Tilting the Balance

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 alongside 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.”