Upsetting the Balance (21 page)

She took another step toward him; now she was so close, she made him want to take a step back. She ran her tongue over her lips, which made him notice again that she’d painted them red. “I’d do just about anything to get the chance to go along,” she murmured in a breathy little voice he wasn’t used to hearing anywhere outside the bedroom.

The sweat that sprang out on his forehead had nothing to do with the heat of Colorado summer. Women had been few and far between for him this past crazy summer, and, like a lot of guys, he always came back from action horny, probably because he was so relieved to be coming back alive.

But if Rachel would go to bed with him to get what she wanted, she’d do the same thing with somebody else. Politely, in case he’d somehow misunderstood her (though he knew damn well he hadn’t), he said, “I’m sorry, but it isn’t in my hands. Like I said, it’s up to the colonel.”

“Well, I’ll just have to talk with
him,
then, won’t I?” She sashayed off toward the First National Bank. Auerbach wondered if Colonel Nordenskold would be able to resist her blandishments, and if he’d even try.

The cavalry captain went on to tend to his horse, also wondering how much he’d regret turning her down. “Damn, if she’d only wanted something easy from me,” he muttered under his breath. “Robbing the bank here, say . . .”

Leslie Groves did not pretend to be a combat general, even to himself. Engineers fought nature and they fought the efforts of ill-intentioned people in the wrong kinds of uniforms who wanted to knock down the things they ran up. They weren’t supposed to worry about fighting the bad guys, not directly.

On the other hand, engineers had to be able to fight in a pinch. You never could tell what might happen to the officers who made battle their proper business, if enough of them went down, you were liable to be the man on the spot for a while.

So Groves had plenty of experience reading situation maps. Just to keep himself in practice, he often tried to figure out strategy for each side. With pardonable pride, he thought he was pretty good at it.

When he looked at the situation map on the wall of his office, he grimaced. You didn’t have to be Napoleon to realize that, if the Lizards wanted to, they could stroll across Colorado and seize Denver without breathing hard, let alone slowing down.

“What’s going to stop them?” Groves snorted. “Cavalry, for God’s sake?” He hadn’t seen cavalry symbols on a map for a long time; he’d felt mild pride for remembering what they meant.

Cavalry, against the Lizards? Cavalry had had trouble with the Sioux Indians, and he didn’t see that the state of the art had improved enough in the past three generations to give the horse soldiers much of a chance of holding off creatures from another planet. If the Lizards took it into their toothy heads to go after Denver, cavalry wouldn’t be enough to hold them back.

More armored divisions than the U.S. Army owned might not be enough to hold them back, either, but Groves didn’t worry about might-have-beens. What
was
posed quite enough difficulties.

“They can’t find out we’re working on the atomic bomb here,” he announced, as if he expected someone to materialize in an empty chair across the desk from him and nod at his wisdom.

Of course, if the Lizards did find out the Metallurgical Laboratory had settled down here, they probably wouldn’t bother mounting an armored drive across Colorado. They’d just do unto Denver what they’d done unto Tokyo: they’d blow it off the face of the earth. If they did that, and especially if they did that before the United States had made any bombs, the war would be as good as lost, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

“Japan’s smashed, England’s invaded,” he said. Astonishing how much the destruction of Tokyo worried him. Not much more than a year before, Jimmy Doolittle had won himself a Congressional Medal of Honor for bombing the Japanese capital, and the whole U.S.A. had stood up and cheered. Now—“If we go under now, everything rides on the Reds and the Nazis,” Groves said, scowling. That was a hell of a thought, depending on a couple of the nastiest regimes ever invented to save the day for everybody else. Living under the Lizards might almost be better . . .

Groves shook his head. Nothing was worse than living under the Lizards. He held one finger in the air, as if to show he’d had a good idea. “The thing to do is not to let them know,” he declared. So far, they hadn’t tumbled. With luck and care, they wouldn’t.

