Tilting the Balance w-2 Read online

  “Sure as hell did.” The pear-shaped man spat a stream of tobacco juice into the street. Groves envied him for having tobacco in any form. He went on, “Only thing missing then was a brass band. Had us a whole slew o’ wagons and soldiers and foreigners who talked funny and even a couple of Lizards-silly-lookin’ little things to cause all the trouble they do, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, now that you mention it.” Excitement coursed through Groves. That sounded very much like the Met Lab crew. If he was only a couple of weeks behind them, they’d be into Colorado by now, not too far from Denver. He might even catch them before they got there. Whether he did or not, the lead-lined saddlebag in his wagon would push their work forward once they got themselves settled. Trying to make his hope a certainty, he asked, “Did they say what they were up to?”

  The heavyset man shook his head. “Nope. They were right close-mouthed, as a matter of fact. Friendly enough people, though.” His chest inflated, although not enough to stick out over his belly. “I married off a couple of ’em.”

  One of the other men on the sidewalk, a stringy, leathery fellow who looked like a real cowboy, not the Hollywood variety, said, “Yeah, go on, Hoot, tell him how you laid the bride, too.”

  “You go to hell, Fritzie,” the pear-shaped man-Hoot-said. A cowboy named Fritzie? Groves thought. Before he had time to do more than marvel, Hoot turned back to him. “Not that I would’ve minded: pretty little thing, a widow I think she was. But I do believe the corporal she married would have kicked my ass around the block if I’d even looked at her sideways.”

  “You’d’ve deserved it, too,” Fritzie said with a most uncowboylike giggle.

  “Oh, shut up,” Hoot told him. Again, he returned to Groves: “So I don’t know what they were doing, Colonel, only that there were a lot of ’em, heading south. Toward Denver, I think, not Cheyenne, but don’t make me swear to that.”

  “Thank you very much. That helps,” Groves said. If they weren’t talking about the crew from the University of Chicago, he’d eat his hat. He’d made better time coming across Canada and then down through Montana and Wyoming than they had traveling straight west across the Great Plains. Of course, his party had only the one wagon in it, and that lightly loaded, while theirs was limited to the speed of their slowest conveyance. And they’d have been doing a lot more scrounging for fodder than his tight band. If you couldn’t think in terms of logistics, you didn’t deserve to be an Army engineer.

  “You folks going to put up here for the night?” Hoot asked. “We’ll kill the fatted calf for you, like the Good Book says. ‘Sides, there’s nothin’ between here and Cheyenne but miles and miles of miles and miles.”

  Groves looked at Auerbach. Auerbach looked back, as if to say, You’re the boss. Groves said, “I know things are tight, Mister, uh-”

  “I’m Joshua Sumner, but you may as well call me Hoot; everybody else does. We got plenty, at least for now. Feed you a nice thick steak and feed you beets. By God, we’ll feed you beets till your eyeballs turn purple-we had a bumper crop of ’em. Got a Ukrainian family up the road a couple miles, they showed us how to cook up what they call borscht-beets and sour cream and I don’t know what all else. They taste a sight better that way than what we were doing with ’em before, I tell you for a fact.”

  Groves was unenthusiastic about beets, with or without sour cream. But he didn’t think he’d get anything better farther south on US 87. “Thanks, uh, Hoot. We’ll lay over, then, if it’s all right with you people.”

  Nobody in earshot made any noises to say it wasn’t. Captain Auerbach raised his hand. The cavalry company reined in. Groves reflected that a couple of the old-timers on the street had probably seen cavalry go through town before, back before the turn of the century. The idea left him unhappy; it was as If the Lizards were forcing the United States-and the world-away from the twentieth century.

  Such worries receded after he got himself outside of a great slab of fat-rich steak cooked medium-rare over a wood fire. He ate a bowl of borscht, too, not least because the person who pressed it on him was a smiling blonde of about eighteen. It wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be, either. And somebody in Chugwater made homebrew beer better than just about anything that came out of a big Milwaukee brewery.

