“I found what I was after,” Sam said, and squeezed her hand. She turned to smile at him. Before she could say anything, the lights dimmed and the big screen at the front of the theater came to sparkling life.
The newsreel wasn’t the smoothly professional production it would have been before the Lizards came. Yeager didn’t know whether the aliens held Hollywood itself, but the distribution system for new films coming out of California had completely broken down.
What the moviegoers got instead was a U.S. Army production, probably put together right here in Denver. Some of the bits had sound added, some used cards with words on them, something Sam remembered from silent film days but had thought to be gone for good.
EASTERN FRANCE one of those cards announced. The camera panned slowly, lovingly, across burned-out Lizard tanks. A tough-looking fellow in German uniform walked among the wreckage.
People cheered wildly. Barbara murmured, “Has everyone forgotten the Nazis were our worst enemies a year ago?”
“Yes,” Yeager whispered back. He had no love for the Nazis, but if they were hurting the Lizards, more power to ’em. He hadn’t loved the Russian Reds last year, either, but he’d been damn glad they were in the fight against Hitler.
Another card flashed, MOSCOW. There stood Stalin, shaking hands with a factory worker in a cloth cap. Behind them, a row of almost-completed airplanes stretched as far as the eye-or the camera-could see. Yet another card said, THE SOVIET UNION STAYS IN THE FIGHT. More cheers echoed through the movie theater.
The next segment had sound; a fellow with a flat midwestern accent said, “Outside of Bloomington, the Lizards banged their snouts into tough American resistance as they tried to push north toward Chicago again.” Another picture of a wrecked Lizard tank was followed by shots of tired-looking but happy GIs around a campfire.
Yeager almost bounced out of his chair. “There’s Mutt, by God!” he told Barbara. “My old manager, I mean. Jesus, I wonder how he lived through all the fighting. He’s got sergeant’s stripes, too-did you see?”
“I wouldn’t have recognized him, Sam. He wasn’t my manager,” she answered, which made him feel foolish. She added, “I’m glad he’s all right.”
“Boy, so am I,” he said, “I’ve played for some real hard cases in my day, but he was one of the other kind, the good ones. He-” People to either side and behind made shushing noises. Yeager subsided, abashed.
The newsreel cut to a card that said, SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S.A. “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States!” the announcer said.
In the black-and-white film, Franklin D. Roosevelt sat behind a desk in what looked like a hotel room. The drapes were drawn behind him, perhaps merely to give him a backdrop, perhaps to keep the Lizards from figuring out where he was by what the camera showed out the window.
Roosevelt was in his shirtsleeves, his collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He looked tired and worn, but kept the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle in his mouth. He still had cigarettes, Yeager noted without resentment: FDR was working hard enough to be entitled to them.
The President took the holder from his mouth, stubbed out the cigarette instead of letting it smolder to add a picturesque plume of smoke to the scene. He leaned toward the microphone in front of him. “My friends,” he said (and Yeager felt Roosevelt was speaking straight to him), “the fight goes on.”
Applause rippled through the theater, then quickly faded so people could listen to what the President had to say. Even his first half-dozen words gave Sam fresh hope. FDR had always had that gift. He hadn’t always made things better, but he’d always made people feel they would get better, which was half the battle by itself-it made people go to work to improve their own lot instead of moaning about how dreadful everything was.
Roosevelt said, “The enemy is on our soil and in the air above our homes. These creatures from another world believe they can frighten us into surrender by raining destruction down on our heads. As our gallant British allies did with the Germans in 1940, we shall prove them wrong.
“Every day we have more new weapons to hurl against the Lizards. Every day they have less with which to resist. Those of you who still live free, everything you do to help the war effort helps ensure that your children, and your children’s children, will grow up in freedom, too. And to those of you in occupied territory who may see this, I say: do not collaborate with the enemy in any way. Do not work in his factories, do not grow crops for him, do nothing you can possibly avoid. Without human beings to be his slaves, sooner or later he will be helpless.
“For we have hurt him, in America, in Europe, and in Asia as well. He is not superhuman, he is merely inhuman. Our united nations-now all the nations on this planet-will surely triumph in the end. Thank you and God bless you.”
The next news segment showed ways to conserve scrap metal. It had a soundtrack, but Yeager didn’t pay much attention to it. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Just hearing FDR’s voice was a tonic. Roosevelt made you think everything would turn out okay, one way or another.
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, 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.