What really worried him, though, was that they wouldn’t have to figure out that the Americans were doing nuclear research to want to conquer Denver. If they decided to head west from where they already were, it was the biggest city in sight. Maybe the Met Lab team would escape, the way they had from Chicago, but where would they go next? He hadn’t the faintest idea. How much precious time would they lose? He didn’t know that, either, but a lot. Could the United States—could the world—afford to have them lose all that time? There, for once, he knew the answer. No.

He got up from his desk, stretched, and headed out the door. Instead of his officer’s cap, he grabbed a civilian-style fedora. He was finally wearing a brigadier general’s stars on his shoulders, but he’d daubed gray paint on them so they wouldn’t sparkle and perhaps draw the notice of Lizard aerial reconnaissance. The last thing he wanted the Lizards wondering was what a general was doing on a university campus. If they were smart enough to figure out that that meant military research, they might also be smart enough to figure out what kind of research it meant . . . in which case, good-bye, Denver.

The walk to the pile under the football stadium was, aside from eating and sleeping, almost the only break Groves allowed himself in his days of relentless toil. Off to the east, civilians, men and women alike, were out digging tank traps and trenches. Those might not come to anything without the soldiers and guns they’d need to make them effective, but the civilians were giving their all. He could hardly do anything less—and it wasn’t in his nature to do anything less, anyhow.

A chart was thumbtacked to a hallway wall of the stadium by the atomic pile. It kept track of two things: the amount of plutonium produced each day, and how much had been produced overall. That second number was the one Groves watched like a hawk.

Leo Szilard came round the corner. “Good morning, General,” he said in the thick Hungarian accent that always made Groves—and a lot of other people—think of Bela Lugosi. Something else besides the accent lurked in his voice. Groves suspected it was scorn for anybody who put on his country’s uniform. Groves’ reaction to that was returned scorn, but he did his best to hide it. He was, after all, fighting to keep the United States a free country.

And besides, he might have been reading altogether too much into a three-word greeting, although other encounters with the physicist made him doubt that “Good morning, Dr. Szilard,” he answered as cordially as he could—and the chart gave him some reason for cordiality. “We’ve been up over ten grams a day this past week. That’s excellent.”

“It is certainly an improvement. Having the second pile operational has helped a good deal. More than half the production now comes from it. We were able to improve its design with what we learned from this one.”

“That’s always the way things go,” Groves said, nodding. “You build the first one to see if it will work and how it will work, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. Your second one’s a better job, and by the third or fourth you’re about ready to enter regular production.”

“Adequate theory would enable the first attempt to be of proper quality,” Szilard said, now with a touch of frost. Groves smiled. That was just the difference between a scientist, who thought theory could adequately explain the world, and an engineer, who was sure you had to get in there and tinker with things before they’d go the right way.

Groves said, “We’re bringing down the time until we have enough plutonium for a bomb every time I look at the chart, but next year still isn’t good enough.”

“We are now doing everything we can here at Denver, given the materials and facilities available,” Szilard answered. “If the Hanford site is as promising as it appears to be, we can begin producing more there soon, assuming we can set up the plant without the Lizards’ noticing.”

“Yes, assuming,” Groves said heavily. “I wish I’d sent Larssen out as part of a team. If something goes wrong with him . . . we’ll just have to judge going ahead at Hanford on the basis of theory rather than experience.”

Szilard gave him a surprised look. The physicist owned a sense of humor, a rather dry, puckish one, but seemed surprised to find anything similar lurking in the soul of a military man. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “The atomic piles we have in mind for that facility are truly elegant, and will make these seem like clumsy makeshifts. The Columbia has enough cooling flow to let them be enormously more efficient.”

“Getting equipment and people to Hanford is going to be complicated,” Groves said. “Getting anything anywhere is complicated these days. That’s what having aliens occupying half the country will do to you.”

“If we do not establish additional facilities, our production rate for plutonium here will remain cruelly low,” Szilard said.

“I know,” Groves answered. So many things the United States had to do if it was going to win the war. So many things, also, the United States couldn’t do. And if the United States couldn’t do the things it had to do . . . Groves was an excellent logician. He wished he weren’t, because he hated the conclusion to which logic led him.

