Читаем Upsetting the Balance полностью

Most of that had been in German, but the blond Russian woman understood enough of it to say, “Nobody says the Nazis cannot fight. Or if anyone does say it, it is a lie; we have all seen enough to know better. But they do not think why they fight. Someone tells them what to do, and they do it well. And for what? For Hitlerism!” Her cornflower-blue eyes blazed contempt.

No one argued with her. A couple of minutes later, Captain Dolger came running into the room. His fleshy, handsome face glowed. “Field telephones from the front say our artillery touched off secondary explosions-some of those lorries were carrying shells.” Bagnall had told him what to do, and he’d done it well.

The blonde with the rifle threw her arms around Bagnall and kissed him on the mouth. Captain Dolger coughed; he left the Englishmen’s office as fast as he’d come in. Jerome Jones flushed till he looked like a boiled crayfish. Ludmila turned away, embarrassed. Such behavior by a Soviet woman was uncultured in the extreme.

She expected Bagnall to take all he could get from the shameless sniper. For one thing, men were like that. For another, he was an Englishman, therefore a capitalist, therefore an exploiter. But he broke the kiss as soon as he decently could, and looked as embarrassed about it as Ludmila felt.

She scratched her head. Bagnall wasn’t behaving the way school had taught her Englishmen were supposed to behave. What did that say about her lessons? She didn’t really know, but the more you looked at things, the more complicated they got.

Jens Larssen pedaled wearily into Hanford, Washington. He stopped in the middle of the main street. “God, what a dump,” he muttered. He could see why the physicists back at the Met Lab had been hot for the place. He could hear the murmur and splash of the Columbia as it flowed by next to the town. It was all the river anybody could ask for, and he knew what the Mississippi was like.

Not only that, the place already had a railroad line coming into it from the north: the train station was much the biggest building in town. No tracks came out of Hanford going south; it was the end of the line.In more ways than one, Jens thought. But the railroad line was a point in favor of the place. With it, you could conveniently move stuff in and out. Without it, that wouldn’t have been so easy.

River and railroad: two big pluses. Everything else, as far as Jens could see, was a minus. Hanford couldn’t have held more than a few hundred people. Any major industrial activity here would stand out like a sore thumb. Hanford didn’t have any major industries. Just to make up for it, Hanford didn’t have any minor industries, either. If it suddenly developed some, the Lizards couldn’t help but notice.

Jens looked around. Both the pile and the plant to get the plutonium out of its fuel elements would have to go underground; there were no buildings big enough to conceal them. Could you do that much digging and keep it a secret? He had his doubts.

“It’s too damn little,” he said, as if someone were arguing with him. The only reason Hanford existed was to act as a market town for the nearby farmers. Some of the fields to the north, south, and west were still green; more, thanks to the job the Lizards had done on pumping stations, lay brown and dry under the sun.

Besides the railhead, Hanford’s amenities were of the basic sort: a couple of general stores (one of them now closed), a gas station (also closed), a school (it being summer vacation, Jens couldn’t tell if that was closed or not), and a doctor’s office. The doctor’s office was open; Jens saw a pregnant woman walk into it.

He scratched absently at a flake of peeling skin on his wrist. Back in Ogden, Utah, that doctor-Sharp, that was his name-had said some small-town doc might have some sulfa to give him to get rid of the clap. He’d tried once or twice on his way here, but no sawbones had had any, or been willing to use it on somebody just passing through. As long as he was here, he figured he might as well ask this one, too. If he heard no, he heard no. He’d heard it before.

He walked his bike over in front of the doctor’s office, put down the kickstand with his foot. On second thought, he shook his head and carried the bike upstairs. If a local absconded with it, everyone else would pretend he hadn’t seen a thing. Jens had grown up in a small town. He knew what they were like.

The waiting room was clean and pleasant. All the magazines were more than a year old, but that might have been true even if the Lizards hadn’t come. Behind the desk sat a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman in a gingham dress. If the arrival of an unkempt, rifle-toting, bike-hauling stranger fazed her, she didn’t show it. “Good morning, sir,” she said. “Dr. Henry will be able to see you soon.”