Captain Borcke made sense of it. He translated: “German says the Wehrmacht is stronger around Pskov than Soviet forces, yes. He asks if it is also stronger than Soviet and Lizard forces combined.”
Chill spoke a single word: “Bluff.”
“Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. He put down his weapon and beamed at the other partisan leader. He’d found a threat the Germans could not afford to ignore.
Bagnall did not think it was a bluff, either. Germany had not endeared itself to the people of any of the eastern lands it occupied before the Lizards came. The Jews of Poland—led by, among others, a cousin of Goldfarb’s—had risen against the Nazis and for the Lizards. The Russians might do the same if this Chill pushed them hard enough.
He might, too. Scowling at the two partisan brigadiers, he said, “You may do this. The Lizards may win a victory through it. But this I vow: neither of you will live long enough to collaborate with them. We will have that radar.”
“Nyet.” This time Aleksandr German said it. He switched back to Yiddish, too fast and harsh for Bagnall to follow. Captain Borcke again did the honors: “He says this set was sent to the workers and people of the Soviet Union to aid them in their struggle against imperialist aggression, and that surrendering it would be treason to the Soviet state.”
Communist rhetoric aside, Bagnall thought the partisan was dead right. But if Lieutenant General Chill didn’t, the flight engineer’s opinion counted for little.
And Chill was going to be hard-nosed about it. Bagnall could see that. So could everyone else in the tower chamber. Captain Borcke edged away from the RAF air crew to one side, Sergei Morozkin to the other. Both men slid a hand under their coats, presumably to grab for pistols. Bagnall got ready to throw himself flat.
Then, instead, he hissed at Jerome Jones: “You have the manuals and such for the radar, am I right?”
“Of course,” Jones whispered back. “Couldn’t very well come without them, not when the Russians are going to start making them for themselves. Or they will if anyone comes out of this room alive.”
“Which doesn’t look like the best wager in the world. How many sets have you got?”
“Of the manuals and drawings, you mean? Just the one,” Jones said.
“Bugger.” That put a crimp in Bagnall’s scheme, but only for a moment. He spoke up in a loud voice: “Gentlemen, please!” If nothing else, he succeeded in distracting the Germans and partisans from the bead they were drawing on each other. Everyone stared at him instead. He said, “I think I can find a way out of this dispute.”
Grim faces defied him to do it. Trouble was, he realized suddenly, the Germans and Russians really wanted to have a go at each other. In English, Kurt Chill said, “Enlighten us, then.”
“I’ll do my best,” Bagnall answered. “There’s only the one radar, and no help for that. If you hijack it, word will get back to Moscow—and to London. Cooperation between Germany and her former foes will be hampered, and the Lizards will likely gain more from that than the Luftwaffe could from the radar. Is this so, or not?”
“It may be,” Chill said. “I do not think, though, there is much cooperation now, when you give the Russians and not us this set.” Captain Borcke nodded emphatically at that.
There was much truth in what the German general said. Bagnall was anything but happy about sharing secrets with the Nazis, and his attitude reflected that of British leaders from Churchill on down. But setting the Wehrmacht and the Red Army back at each other’s throats wasn’t what anyone had had in mind, either.
The flight engineer said, “How is this, then? The radar itself and the manuals go on toward Moscow as planned. But before they do”—he sighed—“you make copies of the manuals and send them to Berlin.”
“Copies?” Chill said. “By photograph?”
“If you have that kind of equipment here, yes.” Bagnall had been thinking of doing the job by hand; Pskov struck him as a burnt-out backwater town. But who could say what sort of gear the division intelligence unit of the 122nd Infantry—or whatever other units were in the area—had available?
“I’m not sure the higher-ups back home would approve, but they didn’t anticipate this situation,” Ken Embry murmured. “As for me, I’d say you’ve managed to saw the baby in half. King Solomon would be proud.”
“I hope so,” Bagnall said.
Sergei Morozkin was still translating his suggestion for the partisan leaders. When he finished, Vasiliev turned to Aleksandr German and said with heavy humor, “Nu Sasha?” It had to be more Yiddish—Bagnall had heard that word from David Goldfarb.
