Anielewicz weighed the odds. The Lizards didn"t know who he was. That counted for a great deal-what they didn"t know he knew, they couldn"t squeeze out of him. Wearily, he set down his Mauser and got to his feet, arms high over his head.
Five or ten meters behind him, Friedrich was doing the same thing. The German managed a wry grin. "Maybe we"ll get away, eh?"
"That would be good," Anielewicz agreed. He"d managed to arrange it for other people (he wondered how Moishe Russie was getting along these days), and he"d managed to slip out of Warsaw right under the Lizards" snouts. Whether he could get out of a prison camp once he was inside it was another question, though.
And it was going to be one he"d have to answer. Several Lizards, all of them with automatic rifles at the ready, approached him and Friedrich. He stood very still, not wanting to spook them and get himself shot. One of the Lizards gestured sharply with the barrel of his gun-this way. "Go!" he said in barely understandable Polish. Anielewicz and Friedrich shambled into captivity. "Go!" he said in barely understandable Polish. Anielewicz and Friedrich shambled into captivity.
Rance Auerbach and his troopers rode into Lamar, Colorado, after another hit-and-run raid into Lizard-held Kansas. A couple of horses had bodies tied across their backs; nothing came easy when you fought the Lizards. But the company had done what it set out to do.
Auerbach turned to Bill Magruder. "Old Joe Selig won"t play footsie with the Lizards any more."
"Sir, that"s a fact, and a good thing, too," Magruder answered. His face was soot-grimy; he"d been one of the band that had torched Selig"s barn. The rest of the company had burned Selig"s farmhouse, and Selig inside it. Magruder leaned down and spat right in the middle of Main Street. "G.o.dd.a.m.n collaborator. I never thought we"d see b.a.s.t.a.r.ds like that, not in the United States."
"Me, neither," Auerbach said glumly. "Just goes to show there"s some b.a.s.t.a.r.ds everywhere, I guess. Hate to say it-hate to see it, by G.o.d-but I reckon it"s true."
Near the railroad station, right where Main Street crossed the Santa Fe tracks, stood the Madonna of the Trail monument, dedicated to all the pioneer mothers. Too bad some of those pioneer mothers had snakes in the gra.s.s for grandchildren.
A pigeon flew overhead, making a beeline for the county courthouse. Auerbach spotted the little aluminum tube fastened to its left leg. Spying it took some of the bitter taste out of his mouth. "I"d like to see the Lizards figure out a way to jam that," he said.
Magruder hadn"t noticed the bird, but he figured out what the captain had to be talking about. "Homing pigeon, was it?" he said. At Auerbach"s nod, he went on, "Yeah, as long as we stick to the nineteenth century, the Lizards don"t have a clue about what we"re doing. Only trouble is, when we get up to the here and now, we get licked."
"Isn"t it the truth?" Auerbach said ruefully. "And if we have the nineteenth-century stuff and they have the twentieth and the Buck Rogers gadgets, too, we"re going to keep right on getting licked unless we"re a d.a.m.n sight smarter than we"ve been so far." The beginning of an idea flickered across his mind, but was gone before he could capture it.
Before the war, Lamar had been a medium-sized town: four thousand people, maybe a few more. Unlike a lot of places, it was bigger now. A lot of the original inhabitants were dead or fled, but soldiers made up for a good many of them because it was an important forward base against the Lizards. And, because it remained firmly in American hands, it was a magnet for refugees from farther east.
Army headquarters was in the First National Bank building, not far from the courthouse (not that Lamar was a big enough town for anything to be real far from anything else). Auerbach dismissed his troopers to see to their horses, then went in to report.
Colonel Morton Nordenskold, the local commander, heard him out and made encouraging noises. "Well done," he said. "Traitors need to know they"ll pay for treason." Nordenskold had to be from somewhere in the upper Midwest; his voice held a trace of singsong Scandinavian intonation.
"Yes, sir." Auerbach felt his own Texas drawl coming out more strongly in reaction to that very northern accent. "What are your orders for the company now, sir?"
"As usual," Nordenskold answered: "Observe, patrol, raid. Given what we have, what else can we do?"
"Nothing much I can see, sir," Auerbach said. "Uh, sir, what do we do if the Lizards push west with armor, the way they did last summer to get into Kansas? I"m proud to be a cavalryman-don"t get me wrong-but you go with horses against tanks once and you won"t do it again with the same horses. Probably not with the same men, either."
