Tilting the Balance

The newsreel ended with a burst of patriotic music. Sam sighed; now he’d have “The Stars and Stripes Forever” noisily going around in his head for the next several days. It happened every time he heard the song.

“Here comes the real movie, ” somebody near him said as the opening credits for You’re in the Army Now filled the screen. Yeager had seen it, www.babypic.ru four or five times since it came out in 1941. New movies just weren’t getting out these days, and even if they did, they often couldn’t have been shown, because electricity was lost in so many places.

When he’d seen the antics of Phil Silvers and Jimmy Durante and the horrified reactions of their superior officers before, they’d left him limp with laughter. Now that he was in the Army himself, they didn’t seem so funny any more. Soldiers like that would have endangered their buddies. He wanted to give both comics a swift kick in the rear.

Beside him, though, Barbara laughed at the capers they cut. Sam tried to enjoy the escape with her. The musical numbers helped: they reminded him this was Hollywood, not anything real. Getting angry at the actors for doing what was in the script, didn’t do him any good. Once he’d figured that out, he was able to lean back and enjoy the movie again.

The house lights came up. Barbara let out a long sigh, as If she didn’t feel like coming back to the real world. Given its complications, Yeager didn’t much blame her. But the world was there, and you had to deal with it whether you wanted to or not.

“Come on, ” he said. “Let’s pick up our bikes and head back to the university. ”

Barbara sighed again, then yawned. “I suppose so. When we get back there, I think I want to lie down for a while. I’m so tired all the time these days. ” She managed a wan smile. “I’ve heard this is what being expecting is supposed to do to you, and boy, it sure does. ”

“We’ll take it nice and easy on the way back, ” said Yeager, who was still inclined to treat Barbara as if she were made of cut glass ad liable to break if jostled. “you’rest, and I’ll go round up Ullhass and Ristin. ”

“Okay, Sam. ”

Outside the theater, a herd of bicycles covered the sidewalk and the street by the curb. Keeping an eye on them, in lieu of a sheepdog, was a large, burly fellow, with a. 45 on his hip. With no gas available for private cars, bikes had become the way of choice to get around, and stealing them as big a problem as horse theft in Denver’s younger days. As many people packed a gun now as they had in the old days, too; an unarmed guard wouldn’t have done much good.

Most of Denver was laid out on a north-south, east-west grid. The downtown area, though, nestled into the angle of the Platte River and Cherry Creek, turned that grid at a forty-five-degree angle. Yeager and Barbara pedaled southeast down Sixteenth Street to Broadway, one of the main north-south thoroughfares.

The Pioneer Monument at the corner of Broadway and Colfax caught Sam’s eye. Around the fountain were three reclining bronzes: a prospector, a hunter, and a pioneer mother. At the top of the monument stood a mounted scout.

On him Yeager turned a critical gaze. “I’ve seen statues that looked realer, ” he remarked, pointing.

“He does look more like an oversized mantelpiece ornament than a pioneer, doesn’t he? ” Barbara said. They both laughed.

They turned left onto Colfax. Bicycles, people on foot, horse and mule-drawn wagons, and quite a few folks riding horses made traffic, if anything, dicier than it had been when cars and trucks dominated. Then everything had moved more or less at the same speed. Now the ponderous wagons were almost like ambulatory roadblocks, but you went around them at your peril, too, because a lot of them were big enough to hide what was alongside till too late.

The gilded dome of the three-story granite State Capitol on Colfax dominated the city skyline. On the west lawn of the capitol building stood a Union soldier in bronze, flanked by two Civil War brass cannon.

Yeager pointed to the statue. He said, “Going up against the Lizards, sometimes I felt the way he would if he had to fight today’s Germans or Japs with his muzzleloader and those guns. ”

“There’s an unpleasant thought, ” Barbara said. They pedaled along; on the east lawn of the capitol stood an Indian, also in bronze. She nodded to that statue. “I suppose he felt the same way when he had to fight the white man’s guns with nothing better than a bow and arrow. ”

“Yeah, he probably did at that, ” said Sam, who’d never thought to look at it from the Indian’s perspective. “He got guns of his own, though, and he hit us some pretty good licks, too-at least, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in General Custer’s boots. ”

“You’re right. ” But instead of cheering up, Barbara looked glum. “Even though the Indians hit us some good licks, they lost-look at the United States now, or the way it was before the Lizards came, anyway. Does that mean we’ll lose to the Lizards, even if we do hurt them in the fight? ”

“I don’t know. ” Sam chewed on that for the next block or so. “Not necessarily, ” he said at last. “The Indians never did figure out how to make their own guns and gunpowder; they always had to get ’em from white men. ” He looked around to make sure nobody was paying undue attention to their conversation before he went on, “But we’re well on our way to making bombs to match the ones the Lizards have. ”

“That’s true. ” Barbara did cheer up, but only for a moment. She said, “I wonder if there’ll be anything left of the world by the time we’re done fighting the Lizards. ”

The science-fiction pulps had printed plenty of stones about worlds ruined one way or another, but Sam hadn’t really thought about living (or more likely dying) in one. Slowly, he said, “If the choice is wrecking the Earth or living under the Lizards, I’d vote for wrecking it. From what Ullhass and Ristin say, the Race has kept two other sets of aliens under their thumbs for thousands of years. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. ”

“No, neither would I, ” Barbara said. “But we sure do remind me of a couple of little kids quarreling over a toy: ‘If I can’t have it, you can’t either! ’-and smash! If we end up smashing a whole world… but what else can we do? ”