Upsetting the Balance

14

Nieh Ho-T’ing glowered at Liu Han. “You are the most exasperating woman in the history of the world,” he snarled.

Liu Han smiled back across the table at the dingy Peking rooming house. She sipped tea, nibbled at a rice cake, and said nothing. She’d been saying nothing ever since she’d let him know she had a good idea weeks before. He still had no notion what her idea was. She’d wanted to keep more control over it than he was willing to give: basically, she wanted to become one of the leaders in the Communists’ Peking underground. Nieh hadn’t been willing to pay that kind of price.

Beside him, Hsia Shou-Tao laughed raucously. “You sound like you’re in love with her, for heaven’s sake,” he said. Nieh glowered at him, too. Hsia thought of everything in terms of his crotch, not economics. But he also thought he knew how to get what he wanted. “If she won’t open up, we can always liquidate her. No one would miss her, that’s certain.”

Nieh glanced over to Liu Han to see if the threat had put her in fear. He didn’t think it had, and he was expert in gauging such things. She said, “If you kill me, you will never find out what I have in mind.”

“We don’t have to kill you,” Hsia said, his voice all the more frightening because he sounded so genial. “All we have to do is hurt you for a while.”

“Do what you want with me,” Liu Han said. “But who will trust you with his ideas if you torture me?”

That made Nieh wince. Mao had written that guerrillas should be like a fish concealed within the school of the people. If they scared the people away from them, they would stand alone and exposed to the wrath of the little scaly devils. Sighing, he made his first retreat: “I will give you what you ask, but only if I think your idea is good enough.”

“Then you will tell me you think it is bad, ignore me, and use it anyhow,” Liu Han said.

“I could do that now: make all the promises in the world and then break them,” Nieh Ho-T’ing reminded her. “If you want your idea used against the little devils, sooner or later you will have to tell me what it is. And if you want your reward, you will have to trust a promise that you will get it.”

Liu Han looked thoughtful when he was through. But then she said, “Any time anyone has promised me anything-men and little scaly devils both-it’s turned out to be a lie. Why should you be any different?”

“Because we are comrades in a fight against the same enemy,” Nieh answered. “If you show me a way to hurt the scaly devils, youwill be rewarded. The People’s Liberation Army does not exploit the women who fight side by side with their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers.” He kicked Hsia Shou-Tao under the table. He had spoken sound doctrine, and wished Hsia were better at living up to it.

Hsia, for a wonder, kept his mouth shut. And, after keeping silent so long, Liu Han at last wavered. “I wish I could do this on my own,” she muttered. “Then I wouldn’t have to believe another pack of lies. But if I want to hurt the little devils-and I do-I need help. So-”

She talked for some time. The longer Nieh Ho-T’ing listened to her low-voiced description of what she had in mind, the more impressed he got. Hsia Shou-Tao said “A beast show!” in disparaging tones, but Nieh kicked him again. He wanted to hear every word of this.

When Liu Han finished, he dipped his head to her and said, “I think you may deserve everything you have been saying you wanted for so long. If it works as it should, this will let us get in among the scaly devils: to spy certainly, and maybe, as you say, to kill.”

“That is what I want,” Liu Han said. “I want the little devils to know I did it to them, too. They will know my name. It is in their records, and the machines that think for them will find it. They stole my child, my tiny daughter. Maybe I can force them to give her back.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing sent her a severe look. “And if they returned the child to you, you would abandon the campaign against the scaly imperialist aggressors?” he demanded. If she said yes to that, he would throw her out of the rooming house and think hard about having her liquidated. The dialectic of the class struggle was more important than merely personal concerns.

But Liu Han shook her head. “Nothing would make me stop fighting the little scaly devils. I owe them too much for that. You Communists seem to be doing more to fight them than anyone except maybe the Japanese, and I hate the eastern devils, too. So I will work with you whether or not I have my child-but I want her back.”

“Good enough,” Nieh said, relaxing. Injuries suffered at the hands of oppressors often led folk to the People’s Liberation Army. Once they learned the true doctrines the Communist Party espoused, they were likely to remain loyal members all their lives, and to be eager to help others escape from similar maltreatment.

Liu Han said, “Our best chance to smuggle weapons and explosives in amongst the little scaly devils, I think, is to use the men who display dung beetles and mice. The scaly devils, I have seen, are squeamish about these little creatures. They will not search the containers that carry them as thoroughly as they would if something else were inside.”

“That is a very good thought,” Nieh said.

“That is avery good thought,” Hsia Shou-Tao echoed. He looked at Liu Han as if he’d never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn’t, in any real sense of the word. He certainly hadn’t taken her seriously until this moment.

“The idea has one weakness,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “If the scaly devils search only by hand, we shall defeat them, and yours is a good way to do it. But if they use the machines that see into things, we shall be discovered.”

“That is true of any scheme for bringing weapons in among the little devils,” Liu Han said. Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded; she was right.

“Two weaknesses,” Hsia said. “The other is that those who will use the guns and grenades probably will not come out alive. It is hard to find men willing to die like that. Every time you use them up, too, finding more like them gets harder.”

“Do not tell the men giving the shows what we’re loading in among their creatures,” Liu Han said.

Nieh and Hsia both laughed. “You’re ruthless enough, that’s plain,” Nieh said. “But bombs and grenades aren’t light and are bulky. They would know the containers for their beetles or mice had been altered.”

“They would not know why, though,” Liu Han answered. “If the explosives were in a metal case painted black, we could say it was one of the scaly devils’ machines for making the films that they show on their little cinema screens. The animal-show men will be honored to believe that, and they probably will not ask the little devils about it.”

Nieh and Hsia Shou-Tao looked at each other. “This woman has the spirit of a people’s commissar in her,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said admiringly.

“Maybe she does, maybe she does,” Hsia said. He leered at Liu Han across the table. “She has other assets, too.”

Nieh wished Hsia would stop evaluating women principally on how beddable they were. He, too, had noticed that Liu Han was far from bad-looking, but that did not mean he thought she was beddable. He had the idea that any man who tried to force his way through her Jade Gate was likely to end up a eunuch like one of those who had served at the court of the old, corrupt Ch’ing emperors. If Hsia wasn’t smart enough to realize as much, he might have to find out the hard way.

“You have the idea now-I’ve given it to you,” Liu Han said, sounding unsure whether or not that had been wise. “Now to use it.”

“Now to use it,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “First we need to find the animal-show men we will need, and to get them to cooperate with us. Then we have to spread this idea far and wide throughout China. We need to learn of some great holiday the little scaly devils will be celebrating, and to attack them in many places at the same time. Each time we come up with a way to get inside their quarters, we can only use it once. We want to wring the most advantage we can from this.”

“Yes,” Liu Han said. “That would be a good beginning to my revenge.”

Nieh sipped tea as he studied her. A good beginning to her revenge? Most people would have been satisfied with that as the whole of it. He nodded thoughtfully. The demands she’d made of him before she would reveal her idea seemed more and more reasonable. Even if she was a woman, she had a soldier’s ruthless spirit.

