Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  Yeager sighed and did his best to pantomime relief. He had no idea whether he got the idea across to the Lizards. Finkelstein undid the bandage. Then he tried moving toward one of the wounded prisoners again. This time, their uninjured companions, though they hissed among themselves, made no move to stop him.

  The edge of a bandage came up easily. “It’s not tape,” the doctor said, as much to himself as to Yeager. “I wonder how it stays on.” He peeled it back farther, looked at the wound in the Lizard’s side. He let out a hiss of his own. “Shell fragment, I’d guess. Give me my bag, soldier.” He grabbed a probe. “Warn him this may hurt.”

  Who, me? But this was what Yeager had asked for. He got the Lizards’ attention, pinched himself, did his best to imitate the noises the wounded captives had made. Then he pointed to Finkelstein, the probe, and the injury. He looked at that as briefly as he could; he found torn flesh to be torn flesh, whether it belonged to man or Lizard.

  Finkelstein slowly inserted the probe. The wounded Lizard sat very still, then hissed and quivered at the same moment as the doctor exclaimed, “Found it! Not too big and not too deep.” He withdrew the probe, took out a pair of long, thin grasping tongs. “Almost there, almost there . . . got it!” His hands drew back; the tongs came out of the wound clenched on a half-inch sliver of metal. A drop of the Lizard’s blood fell from it to the floor of the bus.

  All the alien prisoners, even the wounded one, spoke excitedly in their own language. The one who had threatened the doctor with claws lowered his weird eyes toward the ground and stood very still. Yeager had seen the captives do that before. It had to be a kind of salute, he thought.

  The doctor started to replace the bandage, then paused and glanced toward Yeager. “Think I ought to dust the wound with sulfa? Can Earth germs live on a thing from God knows where? Or would I be running a bigger risk of poisoning the Lizard?”

  Again, Yeager’s first thought was, How should I know? Why was a doctor asking medical questions of a minor league outfielder without a high school diploma? Then he realized that when it came to Lizards, he might not know a whole lot less than Finkelstein. After a few seconds’ thought, he answered, “Seems to me they must come from a planet that isn’t too different than ours, or they wouldn’t want Earth in the first place. So maybe our germs would like them.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I’ll do it.” The doctor poured the yellow powder into the wound, patted the bandage down. It clung as well as it had before.

  Colonel Collins walked to the back of the bus. “How are you doing, Doctor?”

  “Well enough, sir, thank you.” Finkelstein nodded at Yeager. “This is one sharp man you have here.”

  “Is he? Good.” Collins headed up to the bus door again.

  “I’m sorry, soldier,” the doctor said. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “I’m Sam Yeager. Pleased to meet you, sir.”

  “There’s a kick in the head for you—I’m Sam Finkelstein. Well, Sam, shall we see what we can do for this other Lizard here?”

  “Okay by me, Sam,” Yeager said.

  Of all the places Jens Larssen had ever expected to end up when he set out from Chicago to warn the government how important the Metallurgical Laboratory’s work was, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, might have been the last. Staying at the same hotel as the German chargé d’affaires hadn’t been high on his list of things to anticipate, either.

  But here he was at the Greenbrier Hotel by the famous springs, and here—again—was Hans Thomsen. The German had been interned here, along with diplomats from Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Japan, when the United States entered the war. Thomsen had sailed back to Germany on a Swedish ship, lit up to keep it safe from U-boats, in exchange for Americans interned in Germany.

  Now Thomsen was back again. In fact, he had a room right across the hall from Larssen’s. Down in the hotel dining room, he’d boomed, in excellent English, “I was worried going home, yes. But coming back here once more, on a dreadful little scow too small and ugly, God be thanked, for the Lizards to notice, then I was not worried. I was far too seasick to think for a moment of being worried.”

  Everyone who heard him laughed uproariously, Jens included. Having Thomsen back in the United States was a forcible reminder that humanity had more important things to do than slaughtering itself. It still made Larssen nervous. As far as he was concerned, Germany remained an enemy even if it happened to be forced into the same camp as the United States. It was the same feeling he’d had about allying with the Russians against Hitler, but even stronger here.

  Not everybody in White Sulphur Springs agreed with him, not by a long shot. A lot of important people were here, fled from Washington when the government dispersed in the face of Lizard air raids. Larssen had heard that Roosevelt was here. He didn’t know whether it was true. Every new rumor put the President somewhere else: back in Washington, in New York, in Philadelphia (W. C. Fields would not have approved), even in San Francisco (though how he was supposed to travel cross-country with the Lizards running loose was beyond Jens).

  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 hail. 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 to
ld 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.”