Tilting The Balance (23 page)

Then Nishina spoke again: “We return to the question of getting the lighter uranium, the kind which is explosive, out of the other, more common, type. This as yet we have not succeeded in doing; indeed, we have only just begun the attempt. That is why we will learn from you how the Race solves this problem.”

Teerts needed a moment to understand that The Race had been shocked when they reached Tosev 3 to discover how advanced the Big Uglies were. Before Teerts was captured, pilots had talked endlessly about that; they’d expected no opposition, and here the Tosevites were, shooting back – not very well, and from inadequate aircraft, but shooting back. How could they have learned to build combat aircraft in the eight hundred local years since the Race’s probe examined them?

Now, for the first time, Teerts got a glimmering of the answer. The Race made change deliberately slow. When something new was discovered, extrapolationists performed elaborate calculations to learn in advance how it would affect a long-stable society, and how best to minimize those effects while gradually acquiring the benefits of the new device or principle.

With the Big Uglies, the tongue was on the other side of the mouth. When they found something new, they seized it with both hands and squeezed until they got all the juice out. They didn’t care what the consequences five generations – or even five years – hence would be. They wanted advantages now, and worried about later trouble later, if at all.

Eventually, they’d probably end up destroying themselves with that attitude. At the moment, it made them far more deadly opponents than they would have been otherwise.

“Do not waste time thinking up lies. I warned you before,” Major Okamoto said. “Tell Dr. Nishina the truth at once.”

“By what I know, superior sir, the truth is that we do not use any of these methods,” Teerts said. Okamoto drew back his hand for a slap. Afraid that would be the start of a torture session worse than any he’d yet known, Teerts went on rapidly, “Instead, we use the heavier form of uranium: isotope is the term we use.”

“How do you do this?” Okamoto demanded after a brief colloquy with the Nipponese scientists. “Dr. Nishina says the heavier isotope cannot explode.”

“There is another element, number ninety-four, which does not occur in nature but which we make from the heavier, nonexplosive – Dr. Nishina is right – isotope of uranium. This other element is explosive. We use it in our bombs.”

“I think you are lying. You will pay the penalty for it, I promise you that,” Okamoto said. Nevertheless, he translated Teerts’ words for the Big Uglies in the white coats.

They started talking excitedly among themselves. Nishina, who looked to be the senior male, sorted things out and relayed an answer to Okamoto. He said to Teerts, “I may have been wrong. Dr. Nishina tells me the Americans have found this new element as well. They have given it the name plutonium. You will help us produce it.”

“Past what I have already said, I know little,” Teerts warned: Despair threatened to consume him. Every time he’d revealed something new to the Nipponese, it had been with the hope that the technical difficulties of the new revelation would force them off the road that led toward nuclear weapons. Instead, everything he told them seemed to push them further down that road.

He wished a plutonium bomb would fall on Nagasaki. But what were the odds of that?

Captain Rance Auerbach read the other half of the sign.” ‘Population 286,’” he said. “Sounds like Jerkwater’d be a better name for it.”

Groves looked ahead. The cavalry officer had a point. It didn’t look like much of a town. But cattle roamed the fields around it. This late in winter, they were on the scrawny side, but they were still out there grazing. That meant Chugwater had enough to eat, anyhow.

People came out to look at the spectacle of a cavalry company going through town, but they didn’t act as impressed as townsfolk had in Montana and farther north in Wyoming. One boy in ragged blue jeans said to a man in overalls who looked just like him, “I liked the parade a couple of weeks ago better, Dad.”

“You had a parade through here a couple of weeks ago?” Groves called to a heavyset man whose black coat, white shirt, and string tie argued that he was a person of some local importance.

“Sure as hell did.” The pear-shaped man spat a stream of tobacco juice into the street. Groves envied him for having tobacco in any form. He went on, “Only thing missing then was a brass band. Had us a whole slew o’ wagons and soldiers and foreigners who talked funny and even a couple of Lizards – silly-lookin’ little things to cause all the trouble they do, aren’t they?”