He lifted the handleless cup in salute to her. “To the people’s revolution and to liberation from all oppression!” he said loudly. She smiled at him and drank to the toast.

A new idea slid through his mind: if a woman was already a revolutionary, did that not give wanting her a sound ideological basis? It was, he told himself, purely a theoretical question. Had he not already told himself Liu Han was not beddable? He glanced her way again. It was a pity…

The freighter drew close to New York City. Vyacheslav Molotov stared at the great towers with loathing and envy he concealed behind his usual expressionless facade. As he had when he visited Hitler in Berlin, he felt he was entering a citadel of the enemy of everything he and the Soviet Union stood for. Molotov on Wall Street! If that wasn’t an acting-out of the struggle inherent in the historical dialectic, he didn’t know what was.

And yet, just as fascist Germany and the Soviet Union had found common cause a few years before, so now the Soviet Union and the United States, already allies against Hitlerism, joined forces against a worse invader. When you looked at life without the dialectic to give it perspective, it could be very strange.

Pointing ahead to the arrogant, decadent skyline, Molotov’s interpreter said, “The Americans have taken their share of damage in this war, Comrade Foreign Commissar.”

“So they have,” Molotov said. Most of the glass in the windows of the tall, thrusting skyscrapers had been shattered. Black scorchmarks running up the sides of the buildings showed where fires had blazed out of control. A couple leaned drunkenly to one side, as if unlikely to stand much longer. Molotov surveyed the scene with a cold eye, then added, “Only fit that they be reminded they are in a war. Against the Germans, they did the building and we did the dying.”

A tugboat came puffing out to greet the freighter. A man with a megaphone stood at the bow and bellowed something in English. The interpreter translated: “He says, ‘Ahoy, Lithuanian ship! You’re a long way from home.’ This, I believe, is intended as a joke.”

“Heh, heh,” Molotov said, just like that. He’d forgotten his vessel still flew the extinct gold, green, and red banner of what was now, and rightfully, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (he also managed to forget that the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic had been under Nazi occupation till the Lizards came, and still showed no delight at the prospect of bowing to the authority of Moscow).

“How shall I reply?” the interpreter asked.

Molotov was tempted to send the American greetings in the name of the Lithuanian Congress of People’s Deputies, but refrained. “Tell him I greet him in the name of the Soviet people and of General Secretary Stalin.”

More shouts in English. The interpreter said, “This time he replies correctly. He says we are to let him assist us in berthing.”

“Then we shall do so,” Molotov answered. “Take this up with the ship’s officers, not with me. I had thought they might bring proper diplomatic personnel to meet with us here, but if this is not the case, we shall proceed into New York.” He spoke as if he were about to enter some jungle filled with wild and savage tribesmen. That was how he felt: to him, capitalists were no more than predatory wild beasts, and New York their principal lair.

Following the lead of the tug, the freighter sailed into the East River. The battered ship left behind the Statue of Liberty, standing tall and proud on Bedloe’s Island. Molotov had nothing in principle against the ideals the statue epitomized, but thought the United States, with its exploitation of Negroes by whites, of poor by rich, of proletarians by capitalists (which was not quite the same thing), did a poor job of living up to them.

The freighter tied up at Pier 11, quite near the shore. The interpreter pointed to a sign in English. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, do you know what there is between this and Pier 12, the next one over?” he said, his voice quivering with indignation. “There is what is called the Municipal Skyport, where the rich capitalists can land their private seaplanes conveniently close to their Wall Street offices.”

“That any man should be rich enough to own his own seaplane-” Molotov shook his head. How many men went hungry so a handful could afford these useless luxuries?

But he had not come here to mock the capitalists, he had come to deal with them. He’d dealt with the Nazis; he could stand this. He looked around at the bustling activity on the docks. Even invaded, America remained formidably productive and economically strong. He even saw some petrol-powered lorries hauling goods away once they’d been taken off their ships. Back in the USSR, every drop of petrol and diesel fuel went directly to the war effort, to tanks and airplanes. Donkeys and horses and strong backs hauled goods from one place to another.

Waiting on the pier was, not a taxicab as he’d half expected, but a horse-drawn buggy of American design. Molotov was not insulted at failing to rate a motorcar of his own. The Lizards had a habit of strafing automobiles, on the assumption that whoever was in them was liable to be important. As a result, people who were genuinely important traveled for the most part in horse-drawn conveyances, like everyone else.

When Molotov and his interpreter climbed aboard the carriage, the driver surprised him by greeting him in good Russian:“Dobry den, Gospodin Molotov.”

“Good day to you as well, but I amTovarishch Molotov, if you please,” the foreign commissar answered.Gospodin was what you would have called an aristocrat before the Revolution. The simplecomrade showed proper egalitarianism.

“However you like,” the driver said, equably enough. Molotov did not think him a native Russian-speaker; he had a trace of the sibilant accent English gave to Russian. Perhaps his parents had come to the United States and he’d learned his ancestral language from them-or he could have been an American who’d studied Russian thoroughly, as Molotov’s interpreter had studied English.

The interpreter leaned forward in his seat as the carriage began rolling. He looked petulant. Molotov understood that: if the interpreter was not useful, he would soon be performing a function where he was, most likely a function that involved carrying a rifle, living on whatever he could scrounge, and trying to survive against superior Lizard firepower.

“You are going to the Subtreasury Building, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the driver said. “Our first president, George Washington, took his oath of office in front of the old city hall that used to stand there. Inside, in a glass case, is the very stone he stood on.”

“How interesting,” Molotov lied.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the interpreter said hoarsely, pointing to a sign on a corner, “we are traveling down Wall Street at this very moment.” He looked around in alarm, as if he expected an assault from a regiment of swag-bellied plutocrats in toppers, cutaways, and spats, each one sporting a diamond ring bigger than the last and puffing a fat cigar.

Molotov looked around, too. Some of the people on the fabled street did wear business suits, but more were in workmen’s clothes or uniforms. They didn’t look quite so shabby as men on the street in war-ravaged Moscow, but they didn’t seem wildly wealthy, or even prosperous, either.

In a helpful tone of voice, the driver said, “The Subtreasury Building is right across the street from the New York Stock Exchange.” Had Molotov’s interpreter had an apotropaic amulet, he would have taken it out and brandished it at the mention of that tool of the Soviets’ ideological devil.

The Subtreasury Building was a dignified structure in the Greek Revival style of the previous century. To Molotov, for whom socialist realism was as much an article of faith as the doctrine of the Incarnation was to Pope Pius XII, having a building pretend to be something it wasn’t summed up the dishonesty of the capitalist system. That the skyscrapers along Wall Street dwarfed the Subtreasury Building told him everything he needed to know about where economic power in the United States really lay.

A bronze statue of a man in outmoded clothing stood on the steps. As Molotov went past it, his interpreter said, “There is George Washington, the first president of the United States.”

