Has played hob with espionage, you mean, Molotov thought: Flerov had a little diplomat in him after all. That, however, was a side issue. Molotov said, “If you cannot produce as promised, we will remove you and bring in those who can.”
“Good luck to you and good-bye to the rodina,” Flerov said. “You may find charlatans who tell you worse lies than we could ever imagine. You will not find capable physicists—and if you dispose of us, you may never see uranium or plutonium produced in the Soviet Union.”
He was not bluffing. Molotov had watched too many men trying to lie for their lives; he knew nonsense and bluff when he heard them. He didn’t hear them from Flerov. Rounding on Kurchatov, he said, “You direct this project. Why have you not kept us informed about your trouble in holding to the schedule?”
“Comrade Foreign Commissar, we are ahead of schedule in preparing the first bomb,” Kurchatov said. “That ought to count in our favor, even if the other half of the project is going more slowly than we thought it would. We can rock the Lizards back on their heels with one explosion.”
“Igor Ivanovich—” Flerov began urgently.
Molotov raised a hand to cut him off. He glared at Kurchatov. “You may be an excellent physicist, Comrade, but you are politically naive. If we rock the Lizards with one explosion, with how many will they rock us?”
Under the harsh electric lights, Kurchatov’s face went an ugly yellowish-gray. Flerov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar, this has been a matter of only theoretical discussion.”
“You need to make it one of the theses of your dialectic,” Molotov said. He was convinced Stalin had the right of that: the Lizards would hit back hard at any nation that used the explosive metal against them.
“We shall do as you say,” Kurchatov said.
“See that you do,” Molotov answered. “Meanwhile, the Soviet Union—to say nothing of all mankind—requires a supply of explosive metal. You cannot make it within eighteen months, you say. How long, then?” Molotov was not large, nor physically imposing. But when he spoke with the authority of the Soviet Union in his voice, he might have been a giant.
Kurchatov and Flerov looked at each other. “If things go well, four years,” Flerov said.
“If things go very well, three and a half,” Kurchatov said. The younger man gave him a dubious look, but finally spread his hands, conceding the point.
Three and a half years? More likely four? Molotov felt as if he’d been kicked in the belly. The Soviet Union would have its one weapon, which it could hardly use for fear of bringing hideous retaliation down on its head? And the Germans and the Americans—and, for all he knew, maybe the English and the Japanese, too—ahead in the race to make bombs of their own?
“How am I to tell this to Comrade Stalin?” he asked. The question hung in the air. Not only would the scientists incur Stalin’s wrath for being too optimistic, but it might fall on Molotov as well, as the bearer of bad news.
If the academicians were as irreplaceable as they thought, the odds were good that Stalin wouldn’t do anything to them. Over the years, Molotov had done his best to make himself indispensable to Stalin, but indispensable wasn’t the same as irreplaceable, and he knew it.
He asked, “Can I tell the General Secretary you will succeed within two and a half to three years?” If he could arrange to present a small disappointment rather than a big one, he might yet deflect Stalin’s anger.
“Comrade Foreign Commissar, you can of course tell the Great Stalin whatever you please, but that will not be the truth,” Kurchatov said. “When the time passes and we do not succeed, you will have to explain why.”
“If the Lizards give us so much time for research and engineering,” Flerov added; he looked to be enjoying Molotov’s discomfiture.
“If the Lizards overrun this place, Comrades, I assure you that you will have no more joy from it than I,” Molotov said stonily. Had the Germans defeated the Soviet Union, Molotov would have gone up against a wall (with a blindfold if he was lucky), but nuclear physicists might have been useful enough to save their skins by turning their coats. The Lizards, however, would not want human beings to know atoms existed, let alone that they could be split. Driving that home, Molotov added, “And if the Lizards overrun this place, it will be in large measure because you and your team have failed to give the workers and people of the Soviet Union the weapons they need to carry on the fight.”
“We are doing everything men can do,” Flerov protested. “There are too many things we simply do not know.”
Now he was the one who sounded uncertain, querulous. That was how Molotov wanted it. He snapped, “You had better learn, then.”
