Upsetting the Balance (58 page)

Jens fell on the food like a starving wolf, even if all the choices had been Groves’ rather than his own. When he’d reduced it to gnawed bones and crumbs, Groves pulled a bottle of bourbon out of his desk drawer, took a snort, and passed it to him. He had a hefty swig himself, then gave it back.

“Okay, now that you’re not going to fall to pieces right before my eyes, tell me about your trip,” Groves said. “Tell me about this town in Washington you were supposed to be scouting. Did you actually manage to get there?”

“Yes, sir, I sure did.” Larssen looked at him with irritation the whiskey only fueled. He did his best to sound enthusiastic as he went on, “Hanford’s the perfect place to move the Met Lab, sir. The Columbia’s got all the water in the world in it, there aren’t any Lizards for hundreds of miles, and there’s a railhead into town. What more do we need?”

He waited for Groves to leap in the air, shout
Whoopee!
and start moving people around with the same verve and aggressiveness he’d used in getting the fried chicken brought up. But instead, the Met Lab’s chief administrator said, “I appreciate all you did, and I sure as the devil congratulate you for getting there and coming back again. But things have changed since you left—”

“Changed how?” Jens demanded suspiciously. “What have you done, started turning out dental floss instead of atomic bombs?”

He wanted to make Groves mad, but the engineer just laughed. “Not quite,” he said, and explained. The more Jens heard, the less he liked. It wasn’t so much everything the Met Lab crew had accomplished while he was gone—good God, Groves was talking glibly about kilogram quantities of plutonium! What really grated was that the team had done all these important things, had come to the very edge of being able to fabricate a bomb,
without Jens Larssen.

He wished Oscar hadn’t made him leave his rifle downstairs. He wanted to do some shooting now, starting with Groves and maybe ending with himself. If the Met Lab was going to stay here in Denver, everything he’d done since he rolled out of town was wasted effort—spinning his wheels in the most literal sense of the word. And they hadn’t missed him one single, solitary bit while he was gone, either.

“But, General,” he said, hearing the desperation in his own voice, “you don’t understand what a swell place Hanford really is, how perfect it would be for us to work there—” He hadn’t thought it was perfect when he rode into town. He’d thought it was a wide spot in the road, nothing better. But in retrospect, it was starting to take on aspects of the earthly paradise. He didn’t want to think he’d spent so much time in vain.

Gently, Groves said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Larssen, I truly am. But while you were away, we’ve put down deep roots here. We’d need months to make the move and get set up and producing again, and we don’t have months to spare. We don’t have days to spare; hell, Larssen, I grudge every inessential minute. We’re making the best of things here, and the best has turned out to be pretty good.”

“But—” Jens stared at the jumble of chicken bones on his plate. He’d have just as easy a time putting the meat back on them as he would of persuading Groves. He offered a new gambit: “I’ll take this up with Fermi and Szilard.”

“Go right ahead,” Groves said, accepting the move without a qualm. “If you can convince them, I’ll listen to you. But you won’t convince them, and I’ll bet money on that. They’ve got our second pile up and running under the stadium here, and the third won’t be far behind. And our reprocessing plant is doing just fine, separating plutonium from the uranium slugs where it’s made. We’d have to uproot that, too, if we headed for Washington State.”

Jens bit his lip. If things were as Groves said, the physicists wouldn’t want to move. Logically, rationally, he didn’t suppose he could blame them. They’d lost months once already, coming from Chicago to Denver. They wouldn’t want to lose more time, not when they were so close to the success the United States needed so badly.

Sometimes, though, you couldn’t go by logic and reason and nothing else. Clutching at straws, Larssen said, “What if the Lizards start a big overland push toward Denver? There’s nothing much to stand in their way—you couldn’t ask for better tank country than eastern Colorado.”

“I won’t say you’re wrong about that, but it hasn’t happened yet and I don’t think it will happen soon,” Groves answered. “It’s long since started snowing—you’d know more about that than I do, wouldn’t you? Last year, the Lizards didn’t do much once the snow started falling. They seem to be pretty predictable, so it’s a good bet they won’t get aggressive till spring. And by spring, we’ll give them enough other things to worry about that they won’t even be thinking of Denver.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Jens said bitterly.

“Oh, Lord, how I wish I did!” Groves rolled his eyes. “In case I haven’t said so, though, I’m damned glad to have you back. You’ll be able to ease the strain on a lot of people who’ve been stretched real thin for a long time.”

Jens heard that as,
You’ll be a spare tire. We’ll put you on whenever we need to patch a blowout, and then we’ll heave you back in the trunk again.
He almost told Groves just what he thought of him, just what he thought of the whole Met Lab: crew, project and all. But Groves held the whip hand here. Telling him off wouldn’t do anything but ruin the chance for revenge.