Molotov dismissed the first president in half a dozen words: “He is dressed like an aristocrat.” The offhand condemnation made the man who had driven him to the Subtreasury Building mutter something under his breath. Behind the impassive mask Molotov always wore, he chuckled to himself.

Inside, a smiling flunky led him and the interpreter to a large, airy, well-lit chamber. The men waiting behind the tables there rose politely as he came in. “Good morning, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Cordell Hull said. “Excellent to see you again.”

“I am pleased to have this opportunity to consult with my allies in the joint struggle against the imperialist aggressors from the stars,” Molotov answered, keeping any dealing on a personal level to a minimum. “It is also good to have representatives of Great Britain here, after the heroic resistance her people have shown against the aliens’ invading forces.”

“Do you know Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Halifax?” the American Secretary of State asked.

“I had the honor of meeting Lord Beaverbrook in Moscow two years ago, when he headed the Anglo-American mission on sending aid to the Soviet Union after the unprovoked and perfidious fascist attack,” Molotov said, nodding to the present British Minister of Supply.

“Good to see you again, Molotov,” Lord Beaverbrook said, sticking out his hand. He was a tall, ruddy, balding man in his mid-sixties, with a shrewd, blunt-featured face and an air of energy that would have done credit to someone half his age.

“You will introduce me to Lord Halifax?” Molotov said. “We have never met in the flesh.”

What he did know about Halifax, he did not fancy. The British ambassador to the United States had been Foreign Secretary under Neville Chamberlain before war broke out and during most of its first year, till the Chamberlain government fell in the aftermath of disasters in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France. All through his time in office, he’d advocated appeasing the Hitlerite beast by tossing one country after another into its ravening maw.

Now, though, he nodded civilly to Molotov and extended his right hand. The left sleeve of his coat hung limp; his left arm had been withered from birth, and lacked a hand. “A pleasure to meet you at last,” he murmured.

“Indeed,” Molotov said, looking up at him. He was taller and balder than Beaverbrook-he had to be within a few centimeters of two meters tall. Most men, though, were taller than Molotov; he refused to let that, or anything else, intimidate him. “Now that we have dealt with the formalities, shall we move on to the business at hand?”

“Yes, yes, by all means.” With his own hands, Cordell Hull pulled out a chair for Molotov, and then another for his interpreter. Molotov felt faintly scandalized; that was not proper work for a man whose rank matched his own. The American passion for showing equality of upper and lower classes even-sometimes especially-where that equality did not in truth exist always struck him as hypocritical.

But diplomacy without hypocrisy was almost a contradiction in terms. Molotov said, “Let us review the present state of our alliance and plan our future moves against the common foe.”

“Not all such planning is practicable,” Lord Beaverbrook put in. “The damned Lizards have plans of their own, as we found out to our sorrow this past summer.”

“We were invaded first by the Nazis, then by the Lizards,” Molotov said. “We know in great detail what you have experienced.”

“Russia being a large state-” Lord Halifax began.

Molotov corrected him with icy precision: “The Soviet Union being a large state-”

“Yes. Quite. Er, the Soviet Union being a large state,” Lord Halifax resumed, “you enjoyed the luxury of trading space for time, which allowed you more strategic options than were available to us.”

“Thus your immediate use of poison gas,” Molotov said. “Yes. That, like our bomb from explosive metal, does seem to have been something which found the Lizards ill-prepared.”

He watched Halifax and Beaverbrook preen, as if they’d been personally responsible for throwing mustard gas at the Lizards. Maybe Beaverbrook actually had had something to do with the decision; he’d been active in weapons development. Molotov reckoned poison gas an altogether mixed blessing. Not long after the English started using it, the Germans also did-a more lethal species, too. And the Germans had rockets to throw their gas farther than they could directly reach. Not for the first time, Molotov was glad the Lizards had landed in Poland. He would have liked their landing in Germany even better.

The Nazis’ poison gas also seemed to be on Beaverbrook’s mind, for he said, “Technical cooperation among the allies is still not all it might be. We have yet to receive from Berlin-”

“You won’t get anything from Berlin, any more than you would from Washington,” Cordell Hull said. “Or Tokyo, either, come to that.”

“From the Germans, I should say,” Lord Beaverbrook replied. “Ahem. We’ve not received from the Germans the specifics of their new suffocating gas, nor indeed any word from them on their progress toward nuclear weapons for some time.”

“We and they were enemies before; our present alliance with them is nothing more than a convenience,” Molotov said. “We should not be surprised when it creaks.” The Anglo-American-Soviet alliance against the Hitlerites had also been one of convenience, as had the Nazi-Soviet pact before that. You didn’t stay wedded to an alliance because it was there; you stayed because it was useful for you. What had Austria said, refusing to help Russia during the Crimean War after the Romanovs rescued the Hapsburg throne? “We shall astonish the world by our ingratitude”-something like that. If you were in the game, you knew it had slippery rules. The British had some clues along those lines. Molotov wondered about the Americans, though.

Because he still worried about the Germans almost as much as he did about the Lizards, Molotov said, “We have reports that the Nazis will be ready to begin using those bombs next spring.” He didn’t say he’d heard that himself, straight from Ribbentrop’s mouth. The United States and Britain endangered the future of the Soviet Union hardly less than the Nazis.

“We can match that,” Cordell Hull said placidly. “We may even beat it.”

That was more than Molotov had heard from Ribbentrop. He wondered if it was more than Ribbentrop knew. For that matter, he was always amazed when Ribbentrop knew anything. “If that is so, the war against the Lizards will take on an entirely different tone,” he observed.

“So it will,” Hull said. “You Russians should have more of these weapons coming up soon, too, shouldn’t you?”

“So we should.” Molotov let it go at that. Unfortunately, just because the Soviet Union should have had more explosive-metal bombs coming into production didn’t mean itwould have them. He wondered how long the physicists would have before Stalin started liquidating them out of frustration. The Great Stalin’s virtues were multifarious-he would tell you as much himself. Patience, however, was not among them.

Lord Halifax said, “If we show the Lizards we are their match in destructive power, my hope is that we shall then be able to negotiate a just and equitable peace with them.”

Once an appeaser, always an appeaser,Molotov thought.“My hope is that we shall drive them off our world altogether,” he said. “Then the historical dialectic can resume from the point where it was interrupted.”And its processes can finish throwing Britain onto the rubbish heap.

“That would not be easy under the best of circumstances,” Lord Beaverbrook said. “And circumstances are not of the best. The Lizards, as you will probably recall, have a colonization fleet traveling toward Earth, much as theMayflower brought Englishmen and — women to what we then called the New World. Will their military forces flee, leaving the colonists nowhere to land? I think not.”

Molotov hadn’t considered it from that perspective. He was certain Stalin hadn’t, either. And yet it made sense, even in dialectical terms. The Lizards were imperialists. So much was obvious. But what did the imperialists do? They didn’t just conquer locals. They also established colonies-and would fight to protect what they saw as their right to do so.

Slowly, he said, “I do not wish to accept the permanent presence of these aliens on our world.”

