He tried to remember the last time he’d lain on a bed. It hadn’t happened more than once or twice since he’d been shoehorned into the forces fighting desperately to keep Britain free of the invading aliens. They’d given him a bag of medical supplies, a uniform, an armband, and a gas mask, and they’d sent him out to do his best. Comfort hadn’t been part of the bargain.
As if by way of experiment, Rivka kissed his bare cheek. “Bristly,” she said. “I think I like your beard better, unless you can shave your face very smooth.”
“Getting my hands on a razor hasn’t always been easy,” he answered. “I never would have done it at all, but it makes a mask fit properly.”
He didn’t want to think about gas masks and the things that could go wrong if they failed to fit properly, not when he lay beside his wife in an oasis of peace and calm in the midst of chaos and war. For the next little while, he didn’t think about anything but Rivka.
But try as you would to stretch such moments, they had to end. Rivka sat up and began to dress as fast as she could. Partly that was ingrained modesty, and partly a well-justified fear that Reuven would choose the most inconvenient time possible to walk into the flat. Both those concerns also drove Moishe back into his clothes. The shoddy serge of his battledress scraped his skin as he pulled it on.
Rivka reached behind her neck to fasten the last catch. As if that were a signal that the everyday, dangerous world had returned, she asked, “How long will you be able to stay here?”
“Just tonight,” he answered. “I have to go south tomorrow, to help the wounded in the fighting against the Lizards there.”
“How is the fight really going?” Rivka asked. “When there’s power for the wireless and when they can print newspapers, they say they’re smashing the Lizards the way Samson smote the Philistines. But Lizard planes keep on pounding London, the boom of the artillery never goes away, and shells keep falling on us. Can I believe what they claim?”
“The northern pocket is gone-kaputt,” Moishe said, borrowing a word he’d heard German soldiers use. “As for the southern one, your guess is as good as mine. All I know about the fighting is what I’ve seen for myself, and that’s like asking a fish in a pool to tell you everything about the Vistula. If England were losing the fight badly, though, you’d be talking with a Lizard right now, not with me.”
“That is so,” she said thoughtfully. “But after people-human beings-have lost so many fights, it’s hard to believe that just holding the Lizards back should count as a victory.”
“When you think of how many people couldn’t slow the Lizards down, let alone stop them, then holding them backis a victory, and a big one. I don’t ever remember them pulling back from a fight the way they did from the northern pocket. The English have hurt them.” Moishe shook his head in wonder. “For so long, we didn’t think anything or anyone could hurt them.”
The front door to the flat opened, then closed with a slam. Reuven shouted, “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry!” Moishe and Rivka looked at each other and started to laugh. The noise let Reuven find them. “What’s so funny?” he demanded with the indignation of a child who knows a joke is going over his head.
“Nothing,” his father answered gravely. “We slipped one by you, that’s all.”
“One what?” Reuven said. Rivka sent Moishe a warning glance: the boy was really too young. Moishe just laughed harder. Even with the rumble of artillery always in the background, for this little while he could savor being with his wife and son. Tomorrow the war would fold him in its bony arms once more. Today he was free, and reveled in his freedom.
The silvery metal did not look like much. It was so dense that what the Metallurgical Laboratory had managed to produce seemed an even smaller amount than it really was. Appearances mattered not at all to Leslie Groves. He knew what he had here: enough plutonium, when added together with what the Germans and Russians had stolen from the Lizards and the British brought over to the U.S.A., to make an atomic bomb that would go boom and not fizzle.
He turned to Enrico Fermi. “There’s the first long, hard step, by God! After this, we have a downhill track.”
“An easier track, General, yes, but not an easy one,” the Italian physicist answered. “We still have to purify the plutonium, to shape it into a bomb, and to find a way to explode the bomb where we want it.”
“Those are all engineering concerns,” Groves said. “I’m an engineer; I know we can meet them. The physics was what worried me-I wasn’t sure we’d ever see enough plutonium metal.” He waved toward the small silver lump.
Fermi laughed. “For me, it is just the opposite. The physics, we have found, is straightforward enough. Advancing from it to the finished bomb, though, is a challenge of a different sort.”
“Whatever sort of challenge it is, we’ll meet it,” Groves declared. “We can’t afford to be like the Russians-one shot and out. We’ll hit the Lizards again and again, until we make ’em say uncle.”
“From what I understand of the Russians’ design, they are lucky to have achieved any explosion at all,” Fermi said. “A gun-type device with plutonium-” He shook his head. “It must have been a very large gun, with a very high velocity to the slab of plutonium it accelerated into the larger plug. Otherwise, fission would have begun prematurely, disrupting the mass before the full power of the nuclear reaction built up.”
“They could build it any size they wanted, I suppose,” Groves said. “They weren’t going to load it in a bomber, after all.” He laughed at that, a laugh edged with bitterness. “For one thing, they don’t have a bomber big enough to carry even a small nuclear bomb. For another, if they did, the Lizards would shoot it down before it got where it was supposed to go. So why not build big?”
“No reason I can see,” Fermi answered. “The same applies to us, in large degree: we will not be able to deliver the bomb from the air once we have it. Putting it in the proper place at the proper time will not be easy.”
“I know.” Groves rubbed his chin. He didn’t like thinking about that. “The way the Russians did it, from what they say, was to leave the bomb hidden in a position they knew the Lizards were going to overrun in a few hours. They set their timer and waited for the big boom. We’d have a harder time finding a position of that sort.”
“Chicago,” Fermi said quietly.
“Mm, yeah, maybe,” Groves admitted. “That’s a meat grinder, no mistake about it. I see two problems with it, though. Getting the bomb from here to Chicago once it’s done is one. Hell, getting a bomb from here to anywhere is going to be a problem. So that’s number one. And number two is pulling our boys back so we don’t take out one of our own divisions along with the Lizards.”
“Why should that be a problem?” the physicist asked. “They simply retreat, allowing the Lizards to move forward, and that is that.”
Leslie Groves smiled down at him. Groves had been an engineer throughout his years in the military; he’d never led troops in combat, nor wanted to. But he’d forgotten more about strategy than Fermi had ever learned-nice to be reminded there were still some things he knew more about than the eggheads he was supposed to be bossing. As patiently as he could, he answered, “Professor, we’ve been fighting the Lizards tooth and toenail outside of Chicago, and now in it, ever since they came down from space. If we all of a sudden start pulling back without an obvious good reason, don’t you think they’re going to get suspicious about why we’re changing our ways? I know I would, if I were their C.O.”
“Ahh,” Fermi said. He might have been naive, but he wasn’t dumb, not even a little bit. “I see what you mean, General. The Russians were already in full-scale retreat, so the Lizards noticed nothing out of the ordinary when they passed the point where the bomb was hidden. But if we go from stout resistance to quick withdrawal, they will observe something is amiss.”