Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  Hipple turned to the two of them. Goldfarb was afraid he’d overheard, but he just said, “How are we coming at fitting a radar set into the Meteor fuselage, gentlemen?”

  “As long as we don’t fly with fuel tanks in there, we’ll be fine, sir,” Goldfarb answered, deadpan. Hipple gave him a fishy stare, then laughed—warily—and nodded. Goldfarb went on, “Horton, though, has made some exciting finds about which part of the circuitry controls signal amplitude.”

  He’d expected that to excite Hipple, who had been almost as eager to learn about radar as he had been to tinker with his beloved jet engines. But Ripple just asked, “Is it something we can apply immediately?”

  “No, sir,” Horton answered. “I know what they do, but not how they do it.”

  “Then we’ll just have to leave it,” Ripple said. “For now, we must be as utilitarian as possible.”

  Goldfarb and Horton exchanged glances. That didn’t sound like the Fred Ripple they’d come to know. “What’s up, sir?”’ Goldfarb asked. Roundbush and the other RAF officers who worked directly under the group captain also paid close attention.

  But Hipple just said, “Time is not running in our favor at the moment,” and buried his nose in an engineering drawing. ‘Time for what?” Goldfarb asked Horton in a tiny voice. The other radarman shrugged. One more thing to worry about Goldfarb thought, and went back to work

  Except for being illuminated only by sunlight, Dr. Hiram Sharp’s office in Ogden didn’t seem much different from any other Jens Larssen had visited. Dr. Sharp himself, a round little man with gold-rimmed glasses, looked at Jens over the- tops of them and said, “Son, you’ve got the clap.”

  “I knew that, thanks,” Jens said. Somehow he hadn’t expected such forthrightness from a doctor in Mormon, Utah. He supposed doctors saw everything, even here. After that hesitation, he went on, “Can you do anything about it?”

  “Not much,” Dr. Sharp answered, altogether too cheerfully for Jens’ taste. “If I had sulfa, I could give you some of that and cure you like nobody’s business. If I had acriflavine, I could squirt it up your pipe in a bulb syringe. You wouldn’t like that for beans, but it would do you some good. But since I don’t, no point fretting over it.”

  The mere thought of somebody squirting medicine up his pipe made Larssen want to cover his crotch with both hands.

  “Well, what do you have that will do me some good?” he demanded.

  Dr. Sharp opened a drawer, pulled out several little foil-wrapped packets, and handed them to him. “Rubbers,” he said, as if Jens couldn’t figure that out for himself. “Keep you from passing it along for a while, anyway.” He pulled out a fountain pen and a book full of ruled pages. “Where’d you get it? You know? Have to keep records, even with everything all gone to hell these days.”

  “A waitress named Mary, back in Idaho Springs, Colorado.”

  “Well, well.” The doctor scribbled a note. “You do get around, don’t you, son? You know this here waitress’ last name?”

  “It was, uh, Cooley, I think.”

  “You think? You got to know her pretty well some ways, though, didn’t you?” Dr. Sharp whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Okay, never mind that for now. You screw anybody else between there and here?”

  “No.” Jens looked down at the rubbers in his hand. Next time he did end up in the sack with a woman, he might use one . . . or he might not. After what the bitches had done to him, he figured he was entitled to get some of his own back. “Just been a Boy Scout since you got your dose, have you?” Sharp said. “Bet you wish you were a Boy Scout when you got it, too.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” Larssen said dryly. The doctor chuckled. Jens went on, “Truth is, I’ve been moving too much to spend time chasing skirt. I’m on government business.”

  “Who isn’t, these days?” Dr. Sharp said. “Government’s just about the last thing left that’s working—and it isn’t working what you’d call well. God only knows how we’re supposed to hold an election for President next year, what with the Lizards holding down half the country and beating the tar out of the half.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Jens admitted. It was an interesting problem from a theoretical point of view: as a theoretical physicist, he could appreciate that. The only even remotely similar election would have been the one of 1864, and by then North had pretty much won the Civil War; it wasn’t invaded itself. “Maybe FDR has volunteered for the duration.”

