Page 53 of Upsetting the Balance (Worldwar 3)

Instead of answering in words, he took out the fancy letter with which General Groves had equipped him and handed it to her. She carefully read it through, gave it back to him. “Where are you going, Mr. no, Dr. Larssen, on this important government mission of yours?” she asked. She didn’t add,And where did you pick up the clap along the way? — just as well, too, since he’d picked it up twice.

He grinned at her. “As a matter of fact, I was coming here. Now I have to get my bicycle out of your waiting room and head on back to make my report.”

“You were coming here? To Hanford?” Marjorie Henry burst out laughing. “Excuse me, Dr. Larssen, but what on earth does Hanford have that you couldn’t get ten times as much of somewhere-anywhere-else?”

“Water. Space. Privacy,” he answered. Those were absolutely the only things Hanford had going for it, with the possible exception of Dr. Henry, but Larssen had already changed his mind about the dreadful review he’d first thought he would give to the place.

“Yes, we have those things,” Dr. Henry admitted. “Why are they important enough for the government to send someone out looking for them?”

“I’m sorry; I really can’t tell you that.” Jens started to regret pulling out the letter. He said, “Please don’t spread it around, either. In fact, I’d be grateful if you just told Beulah-did I get her name right? — I won the money in a poker game or something like that.”

“All right,” she said. “I can do that. You can’t afford to gossip as a small-town doctor, anyway. If you do, you lose all your patients after about the first week. I will ask one question, though: are you going to put a hospital in here? You may be Dr. Larssen, but I don’t think you’re an M.D.”

“I’m not, and no, that’s not what’s planned,” Jens said, and let it go at that. Telling her what kind of doctorate he had might have told her other things, too, things she didn’t need to know. Now that he was here, security seemed to matter again. He hadn’t worried much about it while he was on the road.

Dr. Henry was visibly disappointed, but didn’t ask any more questions. Maybe she’d really meant what she said about not gossiping. She stuck out her hand and shook his, man-fashion. “Good luck to you,” she said. “I hope the sulfanilamide tablets do as well for you as they commonly do. I also hope you won’t need such medications again.” Before he could decide if that was patronizing, or get mad about it if it was, she went on, “Will we see you again in Hanford, then?”

“You may very well,” he answered. That didn’t seem to make her angry. In spite of her jab, she was a doctor, and didn’t think of gonorrhea as the end of the world. He nodded to her, opened the door, and walked down the hall to the waiting room.

Dr. Henry called after him, “Mr. Larssen has paid me for the visit, Beulah.” Jens nodded again, this time to himself. If she remembered to call him Mr. Larssen in public, she would probably remember not to talk about his letter. He could hope so, anyhow.

In the waiting room sat another pregnant woman, this one less rotund than the one who’d preceded Larssen, and a farmer with a hand wrapped in a blood-soaked rag. They both gave Jens a curious look as he recovered his bicycle. Beulah said, “Go on in, George. The doctor will clean that out and sew it up for you.”

“She got any o’ that tetanus stuff left?” George asked as he rose from his chair.

Jens didn’t find out whether or not Dr. Henry had antitetanus serum. He walked out of her office, lugging the bicycle. Sure enough, the sign outside gave her name in good-sized letters; he just hadn’t noticed. If he had, he wouldn’t have gone in, and he wouldn’t have got the sulfa tablets. Sometimes ignorance worked out pretty well.

He swung onto the bike and began to pedal, southbound now. Dr. Henry was also the first woman he’d met in a long time who hadn’t screwed him, one way or another. She knew what her job was and she went out and did it without any fuss or feathers.

“If she’d been waiting for me, she’d havewaited, by Jesus,” Jens said as he rolled out of Hanford. “She wouldn’t have fallen into bed with some lousy ballplayer.” When he got back to Denver, he’d have some choice things to say to Barbara, and if Sam Yeager didn’t like it, well, there were ways to deal with Sam Yeager, and with Barbara, too.

He reached around behind his back and patted the wooden stock of his Springfield. Then he bent low over the bicycle handlebars and started pumping hard. Colorado was still a long way away, but he could hardly wait to get back.

Lugging a heavy picnic basket uphill on a hiking trail in Arkansas summer wasn’t Sam Yeager’s idea of fun. But getting away from the Army and Navy General Hospital for a while-to say nothing of getting away from the Lizards-was worth some discomfort. And he wasn’t about to let Barbara carry the picnic basket, not when her belly was starting to bulge.

