Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s just exactly right,” Groves said. “I’m damn lucky I wasn’t in Washington, D.C., when they dropped their bomb there.” He snorted. “All they got rid of in Washington was some Congresscritters-odds are, they helped the war effort. But if they land one on Denver, we can’t make any more nuclear bombs of our own. And if we can’t do that, we lose the war.”

  “I know that, too,” Peterson answered. “But the reprocessing plant can only do so much. If you get more plutonium out of it, you put more byproducts into the filters-and if they make it through the filters, they go into the South Platte.”

  “We have to have more plutonium,” Groves said flatly. “If that means putting in more filters or doing more scrubbing of the ones we have, then take care of it. That’s what you’re for. You tell me you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody who can, I promise you that. You’ve got top priority for getting materials, not just from Denver but from all over the country. Use it or find another job.”

  Behind his horn-rimmed glasses, Peterson looked like a puppy who’d got a kick in the ribs for no reason at all. “It’s not the materials, General. We’re desperately short of trained personnel. We-”

  Groves glowered at him. “I told you, I don’t want excuses. I want results. If you don’t have enough trained men, train more. Or else use untrained men and break all your procedures down into baby steps any idiot can understand: if this happens when you do that, then go on and do this next thing. If something else happens, do that instead and try the procedure again. And ifthat orthat happens, yell for your boss, who really knows what’s going on. Takes a while to draft procedures like that, so you’d better get cracking on it.”

  “But-” Peterson began. Groves ignored him-ostentatiously ignored him, picking up the topmost sheet from his overflowing IN basket. The technician angrily got up and stomped out of the office. Groves had all he could do not to laugh. He’d seen furious stomps much better done. He made a mental note to keep an extra close watch on the plutonium reprocessing plant over the next few weeks. Either Peterson would get production up without releasing radioactive contamination into the river, or somebody else would get a crack at the job.

  The sheet Groves had picked up was important in its own right, though, important even by the standards of the moment, where everything in any way connected with atomic weapons had top priority. He rubbed his chin. This one was routed through the Office of Strategic Services, which was something he didn’t see every day.

  “So the damn Russians want our help, do they?” he muttered. He didn’t think much of the Russians, either their politics or their engineering ability. Still, they’d made the first human-built atomic bomb, even though they had used fissionables they’d stolen from the Lizards. That showed they had more on the ball than he’d given them credit for.

  Now, though, they were having trouble turning out their own radioactives, and they wanted somebody to get over there some kind of way and give them a hand. If it hadn’t been for the Lizards, Groves would have reacted to that with all the enthusiasm of a man who’d had a rattlesnake stuck in his skivvies. But with the Lizards in the picture, you worried about them first and only later about the prospect of Uncle Joe with an atomic bomb, or rather a whole bunch of atomic bombs.

  Groves leaned back in his swivel chair. It squeaked. He wished for a cigarette.While you’re at it, why not wish for the moon? Instead of worrying about the moon, he said, “I wish Larssen were still with us. He’d be the perfect guy to ship off to Moscow.”

  Larssen, though, was dead. He’d never been the same after his wife took up with that Army fellow-Yeager, that was his name. Then, even after Larssen made it to Hanford, Washington, and back, nobody’d wanted to disrupt work at the Metallurgical Laboratory by relocating. That had been a hell of a trip; too bad it was wasted. When it came to coping with the travails of the open road, Larssen was top-notch.

  What he couldn’t handle were his own inner demons. Finally, they must have got the better of him, because he’d shot a couple of men and headed east, toward Lizard-held territory. If he’d sung a song for the aliens, as Groves had feared he might, nuclear fire would have blossomed above Denver. But the cavalry had hunted him down before he could go over to the enemy.

  “Well, who does that leave?” Groves asked the office walls. Trouble was, the memorandum he’d got didn’t tell him enough. He didn’t know where the Reds were having trouble. Did they even have an atomic pile going? Was separating plutonium from an active pile their problem? Or were they trying to separate U-235 from U-238? The memo didn’t say. Trying to figure out what to do was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle when you didn’t have all the pieces and weren’t sure which ones were missing.