Softly, Igor Kurchatov said, “It is easier to give orders to generals, Comrade Foreign Commissar, than to nature. She reveals her secrets at a pace she chooses.”
“She has revealed altogether too many of them to the Lizards,” Molotov said. “If they can find them, so can you.” He turned his back to show the interview was over. He thought he’d recovered well from the shocking news the academicians had given him. How well he would recover after he gave Stalin that news was, unfortunately, another question.
The peddler smiled in appreciation as David Goldfarb handed him a silver one-mark piece with Kaiser Wilhelm’s mustachioed image stamped on it. “That’s good money, friend,” he said. Along with the baked apple on a stick that Goldfarb had bought, he gave back a fistful of copper and potmetal coins by way of change. His expression turned sly. “You have money that good, it doesn’t matter how funny your Yiddish sounds.”
“Geh kak afen yam,” Goldfarb said genially, doing his best to hide the sudden pounding of his heart. “Where I come from, everybody talks like me.”
“What a miserable, ignorant place that must be,” the peddler retorted. “At first, I thought you had a nice Warsaw accent. The more I listen to you, though, the more I figure you’re from Chelm.”
Goldfarb snorted. The legendary town was full of shlemiels. What he really spoke, of course, was Yiddish with a Warsaw accent corrupted by living his whole life in England. He hadn’t thought it was corrupted till the British sub dropped him on the flat, muddy coast of Poland. Now, comparing the way he spoke to the Yiddish of people who used it every day of their lives, he counted himself lucky that they understood him at all.
As an excuse not to say where he really did come from, he bit into the apple. Hot, sweet juice flooded into his mouth. “Mmm,” he said, a wordless, happy sound.
“It would be really good if I could get some cinnamon,” the peddler said. “But there’s none to be had, not for love nor money.”
“Good anyhow,” Goldfarb mumbled, his full mouth muffling whatever odd accent the King’s English gave him. With a nod to the peddler, he walked south down the dirt track toward Lodz. He was, he thought, just a couple of hours away. He hoped that wouldn’t be too late. From what he’d heard just before he sailed from England, his cousin Moishe was in jail somewhere in Lodz. He wondered how he was supposed to get Moishe out.
With a noncom’s fatalism, he put that out of his mind. He’d worry about it when the time came. First he had to get to Lodz. He’d already discovered that a couple of years of fighting the war electronically had left his wind a shadow of what it was supposed to be. His physical-training sergeant would not have approved.
“Something to be said for not laying about puffing on fags all day long—it’d be even shorter if I’d had more to smoke,” he said in low-voiced English. “All the same, I miss ’em.”
He looked around. Just a glimpse of the endless flat farmland of the Polish plain had been plenty to tell him all he needed to know about that country’s unhappy history. Besides the shelter of the English Channel, the United Kingdom had mountains in the west and north in which to take refuge: witness the survival of Welsh and Scots Gaelic over the centuries.
Poland, now—all the Poles had was the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, and nothing whatever to keep either one of them out except their own cour
age. And when the Germans outweighed them three to one and the Russians two or three times as badly as that, even suicidal courage too often wasn’t enough.
No wonder they give their Jews a hard time, he thought with a sudden burst of insight: they’re sure they can beat the Jews. After losing so many wars to their neighbors, having in their midst people they could trounce had to feel sweet. That didn’t make him love the people who had driven his parents from Poland, but it did help him understand them.
Goldfarb looked around again. Almost everywhere in England, he’d been able to see hills on the horizon. Here, it went on forever. The endless flat terrain made him feel insignificant and at the same time conspicuous, as if he were a fly crawling across a big china platter.
The green of Polish fields was different from what he’d known in England, too: duller somehow. Maybe it was the light, maybe the soil; whatever it was, he’d noticed it almost at once.
He’d noticed the workers in those fields, too. Englishmen who labored on the land were farmers. The Poles were inarguably peasants. He had trouble defining the difference but, as with the colors of the fields, it was unmistakable. Maybe part of it lay in the way the Polish farmers went about their work. By the standards Goldfarb was used to, they might as well have been moving in slow motion. Their attitude seemed to say that how hard they worked didn’t matter—they weren’t going to realize much from their labors, anyway.
