“Good to see they’ve made it here,” Yeager said. The refugees from the Met Lab hadn’t traveled west across Minnesota all together, for fear such a large wagon train would bring Lizard aircraft down on them. In some places, though, the roads came together. Detroit Lakes was a scheduled layover point.
The wagon driver looked back from his team of plodding horses and said, “Look at all the firewood the people round about here got chopped for us. It’s like, if they’d known we were coming, they’d’ve baked a cake.”
When he got down from the wagon, Yeager discovered the locals had baked a cake. In fact, they’d baked a lot of cakes-though some, he noted, were made from potato flour, and none had any frosting. But such details were soon lost in a great profusion of eggs and turkey, steaks and fried chickens, legs of lamb… he lost track of what he was eating as he stuffed himself. “After so long living out of tin cans in Chicago, I almost forgot they made spreads like this,” he said to a Detroit Lakes man who carried around yet another platter of drumsticks.
“We’ve got more than we know what to do with, when it comes to livestock,” the fellow answered. “We used to ship all the way to the East Coast before the damned Lizards came. Now everything’s just bottled up here. We’ll run short of feed before too long, and have to really start slaughtering, but for now we’re still fat. Happy to share with you folks. It’s a Christian thing to do… even for those critters.”
With undisguised curiosity, the local watched Ristin and Ullhass eat. The Lizards had manners, though not identical to those of Earthlings. Their technique for eating a drumstick was to stab it with a fork, hold it up to their snouts, and then nibble off bits. Every so often, their forked tongues would come out to clean grease off their hard, immobile lips.
Wagons kept coming into Detroit City every fifteen or twenty minutes; they’d been widely spread out to minimize damage from any air strikes that did descend on them (so far, none had, for which Yeager was heartily grateful-coming under air attack once was a thousand times too many). The natives greeted each one as if it held the Prodigal Son.
When shelters were assigned, Yeager found himself with a double cabin that had been altered in advance for use by him and his alien charges. Each of the two rooms had its own wood-burning stove and a bountiful supply of fuel-by now, Ullhass and Ristin knew how to keep a fire going. The windows on the Lizards’ side had boards nailed across them to prevent escape (though Yeager was willing to bet they wouldn’t have tried to run away from their heater). The connecting door between the rooms opened only from his side.
He got Ullhass and Ristin settled for the evening, then went back to his own half of the cabin. It wasn’t luxuriously furnished a table with a kerosene lantern, clothes tree, slop bucket (better that, he thought, than going to an outhouse in the middle of the night-it’d probably freeze right off), cot piled high with extra blankets. So it isn’t the Biltmore, he thought. It’ll do.
He sat down on the cot. He wished he had something to read-an Astounding, by choice. He wondered what had happened to Astounding since the Lizards came; the last issue he’d seen was the one he’d been reading the day the train down from Madison got shot up. But science fiction wouldn’t be the same now that real live bug-eyed (or at least chameleon-eyed) monsters were loose on Earth and bent on conquest.
He bent down to untie his shoes, the only item of clothing he intended to take off tonight. He’d grown so used to sleeping in his uniform to stay warm that doing anything else was starting to seem unnatural.
He’d just grabbed a shoelace when someone scratched at the door. “Who’s that?” Yeager wondered out loud. It had to be something to do with the Lizards, he thought, but whatever it was, couldn’t it wait till morning? The scratching came again. Evidently it couldn’t. Muttering under his breath, he got up and opened the door. “Oh,” he said. It wasn’t anything to do with the Lizards. It was Barbara Larssen.
“May I come in?” she asked.
“Oh,” he said again, and then, “Sure. You’d better, in fact, or all the heat will get out.”
There was no place to sit but the cot, so that was where she sat. After what had happened on the Caledonia and the way she’d acted since, Yeager didn’t know if he ought to sit down beside her. With the instincts of a man who automatically moved back a few steps to prevent the extra-base hit in the late innings, he decided to play safe. He paced back and forth in front of the stove.
Barbara watched him for a few seconds, then said, “It’s all right, Sam. I don’t think you’re going to molest me. That’s what I wanted to talk about with you, anyway.”
Yeager perched cautiously near the head of the cot, at the opposite end from Barbara. “What is there to talk about?” he said. “It was just one of those crazy things that happens sometimes. if you want to pretend it never did-” He started to finish with that’s all right. But it wasn’t, not quite. He tried a different phrase: “You can.” That was better.
“No. I owe you an apology.” She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the worn, grayish-yellow boards of the floor. “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did afterward. I’m sorry. It’s just that after we-did it, I really realized Jens is, is dead, he has to be dead, and that all came down on me at once. I am sorry.” She covered her face with her hands. After a few seconds, he realized she was crying.
He slid down the cot toward her, put a hesitant hand on her shoulder. She stiffened at his touch, but then spun half around and buried her face against his chest. His arms could hardly help folding around her. “It’s okay,” he said, not knowing whether it was okay or not, not even knowing whether she heard him or not. “It’s okay.”
After a while, her sobs subsided to hiccups. She pushed herself away from him, then reached into her purse and dabbed at herself with a hanky. She ruefully shook her head. “I must look like hell.”
Sam considered that. Tears still glistened on her cheeks and brimmed in her eyes. She wasn’t wearing any mascara or shadow to streak and run. If her face was puffy from crying, it didn’t show in the lantern light. But even if it had, so what? “Barbara, you, look real good to me,” he said slowly. “I’ve thought so for a long time.”
“Have you?” she said. “You didn’t really let on, not until-”
“Wasn’t my place to,” he answered, and stopped there.
“Not as long as there was any hope Jens was still alive, you mean,” she said, filling it in for him. He nodded. Her face twisted, but she forced it back to steadiness. “You’re a gentleman, Sam, do you know?”
“Me? I don’t know anything about that. All I know is-” He stopped again. What had started to come out of his mouth was, All I know is baseball, and I’ve spun my wheels there for too damn many years. That was true, but it wasn’t what Barbara needed to hear right now. He gave another try: “All I know is, I’ll try to be good for you if that’s what you want me to do.”
“Yes, that’s what I want,” she said seriously. “Times like these, nobody can get through by himself. If we don’t help each other, hold onto each other, what’s the use of anything?”
“You’ve got me.” He’d been on the road by himself for a lot of years. But he hadn’t really been alone: he’d always had the team, the pennant race, the hope (though that had faded) of moving up-substitutes for family, goal, and dreams.
He shook his head. No matter how deeply baseball had dug its claws into his soul, this was not the time to be thinking about it. Still wary, still a little unsure, he put his arms around Barbara again. She looked at the floor and let out such a long sigh, he almost let go. But then she shook her head; he had a pretty good idea what she was telling herself to forget. She tilted her face up to his.