Tilting The Balance (52 page)

Fermi drew out the rods another couple of centimeters. He too glanced at the dials, worked his slide rule, scrawled a quick calculation on a scrap of paper. “Gentlemen, I make the k-factor here to be 1.0005. This pile produces more free, neutrons than it consumes.”

A few of, the physicists clapped their hands. More just nodded soberly. This was what the numbers predicted. All the same, it remained a solemn moment. Arthur Compton said, “The Italian navigator has discovered the New World.”

“Gentlemen, this means you can now produce the explosive metal we need to make bombs like the ones the Lizards use?” Groves said.

“It means we are a long step closer,” Fermi said. With that, he lowered the control rods back into the pile. Needles swung to the left on the instrument board beside him; the rhythm of the Geiger counter’s clicks slowed. Fermi let out a small sigh of relief. “And, it seems, we can control the intensity of the reaction. This is also of some considerable importance.”

Most of the scientists smiled; Leo Szilard laughed out loud. Larssen had the urge to yank the cadmium rods all the way out of the pile and leave them out until the uranium spat radiation all over, the stadium, all over the university, all over Denver. He fought it down, as he had other lethal, but less spectacular, impulses over the past weeks.

“What do we do next?” Groves demanded. “What exactly do we have to accomplish to turn what we’ve got here into a bomb?” The big man was not a nuclear physicist, but he had more determination than any four Nobel Prize winners Jens could think of. If anybody could drive the project to, success by sheer force of will, Groves was probably the one.

Leo Szilard, on the other hand, had his own sort of practicality. “There is in my office a bottle of good whiskey,” he remarked. “What we do next, I say, is to have a drink.”

The motion passed by acclamation. Jens trooped over to the science building with everyone else. It was good whiskey; it filled his mouth with the taste of smoke and left a smooth, warm trail down to his stomach. The only thing it couldn’t do was make him feel good, which was why people had started distilling whiskey in the first place.

Szilard raised the bottle. A couple of fingers’ worth, coppery bright like a new penny, still sloshed there. Jens held out his glass (actually, a hundred-milliliter Erlenmeyer flask he devoutly hoped had never held anything radioactive) for a refill.

“You have earned it,” Szilard said, pouring. “All that work on the pile-”

Jens knocked back the second shot. It hit hard, reminding him he hadn’t had any lunch. It also reminded him he didn’t have any business celebrating; no matter how well his work was doing, his life was strictly from nowhere.

“Good booze,” said one of the engineers who’d worked under him. “Now we all oughtta go out and get laid.”

Larssen set the flask on a bookshelf and slithered out of the crowded office. His eyes filled with tears which he knew came out of the whiskey bottle but which humiliated him all the same. A week before, he’d picked up a floozy in Denver. He’d been drunk then, not two drinks tiddly but plastered. He wasn’t able to get it up. The girl had been kind about it, which only made things worse. He wondered when he’d have the nerve to try that again. Failure once was bad enough. Failure twice? Why go on living?

With that cheerful thought echoing in his head, he went downstairs to reclaim his bicycle. Oscar the guard stood by the newly built wooden bike rack to make sure none of the machines walked with Jesus. He nodded when he saw Jens. “Back to
BOQ
, sir?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jens said through clenched teeth. He hated his Army cot, he hated the base, he hated having to go to the base and sleep on the cot, and he hated Colonel Hexham with a deep and abiding loathing that matured like a fine burgundy as the days went by. He wished he could have used Hexham as a control rod in the nuclear pile. If only the man had a neutron capture cross-section like cadmium’s…

And then, to make his day complete, Barbara came strolling up the walk toward the apartment she and Sam Yeager were using. Sometimes she just ignored him; that his own behavior might have had something to do with that hadn’t crossed his mind. But Barbara wasn’t the sort to be rude in public. She nodded to him and slowed down a little.

He walked over to her. Oscar was good at sticking with him – all the physicists had bodyguards these days – but knew better than to follow real close this time. A small voice inside Jens warned him he’d only end up bruising himself, but two nips of Szilard’s good hooch made him selectively deaf.

“Hello, dear,” he said.

“Hello,” Barbara answered – the lack of a return endearment set a fire under his temper. “How are you today?”

“About the same as usual,” he said: “not so good. I want you back.”

