Tilting The Balance (40 page)

The meeting with the physicists went on for another half hour, over lesser but still vital issues like keeping electricity coming into Denver and into the University of Denver in particular so the men could do their jobs. People in the United States had taken electricity for granted until the Lizards came. Now, over too much of the country, it was a vanished luxury. But if it vanished in Denver, the Met Lab would have to find somewhere else to go, and Groves didn’t think the country – or the world – could afford the delay.

Unlike nuclear physics, electricity was something with which, by God, he was intimately familiar. “We’ll keep it going for you,” he promised, and hoped he could make good on the vow. If the Lizards got the idea humans were experimenting with nuclear energy here, they’d have something to say about the matter. Keeping them from finding out, then, was going to be a sizable part of keeping the lights on.

When the meeting broke up, Groves fell into step with Larssen and ignored the physicist’s efforts to break away. “We need to talk, Dr. Larssen,” he said.

“No we don’t, Colonel – sorry, General – Groves,” Larssen said, loading the title with all the scorn he could. “The Army’s already done enough to screw up my life, thanks very much. I don’t need any more help from you.” He turned his back and started to stamp off.

Groves shot out a big, meaty hand and caught him by the arm. From the way Larssen whirled around, Groves thought he was going to swing on him. Decking a physicist wasn’t part of his own job description, but if that was what it took, that was what he’d do.

Maybe Larssen saw that in his eyes, for he didn’t throw the punch. Groves said, “Look, your life is your business. But when it makes you have trouble with your job, well, your particular job is too important to let that happen. So what’s eating you, and how come you think it’s the, Army’s fault?”

“You want to know? you’really want to know?” Larssen didn’t wait for an answer from Groves, but plowed ahead: “Well, why the hell shouldn’t I tell you? Somebody else will if I don’t. After I saw you last year, I managed to get all the way to western Indiana on my own. That’s when I ran into General Patton, who wouldn’t let me send my wife a message so she’d know I was alive and okay.”

“Security-” Groves began.

“Yeah, security. So I couldn’t get her a message then, and by the time I got to Chicago, it was too late – the Met Lab team had already taken off. And I couldn’t get a message to Barbara after that – security again. So she figured I was dead. What was she supposed to think?”

“Oh,” Groves said. “I’m sorry. That must have been a shock when she came into Denver. But I’ll bet you had quite a reunion.”

“It was great,” Larssen said, his voice deadly cold. “She thought I was dead, so she fell for this corporal who rides herd on Lizard POWs. She married him up in Wyoming. I was already in Denver, but Colonel Hexham, God bless him, still wouldn’t let me write. Security one more time. Now she’s gonna have the guy’s baby. So as far as I’m concerned, General Groves; sir, the U.S. Army can go fuck itself. And if you don’t like it, throw me in the brig.”

Groves opened his mouth, closed it again. He’d been through Chugwater just after that wedding in Wyoming. He’d known something was eating Larssen, but not what. No wonder the poor bastard was in a blue funk. Mahatma Gandhi wouldn’t have stayed cool, calm, and collected with this landing on him.

“Maybe she’ll come back to you,” he said at last. It sounded lame, even in his own ears.

Larssen laughed scornfully. “Doesn’t look that way. She’s still going to bed with Sam stinking Yeager, that’s for sure. Women!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “You can’t live without ‘em and they won’t live with you.”

Groves hadn’t seen his own wife in months, either, or sent her a note or anything else. He didn’t worry about her running around, though; he just worried about her being all right. Maybe that just meant he was older and more settled than Larssen and his wife. Maybe it meant his marriage was in better shape. Or maybe (unsettling thought) it meant he didn’t know what to worry about.

He fell back on his own training: “Dr. Larssen, you cannot let it get you down to the point where it affects your work. You cannot. More than just you and your wife depends on what you do here, more even than your country. I am not exaggerating when I say the fate of humanity rests on your shoulders.”

“I know that,” Larssen said. “But it’s hard to give a damn about the fate of humanity when the one human being who really matters to you goes and does something like this.”

