In the Balance w-1

by Harry Turtledove

  The door opened. The brigadier general came out, looking grimly satisfied. He returned Groves’ salute, gave Larssen a brusque nod, and strode away.

  “Come in, Colonel Groves, and bring your companion,” General Marshall called from behind his desk. Jens noticed that he got the name straight.

  “Thank you, sir,” Groves said, obeying. “Sir, let me present Dr. Jens. Larssen; as I told your adjutant, he’s reached us from the project at the University of Chicago.”

  “Sir.” As a civilian, Larssen reached across the desk to shake hands with the Army Chief of Staff. The general’s grip was firm and precise. Jens’s first impression was that despite the uniform, despite the three rows of campaign ribbons, Marshall looked more like a senior research scientist than a soldier. He was in his early sixties, spare and trim, with hair going from iron gray toward white. Under a wide forehead, his face was rather narrow. He looked as though he seldom smiled. His eyes were arresting; they said he’d seen a lot and thought hard about every bit of it.

  If not warm, he was gracious enough, waving Larssen and Groves to chairs and listening closely to Jens’ brief retelling of his trip across the eastern half of the United States. Then he put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Tell me the status of the Metallurgical Laboratory as you know it, Dr. Larssen. You may speak freely; I am cleared for this information.”

  “If you’d like me to step outside, sir-” Groves started to get up again.

  Marshall raised a hand to stop him. “That will not be necessary, Colonel. Security requirements have changed considerably since the end of May. The Lizards already know the secrets we are trying to extract from nature.”

  “Do the Germans?” Larssen asked. Being a civilian had advantages; he could question the Army Chief of Staff where military discipline held Groves silent. “Do we want the Germans to learn them from us? I’d better know the answer to that, sir, not least because Hans Thomsen has the room across the hall from mine at the Greenbrier.”

  “The Germans have an atomic research program of their own,” Marshall said. “It is in our interest to keep them fighting the Lizards, not least because, to speak frankly, they are doing a better job of it than anyone else at the moment They have their army and their economy already geared to war on a large scale, while we were still readying our resources when the Lizards came.”

  Larssen nodded before he realized General Marshall hadn’t really answered his question. Being able to talk like a politician, he supposed, was one of the job qualifications for Army Chief of Staff.

  As if thinking along, with him, Marshall said, “Before I tell you what you may say to the German charge, Dr. Larssen-and you may say nothing without direct authorization from me or someone at a higher level-I do need to know where the Metallurgical Laboratory presently stands in its researches.”

  “Of course, sir.” But Larssen remained bemused as he mustered his thoughts. Who was at a higher level than General Marshall? Only two men he could think of-the secretary of war and President Roosevelt. Was Marshall implying he might meet them? Jens shook his head. It didn’t matter now. He said, “When I left Chicago, sir, we were assembling an atomic pile which, we hoped, would have a k-factor greater than one.”

  “You’ll have to explain a bit further than that, I’m afraid,” Marshall said. “While I have studied your group’s report with great attention, I do not pretend to be a nuclear physicist”

  “It means arranging the uranium so that, as atomic nuclei are split-fission, the term is-the neutrons they release will split more atoms, and so on. Think of it as a positive feedback cycle, sir. In a bomb like the ones the Lizards have, it happens in a split second and releases enormous energy.”

  “What you are working toward is not a bomb in and of itself, then,” Marshall said.

  “That’s right” Larssen eyed the older man with respect. As Marshall had said, he was no nuclear physicist, but he had no trouble drawing implications from data. Jens continued, “It is an essential first step, though. We’ll control the nuclear reaction with cadmium rods that capture excess neutrons before they strike uranium atoms. That will keep it from getting out of hand. We have to walk before we can run, sir, and we need to understand how to produce a controlled chain reaction before we can think about making a bomb.”

  “And Chicago is the place where this research is going on?” Marshall said musingly.

  “In the United States, yes,” Larssen said.

