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But he seemed to have taken Fermi by surprise. The physicist rubbed his chin. Like most men’s in Chicago, it was poorly shaven and had a couple of nicks; no new razor blades had made it into town for a long time. Yeager felt smug for using a straight razor, which required only stropping to keep its edge. That also endeared him to his sergeant, who was an old-time graduate of the cleanliness-is-one-step-ahead-of-godliness school.
After a moment, Fermi said, “It may well be that we shall.” He glanced at Yeager. In.a lot of science fiction, scientists were supposed to be so involved in research that they took no notice of the world around them. Yeager’s little while at the University of Chicago had shown him it didn’t usually work that way in real life. Now Fermi confirmed that yet again, saying, “This affects you, no?”
“This affects me, yes,” Yeager said.
“We do not leave tomorrow, or even the day after,” Fermi said. “You will have time to make whatever arrangements you must. Ah! Would you like me to send a request for your services to your commanding officer? This will help you with your military formalities, not so?”
“Professor, if you’d do that, it would save me from a lot of red tape,” Yeager said.
“I will see to it.” To make sure he did see to it, Fermi jotted a note to himself. His head might have been in the clouds much of-the time, but his feet were firmly on the ground. He also shifted gears as smoothly as a chauffeur. “At our last session, Ullhass was telling what he knew of the cooling systems employed by the Lizards’ atomic power plants. Perhaps he will elaborate a little more on these.” His poised his pencil above a fresh sheet of paper. Questions flew, one after another.
Finally Yeager had to call time. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I’ve got to take our friends here on to their next appointment.”
“Si, si,” Fermi said. “I understand. You do what you must do, Mr. Yeager. You have been helpful to us here. I want you to know that, and know you will be very welcome to come with us as we depart to-who knows where we are to depart to?”
“Thank you, sir. That means a lot to me.” A proud smile stretched itself across Yeager’s face. He gave Ullhass and Ristin a grateful look-if it hadn’t been for them, he’d have been reading about scientists for the rest of his life without ever meeting one, let alone being useful to one. He got up, gestured with the rifle that had lain half-forgotten across his lap. “Come on, you two. Let’s go. Time for us to be on our way.”
One nice thing about the Lizards was that, unlike most people he knew, they didn’t give him any back talk. Ullhass said, “It shall be done, superior sir,” and that was that. They preceded him out the door. He’d long since been convinced that his standing orders never to let them get behind him were foolish, but he obeyed anyhow. Army orders were like baseball fundamentals: you couldn’t go far wrong with them and you couldn’t do anything right without them.
He almost bumped into Andy Reilly, the custodian, when he came out the door, and he and his charges hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps down the hall when someone else called, “Hi, Sam!”
He couldn’t just turn around; that would have put the Lizards at his back. So he went around behind them before he answered, “Hi, Barbara. What are you doing up here?”
She smiled as she came up; she wasn’t skittish about Ullhass and Ristin any more. “I’m here a lot. My husband works for the Met Lab, remember?”
“Yeah, you did tell me. I forgot.” Yeager wondered if Barbara Larssen knew how big a misnomer “Metallurgical Laboratory” was. Maybe, maybe not. Secrecy about atomic energy research wasn’t as tight as it had been before the Lizards proved it worked, but he’d been warned in no uncertain terms about what would happen to him if he talked too much. He didn’t want a cigarette bad enough to get a blindfold with it. He didn’t even want to think about that. He asked, “Any word?”
“Of Jens? No, none.” Barbara kept up a brave front, but it was getting tattered. Worry-no, fear-showed in her voice as she went on, “He should have been back weeks ago-you know he was long overdue the first time you brought these little fellows into Dr. Burkett’s office. And if he doesn’t get back soon-”
From the way she stopped short, he thought he scented the great god Security. He said, “Professor Fermi told me the project is going to pull out of Chicago.”
“I wasn’t sure if you knew, and I didn’t want to say too much if you didn’t,” Barbara answered: security, sure enough. “Wouldn’t it be awful if he did make it here, only to find out there isn’t any Met Lab to come hack to?”
“There may not be any Chicago to come back to,” Yeager answered. “From what Fermi said, the line’s just outside Aurora now.”
“I hadn’t heard that.” Her lips thinned; a small vertical worry line appeared between her eyes. “They’re-getting close.”
“What will you do?” he asked. “Will you go with the Met Lab people when they pull out?”
“I just don’t know,” Barbara said. “That’s what I came up here to talk about, as a matter of fact. They’re holding a slot for me, but I don’t know if I should use it. If I were sure Jens was coming back, I’d stay no matter what. But he’s been gone so long, I have trouble believing that anymore. I try, but-” She broke off again. This time, security had nothing to do with it. She groped in her purse for a hanky.
Yeager wanted to put an arm around her. With the two Lizards standing between them, that wasn’t practical. Even without them, it probably would have been stupid. she’d just think he was coming on to her, and she’d be at least half right. He didn’t even tell her Fermi had asked him to evacuate with the Metallurgical Lab staff. Feeling awkward and useless, he said, “I hope he makes it back soon, Barbara.”
“Oh, God, so do I.” Her hands shaped themselves into claws; her red nail polish made them look like bloody claws. Her face twisted. “God damn the Lizards for coming down here and wrecking everything people have tried to do for as long as there’ve been people. Even the bad things-they’re our bad things, nobody else’s.”
Ullhass and Ristin had picked up almost as much English as Yeager had learned of their language. They flinched away from Barbara’s fury. “It’s all right,” Yeager told them. “Nothing’s going to happen to you two.” He understood how Barbara felt; he knew much of that same rage himself. But constantly being around the Lizard POWs had made him start thinking of them as people, too-sometimes almost as friends. He hated the Lizards collectively but n
ot individually. It got confusing.
Barbara seemed to share some of that confusion. she’d gotten to the point where she could tell one of the captive Lizards apart from another. “Don’t worry,” she said to Yeager’s two charges. “I know it’s not your fault in particular.”
“Yes, you know this,” Ullhass said in his hissing voice. “But what can we do if you not know this? No thing. We are-how you say it? — in your grisp?”
“Grip, maybe,” Yeager. answered. “Or do you mean grasp?”
“I do not know what I mean,” Ullhass declared. “It is your speech. You teach, we learn.”
“They’re like that,” Yeager said to Barbara, trying to find less emotionally charged things to talk about. “Now that they’re our prisoners, it’s like we’ve become their superior officers and anything we say goes.”
“Dr. Burkett has talked about the same thing,” she said, nodding. She turned back to the Lizards. “Your people are trying to take our whole world into their grasp. Do you wonder that we don’t like you?”
“But we are the Race,” Ristin said. “It is our right.”
Yeager had got pretty good at reading tone in the Lizards’ voices. Ristin sounded surprised Barbara would question that “right.” Yeager clicked his tongue between his teeth. Both Lizard POWs swung their eyes toward him; it was something he did when he wanted to get their attention. He said, “You’ll find not everybody on this planet agrees with you about that”
Teerts wished his ejection seat had malfunctioned. Better to have crashed with his aircraft than to fall into the hands of the Nipponese. Those hands lacked the Race’s claws, but were no less cruel for that.
He’d found out about the Nipponese in a hurry. Even before they’d got him to Harbin, his illusion that they treated prisoners decently had been shattered. From what he’d seen of the way they treated their own kind, that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him.
