“Physicists,” he snorted under his breath, again bullishly. The trouble with them was they were so lost in their own rarefied world a lot of the time that they didn’t always feel the pressure he put on them, let alone yield to it.
He didn’t note anything out of the ordinary about the day until he walked into the Science building and discovered he didn’t recognize any of the soldiers crowding the downstairs lobby. That made him frown; Sam Yeager and the rest of the dogface with the Met Lab crew were as familiar to him as his shoelaces.
He looked around for the highest-ranking officer he could find. “Why have we been invaded, Major?” he asked.
The fellow with the gold oak leaves on his shoulders saluted. “If you’d be so kind as to come with me, General—” he said in the polite phrases lower-ranking officers use to give their superiors orders.
Groves was so kind as to come with him until he figured out where he was going, which didn’t take long. “Major, if I need an escort to find my own office, I’m the wrong man to head this project,” he growled. The major didn’t answer, he just kept walking. Groves fumed but followed. Sure enough, they were heading for his office. In front of it stood a couple of men who looked as tough and alert as soldiers but wore medium-snappy civilian suits. A light went on in Groves’ head. He turned to the major and asked, “Secret Service?”
“Yes, sir.”
One of the T-men, after checking Groves’ face against a little photo he held in the palm of his hand, nodded to the other.
The second one opened the door and said, “General Groves is here, sir.”
“Well, he’d better come in, then, hadn’t he?” an infinitely familiar voice replied from within. “It being his office, after all.”
“Why the devil didn’t I get any warning President Roosevelt was coming to Denver?” Groves hissed to the major.
“Security,” the other officer whispered back. “We have to assume the Lizards monitor everything we broadcast, and we’ve lost couriers, too. The less we say, the safer FDR is. Now go on in; he’s been waiting for you.”
Groves went in. He’d met Roosevelt before, and knew the President wasn’t as vibrant in person as he appeared in the newsreels: being cooped up in a wheelchair would do that to you. But since the last time he’d seen FDR, a year earlier at White Sulphur Springs, the change was shocking. Roosevelt’s flesh seemed to have fallen in on his bones; he might have aged a decade or more in that year. He looked like a man worn to death’s door.
For all that, though, his grip was still strong when he reached out to shake General Groves’ hand after the engineer had saluted. “You’ve lost weight, General,” he observed, amusement in his eyes—his body might be falling to pieces around it, but his mind was still sharp.
“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. Roosevelt had lost weight, too, but he wasn’t about to remark on it.
“Sit down, sit down.” The President waved him to the swivel chair behind his desk. Groves obediently sat. Roosevelt turned the wheelchair to face him. Even his hands had lost flesh; the skin hung loose on them. He sighed and said, “I wish to God I had a cigarette, but that’s neither here nor there—certainly not here, worse luck.” FDR sighed again. “Do you know, General, when Einstein sent me that letter of his back in ‘39, I had the feeling all his talk of nuclear weapons and bombs that could blow up the world was likely to be so much moonshine, but I couldn’t take the chance of being wrong. And, it turns out, I was right—and how I wish I hadn’t been!”
“Yes, sir,” Groves repeated, but then added, “If you hadn’t been right, though, sir, we’d have been in no position to resist the Lizards and to copy what they’ve done.”
“That’s true, but it’s not what I meant,” Roosevelt said. “I wish I’d been right, and that all the talk about nuclear weapons and atomic power and who knows what were so much moonshine. Then all I’d have to worry about would be beating Hitler and Hirohito, and the Lizards would be back on the second planet of the star Tau Ceti where they belong, and people wouldn’t meet them for another million years, if we ever did.”
“Is that where they’re from?” Groves asked with interest. “I’ll have to have our liaison man put the question to the Lizard POWs we have here.”
FDR made a gesture of indifference. “As you like, and if you have the time; otherwise don’t trouble yourself about it. These Lizards are an astonishing intelligence resource, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir,” Groves said enthusiastically. “The ones we have here have been extremely cooperative.”