  He’d hoped Marshall might tell him what, if anything, was happening elsewhere. The Chief of Staff, however, had taken security for granted longer than Jens had been alive. He did not even change expression to acknowledge he’d noticed the hint. He said, “We intended to fight for Chicago for other reasons. This gives us one more. Thank you for your courage in coming here to report on the Metallurgical Laboratory’s progress.”

  “Yes, sir.” Larssen wanted to ask more questions, but General Marshall did not strike him as a man given to loose talk even in private circumstances, which these emphatically were not. Nevertheless, he blurted what was uppermost in his mind: “General, can we beat the damned Lizards?”

  Colonel Groves shifted weight in his chair, making it squeak; Jens abruptly realized that wasn’t the way you were supposed to talk to the Army Chief of Staff. He felt himself flushing. He was so fair, he knew the flush would show. That only embarrassed him more.

  But Marshall did not seem angry. Maybe the perfectly unmilitary question touched a responsive chord in him, for he said, “Dr. Larssen, if you find anybody who knows the answer to that one, he wins the prize. We’re doing everything we can, and we’ll go on doing everything we can. The alternative is to surrender and live in slavery. Americans won’t accept that-maybe your grandfather was one who helped prove it.”

  “Sir, if you mean the Civil War, my grandfather was still back in Oslo then, trying to make a living as a cobbler. He came to the United States in the 1880s.”

  “Looking for something better than he had over there, no doubt,” Marshall said, nodding. “That’s a very human thing to do. I’ll be frank with you, Dr. Larssen: in purely military terms, the Lizards have us outclassed. Up to now, no one-not us, not the Germans, not the Russians, not the Japs-has been able to stop them. But no one has stopped trying, and we’ve put most of our own conflicts on the back shelf for the time being, as witness Mr. Thomsen’s presence here-across the hail from you, didn’t you say?”

  “That’s right.” Cooperating with the Third Reich still left a bad taste in Larssen’s mouth. “Didn’t I hear that Warsaw fell when the people there rose against the Nazis and for the Lizards?”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Marshall said soberly. “From the intelligence we have of what those people were suffering, I can see how the Lizards might have seemed the better bargain to them.” His voice went flat, emotionless. The very blankness of his face convinced Jens he wasn’t telling all he knew there. After a moment, that blankness lifted. “On a global scale, however, it is a small matter, as are the Chinese uprisings against the Japs and in favor of the Lizards. But the Lizards have weaknesses of their own.”

  Colonel Groves leaned forward. His chair squeaked again. “May I ask what some of those weaknesses are, sir? Knowing them may help me assign priorities in allocating materiel.”

  “The chief one, Colonel, is their rigid adherence to doctrine. They are methodical to a fault, and slow to adapt tactics to fit circumstances. Some of our nearest approaches to success have come from creating situations where we used their patterns to lure units into untenable situations and then exploited the advantages we gained in so doing. And now, if you will excuse me…”

  The dismissal was polite, but a dismissal nonetheless. Groves rose and saluted. Jens got up, too. He decided not to shake hands again; General Marshall’s attention had already returned to the papers that clogged his desk. The general’s aide took charge of them as they came Out of the office, led them back to the door by which they’d entered.

  “I
think you did pretty well there, Dr. Larssen,” Groves said, making slow headway against the tide of officers that flowed toward the entrance.

  “Call me Jens,” Larssen said.

  “Then I’m Leslie.” The heavyset colonel made an extravagant gesture. “Where now? The world lies at your feet.”

  Larssen laughed. Till now, he hadn’t known any senior military men. They were different from what he’d thought they’d be-Marshall scholarly and precise, plainly a first-class mind (a judgment Jens did not make lightly, not after working with several Nobel laureates); Groves without the Chief of Staff’s unbounded mental horizons, but full of bulldog competence and just enough whimsy to leaven the mix. Neither was the singleminded fighting man evoked by the label “general” or “colonel.”

  After a little thought, Larssen decided that made sense. The group, at the Met Lab weren’t the effete eggheads layfolk thought of when they imagined what nuclear physicists were like, either. People were more complicated than any subatomic particles.

