Striking the Balance

“Yes, sir.” Groves said again. “Back in 1941, I saw newsreels of women and kids and old men marching out from Moscow with shovels on their shoulders to dig tank traps and trenches to hold off the Nazis. I never dreamt then that the same thing would happen here in the States one day.”

“Neither did I. Neither did anybody,” Bradley said. He looked tough and worn, an impression strengthened by his Missouri twang and by the M-1 he carried in place of the usual officer’s sidearm. He’d been a crack shot ever since the days when he went hunting with his father, and didn’t let anyone forget it. Scuttlebutt had it that he’d used the M-l to good effect, too, in the first counterattack against the Lizards in late 1942.

“We have more going for us than the Red Army did then,” Bradley said. “We weren’t just shoving dirt around.” He waved to show what he meant, continuing, “The Maginot Line isn’t a patch on these works. This is defense in depth, the way the Hindenburg Line was in the last war.” He paused again, this time to cough. “Not that I saw the Hindenburg Line, dammit, but I did study the reports on it most thoroughly.”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said for the third time. He’d heard that Bradley was sensitive about not having gone Over There during World War I, and evidently the rumor machine had that one straight. He took a step up onto the parapet and looked around. “The Lizards’ll stub their snouts if they run up against this, no doubt about it.”

Bradley’s voice went grim. “That’s not anif, worse luck; it’s awhen. We won’t stop ’em short of our works, not by the way they’ve broken out of Kansas and into Colorado. Lamar had to be evacuated the other day, you know.”

“Yes, I’d heard that,” Groves said. It had sent cold chills down his spine, too. “Looking at all this, though, I feel better than I did when the word came down.”

What man could do to turn gently rising prairie into real defensive terrain, man had done. Trenches and deep, broad antitank ditches ringed Denver to the east for miles around. Great belts of barbed wire would impede Lizard infantry. If not armor. Concrete pillboxes had been placed wherever the ground was suitable. Some of them held machine guns; others provided aiming points for bazooka men.

Along with the antitank ditches, tall concrete teeth and stout steel posts were intended to channel Lizard armor toward the men with the rockets that could destroy it. If a tank tried to go over those obstacles instead of around them, it would present its weaker belly armor to the antitank guns waiting for just that eventuality. Stretches of the prairie looked utterly innocent but were in fact sown with mines enough to make the Lizards pay a heavy price for crossing them.

“It all looks grand, that it does,” Bradley said. “I worry about three things, though. Do we have enough men to put into the works to make them as effective as they ought to be? Do we have enough munitions to make the Lizards say uncle if they strike us with everything they’ve got? And do we have enough food to keep our troops in the works day after day, week after week? The best answer I can up with for any of those isI hope so.”

“Considering that any or all of them might beno, that’s a damn sight better than it might be,” Groves said.

“So it is, but it’s not good enough.” Bradley scratched his chin, then turned to Groves. “Your facilities have taken proper precautions?”

“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. He was pretty sure Bradley already knew that, but even three-star generals sometimes needed reassuring. “As soon as the bombing in and around Denver picked up, we implemented our deception plan. We lit bonfires by our most important buildings, and under cover of the smoke we put up the painted canvas sheets that make them look like ruins from the air. We haven’t had any strikes close by since, so for now it looks like the plan has paid off.”

“Good,” Bradley said. “It had better pay off. Your facility is why we’ll fight to the last man to hold Denver, and you know it as well as I do. Oh, we’d fight for it anyway-God knows we don’t want the Lizards stretching their hold all the way across the Great Plains-but with the Met Lab here, it’s not a town we want to have, it’s a town we have to have.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Groves said. “The physicists tell me we’ll have another little toy ready inside of a couple of weeks. We’ll want to hold the Lizards away from Denver without using it, I know, but if it comes down to using it or losing the town-”

“I was hoping you would tell me something like that, General,” Bradley answered. “As you say, we’ll do everything we can to hold Denver without resorting to nuclear weapons, because the Lizards do retaliate against our civilian population. But if it comes down to a choice between losing Denver and taking every step we can to keep it, I know what the choice will be.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Groves said. Bradley nodded.