  Since they were Russians, he had to figure their problems were pretty basic. His own problem was pretty basic, too: could he spare anybody and ship him halfway around the world in the middle of war, with no guarantee he’d get there in one piece? And if he could, who did he hate enough to want to send him to Moscow, or wherever the Russians had their program?

  He sighed. “Yeah, Larssen would have been perfect,” he said. Nothing he could do about that, though. Nothing anybody could do about it, not till Judgment Day. Groves was not the sort to spend time-to waste time, as he would have thought of it-on something he couldn’t do anything about. He realized he couldn’t decide this one off the top of his head. He’d have to talk things over with the physicists.

  He looked at the letter from the OSS again. If somebody went over to lend the Russians a hand, the U.S.A. would get paid back with gadgets taken from a Lizard base that had mutinied and surrendered to the Soviet Army.

  “Have to make sure the Reds don’t cheat and give us stuff that doesn’t work or that we’ve already got,” he told the walls. The one thing you could rely on about the Russians was that you couldn’t rely on them.

  Then he stopped and read the letter again. He’d missed something there by letting his worries about the Russians blind him to the other things that were going on.

  “A Lizard base up and mutinied?” he said. He hadn’t heard of anything like that happening anywhere else. The Lizards made for solid, disciplined troops, no matter how much they looked like chameleons with delusions of grandeur. He wondered what had driven them far enough over the edge to go against their own officers.

  “Damn, I wish Yeager and those Lizard POWs were still here,” he muttered. “I’d pump ’em dry if they were.” Inciting Lizards to mutiny had nothing to do with his current assignment, but, when curiosity started itching at him, he felt as if he had to scratch or die.

  Then, reluctantly, he decided it was just as well Yeager hadn’t been around when Jens Larssen got back from Hanford. Larssen probably would have gone after him and Barbara both with that rifle he carried. That whole mess hadn’t been anybody’s fault, but Larssen hadn’t been able to let go of it, either. One way or another, Groves was sure it had flipped him over the edge.

  “Well, no point in worrying about it now,” he said. Larssen was dead, Yeager and his wife were gone to Hot Springs, Arkansas, along with the Lizard POWs. Groves suspected Yeager was still doing useful things with the Lizards; he’d had a real flair for thinking along with them. Groves didn’t know exactly what that said about Yeager’s own mental processes-nothing good, odds were-but it was handy.

  He dismissed Yeager from his thoughts as he had Larssen. If the Russians were willing to pay to get the knowledge they needed to build atomic bombs, they needed it badly. On the other hand, Lenin had said something about the capitalists’ selling the Soviet Union the rope the Reds would use to hang them. If they got nuclear secrets, would they think about using them against the United States one fine day?

  “Of course they will-they’re Russians,” Groves said. For that matter, had the shoe been on the other foot, the U.S.A. wouldn’t have hesitated to use knowledge in its own best interests, no matter where that knowledge came from. That was how you played the game.

  The other q
uestion was, did such worries really matter? It was short-term benefits versus long-term risks. If the Russians had to bail out of the war because they got beat without nuclear weapons, then worrying about what would happen down the line was foolish. You’d fret about what a Russia armed with atomic bombs could do to the United States after Russia had done everything it could do to the Lizards.

  From all he’d learned-Yeager and the Lizard prisoners came back to mind-the Lizards excelled at long-term planning. They looked down their snouts at people because people, measured by the way they looked at things, had no foresight. From a merely human perspective, though, the Lizards were so busy looking at the whole forest that they sometimes didn’t notice the tree next door was in the process of toppling over and landing on their heads.

  “Sooner or later, we’ll find out whether they’re right or we are, or maybe that everybody’s wrong,” he said.

  That wasn’t the sort of question with which he was good at dealing. Tell him you needed this built within that length of time for the other amount of money and he’d either make it for you or tell you it couldn’t be done-and why. Those were the kinds of questions engineers were supposed to handle.You want philosophy, he thought,you should have gone to a philosopher.