“I daresay the Red Indians weren’t overjoyed at the prospect of Pilgrim neighbors either,” Beaverbrook answered. “We must first make certain we aren’t simply overwhelmed, as they were.”

“That’s an important point,” Cordell Hull said. “And one of the reasons the Indians got overwhelmed is that they never-or not often enough, anyway-put up a common fight against the white men. If a tribe had another tribe next door for an enemy, they wouldn’t think twice about joining with the new settlers to clear ’em out. And then, a few years later, it would be their turn, and they probably wondered what the devil happened to them. We can’t afford that, and we have to remember it. No matter how bad we think our neighbors are, living under the Lizards would be a damn sight worse.”

Molotov thought not of Red Indians but of the tsars expanding Russian might at the expense of the nomads of the steppe and the principalities in the Caucasus. The principle, though, remained the same. And Hull was right: all the world’s leaders, even the Great Stalin, needed to remember it.

“I shall convey your thoughts, and my agreement with them, to the General Secretary,” Molotov said.

Cordell Hull beamed. “Thank you, Comrade Foreign Commissar. I hope you won’t mind my saying that this is, I believe, the first time you’ve expressed a personal opinion in all our talks.”

Molotov considered. Slowly, he nodded. “You are correct, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “I apologize for the error. It was inadvertent, I assure you.”

Heinrich Jager accepted three francs in change from a shopkeeper after he bought a couple of meters of twine. Two were solid prewar coins. The third, instead of Marianne on the obverse, had a double-headed axe, two stalks of wheat, and the legendETAT FRANCAIS. It was made of aluminum, and felt weightless in his hand.

The shopkeeper must have noticed the sour stare he sent the franc. “Vichy says we have to use them,” the fellow said with a shrug. “So do the Lizards.”

Jager just shrugged and stuck the coin in his pocket. The less he had to put his halting French on display in Albi, the happier he was. He and Otto Skorzeny had already been here longer than they wanted. Other raids Skorzeny planned had run like clockwork. Here, the clock was slow.

He rolled up his twine and walked out of the shop onto the Avenue du Marechal Foch. As always when he looked about in Albi, a line from some English poet sprang to mind. “A rose-red city half as old as time.” Pink and red brickwork predominated hereabouts, though brown and muddy yellow added to the blend. If one-or, here, two-had to rusticate, there were worse places than Albi in which to do it.

The aluminum coin from Marshal Petain’s mint went when he bought a kilo ofharicots verts. He carried the beans back to the flat he and Skorzeny were sharing.

He hoped his comrade in arms hadn’t brought home another tart. When Skorzeny had a mission directly before him, he was all business. When he didn’t, his attention wandered and he needed something else to keep him interested in the world. He’d also been drinking an ungodly lot lately.

But when Jager got back to the flat, he found Skorzeny alone, sober, and beaming from ear to ear. “Guess what?” the big SS man boomed. “Good old Uncle Henri finally shipped us the last piece we need to put our toy together.”

“Did he? That’s first-rate,” Jager said. A mortar was not an impressive-looking piece of lethal hardware, especially disassembled: a sheet-metal tube, an iron base plate, three legs for the tripod, and some straps and screws and a sight. Any individual component could go through the still-functional mails of Vichy France without raising a Gallic eyebrow. But now that the base plate had finally come, they could turn everything back into a mortar in a matter of minutes.

“Let’s go do it now,” Skorzeny said excitedly.

“In daylight?” Jager shook his head. That idea still appalled him. “The plant runs three shifts. We’ll do just as much damage if we hit it at night, and we’ll have a better chance of getting away clean.”

“Sometimes, Jager, you’re a bore,” Skorzeny said.

“Sometimes, Skorzeny, you’re a crazy man,” Jager retorted. He’d long since learned that you couldn’t let Skorzeny grab any advantage, no matter how tiny. If you did, he’d ride roughshod over you. The only thing he took seriously was a will whose strength matched that of his own, and God hadn’t turned out a whole lot of those.

Now Skorzeny laughed, a raucous note that filled the little furnished flat “A crazy man? Maybe I am, but I have fun and the Lizards don’t.”

“They’ll have even less fun once we’re through with them,” Jager said. “Shall we walk by the factory one last time, make sure we’re not overlooking anything?”

“Now you’re talking!” The prospect of action, of facing danger, always got Skorzeny’s juices flowing. “Let’s go.”

“First smear that glop over your scar,” Jager said, as he did whenever Skorzeny was about to go out in public in Albi. The Lizards were terrible at telling people apart, but that scar and the SS man’s size made him stand out. They made him stand out for human collaborators, too.

“Bore,” Skorzeny repeated, but he rubbed the brown makeup paste over his cheek. It left him looking as if his face had been burned, but the Lizards weren’t looking for a man with a burn. They were after a man with a scar-and they won’t be shy about snapping up any friends he has along, either,Jager thought.

Baggy trousers, a tweed jacket, a cloth cap… to Jager, they made Skorzeny look like a German in down-at-the-heels French clothes rather than a down-at-the-heels Frenchman, but he did know the Lizards were a less demanding audience. He thought the beret he wore made him look dashing. Skorzeny insisted it looked like a cowflop on his head. He took the chaffing in good part; wearing a beret in France these days meant you supported Vichy, which was exactly the impression he was trying to create.

The factory was on the Rue de la Croix-Verte, in the northeastern part of the city. Jager and Skorzeny walked past the theater and the Jardin National on their way to it. They ambled along, hands in their pockets, as if they had all the time in the world. Skorzeny gave a pretty girl the eye. She stuck her nose in the air, ignoring him with Gallic panache. He laughed as raucously as he had back in the apartment.

A stream of lorries rolled out of the gas-mask plant as the two Germans came up to it. The lorries headed off to the east, to help save Lizards from German gas. The factory itself was a large, nondescript building of orange brick, utterly unremarkable from the outside. Only the Lizard guards who paced its perimeter with automatic rifles made it seem at all important.

Jager didn’t even turn his head toward it. He just glanced at it out of the corner of his eyes as he mooched on past. As for Skorzeny, he might not even have suspected the place existed, let alone that it manufactured goods which hurt theReich. He was pompous and arrogant, no doubt about that, but a mission made him all business.

He and Jager bought lunch at a little cafe a couple of blocks from the gas-mask factory. The chicken-actually, almost chickenless-stew was pretty bad, even by wartime standards, but the house wine that went with it was noticeably better thanordinaire. After a couple of glasses, you stopped noticing the stringy carrots and sad potatoes that accompanied the little diced-up bits of chicken-or rabbit, or maybe cat.

Lunch finished, Jager and Skorzeny walked back the way they had come. The Lizards took no notice of them. Skorzeny started whistling something. After the first few bars, Jager gave him a shot in the ribs with an elbow. A good thing, too; it was the “Horst Wessel Song.”

When they got back to the flat, Skorzeny hopped up and down like a kid with a new toy. “I want to do it now,” he said, over and over.

