Upsetting the Balance (65 page)

Groves also took special care in describing what had gone wrong with the Germans’ first effort to set up a pile that went critical. Though the Germans seemed to have been spectacularly careless about safety precautions, it wasn’t as if running a pile was an exact science. Things could go wrong here, too.

“What of the Russians?” Enrico Fermi echoed. “They were first with their bomb, but only silence from them since—a long silence now.”

“They say they’ll be ready with another bomb come spring,” Groves answered. “If I had to make a guess, I’d say you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for them. They got a jump start with the plutonium they and the Germans stole from the Lizards. That was enough to give them the one bomb. Past that . . .” He shook his head. “Russia simply does not have the precision industry, technical skill, or scientific numerical strength to come even close to manufacturing their own. Not yet.”

“How long do you think they’ll need?” In almost identical words, three people asked the same question.

“Oh, I don’t know—1955, maybe,” Groves answered, deadpan. That got another laugh. He didn’t really think the Reds would take that long, but he didn’t look for a new bomb from them next Tuesday, either.

“And the Japanese?” Leo Szilard asked, as if he expected Groves to forget. “What of them?”

Groves spread his hands. “Dr. Szilard, there I just don’t know what to tell you. They were on the track of something, or the Lizards wouldn’t have blown Tokyo off the map. How much they knew, how many of their top people got killed when the bomb hit, how far they’ve come toward rebuilding their program—I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said I did.”

Szilard nodded. “That is fair, General. So often, people are in the habit of saying they know more than they do. Seeing a case where this is not so makes a pleasant change.”

That was the first compliment Groves had got from Szilard in as long as he could remember. He cherished it for that very reason. For the sake of his own peace of mind, though, he wished he could give the Hungarian physicist a more authoritative answer. The Japanese worried him. Before Pearl Harbor, the United States hadn’t taken Japan seriously: not a white man over there, for one thing, he thought. But whether the Japs were white, yellow, or bright blue, their warships had proved as good as those Americans made, and their airplanes probably better. Buck-toothed, slant-eyed little bastards they might be, but if you thought they couldn’t fight—if you thought they couldn’t engineer—you had another think coming.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said the technician who’d asked him about getting the bomb out of the reprocessing plant “How come that arrow that says ‘this end up’ is pointing down at the floor?”

“What arrow?” Groves blurted, a split second before he realized the technician was pulling his leg. “Wise guy,” he said, through the laughter sent at him. He didn’t mind it. He knew hostility aimed at him was sometimes what kept the crew working together and working hard. That was fine. As long as they
were
working together and working hard, he couldn’t kick.

He walked out of the reprocessing plant to let the gang cuss at him when he wasn’t there to hear it. His breath smoked. To the west, the Rockies were white. It had snowed in Denver more than once, but not for the past week. He hoped it would hold off a bit longer. Moving the Fat Lady with ice on the ground wasn’t something he wanted to think about, though he would if he had to. Actually, getting the bomb moving wouldn’t be such a problem. Stopping it, though . . .

Ice wasn’t something Pharaoh’s engineers had had to worry about.
Lucky dogs,
he thought.

His office back in the Science Building wasn’t what you’d call warm, either. He refused to let it get him down. Like a bear before hibernation, he had enough adipose tissue to shield him from the chill. So he told himself, at any rate.

He pulled an atlas off the shelf and opened it to a map of the United States. The one thing you couldn’t do without aircraft, at least not easily, was deliver a bomb to the heart of enemy’s territory. You had to place the weapon somewhere along the frontier between what you held and what he did. Given the state of the war between humanity and the Lizards, that didn’t strike Groves as an insurmountable obstacle to using it effectively.

Once the Fat Lady got aboard a freight car and headed out of Denver, where would they use it? That wasn’t his responsibility, which would end when the bomb went onto the train. Even so, he couldn’t help thinking about it.

His eyes kept coming back to one place. Nowhere else in the whole country had a rail network that even approached the one going into and out of Chicago. The Lizards had cut a lot of those routes, of course, but you could still reach the outskirts of town from the north or from the east. And with all the fighting going on there, you couldn’t help but knock out a lot of Lizards if the bomb went off there.