“Jens, we’ve been over this a hundred times,” she said, her voice tired. “It wouldn’t work. Even if it might have right after I got to Denver, it wouldn’t any more. It’s too late.”

“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

Her eyes narrowed; she took half a step back from him. Instead of answering, she said, “You’ve been drinking.”

He didn’t explain that they were drinks of triumph. “What if I have?” he said. “You going to tell me Mr.

Sam Walk-on-Water Yeager never takes a drink?”

He knew the words were a mistake as soon as he said them. That, of course, did him no good. Barbara’s face froze. “Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see you some other time.” She started walking again.

He reached out and grabbed her arm. “Barbara, you’ve got to listen to me-”

“Let me go!” she said angrily! She tried to twist away. He held on.

As if by malign magic, Oscar appeared. He stepped between Jens and Barbara. “Sir, the lady asked you to let go,” he said, quietly as usual, and detached Larssen’s hand from Barbara’s forearm. He wasn’t what you’d call gentle, but Jens got the feeling he could have been a lot rougher if he felt like it.

Sober he never would have swung on Oscar. With two whiskeys in him, he didn’t give a damn any more. He’d seen some action himself, by God – and, by God, Barbara was his wife… wasn’t she?

Oscar knocked his fist aside and hit him in the pit of the stomach. Jens folded up like a fan, trying to breathe and not having much luck, trying not to puke and doing a little better with that. Even as he went down on his knees, he was pretty sure Oscar had pulled that punch, too; with arms like those, Oscar could have ruptured his spleen if he really got annoyed.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Oscar asked Barbara.

“Yes,” she said, and then, a moment later, “Thank you. This has been hell on everybody, and on Jens especially. I know that, and I’m sorry, but I’ve done what I have to do.” Only then did her voice change: “You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

“No, ma’am, not like you mean. He’ll be okay in a minute or two. Why don’t you go on back to your place?” Jens kept his eyes on the pavement in front of him, but he couldn’t help listening to Barbara’s receding – rapidly receding – footsteps. Oscar hauled him to his feet with the same emotionless strength he’d shown before. “Let me dust you off, sir,” he said, and started to do just that.

Jens knocked his hands away. “Fuck you,” he gasped with all the air he had in him. He didn’t care if he turned blue and died after that, and what with the way he still couldn’t breathe, he thought he just might.

“Yes, sir,” Oscar said, tonelessly still. Just then, Jens’ motor finally turned over, and he managed a long, wonderful mouthful of air. Oscar nodded in approval. “There you go, sir. Not too bad. When you get on that bike, I’ll ride with you to
BOO
, and tomorrow you can see about getting yourself a new guard.”

“Won’t be soon enough,” Jens said, louder now that his lungs were following orders again.

“If you’ll forgive me, sir, I feel the same way,” Oscar replied.

Snarling, Jens stalked back to his bicycle, Oscar right on his heels. Jens rocketed away from the university. Oscar stuck with him; he’d already found out he couldn’t shake the guard. He wasn’t really trying – he was just doing his best to get rid of his own rage.

Gravel kicked up under his wheels as he banked his weight to the side for the right turn from University to Alameda and on to Lowry Field. Of all the places in the world, Lowry Field
BOQ
was the last one he wanted to go. But where else was he supposed to sleep tonight?

For a moment, he didn’t care about that, either. As the air base approached, all he wanted to do was keep on going, past the
BOQ
, past the endlessly cratered, endlessly repaired runways, past everything – keep on going to somewhere better than this stinking place, this stinking life.

You keep on going the direction you’re headed in, you’ll end up in Lizard country, an interior voice reminded him. That was enough, for now, to make him swing the bike up toward
BOQ
like a good little boy.

But even as he and Oscar parked their bicycles side by side, he was looking east again.

“Come on, you mis’able lugs – get movin’,” Mutt Daniels growled. Rain ran off his helmet and down the back of his neck That never would’ve happened with an old limey-style tin hat, he thought resentfully. The anger put an extra snap in his voice as he added, “We ain’t on the newsreels today.”

“We ain’t south o’ Bloomington no more, neither,” Dracula Szabo put in.

“You are painfully, correct, Private Szabo,” Lucille Potter said in her precise, schoohmarmish voice. She pointed ahead to the complex of low, stout buildings just coming into view through the curtains of rain. “That looks to be Pontiac State Penitentiary up there.”