Voice tightly controlled, Jens asked, “How’s Barbara doing these days? Do you think there’s any chance she’d want to see me?”

“I really couldn’t tell you about that one way or the other, Dr. Larssen.” Groves sounded wary, which wasn’t like him. “The thing is, she and—and her husband left the Met Lab staff not long after you headed west. Yeager got a new assignment, and it was one where she could be useful, too, so she went along.”

“I—see,” Jens said. The first time he’d gone away, Barbara hadn’t waited for him to come home; she’d slid out of her skirt for that damn dumb ballplayer. Now when he went off to do something else for his country, she hadn’t wanted so much as to set eyes on him when he got back. Wasn’t the world a hell of a place? He asked, “Where did she—where did they—go?”

“Afraid I can’t tell you that,” Groves answered. “I couldn’t tell you even if you didn’t know either one of them. We do try to keep up security, no matter how irregular things get sometimes. And what with the troubles you’ve had, it’d be better for you and for them if you didn’t know where they were.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Jens didn’t believe it for a minute. It might be better for the whore who had been his wife and the bastard she was shacked up with, but for him? He shook his head. Getting his own back would be better for him. Changing the subject again, he asked, “Where are you going to put me up for the night?”

“Let’s see. If I remember right, you were BOQ over at Lowry, weren’t you?” Groves did have an impressive ability to remember detail. “Why don’t we send you back there for the time being, anyhow? Things are pretty cramped right around the campus here.”

“Okay,” Jens said.
Spare tire, sure as hell.
“You have to remember, though, that I am going to keep trying to convince you and everybody else that Hanford is a better place than Denver for making bombs.”

“Oh, I believe you,” Groves said. “What I don’t believe is that it’s enough better to justify shutting down here and making tracks to start up again over there. You get yourself a good night’s sleep, look around and see what we’ve done while you were away, and see if you don’t change your mind yourself.”

“I’ll do that,” Larssen said, but he was damned if anything would change his mind, not now, not after all he’d been through. He got up and started for the door.

“Wait,” Groves said. He scrawled rapidly on a sheet of paper. “Show this to the sentries at Lowry Field. Show it to Colonel Hexham, too, if he doesn’t want to give you a room at the inn.”

“Right.” Larssen took the paper, left Groves’ office, and went downstairs. He reclaimed his rifle from Oscar and walked out into the night. “Good old Colonel Hexham,” he muttered as he climbed onto his bicycle. If Hexham had just let him send a letter to Barbara before it was too late, he’d probably still be married to her today. A fling with that son of a bitch Yeager wouldn’t have mattered so much; after all, she had thought Jens was dead. But when she got herself knocked up, that ruined everything.

And now Groves wanted him to deal with Hexham. He rode slowly up University to Alameda, then turned right to go on to Lowry Field. As he pedaled east toward the air base, the temptation rose in him to keep on going past it, to keep heading east till he got to somewhere not far from the Colorado-Kansas border. Nobody was going to listen to him here, no matter how right he was. He could see that, plain as the nose on his face. But if he headed out and talked to the Lizards, they’d be very interested in finding out what was going on in Denver.

He’d had that thought before. He’d almost ridden east instead of west when they sent him out to look Hanford over. He’d fought it down then; he’d still figured his first obligation was to mankind.

“But what if the only thing every goddamn human being in the world wants is to give me a hard time?” he asked the silent, chilly darkness.

He got no answer. When he came to the Lowry Field turnoff, he stopped his bicycle and stood unmoving for two or three minutes. At last, he rode on toward the airfield. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, how close he’d come to choosing the other path.

15

Rain drummed down out of a leaden sky. Most of the leaves were off the trees in Pskova Park; they lay, brown and forlorn, on the yellow dying grass below. As George Bagnall walked toward the Pskov
Krom,
he thought the bare-branched beeches and birches looked sad and miserable, like skeletons with their arms held high in surrender to approaching winter.

Sheets of water ran over the concrete slabs of the pavement. Rain collected in bomb craters, turning them to muddy little ponds. If you stepped into one, not watching where you were going, you could sink deeper than your waist—or deeper than your head. Two or three people had already drowned that way, or so rumor said.

The sentries at the
Krom
stood inside the entrance, both to keep dry and to keep the Lizards from spotting them from the air. Pskov’s ancient fortress had taken a couple of bombs in the early days of the Lizard invasion, but the aliens had pretty much left it alone since. Everyone in town hoped they would go right on doing that.

“Who comes?” the German sentry demanded, while his Soviet opposite number raised the barrel of his submachine gun. Bagnall swept back the hood on the rain cape he was wearing. “Ah, the Englishman,” the German said, first in his own language and then in Russian. The Soviet sentry nodded and gestured with his weapon: go ahead.