“Yes, now that you mention it.” Excitement coursed through Groves. That sounded very much like the Met Lab crew. If he was only a couple of weeks behind them, they’d be into Colorado by now, not too far from Denver. He might even catch them before they got there. Whether he did or not, the lead-lined saddlebag in his wagon would push their work forward once they got themselves settled. Trying to make his hope a certainty, he asked, “Did they say what they were up to?”

The heavyset man shook his head. “Nope. They were right close-mouthed, as a matter of fact. Friendly enough people, though.” His chest inflated, although not enough to stick out over his belly. “I married off a couple of “em.”

One of the other men on the sidewalk, a stringy, leathery fellow who looked like a real cowboy, not the Hollywood variety, said, “Yeah, go on, Hoot, tell him how you laid the bride, too.”

“You go to hell, Fritzie,” the pear-shaped man – Hoot – said. A cowboy named Fritzie? Groves thought. Before he had time to do more than marvel, Hoot turned back to him. “Not that I would’ve minded: pretty little thing, a widow I think she was. But I do believe the corporal she married would have kicked my ass around the block if I’d even looked at her sideways.”

“You’d’ve deserved it, too,” Fritzie said with a most uncowboylike giggle.

“Oh, shut up,” Hoot told him. Again, he returned to Groves: “So I don’t know what they were doing, Colonel, only that there were a lot of ‘em, heading south. Toward Denver, I think, not Cheyenne, but don’t make me swear to that.”

“Thank you very much. That helps,” Groves said. If they weren’t talking about the crew from the University of Chicago, he’d eat his hat. He’d made better time coming across Canada and then down through Montana and Wyoming than they had traveling straight west across the Great Plains. Of course, his party had only the one wagon in it, and that lightly loaded, while theirs was limited to the speed of their slowest conveyance. And they’d have been doing a lot more scrounging for fodder than his tight band. If you couldn’t think in terms of logistics, you didn’t deserve to be an Army engineer.

“You folks going to put up here for the night?” Hoot asked. “We’ll kill the fatted calf for you, like the Good Book says. ‘Sides, there’s nothin’ between here and Cheyenne but miles and miles of miles and miles.”

Groves looked at Auerbach. Auerbach looked back, as if to say, You’re the boss. Groves said, “I know things are tight, Mister, uh-”

“I’m Joshua Sumner, but you may as well call me Hoot; everybody else does. We got plenty, at least for now. Feed you a nice thick steak and feed you beets. By God, we’ll feed you beets till your eyeballs turn purple – we had a bumper crop of ‘em. Got a Ukrainian family up the road a couple miles, they showed us how to cook up what they call borscht – beets and sour cream and I don’t know what all else. They taste a sight better that way than what we were doing with ‘em before, I tell you for a fact.”

Groves was unenthusiastic about beets, with or without sour cream. But he didn’t think he’d get anything better farther south on US 87. “Thanks, uh, Hoot. We’ll lay over, then, if it’s all right with you people.”

Nobody in earshot made any noises to say it wasn’t. Captain Auerbach raised his hand. The cavalry company reined in. Groves reflected that a couple of the old-timers on the street had probably seen cavalry go through town before, back before the turn of the century. The idea left him unhappy; it was as If the Lizards were forcing the United States – and the world – away from the twentieth century.

Such worries receded after he got himself outside of a great slab of fat-rich steak cooked medium-rare over a wood fire. He ate a bowl of borscht, too, not least because the person who pressed it on him was a smiling blonde of about eighteen. It wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be, either.

And somebody in Chugwater made homebrew beer better than just about anything that came out of a big Milwaukee brewery.

Hoot Sumner turned out to be sheriff, justice of the peace, and postmaster all rolled into one. He gravitated to Groves, maybe because they were the leaders of their respective camps, maybe just because they were about the same shape. “So what brings you through town?” he asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” Groves said. “The less I say, the less chance the Lizards have of finding out.”

“As If I’m gonna tell ‘em,” Sumner said indignantly.

“Mr. Sumner, I have no way of knowing whom you’d tell, or whom they’d tell, or whom fhey’cftell,” Groves said. “What I do know is that I have orders directly from President Roosevelt that I tell no one. I intend to obey those orders.”

