Upsetting the Balance

They were also camouflage. The Lizards flew over Denver a good deal, and bombed the plants that turned out tires and bricks and mining equipment and furniture (some of the latter plants were making wooden aircraft parts these days instead). The United States needed everything the factories produced. All the same, Groves didn’t too much mind seeing them bombed. As long as the Lizards hit them, they weren’t hitting anything of greater importance. And here, unlike in Hanford, new industrial facilities could go up without being reckoned anything out of the ordinary.

Even if Larssen did come back with the news that Hanford could be the earthly paradise for atomic research, Groves figured the Metallurgical Laboratory would stay here, east of Eden. Packing up and moving would be tough, doing it secretly would be tougher, and keeping things in Washington State secret would be toughest of all. Accepting Denver’s drawbacks and exploiting its advantages seemed a better bet.

“That’ll tick Larssen off, too,” Groves muttered under his breath. If Larssen came back from risking his neck for project and country with a recommendation to go yonder, he wouldn’t be dancing with glee when he found out they’d decided to stay hither no matter what. “Too damn bad,” Groves told the ceiling. “If he doesn’t like it, he can go back to Hanford by his lonesome.”

He turned to the report he’d been studying when that idiot Porlock called. Keeping the atomic piles cool as they cooked plutonium took a lot of water from Cherry Creek and the South Platte. Separating the plutonium from the uranium took chemical reactions that used more water. Every bit of that water, by the time it finished doing its job, ended up radioactive. A radioactive trail in the South Platte leading back to Denver might as well have been a sign to the Lizards, saying AIM HERE.

Heavy-duty filters sucked as much radioactive goop out of the water as they could. They did a good job; Geiger counters downstream from the University of Denver were pretty quiet. But that didn’t end the problem. The glass wool and diatomaceous earth and other goodies in the filter (the report had a long list) grew radioactive themselves after a while. When they got cleaned out and replaced, they had to go somewhere. To keep the Lizards from detecting them, “somewhere” meant lead-lined tubs and trash cans.

The major who’d written the report was complaining that he had trouble getting enough lead sheeting to line the tubs and cans. Groves scribbled a note in the margin: This is silver-mining country, for heaven’s sake. Wherever there’s silver, there’s going to be lead. If we aren’t exploiting that as well as we should, we have to get better at it.

If he had to requisition lead from outside of town, God only knew how long it would take to get here. If he stayed local, he could control the whole process of getting it from start to finish. All at once, he understood how old-time feudal barons, living off the produce and manufactures of their own estates, must have felt.

He smiled. “Lucky bastards,” he said.

9

The mustard-gas burn on David Goldfarb’s leg throbbed painfully. His trousers had pulled up over his socks just for a moment, while he was scrambling through grass near a shell hole that must have come from a gas round. That was all it took.

He pulled up his trousers now. In spite of the slimy stuff the medic had smeared on it, the burn remained red and inflamed. It looked infected. Mustard gas was nasty stuff. It could linger for days. He was just glad he’d been wearing his gas mask while he was near that hole. The idea of trying to breathe with a burn on his lungs made him shiver all over.

“ ‘Ow’s it doin’, flyboy?” Fred Stanegate asked in Yorkshire dialect so broad Goldfarb had trouble following it. Stanegate was a big blond chap with cheekbones that made him look more like a Viking than an Englishman. The Sten gun he carried seemed hardly more than a pistol in his massive, thick-fingered hands. It also seemed anachronistic; he should have been toting a battle-axe and wearing a hauberk, not filthy army battledress.

“I expect I’ll live,” Goldfarb answered. Stanegate chuckled as if he’d said something funny. From the Yorkshireman’s point of view, maybe he had; by all appearances, he bemused Fred at least as much as the other way round.

“Right peculiar they didna want you back,” Stanegate said. “Peculiar.” He repeated the word with relish, making four distinct syllables of it: pee-kyou-lee-yuhr.