  He wondered what the Lizards made of people. If the invaders were as compulsively orderly as Marshall had said, mankind’s aggressive randomness likely confused them no end. He hoped so-every weakness of theirs, no matter how tiny, was a corresponding strength for humanity.

  He also wondered what it would be like in one of their spaceships, cruising along far above the surface of the Earth, flying between planets, perhaps even between stars. They were the ones who could literally have the world under their feet. Cold, clear envy pierced him.

  Despite his musings, he was only a beat slow in answering Groves: “Unless you’ve got FDR up your sleeve there, Leslie, I think you’ve done as much as any man could. Thanks more than I can say for all your help.”

  “My pleasure.” Groves stuck out a hand. He had a grip like a hydraulic press. “You convinced me you and your group are on to something important, and my superiors need to understand that, too, so they can factor it into their calculations. As for Roosevelt, hmm…” He actually did look up his sleeve. “Sorry, no. He seems to have stepped out.”

  “Too bad. If you do happen to see him”-Larssen had no idea how probable that was, but believed in covering his bets-“mention the project if you get the chance.”

  “I’ll do that, Jens.” Groves glanced at his wrist again, this time just to check his watch. “I’d best get back to it. I’ve been away too long already. God only knows what’s stacking up on my desk. No rest for the weary, as they say.” With a last nod, he turned and headed back toward the Methodist church. Larssen hadn’t been able to park any closer than several blocks away. Watching Groves’ broad back recede, he concluded the colonel got results from those around him by working twice as hard as any of them. In that, he would have fit in well at the Metallurgical Lab.

  The physicist looked at his own watch. Nearly noon-no wonder his stomach was sounding reveille. He wondered what epicurean delight the Greenbrier was offering for lunch. Yesterday it had been canned pork and beans, canned corn, and canned fruit cocktail. Wryly shaking his head, he wondered about the consequences of excessive tin in the diet.

  Today’s menu, he discovered when he got to the hotel restaurant, was extravagant by current standards: Spam and canned peas. The peas were more nearly olive drab than green, but he ate them all the same, hoping they retained at least some of their vitamins. He also put down an extra buck and a half for a nickel bottle of Coke-that, nobody could snafu. The bottle, he noted, was closer to the color peas ought to be than the peas themselves were.

  As he was chasing the last sad, soft, overcooked peas with his fork, there was a stir at the entrance to the dining room. A couple of people started to clap. Larssen looked up, saw a short, pale, bullet-headed man wearing a homburg, steel-rimmed spectacles, and a suit of European cut. That face had looked out at him from countless newsreels, but he’d never thought to encounter Vyacheslav Molotov in the flesh.

  Something else occurred to him. His gaze flicked from table to table. Sure enough, there sat Hans Thomsen, also with a plate of Spam. The German charge d’affaires was affable, genial, a fluent English-speaker who’d worked hard to put the best face on the activities of the Nazi government until Hitler declared war on the United States. Larssen wondered how he felt to be in the presence of the Soviet foreign minister after Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Russia. He also wondered how Molotov would react to finding a Nazi representative here in the heart of the American government in refuge.

  Nor was his the only such curiosity. The dining room grew silent for a few seconds as people stopped talking and suspended forks in midair to see what would happen next Thomsen, Jens thought, recognized Molotov before the latter saw him. Maybe Molotov would not have noticed him at all but for the Nazi party badge he wore on his left lapel.

  The Russian had a face as impassive as any Larssen had ever seen. He did not change expression now, but he did hesitate be-fore proceeding into the dining room. Then he turned to the man beside him, a squarely built fellow whose suit was similar in cut to his own but much more poorly fitted. He spoke a single sentence of Russian.

  From the explosive coughs that went up, a few people understood what he had to say in the original. The squarely built man’s function was then revealed; he translated Molotov’s words into elegant, Oxford-accented English: “The foreign commissar of the USSR observes that, having already entered into diplomatic discussions with the Lizards, he has no objection to speaking to serpents as well.”