“Spasebo,”
Bagnall said. His German, after months of intensive practice, was pretty fluent. His Russian wasn’t, so he used it whenever he could.

He went upstairs to the office of the local German commandant,
Generalleutnant
Kurt Chill. “Good day, Mr. Bagnall,” Chill said in excellent English. “Brigadiers German and Vasiliev, I fear, have not yet arrived. I thank you, at least, for being punctual.”

Bagnall shrugged. If you let Russian habits of punctuality get you down, you would go mad. “They’ll be here, General,” he said. And so they would, in five minutes or half an hour or a couple of hours. The concept of having
0900
mean anything more than a way of saying
sometime this morning
was beyond the Russian mental horizon.

The two partisan leaders showed up at twenty of ten. If they knew why Kurt Chill was gently steaming, they didn’t show it. “So,” Nikolai Vasiliev said, “let us discuss our moves against the imperialists from another world. We should be able to drive them back from Pskov while winter conditions prevail.” His comrade, Aleksandr German, translated Russian into Yiddish, which was close enough to German for Chill—and Bagnall—to understand.

On his own, Aleksandr German added, “They are weak in winter, weaker even than you Germans were that first year.”

Chill was used to such sniping, and gave as good as he got. “We were strong enough then to hold you out of Pskov,” he said with a chilly smile, “and we have got better since. My hope is that the Lizards will not do the same.”

“I think they probably won’t,” Bagnall said in German; Aleksandr German translated for Vasiliev. “They seem to do the same old things over and over.”

“Their old ones are quite bad enough,” Vasiliev said through Aleksandr German. “They are not imaginative fighters”—which was a hell of a thing for a Russian, the product of the world’s most rigid military system, to say—“but with their weapons and machines, they do not always need to be. We are lucky to have withstood them so long.”

“For them, this is a subsidiary front,” General Chill said. “Had they put full effort into it, they might well have overrun us.”

Nikolai Vasiliev puffed out his broad chest. With his dark, curly beard, he looked like a proud bandit chieftain—which in many ways he was. The flickering lamplight only added to the impression. But he was also a Soviet citizen and proud of it, for he said, “The marvelous bomb the Great Stalin touched off south of Moscow taught the Lizards better than to risk too much against us in any one place.”

Bagnall glanced over at Lieutenant General Chill. The
Wehrmacht
officer looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. The Germans set great store on their scientific ingenuity. To have to listen to someone he probably thought of as a Slavic
Untermensch
going on about the achievements of Soviet science had to be galling—and all the more so because the Nazis hadn’t matched that bomb.

Aleksandr German said, “We cannot count on the Lizards’ holding back forever. We need to force them to retreat wherever we can, to regain the soil of the
rodina,
the motherland. General Chill, will our men fight side by side in this, as they have the past year and more?”
Except when they were shooting at one another,
Bagnall glossed silently to himself.

Despite that reservation, he looked for Chill to give hearty assent. Chill had better give his assent, if any planned winter offensive was to get anywhere. The Russians had more soldiers in Pskov than the Nazis did, but their men were armed with rifles and submachine guns and a few machine guns. The Germans were the ones who had the artillery, the lorries, the carefully husbanded panzers, the even more carefully husbanded petrol.

“I shall have to examine the overall strategic situation,” was what Chill did say. “Standing on the defensive until spring may prove a wiser, more economical choice.”

Vasiliev and Aleksandr German both shouted at him.
Coward
was one of the kinder words they used. Bagnall found himself speechless. Up till now, Chill had always been an aggressive commander, willing, even eager, to spend lives to gain territory. Of course, a lot of the lives he’d spent around Pskov were Russian . . .

Not only were a lot of the lives Chill had spent Russian, so was a lot of the matériel. The German garrison at Pskov had done plenty of hard fighting, and the Lizards in Poland cut them off from the
Vaterland
(one of these days, he’d have to think about what the differences between
rodina
and
Vaterland
implied, but not now, not now).

As innocently as he could, Bagnall asked, “How is your supply situation, General Chill?”

“Given all we have done, it is not bad,” Chill answered. Bagnall had heard a great many more responsive replies. The German officer’s face said more; it reminded Bagnall of the look a poker player wore when he’d got himself into a big hand and had to own up to holding nothing more ferocious than a pair of nines.

From strident, Aleksandr German’s voice went soft, persuasive: “
Generalleutnant,
supplies from the Soviet Union would probably be available. The routes and the amounts are not always what they might be, but they do exist. Surely your well-trained men would not have much trouble getting used to Soviet weapons.”

