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How much the answer mattered surprised him. Till now, he hadn’t asked himself what Liu Han meant to him, either. Sure, getting laid was fine, and he’d found out more about that from her than he’d thought he needed to learn until the Lizards brought him up here. But there was more to it. In spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to her, she remained good people. He wanted to take care of her. But did she want him for anything more than an insurance policy?
She never did answer, not in words. She put her head on his chest, smoothing away the hairs with her hand so they wouldn’t tickle her nose. His arms closed around her back. He could have rolled over on top of her, but it didn’t cross his mind, not now. They held each other for a while.
He wondered what his mother would say if he told her he was falling in love with a Chinese girl. He hoped he’d have the chance to find out.
Then he wondered how he’d say “I love you” to Liu Han. He didn’t know the Chinese for it, she didn’t know the English, and it was one place where the Lizards’ language helped not at all. He patted her bare shoulder. One way or another, he’d get the idea across.
13
The latest storm had finally blown out of Chicago leaving a fine dusting of snow on the ground. The Lizards stared at it in swivel-eyed wonder as Sam Yeager marched them along toward the Metallurgical Laboratory. He was comfortable enough in a wool sweater, but they shivered in too-large peacoats scrounged from the Great Lakes Naval Base Their breath, hotter than his made puffs of steam in the crisp air.
In spite of intermittent Lizard air raids, a couple of students were playing catch on the dying grass by the walk. Doing their best to pretend everything’s normal, Yeager thought. He envied them their deternunation.
As athletes, they weren’t much. One of them flat-out missed the ball when it came to him It skidded through the slush and stopped almost at Yeager’s feet. He set down the rifle he was still required to carry scooped up the baseball and fired it back to the student who’d thrown it. If the kid hadn’t caught it, it would have hit him right in the middle of the chest. He stared at Yeager, as if to say Who is this old guy? Yeager just grinned, picked up his piece, and started shepherding the Lizards down the walk again.
Ristin said, “You”-he followed it with a Lizard word Yeager didn’t know-“very well.”
As best he could, Yeager echoed the croaked word. “Not understanding,” he added in the Lizards’ language. Ristin obligingly gestured while repeating the word. A light went on in Yeager’s head. He dropped back into English. “Oh, you mean throw.” He made as if to throw again, this time without a baseball. “Throw.”
“Ssrow,” Ristin agreed. He tried English himself: “You-ssrow-good.”
“Thanks,” Yeager said, and let it go at that. How was he supposed to explain to an alien that he’d made a living (not much of a living, sometimes, but he’d never gone hungry) because he could throw and hit a baseball? If he didn’t have a better arm than a couple of half-assed college kids, he’d better leave town.
It wasn’t much warmer inside Eckhart Hall than it had been outside. Heat was as hard to come by as electricity these days. Army engineers did a marvelous job of repairing bomb damage, but the Lizards could wreck things faster than they could fix them. Since the elevator wasn’t running, Yeager took Ristin and Ullhass up the stairs to Enrico Fermi’s office. He didn’t know about them, but the exercise made him warmer.
Fermi bounced up out of his chair when Yeager walked the Lizards through his open door. “So good to see you and your friends here,” he said effusively. Yeager nodded, hiding a smile at the physicist’s heavy accent. He would have bet Bobby Fiore’s father sounded the same way.
Fermi had a glass coffeepot set up above a tin of canned heat. Heavy china mugs, cafeteria-style, stood beside the Sterno. The physicist gestured for Yeager to take one. “Thank you, sir,” Yeager said. He hadn’t noticed little things like cigarettes and coffee until he couldn’t get them whenever he wanted. Scarcity made them precious-and besides, the coffee was hot.
He glanced at Ullhass and Ristin. They’d tried coffee, too, but found it too bitter to stand. That was their tough luck, he thought; it cut them off from something that could heat them up from the inside out. He took another sip from his cup, felt his eyes opening wider. Coffee hit harder when you couldn’t have it every day. So did tobacco; he remembered how Barbara Larssen had reacted to her first smoke in a while.
