Upsetting the Balance

He unslung the Springfield he carried on his back and looked around. He wasn’t much of a hunter, but if a deer came down for a drink, he wouldn’t say no to trying for some venison. The jay screeched again. He swung the rifle its way, then laughed at himself. He’d probably miss, and even if he didn’t, nailing a jay with a.30-caliber slug was about like smashing a roach by dropping an anvil on it. You might have a few feathers left, floating on the breeze, but that was it.

Since he was sitting by the stream, he drank another cup of water. If Bambi didn’t show up, he’d be gnawing on beef jerky for lunch. He’d traded a few rounds of rifle ammo for it just outside of a tiny town incongruously called Cambridge; the more he thought about the deal he’d made, the more he figured he’d been snookered.

The water had its usual effect. He got up and walked over to a tree-not the one in which the jay still perched. He undid his fly and, setting his teeth, took a leak against the tree trunk. It didn’t hurt as much as it had just after he came down with the clap; for a while there, he’d been wishing his joint would drop off every time he used it. But it still wasn’t what anybody in his right mind would call fun.

“Goddamn bitch,” he ground out between his teeth as he fastened himself up again. The first time he’d got laid after Barbara left, and that was the present the stinking waitress had given him. Better he should have stayed a monk.

No sign of any deer. No sign of any bears, either, but Larssen, at the moment, was not inclined to look on the bright side of things. Cursing that slut of a waitress all over again (and conveniently forgetting how much he’d enjoyed having her while she lay in his arms), he got up, went back over to the bicycle, and used his belt knife to carve off a lunch-sized slab of jerky.

Chewing on the stuff was about like gnawing well-salted shoe leather. “Good thing I’ve got a decent set of choppers,” Jens said, and the jay, as if carrying on a bad-tempered conversation with him, peevishly screeched back. “I told you once to shut up,” Larssen reminded it. It took no more notice of him than anybody else had lately.

He gulped down a mouthful of the jerky. Even after he’d been chewing on it, little sharp edges scraped his throat. His laugh wasn’t a friendly sound. “I’d like to see Mr. Sam fucking Yeager eat this stuff with his store-bought teeth,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more he figured that if Barbara could go for a guy like that, she wasn’t such a bargain after all.

But even figuring he was well rid of her didn’t make the burn of being thrown over go away. She shouldn’t have decided he was dead, not anywhere near so soon. Even if she had, even if she’d ended up in bed with that Yeager son of a bitch a time or two, she shouldn’t have married him, and she sure as hell shouldn’t have let him knock her up. That had put the kibosh on any hope she’d come to her senses, all right.

“Security,” Larssen snarled, making it into a curse word fouler than any of the others he’d been throwing around. If that stinking Colonel Hexham had just let him write to her as the Met Lab wagon train made its slow way across the northern Great Plains, everything would have been fine. But he’d literally had to go on strike in Denver to get Hexham to let him send a letter. By the time it got to her, it was too late. She was already married and already pregnant.

In peacetime, some lawyer probably would have been able to buy himself a new Packard from the fees he’d have made trying to sort out the whole mess. With the Lizards giving the whole world hell, nobody bothered with much in the way of legal niceties any more. Barbara decided she wanted to stay with Mr. Dentures, so she damn well did.

“And I’m the one who gets screwed-or rather, who doesn’t get screwed any more,” Larssen said. “Isn’t that a hell of a note?”

It was, in more ways than one. Not only did his wife up and leave him but, just because he was too burned up about it to let her go quietly, he’d been all but booted off the Met Lab team. And so, instead of the nuclear physics he loved and for which he’d spent a lifetime training, he got to play Natty Bumppo in the wilderness instead.

If he hadn’t refused to admit he was beaten, he never would have managed to make it back from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Chicago. He never would have found out where the Met Lab crew had gone, nor managed to beat them there on his own (of course, if he hadn’t been quite so efficient there, he might have had a better chance of hanging on to Barbara).

Well, he owed the Lizards a good deal, for fouling up his life beyond all recognition. So he’d go on to Hanford and see if it made a good place for building an atomic pile to blow them to hell and gone. So much seemed only fair.