Whatwas he seeing, anyhow? Pursuing his earlier thought, he said, “That ain’t no ammo dump. You could blow up all the ammo in the world, and it wouldn’t make a cloud like that there one.”
“Yeah,” Muldoon agreed, almost with a sigh. “Whatever it is, it came down on the Lizards’ heads, not ours. Look where it’s at, Lieutenant-that’s the part of Shytown we retreated out of.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Mutt said. “Maybe we was lucky to get out of there when we did. Or maybe-” He stopped, his eyes going wide. “Or maybe, an’ I hate like hell to say it, the brass ain’t so dumb after all.”
“What the hell you talkin’ about, uh, sir?” Muldoon said. Then he got a faraway look on his face, too. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Lieutenant, you think we pulled back on purpose so those scaly bastards could walk right into that big boom like they was moths divin’ into a fire?”
“Don’t know if it’s so, but it stands to reason,” Daniels answered. “The Russians, they figured out last year how to make one of them big bombs the Lizards use, and the Nazis, they fired one off last week, I hear, ‘less’n the radio’s tellin’ more lies’n usual.”
“Fat lot of good it did ’em, too,” Muldoon retorted. “The Lizards went and blew one of their cities to hell and gone right afterwards.”
Mutt refused to let that distract him. “If the Reds can do it and the goddamn Nazis can do it, though, why the hell can’t we? You think we don’t got a bunch o’ guys with thick glasses and what d’you call ’ems-slide rules, that’s it-tryin’ to figure out how to make our own bombs? You’re crazy if you do. And you ain’t never seen an explosion like that, and neither have I, so what do you think it’s liable to be?”
“That makes sense, sounds like,” Muldoon said reluctantly. Then he brightened. “Jeez, if that’s what it was, Lieutenant, a whole bunch o’ Lizards and all their gear just went up in smoke.”
“Reckon that was the idea.” Daniels thought back to the crew who’d been hiding the big crate in what looked like more rubble. Had they been setting the bomb there so it would be waiting for the Lizards when they advanced in pursuit of the withdrawing Americans? He didn’t know for sure; no way he ever would, but he couldn’t think of any better reason for wanting to conceal a crate. He laughed. You’d have a devil of a time proving him wrong, that was for sure.
“Let’s say it was one o’ those bombs, Lieutenant,” Muldoon persisted. “When the Germans used one, next thing you know the Lizards knocked one of their towns flat, like I said. They gonna do the same thing to us?”
Mutt hadn’t thought about that. Now that he did, he found he didn’t fancy any of the answers that popped into his head. “Damfino,” he said at last. “We’ll just have to wait and find out, seems like to me. That’d be a damned ugly way to fight a war, wouldn’t it? You blew up all o’ my guys in this city over here, so I’ll go and blow up all o’ yours in that one over yonder.”
“Shit, that’s what the krauts and the limeys were doin’ to each other when the Lizards got here,” Muldoon said. “But doin’ it with one bomb to a city makes you start runnin’ out o’ cities pretty damn quick.”
“Lordy, don’t it just,” Mutt said. “Like two guys playin’ Russian roulette, ‘cept they’re pointin’ the guns at each other an’ five o’ the chambers are loaded. Maybe all six of ’em, you come to that.”
The cloud to the south of them was fading now, dispersing, the wind sweeping it away toward Lake Michigan. Pretty soon it would be gone. But the horrible dilemmas it raised would not disappear so soon.
Uneasily, Mutt looked north, east, west, and then last of all south once more, toward and past the dissipating cloud. “What you tryin’ to do, Lieutenant?” Muldoon asked. “You tryin’ to figure out where the Lizards are gonna drop the one they use to answer ours?”
Daniels scowled. He didn’t like being that obvious. But he didn’t want to be a liar, either, not when he was talking about something as important as this. He sighed. “Yeah,” he said.
The alarm hissed hideously. When Atvar woke, for a moment he thought he was dreaming about the last time the alarm had gone off. Then, incontestably, his senses came to full alertness, and the alarm was still yammering away. And there was Pshing’s face in the communicator screen, just as it had been that dreadful, all-too-recent night.
“Activate two-way voice,” Atvar said to the computer, as he had then. Whatever disaster his adjutant had to report, it couldn’t be so hideous as news of the Deutsche with nuclear weapons. So the fleetlord told himself, even as he was asking Pshing, “What now?”
“Exalted Fleetlord-” Pshing began, and then had trouble going on. Gathering himself, he finally managed to continue: “Exalted Fleetlord, I regret to have to inform you that the Tosevites of the not-empire of the United States detonated a fission bomb in the northern sector of the city known as Chicago. As our males had only just succeeded in occupying this sector, and as the front lay not far north, our concentrations in the area of the explosion, and thus our losses, appear to have been heavy.”
A predator in the warm, friendly deserts of Home dug a pit in the sand and hid at the bottom. When an animal stumbled into the pit, it would scrabble at the loose sand, but generally slide down deeper and deeper until the trapmaker came out and devoured it with a minimum expenditure of effort. Atvar felt now like a creature trapped in one of those sand pits. No matter what he did on Tosev 3, things kept getting worse.
He gathered himself. “Tell me the rest,” he said, as if knowing the rest could somehow restore what the Race had lost.
Pshing clung to what had been normality with some of the same desperation Atvar felt “Exalted Fleetlord, the bomb appears to have been of the same type as that which the Deutsche employed against us: that is to say, some of the plutonium in it was stolen from us, while the Big Uglies produced the rest for themselves.”
“But the American Big Uglies are on the other side of an immense ocean from the Deutsche and the Russkis,” Atvar said, “and we have made air passage between the continental masses rare, difficult, and dangerous for the Tosevites to attempt. To think they could have smuggled the explosive metal across in one of the few successful flights-” He checked himself. “Wait I am overlooking something.”
“Exalted Fleetlord?” By the tone of his interrogative cough, Pshing didn’t see what Atvar was missing.
“Water. It is the curse of this world whether liquid or frozen,” Atvar said. “The Big Uglies have so much of it to deal with, they transport goods on it much more readily than ever became the norm back on Home. We’ve not properly dealt with their ships and boats because we’ve assumed them to be of relatively small importance-and because we’ve had so many other commitments on this miserable iceball of a world that seemed more urgent We may now be paying the price for our inability to think as the Big Uglies do.”
Pshing made an eloquent gesture of distaste. “If becoming like the Big Uglies is a condition for victory over them, I for one would almost rather lose.”
“A distinct point,” Atvar admitted. “Were it only my own personal choice, I should agree with you. But we have committed ourselves to bringing this world and its noxious inhabitants under the rule of the Emperor.” He cast down his eyes. What would his sacred sovereign think when he learned of the difficulties the Race was having in annexing Tosev 3? First reports of combat were already on the way Home, but at laggard lightspeed would have completed only about a sixth part of their journey.
“For the Emperor, I would brave anything,” Pshing said, seeming to take fresh spirit. Sometimes Atvar thought loyalty and reverence to the Emperor were all that kept his males performing as they should on a world where the weather and the natives both seemed calculated to drive them mad.