Aleksandr German peered through his spectacles at Chill the German. Having Goldfarb in the aircrew for a while had made Bagnall more aware of what the Nazis had done to Eastern European Jews than he otherwise would have been. He wondered what went on behind German’s poker face, how much hatred seethed there. The partisan did not let on. After a while, he sighed and spoke one word: “Da.”
“We shall do this, then.” If Chill was enthusiastic about Bagnall’s plan, he hid it very well. But it gave him most of what he wanted, and kept alive the fragile truce around Pskov.
As if to underline how important that was, Lizard jets streaked overhead. When bombs began to fall, Bagnall felt something near panic: a hit anywhere close by would bring all the stones of the Krom down on his head.
Through the fading wail of the Lizards’ engines and the ground-shaking crash of the bombs came the rattle of what sounded like every rifle and submachine gun in the world going off at once. Pskov’s defenders, Nazis and Communists alike, did their best to knock down the Lizards’ planes.
As usual, their best was not good enough. Bagnall listened hopefully for the rending crash that would have meant a fighter-bomber destroyed, but it never came. He also listened for the roar that would warn of a second wave of attackers. That didn’t come, either.
“Anyone would think that flying more than a thousand miles would take us out of the bloody blitz,” Alf Whyte complained.
“They called it a world war even before the Lizards came,” Embry said.
Nikolai Vasiliev shouted something at Morozkin. Instead of translating it, he hurried away to return a few minutes later with a tray full of bottles and glasses. “We drink to this—how you say?—agreement,” he said.
He was pouring man-sized slugs of vodka for everyone when a partisan burst in, shouting in Russian. “Uh-oh,” Jerome Jones said. “I didn’t catch all of that, but I didn’t care for what I understood.”
Morozkin turned to the RAF air crew. “I have—bad news. Those—how you say?—Lizards, they bomb your plane. Is wreck and ruin—is that what you say?”
“That’s what we say,” Embry answered dully.
“Nichevo, tovarishchi,” Morozkin said.
He didn’t translate that, maybe because it was so completely Russian that doing so never occurred to him. “What did he say?” Bagnall demanded of Jerome Jones.
“ ‘It can’t be helped, comrades’—something like that,” the radarman answered. “ ‘There’s nothing to be done about it,’ might be a better rendering.”
Bagnall didn’t care a pin for fine points of translation. “We’re stuck here in bloody Pskov and there’s bloody nothing to be done about it?” he burst out, his voice rising to a shout. “Nichevo,” Jones said.
Science Hall was a splendid structure, a three-story red brick building on the northwest corner of the University of Denver campus. It housed the university’s chemistry and physics departments, and would have made a fine home for the transplanted Metallurgical Laboratory from the University of Chicago. Jens Larssen admired the facility intensely.
There was only one problem: he had no idea when the rest of the Met Lab team would show up.
“All dressed up with no place to go,” he muttered to himself as he stalked down a third-floor corridor. From the north-facing window at the end of that corridor, he could see the Platte River snaking its way south and east through town, and
beyond it the state capitol and other tall buildings of the civic center. Denver was a pretty place, snow still on the ground here and there, the air almost achingly clear. Jens delighted in it not at all.
Everything had gone so perfectly. He might as well have been riding the train in those dear, vanished pre-Lizard days. He wasn’t bombed, he wasn’t strafed, he had a lower Pullman berth more comfortable than any bed he’d slept in for months. He had heat on the train and electricity; the only hint there was a war on was the blackout curtain on the window and a sign taped alongside it: USE IT. IT’S your NECK.
An Army major had met him when the train pulled into Union Station, had taken him out to Lowry Field east of town, had arranged a room for him at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. He’d almost balked at that—he was no bachelor. But Barbara wasn’t with him, so he’d gone along.
“Stupid,” he said aloud. Going along even once had got him tangled up again in the spiderweb of military routine. He’d had a taste of that in Indiana under George Patton. The local commanders were less flamboyant than Patton, but no less inflexible.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Larssen, but that will not be permitted,” a bird colonel named Hexham had said. The colonel hadn’t sounded sorry, not one bit. By that he meant Larssen’s going out of town to find out where the rest of the Met Lab team was.