“Better we wait till tonight,” Jager kept answering. “Less chance of someone noticing us setting up a mortar in the middle of the Parc Rochegude.”

“But they’re more likely to notice us carrying the stuff at night,” Skorzeny argued. “You carry boxes during the day, you’re a workman. You carry boxes at night, if you’re lucky people think you’re a burglar on your way to do a job. You aren’t so lucky, they think you’ve already done it and they try to rob you.”

“No,” Jager said yet again. “The park is just a little ways away-that’s why we took this flat, remember? We can carry all our gear in one trip, set up in the middle of that nice stand of elms we found, and start firing. We can get off eight or ten bombs in a minute or so and then get the hell out of there. What could be better than that?”

“Watching the fur fly,” Skorzeny answered without hesitation. Then he sighed. “I don’t suppose we could do that anyway. Wouldn’t be a good idea to walk past the factory on our way out of town.”

“Why?” Jager said in mock astonishment. “Just because we’ll have lobbed eight or ten bombs full of Tabun into it and around the neighborhood? All we’d have to do is hold our breath as we went by.”

“You’re right-maybe we could get away with it.” Before Jager could explode, Skorzeny laughed at him. “I’m joking, son, I’m joking.”

“Tabun isn’t anything to joke about.” Jager cast a respectful eye on the mortar bombs he and Skorzeny had carried down through the Lizard lines from Germany. Had one of those bombs developed the tiniest leak, the sun would have gone dark in the sky, his lungs would have stopped working, and he wouldn’t have made it to Albi.

“Well, I don’t say you’re wrong about that,” Skorzeny answered. “It’s some very nasty stuff, for a fact. TheFuhrer wasn’t going to use it, even against the Lizards, till the British hauled out their mustard gas. Then I suppose he decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”

“TheFuhrer knows about gas,” Jager said. “He was in the trenches in France himself.” He remembered his own days there, the frantic cries of alarm when the gas shells started landing, the struggle to get your mask on and tight before the tendrils of poison reached you and started eating your lungs, the anguished cries of comrades who hadn’t grabbed their masks fast enough, the stifling feel of every breath, the way you started wanting to tear off the mask after you’d worn it for hours on end, no matter what happened to you once you did… Across a quarter of a century, those memories remained vivid enough to make the fear sweat prickle up under his arms.

Grumpily, Otto Skorzeny said, “All right, Jager, we’ll do it your way, tonight when it’s nice and dark. Should be clear, too, which won’t be bad if we can spy the North Star through the trees. Give us a better gauge of true north than our compasses would if somebody’s tampered with our marks.”

“That’s true,” Jager said. They’d picked the spot from which they would fire a good while before. Thanks to some excellent maps of Albi and their French friends (no, not friends, partners: the Frenchmen had been enemies of Vichy when Petain collaborated with the Germans, and remained enemies now that he was collaborating with the Lizards), they knew the range and bearing from their chosen copse in the Parc Rochegude to the gas-mask factory, to within a few meters and minutes of the arc. It was just a matter of getting the mortar pointing in the right direction, fiddling with the elevation screw, and firing away.

To kill time till darkness fell, they played skat. As he usually did, Skorzeny won money from Jager. They were playing for Vichy francs, though, so the losses hardly felt real. Jager thought of himself as a pretty fair cardplayer, and wondered if Skorzeny cheated. He’d never caught him at it and, if he did, Skorzeny would make jokes about it and turn it into a lark. What could you do?

When twilight came and the sky turned purple-gray, Skorzeny stuck the cards in his pocket and said, “Shall I make us some supper?”

“I thought you wanted us to live till tonight,” Jager said, which earned him a glare from the bigger man. As anyone does who spends time in the field, Skorzeny had learned to cook after a fashion: roasted meats, stews made from whatever was handy thrown into a pot and stuck over the fire for a while. Since Jager cooked the same way, he waved a hand to tell Skorzeny to go ahead.

You couldn’t do a lot to mess up beans and cabbage and onions and carrots and potatoes. The stew was bland and boring, but it filled the belly. At the moment, Jager didn’t care about anything else. The flat had good blackout curtains. That let him turn on the electric lights after supper, and let Skorzeny win more funny money from him with those possibly trained pasteboards.

Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven… the hours crawled slowly past. When midnight struck, Skorzeny loaded the thirty kilos of mortar onto his back, slung into a big cloth bag. Jager carried the bombs in the packs he and the SS man had used to bring them down from German-held territory.

They closed the door behind them and went downstairs and then outside as quietly as they could. Every little clank they made seemed magnified in the dark, silent street. Jager wondered how many people were peering at them as they trudged east down the Avenue du Marechal Foch toward the park.

He also wondered if he would make it to the park. Added together, the mortar bombs and powder charges were at least as heavy as the weapon that fired them, while he was not nearly so big and burly as Otto Skorzeny.

He was staggering but still moving along when they got to the Parc Rochegude. A rustle in the bushes made him snatch for the pistol he wore in the waistband of his trousers. “Just a couple playing games,” Skorzeny said with a coarse laugh. “Might have been a couple of men, but it’s too dark for me to be sure.”

The tree-surrounded open space they’d picked to set up the mortar had no couples using it, for which Jager was heartily glad: he had found a discarded French letter in it one morning. “We won’t need the compass or the North Star,” he said with relief. A few days before, Skorzeny had splashed whitewash on a branch of one of the elms in the grove. Set the base plate of the mortar on the gray stone Jager had placed in the grass, aim the barrel over the white splash, and the Lizards-and the humans who worked for them-would learn collaboration had its price.

Skorzeny assembled the mortar, swearing softly when he barked his knuckles in the darkness. He’d practiced so often in the flat that the lethal little device quickly grew from a collection of innocent-looking hardware to an artillery piece. He lined it up roughly on the marked branch, then turned the traversing screw to bring it to exactly the bearing he wanted. At last he grunted in satisfaction and began adjusting the elevation screw so the mortar would fling its bombs just the right distance.

Jager, meanwhile, had been taking the bombs out of the packs and standing them on their tailfins by the mortar. Even without knowing the particularly lethal freight they carried, anyone would have recognized them as intended for no good purpose: nothing painted flat black and full of sharp curves and angles was apt to be a kiddie toy.

“Flick on your lighter,” Skorzeny said. “I want to make sure I have the elevation right. Wouldn’t do to shoot over or under.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Jager dug the lighter out of his pocket and flicked the wheel with his thumb. His breath came short and quick, as if he’d spied a Lizard panzer’s turret traversing to bring its main armament to bear on him. A cry ofQu’est-ce que c’est? and feet pounding toward the copse would be just as disastrous now.

After what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than half a minute, Skorzeny said, “Everything’s fine. Douse it.” Jager flicked the cover over the flame. Even that little noise made his heart pound. Well, the Parc Rochegude would know bigger noises any minute now.

Skorzeny softly slapped him on the back. He took that as his signal to begin. Snatching up a bomb, he dropped it down the barrel of the mortar.