A noise in the sky, like an angry cockchafer … Goldfarb had heard that noise more times than he cared to remember, and his reaction to it was instinctive: he threw himself flat. Hugging the ground, a flight of German bombers roared by, heading east.
Ju-88s, Goldfarb thought, identifying them by sound and shape as automatically as he would have told his father from an uncle. He was used to praying for fighters and antiaircraft guns to blow German bombers out of the sky. Now he found himself wishing them luck. That felt strange, wrong; the world had taken a lot of strange turns since the Lizards came.
He got to his feet and peered south. Smoke smudged the horizon there, the first mark he’d seen. That ought to be Lodz, he thought. A little farther and he could start doing the job the British high command had, in their wisdom, decided he was right for.
Cloth cap, black jacket and wool trousers—they all shouted I am a Jew! He wondered why Hitler had bothered adding yellow stars to the getup; they struck him as hardly necessary. Even his underwear was different from what he’d worn in England, and chafed him in strange places.
He had to look like a Jew. He spoke Yiddish, but his Polish was fragmentary and mostly foul. In England, even before he went into uniform, he’d dressed and sounded like everyone else. Here in Poland, he felt isolated from a large majority of the people around him. “Get used to it,” he muttered. “Most places, Jews don’t fit in.”
An ornate brass signpost said, LODZ, 5KM. Fastened above it was an angular wooden sign with angular black letters on a white background: LITZMANNSTADT, 5KM. Just seeing that sign pointing like an arrow at the heart of Lodz set Goldfarb’s teeth on edge. Typical German arrogance, to slap a new name on the town once they’d conquered it.
He wondered if the Lizards called it something altogether different.
A little more than an hour brought him into the outskirts of Lodz. He’d been told the town had fallen to the Nazis almost undamaged. It wasn’t undamaged now. The briefings he’d read on the submarine said the Germans had put up a hell of a scrap before the Lizards drove them out of town, and that they’d lobbed occasional rockets or flying bombs (the briefings weren’t very clear about which) at it ever since.
Most of the people in the outer part of the city were Poles. If any German settlers remained from Lodz’s brief spell as Litzmannstadt, they were lying low. Sneers from the Poles were bad enough. He didn’t know what he would have done with Germans gaping at him. All at once, he regretted hoping the German bombers had a good mission. Then he got angry at himself for that regret. The Germans might not be much in the way of human beings, but against the Lizards they and England were on the same side.
He walked on down Lagiewnicka Street toward the ghetto. The wall the Nazis had built was still partly intact, although in the street itself it had been knocked down to allow traffic once more. As soon as he set foot on the Jewish side, he decided that while the Germans and England might be on the same side, the Germans and he would never be.
The smell and the crowding hit him twin sledgehammer blows. He’d lived his whole life with plumbing that worked. He’d never reckoned that a mitzvah, a blessing, but it was. The brown reek of sewage (or rather, slops), garbage, and unwashed humanity made him wish he could turn off his nose.
And the crowd! He’d heard men who’d been in India and China talk of ant heaps of people, but he hadn’t understood what that meant. The streets were jammed with men, women, children, carts, wagons—a good-sized city was boiled down into a few square blocks, like bouillon made into a cube. People bought, sold, argued, pushed past one another, got, in each other’s way, so that block after block of ghetto street felt like the most crowded pub where Goldfarb had ever had a pint.
The people—the Jews—were dirty, skinny, many of them sickly-looking. After tramping down from the Polish coast, Goldfarb was none too clean himself, but whenever he saw someone eyeing him, he feared the flesh on his bones made him conspicuous.
And this misery, he realized, remained after the Nazis were the better part of a year out of Lodz. The Jews now were fed better and treated like human beings. What the ghetto had been like under German rule was—not unimaginable, for he imagined it all too vividly, but horrifying in a way he’d never imagined till now.