She glanced over at him. “You’re red as a beet, Sam,” she said. “Really, nothing will happen if I take that for a few minutes. Just because I’m expecting doesn’t mean I’m made out of cut glass. I won’t break.”

“No,” Yeager answered stubbornly. “I’m all right.” The path rounded a corner. The pines to either side opened out onto a grassy meadow. “Besides,” he went on with a grin not altogether free of relief, “this looks like a perfect spot.”

“Why, so it does,” Barbara said. At first he thought that was hearty agreement. Then, when he listened to it again in his mind, he suspected she would have agreed had the meadow been a dismal swamp. She was ready to stop walking, and she was ready to have him stop toting that basket.

The meadow wasn’t so closely trimmed as it might have been had the federal government not had more urgent things to worry about. Long grass didn’t bother Yeager; he’d played in outfields where it wasn’t a whole lot shorter. He set down the basket, flipped open the lid, pulled out a blanket, and spread it on the ground. As soon as Barbara sat down on it, he did, too.

Now that the hauling was done, the picnic basket became her responsibility. She reached in and got out ham sandwiches wrapped in cloth napkins from the hospital-waxed paper was a thing of the past. The bread was homemade and sliced by hand; the ham came from a Hot Springs razorback; the mustard had never seen the inside of a factory. It might have been the best sandwich Sam had ever eaten. After it came hard-boiled eggs and a peach pie that gave the ham sandwich a run for its money.

The only rough spot in the road was the beer. Several people in Hot Springs were brewing, but what they turned out didn’t stack up too well against store-bought brands. It wasn’t cold, either. But Sam could drink it, and he did.

When he was through, he lay back on the blanket with a sigh of contentment. “I wish I had me a cigarette,” he said. “Otherwise, the world looks like a pretty fine place right now.” Barbara didn’t answer. He glanced over to her. She hadn’t done justice to either that magnificent sandwich or the peach pie. “Come on,” he told her. “You’re eating for two.”

“I know,” she said. “Sometimes I still have trouble keeping down food for one, though.” She looked a trifle green. Defensively, she added, “It’s better than it was a couple of months ago. Then I thought having a baby meant starving to death-or rather, eating something and then tossing it up right away. Thank heaven I’m not doing that any more.”

“You said it,” he answered. “Well, I’m not going to agitate you about it, not now. It’s too nice a day-now that that picnic basket’s sitting here on the blanket.” He consoled himself: “It’s downhill on the way back-and the basket’ll be lighter, too.”

A lazy breeze drifted through the pines, filling the meadow with their spicy scent. High overhead, a hawk circled. Blue larkspur and violets, great blue sage and purple cone splashed the rainbow here and there across the green grass. Bees buzzed from one flower to another. Flies snacked on the remains of the feast, and on the picnickers.

Barbara let out a squeak. Sam jumped; he’d been lulled by the peaceful surroundings-the most peace he’d known in quite a while. “What’s the matter?” he asked. He rea

ched into the pocket of his chinos. If peace dissolved, as it had a way of doing, he was armed with nothing better than a pocketknife.

But Barbara pointed to the blanket and said, “A little green lizard just ran across there. I didn’t see it till it jumped out of the grass. Now it’s gone again.”

“I know the ones you mean,” Sam said, relaxing. “They can change colors-sometimes they’re brown instead of green. People around here call ’em chameleons on account of that, but I don’t think they are, not really. They don’t have the funny eyes real chameleons do, the ones that go every which way like Lizards’ eye turrets.”

Barbara sniffed. “I was looking for sympathy, not herpetology,” she said, but she was laughing while she said it. Then everything but concentration drained from her face. Her face was turned toward Sam, but she was looking inward. “The baby’s moving,” she murmured. Her eyes got wide. “Moving, heck-he’s kicking like nobody’s business. Come here, Sam. You should be able to feel this.”

He slid across the blanket toward her. She pulled the shirttail of her thin white cotton blouse out from the waistband of her pleated skirt. He set his hand on her belly, just below her navel. When she had clothes on, you couldn’t see she was pregnant, or not, and be sure, but you could feel the mound that had begun to rise there. Her flesh was warm and beaded with sweat from the sticky day.

“He’s stopped,” Barbara said, disappointed. “No, wait-did you feel that?”

“I sure did,” Yeager said. Something had-fluttered-under his palm. He’d felt it a few times before, but it never failed to awe him. He closed his hand into a fist, tapped gently on her belly. “Hello? Anybody home?”

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