Upsetting the Balance (34 page)

Snarling, Groves said, “I wasn’t done yet, Porlock. God damn it to hell, sir, if I tell you I want your breakfast fried eggs and toast chucked into a fighter plane and flown out here, they’d better still be hot when I meet ’em at the airport.
That’s
what the priority this project has is all about. You want to send me backups for my requisitions, you can send ’em any damn way you please. But you will send me a set my way, on my schedule, or the President of the United States will hear about it. Do you have that down loud and clear, Mister? You’d better, that’s all I have to say.”

Porlock had tried to interrupt him a couple of times, but Groves used his loud, gravelly voice the same way he used his wide, heavy body: to bulldoze his way ahead. Now, when he paused for breath, Porlock said, “There are more projects than yours these days, General. Poison gas has had its priority increased to—”

“Three levels below ours,” Groves broke in. When he felt like interrupting, he damn well interrupted. “Poison gas is a sideshow, Mister. The Lizards’ll figure out proper masks sooner or later, and they’ll figure out how to make gas of their own, too. If they don’t manage it by themselves, you can bet your bottom dollar some helpful frog or wop’ll give ’em a hand. The thing we’re working on here, though”—he wouldn’t call it a bomb, not over the telephone; you never could tell who might be listening—“the only way to defend against that is to be somewhere else when it goes off.”

“Rail travel isn’t safe or secure,” Porlock protested.

“Mister, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a war on. Not one damned thing in the United States is safe or secure these days. Now I need what I need, and I need it when I need it. Are you going to send it to me my way, or not?” Groves made the question into a threat:
You are going to send it to me my way, or else.

“Well, yes, but—”

“All right, then,” Groves said, and hung up. He glared at the phone after it was back on the hook. Sometimes the people on his own side were worse enemies than the Lizards. No matter that the United States had been at war for more than a year and a half, no matter that the Lizards had been on American soil for more than a year. Some people still didn’t get the idea that if you didn’t take occasional risks—or not so occasional risks—now, you’d never get the chance to take them later. He snorted, a full-throated noise of contempt. For all the initiative some people showed, they might as well have been Lizards themselves.

He snorted again. Nobody would ever accuse him of failing through lack of initiative. Through rushing ahead too fast, maybe, but never through hanging back.

He had a picture of his wife on his desk. He didn’t look at it as often as he should, because when he did, he remembered how much he missed her. That made him inefficient, and he couldn’t afford inefficiency, not now.

Thinking of his own wife made him think of what had happened to Jens Larssen. The guy had caught a bunch of bad breaks, no doubt about that. Having your wife take up with another man was tough. But Larssen had let it drive him—oh, not round the bend, but to a nasty place, a place where people didn’t want to work with him any more. He’d had real talent, but he’d given up on the team and he wasn’t quite brilliant enough to be an asset as a lone-wolf theorist. Sending him out had been a good notion. Groves hoped he’d come back better for it

“Hanford,” Groves muttered discontentedly. It had seemed a great idea at the time. The Columbia was about as ideal a cooling source for an atomic pile as you could imagine, and eastern Washington a good long way away from any Lizards.

But things had changed since Larssen got on his trusty bicycle and pedaled out of Denver. The project was running smoothly here now, with plutonium coming off the piles gram after gram, and with a third pile just starting construction.

Not only that, Groves had his doubts about being able to start up a major industrial development in a sleepy hamlet like Hanford without having the Lizards notice and wonder what was going on. Those doubts had grown more urgent since Tokyo vanished in a flash of light and an immense pillar of dust, and since Cordell Hull brought back word that the Lizards would treat any American nuclear research facility the same way if they found it.

Just because Hanford was such a good site for a pile, Groves feared the Lizards would suspect any new work there was exactly what it really was. If they did, it would cease to exist moments later, and so would the hamlet of Hanford. Of course, if they got suspicious about Denver, the same thing would happen there—and Denver had a lot more people in it than Hanford did. Most of them—Groves devoutly hoped—knew nothing whatever about the atomic bombs being spawned here. They were hostages to the secret’s being kept, just the same.

They were also camouflage. The Lizards flew over Denver a good deal, and bombed the plants that turned out tires and bricks and mining equipment and furniture (some of the latter plants were making wooden aircraft parts these days instead). The United States needed everything the factories produced. All the same, Groves didn’t too much mind seeing them bombed. As long as the Lizards hit them, they weren’t hitting anything of greater importance. And here, unlike in Hanford, new industrial facilities could go up without being reckoned anything out of the ordinary.

