In the Balance (32 page)

Larssen sighed, walked over to the sink in his room to see if he’d get any hot water. He waited and waited, but the stream stayed cold. Sighing, he scraped whiskers off his face with that cold water, lather from a hotel-sized bar of Lifebuoy soap, and a razor blade that had definitely seen better days. The resulting nicks tempted him to cultivate a beard.

His suits were wrinkled. Even his ties were wrinkled. He’d spent a long time getting here, and service at the hotel ranged from lousy on down. At that, he knew damned well he was lucky. No one in Washington or White Sulphur Springs had heard from Gerald Sebring, who’d headed east from Chicago by train instead of by car.

Larssen stooped to tie his shoelaces. One of them broke when he pulled at it. Swearing under his breath, he got down on one knee and tied the lace back together, then made his bow. It was ugly; but he’d already found out how badly picked over the Greenbrier’s little sundries store was: it had been plundered first by Axis diplomats and then by invading American bureaucrats. He knew the place didn’t have shoelaces. Maybe somebody in town did.

His nose wrinkled when he went out into the hall. Along with the brimstone odor of the springs, it still smelled of the dogs and cats the interned diplomats had brought with them from Washington.
Really gives me an appetite for breakfast
, he thought as he headed downstairs to the dining room.

Breakfast didn’t rate much of an appetite. His choice was between stale toast with jam and corn flakes floating in reconstituted powdered milk. Either one cost $3.75. Jens suspected he might have to declare bankruptcy before he got out of White Sulphur Springs. He’d been making good money by wartime standards—great money by the lean standards of the 1930s—but inflation headed straight for the roof when the Lizards landed. Demand stayed high, and they played merry hell with supply.

He ended up eating toast; one taste of the powdered milk had been enough to last him a lifetime. He left a niggardly tip, and begrudged even that. Escaping quickly, before the waiter could see how he’d been stiffed, Larssen got his car and drove five miles into town, to the Methodist church to which he’d been directed to report.

White Sulphur Springs was a beautiful little town. It had probably been even more beautiful before herds of olive-drab trucks fouled the air with their exhaust and honked at each other like bellowing bulls disputing the right of way. The antiaircraft guns which blossomed on every streetcorner also did little for the decor.

But even so, the rolling, green-clad slopes of the Alleghenies, the clear water of nearby Sherwood Lake, and the fuming springs that gave the place its name made it easy for Jens to understand why White Sulphur Springs had been a presidential resort in the days before the Civil War, when it was part of Virginia and no one had ever imagined West Virginia would become a separate state.

On the outside, the white-painted church with its tall steeple maintained the serenity the town sought to project. One step through the door told Larssen he had entered another world. The pastor retained half his office, but that was all. From everywhere else came the clatter of typewriters, the raucous chatter of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it, and the purposeful clomp of government-issue footgear on a hardwood floor.

A harassed corporal looked up from whatever he was typing. Seeing a veritable civilian before him, he dispensed with even military politeness: “Watcha want, mac? Make it snappy.”

“I have a nine o’clock appointment to see Colonel Groves.” Larssen looked down at his watch. He was five minutes early.

“Oh.” The corporal visibly shifted gears as he reassessed this civilian’s likely importance. A good piece of his big-city tough-guy accent disappeared when he spoke again: “You want to come along with me, sir?”

“Thank you.” Larssen followed the noncom through the pews on which more enlisted men were awkwardly working rather than praying, crabwise down a hallway pinched by mountains of file boxes that clung like clots to either wall, and into what had been the pastor’s sanctum. New plywood
partitions restricted that worthy to a fraction of his former domain—the fraction thereof that lacked a telephone.

Colonel Leslie Groves sat behind a desk that held said telephone. He employed the instrument with vim and gusto: “What the hell do you mean, you can’t ship those tracks up to Detroit? … So the bridge is out and the road has a hole in it? So what? Get ’em on a barge. The Lizards aren’t blasting half the shipping they might, the stupid bastards. We have to get those tanks made, or we can kiss everything good-bye … I’ll call you tonight, so I can keep up with what you’re doing. Get it done, Fred, I don’t care how.”