  Hoot Sumner turned out to be sheriff, justice of the peace, and postmaster all rolled into one. He gravitated to Groves, maybe because they were the leaders of their respective camps, maybe just because they were about the same shape. “So what brings you through town?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” Groves said. “The less I say, the less chance the Lizards have of finding out.”

  “As If I’m gonna tell ’em,” Sumner said indignantly.

  “Mr. Sumner, I have no way of knowing whom you’d tell, or whom they’d tell, or whom they’d tell,” Groves said. “What I do know is that I have orders directly from President Roosevelt that I tell no one. I intend to obey those orders.”

  Sumner’s eyes got big. “Straight from the President, you say? Must be something important, then.” He cocked his head, studied Groves from under the brim of his Stetson. Groves looked back at him, his face expressionless. After close to a minute of that tableau, Sumner scowled in frustration. “Goddamn, Colonel, I’m glad I don’t play poker against you, or I’d be walking home in my long johns, I think.”

  “Hoot, If I can’t tell you anything, that means I really can’t tell you anything,” Groves said.

  “Thing is, though, a small town like this one here runs on gossip. If we can’t get any, we’ll just shrivel up and die,” Sumner said. “The folks who came through a couple weeks ago were just as tight-lipped as you people are-they wouldn’t’ve said shit if they had a mouthful, if you know what I mean. All this stuff going through us, and we don’t even get to find out what the hell it is?”

  “Mr. Sumner, it’s altogether possible that you and Chugwater don’t want to know,” Groves said. His face did twist then, in annoyance at himself. He shouldn’t have said anything at all. How many mugs of that good home brew had he drunk?

  He consoled himself with the thought that he’d learned something from Sumner. If the previous set of travelers had been as secretive as he was, the odds were even better than good that they came from the Metallurgical Laboratory.

  The justice of the peace said, “Hellfire, man, those people even had an Eyetalian with ’em, and ain’t Eyetalians supposed to be the talkingest people on the face of the earth? Brother, not this one! Nice enough feller, but he wouldn’t give you the time of day. What kind of an Eyetalian is that?”

  A smart one, Groves thought. It sounded like Enrico Fermi to him… which just about nailed things down.

  “Only time he unbent a-tall,” Sumner went on, “was when he did best man duty at the wedding I told you about-kissed the bride right pert, he did, even though his own wife-not a bad looker herself-was standing right there beside him. Now that sounds like an Eyetalian to me.”

  “Maybe so.” Groves wondered where Sumner got his ideas about how Italians were supposed to act. Not in the great metropolis of Chugwater, Wyoming-or at least Groves hadn’t seen any here. Most likely from Chico Marx, he thought.

  Wherever he got those ideas, though, Sumner was no fool in matters directly under his own eye. Nodding to Groves, he said, “Stands to reason your business, whatever it is-and I won’t ask any more-is somehow connected with that other crowd. We hadn’t seen hardly anybody from the outside world since things went to hell last year, and then two big bunches both goin’ the same direction, almost one on top of the other. You gonna tell me it’s a coincidence?”

  “Mr. Sumner, I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no. I am saying we’d all be better off-you and me and the country, too-if you didn’t ask questions like that.” Groves was a Career Army man; to him, security was as natural as breathing. But civilians didn’t, wouldn’t, think that way. Sumner set a finger alon
gside his nose and winked, as If Groves had told him what he wanted to know.

  Gloomily, Groves sipped more homemade beer. He was afraid he’d done just that.

  “Ah, the vernal equinox,” Ken Embry exclaimed. “Harbinger of mild weather, songbirds, flowers-”

  “Oh, shut your bleeding gob,” George Bagnall said, with heartfelt sincerity.

  Breath came from both Englishmen in great icy clouds. Vernal equinox or not, winter still held Pskov in an iron grip. The oncoming dawn was just beginning to turn the eastern horizon gray above the black pine forests that seemed to stretch away forever. Venus blazed low in the east, with Saturn, far dimmer and yellower, not far above her. In the west, the full moon was descending toward the land. Looking that way, Bagnall was painfully reminded of the Britain he might never see again.

  Embry sighed, which turned the air around him even foggier. He said, “I’m not what you’d call dead keen on being demoted to the infantry.”