  “Maybe he has,” Sharp said. “Damned if I know who’d run against him anyhow, or how he’d campaign if he did.”

  “Yeah,” Jens said. “Look, Doc, if you don’t have any medication that’ll help me, what am I supposed to do about what I’ve got?”

  Dr Sharp sighed. “Live with it as best you can. I don’t know what else to tell you. The drugs we’ve been getting the past few years, they’ve let us take a real bite out of germs for the first time ever. I felt like I was really doing something worthwhile. And now I’m just an herb-and-root man again, same as my grandpa back before the turn of the century. Oh, maybe a better surgeon than Gramps was, and, I know about asepsis and he didn’t, but that’s about it. I’m sorry, son, I don’t have anything special to give you.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Larssen said. “Do you think I’m likely to find any other doctors who have the drugs you were talking about?” Even if the acriflavine treatment sounded worse than the disease it was supposed to help, at least it would be over pretty soon. You got gonorrhea for keeps.

  “Nobody else here in Ogden, that’s for damn sure,” Dr Sharp answered. “We share what we have, not that it’s much. Your best bet would be some fellow in a little town who hasn’t used up all his supplies and doesn’t mind sharing them with strangers passing through. A lot of that kind, though, won’t treat anybody but the people they live with. It’s like we’re going back to tribes instead of being one country any more.”

  Jens nodded. “I’ve seen that, too. I don’t much like it, but I don’t know what to do about it, either.” Before the Lizards came, he’d taken for granted the notion of a country stretching from sea to shining sea. Now he saw it was an artificial construct, built on the unspoken agreement of citizens and on long freedom from internal strife. He wondered how many other things he’d taken for granted weren’t as self-evident as they seemed to be.

  Like Barbara always loving you, for instance, he thought.

  Dr. Sharp stuck out a hand. “Sorry I couldn’t help you more, son. No charge, not when I didn’t do anything. Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks a bunch, Doc.” Larssen picked up the rifle he propped in a corner of the office, slung it over his should and left without shaking hands. Sharp stared after him, but you didn’t want to get huffy with somebody packing a gun.

  Jens had chained his bicycle to a telephone pole outside the doctor’s office. It was still there when he went out to get it. Looking up and down Washington Boulevard (which US 89 turned into when it ran through Ogden), he saw quite a few bikes parked with no chains at all. The Mormons were still trusting people. His mouth twisted. He’d been trusting, too, and look where it had got him.

  “In Ogden goddamn Utah, on my way to a job nobody else wants,” he muttered. A fellow, in overalls driving a horse-drawn wagon down the street gave him a reproachful stare. He glared back so fiercely that Mr. Overalls went back to minding his own business, which was a pretty good idea any way you looked at it.

  A puff of breeze from the west brought the smell of the Great Salt Lake to his nostrils. Ogden lay in a narrow stretch of ground between the lake and the forest-covered Wasatch Mountains. Larssen had grown used to the tang of the sea his grad school days out in Berkeley, but the Great Salt Lake odor was a lot stronger, almost unpleasant.

  He’d heard you floated there, that you couldn’t sink even if wanted to. Wish I could throw Yeager in, and find out by experiment, he thought. And that waitress, too. I’d hold ’em under if they didn’t drown on their own.


  He stowed the chain, swung up onto his bike, and started pedaling north up Washington. He rolled past City Hall Park the three-story brick pile of the Broom Hotel, with its eighteen odd, bulging windows: Another three-story building, at the corner of Twenty-fourth Street, had the wooden statue of a horse atop it, complete with a tail that streamed in the breeze.

  He had to stop there to let a convoy of wagons head west down Twenty-fourth. While he waited, he turned to a fellow on horseback and asked, “You live here?” When the man nodded, went on, “What’s the story of the horse?” He pointed to the statue.

  “Oh, Nigger Boy?” the man said. “He was a local racehorse, he’d beat critters you couldn’t believe if you didn’t see it. Now he’s the best weather forecaster in town.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Jens said. “How’s that?”

  The local grinned. “If he’s wet, you know it’s raining; if covered with snow, you know it’s been snowing. And if tail’s blowin’ around like it is now, it’s windy out.”