Even if Larssen did come back with the news that Hanford could be the earthly paradise for atomic research, Groves figured the Metallurgical Laboratory would stay here, east of Eden. Packing up and moving would be tough, doing it secretly would be tougher, and keeping things in Washington State secret would be toughest of all. Accepting Denver’s drawbacks and exploiting its advantages seemed a better bet.

“That’ll tick Larssen off, too,” Groves muttered under his breath. If Larssen came back from risking his neck for project and country with a recommendation to go yonder, he wouldn’t be dancing with glee when he found out they’d decided to stay hither no matter what. “Too damn bad,” Groves told the ceiling. “If he doesn’t like it, he can go back to Hanford by his lonesome.”

He turned to the report he’d been studying when that idiot Porlock called. Keeping the atomic piles cool as they cooked plutonium took a lot of water from Cherry Creek and the South Platte. Separating the plutonium from the uranium took chemical reactions that used more water. Every bit of that water, by the time it finished doing its job, ended up radioactive. A radioactive trail in the South Platte leading back to Denver might as well have been a sign to the Lizards, saying AIM HERE.

Heavy-duty filters sucked as much radioactive goop out of the water as they could. They did a good job; Geiger counters downstream from the University of Denver were pretty quiet. But that didn’t end the problem. The glass wool and diatomaceous earth and other goodies in the filter (the report had a long list) grew radioactive themselves after a while. When they got cleaned out and replaced, they had to go somewhere. To keep the Lizards from detecting them, “somewhere” meant lead-lined tubs and trash cans.

The major who’d written the report was complaining that he had trouble getting enough lead sheeting to line the tubs and cans. Groves scribbled a note in the margin:
This is silver-mining country, for heaven’s sake. Wherever there’s silver, there’s going to be lead. If we aren’t exploiting that as well as we should, we have to get better at it.

If he had to requisition lead from outside of town, God only knew how long it would take to get here. If he stayed local, he could control the whole process of getting it from start to finish. All at once, he understood how old-time feudal barons, living off the produce and manufactures of their own estates, must have felt.

He smiled. “Lucky bastards,” he said.

9

The mustard-gas burn on David Goldfarb’s leg throbbed painfully. His trousers had pulled up over his socks just for a moment, while he was scrambling through grass near a shell hole that must have come from a gas round. That was all it took.

He pulled up his trousers now. In spite of the slimy stuff the medic had smeared on it, the burn remained red and inflamed. It looked infected. Mustard gas was nasty stuff. It could linger for days. He was just glad he’d been wearing his gas mask while he was near that hole. The idea of trying to breathe with a burn on his lungs made him shiver all over.

“ ‘Ow’s it doin’, flyboy?” Fred Stanegate asked in Yorkshire dialect so broad Goldfarb had trouble following it. Stanegate was a big blond chap with cheekbones that made him look more like a Viking than an Englishman. The Sten gun he carried seemed hardly more than a pistol in his massive, thick-fingered hands. It also seemed anachronistic; he should have been toting a battle-axe and wearing a hauberk, not filthy army battledress.

“I expect I’ll live,” Goldfarb answered. Stanegate chuckled as if he’d said something funny. From the Yorkshireman’s point of view, maybe he had; by all appearances, he bemused Fred at least as much as the other way round.

“Right peculiar they didna want you back,” Stanegate said. “Peculiar.” He repeated the word with relish, making four distinct syllables of it: pee-kyou-lee-yuhr.

“Wasn’t much of a ‘they’ left at Bruntingthorpe by the time the Lizards got through with it,” Goldfarb said, shrugging. After the first Lizard attack on the air base, Basil Roundbush had been recalled to piloting at once, but no orders had come for Goldfarb to return to a proper radar station. Then the Lizards started pounding Bruntingthorpe with pilotless aircraft, and after one of them hit the officers’ barracks in the middle of the night, nobody much was left in RAF blue who could give him orders.

The local army commander had been happy enough to take him on. He’d said, “You know how to handle a weapon and obey orders, and that gives you a leg up—two legs up—on a lot of the lads we’re giving the king’s shilling to these days.” Goldfarb pictured himself with two legs up, and crashing to earth immediately thereafter. He didn’t argue with the major, though. He’d wanted to get into the scrap firsthand.

Now he waved about him and said, “And so we find ourselves approaching the lovely metropolis of Market Harborough and all its amenities, which—”

“All its what?” Fred Stanegate broke in.

