Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Like any true believer, Molotov was certain the historical dialectic would one day produce a proletarian revolution among the Lizards. Given what scraps he knew of their history, though, he was not prepared for mankind to wait the thousands of years the dialectic was liable to take.

  Brigadier General Leslie Groves had a sign over his desk in the Science Hall at the University of Denver: DO IT ANYHOW. He scrawled his signature on a report and got up from the desk: a big, ginger-haired man with a big belly and enough driving energy for any three ordinary mortals. That energy, and a gift for organization that went with it, had made him a first-rate military engineer and led to his being put in charge of America’s effort to build an atomic bomb.

  As Groves put on his cap, he glanced back at the sign. He’d used all his impressive energy to make sure the United States built the first human-made atomic bomb, only to be beaten by the Russians, of all people.

  That wounded his pride. Losing the race to the Germans would have been a catastrophe had the Lizards not come. Under the present circumstances, though, it wouldn’t have surprised him-the Germans were the ones who’d discovered nuclear fission, after all. But the Russians-

  “The Russians,” he muttered to himself as he tramped down the hall. “Unfair advantages.” The Russians and Germans had split a load of plutonium they’d captured from the Lizards not far from Kiev. Thanks to Polish Jews who’d intercepted their courier, the Germans had had to split their half again; the American Metallurgical Laboratory physicists had the half the Germans had been forced to disgorge. Neither that half nor what the Germans bad left was enough by itself to make a bomb. If the Russians had kept as much as the Germans had started out with, though, they’d had plenty.

  “All right, so they didn’t do it all by themselves,” Groves said. That they’d done it ahead of the United States in any way, shape, form, color, or size still rankled, no matter how much the bomb they’d used had helped the war effort against the Lizards.

  It rankled more people than Groves, too. Ever since the Russian bomb went off, the Denver papers bad been screaming that the U.S.A. should have been the first country to blow the Lizards to hell and gone. None of the reporters and editorial writers had shown that he knew his atoms from third base, and none of them (thank God!) seemed to have a clue that the Met Lab was operating out of the University of Denver these days.

  On his way from Science Hall to the football stadium that housed the atomic pile the physicists had built, Groves passed a sergeant leading a couple of Lizard POWs. The man and the aliens were almost friends by now; they chatted in a mixture of English and the Lizards’ language.

  “Morning, General,” the sergeant said, saluting.

  “Superior sir,” the two Lizards added in their hissing English.

  “Morning, Yeager.” Groves returned the salute. He even grudged the Lizards a nod. “Ullhass, Ristin.” As individuals, they looked strange, but not particularly dangerous. They were about the size and build of skinny ten-year-olds, with scaly, green-brown skins. Their bodies leaned forward slightly at the hips, and had stubby little tails to balance that. Their fingers and toes bore claws rather than nails. They had forward-thrusting muzzles filled with lots of small, sharp teeth, and long tongues they’d stick out like snakes. Their eyes were like a chameleon’s, on independently rotating turrets so they could look in two directions at the same time. No mere humans had ever put the United States in such deadly danger, though.

  Groves tramped on. Science Hall was near the north end of the campus, a long way away from the stadium. The walk helped keep his weight down. So did the short rations everybody was on these days. He was a long way from skinny even so. Had things been a little different, he would have looked like one of the blimps the Navy flew (or, more likely, had flown) out of Lakehurst, New Jersey.

  Outside the football stadium, a guard saluted Groves, who noted approvingly that the fellow was under cover so he couldn’t be spotted from the air. One of the keys to the American atomic bomb project was not letting the Lizards know it existed.

  It was shadowy under the stadium, but not cool. During the day, Denver was like a bake oven in summer, even though the mile-high air shed heat fast at night. The physicists and technicians in charge of the pile nodded as Groves approached. They didn’t necessarily love him, but they took him seriously, which sufficed.

  “How much closer are we?” he asked Enrico Fermi.

  “We have gained another day,” the physicist answered. “The output of plutonium from this pile does continue to increase.”

  “Not fast enough,” Groves growled. The pile produced grams of plutonium per day. The United States needed several kilograms of the stuff to add to what they received from inside the Soviet Union by way of a reluctant German courier, the Jewish irregulars in Poland, and a British submarine. Groves had shepherded that plutonium all the way from Boston to Denver, only to be told when he got it here that he hadn’t brought enough. The memory still rankled.

  Fermi shrugged a large Latin shrug. “General, I cannot change the laws of nature. I can learn to apply them more efficiently, and this I try to do: this is how we gain time on the date I first predicted. But to increase production to any really great degree, we need to build more piles. That is all there is to it.”

