AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Larssen said dryly. The doctor chuckled. Jens went on, “Truth is, I’ve been moving too much to spend time chasing skirt. I’m on government business.”
“Who isn’t, these days?” Dr. Sharp said. “Government’s just about the last thing left that’s working-and it isn’t working what you’d call well. God only knows how we’re supposed to hold an election for President next year, what with the Lizards holding down half the country and beating the tar out of the half.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jens admitted. It was an interesting problem from a theoretical point of view: as a theoretical physicist, he could appreciate that. The only even remotely similar election would have been the one of 1864, and by then North had pretty much won the Civil War; it wasn’t invaded itself. “Maybe FDR has volunteered for the duration.”
“Maybe he has,” Sharp said. “Damned if I know who’d run against him anyhow, or how he’d campaign if he did.”
“Yeah,” Jens said. “Look, Doc, if you don’t have any medication that’ll help me, what am I supposed to do about what I’ve got?”
Dr Sharp sighed. “Live with it as best you can. I don’t know what else to tell you. The drugs we’ve been getting the past few years, they’ve let us take a real bite out of germs for the first time ever. I felt like I was really doing something worthwhile. And now I’m just an herb-and-root man again, same as my grandpa back before the turn of the century. Oh, maybe a better surgeon than Gramps was, and, I know about asepsis and he didn’t, but that’s about it. I’m sorry, son, I don’t have anything special to give you.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Larssen said. “Do you think I’m likely to find any other doctors who have the drugs you were talking about?” Even if the acriflavine treatment sounded worse than the disease it was supposed to help, at least it would be over pretty soon. You got gonorrhea for keeps.
“Nobody else here in Ogden, that’s for damn sure,” Dr Sharp answered. “We share what we have, not that it’s much. Your best bet would be some fellow in a little town who hasn’t used up all his supplies and doesn’t mind sharing them with strangers passing through. A lot of that kind, though, won’t treat anybody but the people they live with. It’s like we’re going back to tribes instead of being one country any more.”
Jens nodded. “I’ve seen that, too. I don’t much like it, but I don’t know what to do about it, either.” Before the Lizards came, he’d taken for granted the notion of a country stretching from sea to shining sea. Now he saw it was an artificial construct, built on the unspoken agreement of citizens and on long freedom from internal strife. He wondered how many other things he’d taken for granted weren’t as self-evident as they seemed to be.
Like Barbara always loving you, for instance, he thought.
Dr. Sharp stuck out a hand. “Sorry I couldn’t help you more, son. No charge, not when I didn’t do anything. Good luck to you.”
“Thanks a bunch, Doc.” Larssen picked up the rifle he propped in a corner of the office, slung it over his should and left without shaking hands. Sharp stared after him, but you didn’t want to get huffy with somebody packing a gun.
Jens had chained his bicycle to a telephone pole outside the doctor’s office. It was still there when he went out to get it. Looking up and down Washington Boulevard (which US 89 turned into when it ran through Ogden), he saw quite a few bikes parked with no chains at all. The Mormons were still trusting people. His mouth twisted. He’d been trusting, too, and look where it had got him.
“In Ogden goddamn Utah, on my way to a job nobody else wants,” he muttered. A fellow, in overalls driving a horse-drawn wagon down the street gave him a reproachful stare. He glared back so fiercely that Mr. Overalls went back to minding his own business, which was a pretty good idea any way you looked at it.
A puff of breeze from the west brought the smell of the Great Salt Lake to his nostrils. Ogden lay in a narrow stretch of ground between the lake and the forest-covered Wasatch Mountains. Larssen had grown used to the tang of the sea his grad school days out in Berkeley, but the Great Salt Lake odor was a lot stronger, almost unpleasant.
He’d heard you floated there, that you couldn’t sink even if wanted to. Wish I could throw Yeager in, and find out by experiment, he thought. And that waitress, too. I’d hold ’em under if they didn’t drown on their own.
He stowed the chain, swung up onto his bike, and started pedaling north up Washington. He rolled past City Hall Park the three-story brick pile of the Broom Hotel, with its eighteen odd, bulging windows: Another three-story building, at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street, had the wooden statue of a horse atop it, complete with a tail that streamed in the breeze.
He had to stop there to let a convoy of wagons head west down Twenty-fourth. While he waited, he turned to a fellow on horseback and asked, “You live here?” When the man nodded, went on, “What’s the story of the horse?” He pointed to the statue.
“Oh, Nigger Boy?” the man said. “He was a local racehorse, he’d beat critters you couldn’t believe if you didn’t see it. Now he’s the best weather forecaster in town.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jens said. “How’s that?”