  “Nor I,” Bagnall agreed. “That’s what we get for being supernumeraries. You don’t see them handing Jones a rifle and having him give his all for king and country. He’s useful here, so they have him teaching everything he can about his pet radar. But without the Lanc, we’re just bodies.”

  “For commissar and country, please-remember where we are,” Embry said. “Me, I’d sooner they tried training us up on Red Air Force planes. We are veteran aircrew, after all.”

  “I’d hoped for that myself,” Bagnall said. “Only difficulty with the notion is that, as far as I can see, the Red Air Force, whatever may be left of it, hasn’t got any planes within God knows how far from Pskov. If there’s damn all here, they can hardly train us up on it.”

  “Too true.” Embry tugged at his shlem-sort of a balaclava that didn’t cover his nose or mouth-so it did a better job of keeping his neck warm. “And I don’t like the tin hat they’ve kitted me out with, either.”

  “Then don’t wear it. I don’t fancy mine, now that you mention it.” Along with Mauser rifles, both Englishmen had received German helmets. Wearing that coal scuttle with its painted swastika set Bagnall’s teeth on edge, to say nothing of worrying him lest he be mistaken for a Nazi by some Russian more eager for revenge against the Germans than to attack the Lizards.

  “Don’t like to leave it off, either,” Embry said. “Puts me too much in mind of the last war, when they went for a year and a half with no tin hats at all.”

  “That is a poser,” Bagnall admitted. Thinking about the infinite slaughter of World War I was bad enough anyhow. Thinking how bad it had been before helmets was enough to make your stomach turn over.

  Alf Whyte came walking toward them. He had his helmet on, which made his silhouette unnervingly Germanic. He said, “You chaps ready to find out about the way our fathers fought?”

  “Sod our fathers,” Bagnall muttered. He stamped his feet up and down. Russian felt boots kept them warm; boots were the one part of his flying suit he’d willingly exchanged for their local equivalents.

  Other small groups of men gathered in Pskov’s market square, chatting softly among themselves in Russian or German. It was a more informal muster than any Bagnall had imagined; the occasional female voice among the deeper rumbles only made the scene seem stranger.

  The women fighters were as heavily bundled against the cold as their male counterparts. Pointing to a couple of them, Embry said, “They don’t precisely put one in mind of Jane, do they?”

  “Ah, Jane,” Bagnall said. He and Alf Whyte both sighed. The Daily Mirror’s marvelous comic-strip blonde dressed in one of two ways: very little and even less. Bagnall went on, “Even Jane would dress warmly here. And the Russians, even dressed like Jane, wouldn’t much stir me. The ones I’ve seen are most of them lady dockwallopers or lorry drivers.”

  “Too right,” Whyte said. “This is a bloody place.” All three Englishmen nodded glumly.

  A couple of minutes later, officers-or at least leaders-moved the fighters out. Bagnall’s rifle was heavy; it made him feel lopsided and banged his shoulder at every step he took. At first it drove him to distraction. Then it became only a minor nuisance. By the time he’d gone a mile or so, he stopped noticing it.

  He did expect to see some difference in the way the Russians and Germans went off to war. German precision and efficiency were notorious, while the Red Army, although it had a reputation for great courage, was not long on spit and polish. He soon found what such cliches were worth. He couldn’t even tell the two groups apart by their gear: many Russian partisans bore captured German equipment, while about an equal number of Hitler’s finest eked out their own supplies with Soviet stocks.

  They even marched the same way, in loose, widespread groups that got looser and more spread out as the sun rose. “We might do well to emulate them,” Bagnall said. “They have more experience at this kind of thing than we do.”

  “I suppose it’s to keep too many from going down at once if they’re caught out in the open by aircraft,” Ken Embry said.

  “If we’re caught out in the open, you mean,” Alf Whyte corrected him. As If with one accord, the three RAF men spread out a little farther.

  Before long, they entered the forest south of Pskov. To Bagnall, used to neat, well-trimmed English woods, it was like stepping into another world. These trees had never been harvested; he would have bet money that many of them had never been seen by mortal man till this moment. Pine and fir and spruce held invaders at bay with their dark-needled branches, as if the only thing they wanted in all the world was for the men to go away. The occasional pale gray birch trunks among them startled Bagnall each time he went past one; they reminded him of naked women (he thought again of Jane) scattered among matrons properly dressed for the cold.