“Thank you, Father, for getting out when you did,” he said.
For a couple of blocks he simply let himself be washed along like a fish in a swift-flowing stream. Then he began moving against the current in a direction of his own choosing.
Posters of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski seemed to follow him wherever he went. Some were tattered and faded, some as new and bright as if they’d been put up yesterday, which they probably had. Rumkowski stared down at Goldfarb from a variety of poses, but always looked stern and commanding.
Goldfarb shook his head; the briefing papers had had considerable to say about Rumkowski and his regime in Lodz, but not much of that was good. In sum, he amounted to a pocket Jewish Hitler. Just what we need, Goldfarb thought.
A couple of times, he passed Order Service men with their armbands and truncheons. He noticed them not only for those, but also because they looked uncommonly well-fed. A pocket Jewish SS, too. Wonderful. Goldfarb kept his head down and did his best to pretend he was invisible.
But he had to look up from time to time to tell where he was going; studying a street map of Lodz didn’t do enough to let him make his way through the town itself. Luckily, being one mote in a swirling crowd kept him from drawing special notice. After three wrong turns—about half as many as he’d expected—he walked into a block of flats on Mostowski Street and started climbing stairs.
He knocked on what he hoped was the right door. A woman a couple of years older than he was—she would have been pretty if she hadn’t been so thin—opened it and stared at his unfamiliar face with fear-widened eyes. “Who are you?” she demanded.
Goldfarb got the idea something unpleasant would happen to him if he gave the wrong answer. He said, “I’m supposed to tell you even Job didn’t suffer forever.”
“And I’m supposed to tell you it must have seemed that way to him.” The woman’s whole body relaxed. “Come in. You must be Moishe’s cousin from England.”
“That’s right,” he said. She closed the door behind him. He went on, “And you’re Rivka? Where’s your son?”
“He’s out playing. In the crowds on the street, the risk is small, and besides, someone has an eye on him.”
“Good.” Goldfarb looked around. The flat was tiny, but so bare that it seemed larger. He shook his head in sympathy. “You must be sic
k to death of moving.”
Rivka Russie smiled for the first time, tiredly. “You have no idea. Reuven and I have moved three times since Moishe didn’t come back to the flat we’d just taken.” She shook her head. “He thought someone had known who he was. We must have been just too late getting out of the other place. If it hadn’t been for the underground, I don’t know what we would have done. Got caught, I suppose.”
“They got word to England, too,” Goldfarb said, “and orders eventually got to me.” He wondered if they would have, had Churchill not spent a while talking with him at Brunting-thorpe. “I’m supposed to help get Moishe out of here and take him—and you and the boy—back to England with me. If I can.”
“Can you do that?” Rivka asked eagerly.
“Gott vayss—God knows,” he said. That won a startled laugh from her. He went on, “I’m no commando or hero or anything like that. I’ll work with your people and I’ll do the best I can, that’s all.”
“A better answer than I expected.” Her voice was judicious.
“Is he still in Lodz?” Goldfarb asked. “That’s the last information I had, but it’s not necessarily good any more.”
“As far as we know, yes. The Lizards aren’t in a lot of hurry about dealing with him. That doesn’t make sense to me, when he did such a good job of embarrassing them.”
“They’re more sure than quick,” Goldfarb said, remembering pages from the briefing book. “Very methodical, but not swift. What sort of charge do they have him up on?”
“Disobedience,” Rivka said. “From everything he ever said while he was on better terms with them, they couldn’t accuse him of anything much worse.”
That fit in with what Goldfarb had read, too. The Lizards seemed rank-, class-, and duty-conscious to a degree that made the English and even the Japanese look like wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchists. In that kind of society, disobedience had to be as heinous a sin as blasphemy in the Middle Ages.
“Still here in Lodz,” Goldfarb mused. “That’s good, I suppose. The Lizards’ main Polish headquarters is in Warsaw. Getting him out of there would be a lot tougher.” He grinned wryly. “Besides, I don’t fancy walking all that way east, not when I’ve just come here from the coast the same way.”
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 115