At Fermi’s gesture, the Lizards perched themselves on a couple of chairs in front of the desk. Their feet barely touched the ground; human furniture was too big for them. Yeager sat down too, off to one side, his Springfield resting in his lap. He was still on guard duty, though that wasn’t his chief reason for being here. Enrico Fermi had more important things to do than learning the Lizards’ language, so Yeager interpreted whenever Ristin and Ullhass ran out of English.
Till the past few weeks, everything he knew about nuclear physics had come from the pages of Astounding. If stories like “Blowups Happen” and “Nerves” hadn’t had good science in them as well as good fiction, he would have been no use to Fermi-not because he couldn’t understand the Lizards, but because he wouldn’t have been able to understand the physicist.
Fermi asked the Lizards, “How long have your people known how to control and release the energy contained within the atomic nucleus?”
Yeager translated. He knew he didn’t do perfectly for nucleus; the word he used actually meant something closer to center. But the Lizards understood him well enough. They chattered back and forth between themselves for a few seconds before Ullhass said, “Somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand years, we think.”
Ristin added, “That’s our years, of course. Yours are about twice as long.”
Yeager did the arithmetic in his head. Even after dividing by two, it was still an ungodly long time. If Ristin and Ullhass were telling the truth, the Lizards had known about atomic power since humanity’s newest superweapon was fire against cave bears. If-He turned to Fermi. “Do you believe them, Professor?”
“Let me say that I know of no reason for them to lie,” Fermi answered. He looked like the fellow you’d find behind the counter of a delicatessen in half the medium-sized towns in the United States. He sounded like him, too, until you listened to what he had to say. Now he went on, “I think if we had had this power for so long, we would have accomplished more with it than they have.”
What the Lizards had done looked like plenty to Yeager. They’d crossed space to land on Earth, they’d kicked the tar out of every army they’d come up against, and they’d blown Berlin and Washington clean off the map. What did Fermi want, egg in his beer?
The physicist gave his attention back to the aliens. “How do you proceed in separating the useful U-235 from the much more abundant U-238?” In one form or another, he’d been asking that same question since he first set eyes on the Lizards.
As usual, they left him frustrated. Ullhass spread his clawed hands in a very human-seeming gesture of frustration. “You keep pestering us about this. We have told you before-we are soldiers. We do not know all the fine details of our technology.”
This time, Fermi turned to Yeager. “Can you credit what they say?”
Not for the first time, Yeager wondered why the devil the cxperts were asking him questions. All at once, though, he realized he too was an expert of sorts: an expert on the Lizards. That made him chuckle; the only thing on which he’d been an expert before was hitting the cutoff man. He certainly hadn’t been an expert at hitting a curve ball, or he’d have played at fields a lot fancier than the ones in the Three-I League.
He still didn’t believe he had much expertise, but he did know more about the Lizards than most people. Mixing what he did know with his common sense (which, except for keeping him at a baseball career, had always been pretty good), he answered, “Professor, I think maybe I do believe them. You yank a couple of privates out of the American army and they might not be able to tell
you everything you want to know about how an electrical generator works.”
Fermi’s sigh was melodramatic. “Si, this may be so. And yet I have learned a great deal from what they do know: they take for granted so many things which are for us on the cutting edge of physics-or beyond it. Just by examining what they know ‘of course’ to be true, we have tremendously refined our own lines of investigation. This will help us a great deal when we relocate our program.”
“I’m glad you’ve-” Yeager broke off. “When you what?”
“When we move away from here,” Fermi said. Sadness filled his liquid brown eyes. “It will be very hard, this I know. But how are we to do physics in a city, where we have not even electricity most of the day? How are we to proceed when the Lizards may bomb us at any time, may even capture Chicago before long? The line, I hear, is nearly to Aurora now. Under these circumstances, what is there to do but go?”
“Where will you go to?” Yeager asked.
“It is not yet decided. We will leave the city by ship, surely-much the safest way to go, as your little friends”-Fernii nodded toward Ullhass and Ristin-“do not seem to have grasped the importance of travel by water on this world. But where we shall try to set down new roots, that is still a matter for debate.”
Yeager looked at the Lizards, too. “Are you going to want to take them with you?” he asked. If the answer was yes, he’d have to figure out whether he should try to finagle a way to come, too. He supposed he should; he couldn’t think of any way in which he’d be more useful to the war effort.