  Off in the distance, something howled. “A wolf!” Bagnall said, and grabbed for his rifle before he realized there was no immediate need. Wolves had been hunted out of England for more than four hundred years, but he reacted to the sound by instinct printed on his flesh by four hundred times four hundred generations.

  “We’re rather a long way from home, aren’t we?” Whyte said with a nervous chuckle; he’d started at the wolf call, too.

  “Too bloody far,” Bagnall said. Thinking about England brought him only pain. He tried to do it as little as he could. Even battered and hungry from war, it felt infinitely more welcoming than wrecked Pskov, tensely divided between Bolsheviks and Nazis, or than this forbidding primeval wood.

  In amongst the trees, the almost eternal ravening wind was gone. That let Bagnall grow as nearly warm as he’d been since his Lancaster landed outside Pskov. And Jerome Jones had said the city was known for its mild climate. Trudging through snow as spring began gave the lie to that, at least If you were a Londoner. Bagnall wondered if spring ever truly began here.

  Alf Whyte said, “What precisely is our mission, anyhow?”

  “I was talking with a Jerry last night.” Bagnall paused, and not just to take another breath. He had a little German and no Russian, so he naturally found it easier to talk with the Wehrmacht men than with Pskov’s rightful owners. That bothered him. He was so used to thinking of the Germans as enemies that dealing with them in any way felt treasonous, even if they loved the Lizards no better than he.

  “And what did the Jerry say, pray tell?” Whyte asked when he didn’t go on right away.

  Thus prompted, Bagnall answered, “There’s a Lizard… I don’t know what exactly-forward observation post, little garrison, something-about twenty-five kilometers south of Pskov. We’re supposed to put paid to it.”

  “Twenty-five kilometers?” As a navigator, Whyte was used to going back and forth between metric and imperial measures. “We’re to hike fifteen miles through the snow and then fight? It’ll be nightfall by the time we get there.”

  “I gather that’s pare of the plan,” Bagnall said. Whyte’s scandalized tone showed what an easy time England had had in the war. The Germans and, from what Bagnall could gather, the Russians took t
he hike for granted: just one more thing they had to do. They’d done worse marches to get at each other the winter before.

  He munched cold black bread as he shuffled along. While he paused to spend a penny against the trunk of a birch tree, a Lizard jet wailed by, far overhead. He froze, wondering if the enemy could have spotted the advancing human foes. The trees gave good cover, and most of the fighters wore white smocks over the rest of their clothes. Even his own helmet had whitewash splashed across it.

  The leaders of the combat group (or so his German of the night before had called it) took no chances. They hurried the fighters along and urged them to scatter even more widely than before. Bagnall obeyed, but worried. He’d thought nothing could be worse than fighting in these grim woods. But suppose he got lost in them instead? The shiver that brought had nothing to do with cold.

  On and on and on. He felt as If he’d marched a hundred miles already. How was he to fight after a slog like this? The Germans and Russians seemed to think nothing of it. A British Tommy might have felt the same, but the RAF let machines carry warriors to combat. In a Lanc, Bagnall could do things no infantry could match. Now, quite literally, he found the shoe on the other foot.

  The sun swung through the sky. Shadows lengthened, deepened. Somehow, Bagnall kept up with everyone else. As shadows gave way to twilight, he saw the men ahead of him going down on their bellies, so he did, too. He slithered forward. Through breaks in the forest he saw a few houses-huts, really-plopped down in the middle of a clearing. “That’s it?” he whispered.

  “How the devil should I know?” Ken Embry whispered back. “Somehow, though, I don’t think we’ve been invited here for high tea.”

  Bagnall didn’t think the village had ever heard of high tea. By its look, he wondered if it had heard of the passing of the tsars. The wooden buildings with carved walls and thatched roofs looked like something out of a novel by Tolstoy. The only hint of the twentieth century was razor wire strung around a couple of houses. No one, human or Lizard, was in sight.