“Not just them, General. With what we’re learning from systematic interrogation of all our captives, we’ll leap forward by decades, maybe centuries.” Roosevelt’s expression, which had brightened, turned cloudy again. “If we win the war, that is—which is what I came to talk about. What I want to know is, how soon will we have nuclear weapons of our own to use against the Lizards?” He leaned forward in his chair, intently awaiting Groves’ reply.
Groves nodded; he’d expected the question. “Sir, I am told we can have one nuclear bomb fairly soon. England supplied us with enough plutonium that we need to manufacture only a few more kilograms of our own to have enough for a bomb. Within a. year, the scientists here tell me.”
“That’s not soon enough.” Roosevelt made a sour face. “It may do, but every day they shave off it will bring the country one day closer to being saved. How long for more after the first?”
Now it was Groves’ turn to look unhappy. “You understand, sir, that we have to come up with all the explosive material for them on our own. The pile—that’s, what they call it—the Met Lab staff has built here isn’t ideally designed for that, although we are improving it as we gain experience. And one of our physicists is scouting a site where we can build a pile that will give us larger amounts of plutonium.” He wondered how Jens Larssen was doing.
“I know about Hanford,” Roosevelt said impatiently. “I don’t need the technical details, General—that’s why you’re here. But I do need to know how long I have to wait for my weaponry so I can make sure there’s a country left when I get it.”
“I understand,” Groves said. “If all goes well—if the pile goes up on schedule and works as advertised, and if the Lizards don’t overrun Hanford or wherever we put it—you should have more bombs starting about six months after the first one: by the end of 1944, more or less.”
“Not soon enough,” Roosevelt repeated. “Still, we’re better off than the rest. The Germans might have been right there with us, but you’ve no doubt heard about the mistakes they made with their pile. The British are relying on us; we’re passing information to the Japanese, who are well behind us; and the Russians—I don’t know about the Russians.”
Groves’ opinion of Soviet scientific prowess was not high. Then he remembered the Russians had got some plutonium from that raid on the Lizards, too. “A wild card,” he said.
“That’s right.” Roosevelt nodded emphatically. His famous jaw still had granite in it, no matter how badly the rest of his features had weathered. “I’ve been in touch with Stalin. He’s worried—the Lizards are pushing hard against Moscow. If it falls, who can say whether the Russians will keep on listening to their government, and if they don’t, we’ve lost a big piece of the war.”
“Yes, sir,” Groves said. Although he was as security-conscious as a man in his position had to be, he also had a well-honed curiosity—and how often did you get to pick the brain of the President of the United States? “How bad is it over in the Soviet Union, sir?”
“It’s not good,” FDR said. “Stalin told me that if I had any men to spare, he’d leave them under their own officers, leave them under my direct personal command if that was wanted, as long as they went over there and fought the Lizards.”
Groves’ lips puckered into a soundless whistle. That was a cry of pain if ever he’d heard one. “He’s not just worried, sir, he’s desperate. What did you tell him?”
“I answered no, of course,
” Roosevelt said. “We have a few small differences with the Lizards on our own soil at the moment.” The high-pitched laugh so familiar from the radio and the newsreel screen filled the office. As it had so often in the past, it lifted Groves’ spirits—but only for a moment. The danger facing—filling—the United States was too great to be laughed off. The President continued, “For instance, the Lizards are pushing hard against Chicago, too. They have us cut in half along the Mississippi almost as badly as the North did with the South during the Civil War, to say nothing of the other areas they’ve carved out of the country. It hinders us every way you can think of, militarily and economically both.”
“Believe me, sir, I understand that,” Groves said, remembering how he’d had to bring the plutonium to Denver by way of Canada. “What can we do about it, though?”
“Fight ’em,” Roosevelt answered. “If they’re going to beat us, they’ll have to beat us, no other way. From what we hear from prisoners we’ve captured, they’ve taken over two other whole worlds before they attacked us, and they’ve ruled them for thousands of years. If we lose, General, if we lay down and. give up, it’s for keeps. That’s why I came to talk about the atomic bomb: if I have any weapon I can use against those dastardly creatures, I want to know about it.”
