Worldwar_ Upsetting The Balance Part 38

"I wonder where Fred Hipple is these days," Goldfarb said, and then, more somberly, "I wonder if he's alive."

"I fear not," Roundbush said. He too sounded more serious than was his wont. "I've not seen the little fellow, nor heard word of him, since the Lizards raided Bruntingthorpe. My guess is that he was one of the officers killed in the barracks. He wasn't among those who rea.s.sembled afterwards: that much I know."

"Well, neither was I," Goldfarb answered. "I got separated in the fighting and ended up in the army."

"They'd not have commandeered a group captain in quite so cavalier a fashion, nor would Fred Hipple have been shy about pointing out the error of their ways had they made the attempt," Roundbush said. Then he sighed. "On the other hand, they might not have listened to him. No one paid the jet engine much heed before the war, and that's a melancholy fact."

"Why not?" Goldfarb asked. "Do you know, sir? It seems so obviously a better way of doing things. Try as you will, you'll never tweak a Spitfire to the point where it can match a Meteor's performance."

"All true. I've flown both; I should know." Roundbush thought for a moment. When he put his mind to it, he was quite a clever chap. He was also handsome and brave. When Goldfarb was in an intolerant mood, he found the combination depressing. Roundbush went on, "A couple of things went into it, I think. We had a large investment in piston engines, an investment not just in the factories that made them but also in close to forty years' thinking they were the right and proper way to go about powering aircraft. The other factor is, piston engines were proved proved by those forty years. It takes a bold man, or a desperate one, to make the leap into the unknown and abandon the tried and true." by those forty years. It takes a bold man, or a desperate one, to make the leap into the unknown and abandon the tried and true."

"Something to that, I expect," Goldfarb said. "Against the Germans, we could make gains by squeezing out an extra fifty horsepower here or a hundred there. They were doing the same against us, I expect, or those jet Messerschmitts of theirs would have started showing up over England a year ago and more. But against the Lizards, it's pretty clear we had to try something new or go under."

"There you have it in a nutsh.e.l.l," Basil Roundbush agreed. "Now, to business: are we going to be able to mount these Lizard radars in any of our aircraft? They're small and light enough, that's certain, and we'll finally be able to see as far as the Lizards can."

"I think it should be possible, if we have enough sets," Goldfarb answered. "They don't draw a lot of power, and we've figured out the voltage and cycles per second they use-about two-thirds of the way from our standard down towards what the Americans prefer. We are still working to calibrate their ranges, though, and we still have to decide how many we want to mount on the ground to add to our air defense. Seeing the Lizards counts there, too."

"That's so," Roundbush admitted reluctantly. "The other side of the coin is, the Lizards' radar should be less susceptible to being tracked by their missiles and confused by their interference. That matters a great deal when you're up past Angels twenty."

"It matters when you're on the ground, too." Goldfarb remembered the opening days of the Lizards' invasion of Earth, when their missiles had homed unerringly on radar transmitters throughout the British Isles, knocking them out again and again. "Try tracking their fighter-bombers with binoculars, if you want a treat for yourself."

"Binoculars? Old chap, try tracking them with the Mark One eyeball." Roundbush could also deliver a convincing impersonation of an overbred, underbrained aristocratic twit, of the sort who made Bertie Wooster seem a philosopher-king by comparison. Now he leered horribly, aiming a pair of Mark One eyeb.a.l.l.s (rather bloodshot) at Goldfarb. "Bit of a bore in the c.o.c.kpit, don't you know?"

"I know you're quite mad," Goldfarb retorted. "Sir."

Roundbush stopped twisting his features into that bucktoothed grimace and let his voice lose the nasal whine he'd affected. "What I know is that I need a pint or three after we knock off today. What's the name of that pub you dragged me to, the one with the blonde and the redhead?"

"That's the White Horse Inn, sir. I don't think Daphne, the blond one, works there any more; she was just visiting old friends." From what he'd heard, Daphne was in a family way, but he kept that to himself. He hadn't done it, and in any case he'd been sweet on Sylvia when last he was in Dover.

"The White Horse Inn, that's it Couldn't recall the name for love nor money." Roundbush coughed significantly. "Only thing about the place I'm likely to forget though. The beer's not bad-made locally, I'd say-and that little redhead... Ah!" He kissed his fingertips, like an actor playing a comic Italian. "She's quite a piece of work, she is."