Wham!The noise hit harder than that of a panzer’s cannon; he didn’t have several centimeters of steel shielding him from most of it now. He grabbed another bomb, sent it after the first one.Wham!

Between shots, he tried to use his stunned ears to listen for any outcry, and for whistle blasts from the French gendarmerie. He didn’t hear anything, and prayed that meant there wasn’t anything to hear. He’d brought a dozen bombs in all. He’d hoped to be able to fire most of them before the uproar started. In just over a minute, he sent every one of them on its way.

Skorzeny slapped him on the back again, this time hard enough to stagger him. “You can be on my mortar team any day!” the burly SS man bawled, his mouth as close to Jager’s ear as if he’d been a lover.

“That’s wonderful,” Jager said dryly. “Now let’s get back to the flat before somebody spots us out here and puts two and two together.”

“Just a minute.” Skorzeny grabbed the mortar by the tripod, heaved it up off the ground. Jager started in alarm; the plan had called for leaving it behind. But Skorzeny didn’t carry it far. Close by the copse was a little pond. He heaved the mortar in with a splash. “They won’t find it till sunup this way, and maybe not for a while afterwards. By then,Gott mit uns, we’ll be on our way.”

“Gott mit uns,”Jager echoed. “Now come on, damn it.”

They’d just shut the front door to their building when several men came round the corner and dashed toward the park. Jager and Skorzeny hurried upstairs. The biggest worry in the plan had been that people would come out of their block of flats when the mortar started banging. That would make them notice the two men in Number 14 had been outside-and wonder why. They probably wouldn’t have wondered long.

But the hallway was empty when Jager closed the door behind him. He let out a long sigh of relief. Off in the distance, sirens wailed and bells clanged: ambulances and fire engines. Solemnly, he stuck out his hand. As solemnly, Skorzeny shook it.

The SS man pulled the cork from a bottle of wine, took a swig, and passed it to Jager. Jager wiped it on his sleeve and then drank, too. “Success,” he said. Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. After a moment, Jager thought about what his toast had meant: some unknown number of Frenchmen-Frenchwomen, too, very likely-asphyxiating, not because they’d harmed him in particular but because, to support themselves and their families, they were turning out goods the Lizards could use.

The wine turned to vinegar in his mouth. “This is a filthy business we’re in,” he said.

“You just figured that out?” Skorzeny said. “Come on, Jager, you’re not a virgin, except maybe in your left ear. If we don’t hurt the Lizards, we lose. If hurting the Lizards means hurting civilians, too, well, too bad. These things happen. We did what we were supposed to do, what our superiors ordered us to do.”

“Ja,”Jager said in a hollow voice. What Skorzeny didn’t get and wouldn’t get if he lived to be a hundred-not likely, considering how the SS man lived-was thatwhat we were supposed to do andwhat our superiors ordered us to do weren’t necessarily one and the same thing.

Soldiers didn’t commonly have to draw that distinction. Jager hadn’t worried about it, not until he found out how the Germans dealt with Jews in the east. Since then, he hadn’t been able to look away. He knew what sort of disaster awaited the world if the Lizards won the war. Like Skorzeny, he was willing to do just about anything to keep that from happening. Unlike the SS man, he wasn’t willing to believe everything he did was fine and virtuous.

That made for another subtle distinction, but he clung to it.

Panting, Jens Larssen stopped at the top of Berthoud Pass. His breath smoked in the thin, cold air. Snow dappled the ground and turned the pines and firs into a picture right off a Christmas card. Snow and ice also turned US 40 into a slippery slalom course that had to be treated with the utmost respect.

“Downhill from here,” Jens said. That was literally true; he’d lose more than a mile of altitude before he made it back to Denver, a bit more than fifty miles away. It also normally implied everything would be easy the rest of the way. Heading back to Denver wasn’t going to be easy. If your bike hit an icy patch and skidded while you were slogging uphill to the Continental Divide, you’d fall and scrape your shin. If you lost it while you were speeding down some of these steep grades, you’d break a leg-or your neck.

“Slow and easy,” he said out loud, reminding himself. “Slow and easy.” He’d spent some of his time getting up to the pass walking the bicycle; he’d spend even more coming down. All the same, with luck he’d be in Denver in a couple of days, and then, before long, the Metallurgical Laboratory could pack up and head for Hanford and the Columbia.

Up in Tabernash, a ways to the north, he’d bought a knitted wool sailor’s cap. God only knew what it was doing there; Tabernash was about as far from the sea as you could get in North America. He kept it pulled down over his ears, even though that made them itch. He also hadn’t bothered shaving since the leaves started turning colors. His beard had come in thick and strawberry blond; it did a surprisingly good job of keeping his cheeks and chin warm.

“I wonder if Mary Cooley would know me,” he muttered; Idaho Springs lay only twenty miles or so to the east. His hand went over his shoulder and briefly caressed the barrel of the Springfield he wore slung on his back.

But, now that he found himself close to Idaho Springs, he also found he wasn’t killing angry at the waitress who’d given him the clap, not any more. The sulfa tablets Dr. Henry had given him in Hanford had done the job. The disease wasn’t bothering him at all now. He didn’t even have the morning drop of pus he had to piss away with the day’s first whizz, so he supposed he was cured.I’ll let the bitch live, he thought, and felt magnanimous.

The sky was the grayish-yellow color that warned of more snow coming. He made the best speed he could down US 40; the lower he was when it started to fall, the happier he’d be. One thing growing up in Minnesota did: it taught you what to do in a blizzard. And if he hadn’t learned then, traveling cross-country the winter before would have imparted a lesson or three.

He rolled past an abandoned Studebaker. Dead cars and trucks lined the highway, here one, there a clump, here another. They’d make decent shelters if it really started coming down hard.

Somewhere up off the road, a cougar yowled. The wildlife was probably having a high old time these days. Not a lot of people were able to get up here and go hunting, as they had once. Thinking of the Lizards being good for something on Earth felt odd.

Jens’ hands tightened on the black rubber grips of the handlebars. The Lizards hadn’t been good for him, not even slightly. If they’d just stayed on the pages of the pulp magazines where they belonged, he and Barbara would still be married and happy. He meant to say a thing or two to her when he got back to Denver-and to Sam Yeager, too. He’d been thinking about that, on and off, ever since he headed west.

He reached back and patted the gun barrel again. That might end up doing some of his talking for him.

He didn’t quite make it into Idaho Springs before darkness descended like a cloak. A few minutes later, the snow started falling. Larssen kept rolling along until he came to a dead car in the middle of the road. “A Cadillac, no less,” he said as he came up to it. It would be roomier than a lot of the autos in which he’d taken refuge during his travels.

The Cadillac’s windows were rolled up and the doors locked, as if the fellow who’d been driving it had been sure he’d be back to get it pretty soon. Jens took savage pleasure in smashing the driver’s-side window with the butt of his rifle. He unlocked the door, opened it with a squeak of rusty hinges, and reached inside to unlock the back door. Then he shut the front door again. He wondered if he should have shot out the front-door lock instead, to keep cold air from blowing in, and thought about going on and finding another car.

