“Changed how?” Jens demanded suspiciously. “What have you done, started turning out dental floss instead of atomic bombs?”
He wanted to make Groves mad, but the engineer just laughed. “Not quite,” he said, and explained. The more Jens heard, the less he liked. It wasn’t so much everything the Met Lab crew had accomplished while he was gone-good God, Groves was talking glibly about kilogram quantities of plutonium! What really grated was that the team had done all these important things, had come to the very edge of being able to fabricate a bomb,without Jens Larssen.
He wished Oscar hadn’t made him leave his rifle downstairs. He wanted to do some shooting now, starting with Groves and maybe ending with himself. If the Met Lab was going to stay here in Denver, everything he’d done since he rolled out of town was wasted effort-spinning his wheels in the most literal sense of the word. And they hadn’t missed him one single, solitary bit while he was gone, either.
“But, General,” he said, hearing the desperation in his own voice, “you don’t understand what a swell place Hanford really is, how perfect it would be for us to work there-” He hadn’t thought it was perfect when he rode into town. He’d thought it was a wide spot in the road, nothing better. But in retrospect, it was starting to take on aspects of the earthly paradise. He didn’t want to think he’d spent so much time in vain.
Gently, Groves said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Larssen, I truly am. But while you were away, we’ve put down deep roots here. We’d need months to make the move and get set up and producing again, and we don’t have months to spare. We don’t have days to spare; hell, Larssen, I grudge every inessential minute. We’re making the best of things here, and the best has turned out to be pretty good.”
“But-” Jens stared at the jumble of chicken bones on his plate. He’d have just as easy a time putting the meat back on them as he would of persuading Groves. He offered a new gambit: “I’ll take this up with Fermi and Szilard.”
“Go right ahead,” Groves said, accepting the move without a qualm. “If you can convince them, I’ll listen to you. But you won’t convince them, and I’ll bet money on that. They’ve got our second pile up and running under the stadium here, and the third won’t be far behind. And our reprocessing plant is doing just fine, separating plutonium from the uranium slugs where it’s made. We’d have to uproot that, too, if we headed for Washington State.”
Jens bit his lip. If things were as Groves said, the physicists wouldn’t want to move. Logically, rationally, he didn’t suppose he could blame them. They’d lost months once already, coming from Chicago to Denver. They wouldn’t want to lose more time, not when they were so close to the success the United States needed so badly.
Sometimes, though, you couldn’t go by logic and reason and nothing else. Clutching at straws, Larssen said, “What if the Lizards start a big overland push toward Denver? There’s nothing much to stand in their way-you couldn’t ask for better tank country than eastern Colorado.”
“I won’t say you’re wrong about that, but it hasn’t happened yet and I don’t think it will happen soon,” Groves answered. “It’s long since started snowing-you’d know more about that than I do, wouldn’t you? Last year, the Lizards didn’t do much once the snow started falling. They seem to be pretty predictable, so it’s a good bet they won’t get aggressive till spring. And by spring, we’ll give them enough other things to worry about that they won’t even be thinking of Denver.”
“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Jens said bitterly.
“Oh, Lord, how I wish I did!” Groves rolled his eyes. “In case I haven’t said so, though, I’m damned glad to have you back. You’ll be able to ease the strain on a lot of people who’ve been stretched real thin for a long time.”
Jens heard that as,You’ll be a spare tire. We’ll put you on whenever we need to patch a blowout, and then we’ll heave you back in the trunk again. He almost told Groves just what he thought of him, just what he thought of the whole Met Lab: crew, project and all. But Groves held the whip hand here. Telling him off wouldn’t do anything but ruin the chance for revenge.
Voice tightly controlled, Jens asked, “How’s Barbara doing these days? Do you think there’s any chance she’d want to see me?”
“I really couldn’t tell you about that one way or the other, Dr. Larssen.” Groves sounded wary, which wasn’t like him. “The thing is, she and-and her husband left the Met Lab staff not long after you headed west. Yeager got a new assignment, and it was one where she could be useful, too, so she went along.”
“I-see,” Jens said. The first time he’d gone away, Barbara hadn’t waited for him to come home; she’d slid out of her skirt for that damn dumb ballplayer. Now when he went off to do something else for his country, she hadn’t wanted so much as to set eyes on him when he got back. Wasn’t the world a hell of a place? He asked, “Where did she-where did they-go?”
“Afraid I can’t tell you that,” Groves answered. “I couldn’t tell you even if you didn’t know either one of them. We do try to keep up security, no matter how irregular things get sometimes. And what with the troubles you’ve had, it’d be better f2or you and for them if you didn’t know where they were.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Jens didn’t believe it for a minute. It might be better for the whore who had been his wife and the bastard she was shacked up with, but for him? He shook his head. Getting his own back would be better for him. Changing the subject again, he asked, “Where are you going to put me up for the night?”
“Let’s see. If I remember right, you were BOQ over at Lowry, weren’t you?” Groves did have an impressive ability to remember detail. “Why don’t we send you back there for the time being, anyhow? Things are pretty cramped right around the campus here.”
“Okay,” Jens said.Spare tire, sure as hell. “You have to remember, though, that I am going to keep trying to convince you and everybody else that Hanford is a better place than Denver for making bombs.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Groves said. “What I don’t believe is that it’s enough better to justify shutting down here and making tracks to start up again over there. You get yourself a good night’s sleep, look around and see what we’ve done while you were away, and see if you don’t change your mind yourself.”
“I’ll do that,” Larssen said, but he was damned if anything would change his mind, not now, not after all he’d been through. He got up and started for the door.
“Wait,” Groves said. He scrawled rapidly on a sheet of paper. “Show this to the sentries at Lowry Field. Show it to Colonel Hexham, too, if he doesn’t want to give you a room at the inn.”
“Right.” Larssen took the paper, left Groves’ office, and went downstairs. He reclaimed his rifle from Oscar and walked out into the night. “Good old Colonel Hexham,” he muttered as he climbed onto his bicycle. If Hexham had just let him send a letter to Barbara before it was too late, he’d probably still be married to her today. A fling with that son of a bitch Yeager wouldn’t have mattered so much; after all, she had thought Jens was dead. But when she got herself knocked up, that ruined everything.
And now Groves wanted him to deal with Hexham. He rode slowly up University to Alameda, then turned right to go on to Lowry Field. As he pedaled east toward the air base, the temptation rose in him to keep on going past it, to keep heading east till he got to somewhere not far from the Colorado-Kansas border. Nobody was going to listen to him here, no matter how right he was. He could see that, plain as the nose on his face. But if he headed out and talked to the Lizards, they’d be very interested in finding out what was going on in Denver.
He’d had that thought before. He’d almost ridden east instead of west when they sent him out to look Hanford over. He’d fought it down then; he’d still figured his first obligation was to mankind.
“But what if the only thing every goddamn human being in the world wants is to give me a hard time?” he asked the silent, chilly darkness.