“But why?” Jens had howled, pacing the colonel’s office like a newly caged wolf. “Without the other people, without the equipment they have with them, I’m not much good to you by myself.”
“Dr. Larssen, you are a nuclear physicist working on a highly classified project,” Colonel Hexham had answered. He’d kept his voice low, reasonable; Jens supposed he’d got on the fellow’s nerves as well as the other way round. “We cannot let you go gallivanting off just as you please. And if disaster befalls your colleagues, who better than you to reconstruct the project?”
Larssen hadn’t laughed in his face, but he’d come close. Reconstruct the work of several Nobel laureates—by himself? He’d have to be Superman, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. But there was just enough truth in it—he’d been part of the project, after all—to keep him from taking off on his own.
“Everything is fine,” Hexham had told him. “They’re heading this way; we know that much. We’re delighted you’re here ahead of them. That means you can help get things organized so they’ll be able to hit the ground running when they arrive.”
He’d been a scientist at the Met Lab, not an administrator. Administration had been a headache for other people. Now it was his. He went back to his office, wrote letters, filled out forms, tried the phone three or four times, and actually got through once. The Lizards hadn’t hit Denver anywhere near the way they’d plastered Chicago; to a large degree, it still functioned as a modern city. When Jens turned the switch on the gooseneck lamp on his desk, the bulb lit up.
He worked a little longer, then said the hell with it and went downstairs. His bicycle waited there. So did a glum, unsmiling man in khaki with a rifle on his back. He had a bike, too. “Evening, Oscar,” Jens said.
“Dr. Larssen.” The bodyguard nodded politely. Oscar wasn’t his real name, but he answered to it. Jens thought it amused him, but his face didn’t show much Oscar had been detailed to keep him safe in Denver—and to keep him from leaving town. He was depressingly good at his job.
Larssen rode north up University, turned right toward Lowry Field. Oscar stuck to the physicist like a burr. Jens was in good shape. His bodyguard, he was convinced, could have made the Olympic team. All the way back to BOQ, he sang, “I’m Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage.” Oscar joined in the choruses.
But in the next morning, instead of biking back to the University of Denver, Larssen (Oscar in his wake) reported to Colonel Hexham’s office. The colonel looked anything but delighted to see him. “Why aren’t you at work, Dr. Larssen?” he said in a tone that probably turned captains to Jell-O.
Jens, however, was a civilian, and a fed-up civilian at that. “Sir, the more I think about my working conditions here, the more intolerable they look to me,” he said. “I’m on strike.”
“You’re what?” Hexham chewed toothpicks, maybe in lieu of scarce cigarettes. The, one he had in his mouth jumped. “You can’t do that!”
“Oh yes I can, and I’m going to stay on strike until you let me get in touch with my wife.”
“Security—” Hexham began. Up and down, up and down went the toothpick.
“Stuff security!” Jens had wanted to say that—he’d wanted to scream it—for months. “You won’t let me go after the Met Lab. Okay, I guess I can see that, even if I think you’re pushing it too far. But you as much as told me the other day you know where the Met Lab wagon train is, right?”
“What if I do?” the colonel rumbled. He was still trying to intimidate Larssen, but Larssen refused to be intimidated any more.
“This if you do: unless you let me send a letter—just an ordinary, handwritten letter—to Barbara, you get no more work out of me, and that’s that.”
“Too risky,” Hexham said. “Suppose our courier is captured—”
“Suppose he is?” Jens retorted. “I’m not going to write about uranium, for God’s sake. I’m going to let her know I’m alive and in one piece and that I love her and I miss her. That’s all. I won’t even sign my last name.”
“No,” said Hexham.
“No,” said Larssen. They glared at each other. The toothpick twitched.
Oscar escorted Larssen back to BOQ. He lay down on his cot. He was ready to wait as long as it took.
