you, too, you wouldn’t have been anybody I’d’ve wanted to fall in love with. And even if I had, just on account of you’re such a fine-looking woman”-he poked her in the ribs, because he knew she’d squeak-“you wouldn’t have loved me back. You wouldn’t have known how to.”

“You’re sweet. You make good sense, too. You seem to have a way of doing that.” Instead of clutching, now Barbara snuggled against him; he felt her body relax. The tip of her nipple brushed his arm, just above the elbow. He wondered if she felt like making love again. But before he could try to find out, she yawned enormously. Voice still blurry, she said, “If I don’t get some sleep, God only knows what kind of wreck I’ll be tomorrow.” In the darkness, her lips found his, but only for a moment. “Good night, Sam. I love you.” She rolled over onto her side of the bed.

“I love you, too. Good night.” Sam found himself yawning, too. Even if she had been interested, he wasn’t sure he could have managed two rounds so close together. He wasn’t a kid any more.