  And yet, in the course of his engineering work for this project, he’d listened to a lot of what the physicists had to say. Learning how the bomb did what it did helped him figure out how to make it. But when Fermi and Szilard and the rest of them got to chewing the fat, the line between engineering and philosophy sometimes got very blurry. He’d always thought he had a good head for math, but quantum mechanics made that poor head spin.

  Well, he didn’t have to worry about it, not in any real sense of the word. What he did have to worry about was picking some luckless physicist and shipping him off to Russia. Of all the things he’d ever done in his nation’s service, he couldn’t think of one that roused less enthusiasm in him.

  And, compared to the poor bastard who’d actually have to go, he was in great shape.

  III

  Panagiotis Mavrogordato pointed to the coastline off theNaxos’ port rail. “There it is,” he said in Greek-accented German. “The Holy Land. We dock in Haifa in a couple of hours.”

  Moishe Russie nodded. “Meaning no offense,” he added in German of his own, with a guttural Yiddish flavor to it, “but I won’t be sorry to get off your fine freighter here.”

  Mavrogordato laughed and tugged his flat-crowned black wool sailor’s cap down lower on his forehead. Moishe wore a similar cap, a gift from one of the sailors aboard theNaxos. He’d thought the Mediterranean would be warm and sunny all the time, even in winter. It was sunny, but the breeze that blew around him-blew through him-was anything but warm.

  “There’s no safe place in a war,” Mavrogordato said. “If we got through this, I expect we can get through damn near anything,Theou thelontos.” He took out a string of amber worry beads and worked on them to make sure God would be willing.

  “I can’t argue with you about that,” Russie said. The rusty old ship had been sailing into Rome when what had been miscalled the eternal city-and was the Lizards’ chief center in Italy-exploded in atomic fire. The Germans were still bragging about that over the shortwave, even though the Lizards had vaporized Hamburg shortly afterwards in retaliation.

  “Make sure you and your family are ready to disembark the minute we tie up at the docks,” Mavrogordato warned. “The lot of you are the only cargo we’re delivering here this trip, and as soon as the Englishmen pay us off for getting you here in one piece, we’re heading back to Tarsus as fast as theNaxos will take us.” He stamped on the planking of the deck. TheNaxos had seen better decades. “Not that that’s what you’d call fast.”

  “We didn’t bring enough to have to worry about having it out of order,” Moishe answered. “As long as I make sure Reuven isn’t down in the engine room, we’ll be ready as soon as you like.”

  “That’s a good boy you have there,” the Greek captain answered. Mavrogordato’s definition of a good boy seemed to be one who got into every bit of mischief imaginable. Moishe’s standards were rather more sedate. But, considering everything Reuven had been through-everything the whole family had been through-he couldn’t complain nearly so much as he would have back in Warsaw.

  He went back to the cabin he shared with Reuven and his wife Rivka, to make sure he’d not been telling fables to Mavrogordato. Sure enough, their meager belongings were neatly bundled, and Rivka was making sure Reuven stayed in one place by reading to him from a book of Polish fairy tales that had somehow made the trip first from Warsaw to London and then from London almost to the Holy Land. If you read to Reuven, or if he latched onto a book for himself, he’d hold still; otherwise, he seemed a perpetual motion machine incarnated in the shape of a small boy-and Moishe could think of no more fitting shape for a perpetual-motion machine to have.

  Rivka put up the book and looked a question at him. “We land in a couple of hours,” he said. She nodded. She was the glue that held their family together, and he-well, he was smart enough to know it.

  “I don’t want to get off theNaxos,” Reuven said. “I like it here. I want to be a sailor when I grow up.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Rivka told him. “This is Palestine we’re going to, the Holy Land. Do you understand that? There haven’t been many Jews here for hundreds and hundreds of years, and now we’re going back. We may even go to Jerusalem. ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ people say during the High Holy Days. That will really come true for us now, do you see?”

  Reuven nodded, his eyes big and round. Despite their travels and travails, they were bringing him up to understand what being a Jew meant, and Jerusalem was a name to conjure with. It was a name to conjure with for Moishe, too. He’d never imagined ending up in Palestine, even if he was being brought here to help the British rather than for any religious reason.

