“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.
Now he said, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, lad. I tried to get back into it, too-if they’d take Tin-Legs Bader to fly a Spit with both legs gone, why wouldn’t they take me to fight with just one? Blighters said I’d best serve His Majesty by keeping an eye on air pressure and wind direction.”
“It’s a filthy job, Ralph, but someone’s got to do it,” Roundbush said. “I just wish I’d never heard of turbines. Teach me to be an engineer-”
Goldfarb couldn’t make complaints like that. If he hadn’t been mad for wireless sets and the like before the war, he wouldn’t have become a radarman in the first place; he’d have gone straight into the infantry. He might have come back from Dunkirk, but then again he might not have. So many good chaps hadn’t.
He stuck a lead onto one of the subunits he and Leo Horton had salvaged from the radar of a crashed Lizard fighter. Little by little, they were figuring out what the unit did, if not always how it did it.
Just as he was about to take his first reading, the air-raid alarm began to wail. Swearing in English and Yiddish, he dashed for the trench right outside the Nissen hut and jumped down into it.
Basil Roundbush landed almost on top of him. The flight officer clattered as he dove into the trench; on the way out, he’d grabbed several Sten guns and enough ammunition to fight a small war. When the first Lizard plane screamed overhead, he fired off a long burst. “Just on the off chance, don’t you know,” he shouted to Goldfarb through the hellish din.
Bombs slammed down all around, jerking them and the other men in the trench around like so many rag dolls. “Odd pattern,” Goldfarb remarked; he’d become something of a connoisseur of bombing runs. “Usually they go after the runways, but it sounds more as though they were hitting the buildings today.” He stuck up his head. “That’s what they were doing, all right.”
Most of the huts and barracks and other buildings of the Bruntingthorpe Experimental Air Station had just taken a dreadful pounding. The Nissen hut from which he’d fled was still intact, but all its windows had blown in.
Roundbush also peered this way and that. “You’re right-not a scratch on the runways,” he said. “That isn’t like the Lizards, not even a little bit. It’s almost as if they wanted them-” His voice faded before the last word: “-intact.”
No sooner had that passed his lips than Goldfarb’s battered ears caught a thuttering roar from out of the south. It seemed to be coming from the air, but he’d never heard anything like it. Then he caught sight of something that reminded him of a tadpole slung beneath an electric fan. “Helicopter!” he yelled.
“Helicopters,” Roundbush corrected grimly. “And they’re coming this way-probably want to seize the airstrip.”
Goldfarb kept his head up another moment. Then one of the helicopters let loose with a salvo of rockets. He threw himself flat again. Several of them tore into the Nissen hut; a piece of hot corrugated iron landed on him like an overaggressive player in a rugby scrum. “Oof!” he said. A couple of precious Meteors blew up in their revetments.
The radarman started to shake the slab of metal off and get up, but Roundbush sat on him. “Stay low, you bloody fool!” the flight officer shouted. As if to underscore his words, machine-gun bullets kicked up dirt all around. When a fighter plane strafed you, it made its pass and flew on. The helicopters hung in the air and kept shooting and shooting.
Over the racket of the guns, Goldfarb said, “I think Group Captain Hipple’s research team has just broken up.”
“Too bloody right it has,” Roundbush answered.
“Here, give me one of those Sten guns,” Ralph Wiggs said. “If they’re going to shoot us, we may as well shoot back as long as we can.” The middle-aged, one-legged meteorologist sounded a great deal calmer than Goldfarb felt. After the Somme, Wiggs might not have found a mere airborne invasion worth showing excitement over. Roundbush passed him a submachine gun. Wiggs pulled the bolt back, stuck his head up, and started shooting regardless of the bullets still raking the trench. The Somme had been machine-gun hell, hundreds of them firing at the overburdened British troops slogging toward their positions. Next to that, what the Lizards were throwing at Bruntingthorpe had to seem negligible.
If Wiggs could get up and fight, Goldfarb supposed he could also manage it. He peered over the lip of the trench. The helicopters still hovered above the runway, covering the Lizards who skittered along the tarmac, shooting as they ran. Goldfarb blazed away at them. Several of them went down, but whether he’d hit them or they were just taking cover he could not say.
All at once, one of the helicopters turned into a blue-white fireball. Goldfarb whooped like a Red Indian. Antiaircraft guns ringed Bruntingthorpe. Nice to know that, aside from almost shooting down British jet fighters, they could also do some damage to the enemy.
The remaining helicopter whirled in the air and fired more rockets at the ack-ack gun that had brought down its companion. Goldfarb couldn’t imagine anyone living through such a barrage, but the gun kept pounding away. Then the helicopter lurched in the air. Goldfarb screamed louder than he had before. The helicopter did not explode, but did flee, trailing smoke.
Basil Roundbush bounded out of the trench and fired at the Lizards on the ground, who had halted in dismay. “We have to wipe them out now,” he shouted, “before they get their air cover back.”
Goldfarb got up onto the greensward, too, though he felt horribly naked outside the trench. He fired a burst, went down on his belly, wriggled forward, and fired again.
Other men came up and started shooting,
too, from their slit trenches, from others, and from the wreckage of the buildings the Lizards had bombed. Ralph Wiggs limped straight toward the Lizards, as if this were 1916 all over again. A bullet caught him. He went down but kept on shooting.
“You hurt badly?” Goldfarb asked.
Wiggs shook his head. “I took one through the knee there, so I can’t walk, but otherwise I’m right as rain.” He fired again.
He didn’t sound like a man who’d just been shot. Goldfarb stared for a moment, then realized the Lizard bullet must have wrecked the knee of Wiggs’ artificial leg. Even out in the open, with precious little cover and bullets whistling all around, he burst out laughing.
“They can’t have more than two squads on the ground,” Roundbush said. “We can take them, I really think we can.”
As if to underline his words, the antiaircraft gun the helicopters hadn’t been able to silence opened up on the Lizard infantry. Using ack-ack as regular artillery was unconventional, although the Germans were supposed to have started doing it as far back as their blitzkrieg through France in 1940. It was also deucedly effective.
Goldfarb scurried forward toward some wreckage strewn over the runway. He got in behind it with a grateful belly flop; any bit of cover was welcome. He poked the barrel of his Sten gun up over the edge of the torn wood and metal and blazed away.
“Hold fire!” somebody yelled from across the runway. “They’re trying to give up.”
One weapon at a time, the insane rattle of small-arms fire died away. Goldfarb ever so cautiously raised his head and peered toward the Lizards. He’d seen them as blips on a radar screen, and briefly in the raid on the prison in Lodz that had freed his cousin, Moishe Russie. Now, as the survivors of the force threw down weapons and raised hands high, he got his first good look at them.
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