"I know." Nordenskold wore a small, precise gray mustache-too small and precise to fluff out when he sighed. "Captain, we"ll do the best we can under the circ.u.mstances: we"ll hara.s.s, we"ll counterattack when we can..." He sighed again. "Take away the Army guff, and a lot of us are going to get killed trying to hold them back. Any further questions, Auerbach?"
"Uh, no, sir," Rance answered. Nordenskold had been more forthright than he"d expected. Things weren"t good, and they weren"t likely to get better any time soon. He"d known that, but having his superior come right out and say it made it feel as real and immediate as a kick in the teeth.
"Dismissed, then," the colonel said. His desk was piled high with papers, some of them reports and notes handwritten on the backs of old bank forms. He bent to them once more before Auerbach was out of the office.
Without electric lights, the room where First National Bank customers would have stood was dark and gloomy. Rance blinked several times when he went out into the bright sunshine of the street. Then he blinked again, and touched the brim of his cap with a forefinger in what was more a polite gesture than a salute. "h.e.l.lo, Miss Penny. How are you today?"
"I"m all right, I suppose," Penny Summers answered indifferently. She"d been like that ever since Auerbach had brought her back to Lamar from Lakin, Kansas. Nothing seemed to matter much to her. He understood that; watching your father smashed to cat meat right before your eyes was plenty to leave you stunned for a while.
"You look mighty nice," he offered gallantly. She was a nice-looking girl, true, but that wasn"t the same thing. Her face still had a wounded look to it and, like a lot of faces in Lamar, was none too clean. She still wore the overalls she"d had on when she and her father decided to pitch in and help the cavalry against the Lizards in Lakin. Under them she had on a man"s shirt that had seen better years-maybe better decades-and was also several sizes too big for her.
She shrugged, not because she didn"t believe him, he judged, but because she didn"t care one way or the other.
He tried again: "The folks you"re staying with here, are they treating you okay?"
"I guess so," she said, still so flat that he started to give up hope of bringing her back into full contact with the world. But then her voice picked up a little as she went on, "Mr. Purdy, he tried peekin" at me when I got undressed one night, but I told him I was your girlfriend and you"d whale the stuffing out of him if he ever did it again."
"I ought to whale the stuffing out of him for doing it once," Auerbach growled; he had definite, even vehement, notions about what you should and shouldn"t do. Taking advantage of somebody you were supposed to be helping fell with a thud into the second category.
"I told him I"d tell his wife on him, too," Penny said. Was that amus.e.m.e.nt in her voice? Auerbach wasn"t sure, but it was something, and he hadn"t heard anything there since the Lizard plane swooped low over her father.
He decided to risk laughing. "That was a good idea," he said. Then he asked, "Why did you say you were my girlfriend? Not that I wouldn"t like it if it were so, mind you, but-"
"On account of Mr. Purdy knows you brought me here, and he knows you"re half his age and twice his size," Penny Summers answered. If she noticed the last sentence he"d politely tacked on, she didn"t show it.
He sighed. He wished he could do something for her, but had no idea what that something might be. When he said good-bye, Penny only nodded and went on down the street. He didn"t think she was going anywhere in particular, just wandering around-maybe she and the Purdys got on one another"s nerves in ways other than the one she"d mentioned, too.
He turned a corner and headed for the stables (funny to think of towns having stables again; they"d been going out of business since about the time he was born) to see to his horse: if you didn"t worry about your animal before you worried about yourself, you didn"t belong in the cavalry.
Somebody sang out, "h.e.l.lo, Captain Rance, sir!"
Auerbach whirled. Only one person called him Captain Rance. To his men, he was Captain Auerbach. To his friends, he was just Rance-or rather, he"d been just Rance; the people he"d called friends were a lot of duty stations away from Lamar, Colorado. Sure enough, there stood Rachel Hines, grinning at him. He grinned back. "h.e.l.lo yourself."
Where Penny, weighed down by her father"s death, had withdrawn into herself since she came to Lamar, Rachel had blossomed. She was still wearing the dress in which she"d come to town, and it wasn"t any too clean, but she wore it with a flair Penny had forgotten-if she"d ever known it. From G.o.d knows where, Rachel had managed to come by makeup which highlighted her blond good looks. And, perhaps for no better reason than to keep life interesting, she still had her .22 slung over a shoulder.
Or perhaps she did have a reason: perhaps she was trying to make a point. She walked up to Auerbach and said, "When am I going to get to ride out with your men against the Lizards?"