He nodded to himself. Chicago was a good bet, probably
the
good bet. And where would they use the second bomb? That was harder to figure. Where it would do the most good, he hoped.

Mutt Daniels had known snow in Chicago before. He’d been snowed out of an opening-day series here in 1910—or was it 1911? He couldn’t recall. A hell of a long time ago, whichever it was. The Cubs hadn’t even been playing in Wrigley Field yet, he knew that; they were still over at West Side Grounds.

When it snowed in April, though, you knew things were winding down: pretty soon it would be hot and muggy enough to suit you even if you were from Mississippi. Now, though, winter looked to be settling in for a nice long stay.

“No gas heat, no steam heat, not even a decent fireplace,” Mutt grumbled. “I went through all o’ this last winter, and I don’t like it worth a damn. Too stinkin’ cold, and that there’s a fact.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Muldoon said, “so don’t make it out like I am, but the Lizards, they like it even less than we do.”

“There is that. It’s almost reason enough to get fond of snow, but not quite, if you know what I mean.” Mutt sighed. “This here overcoat ain’t real bad, neither, but I wish I didn’t have to wear it.”

“Yeah.” Muldoon’s overcoat was a lot more battered than the one Daniels was wearing, and smelled overpoweringly of mothballs; Mutt wondered if it had been in storage somewhere since the end of the Great War. The sergeant, though, was good at making the best of things. He said, “We may not have a decent fireplace like you was talkin’ about, Lieutenant, but Lord knows we got plenty of firewood.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Daniels said. Every other house in Chicago—some parts of town, every single house—was wrecked. Places where fire hadn’t done the job for you, you could burn a lot of wood staying warm.

The neighborhood in which the platoon was presently encamped was one of those areas where next to nothing was left upright. Since winter arrived, the Americans had pushed their front south a couple of miles. The Lizards weren’t grinding forward any more; they were letting humanity come to them. The price was ghastly. One thing the cold weather did do: it kept the stink of rotting flesh from becoming intolerable instead of just bad.

Fighting back and forth across the same stretch of ground also produced a landscape whose like Mutt—and Muldoon, too—had seen over in France in 1918. Not even an earthquake shattered a town the way endless artillery barrages did. In France, though, once you got out of a town, you were back in the country again. Chewed-up countryside was pretty bad, too, but it didn’t have quite the haunted feel of stretches where people used to be crowded together. And Chicago wasn’t anything but stretches where people had been packed close together.

“One thing,” Mutt said: “I don’t believe in ghosts no more.” He waited for a couple of people to wonder why out loud, then said, “If there was such a thing as ghosts, they’d be screamin’ to beat the band at what we done to Chicago and done to their graveyards in partic’lar. I ain’t seen none o’ that, so I reckon ghosts ain’t real.”

Off to the rear, American artillery opened up. Mutt listened to the shells whistling by overhead. That was a reassuring noise, nothing like the roaring screech they made when they were coming straight at you. They landed a couple of miles south of the house in whose wreckage he was squatting. The explosions sounded flat and harsh, not so big as they might have been. Mutt grimaced. He knew the why of that.

So did Muldoon. “Gas,” he said, as if tasting something sour.

“Yeah.” It was one of the big reasons the Lizards had stopped advancing in Chicago, but that didn’t mean Daniels liked it. Nobody who’d ever been on the receiving end of a gas bombardment liked the idea of gas. “All the hell we let loose on this city our own selves, us and the Lizards, I mean, maybe it’s no wonder we ain’t seen any ghosts. By now, I reckon they’re liable to be more scared of us than we are of them.” He scratched his head. “What the dickens was the Irving Berlin song from the last war? ‘Stay Down Here Where You Belong,’ that’s it—the one where the devil tells his son not to go up to earth on account of it was worse there than it was down in hell. Maybe the devil knew what he was talkin’ about.”

“Maybe he did.” Muldoon nodded. “Thing of it is, though, it’s either do what we gotta do or else have the Lizards do somethin’ worse.”

“Yeah,” Daniels said again. “An’ that reminds me—I’m gonna go up and check on the sentries, just to make sure the Lizards ain’t doin’ somethin’ worse right here.”