  More coughs rose, Larssen’s among them. His eyes swung back to Hans Thomsen. He doubted he could have been as politely insulting as Molotov, given what the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, all of humanity was supposed to be joining together to resist the invaders from another planet. If everyone kept remembering what was going on before the Lizards came, the united front would come crashing down. And if it did, that literally handed the Lizards the world.

  Thomsen was a trained diplomat. If he noticed Molotov had given him the glove, he never let on. He was smiling as he replied, “There is in English an old saying about the enemy of one’s enemy.”

  The interpreter murmured to Molotov. Now the Communist official looked straight back at the German. “It was on this basis, no doubt, that the imperialist powers of Great Britain and the United States allied with the peace-loving people of the USSR against the Hitlerite regime.”

  Watch out for this guy, Jens thought. He’s dangerous. Thomsen kept his smile, but it looked held in place by force of will Still, he had a counterthrust ready: “No doubt it was also on this basis that Finland allied with Germany after being invaded by the peace-loving people of the USSR.”

  As if at a tennis match, Larssen turned his head to look at Molotov. The match here, though, he thought, used a live hand grenade for a ball. Molotov’s lips might have drawn back from his teeth a millimeter or two. Through his interpreter, the Soviet foreign minister replied, “As we have both noted, the principle admits of broad application. Thus I am willing to discuss our own differences at another time.”

  The sigh of relief that filled the dining room was quite audible. Larssen didn’t consciously notice; he was too busy adding to it.

  8

  The hologram of Tosev 3 hung in space above its projector, just as it had before the Race began to add a fourth world to the Empire. Today, though, Atvar did not urge Kirel to project the image of the ferocious Tosevite warrior with his sword and chain mail that the Race’s probes had brought Home. Like everyone else in the fleet, Atvar had found out more about Tosevite warriors than he’d ever wanted to learn.

  The fleetlord turned to the assembled shiplords. “We are met here, today, valiant males, to evaluate the results of the first half-year’s fighting”-he used the Race’s chronology, of course; sluggish Tosev 3 had completed only a fourth of its orbit-“and to discuss our plans for the combat yet to come.”

  The shiplords accepted the introduction better than he’d dared hope. When the schedule for the conquest
of Tosev 3 was drawn up back on Home, the half-year meeting was the last one included. After half a year, everyone was certain, Tosev 3 would be firmly attached to the Empire. The Race lived by schedules and plans drawn up long before they were carried out. That Atvar’s chief underlings recognized the need for much more work was a measure of how much the Tosevites had shaken them.

  “We make progress,” Atvar insisted. “Large parts of Tosev 3 are under our virtually complete control.” On the hologram, portions of the planet’s land area changed color from their natural greens and browns to a bright golden hue: the southern half of the smaller continental mass, much of the southwestern part of the main continental mass. “The natives in these areas, while not as primitive as previously available data led us to believe, have been unable to offer resistance much above the nuisance level.”

  “May it please the exalted fleetlord,” Shiplord Straha of the 206th Emperor Yower said, “but much of this territory strikes me as being that on Tosev 3 least worth the having. True, it’s warm enough to suit our kind, but much of it is so beastly wet that our fighting males break out in molds and rots.”

  “Molds and rots are a small price to pay for victory,” Atvar answered. More of the hologram turned gold, so that Tosev 3 itself looked blotched and diseased. “Here are our holdings in the regions where the Big Uglies are most technologically advanced. As you can see for yourselves, valiant males, these have expanded considerably since last we gathered together.” The hologram rotated to give the shiplords a view of the entire planet.

  Brash as usual, Straha said, “Certainly we have made great gains. How could it be otherwise, when we are the Race? The question that arises, however, Exalted Fleetlord, is why our gains have not been greater still, why Tosevite forces yet remain in arms against us.”

  “May I speak, Exalted Fleetlord?” Kirel asked. At Atvar’s assent, the shiplord of the 127th Emperor Hetto went on, “The principal reason for our delays, Shiplord Straha, strikes me as obvious to a hatchling still wet from the egg: the Big Uglies’ capabilities are far greater than we imagined while readying the expeditionary force.”