He didn"t dismiss the idea out of hand, as he would have before the Lizards came. The position of the United States was, in a word, desperate. In a situation like that, whether you could take a leak standing up suddenly looked a lot less important than whether you could ride hard, shoot straight, and follow orders.
He studied Rachel Hines. She stared saucily back at him. He wasn"t sure about that last one, not where she was concerned. Some women wouldn"t be any trouble on campaign, but Rachel enjoyed flaunting what she had. That could make trouble. So Auerbach temporized, saying, "I can"t tell you yes or no yet. Colonel Nordenskold is still thinking that one over." That had the additional virtue of being more or less true.
She took another step toward him; now she was so close, she made him want to take a step back. She ran her tongue over her lips, which made him notice again that she"d painted them red. "I"d do just about anything to get the chance to go along," she murmured in a breathy little voice he wasn"t used to hearing anywhere outside the bedroom.
The sweat that sprang out on his forehead had nothing to do with the heat of Colorado summer. Women had been few and far between for him this past crazy summer, and, like a lot of guys, he always came back from action h.o.r.n.y, probably because he was so relieved to be coming back alive.
But if Rachel would go to bed with him to get what she wanted, she"d do the same thing with somebody else. Politely, in case he"d somehow misunderstood her (though he knew d.a.m.n well he hadn"t), he said, "I"m sorry, but it isn"t in my hands. Like I said, it"s up to the colonel."
"Well, I"ll just have to talk with him, him, then, won"t I?" She sashayed off toward the First National Bank. Auerbach wondered if Colonel Nordenskold would be able to resist her blandishments, and if he"d even try. then, won"t I?" She sashayed off toward the First National Bank. Auerbach wondered if Colonel Nordenskold would be able to resist her blandishments, and if he"d even try.
The cavalry captain went on to tend to his horse, also wondering how much he"d regret turning her down. "d.a.m.n, if she"d only wanted something easy from me," he muttered under his breath. "Robbing the bank here, say..."
Leslie Groves did not pretend to be a combat general, even to himself. Engineers fought nature and they fought the efforts of ill-intentioned people in the wrong kinds of uniforms who wanted to knock down the things they ran up. They weren"t supposed to worry about fighting the bad guys, not directly.
On the other hand, engineers had to be able to fight in a pinch. You never could tell what might happen to the officers who made battle their proper business, if enough of them went down, you were liable to be the man on the spot for a while.
So Groves had plenty of experience reading situation maps. Just to keep himself in practice, he often tried to figure out strategy for each side. With pardonable pride, he thought he was pretty good at it.
When he looked at the situation map on the wall of his office, he grimaced. You didn"t have to be Napoleon to realize that, if the Lizards wanted to, they could stroll across Colorado and seize Denver without breathing hard, let alone slowing down.
"What"s going to stop them?" Groves snorted. "Cavalry, for G.o.d"s sake?" He hadn"t seen cavalry symbols on a map for a long time; he"d felt mild pride for remembering what they meant.
Cavalry, against the Lizards? Cavalry had had trouble with the Sioux Indians, and he didn"t see that the state of the art had improved enough in the past three generations to give the horse soldiers much of a chance of holding off creatures from another planet. If the Lizards took it into their toothy heads to go after Denver, cavalry wouldn"t be enough to hold them back.
More armored divisions than the U.S. Army owned might not be enough to hold them back, either, but Groves didn"t worry about might-have-beens. What was was posed quite enough difficulties. posed quite enough difficulties.
"They can"t find out we"re working on the atomic bomb here," he announced, as if he expected someone to materialize in an empty chair across the desk from him and nod at his wisdom.
Of course, if the Lizards did find out the Metallurgical Laboratory had settled down here, they probably wouldn"t bother mounting an armored drive across Colorado. They"d just do unto Denver what they"d done unto Tokyo: they"d blow it off the face of the earth. If they did that, and especially if they did that before the United States had made any bombs, the war would be as good as lost, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
"j.a.pan"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 j.a.panese 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 n.a.z.is," Groves said, scowling. That was a h.e.l.l 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, a.s.suming we can set up the plant without the Lizards" noticing."
"Yes, a.s.suming," 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 endors.e.m.e.nt 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 c.o.c.kpit" 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 b.l.o.o.d.y well stay here till we were either evacuated or b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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, b.u.g.g.e.r 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 h.e.l.lish din.