“All the good stuff it has in it,” Goldfarb said. Next to Bruntingthorpe, Market Harborough, a town of ten or fifteen thousand people, was indeed a metropolis, not that that in itself said much for Market Harborough. Goldfarb had pedaled into it a few times; it was no farther from Bruntingthorpe than Leicester was. “The Three Swans served some very fine bitter, even in wartime.”

“Aye, that’s so. Ah recall now.” Stanegate’s face grew beatific at the memory. “And in the market—you ken, the one by t’old school—you could get a bit o’ butter for your bread, if you knew the right bloke t’ask.”

“Could you?” Goldfarb hadn’t known the right bloke, or even that there was a right bloke. Too late to worry about it now, even if the margarine he’d been spreading on his bread had tasted like something that dripped from the crankcase of a decrepit lorry.

“Aye, y’could.” Fred Stanegate sighed. “Wonder how much of the place is left.” He shook his head gloomily. “Not much, I wager. Not much o’ anything left these days.”

“Pretty country,” Goldfarb said, waving again. Occasional shell holes marred the green meadows and fields or shattered fence gates, but the Lizards hadn’t quite moved up into Market Harborough itself, so it hadn’t been fought over house by house. “Can’t you just see the hounds and riders chasing a fox into those woods there?”

“Ah, weel, Ah always used t’pull for the fox, if tha kens what I mean, whenever the hunt went by my farm.”

“You’re one up on me, then,” Goldfarb said. “The only hunts I’ve ever seen were in the cinema.”

“Looked to me like it’d be a fair bit of a lark, if you had the brass to keep up the hounds and the horses and the kit and all,” Stanegate said. “Me, Ah was getting by on a couple o’ quid a week, so Ah wasn’t about t’go out ridin’ t’the hounds.” He spoke quite without malice or resentment, just reporting on how things had been. After a moment, he grinned. “So here Ah am in the army now, at a deal less than a couple o’ quid a week. Life’s a rum ‘un, ain’t it?”

“Won’t quarrel with you there.” Goldfarb reached up to straighten the tin hat on his head. His right index finger slid toward the trigger of his Sten gun. Houses were growing thicker on the ground as they got into Market Harborough. Even though the Lizards had never been in the town, they’d bombed it and shelled it, and a lot of their bombs and shells sprayed submunitions that stayed around waiting for some unlucky or careless sod to tread on them. Goldfarb did not intend to be careless.

A lot of people who had lived in Market Harborough had fled. A good many others, no doubt, were casualties. That did not mean the place was empty. Far from it: it bulged with refugees from the fighting farther south in the Midlands. Their tents and blankets filled the grassy square around the old grammar school—the place where, before the Lizards invaded England, Fred Stanegate had bought his butter.

Goldfarb had seen his share of refugees the past few weeks. These seemed at first glance no different from the men and women who’d streamed north before them: tired, pale, thin, filthy, many with blank faces and haunted eyes. But some of them were different. Nurses in white (and some ununiformed but for a Red Cross armband on a sleeve) tended to patients with burns like Goldfarb’s but worse, spreading over great stretches of their bodies. Others did what they could for people who wheezed and coughed and tried desperately to get air down into lungs too blistered and burned to receive it.

“Filthy stuff, gas,” Goldfarb said.

“Aye, that it is.” Stanegate nodded vigorously. “My father, he was in France the last war, and he said it were the worst of anything there.”

“Looking at this, I’d say he was right.” That England had resorted to poison gas in the fight against the Lizards bothered Goldfarb, and not just because he’d had the bad luck to get hurt by it. His cousin Moishe Russie had talked about the camps the Nazis had built in Poland for gassing Jews. How anyone could reckon gas a legitimate weapon of war after that was beyond Goldfarb.

But Fred Stanegate said, “If it shifts the bloody Lizards, Ah don’t care how filthy it is. Manure’s filthy, too, but you need it for your garden.”

“That’s so,” Goldfarb admitted. And it
was
so. If you were invaded, you did whatever you could to beat back the invaders, and worried about consequences later. If you lost to the Lizards now, you lost forever and you never had the chance to worry about being moral again. Wouldn’t that make gas legitimate? Churchill had thought so. Goldfarb sighed. “Like you said, it’s a rum world.”

Fred Stanegate pointed. “Isna that the Three Swans there?”

“That used to be the Three Swans, looks more like to me,” Goldfarb answered. The inn had boasted a splendid eighteenth-century wrought-iron sign. Now a couple of finger-length chunks of twisted iron lay in the gutter. A shell hit had enlarged the doorway and blown glass out of the windows. “Bloody shame.”

