Tilting the Balance

WELCOME TO CHUGWATER, POPULATION 286, the sign said. Colonel Leslie Groves shook his head as he read it. “Chugwater? ” he echoed. “Wonder why they call it www.businessmartbooks.ru that. ”

Captain Rance Auerbach read the other half of the sign. “ ‘Population 286, ’ ” he said. “Sounds like Jerkwater’d be a better name for it. ”

Groves looked ahead. The cavalry officer had a point. It didn’t look like much of a town. But cattle roamed the fields around it. This late in winter, they were on the scrawny side, but they were still out there grazing. That meant Chugwater had enough to eat, anyhow.

People came out to look at the spectacle of a cavalry company going through town, but they didn’t act as impressed as townsfolk had in Montana and farther north in Wyoming. One boy in ragged blue jeans said to a man in overalls who looked just like him, “I liked the parade a couple of weeks ago better, Dad. ”

“You had a parade through here a couple of weeks ago? ” Groves called to a heavyset man whose black coat, white shirt, and string tie argued that he was a person of some local importance.

“Sure as hell did. ” The pear-shaped man spat a stream of tobacco juice into the street. Groves envied him for having tobacco in any form. He went on, “Only thing missing then was a brass band. Had us a whole slew o’ wagons and soldiers and foreigners who talked funny and even a couple of Lizards-silly-lookin’ little things to cause all the trouble they do, aren’t they? ”

“Yes, now that you mention it. ” Excitement coursed through Groves. That sounded very much like the Met Lab crew. If he was only a couple of weeks behind them, they’d be into Colorado by now, not too far from Denver. He might even catch them before they got there. Whether he did or not, the lead-lined saddlebag in his wagon would push their work forward once they got themselves settled. Trying to make his hope a certainty, he asked, “Did they say what they were up to? ”

The heavyset man shook his head. “Nope. They were right close-mouthed, as a matter of fact. Friendly enough people, though. ” His chest inflated, although not enough to stick out over his belly. “I married off a couple of ’em. ”

One of the other men on the sidewalk, a stringy, leathery fellow who looked like a real cowboy, not the Hollywood variety, said, “Yeah, go on, Hoot, tell him how you laid the bride, too. ”

“You go to hell, Fritzie, ” the pear-shaped man-Hoot-said. A cowboy named Fritzie? Groves thought. Before he had time to do more than marvel, Hoot turned back to him. “Not that I would’ve minded: pretty little thing, a widow I think she was. But I do believe the corporal she married would have kicked my ass around the block if I’d even looked at her sideways. ”

“You’d’ve deserved it, too, ” Fritzie said with a most uncowboylike giggle.

“Oh, shut up, ” Hoot told him. Again, he returned to Groves: “So I don’t know what they were doing, Colonel, only that there were a lot of ’em, heading south. Toward Denver, I think, not Cheyenne, but don’t make me swear to that. ”

“Thank you very much. That helps, ” Groves said. If they weren’t talking about the crew from the University of Chicago, he’d eat his hat. He’d made better time coming across Canada and then down through Montana and Wyoming than they had traveling straight west across the Great Plains. Of course, his party had only the one wagon in it, and that lightly loaded, while theirs was limited to the speed of their slowest conveyance. And they’d have been doing a lot more scrounging for fodder than his tight band. If you couldn’t think in terms of logistics, you didn’t deserve to be an Army engineer.

“You folks going to put up here for the night? ” Hoot asked. “We’ll kill the fatted calf for you, like the Good Book says. ‘Sides, there’s nothin’ between here and Cheyenne but miles and miles of miles and miles. ”

Groves looked at Auerbach. Auerbach looked back, as if to say, You’re the boss. Groves said, “I know things are tight, Mister, uh-”

“I’m Joshua Sumner, but you may as well call me Hoot; everybody else does. We got plenty, at least for now. Feed you a nice thick steak and feed you beets. By God, we’ll feed you beets till your eyeballs turn purple-we had a bumper crop of ’em. Got a Ukrainian family up the road a couple miles, they showed us how to cook up what they call borscht-beets and sour cream and I don’t know what all else. They taste a sight better that way than what we were doing with ’em before, I tell you for a fact. ”

Groves was unenthusiastic about beets, with or without sour cream. But he didn’t think he’d get anything better farther south on US 87. “Thanks, uh, Hoot. We’ll lay over, then, if it’s all right with you people. ”

Nobody in earshot made any noises to say it wasn’t. Captain Auerbach raised his hand. The cavalry company reined in. Groves reflected that a couple of the old-timers on the street had probably seen cavalry go through town before, back before the turn of the century. The idea left him unhappy; it was as If the Lizards were forcing the United States-and the world-away from the twentieth century.

Such worries receded after he got himself outside of a great slab of fat-rich steak cooked medium-rare over a wood fire. He ate a bowl of borscht, too, not least because the person who pressed it on him was a smiling blonde of about eighteen. It wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be, either. And somebody in Chugwater made homebrew beer better than just about anything that came out of a big Milwaukee brewery.