“Sounds good to me,” Muldoon said. “I sorta got fond of living, all that time between the wars—I’d like to keep on doin’ it a while longer now. But you wanna watch yourself, Lieutenant. The Lizards, they can see like cats in the dark.”

“I seen that already,” Mutt agreed. “Dunno whether it’s their eyes or the gadgets they got. Don’t reckon that matters anyway. They sure can do it, and that’s what counts.”

Most officers just used .45s. Mutt had been a noncom and a dog-face too long to trust his neck to anything less than the best weapon he could carry. If that meant he had to lug around the extra weight of a tommy gun, he was willing to put up with it.

He paused a while outside the mined house where his men were sheltering, so his eyes could adapt to the dark all around. He didn’t see like a cat, and he didn’t have any gadgets to help him do it, either. No moon in the sky and, even had there been, the cloud cover would have kept him from seeing it The only light came from the fires that turned parts of the skyline orange. Chicago was so big, it never seemed to run out of things that would burn.

The Lizards’ lines lay about half a mile to the south of the positions the Americans were holding. Between them were both sides’ sentry posts, along with American barbed wire and Lizard razor wire coiling through the ruins of what had been middle-class homes not long before. Those ruins made the no-man’s-land an even more dangerous place than it had been in France back in 1918. They gave snipers wonderful cover.

As if the blamed war isn’t bad enough, what with the gas and the tanks and the shells and the planes and the machine guns and all that other shit,
Mutt thought.
But no, you gotta worry about some damn sniper puttin’ a bullet through your head while your damn underpants are down around your ankles so you can take a dump.
Some things didn’t change. One of his grandfathers had fought in the Army of Northern Virginia during the States War, and he’d complained about snipers, too.

Going out to the sentry positions, Mutt used a route he’d worked out that kept him behind walls most of the way: he didn’t believe in making a sniper’s job any easier. He had three or four different ways to get from the main line to the pickets in front of it, and he didn’t use any one of them more than twice running. He made sure the sentries took the same precautions. His platoon hadn’t had a man shot going up to sentry duty in weeks. A low but threatening whisper: “Who’s that?”

Daniels answered with the password: “Cap Anson. How they hangin’, Jacobs?”

“That you, Lieutenant?” The sentry let out a low-voiced chuckle. “You give us those baseball names for recognition signals, why don’t you make ’em people like DiMaggio or Foxx or Mel Ott that we’ve heard of, not some old guy who played way back when?”

Mutt remembered hearing about Cap Anson when he was a kid. Was that way back when? Well, now that you mentioned it, yes. He said, “The Lizards’ll know about today’s players. They might fool you.”

“Sure, okay, yeah, but we can forget the old guys,” Jacobs said. “Then we’re liable to end up shooting at each other.”

Did I talk back to my officers in France like that?
Mutt wondered. Thinking back on it, he probably had talked back like that. American soldiers were a mouthy lot, no two ways about it. That had been true for a long time, too, and even more so a long time ago. Some of the things his granddads said they’d called the officers over them would curl your hair.

He sighed and said, “Sonny, if you don’t want your buddies shootin’ at you, you better remember, that’s all.”

“Yeah, okay, sure, Lieutenant, but—” Jacobs quit bitching and stared out into the darkness. “What was that?”

“I didn’t hear nothin’,” Daniels said. But his voice came out as the barest thread of whisper. His ears were old-timers, and knew it. Jacobs couldn’t be a day over nineteen. He had more balls than brains, but he could hear. Mutt made sure he was under cover. Jacobs pointed at the direction from which the sound had come. Mutt didn’t see anything, but that didn’t signify.

He picked up a fist-sized lump of plaster, hefted it in his hand. “Be ready, kid,” he breathed. Jacobs, for a wonder, didn’t say
For what?
He just took a firmer grip on his rifle and nodded.

Mutt tossed the plaster underhand through the air. It came down maybe thirty feet to one side, clattering off what sounded like a brick chimney. Out in no-man’s-land, a Lizard cut loose with his automatic rifle, squeezing off a burst whose bullets whined through the area where the plaster had landed.

Jacobs and Daniels both fired at the muzzle flashes from the Lizard’s weapon. “Did we get him?” Jacobs demanded, shoving a fresh clip into his Springfield.