He hung up with no more of a good-bye than that, fixed Larssen with an intense blue stare. “You’re from that Chicago project.” It was not a question. A flick of the colonel’s left hand dismissed the corporal.

“That’s right.” Larssen wondered how much Groves knew about it, and how much he ought to tell him. More than he wanted to; he was already sure of that. “After Berlin, sir, you have to know how important that project is. And the Lizards are advancing on Chicago.”

“Son, we all got troubles,” Groves rumbled. He was a big man with auburn hair cut short, a thin mustache, and blunt, competent features. He filled the pastor’s chair to overflowing and sat well back from the desk; a hefty belly kept him from getting any closer.

“I know it,” Jens said. “I mean, I drove here from Chicago, after all.”

“Sit down; tell me about that,” Groves urged. “I’ve been holed up here almost since the Lizards came. I ought to know more about the world outside than what I can find out over a phone line.” As if on cue, the telephone jangled. “Excuse me.”

While the colonel barked instructions to someone on the other end of the line, Larssen perched on the uncomfortable chair in front of the desk and tried to marshal his thoughts. Groves gave him the impression of a man who worked hard every waking moment, so he was ready when the handset went back into its cradle: “It’s not a trip I’m looking forward to reversing. Lizard planes are everywhere, and I had to take the side roads up into upstate New York to get around the Lizard pocket east of Pittsburgh.”

“They’re in Pittsburgh now,” Groves said.

Jens grunted. The news didn’t surprise him, but it was like a kick in the belly just the same. He made himself go on: “Gas is hard as the devil to get. I drove a few miles on a half gallon of grain alcohol I bought from a little old man I think was a moonshiner. My engine hasn’t been the same since, either.”

“You kept going, which is what counts,” Groves said. “The alcohol was a good dodge. One of the things we’re looking at is adapting engines to burn it, in case the Lizards hurt our refining capacity even worse than they
have already. If the revenuers haven’t been able to put a stop to stills, damned if I see the Lizards doing it.”

“I suppose not,” Larssen agreed. But the colonel’s words brought home to him how bad things were. Somehow all the terror and trouble that had befallen him on the way from Chicago, all the horrors he’d edited out of his brief account to Groves, seemed to have happened to him in isolation; he could imagine other parts of the United States going on about their usual business while hell didn’t seem half a mile off for him. He could imagine it, yes, but Groves was warning him it wasn’t true. He said, “As bad as that?”

“Some places worse,” Colonel Groves said somberly. “The Lizards are like a cancer on the country. They don’t just hurt the places where they are—they hurt other places, too, because supplies can’t go through the territory they hold.” The phone rang again. Groves delivered a crisp series of orders, then returned to his conversation with Jens without missing a beat: “They cut off our circulation, you might say, so we die inch by inch.”

“That’s why the Metallurgical Laboratory is so important,” Larssen said. “It’s our best chance at a weapon that will let us fight them on something like equal terms.” He decided to push a little. “Washington could go the same way as Berlin, you know.”

Groves started to say something, but was interrupted by the phone once more. When he hung up, he did say it: “You really think your people will be able to make an atomic bomb in time for us to get some use out of it?”

“We’re close to starting up a sustained reaction,” Larssen said. Then he shut up; even saying that much trampled on the security he’d lived with ever since he became a part of the project. The times, though, were not what they had been before the Lizards proved atomic weapons didn’t belong just on the pages of pulp magazines. He added, “Speaking of Berlin, nobody here knows how far along the Germans are on their own special project.” No matter how things had changed, he couldn’t bring himself to say
uranium
to someone not in the know.

“The Germans.” Groves scowled. “I hadn’t thought of that. Nothing’s ever simple, is it? After Berlin, they have some kind of incentive to push ahead, too. Heisenberg wasn’t in the city when the bomb hit, I hear.”

“If you know about Heisenberg, you know quite a bit about this,” Larssen said, surprised and impressed. He’d taken Groves for just another man in a uniform, if one more overstuffed than most.