  “Walked into that one, didn’t I?” Jens said, snorting. The wagon of the convoy creaked by. He started rolling again, soon passed Tabernacle Park. The Ogden Latter Day Saints Tabernacle was one of the biggest, fanciest buildings in town. He’d seen that elsewhere in Utah, too, the temples much more the focus of public life than the buildings dedicated to secular administration.

  Separation of church and state was another of the things I taken for granted that didn’t turn out to be as automatic as he’d thought. Here in Utah, he got the feeling they separated things to keep outsiders happy, without really buying into notion that that was the right and proper way to operate. He shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. He had plenty of his own.

  Just past the city cemetery, a concrete bridge took him over Ogden River. By then, he was just about out of town. The scrubby country ahead didn’t look any too appetizing. No wonder the Mormons settled here, he thought. Who else would be crazy enough to want land like this?

  He lifted one hand to scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, what the Mormons believed was good only for a belly laugh. Even so, he’d never felt safer in all his travels than he did in Utah. Whether the doctrines were true or not, they turned out solid people.

  Is that what the answer is? he wondered: as long as you seriously believe in something, almost no matter what you have a pretty good chance of ending up okay? He didn’t care for the idea. He’d dedicated his career to pulling objective truth out of the physical world. Theological mumbo-jumbo wasn’t supposed to stack up against that kind of dedication.

  But it did. Maybe the Mormons didn’t know a thing about nuclear physics, but they seemed pretty much content with the lives they were living, which was a hell of a lot more than he could say himself.

  Putting your faith in what some book told you, without any other evidence to show it was on the right track, struck him as something right out of the Middle Ages. Ever since the Renaissance, people had been looking for a better, freer way to live. Jesus loves me! This I know! ’Cause the Bible!’ Tells me so. Jens’ lip curled derisively. Sunday school pap, that’s what it was.

  And yet . . . When you looked at it the right way, accepting your religion could be oddly liberating. Instead of being free to make choices, you were free from making them: they’d already been made for you, and all you had to do was follow along.

  “Yeah, that’s what Hitler and Stalin peddle, too,” Larssen said as he left Ogden behind. Thinking was what he did best; the idea of turning that part of him over to somebody else sent the heebie-jeebies running up and down his spine.

  People looked up from whatever they were doing when he rode past. He didn’t know how they did it, but they could tell he didn’t belong here. Maybe somebody’d pinned a sign to him: I AM A GENTILE. He laughed, partly at himself, partly at Utah. Hell, even Jews were gentiles here.

  Up ahead on US 89, a fellow was riding a buckboard that had probably been sitting in the barn since his grandfather’s day. As Jens put his back into pedaling and whizzed past the gray mule drawing the buggy, the man called out to him: “You headin’ up toward Idaho, stranger?”

  Stranger. Yeah, they could tell, all right. Larssen almost kept going without answering, but the question hadn’t sounded hostile or suspicious. He slowed down and said, “What if I am?”

  “Just that you oughta be careful, is all,” the man on the buckboard answered. “Them Lizard things, there’s some of ’em up there, I hear tell.”

  “Are there?” Jens said. If he wanted to abdicate responsibility for his life, that would be the way to do it. He had enough reasons for thinking it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, either. He owed so many people so much . . . “Are there? Good.” He turned on the heat, and left the fellow in the buggy staring after him.

  The only way Mutt Daniels had ever wanted to see the south side of Chicago was to bring in a big-league team to play the White Sox at Comiskey Park. He’d learned, though, that what you wanted and what life handed you all too often weren’t the same thing.

  Take the gold bars he wore on his shoulders. He hadn’t even changed shirts when he got ’em, because he had only one shirt. He’d just taken off the stripes with somebody’s bayonet and. put on lieutenant’s insignia instead. People from his old squad still called him Sarge. He didn’t care. He felt like a sergeant, and the platoon he was leading now had taken enough casualties that it had only two squads worth of guys, anyway.

  One nice thing about turning into an officer was that he got his orders with one less layer of manure on top, and that they gave him a bigger picture of what was going on. As now: Captain Sid Klein (who’d been Lieutenant Klein till Captain Maczek got hit) drew in the dirt between the ruins of, what hadn’t been fancy apartment buildings even before the Lizards came, saying, “It may not look that way, boys, but the brass says we’ve got these scaly bastards right where we want ’em.”

