Upsetting the Balance (57 page)

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 Jäger’s ear as if he’d been a lover.

“That’s wonderful,” Jäger 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. Jäger 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,”
Jäger 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. Jäger 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 Jäger 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 Jäger. Jäger wiped it on his sleeve and then drank, too. “Success,” he said. Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. After a moment, Jäger 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, Jäger, 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,”
Jäger 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 that
what we were supposed to do
and
what our superiors ordered us to do
weren’t necessarily one and the same thing.

Soldiers didn’t commonly have to draw that distinction. Jäger 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.