“Good morning, Oscar,” she answered. She spoke more precisely than Sam did. Hell, she spoke more precisely than most people did. She’d been a graduate student in medieval English out at Berkeley before the war; that was where she’d met Jens.
Oscar turned back to Sam. “Go on in. General Groves, he’s expecting you.”
“Okay, thanks.” Yeager turned the doorknob, feeling the same willies he’d had whenever a manager called to him in a certain tone of voice after a game.Oh, God, he thought.Where have they gone and traded me to now?
He went through the door, closed it after him. General Groves looked up from the notes he was scribbling on a typed report. Sam came to attention and saluted. “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting as ordered, sir,” he said formally.
“At ease, Yeager. You’re not in trouble,” Groves said, returning the salute. He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down if you care to.” When Sam had, Groves went on, “Is it your opinion that we’ve wrung just about everything your two scaly accomplices know about nuclear physics out of them?”
“Yes, sir, I’d say that’s probably true,” Yeager answered after a moment’s thought.
“Good. I’d have thrown you out of here on your ear if you’d tried to tell me anything else,” Groves said. By the way the muscles shifted in his big shoulders, he’d meant it literally. “The United States can still learn a lot about the Lizards from Ullhass and Ristin, though, even if what we learn has nothing directly to do with the Metallurgical Laboratory. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”
“No doubt about it, sir,” Yeager said. “The more we know about the Lizards, the better. They’ll still be around from now on even if we manage to beat them, and that’s not counting this colonization fleet of theirs. It’s due in-what? — twenty years?”
“That’s about right, yes.” General Groves looked intently across the desk at Sam. “The way you answered that last question convinced me these are absolutely the right orders for you: you casually came to the same conclusion a staff of government experts has needed months to reach.”
Probably comes from reading science fiction,Yeager thought. He didn’t say that out loud; he had no idea how Groves felt about that Buck Rogers stuff. He did say, “You haven’t told me what the orders are, sir.”
“So I haven’t.” Groves glanced down at some papers behind hisIN basket that Yeager couldn’t see. “We’ve established a center for interrogation and research on Lizard POWs down in Arkansas. I’m going to send Ristin and Ullhass there, and I’m ordering you to accompany them. I think you can best serve your country by using your rapport with the Lizards, and that’s the place for you to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. He’d been traded, all right, but to a place he didn’t mind going… assuming he could get there. “Uh, sir, what sort of transportation will we have? There’s a lot of Lizards between here and Arkansas that aren’t prisoners, if you know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean. Nevertheless, you’ll fly,” Groves answered.
“Sir?” Yeager did his best to keep the surprise-to say nothing of the dismay-he felt from showing. His best, he feared, was none too good. He figured he’d better explain: “They shoot down an awful lot of our planes, sir.” That would do for an understatement until a better one came along. The Lizards’ aircraft had the same sort of advantage against the planes the Americans flew as a Lightning or a Warhawk would have against a World War I-vintage Sopwith Camel.
But Groves nodded his big head and said, “You’ll fly anyhow-and what’s more, the Lizards will know you’re coming.” Yeager must have looked as if he’d just been smacked in the kisser with a large carp, for the general chuckled a little before continuing, “We always inform them before we move prisoners by air, and we paint the planes we fly them in bright yellow. It’s worked pretty well; they don’t like shooting at their own people any more than we would.”
“Oh,” Yeager said. “I guess that’s okay, then.” And if there were no such arrangement between Lizards and men and Groves had told him to fly anyway, he’d have damn well flown: that’s what the Army was about. As it was, though, he asked, “Do you think it’s safe enough for my wife to come along, sir? Really, I’m not just asking for the sake of having her with me; she knows just about as much about the Lizards as I do. She’d be useful at this Arkansas place, at least until she has her baby.”
“Under normal circumstances, Sergeant, I’d say no,” Groves answered. He grimaced. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as normal circumstances any more. As you say, your Barbara may be useful in Arkansas, but that’s not why I’m going to tell you yes. Frankly, Sergeant, getting you and her out of here will simplify matters when Professor Larssen gets back from Washington State.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said woodenly. Groves had to think like that, though; Jens Larssen was a talented nuclear physicist, and the general was running a project to build an atomic bomb. If he could help the Lizard prisoner research project at the same time…two birds with one stone ran through Yeager’s mind. “When do we leave, sir?” he asked.
“Not for a few days,” Groves answered. “We need to make the arrangements and be sure they’re understood. Written orders will go out to you as soon as one of the secretaries gets around to typing them. Dismissed.”
Yeager stood, saluted, and left. He wasn’t sure Groves even saw the salute; he’d already gotten back to work on the report he’d been scribbling on when Sam came in.
Barbara, Ullhass, and Ristin all took a couple of steps toward him when he came out into the hallway. “You look green, Sam,” she said. “What happened in there?”
“Pack your bags, hon,” he answered. “We’re moving to Arkansas.” She stared and stared. He had to remind himself that she’d never been traded before.
Heinrich Jager stuck his head and torso up through the open cupola of his Panzer V for a look around, then ducked back down into the turret of the panzer. “Lord, it feels good to have some centimeters of steel all the way around me again,” he said.
His gunner, a veteran sergeant named Klaus Meinecke, grunted at that. “Colonel, you don’t seem to have done too bad while you were out on your own, either.” He pointed to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross that Jager wore at his collar.
Jager’s hand went to the medal. He’d earned it for helping Otto Skorzeny take the town of Split on the Adriatic back from the Lizards. He said, “Sergeant, I was in the infantry during the last war. I thought one round of that had cured me forever. Just goes to show, you may get older, but you don’t get smarter.”
Meinecke laughed as if he’d told a joke. But Jager meant every word of it. Fighting from building to building inside the great stone walls of Diocletian’s palace had been every bit as appalling as trench warfare in France a quarter of a century before.
The Alsatian town of Rouffach, through which the Panther had rumbled a few minutes before, had been part of the GermanReich during World War I, taken from France after the Franco-Prussian War. France had taken it back after the First World War; now it was German again… for as long as theReich could maintain itself against the Lizards.
Jager stood up in the cupola again, looked back over his shoulder. The spires of Rouffach’s church of Notre Dame still loomed against the sky; so did what the locals called the Witches’ Tower, crowned by a huge, disorderly storks’ nest. “Pretty country,” he said, lowering himself once more.
Klaus Meinecke grunted. “I wouldn’t know. All I get to see of it is a gunsight’s worth, except when we stop for the night.” He smacked his lips. “They make good wine around here, though; I’ll give them that much.”
“That they do,” Jager said. “They didn’t do badly farther south, either.”
He wouldn’t let himself venture any more in the way of reproach than that. When he’d left the panzer forces in the west to head for Croatia, they’d had the Lizards stopped in their tracks between Besancon and Belfort. Since then, Belfort had fallen, and Mulhouse, too; the Lizards had pushed all the way up to the Rhine.If I’d been here… Jager thought, and then shook his head. Almost certainly, the same thing would have happened. He knew he was a damn fine panzer officer. He also knew he wasn’t a panzer genius-and even a panzer genius might not have held the Lizards once they got rolling.