David Goldfarb drew himself to attention as Fred Hipple walked by, which meant he looked down on the crown of the diminutive group captain’s service cap. “Permission to speak to you a moment, sir?”

Hipple stopped, nodded. “What is it, Goldfarb?”

The rumble of artillery was plainly audible in the moment Goldfarb used to gather his thoughts. The Lizards’ northern perimeter was only a few miles away. Up till now, it had been a defensive perimeter; their main effort went into the southward push toward London. That didn’t mean the British were attacking it with any less ferocity, though.

Goldfarb said, “Sir, I’d like your endorsement on a request to transfer from this unit to one where I can get into combat.”

“I thought that might be what you would say.” Hipple rubbed at the thin line of his mustache. “Your spirit does you credit. However, I shall not endorse any such request. On the contrary. As long as this research team exists, I shall bend every effort toward maintaining it at full strength.” He scratched at his mustache again. “You are not the first man to ask this of me.”

“I didn’t think I would be, sir, but this is the first chance I’ve had to speak to you in any sort of privacy,” Goldfarb said. Being one of the other ranks, he didn’t share quarters with Hipple, as did the officers on the jet propulsion and radar research team. Stealing this moment outside the Nissen hut where they all worked wasn’t the same thing—although the roar of cannon and the cloud of dust and smoke that obscured the southern horizon lent his words urgency.

“Yes, yes, I understand all that. Quite.” Hipple looked uncomfortable. “I might add that my own request to return to combat duty was also rejected, and I must admit I found the reasons for its rejection compelling enough to apply them myself.” He shifted from foot to foot, a startling gesture from such a usually dapper little man.

“What are those reasons, sir?” Goldfarb gestured violently. “With the country invaded, seems to me we need every man who can carry a rifle to do just that.”

Hipple’s smile was rueful. “Exactly what I said, though I believe I used the phrase ‘climb into a cockpit’ instead. I was told, quite pointedly, that this was penny wise and pound foolish, that we have a sufficiency of fighting men who are only that and nothing more, but that technical progress had to continue lest in winning this fight we sow the seeds of losing the next one, and that—you will forgive me, I trust, for quoting the words of the Air Vice Marshal—I was to bloody well stay here till we were either evacuated or bloody well overrun.”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. Then, greatly daring, he added, “But sir, if we lose this fight, can we make another?”

“A cogent point,” Hipple admitted. “If by ‘we’ you mean the British Isles, I daresay the answer is no. But if you mean by it mankind as a whole, I believe the answer to be yes. And if we are evacuated, I believe we shan’t go into the Welsh mountains or up into Scotland or across the Irish Sea to Belfast. My guess is that they may send us across to Norway, and from there to join forces with the Germans—no, I don’t care for that, and I see from your face that you don’t, either, but neither of our opinions has anything to do with anything. More likely, though, we’d sail across the Atlantic and set up shop in Canada or the United States. Meanwhile, we soldier on here. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb repeated. Hipple nodded as if everything were settled and went on his way. Sighing, Goldfarb walked into the Nissen hut.

Basil Roundbush was in there, poring over a blueprint with a singular lack of enthusiasm. He looked up, saw Goldfarb’s hangdog expression, and recognized it for what it was. “The Old Man wouldn’t let you go fight either, eh?”

“Too bloody right.” Goldfarb waved to the Sten guns and spare magazines that had gone up on hooks and in bins on the walls of the hut, ready to be grabbed. “I suppose those are there to make us feel like soldiers, even if we’re not.”

Roundbush laughed, but without much humor. “That’s well put. I never should have learned so blinking much. If I were just a pilot, I’d be in there battling, not chained to a draughtsman’s table away from it all.”

One of the meteorologists said, “If you were just a pilot, you’d have been in there battling all along, and odds are you’d’ve long since bought your plot.”

“Oh, bugger off, Ralph,” Basil Roundbush said. For a crack like that, he would have beaten most men to a jelly, but Ralph Wiggs had had an artificial leg since the day when, a generation before, he’d gone over the top at the Somme. Having seen that and been lucky enough to survive it, he knew everything worth knowing about senseless slaughter.