Sumner’s eyes got big. “Straight from the President, you say? Must be something important, then.” He cocked his head, studied Groves from under the brim of his Stetson. Groves looked back at him, his face expressionless. After close to a minute of that tableau, Sumner scowled in frustration. “Goddamn, Colonel, I’m glad I don’t play poker against you, or I’d be walking home in my long Johns, I think.”

“Hoot, If I can’t tell you anything, that means I really can’t tell you anything,” Groves said.

“Thing is, though, a small town like this one here runs on gossip. If we can’t get any, we’ll just shrivel up and die,” Sumner said. “The folks who came through a couple weeks ago were just as tight-lipped as you people are – they wouldn’t’ve said shit if they had a mouthful, if you know what I mean. All this stuff going through us, and we don’t even get to find out what the hell it is?”

“Mr. Sumner, it’s altogether possible that you and Chugwater don’t want to know,” Groves said. His face did twist then, in annoyance at himself. He shouldn’t have said anything at all. How many mugs of that good home brew had he drunk?

He consoled himself with the thought that he’d learned something from Sumner. If the previous set of travelers had been as secretive as he was, the odds were even better than good that they came from the Metallurgical Laboratory.

The justice of the peace said, “Hellfire, man, those people even had an Eyetalian with ‘em, and ain’t Eyetalians supposed to be the talkingest people on the face of the earth? Brother, not this one! Nice enough feller, but he wouldn’t give you the time of day. What kind of an Eyetalian is that?”

A smart one. Groves thought. It sounded like Enrico Fermi to him… which just about nailed things down.

“Only time he unbent a-tall,” Sumner went on,

“was when he did best man duty at the wedding I told you about – kissed the bride right pert, he did, even though his own wife – not a bad looker herself – was standing right there beside him. Now that sounds like an Eyetalian to me.”

“Maybe so.” Groves wondered where Sumner got his ideas about how Italians were supposed to act. Not in the great metropolis of Chugwater, Wyoming – or at least Groves hadn’t seen any here. Most likely from Chico Marx, he thought.

Wherever he got those ideas, though, Sumner was no fool in matters directly under his own eye. Nodding to Groves, he said, “Stands to reason your business, whatever it is – and I won’t ask any more – is somehow connected with that other crowd. We hadn’t seen hardly anybody from the outside world since things went to hell last year, and then two big bunches both goin’ the same direction, almost one on top of the other. You gonna tell me it’s a coincidence?”

“Mr. Sumner, I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. I am saying we’d all be better off – you and me and the country, too – if you didn’t ask questions like that.” Groves was a Career Army man; to him, security was as natural as breathing. But civilians didn’t, wouldn’t, think that way. Sumner set a finger alongside his nose and winked, as If Groves had told him what he wanted to know.

Gloomily, Groves sipped more homemade beer. He was afraid he’d done just that.

“Ah, the vernal equinox,” Ken Embry exclaimed. “Harbinger of mild weather, songbirds, flowers-”

“Oh, shut your bleeding gob,” George Bagnall said, with heartfelt sincerity.

Breath came from both Englishmen in great icy clouds. Vernal equinox or not, winter still held Pskov in an iron grip. The oncoming dawn was just beginning to turn the eastern horizon gray above the black pine forests that seemed to stretch away forever. Venus blazed low in the east, with Saturn, far dimmer and yellower, not far above her. In the west, the full moon was descending toward the land. Looking that way, Bagnall was painfully reminded of the Britain he might never see again.

Embry sighed, which turned the air around him even foggier. He said, “I’m not what you’d call dead keen on being demoted to the infantry.”

“Nor I,” Bagnall agreed. “That’s what we get for being supernumeraries. You don’t see them handing Jones a rifle and having him give his all for king and country. He’s useful here, so they have him teaching everything he can about his pet radar. But without the Lane, we’re just bodies.”

“For commissar and country, please – remember where we are,” Embry said. “Me, I’d sooner they tried training us up on Red Air Force planes. We are veteran aircrew, after all.”

“I’d hoped for that myself,” Bagnall said. “Only difficulty with the notion is that, as far as I can see, the Red Air Force, whatever may be left of it, hasn’t got any planes within God knows how far from Pskov. If there’s damn all here, they can hardly train us up on it.”