The colonel’s gruff laugh said he understood what Larssen was thinking. “I do try to remind myself I’m living in the twentieth century,” he noted dryly. “I spent a couple of years at MIT before I got my West Point ring, and took an engineering doctorate afterward. All of which and a nickel will buy me a cup of coffee—or would have, before the Lizards came.
Costs more now. So you really think this gang of yours is on to something, do you?”

“Yes, I do, Colonel. We’re too far along to make it easy for us to move, too. The Lizards are advancing on Chicago from the west, and after my adventures coming east, moving that way looks just about as risky. If we’re going to go on doing our research, the United States has to hold on to Chicago.”

Groves rubbed his chin. “What we have to do and what we can do too often aren’t nearly the same thing these days, worse luck. Anyway”—he tapped the eagle that perched on one shoulder—“I don’t have the authority to order us to hold Chicago no matter what and forget about the other rune million emergencies all over the country.”

“I know that.” Jens’ heart sank. “But you’re the best contact I’ve made. I was hoping you would—”

“Oh, I will, son, I will.” Groves heaved his bulk out of the chair. The phone rang again. Swearing, Groves flopped down again, so hard Larssen half expected the seat to break under him. It held, and Groves, as he had several times already, crisply and authoritatively dealt with a new string of problems. Then he got up once more, and went on talking as if he’d never been interrupted: “I’ll run interference for you, best I can. But you’re the one who’s carrying the ball.” He stuck a fore-and-aft cap on his head. “Let’s go.”

Larssen had played football in high school. If he’d run the ball behind a lineman as huge as Groves, he’d have put so many touchdowns on the board that people would have thought
him
the second coming of Red Grange. The image made him smile. “Where are we going?” he asked as Groves pushed past him.

“To see General Marshall,” the colonel said over his shoulder. “He has the power to bind and to loose. I’ll get you in to talk to him—today, I hope. After that, it’s up to you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Larssen said. George Marshall was Army Chief of Staff. If anyone could order Chicago defended at all cost, he was the man (although, against the Lizards, ordering something and having it come to pass were not the same thing). Hope rose in Jens. As he followed Groves out into the street, he drew in a lungful of air ripe not only with exhaust but also with the sulfurous reek of the springs.

Groves took a deep breath, too. A grin made him look years younger. “That smell always reminds me of walking into a freshman chemistry lab.”

“It does, by God!” Jens hadn’t made the connection, but the colonel was absolutely right. The very next breath brought with it memories of Bunsen burners and reagent bottles with frosted glass stoppers.

Colonel Groves literally ran interference for Larssen on the streets of White Sulphur Springs, using his blocky body to bull ahead where a thinner
or less confident man might have hesitated. He had a good deal of muscle beneath the fat, and also a driving energy that made him walk with a forward lean, as if into a headwind.

Getting in to see the Chief of Staff wasn’t as simple as Groves had made it sound back in his office. The lawn of the house in which Marshall stayed was clogged with officers. Jens had never seen so many sparkling silver stars in his life. To generals, a colonel like Groves might as well have been invisible.

He did not stay invisible long. Sheer physical bulk got him near enough to the doorway to catch the eye of a harried-looking major inside. In a ringing voice that cut through the hubbub, Groves announced his name and declared, “Tell the general I have a fellow here from the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. It’s urgent.”

“What isn’t?” the major answered, but he ducked back inside. Groves peacefully yielded up his place to a major general.

“Now what?” Larssen asked. He could feel the sun pounding his head and his arms—he wore a short-sleeved shirt. He was so fair he didn’t tan worth a damn; he just burned layer by layer.

“Now we wait.” Groves folded his own arms across his broad, khaki-clad chest.

“But you said it was urgent—”

The colonel’s booming laugh made heads swing toward him. “If it weren’t urgent, I wouldn’t be here at all. Same with everybody else, son. As that major said, everything is urgent nowadays. But if he delivers that message, well, I expect we’re urgent
enough
, if you know what I mean.”

As seconds crawled by on hands and knees, Jens began to wonder. He also wondered where in White Sulphur Springs he’d be able to find calamine lotion to slather on his poor toasting arms and nose. As inconspicuously as he could, he moved into Groves’ massive shadow. He felt a stab of jealousy when the major returned to call out the name of a brigadier general. Groves only shrugged.