Atvar forced himself to think clearly, even if not like a Tosevite. “The composition of the bomb, like the one the Deutsche used, means the Americans will soon have more such weapons, of production entirely native. For that matter,” he added, as if reminding himself, “they may already have more such weapons, and be saving them for future strikes against us.”
“Underestimating the capacity of the Big Uglies has caused us grief and misfortune ever since we arrived here,” Pshing said.
“Truth,” Atvar answered wearily. “Even when we build their advances in technology into our planning, as we did with the campaign against the Deutsche, we still underestimate them-and pay the price for it.” He let out a long, hissing sigh. “Rouse the targeting specialists. Also rouse the shiplord Kirel and summon him to the operations chamber. We must plan our response to the American bomb.”
“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”
When Kirel reached the operations chamber, Atvar couldn’t decide if he looked sleepy or stunned. A bit of both, perhaps. “Another nuclear weapon, your adjutant tells me,” the shiplord said. “From the Americans this time? Did I hear that correctly?”
“You did,” Atvar said. “As at Breslau, our progress at Chicago has been halted, and the spearhead of our forces destroyed.” He hissed again, this time thoughtfully. “In both instances, we were led to impale ourselves on the bomb by unforced or lightly forced retreats on the part of the Big Uglies. In future, we shall be more wary.”
“A worthy plan, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “but the very recent past has been extremely damaging to us. Have we any notion where the Americans prepared their fission bomb?”
“I wish we did,” Atvar said. “That site would no longer exist. The Americans cannot hide their program in an already radioactive area, as the Deutsche seem to be doing. They are simply careful about allowing leaks to pinpoint their atomic piles and reprocessing plants.”
“That is a problem,” Kirel said-a good-sized understatement. “If they destroy fighting males with their bombs and we only civilians with ours, do they not gain advantage from that?”
“Some, certainly, but we also destroy industrial sites, and, were this planet not industrialized, it would long since have been incorporated into the Empire,” Atvar answered. Kirel could not disagree with that Atvar went on, “We also put pressure on the Tosevites’ not-empires to accommodate themselves to us while they still have a significant civilian population.”
“None of the Tosevite empires and not-empires we have bombed has yet chosen to accommodate itself to us,” Kirel remarked, but he let it go at that. He knew better, these days, than to criticize Atvar. After a moment, he called up the map of the United States and highlighted two cities the targeting specialists had chosen. Pointing to one, he said, “Here is a centrally located target, Exalted Fleetlord, if you want one.”
Atvar read the name of the place. “Denver? No, I don’t want that one. See how relatively close our males to the east of it are. The prevailing wind will sweep radioactive waste in among them.”
“Truth,” Kirel said. “Very well, then. Your adjutant gave me to understand that you are concerned about the Big Uglies’ traffic on the water.” He brightened the light that showed the other town. “This one is a waterside city, and we have no great numbers of males nearby.”
“Seattle?” Atvar considered. “Yes, that is a good choice, for exactly the reasons you name. We shall bomb it. The Tosevites have begun this game-let us see if they have the liver to play it out to the end.”
19
Leslie Groves stared down at his hands. They were big and blunt and battered, the hands of a working engineer. He didn’t bite his nails, though. He was proud of that. If he hadn’t been so proud of it, he probably would have started.
He’d led the team that made the Fat Lady. The bomb had worked exactly as advertised, maybe better than advertised. A big chunk of the North Side of Chicago would never be the same-but a whole bunch of Lizards would never be the same, either, and that was the point of the exercise.
“So I should be on Easy Street, right?” he asked the walls. In the privacy of his office, he sometimes talked to himself. One of these days, he’d do it in public. “So what?” he said, out loud again. People who didn’t like him already thought he was crazy. He didn’t care if he gave them more ammunition. He’d got the job done, crazy or not.
But he wasn’t on Easy Street. All he knew about Jens Larssen was that he’d shot two people and then headed east. The sentries at Lowry had seen him ride by, but they hadn’t stopped him. They hadn’t known he’d shot anybody. They also hadn’t known Groves had ordered him back to his quarters in the BOQ to calm down.
Groves slammed a fist onto the desk, making papers and theIN andOUT trays jump. “If I hadn’t sent him back to Lowry, would he still be all right now?” he asked. The walls didn’t give him any answers.
He wished Larssen hadn’t gone east. East was where the Lizards lived. You wouldn’t think anybody would go running off to the Lizards, but you wouldn’t think anybody would gun down a colonel and a noncom in cold blood, either. Once Larssen had done the shooting, taking refuge with the Lizards looked a lot more likely than it had before.
They hadn’t managed to catch the son of a bitch, either. One thing Larssen had proved, traveling cross-country from White Sulphur Springs to Chicago and then from Denver to Hanford and back again: he knew how to live off the land. You couldn’t count on him freezing to death in a Colorado winter or doing something dumb to give himself away. If he was heading toward the Lizards, he might well get to them.
“Next question,” Groves said in his orderly fashion: “What will he do if he does get to them? Will he spill his guts?”
By all the signs, Larssen hated the Met Lab and anybody who had anything to do with it. Sure, he’d blamed Hexham for the breakup with his wife, but that had sprung from the secrecy surrounding the project, too. So, the sixty-four dollar question was, if he got to the Lizards, would he blab about what was going on in Denver? If he did, the town would become radioactive gas and dust in short order. No less than the Americans, the Lizards were playing for keeps.
As if he needed more proof of that, he turned on the battery-powered radio he’d ordered into the office when news of the destruction of Seattle came over the wires. When the set warmed up, he caught an announcer in the middle of a word: “-veral hundred thousand believed dead, as we’ve told you before. Newly released information from the Secret White House indicates that one of them was Vice President Henry Wallace, who was visiting war workers in the stricken city to improve their morale.”
Groves whistled softly and turned off the radio. Thatwas news. The last time he’d seen FDR, a few months before, the president had looked like death warmed over. If he did drop dead, who was next in line now? The Secretary of State, assuming he was still alive-Groves didn’t know for sure. President Cordell Hull? He thought about that. He’d always figured Wallace for a custardhead, so Hull might be an improvement All the same, he hoped Roosevelt would die of old age at about a hundred and thirty-one.
He turned the radio back on. The newsman was still talking about the hideous things that had happened to Seattle. The same kinds of things had happened to Berlin and Washington and Tokyo and Munich, and to the Lizards outside Moscow and Breslau and inside Chicago. After a while, hearing them repeated numbed the brain, not so they seemed unreal but so their horrors no longer struck the mind as quite so horrific. As with anything else, acquaintance made what had once been unimaginable take on the comforting cloak of familiarity.
Men had gone through four years of trench warfare in World War I, and thought man’s inhumanity to man could sink no lower. Then, just to prove they were wrong, they’d found ways to bomb noncombatants from the air. And now more than half a dozen atomic bombs had been used, with more liable to come. How soon would those dreadful clouds come to be taken for granted-by those who survived them?