Upsetting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  He unrolled the sleeping bag, and also took a couple of thick wool blankets from the pack he’d tied to the bicycle’s carrying rack. He still had bread and homemade butter he’d got in Tabernash. He ate some of that. He’d eaten like a pig all through this jaunt, and was skinnier now than he had been at the start of it.

  With the sleeping bag around him and the blankets on top, he was plenty warm enough. He slid the rifle down into the space between the backseat and the front; the transmission hump made it stick up a little. “Anybody who tries messing with me for any reason at all will regret it,” he said.

  He woke up, unmessed with, the next morning, to some of the most supernal quiet he’d ever known. It was as if the snow of the night before had coated the whole world with a thick blanket of muffling feathers. The shift of the car springs under him as he sat up was the only sound in the land.

  Keeping on the road would be more interesting than it had been. No snow plows, not now, nor salt that let tires grip even as it rotted fenders. “Slow and easy,” he told himself again.

  As it had when he came through westbound, Idaho Springs had sentries out to check on who entered their little town. When Jens started to produce his letter signed by General Groves, the men stood aside. “You go right on ahead, buddy,” one of them said. “I ‘member you and that there letter from back a few months, don’t I?”

  Larssen pedaled through Idaho Springs and then struggled up to the top of Floyd Hill, which wasn’t that much lower than Berthoud Pass. After that, the road got better. Even if it wasn’t plowed, what looked from the marks like a wagon train had been through ahead of him, defining the roadway and shoving aside the worst of the snow. He made good time coming down into Denver.

  Before the Lizards came, the town had held better than a quarter of a million people. What with evacuations, simple flight, and bombings, not nearly so many lived there nowadays. All the same, the sight of so many men and women on the streets felt strange and untoward, and made Larssen nervous. He’d got very used to his own company and nobody else’s on his travels. He wondered how he’d fit in the Met Lab team once he got back to the University of Denver.

  “Hell with ’em,” he muttered. “If they can’t make room for me, that’s their problem.”

  A man riding east alongside him on US 40—no, they called it Colfax Avenue here in town—overheard that and gave him a curious look. He stared back, so fiercely that the Nosy Parker found some business elsewhere in a hurry.

  Jens swung south onto University Boulevard just as the sun, which had come out in the afternoon, sank behind the Rockies. That didn’t bother him. He knew just where he was going now, and he didn’t figure the Met Lab crew were working eight-hour days and then knocking off.

  The buildings on the university campus were dark, but that didn’t mean anything. Except on the East Coast, blackouts had been kind of a joke in the United States after the first few panicky days that followed Pearl Harbor, but the coming of the Lizards turned them into deadly serious business once more. A lot of work got done behind blackout curtains.

  He stopped the bike outside the Science Building, then opened the door and went in, pushing his way through the curtains that shielded the electric lights from view. The shining bulbs made his eyes water, not just for their brilliance but also as a sign the twentieth century still lived.

  A sentry stood a few paces inside the doorway. By the time Jens got through the yards of black cloth pinned to the ceiling, the fellow had a rifle aimed at his brisket “Who goes there?” he demanded, and then, after a moment, with visible reluctance, moved the rifle aside. “Oh, it’s you, Dr. Larssen. Welcome back” His tone gave the lie to the words.

  “Hello, Oscar.” Jens tried to keep what he was feeling out of his voice. Oscar had been his bodyguard—his keeper, if you wanted a less polite word for it—when he got into Denver. Oscar had also slugged him when he had tried to talk sense into Barbara. All right, he’d grabbed her, but still, the bitch hadn’t had any business squawking like that. He fought down the red rage that made him want to throw himself at the soldier. “Is General Groves still working?”

  “Yes, sir, he is.” Oscar sounded relieved to be sticking to business. “He works late ‘most every night. You want to see him now, sir?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Larssen answered. “I’ve been on the road a long time. The sooner he hears what I have to say, the sooner he can start doing something about it.”

  “Okay, Dr. Larssen, you can go on upstairs.” Oscar hesitated. “Uh, sir, you want to leave that Springfield down here with me?” It was phrased as a request, but it didn’t sound like one.

  Jens unslung the rifle and leaned it against the wall, not without an inward pang. He did his best to sound light as he said, “Don’t suppose I’ll need to shoot anybody before I come back down.” The one he really wanted to shoot was Oscar. By the way the soldier’s eyes clung to him as he walked over to the stairwell, Oscar knew it, too.

  The door to Leslie Groves’ office was ajar. Jens rapped on the frosted glass panel set into the top part of it “Who’s there?” Groves demanded gruffly. Taking that as all the invitation he was likely to get, Jens went in. Surprise spread over Groves’ heavy features. He got up from behind his desk, stuck out a big, thick hand. “Dr. Larssen! We were beginning to be afraid you wouldn’t make it back. Come in, sit down.”

  Mechanically, Jens shook hands. “Thanks,” he said, and sank into one of the wooden chairs in front of the desk. With a sigh, he shrugged off his pack.

  “You look like something the cat dragged in,” Groves said, surveying him. He picked up the phone, dialed four numbers. “That you, Fred? Listen, send me up some fried chicken, maybe half a dozen of those nice rolls, and some honey to go with ’em. I’ve got a prodigal to feed here, so don’t waste time.” He slammed the receiver down on its cradle. Even in ordering up some supper, he was a man who brooked no nonsense.

  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. An
d 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 t
hat 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.”