“I’m sorry I can’t give you better news, sir.”
“So am I.” Roosevelt hunched his shoulders and let out another long sigh. His shirt and jacket both seemed a couple of sizes too big. The burden of the war was killing him; Groves realized with a jolt that that was literally true. He wondered where Vice President Henry Wallace was and what sort of shape he was in.
He couldn’t t say that to the President. What he did say was “The trick will be to get through the time between using the one bomb we can make fairly quickly and the rest, which will take longer.”
“Yes indeed,” FDR said. “I‘d hoped that would be a shorter gap. As it is we’ll have to be very careful picking the time when we use the first one. you’re right that we would be very vulnerable to whatever atomic response the Lizards make.”
Groves had seen pictures of the slag heap the Lizards had made of Washington, D.C. He heard men who’d seen it talk about the incongruous beauty of the tall cloud of dust and hot gas that had sprouted over the city like a gigantic, poisonous toadstool. He imagined such toadstools springing into being above other cities across the United States, across the world. A bit of Latin from his prep school days came back to haunt him: they make a desert and they call it peace.
When he murmured that aloud, the President nodded and said, “Exactly so. And in a curious way, that may turn out to be one of our greatest strengths. Our Lizard prisoners insist to a man—well, to a Lizard—that they don’t want to use their atomic weapons here on a large scale. They say it would do too much damage to the planet: they want to control Earth and settle colonists on it, not just smash us by any means that come to hand.”
“Whereas, we can do anything we have to, to get rid of them,” Groves said. “Yes, sir, I see what you mean. Odd that we should have fewer constraints on our strategy than they do when they have the more powerful weapons.”
“That’s just what I mean,” Roosevelt agreed. “If we—humanity, that is—can say, ‘If we don’t get to keep our world, you won’t use it, either,’ that will give our scaly friends something new and interesting to think about. Their colonization fleet will be here in a generation’s time, and I gather it can’t be conveniently recalled. If the Lizards lay Earth to waste, the colonists are like somebody invited to a party at a house that’s just burnt to the ground: all dressed up with no place to go.”
“And no one to pass them a hose to put out the fire, either,” Groves observed.
That won a chuckle from FDR. “Nice to know you were paying attention when I made my Lend-Lease speech.”
Any military man who didn’t pay attention to what his commander-in-chief said was an idiot, as far as Groves was concerned. He replied, “The question is how far we can push that line of reasoning, sir. If the Lizards are faced with the prospect of either losing the war or hurting us as badly as we hurt them, which will they choose?”
“I don’t know,” Roosevelt said, which made Groves respect his honesty. “I tell you this, though, General: compared to the problems we have right now, I shouldn’t mind facing that one at all. I want you and your crew here to exert every effort possible to producing that first atomic bomb and then as many more as fast as you can. If we go down, I’d sooner go down with guns blazing than with our hands in the air.”
“Yes, sir, so would I,” Groves said. “We’ll do everything we can, sir.”
“I’m sure you will, General.” Roosevelt turned his wheelchair and rolled toward the door. He got to it and opened it before Groves could come around the desk to do the job for him. That made the old jaunty look come back to his haggard features, just for a moment. He liked to preserve as much independence as his circumstances allowed.
And in that, Groves thought, he was a good representative for the whole planet.
XVIII
Mordechai Anielewicz had never imagined he would be relieved that the Lizards had set up a rocket battery right outside Leczna, but he was. That gave him an excuse to stay indoors, which meant he didn’t have to see Zofia Klopotowski for a while.
“It’s not that I don’t like her, you understand,” he told Dr. Judah Ussishkin over the chessboard one night.
“No, it wouldn’t be that, would it?” Ussishkin’s voice was dry. He moved a knight. “She’s fond of you, too.”
Anielewicz’s face flamed as he studied the move. Zofia would have been more fond of him in direct proportion to any increased stamina he showed. He’d never imagined an affair with a woman who was more lecherous than he was; up till now, he’d always had to do the persuading. But Zofia would drop anything to get between the sheets—or under a wagon, or into the backseat of Dr. Ussishkin’s moribund Fiat.