When they got a little closer, Szabo grunted. “Looks like somebody kicked the sh – uh, the tar out of it, too.”

“Us ‘n’ the Lizards must have done fought over this stretch of ground last year,” Mutt said. The penitentiary complex looked like any fortified area that had been a battleground a few times, which is to say, not a whole lot of it was left standing. A bullet-pocked wall here, half a building a hundred yards over that way, another wall somewhere else – the rest was rubble.

Bloomington lay thirty-five bloody miles behind Mutt now. Most of it was rubble, too, now that the Lizards had run the Army out again. That made three times the town had changed hands in the past year. Even If the lizards went home and the war ended tomorrow, Mutt thought, the U.S.A. would be years pulling itself back up on its pins. He’d never imagined his own country turning into something that looked like the worst he’d seen in France in 1918.

He did his best not to think about that. A sergeant, like a manager, had to keep his mind on what was happening now – you could lose the trees for the forest if you weren’t careful. Officers got paid to worry about forests. Mutt said, “Any place better’n this we can camp?”

From behind him, somebody said, “It’s got good protection, Sarge.”

“I know it does, from the ground, anyway,” Daniels said. “But If the Lizards bomb us, we’re sittin’ ducks.”

“There’s a park – Riverview Park, I think the name of it is,” Lucille Potter said. “I’ve been there once or twice. The Vermilion River winds around three sides of it. Plenty of trees there, and benches, and an auditorium, too, if anything is left of it. It’s not far.”

“You know how to get there from here?” Mutt asked. When Lucille nodded, he said, “Okay, Riverview Park it is.” He raised his voice: “Hey, Freddie, look alive up there. Miss Lucille’s comin’ up on point with you. She knows where a decent place for us to lay our bodies down is at.” I hope, he added to himself.

He’d seen a lot of parks in Illinois, and knew what to expect: rolling grass, plenty of trees, places where you could start a fire for a cookout, probably a place to rent a fishing boat, too, since the park was on a river. The grass would be hay length now, most likely; he didn’t figure anybody would have mowed it since the Lizards came.

Lucille Potter found Riverview Park without any trouble. Whether it was worth finding was another question. Once, in one of those crazy magazines Sam Yeager used to read, Mutt had seen a picture of the craters of the moon. Add in mud and the occasional tree that hadn’t been blown to pieces and you’d have a pretty good idea of what the park was like.

Daniels wondered if enough trees still stood to offer his squad decent cover from Lizard air attack. The rain wouldn’t stop the scaly sons of bitches; he’d already seen that They weren’t a whole lot less accurate in bad weather than in good, either. He didn’t know how they managed that. He just wished to the dripping heavens that they weren’t able to do it.

From up ahead Freddie Laplace called, “There’s bones stickin’ up outta the ground.”

“Yeah? So what?’ Mutt answered. “This here place been fought over two-three times, in case you didn’t notice.”

“I know that, Sarge,” Laplace answered in an injured voice. “Thing of it is, some of ‘em look like they’re Lizard bones.” He sounded half intrigued, half sick.

“What’s” that?” Lucille Potter said sharply. “Let me see those, Frederick.”

Mutt went over to have a look at what Freddie had found, too. Lizard bones were the most interesting thing Riverview Park had to offer, as far as he was concerned. If he didn’t take a gander at them, he’d have to get out his entrenching tool and start digging himself a hole in the torn-up mud.

Squelch, squelch, squelch. His boots threatened to come off at every step. The rain kept pattering down. Mutt sighed. Too damn bad you couldn’t call a war on account of rain. Or on second thought, maybe not. On the ground if not in the air, the storm probably slowed down the Lizards worse than it did the Americans. “Course, we were slower to start with,” he muttered under his breath.

Freddie Laplace, a skinny little guy with a highly developed sense of self-preservation, pointed down into a shell hole that was rapidly turning into a pond. Sure enough, white bones stuck out of the dirt. “Those never came from no human bein’, Sarge,” Freddie said.

“You’re right,” Lucille, Potter answered. “Those never came from any creature on Earth.”

“Just look like arm bones to me,” Mutt said. “Yeah, they got claws ‘stead of fingers, but so what?” He wrinkled his nose. “Still got some old meat on ‘em, too.” The rain banished the worst of the after-the-battle stench, but not all of it.