"Can't argue with you there, sir." Goldfarb had been trying to get back into Sylvia's good graces-to say nothing of her bed-ever since he returned to Dover. He'd been making progress with the one, if not the other. Now he waved a fond farewell to any hope of seeing the inside of Sylvia's flat again. Women had a way of throwing themselves at Basil Roundbush-his problem wasn't in catching them but in throwing back the ones he didn't want. If he did want Sylvia, odds for anyone else's drawing her notice were abysmally poor.

Sighing, Goldfarb bent low over the radar he'd been working on when Roundbush came in. Work couldn't make you forget your sorrows, but if you kept at it you found yourself too busy to do much fussing over them. In a world that showed itself more imperfect with every pa.s.sing day, that was about as much as any man had a right to expect.

Because it was large and round, the Met Lab crew had dubbed their first completed bomb the Fat Lady. Leslie Groves eyed the metal casing's curves with as much admiration as if they belonged to Rita Hayworth. "Gentlemen, I'm prouder than I can say of every one of you," he declared. "Now we have only one thing left to do-build another one."

The physicists and technicians stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter and applause. "You had us worried there for a moment, General," Enrico Fermi said. "We are not used to unadulterated praise from you."

Another man might have taken that for an insult Groves took it in stride. "Dr. Fermi, when the war is over and the United States has won, I will praise all of you to the skies and ten miles further. Till that day comes, we have too much work to do to waste time saying nice things."

"No one ever accused you of wasting time in this fashion," Leo Szilard said, drawing a fresh round of laughter from the Met Lab crew. Groves even saw a smile flicker on the face of Jens Larssen, who had been more gloomy and taciturn than ever since he got back from Hanford, Washington, and found the whole program not only wasn't moving there but had moved on without him. Groves understood how all that could grate on a man, but didn't know what to do about it.

It was, in any case, far down on his list of worries. He knew what was at the top of the list: "I wasn't joking there, my friends. We had help with this bomb: the plutonium we got from the British, who got it from the Polish Jews, who got it from the Germans, who got it from the Lizards with help from the Russians. Next time, we make it all ourselves, all by ourselves. How long till the next bomb?"

"Now that we have made the actual product once, doing it again will be easier; we will make fewer mistakes," Szilard said. That drew nods from almost everyone, Groves included. Any engineer knew half the trouble in making something for the first time lay in figuring out what you were doing wrong and figuring out how to do it right.

"We have almost enough plutonium for the second weapon now," Fermi said. "Once we use it in the bomb, though, we will for a time be low. But production is steady, even improving. With what we have now, with the third atomic pile coming into full production, from now on we will be manufacturing several bombs a year."

"That's what I want to hear," Groves said. The production numbers had told him the same thing, but hearing it from the man in charge of the piles was better than inferring it from figures.

"The next question is, now that we have these bombs, how do we place them where we want to use them?" Szilard said. He waved a stubby hand toward the Fat Lady. "This one would have to go on a diet before it could fit in an airplane, and the Lizards would shoot down any airplane before it got where it was going, anyhow."

Both those points were true. The Fat Lady weighed nearly ten tons, which was more than any bomber could carry. And anything bigger than a Piper Cub drew the Lizards' immediate and hostile attention. Groves didn't know how to make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit into a Piper Cub, but he did know that, no matter what the Luftwaffe Luftwaffe thought, you didn't have to deliver a bomb by air. thought, you didn't have to deliver a bomb by air.

"I promise you, Dr. Szilard: we will manage when the time comes," he said, and let it go at that. He didn't want everybody to hear what the delivery plans were. Security wasn't as tight as it had been with the j.a.ps and n.a.z.is to worry about; he had trouble imagining anybody vile enough to want to betray American atomic secrets to the Lizards. But he was just an engineer, and knew his imagination had limits. What was unthinkable for him might not be for someone else.

"How do we even get the thing out of the reprocessing plant?" a technician asked. He worked at one of the piles, not here where the plutonium was extracted and the bomb made. Groves just pointed to the wooden cart on which the Fat Lady sat. It had wheels. The technician looked foolish.