“Hardly—we captured enough of them on the way here,” Chill said with as much aplomb as he could muster: more than Bagnall had guessed he had in him. He was indeed a formidable man. When he continued, he cut straight to the heart of the problem: “If I take Soviet supplies and grow to depend on them to keep my force in being, then before long I have to take Soviet orders, too.”

“If you don’t, then before long you have no supplies and it no longer matters whose orders you take, because you won’t be able to carry them out in any case,” Aleksandr German said.

Nikolai Vasiliev’s eyes lit up with a fierce light. “And when you have no supplies left, no point to our truce any more, either. We will restore Pskov to the
rodina
then, and we will remember what you have done here.”

“You’re welcome to try, at any time you choose,” Chill answered calmly. “This I tell you, I do not lie: we have plenty to knock any number of partisans back into the woods, or into graves in them. By all means feel free to test what I say.” The German soldier glared fiercely back at Vasiliev. By the look in
his
eye, he would sooner have killed Russians than Lizards any day of the week.

“Enough, both of you!” Bagnall exclaimed. “The only ones who gain when we bicker are the Lizards. We would do well to remember that. We can hate one another later, after the main war is won.”

Kurt Chill and Aleksandr German both stared at him as if he’d suddenly started spouting Swahili. After Aleksandr German translated, Nikolai Vasiliev gave Bagnall that same dubious look. But slowly, one by one, the three leaders nodded. “This is truth,” Chill said. “We
would
do well to remember it.”

“Da,”
Aleksandr German said. But he could not resist twisting the knife: “Also truth,
Herr Generalleutnant,
is that sooner or later, hoard them or use them, your German munitions will be exhausted. Then you will use those of the Soviet Union or you will cease being soldiers.”

Lieutenant General Chill looked as if he’d found a worm—worse, found half a worm—in his apple. The prospect of becoming not just allies but dependents on the Soviet Union, after being first overlords and then at least superior partners because of superior firepower, had to be anything but appetizing for him.

“It can work,” Bagnall insisted, not just to the
Wehrmacht
officer but also to the partisan brigadiers. And yet it wasn’t their shaky truce that made him speak with such conviction; it was the passionate affair that German mechanic who’d come into Pskov with Ludmila Gorbunova was having with the fair Tatiana (much to Bagnall’s relief, and even more to Jerome Jones’). The pair still didn’t like each other much, but that didn’t stop them from coming together every chance they got.
They should be a lesson for all of us,
Bagnall thought.

“This should be a lesson for all of us,” Atvar said, looking with one eye at the video of the damage to the gas-mask factory in Albi and with the other at Kirel. “Whatever we thought of our security procedures, they have been starkly revealed as inadequate.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “And yet, the destruction was not so bad as it would have been had these mortar rounds contained explosives rather than poison gas. Now that the plant has been decontaminated, it is ready to resume full operation.”

“Ready physically, yes.” Atvar felt ready himself, ready to bite something. In lieu of an actual enemy, poor Kirel would have to do. “Of course, the decontamination cost us four irreplaceable males of the Race. Of course, the gas attack itself killed most of one entire shift of highly trained Big Uglies. Of course, the Big Uglies who work the other two shifts are afraid to go back into the plant even if it is decontaminated, for one thing because they don’t believe it truly is and for another because they fear the Deutsche will attack once more—and how can we blame them for that when we fear it ourselves? Other than these minor details, the plant is, as you said, ready to start up again.”

Kirel crouched down, as if he expected to be bitten. “Exalted Fleetlord, it is merely a matter of bringing in other Tosevites who have this skill: either that or making it plain to the locals that if they do not do this work, they will not eat.”

“Bringing Tosevites into one area from another is far more difficult than it would be on a properly civilized world,” Atvar said, “for they are not simply Tosevites, essentially the same regardless of from which part of the planet they spring. Some are Français Tosevites, some are English Tosevites, some are Italiano Tosevites, some are Mexicano Tosevites, and so on. They all have their own foods, they all have their own languages, they all have their own customs, and they all think their ways are superior to everyone else’s, which touches off fights whenever groups from two regions come together. We’ve tried; the Emperor knows we’ve tried it.” He cast down his eyes not so much in reverence as in worn resignation. “It does not work.”

“The other approach will, then,” Kirel said. “No matter what foods they eat, all the Big Uglies must eat some foods. If they fail to produce what we require of them, they will also fail to be fed.”

“This has some merit, but, again, not so much as I would wish,” Atvar said. “The sabotage level in Tosevite factories producing goods for us is already unacceptably high. Wherever we try to coerce the workers to produce more or produce under harsher conditions, it goes higher. This is intolerable when the product under discussion is as important as a gas mask.”