The local grinned. “If he’s wet, you know it’s raining; if covered with snow, you know it’s been snowing. And if tail’s blowin’ around like it is now, it’s windy out.”
“Walked into that one, didn’t I?” Jens said, snorting. The wagon of the convoy creaked by. He started rolling again, soon passed Tabernacle Park. The Ogden Latter Day Saints Tabernacle was one of the biggest, fanciest buildings in town. He’d seen that elsewhere in Utah, too, the temples much more the focus of public life than the buildings dedicated to secular administration.
Separation of church and state was another of the things I taken for granted that didn’t turn out to be as automatic as he’d thought. Here in Utah, he got the feeling they separated things to keep outsiders happy, without really buying into notion that that was the right and proper way to operate. He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. He had plenty of his own.
Just past the city cemetery, a concrete bridge took him over Ogden River. By then, he was just about out of town. The scrubby country ahead didn’t look any too appetizing. No wonder the Mormons settled here, he thought. Who else would be crazy enough to want land like this?
He lifted one hand to scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, what the Mormons believed was good only for a belly laugh. Even so, he’d never felt safer in all his travels than he did in Utah. Whether the doctrines were true or not, they turned out solid people.
Is that what the answer is? he wondered: as long as you seriously believe in something, almost no matter what you have a pretty good chance of ending up okay? He didn’t care for the idea. He’d dedicated his career to pulling objective truth out of the physical world. Theological mumbo-jumbo wasn’t supposed to stack up against that kind of dedication.
But it did. Maybe the Mormons didn’t know a thing about nuclear physics, but they seemed pretty much content with the lives they were living, which was a hell of a lot more than he could say himself.
Putting your faith in what some book told you, without any other evidence to show it was on the right track, struck him as something right out of the Middle Ages. Ever since the Renaissance, people had been looking for a better, freer way to live. Jesus loves me! This I know! ’Cause the Bible!’ Tells me so. Jens’ lip curled derisively. Sunday school pap, that’s what it was.
And yet… When you looked at it the right way, accepting your religion could be oddly liberating. Instead of being free to make choices, you were free from making them: they’d already been made for you, and all you had to do was follow along.
“Yeah, that’s what Hitler and Stalin peddle, too,” Larssen said as he left Ogden behind. Thinking was what he did best; the idea of turning that part of him over to somebody else sent the heebie-jeebies running up and down his spine.
People looked up from whatever
they were doing when he rode past. He didn’t know how they did it, but they could tell he didn’t belong here. Maybe somebody’d pinned a sign to him: I AM A GENTILE. He laughed, partly at himself, partly at Utah. Hell, even Jews were gentiles here.
Up ahead on US 89, a fellow was riding a buckboard that had probably been sitting in the barn since his grandfather’s day. As Jens put his back into pedaling and whizzed past the gray mule drawing the buggy, the man called out to him: “You headin’ up toward Idaho, stranger?”
Stranger. Yeah, they could tell, all right. Larssen almost kept going without answering, but the question hadn’t sounded hostile or suspicious. He slowed down and said, “What if I am?”
“Just that you oughta be careful, is all,” the man on the buckboard answered. “Them Lizard things, there’s some of ’em up there, I hear tell.”
“Are there?” Jens said. If he wanted to abdicate responsibility for his life, that would be the way to do it. He had enough reasons for thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, either. He owed so many people so much… “Are there? Good.” He turned on the heat, and left the fellow in the buggy staring after him.
The only way Mutt Daniels had ever wanted to see the south side of Chicago was to bring in a big-league team to play the White Sox at Comiskey Park. He’d learned, though, that what you wanted and what life handed you all too often weren’t the same thing.
Take the gold bars he wore on his shoulders. He hadn’t even changed shirts when he got ’em, because he had only one shirt. He’d just taken off the stripes with somebody’s bayonet and. put on lieutenant’s insignia instead. People from his old squad still called him Sarge. He didn’t care. He felt like a sergeant, and the platoon he was leading now had taken enough casualties that it had only two squads worth of guys, anyway.
One nice thing about turning into an officer was that he got his orders with one less layer of manure on top, and that they gave him a bigger picture of what was going on. As now: Captain Sid Klein (who’d been Lieutenant Klein till Captain Maczek got hit) drew in the dirt between the ruins of, what hadn’t been fancy apartment buildings even before the Lizards came, saying, “It may not look that way, boys, but the brass says we’ve got these scaly bastards right where we want ’em.”