“They’re not dead yet, seems to me,” Stanegate said. Maybe he was right, too. The building hadn’t been abandoned; somebody’d hung blankets over the doorway. And, as Goldfarb watched, a man in a publican’s leather apron slipped out between two of those blankets and looked around in wonder at what Market Harborough had become.

Spying Goldfarb’s and Stanegate’s draggled uniforms, he waved to the two military men. “Come in and have a pint on me, lads.”

They looked at each other. They were on duty, but a pint was a pint. “Let me buy you one, then, for your kindness,” Goldfarb answered. The innkeeper did not say no, but beckoned them into the Three Swans.

The fire crackling in the hearth was welcome. The innkeeper drew three pints with professional artistry. “Half a crown for mine,” he said. Given what England was enduring, it was a mild price. Goldfarb dug in his pockets, found two shillings. He was still rummaging for a sixpence when Fred slapped one on the bar.

Goldfarb leered at him. “Pitching in on the cheap, are you?”

“That Ah am.” Stanegate sipped his beer. One blond eyebrow rose. So did his mug, in salute to the publican. “Better nor I looked for. Your own brewing?”

“Has to be,” the fellow said with a nod. “Couldn’t get delivery even before the bloody Lizards crashed in on us, and now—Well, you’ll know more about now than I do.”

A good number of tavern keepers were brewing their own beer these days, for just the reasons this one had named. Goldfarb had sampled several of their efforts. Some were ambrosial; some were horse piss. This one . . . He thoughtfully smacked his lips. Fred Stanegate’s “Better nor I looked for” seemed fair.

Someone pushed his way between the blankets that curtained off the Three Swans. Goldfarb’s gulp had nothing to do with beer: it was Major Smithers, the officer who’d let him embark on his infantry career.

Smithers was a short, chunky man who probably would have run to fat had he been better fed. He ran a hand through thinning sandy hair. His forward-thrusting, beaky face was usually red. Goldfarb looked for it to get redder on his discovering two of his troopers in a public house.

But Smithers had adaptability. Without it, he would have taken Goldfarb’s RAF uniform more seriously. Now he just said, “One for me as well, my good man,” to the innkeeper. To Goldfarb and Stanegate, he added, “Drink up quick, lads. We’re moving forward.”

David Goldfarb downed his pint in three long swallows and set it on the cigarette-scarred wood of the bar, relieved not to be placed on report. Stanegate finished his at a more leisurely pace, but emptied it ahead of Major Smithers even so. He said, “Moving forward. By gaw, Ah like the sound o’ that.”

“On to Northampton,” Smithers said in tones of satisfaction. He sucked foam from his mustache. “That won’t be an easy push; the Lizards are there in force, protecting their perimeter, and they have outposts north of town—their line runs through Spratton and Brixworth and Scaldwell.” He swallowed the last of his pint, did that foam-sucking trick again, and shook his head. “Just a pack of bloody little villages nobody’d ever heard of except the people who lived in ’em. Well, they’re on the map now, by God.”

He meant that literally; he drew from a pocket of his battledress an Ordnance Survey map of the area and spread it on the bar so Goldfarb and Stanegate could see. Goldfarb peered at the map with interest; Ordnance Survey cartography, so clear and detailed, always put him in mind of a radar portrait of the ground it pictured. The map seemed to show everything this side of cow tracks in the fields. Brixworth lay along the main road from Market Harborough down to Northampton; Spratton and Scaldwell flanked that road to either side.

Major Smithers said, “We’ll feint at Spratton. The main attack will go in between Brixworth and Scaldwell. If we can roll them out of Northampton, their whole position north of London unravels.” He glanced at the gas masks hanging from the soldiers’ belts. “Canisters in there fresh?”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb and Stanegate said together. Goldfarb clicked his tongue between his teeth. The question probably meant another mustard gas bombardment was laid on as part of the attack. After a moment, he asked, “Sir, how do things stand south of London?”

“Not as well, by what I’ve heard.” Smithers made a sour face, as if the admission tasted bad to him. “They put more men—er, more Lizards—into that one, and seized a broader stretch of territory. In spite of the gas, it’s still very much touch and go in the southeast and the south. I’ve heard reports that they’re trying to push round west of London, by way of Maidenhead and such, to link their two forces. Don’t know whether it’s so, but it would be bad for us if it is.”

“Just on account of you’re goin’ good one place, you think it’s the same all around,” Fred Stanegate said. He sighed. “Wish it were so, Ah do.”