“Hell with it,” he said. The window still had some glass in it, and he would have rolled it down a couple of inches for the fresh air anyhow. Even if the Cadillac was full of the musty smell of mildew, he wouldn’t find any better place to spread out his sleeping bag. The backseat was plenty long and plenty wide. It would have made a wonderful backseat for making out, though he doubted whether people who owned Cadillacs needed to use backseats for such purposes.

He unrolled the sleeping bag, and also took a couple of thick wool blankets from the pack he’d tied to the bicycle’s carrying rack. He still had bread and homemade butter he’d got in Tabernash. He ate some of that. He’d eaten like a pig all through this jaunt, and was skinnier now than he had been at the start of it.

With the sleeping bag around him and the blankets on top, he was plenty warm enough. He slid the rifle down into the space between the backseat and the front; the transmission hump made it stick up a little. “Anybody who tries messing with me for any reason at all will regret it,” he said.

He woke up, unmessed with, the next morning, to some of the most supernal quiet he’d ever known. It was as if the snow of the night before had coated the whole world with a thick blanket of muffling feathers. The shift of the car springs under him as he sat up was the only sound in the land.

Keeping on the road would be more interesting than it had been. No snow plows, not now, nor salt that let tires grip even as it rotted fenders. “Slow and easy,” he told himself again.

As it had when he came through westbound, Idaho Springs had sentries out to check on who entered their little town. When Jens started to produce his letter signed by General Groves, the men stood aside. “You go right on ahead, buddy,” one of them said. “I ‘member you and that there letter from back a few months, don’t I?”

Larssen pedaled through Idaho Springs and then struggled up to the top of Floyd Hill, which wasn’t that much lower than Berthoud Pass. After that, the road got better. Even if it wasn’t plowed, what looked from the marks like a wagon train had been through ahead of him, defining the roadway and shoving aside the worst of the snow. He made good time coming down into Denver.

Before the Lizards came, the town had held better than a quarter of a million people. What with evacuations, simple flight, and bombings, not nearly so many lived there nowadays. All the same, the sight of so many men and women on the streets felt strange and untoward, and made Larssen nervous. He’d got very used to his own company and nobody else’s on his travels. He wondered how he’d fit in the Met Lab team once he got back to the University of Denver.

“Hell with ’em,” he muttered. “If they can’t make room for me, that’s their problem.”

A man riding east alongside him on US 40-no, they called it Colfax Avenue here in town-overheard that and gave him a curious look. He stared back, so fiercely that the Nosy Parker found some business elsewhere in a hurry.

Jens swung south onto University Boulevard just as the sun, which had come out in the afternoon, sank behind the Rockies. That didn’t bother him. He knew just where he was going now, and he didn’t figure the Met Lab crew were working eight-hour days and then knocking off.

The buildings on the university campus were dark, but that didn’t mean anything. Except on the East Coast, blackouts had been kind of a joke in the United States after the first few panicky days that followed Pearl Harbor, but the coming of the Lizards turned them into deadly serious business once more. A lot of work got done behind blackout curtains.

He stopped the bike outside the Science Building, then opened the door and went in, pushing his way through the curtains that shielded the electric lights from view. The shining bulbs made his eyes water, not just for their brilliance but also as a sign the twentieth century still lived.

A sentry stood a few paces inside the doorway. By the time Jens got through the yards of black cloth pinned to the ceiling, the fellow had a rifle aimed at his brisket “Who goes there?” he demanded, and then, after a moment, with visible reluctance, moved the rifle aside. “Oh, it’s you, Dr. Larssen. Welcome back” His tone gave the lie to the words.

“Hello, Oscar.” Jens tried to keep what he was feeling out of his voice. Oscar had been his bodyguard-his keeper, if you wanted a less polite word for it-when he got into Denver. Oscar had also slugged him when he had tried to talk sense into Barbara. All right, he’d grabbed her, but still, the bitch hadn’t had any business squawking like that. He fought down the red rage that made him want to throw himself at the soldier. “Is General Groves still working?”

“Yes, sir, he is.” Oscar sounded relieved to be sticking to business. “He works late ‘most every night. You want to see him now, sir?”

“Yeah, I do,” Larssen answered. “I’ve been on the road a long time. The sooner he hears what I have to say, the sooner he can start doing something about it.”

“Okay, Dr. Larssen, you can go on upstairs.” Oscar hesitated. “Uh, sir, you want to leave that Springfield down here with me?” It was phrased as a request, but it didn’t sound like one.

Jens unslung the rifle and leaned it against the wall, not without an inward pang. He did his best to sound light as he said, “Don’t suppose I’ll need to shoot anybody before I come back down.” The one he really wanted to shoot was Oscar. By the way the soldier’s eyes clung to him as he walked over to the stairwell, Oscar knew it, too.

The door to Leslie Groves’ office was ajar. Jens rapped on the frosted glass panel set into the top part of it “Who’s there?” Groves demanded gruffly. Taking that as all the invitation he was likely to get, Jens went in. Surprise spread over Groves’ heavy features. He got up from behind his desk, stuck out a big, thick hand. “Dr. Larssen! We were beginning to be afraid you wouldn’t make it back. Come in, sit down.”

Mechanically, Jens shook hands. “Thanks,” he said, and sank into one of the wooden chairs in front of the desk. With a sigh, he shrugged off his pack.

“You look like something the cat dragged in,” Groves said, surveying him. He picked up the phone, dialed four numbers. “That you, Fred? Listen, send me up some fried chicken, maybe half a dozen of those nice rolls, and some honey to go with ’em. I’ve got a prodigal to feed here, so don’t waste time.” He slammed the receiver down on its cradle. Even in ordering up some supper, he was a man who brooked no nonsense.

Jens fell on the food like a starving wolf, even if all the choices had been Groves’ rather than his own. When he’d reduced it to gnawed bones and crumbs, Groves pulled a bottle of bourbon out of his desk drawer, took a snort, and passed it to him. He had a hefty swig himself, then gave it back.

“Okay, now that you’re not going to fall to pieces right before my eyes, tell me about your trip,” Groves said. “Tell me about this town in Washington you were supposed to be scouting. Did you actually manage to get there?”

“Yes, sir, I sure did.” Larssen looked at him with irritation the whiskey only fueled. He did his best to sound enthusiastic as he went on, “Hanford’s the perfect place to move the Met Lab, sir. The Columbia’s got all the water in the world in it, there aren’t any Lizards for hundreds of miles, and there’s a railhead into town. What more do we need?”

He waited for Groves to leap in the air, shoutWhoopee! and start moving people around with the same verve and aggressiveness he’d used in getting the fried chicken brought up. But instead, the Met Lab’s chief administrator said, “I appreciate all you did, and I sure as the devil congratulate you for getting there and coming back again. But things have changed since you left-”

“Changed how?” Jens demanded suspiciously. “What have you done, started turning out dental floss instead of atomic bombs?”