Trying to keep his mind on the game, Mordechai pushed a pawn one square ahead. That kept the knight from taking a position in which, with one more move, it could fork his queen and a rook.
A beatific smile wreathed Ussishkin’s tired face. “Ah, my boy, you are learning,” he said. “Your defense has made good progress since we began to play. Soon, now, you will learn to put together an effective attack, and then you will be a player to be reckoned with.”
“Coming from you, Doctor, that’s a compliment.” Anielewicz wanted to be a player to be reckoned with, and he wanted to mount an effective attack. He hadn’t got to be head of the Jewish fighters in Lizard-occupied Poland by sitting back and waiting for things to happen; his instinct was to try to make them happen. Against Ussishkin, he hadn’t been able to, not yet.
He did his best; the midgame might have seen a machine gun rake the chessboard, so fast and furious did pieces fall. But when the exchanges were done, he found himself down a bishop and a pawn and facing another losing position. He tipped over his king.
“You make me work harder all the time,” Ussishkin said. “I got some plum brandy for stitching up a farmer’s cut hand yesterday. Will you take a glass with me?”
“Yes, thank you, but don’t ask me for another game of chess afterwards,” Mordechai said. “If I can’t beat you sober, I’m sure I can’t beat you shikker.”
Ussishkin smiled as he poured. “Chess and brandy do not mix.” The brandy came from a bottle that had once, by its label, held vodka. People still had vodka these days, but it was homemade. For that matter, the plum brandy had to be homemade, too. Ussishkin lifted his glass in salute. “L’chaym.”
“L’chaym.” Anielewicz drank. The raw brandy charred all the way down; sweat sprang out on his face. “Phew! If that were any stronger, you wouldn’t need gasoline for your automobile.”
“Ah but if I got it running, think how disappointed you and Zofia would be,” Ussishkin said. Mordechai blushed again. In the candlelight, the doctor didn’t notice, or pretended he didn’t. He tu
rned serious. “I know telling a young man to be careful is more often than not a waste of time, but I will try with you. Do be careful. If you make her pregnant, her father will not be pleased, which means the rest of the Poles here will not be pleased, either. We and they have gotten on as well as could be expected, all things considered. I would not like that to change.”
“No, neither would I,” Mordechai said. For one thing, Leczna held a good many more Poles than Jews; strife would not be to the minority’s advantage. For another, strife among the locals was liable to draw the Lizards’ unwelcome attention to the town. They already had more interest than Anielewicz liked, for they drew their food locally. He preferred staying in obscurity.
“You seem sensible, for one so young.” Ussishkin sipped his brandy again. He didn’t cough or flush or give any other sign he wasn’t drinking water. An aspiring engineer till the war, Anielewicz guessed he’d had his gullet plated with stainless steel. The doctor went on, “You should also remember—if she does conceive, the child would be raised a Catholic. And she might try to insist on your marrying her. I doubt”—now Ussishkin coughed, not from the plum brandy but to show he did more than doubt—“she would convert. Would you?”
“No.” Mordechai answered without hesitation. Before the Germans invaded, he hadn’t been pious; he’d lived in the secular world, not that of the shtetl and the yeshiva. But the Nazis didn’t care whether you were secular or not. They wanted to be rid of you any which way. More and more, he’d decided that if he was a Jew, he’d be a Jew. Turning Christian was not an option.
“Marriages of mixed religion are sometimes happy, but more often battlegrounds,” Ussishkin observed.
Mordechai didn’t want to marry Zofia Klopotowski. He wouldn’t have wanted to marry her if she were Jewish. He did, however, want to keep on making love with her, if not quite as often as she had in mind. If he did, she’d probably catch sooner or later, which would lead to the unpleasant consequences the doctor had outlined. He knocked back the rest of his brandy, wheezed, and said, “Life is never simple.”
Turtledove: World War Page 128