  “Yeah, an’ we retreated through half of Illinois to get ’em here, too,” Mutt said.

  The captain was half his age; damn near everybody in the Army, seemed like, was half his age. Klein said, “You may think you’re joking, but you’re not. When it comes to maneuver, they got us licked. Their tanks and trucks are faster than ours, and they’ve got those goddamn helicopters to give it to us in the rear when we’re bent over the wrong way. But that doesn’t count for much in city fighting. Here it’s just slugging, block by block, body by body.”

  Mutt’s opposite number for the company’s first platoon was a skinny midwesterner named Chester Hicks. “Puts a lot, of bodies underground,” he observed.

  “Lord, you can say that again,” Daniels said. “I did some of that block-by-block stuff last fall, and it’s ugly. Even for war, it’s ugly.”

  Captain Klein nodded. “You bet it is. But the brass don’t think the Lizards can afford that kind of slugging any more. When the Germans were blitzing across Russia in ‘41, they got their noses bloody when they went into the towns, not out on the plains. Maybe it’ll be the same way here.”

  “And if it ain’t, so what, ’cause the Lizards drove us back here anyways,” Mutt said.

  “You’re right about that.” Captain Klein sighed and ran a hand through his short, curly red hair. “We gotta do all we can, though. Go on back to your boys and give ’em the word.”

  Mutt’s platoon was defending a couple of blocks of East 111th Street. Off to the west was the Gothic ornateness of the Morgan Park Military Academy. Daniels wondered if the cadets were in the line somewhere, the way the boys from the Virginia Military Institute had marched out and fought during the States War. He didn’t see anybody who looked like a cadet, but he knew that didn’t mean anything. It was a hell of a big fight.

  To the east was an American strongpoint on the high ground of Pullman, and then, east of that, the marsh around Lake Calumet. If the Lizards dislodged his boys, he aimed to fall back to the east if he could. North of 111th Street stood the low, ornate buildings that housed the Pullman car shops. He’d fought through b
locks of factories before. That was even worse than the trenches had been back in France, but Captain Klein was right about one thing: digging determined troops out of a warren like that would cost the Lizards plenty.

  Some of the platoon’s foxholes and bits of trench were on he south side of 111th, some on the north. Some were literally in the middle of the street; bombs and shells had torn big holes in the asphalt.

  Dracula Szabo waved to Daniels as he came up the broken sidewalk. Szabo was wearing the chevrons Mutt had cut off his own sleeve; Mutt’s old squad belonged to him now. Mutt was sure the men would get on better than most: as long as there were supplies to scrounge, Dracula would figure out how to scrounge them.

  Now he said, “Took ya long enough to get back, Sarge—uh, I mean, Lieutenant. You’re lucky we still got more o’ what I came up with.”

  “Not more fancy booze?” Mutt said. “I told you a dozen times, if it ain’t beer or bourbon, I ain’t interested—not real interested, anyways,” he amended hastily.

  “Better’n booze,” Dracula said, and before Daniels could deny that anything was better than booze, he named something that was, or at least harder to come by: “I found somebody’s stash o’ cigarettes: ten bee-yoo-tee-full, lovely, cartons of Pall Malls.”

  “Goddamn,” Mutt said reverently. “How’d you manage that one?”

  “C’mere an’ I’ll show ya.” Proud of his exploit, Szabo led Daniels to one of the battered houses on the south side of 111th Street, then down into the basement. It was dark down there, and full of cobwebs. Mutt didn’t like it worth a damn. Dracula seemed right at home; he might have been in a Transylvanian castle.

  He started stomping on the floor. “It was somewhere right around here,” he muttered, then grunted in satisfaction. “There. You hear that?”

  “A hollow,” Daniels said.

  “You betcha,” Szabo agreed. He flicked on his Zippo, lifted up the board, pointed. “Lined with lead, too, so it don’t get wet in, there.” He reached in, pulled out a couple of cartons, and handed them to Mutt. “Here, these are the last ones.”