  Rivka went back to reading. Moishe walked up to the bow of theNaxos and watched Haifa draw near. The town rose up from the sea along the slopes of Mount Carmel. Even in winter, even in cold, the Mediterranean sun shed a clearer, brighter light than he was used to seeing in Warsaw or London. Many of the houses and other buildings he saw were whitewashed; in that penetrating sunlight, they sparkled as if washed with silver.

  Mixed among the buildings were groves of low, spreading trees with gray-green leaves. He’d never seen their like. When Captain Mavrogordato came up for a moment, he asked him what they were. The Greek stared in amazement. “You don’t know olives?” he exclaimed.

  “No olive trees in Poland,” Moishe said apologetically. “Not in England, either.”

  The harbor drew near. A lot of the men on the piers wore long robes-some white, others bright with stripes-and headcloths.Arabs, Moishe realized after a moment. The reality of being far, far away from everything he’d grown up with hit him like a club.

  Other men wore work clothes of the kind with which he was more familiar: baggy pants, long-sleeved shirts, a few in overalls, cloth caps or battered fedoras taking the place of the Arabs’ kerchiefs. And off by themselves stood a knot of men in the khaki with which Moishe had grown so familiar in England: British military men.

  Mavrogordato must have seen them, too, for he steered theNaxos toward the pier where they stood. The black plume of coal smoke that poured from the old freighter’s stacks shrank, then stopped as the ship nestled smoothly against the dockside. Sailors and dockworkers made theNaxos fast with lines. Others dropped the gangplank into place. With that thump, Moishe knew he could walk down to the land of Israel, the land from which his forefathers had been expelled almost two thousand years before. The hair at the back of his neck prickled up in awe.

  Rivka and Reuven came out on deck. Moishe’s wife was carrying one duffel bag; a sailor had another slung over his shoulder. Moishe took it from the man, saying,“Evkharisto poly — thanks very much.” It was almost the only Greek he’d picked up on the long, nervous voyage across the Medi
terranean, but a useful phrase to have.

  “Parakalo,”the sailor answered with a smile: “You’re welcome.”

  The uniformed Englishmen walked toward theNaxos. “May I-may we-go to them?” Moishe asked Mavrogordato.

  “Go ahead,” the captain said. “I’m coming, too, to make sure I get paid.”

  Moishe’s feet thudded on the gangplank. Rivka and Reuven followed closely, with Mavrogordato right behind them. Moishe took one last step. Then he was off the ship and onto the soil-well, the docks-of the Holy Land. He wanted to kneel down and kiss the dirty, creosote-stained wood.

  Before he could, one of the Englishmen said, “You would be Mr. Russie? I’m Colonel Easter, your liaison here. We’ll get you in contact with your coreligionists as soon as may be. Things have been rather dicey lately, so your assistance will be most welcome. Having everyone pulling in the same direction will help the war effort, don’t you know?”

  “I will do what I can,” Moishe answered in his slow, accented English. He studied Easter without much liking: the man plainly saw him as a tool, nothing more. That was how the Lizards had seen him, too. He liked the British cause better than he had that of the aliens, but he was sick of being anyone’s tool.

  Off to one side, a British officer handed Panagiotis Mavrogordato several neat rolls of gold sovereigns. The Greek beamed from ear to ear. He didn’t think of Moishe as a tool: he thought of him as a meal ticket, and made no bones about it. That struck Moishe as a more honest approach than the one Easter showed.

  The Englishman said, “If you’ll come with me, Mr. Russie, you and your family, we have a buggy waiting down past the end of the dock. Sorry we can’t lay on a motorcar for you, but petrol is in rather short supply these days.”

  Petrol was in short supply all over the world. Colonel Easter hardly needed to be polite in mentioning its absence. He ignored politeness at a much more basic level: neither he nor any of his men made any move to take the duffel bags from Moishe and Rivka. You worried about whether guests were comfortable. Tools-who cared about tools?