“We should eat well tonight, then.” Yeager’s mouth watered at the thought of milk, cheese, probably big steaks, too-the folk around here might well be inclined to do some slaughtering for their guests, because they wouldn’t be able to keep feeding all their livestock now that the Lizards had made moving grain and hay on a large scale impossible.

More wagons from the convoy came into town, some carrying people but more loaded down with the equipment that had filled much of Eckhart Hall back at the University of Chicago. Not all the wagons would stop here tonight, they were spread out for miles along the highway and back roads that ran parallel to it, both to avoid looking interesting to the Lizards and to keep from taking too much destruction from an air attack if they did.

Enrico Fermi helped his wife Laura down from their wagon, then waved to Yeager. He waved back. He still felt a rush of pride at hanging around with scientists and even helping them when they had questions for the Lizard prisoners. Till a few months ago, his closest brush with scientists had been with the near-supermen who populated the pages of Astounding.

The real ones, while bright enough, weren’t a lot like their fictional counterparts. For one thing, a lot of the best ones-Fermi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner-were dumpy foreigners with funny accents. Fermi talked like Bobby Fiore’s father (he wondered what had happened to his old roommate, the second baseman on the Decatur Commodores). For another; just about all of them, foreign and American, were much more human than their fictional analogs; they’d have a drink (or more than one), they’d tell stories, and they’d argue with their wives. Yeager liked them more for it, not less.

Steaks there proved to be, cooked over open flames and eaten by the fireside-no gas and no electricity in New Salem. Yeager cut his into very small pieces as he ate it: though he wouldn’t be thirty-six for another couple of months, he had full upper and lower plates. He’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and his teeth had rotted in his head. The only teeth of his own he had were the ones that gave everybody else trouble: seven or eight years after the epidemic, his wisdom teeth had come in fine.