Tilting the Balance

“Wait,” she said again. He stared at her, startled. She was looking down at the ground. When she raised her eyes, she looked not to him but to this Yeager character, which not only startled Jens but made him mad. The corporal nodded. Now Barbara turned toward Jens. In a low voice, she went on, “There’s something you have to know. You and Sam have-something in common.”

“Huh?” Jens gave Yeager another look. The soldier was human, male, white, and, by the way he talked, might well have sprung from the Midwest. Past that, Larssen couldn’t see any resemblance between them. “What is it?” he asked Barbara.

“Me.”

At first, he didn’t understand. That lasted only a heartbeat, maybe two; the way she said it didn’t leave much room to doubt what she meant. Numbness filled him, to be replaced in an instant by all-consuming rage.

He almost threw himself blindly at Sam Yeager. He’d always been a peaceable man, but he wasn’t afraid of a fight. After attacking a Lizard tank when Patton’s troops drove the aliens back from Chicago, the idea of taking on somebody carrying a rifle didn’t faze him.

Then he took another look at Yeager’s face. The corporal wasn’t toting that rifle just for show. Somewhere or other, he’d done some work with it. The way his eyes narrowed as he watched Jens said that louder than words. Jens hesitated.

“It wasn’t the way it sounds,” Barbara said. “I thought you were dead; I was sure you had to be dead. If I hadn’t been, I never would have-”

“Neither would I,” Yeager put in. “There’s names for people who do stuff like that. I don’t like ’em.”

“But you did,” Jens said.

“We did it the right way, or the best way we knew how.” Yeager’s mouth twisted; those weren’t the same, not here. He went on, “Up in Wyoming a little while back, we got married.”

“Oh, Lord.” Larssen’s eyes went to Barbara, as if begging her to tell him it was all some dreadful joke. But she bit her lip and nodded. Something new washed over Jens then: fear. She wasn’t just telling him she’d made a mistake with this miserable two-striper. She really had a thing for him.

“There’s more,” Yeager said grimly.

“How could there be more?” Jens demanded.

Barbara held up a hand. “Sam-” she began.

Yeager cut her off. “Hon, he’s gotta know. The sooner all the cards are on the table, the sooner we can start figuring out what the hand looks like. Are you gonna tell him, or shall I?”

“I’ll do it,” Barbara said, which surprised Jens not at all: she’d always been one to take care of her own business. Still, she had to gather herself before she brought out a blurted whisper: “I’m going to have a baby, Jens.”

He started to say, “Oh, Lord,” again, but that wasn’t strong enough. The only things that were, he didn’t want to say in front of Barbara. He thought he’d been afraid before. Now-how could Barbara possibly want to come back to him if she was carrying this other guy’s child? She was the best thing he’d ever known, most of the reason he’d kept going across Lizard-held Ohio and Indiana… and now this.

He wished they’d started their family before the Lizards came. They’d talked about it, but he kept reaching for the rubbers in the nightstand drawer-and times he hadn’t (there were some), nothing happened. Maybe he was shooting blanks. Yeager sure as hell wasn’t.

Jens also wished, suddenly, savagely, that he’d screwed the ears off the brassy blond waitress named Sal when the Lizards held them and a bunch of other people in that church in Fiat, Indiana. She’d done everything but send up a flare to let him know she was interested. He’d stayed aloof, figuring he’d be back with Barbara soon, but when he finally got back to Chicago, she was already gone, and now that he’d finally caught up with her-she was pregnant by somebody else. Wasn’t that a kick in the nuts? It sure was. And he’d gone and wasted his chance.

“Jens-Professor Larssen, I guess I mean-what are we gonna do about this?” Sam Yeager asked.

He was being as decent as he could. Somehow, that made things worse, not better. Worse or better, though, he’d sure found the sixty-four-dollar question. “I don’t know,” Jens muttered with a helplessness he’d never felt while confronting the abstruse equations of quantum mechanics.

Barbara said, “Jens, I guess you’ve been here a while.” She waited for him to nod before she went on, “Do you have some place where we could talk for a while, just the two of us?”

“Yeah.” He pointed back toward Science Hall. “I’ve got an office on the third floor there.”

“Okay, let’s go.” He wished she’d headed off with him without a backwards glance, but she didn’t. She turned back to Sam Yeager and said, “I’ll see you later.”

Yeager looked as unhappy about her going with Jens as Jens felt about her looking back at the corporal, which oddly made him feel a little better. But Yeager shrugged-what else could he do? “Okay, hon,” he said. “You’ll probably find me riding herd on the Lizards.” He mooched after the wagon that had held him and Barbara and the aliens.