The fat man in the black Stetson paused in the ceremony first to spit a brown stream into the polished brass spittoon near his feet (not a drop clung to his handlebar mustache) and then to sneak another glance at the Lizards who stood in one corner of his crowded office. He half shrugged and resumed: “By the authority vested in me as justice of the peace of Chugwater, Wyoming, I now pronounce you man and wife. Kiss her, boy.”
Sam Yeager tilted Barbara Larssen’s—Barbara Yeager’s—face up to his. The kiss was not the decorous one first post-wedding kisses are supposed to be. She molded herself against him. He squeezed her tight.
Everybody cheered. Enrico Fermi, who was serving as best man, slapped Yeager on the back. His wife Laura stood on tiptoe to kiss Sam’s cheek. Seeing that, the physicist made a Latin production out of kissing Barbara on the cheek. Everybody cheered again, louder than ever.
Just for a second, Yeager’s eyes went to Ullhass and Ristin. He wondered what they made of the ceremony. From what they said, they didn’t mate permanently—and to them, human beings were barbarous aliens.
Well, to hell with what they think of human beings, he thought. As far as he was concerned, having Fermi as his best man was almost—not quite—as exciting as getting married to Barbara. He’d been married once before, unsuccessfully, and he’d sometimes thought about marrying again. But never in all the hours he’d spent reading science fiction on trains and buses between one minor-league game and the next had he thought he’d really get to hobnob with scientists. And having a Nobel Prize winner as your best man was about as hob a nob as you could find.
The justice of the peace—the sign on his door said he was Joshua Sumner, but he seemed to go by Hoot—reached into a drawer of the fancy old rolltop desk that adorned his office. What he pulled out was most unjudicial: a couple of shot glasses and a bottle about half full of dark amber fluid.
“Don’t have as much here as we used to. Don’t have as much here as we’d like,” he said as he poured each glass full. “But we’ve still got enough for the groom to make a toast and the bride to drink it.”
Barbara eyed the full shot dubiously. “If I drink all that, I’ll just go to sleep.”
“I doubt it,” the justice of the peace said, which raised more whoops from the predominantly male crowd in his office. Barbara turned pink and shook her head in embarrassment but took the glass.
Yeager took his, too, careful
not to spill a drop. He knew what he was going to say. Even though he hadn’t expected to have to propose a toast, one leaped into his mind the moment Sumner said he’d need it. That didn’t usually happen with him; more often than not, he’d come up with snappy comebacks a week too late to use them.
Not this time, though. He raised the shot glass, waited for quiet. When he got it, he said, “Life goes on,” and knocked back the shot. The whiskey burned its way down his throat, filled his middle with warmth.
“Oh, that’s good, Sam,” Barbara said softly. “That’s just right.” She lifted the shot glass to her lips. She started to sip, but at the last moment drank it all down at once as Sam had. Her eyes opened very wide and started to water. She turned much redder than she had when the justice of the peace flustered her. What should have been her next breath became a sharp cough instead. People laughed and clapped anyhow.
Joshua Sumner said, “Don’t do that every day, you tell me?” He had the deadpan drollness that goes with many large men who are sparing of speech.
As the wedding party filed out of the justice of the peace’s office, Ristin said, “What you do here, Sam, you, and Barbara? You make”—he spoke a couple of hissing words in his own language—“to mate all the time?”
“An agreement that would be in English,” Yeager said. He squeezed Barbara’s hand. “That’s just what we did, even if I am too old to mate ‘all the time.’ ”
“Don’t confuse him,” Barbara said with a cluck in her voice.
They went outside Chugwater was about fifty miles north of Cheyenne. Off against the western horizon, snow-cloaked mountains loomed. The town itself was a few houses, a general store and the post office that also housed the sheriff’s office and that of the justice of the peace. Hoot Sumner was also postmaster and sheriff, and probably none too busy even if he did wear three hats.
The sheriff’s office (fortunately, from Yeager’s point of view) boasted a single jail cell big enough to hold the two Lizard POWs. That meant he and Barbara got to spend their wedding night without Ristin and Ullhass in the next room. Not that the Lizards were likely to pick that particular night to try to run away, nor, being what they were, that they would make anything of the noises coming from the bridal bed. Nevertheless . . .
Turtledove: World War Page 78