There Groves could not argue with him, nor did he try. He said, “You’re not the only one in that boat. It happens all the time – maybe more in war than in peace, because things are more broken up nowadays – but all the time. You have to pick up the pieces and keep going.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Larssen said. “I tell myself the same thing twenty times a day. But it’s damned hard when I keep seeing her there with that other guy. It hurts too much to stand.”

Groves thought about shipping out the other guy-

Yeager, Larssen had said his name was. With the war on, keeping a physicist happy counted for more than the feelings of a Lizard liaison man. But even if he did that, he had no guarantee it would bring Barbara back into Jens’ arms, not if she was carrying Yeager’s baby.

And she and Yeager wouldn’t have got married if they hadn’t thought Larssen was dead. They’d tried to make things right, the best way they knew how. It hadn’t worked, but they hadn’t had all the data they needed, and humans couldn’t be engineered like electrons, anyhow.

Just the same, Groves wished he could order Barbara to go to bed with Jens for the good of the country. It would have made things a lot simpler. But, while a medieval baron might have gotten away with an order like that, a twentieth-century woman would spit in his eye if he tried it. That was what freedom was about. He believed in freedom… no matter how inconvenient it was at the moment.

“Professor Larssen, you’ve got yourself a mess,” he said heavily.

“Yeah. Now tell me one I haven’t heard.”

When Larssen broke away this time, Groves didn’t try to stop him. He just stood and watched till the physicist turned a corner and disappeared. Then he shook his head. “That’s trouble, waiting to happen,” he muttered, and started slowly down the hall himself.

Atvar turned one eye turret to the left side of the audience chamber, the other to the right. The assembled shiplords stared back at him. He tried to gauge their temper. They’d been struggling for close to two years, almost one of Tosev 3’s slow revolutions around its star, to bring the miserable world into the Empire. By all they’d known when they left from Home, the conquest should have been over in a matter of days – which only proved they hadn’t known much.

“My fellow males, let us consider the status of our enterprise,” he said.

“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the shiplords chorused in a show of the perfect obedience the Race so esteemed. No virtue was more fundamental than obedience. So Atvar had been taught since he came from his egg; so he’d believed till he came to Tosev 3.

He still believed it, but not as he had back on Home. Tosev 3 corroded every assumption the Race made about how life should be lived. The only thing the Big Uglies knew about obedience was that they weren’t very good at it. They’d even overthrown and murdered emperors: to Atvar, whose ruling dynasty had held the throne for tens of thousands of years, a crime almost incomprehensibly heinous.

He said, “We do continue to make progress in our campaigns. Our counterattacks south of the Tosevite city known as Chicago on the smaller continental mass have pushed back the enemy, and-”

Straha, shiplord of the 206th Emperor Yower, raised a hand. Atvar wished he could ignore the male. Unfortunately, Straha was next most senior shiplord after Kirel, who commanded the bannership itself. Even more unfortunately, from Atvar’s point of view, Straha headed a loud and vocal faction of males whose principal amusement seemed to be carping about the way the war against the Tosevites was going.

Having been (reluctantly) recognized, Straha said, “May it please the exalted fleetlord, I would respectfully note that the campaign continues to have obvious shortcomings. I hope I shall not try his patience if I elucidate?”

“Proceed,” Atvar said. Maybe, he thought unforgivable and give me the excuse I’ve been looking for to sack him. It hadn’t happened yet, worse luck.

Straha stood a little straighter, the better to display his elaborate, punctiliously applied body paint. He had his own agenda, Atvar knew: if he could persuade enough males that the fleetlord was botching his leadership of the war, he might become fleetlord himself. It would be irregular, but everything about the conquest – the attempted conquest – of Tosev 3 was irregular. If Straha succeeded where Atvar had failed, the Emperor would turn his eye turrets away from the irregularity.

The fractious shiplord said, “First and most important is the increased punishment our armor is taking at the hands of the Big Uglies. Loss rates are up significantly from last year’s fighting to this. Such a toll cannot continue indefinitely.”

There Atvar, try as he would, could not disagree with Straha. He made his voice sharp, though, as he answered, “I cannot produce landcruisers out of thin air, nor can the Big Uglies under our control manufacture any that meet our needs. Meanwhile, those out of our control continue to improve their models, and to introduce new weapons such as antilandcruiser rockets. Thus our losses are higher of late.”