He needn't have. Moving ten tons was no laughing matter, especially when those ten tons included complicated gadgetry and had to be moved in utmost secrecy. Groves had most of the answers now. Inside a week, he needed all of them. He was confident he'd get them. Moving heavy things from one place to another was a technology mankind had had under control since the days of the Pharaohs.

Somebody said, "We got our bombs now. How soon will the Germans have theirs? When will the Russians set off another one? What about the j.a.ps?"

"If there are no other questions, cla.s.s is dismissed," Groves said solemnly. That got the laugh he'd hoped for. When it was over, he went on, "The Germans aren't very far behind us. If they hadn't had their, ah, accident, they might be ahead of us."

The intelligence information on which he based that wasn't firsthand. Much of it came from things Molotov had said when he was in New York. Where Molotov had got it, Groves didn't know. The Russians had been wrong about the Germans before, generally to their sorrow.

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 j.a.panese?" 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 j.a.panese worried him. Before Pearl Harbor, the United States hadn't taken j.a.pan seriously: not a white man over there, for one thing, he thought. But whether the j.a.ps 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 were working together and working hard, he couldn't kick. 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, Lucky dogs, he thought. 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 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. 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.n. 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 mothb.a.l.l.s; 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 sh.e.l.ls whistling by overhead. That was a rea.s.suring 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. n.o.body who'd ever been on the receiving end of a gas bombardment liked the idea of gas. "All the h.e.l.l 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 d.i.c.kens 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 h.e.l.l. 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-cla.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls and the planes and the machine guns and all that other s.h.i.t, Mutt thought. Mutt thought. But no, you gotta worry about some d.a.m.n sniper puttin' a bullet through your head while your d.a.m.n underpants are down around your ankles so you can take a dump. But no, you gotta worry about some d.a.m.n sniper puttin' a bullet through your head while your d.a.m.n 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. 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 pa.s.sword: "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. 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 b.i.t.c.hing 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 b.a.l.l.s 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? For what? He just took a firmer grip on his rifle and nodded. 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.

"d.a.m.nfino," Mutt answered. His ears were still ringing from the racket the tommy gun made. "It ain't always-how do you say it?-cut and dried like that. Next thing we gotta do is, we gotta find you a new position. We just told 'em where this one's at."

"Okay, Lieutenant," Jacobs said. "I hadn't thought of that myself, but it makes sense now that you've said it."

Daniels sighed, a long, silent exhalation. But he was used to thinking strategically, and a lot of people weren't. "We gotta be careful," he whispered. "If we didn't get that son of a b.i.t.c.h of a Lizard, he'll be out there waitin' to nail us. Now if I remember straight, there was a house over that way"-he pointed west with his right hand-"maybe a hundred yards that'd fill the bill. Lemme go check it out. That Lizard starts shootin' at me, keep him busy."

"Sure, okay, yeah, Lieutenant," Jacobs said. Throwing those words into varying combinations seemed to be his sport for the evening.

Down on his belly like a reptile, Mutt slithered through rubble toward the house he had in mind. Part of its second story was still standing, which made it d.a.m.n near unique around these parts-and made it a good observation point, too, at least till the Lizards figured out somebody was up in it. Then they were liable to expend a rocket or a bomb just to knock down the place.

Something skittered by, a few feet in front of Mutt. He froze. It wasn't a Lizard; it was a rat. That much he saw. His imagination filled in the rest-a fat, happy rat like the ones he'd seen in the trenches of France, with a diet it was better not to think about.

He made it to the house he had in mind without getting shot at, which he took as a sign, if not a sure one, that he and Jacobs had hit the Lizard would-be infiltrator. The house seemed all right. The stairway wobbled a little when you went up it, but considering that half the second floor wasn't there, he didn't suppose you could expect miracles. And you could see a long way from the second-story window.

He returned to the current sentry post and told Jacobs, "Everything's okay. Come on with me and I'll show you where I'm moving you." Once he'd installed the sentry in his new position, he said, "I'll go back and give your replacement word about where you'll be."

"Yeah, okay, Lieutenant," Jacobs said.

When Mutt had almost made it back for the second time to the ruins where Jacobs had been, stationed, the Lizard out there in no-man's-land fired at him. He dug his face into the dirt as bullets cracked all around him and ricocheted with malignant whines from stones and chunks of concrete.