Upsetting the Balance

But the hallway was empty when Jager closed the door behind him. He let out a long sigh of relief. Off in the distance, sirens wailed and bells clanged: ambulances and fire engines. Solemnly, he stuck out his hand. As solemnly, Skorzeny shook it.

The SS man pulled the cork from a bottle of wine, took a swig, and passed it to Jager. Jager wiped it on his sleeve and then drank, too. “Success,” he said. Skorzeny’s big head bobbed up and down. After a moment, Jager thought about what his toast had meant: some unknown number of Frenchmen-Frenchwomen, too, very likely-asphyxiating, not because they’d harmed him in particular but because, to support themselves and their families, they were turning out goods the Lizards could use.

The wine turned to vinegar in his mouth. “This is a filthy business we’re in,” he said.

“You just figured that out?” Skorzeny said. “Come on, Jager, you’re not a virgin, except maybe in your left ear. If we don’t hurt the Lizards, we lose. If hurting the Lizards means hurting civilians, too, well, too bad. These things happen. We did what we were supposed to do, what our superiors ordered us to do.”

“Ja,”Jager said in a hollow voice. What Skorzeny didn’t get and wouldn’t get if he lived to be a hundred-not likely, considering how the SS man lived-was thatwhat we were supposed to do andwhat our superiors ordered us to do

weren’t necessarily one and the same thing.

Soldiers didn’t commonly have to draw that distinction. Jager hadn’t worried about it, not until he found out how the Germans dealt with Jews in the east. Since then, he hadn’t been able to look away. He knew what sort of disaster awaited the world if the Lizards won the war. Like Skorzeny, he was willing to do just about anything to keep that from happening. Unlike the SS man, he wasn’t willing to believe everything he did was fine and virtuous.

That made for another subtle distinction, but he clung to it.

Panting, Jens Larssen stopped at the top of Berthoud Pass. His breath smoked in the thin, cold air. Snow dappled the ground and turned the pines and firs into a picture right off a Christmas card. Snow and ice also turned US 40 into a slippery slalom course that had to be treated with the utmost respect.

“Downhill from here,” Jens said. That was literally true; he’d lose more than a mile of altitude before he made it back to Denver, a bit more than fifty miles away. It also normally implied everything would be easy the rest of the way. Heading back to Denver wasn’t going to be easy. If your bike hit an icy patch and skidded while you were slogging uphill to the Continental Divide, you’d fall and scrape your shin. If you lost it while you were speeding down some of these steep grades, you’d break a leg-or your neck.

“Slow and easy,” he said out loud, reminding himself. “Slow and easy.” He’d spent some of his time getting up to the pass walking the bicycle; he’d spend even more coming down. All the same, with luck he’d be in Denver in a couple of days, and then, before long, the Metallurgical Laboratory could pack up and head for Hanford and the Columbia.

Up in Tabernash, a ways to the north, he’d bought a knitted wool sailor’s cap. God only knew what it was doing there; Tabernash was about as far from the sea as you could get in North America. He kept it pulled down over his ears, even though that made them itch. He also hadn’t bothered shaving since the leaves started turning colors. His beard had come in thick and strawberry blond; it did a surprisingly good job of keeping his cheeks and chin warm.

“I wonder if Mary Cooley would know me,” he muttered; Idaho Springs lay only twenty miles or so to the east. His hand went over his shoulder and briefly caressed the barrel of the Springfield he wore slung on his back.

But, now that he found himself close to Idaho Springs, he also found he wasn’t killing angry at the waitress who’d given him the clap, not any more. The sulfa tablets Dr. Henry had given him in Hanford had done the job. The disease wasn’t bothering him at all now. He didn’t even have the morning drop of pus he had to piss away with the day’s first whizz, so he supposed he was cured.I’ll let the bitch live, he thought, and felt magnanimous.

The sky was the grayish-yellow color that warned of more snow coming. He made the best speed he could down US 40; the lower he was when it started to fall, the happier he’d be. One thing growing up in Minnesota did: it taught you what to do in a blizzard. And if he hadn’t learned then, traveling cross-country the winter before would have imparted a lesson or three.

He rolled past an abandoned Studebaker. Dead cars and trucks lined the highway, here one, there a clump, here another. They’d make decent shelters if it really started coming down hard.