“The Tosevites out of our control always seem capable of more than those we have conquered,” Straha said acidly.

With an effort, the fleetlord ignored the sarcasm and replied to the literal sense of Straha’s words: “This is not surprising, Shiplord. The most technologically advanced regions of this inhomogeneous planet are precisely the ones most capable of extended resistance and, I suppose, of innovation.”

He spoke the last word with a certain amount of distaste. In the Empire, innovation came seldom,,

and its effects were tightly controlled. On Tosev 3, it ran wild, fueled by the endless squabbling among the Big Uglies’ tiny empires. Atvar thought such quick change surely malignant for the long-term health of a civilization, but the Tosevites cared nothing for the long term. And in the short term, quick change made them more dangerous, not less.

“Let that be as you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Straha answered. Atvar gave him a suspicious look; he’d yielded too easily. Sure enough, he went on, “Some of our losses, however, may be better explained by causes other than Tosevite technical progress. I speak in reference to the continued and growing use among our fighting males of the herb termed ginger.”

“I concede the problem, Shiplord,” Atvar said. He could hardly do otherwise, what with some of the after-action reports he’d seen from the landcruiser combats in France. Had things gone as planned, the Race would have been pushing into Deutschland. Instead, they’d taken a pounding almost as costly as the one that had held them out of Chicago, and without the excuse of winter.

Atvar continued, “Surely, though, you cannot hold me responsible for the effects of an unanticipated alien herb. We are making every effort to diminish its consequences on our operations. If you have any concrete suggestions in that regard, I would gratefully receive them.”

He’d hoped that would shut Straha up. It didn’t; nothing seemed to. But it did make the shiplord change the subject: “Exalted Fleetlord, what have we learned of the Big Uglies’ efforts to produce their own nuclear weapons?”

Where Straha had been playing to his own faction before, now he seized the attention of all the assembled males. If the Tosevites got their clawless hands on nuclear weapons, the campaign stopped being a war of conquest and turned into a war of survival. And what would the onrushing colonization fleet do if, between them, the Big Uglies and the Race rendered Tosev 3 uninhabitable?

Hating Straha, Atvar answered, “Though they did steal nuclear material from us, we have found no sign that they can yet produce a weapon with it.” The fleetlord had expected that question to arise, if not from Straha, then from someone else. He touched a recessed button on the podium. A holograph of one of the Race’s power plants appeared. Seeing the familiar egg-shaped protective dome over the reactor made him long bitterly for Home. Forcing down the emotion, he went on, “We have also detected no indications of any structures like this one, which would be required for them to utilize their own radioactive materials.”

Most of the shiplords relaxed when they heard that. Even Straha said, “So they won’t be able to use nuclear weapons against us for the next few years, eh? Well, there’s something, anyhow.” If that wasn’t praise, it wasn’t carping criticism, either. Atvar gratefully accepted it.

Loyal, steadfast Kirel raised a hand. Atvar was delighted to recognize him. Then Kirel said, “Excuse me, Exalted Fleetlord, but the Big Uglies are good at camouflage. And besides, some of their primitive structures look very little like those of ours which perform equivalent functions.” Are we truly as certain as we would like to be that their nuclear weapons programs are not progressing under our very snouts, to emerge as unexpectedly as some of their other weapons?”

Aside from the difficulty of proving a negative, Atvar had no answer prepared for that. The meeting did not dissolve on the note for which he’d hoped.

x Teerts was coming to look forward to mealtimes. For one thing, the Nipponese had been feeding him better lately, with many more bits of meat and fish mixed in with the rice that made up the greater part of his diet. For another, they’d also taken to spicing his food instead of leaving it bland and boring; his tongue tingled pleasantly when he ate now. The spices weren’t the same as the ones cooks back on Home would have used, but they livened up meals in a similar way.

And for a third, food these days gave him a lift that carried him altogether out of the depression that had gripped him since his killercraft went down near Harbin. For a while after he ate, he felt bright and strong and ever so wise. The feeling never lasted as long as he wished it would, but having it even for a little while was welcome.