He wanted to make Groves mad, but the engineer just laughed. “Not quite,” he said, and explained. The more Jens heard, the less he liked. It wasn’t so much everything the Met Lab crew had accomplished while he was gone-good God, Groves was talking glibly about kilogram quantities of plutonium! What really grated was that the team had done all these important things, had come to the very edge of being able to fabricate a bomb,without Jens Larssen.

He wished Oscar hadn’t made him leave his rifle downstairs. He wanted to do some shooting now, starting with Groves and maybe ending with himself. If the Met Lab was going to stay here in Denver, everything he’d done since he rolled out of town was wasted effort-spinning his wheels in the most literal sense of the word. And they hadn’t missed him one single, solitary bit while he was gone, either.

“But, General,” he said, hearing the desperation in his own voice, “you don’t understand what a swell place Hanford really is, how perfect it would be for us to work there-” He hadn’t thought it was perfect when he rode into town. He’d thought it was a wide spot in the road, nothing better. But in retrospect, it was starting to take on aspects of the earthly paradise. He didn’t want to think he’d spent so much time in vain.

Gently, Groves said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Larssen, I truly am. But while you were away, we’ve put down deep roots here. We’d need months to make the move and get set up and producing again, and we don’t have months to spare. We don’t have days to spare; hell, Larssen, I grudge every inessential minute. We’re making the best of things here, and the best has turned out to be pretty good.”

“But-” Jens stared at the jumble of chicken bones on his plate. He’d have just as easy a time putting the meat back on them as he would of persuading Groves. He offered a new gambit: “I’ll take this up with Fermi and Szilard.”

“Go right ahead,” Groves said, accepting the move without a qualm. “If you can convince them, I’ll listen to you. But you won’t convince them, and I’ll bet money on that. They’ve got our second pile up and running under the stadium here, and the third won’t be far behind. And our reprocessing plant is doing just fine, separating plutonium from the uranium slugs where it’s made. We’d have to uproot that, too, if we headed for Washington State.”

Jens bit his lip. If things were as Groves said, the physicists wouldn’t want to move. Logically, rationally, he didn’t suppose he could blame them. They’d lost months once already, coming from Chicago to Denver. They wouldn’t want to lose more time, not when they were so close to the success the United States needed so badly.

Sometimes, though, you couldn’t go by logic and reason and nothing else. Clutching at straws, Larssen said, “What if the Lizards start a big overland push toward Denver? There’s nothing much to stand in their way-you couldn’t ask for better tank country than eastern Colorado.”

“I won’t say you’re wrong about that, but it hasn’t happened yet and I don’t think it will happen soon,” Groves answered. “It’s long since started snowing-you’d know more about that than I do, wouldn’t you? Last year, the Lizards didn’t do much once the snow started falling. They seem to be pretty predictable, so it’s a good bet they won’t get aggressive till spring. And by spring, we’ll give them enough other things to worry about that they won’t even be thinking of Denver.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Jens said bitterly.

“Oh, Lord, how I wish I did!” Groves rolled his eyes. “In case I haven’t said so, though, I’m damned glad to have you back. You’ll be able to ease the strain on a lot of people who’ve been stretched real thin for a long time.”

Jens heard that as,You’ll be a spare tire. We’ll put you on whenever we need to patch a blowout, and then we’ll heave you back in the trunk again. He almost told Groves just what he thought of him, just what he thought of the whole Met Lab: crew, project and all. But Groves held the whip hand here. Telling him off wouldn’t do anything but ruin the chance for revenge.

Voice tightly controlled, Jens asked, “How’s Barbara doing these days? Do you think there’s any chance she’d want to see me?”

“I really couldn’t tell you about that one way or the other, Dr. Larssen.” Groves sounded wary, which wasn’t like him. “The thing is, she and-and her husband left the Met Lab staff not long after you headed west. Yeager got a new assignment, and it was one where she could be useful, too, so she went along.”

“I-see,” Jens said. The first time he’d gone away, Barbara hadn’t waited for him to come home; she’d slid out of her skirt for that damn dumb ballplayer. Now when he went off to do something else for his country, she hadn’t wanted so much as to set eyes on him when he got back. Wasn’t the world a hell of a place? He asked, “Where did she-where did they-go?”

“Afraid I can’t tell you that,” Groves answered. “I couldn’t tell you even if you didn’t know either one of them. We do try to keep up security, no matter how irregular things get sometimes. And what with the troubles you’ve had, it’d be better f2or you and for them if you didn’t know where they were.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Jens didn’t believe it for a minute. It might be better for the whore who had been his wife and the bastard she was shacked up with, but for him? He shook his head. Getting his own back would be better for him. Changing the subject again, he asked, “Where are you going to put me up for the night?”

“Let’s see. If I remember right, you were BOQ over at Lowry, weren’t you?” Groves did have an impressive ability to remember detail. “Why don’t we send you back there for the time being, anyhow? Things are pretty cramped right around the campus here.”

“Okay,” Jens said.Spare tire, sure as hell. “You have to remember, though, that I am going to keep trying to convince you and everybody else that Hanford is a better place than Denver for making bombs.”

“Oh, I believe you,” Groves said. “What I don’t believe is that it’s enough better to justify shutting down here and making tracks to start up again over there. You get yourself a good night’s sleep, look around and see what we’ve done while you were away, and see if you don’t change your mind yourself.”

“I’ll do that,” Larssen said, but he was damned if anything would change his mind, not now, not after all he’d been through. He got up and started for the door.

“Wait,” Groves said. He scrawled rapidly on a sheet of paper. “Show this to the sentries at Lowry Field. Show it to Colonel Hexham, too, if he doesn’t want to give you a room at the inn.”

“Right.” Larssen took the paper, left Groves’ office, and went downstairs. He reclaimed his rifle from Oscar and walked out into the night. “Good old Colonel Hexham,” he muttered as he climbed onto his bicycle. If Hexham had just let him send a letter to Barbara before it was too late, he’d probably still be married to her today. A fling with that son of a bitch Yeager wouldn’t have mattered so much; after all, she had thought Jens was dead. But when she got herself knocked up, that ruined everything.

And now Groves wanted him to deal with Hexham. He rode slowly up University to Alameda, then turned right to go on to Lowry Field. As he pedaled east toward the air base, the temptation rose in him to keep on going past it, to keep heading east till he got to somewhere not far from the Colorado-Kansas border. Nobody was going to listen to him here, no matter how right he was. He could see that, plain as the nose on his face. But if he headed out and talked to the Lizards, they’d be very interested in finding out what was going on in Denver.

He’d had that thought before. He’d almost ridden east instead of west when they sent him out to look Hanford over. He’d fought it down then; he’d still figured his first obligation was to mankind.

“But what if the only thing every goddamn human being in the world wants is to give me a hard time?” he asked the silent, chilly darkness.

He got no answer. When he came to the Lowry Field turnoff, he stopped his bicycle and stood unmoving for two or three minutes. At last, he rode on toward the airfield. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, how close he’d come to choosing the other path.