  “That’s not going fast enough, either,” Groves said. Another pile was going up under the stands at the opposite end of the football field. They had plenty of uranium oxide for it. Getting the super-pure graphite they needed was another matter. Groves was an expediter supreme, but the transportation snarl into which the Lizards had thrown the United States was more than enough to drive even expediters mad.

  “What we really need is to build piles of more efficient design,” Fermi said. “The Hanford site on the Columbia would be ideal-far more water for cooling than we can take from the South Platte, an area far removed from the Lizards-”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Groves broke in. “They’re supposed to have a base in Idaho, only a couple of hundred miles off to the east.”

  “A small one.” Fermi pinched his thumb and forefinger together to show how small. “As soon as Professor Larssen returns to confirm that the site is as good as it appears to be, we will begin centering more and more of our activities there.”

  “As soon as Larssen gets back, yeah,” Groves said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. As far as he was concerned, Jens Larssen could stay away indefinitely. Yeah, sure, the guy had a beef: he’d been away from the Met Lab crew for a long time on a dangerous mission (any cross-country travel counted as a dangerous mission these days), and his wife, figuring he had to be dead, had fallen for Sergeant Sam Yeager-he’d been a corporal then-married him, and got pregnant. When Larssen turned out to be alive after all, she’d decided to stay with Yeager. None of that was calculated to improve a man’s attitude.

  But goddamn it, you couldn’t let how you felt drag down your work the way Larssen had. It wasn’t just his own work that had been hurting, either. He’d been taking his colleagues’ minds off what they were supposed to be doing, too. Groves hadn’t been sorry to see him volunteer to scout out Hanford, Washington, and would hold in his delight at seeing him come back.

  “Professor Larssen has had a difficult time,” Fermi said, reacting to the dislike in Groves’ voice.

  “Professor Fermi, the whole country-hell, the whole world-has had a difficult time,” Groves retorted. “It’s not like he’s the only one. He’d better stop whimpering and pull himself together.”

  He leaned toward Fermi, using his physical presence to make his point for him. He wasn’t that much taller than the Italian, but he was wider, and harder and tougher to boot. Fermi said, “If you will excuse me, General, I have some calculations I must attend to,” and hurried away.

  Groves grunted. Scoring a victory against a mild-mannered physics prof was like shooting fish in a barrel-yeah, you’d done it, but so what? When you’d cut your teeth on hard cases, you barely even noticed biting dow
n on a Fermi.

  And besides, you couldn’t bite down too hard on Fermi. Without false modesty, Groves knew he was very good at what he did. There weren’t a whole lot of people who were both the engineer and administrator he was. But if he dropped dead tomorrow, George Marshall would pick somebody just about as good to replace him. Who was just about as good as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist? In a word, nobody.

  The bombs would be built. He had no doubt of that: first the one that incorporated the plutonium stolen from the Lizards, then others made entirely with human-produced nuclear material. The know-how and resources were in place; the United States merely had to await results.

  Only trouble was, the United States couldn’t wait. As things stood, that first bomb was a year away, maybe more. How much of the States would be left in American hands by the time it was ready to blow?Not enough, Groves thought gloomily; the guys with the guns and the tanks and the airplanes were doing all they could, but all they could was liable not to be enough.

  That meant every day he could shave off getting the first bomb ready was a day that might save the country. Nobody in the United States had faced that weight of responsibility since the Civil War. He shrugged his broad shoulders. He had to hope they were strong enough to bear the burden.

  Ristin threw a baseball to Sam Yeager. The Lizard POW handled the ball as if it were a grenade, but he threw pretty straight. The ball slapped leather in Yeager’s beat-up glove. “Good toss,” he said, and threw the baseball on to Ullhass.

  Ullhass’ mitt was even more battered than Yeager’s, but that wasn’t his problem. He lunged at the ball with the glove, as if he were trying to push it away rather than catch it. Not surprisingly, he didn’t catch it. “Stupid egg-addled thing,” he said in his own language as he stooped to pick the ball up off the grass, and added the emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

  Yeager felt a surge of pride at how automatically he understood what the Lizard was saying. He wasn’t any big brain; he’d had his third stripe only a few days. He hadn’t been a prof before the Lizards came, either. He’d been an outfielder for the Decatur Commodores of the Class B Three-I League; the only reason the draft hadn’t grabbed him was that he wore full dentures, uppers and lowers, a souvenir of the 1918 influenza epidemic that had almost killed him, and had left him so weak and debilitated that his teeth rotted in his head.

  But prof or no, he’d been an avid reader ofAstounding and the other science-fiction pulps. After the Lizards came, the Army didn’t care any more whether you had teeth; all they worried about was a pulse-if you had one, you were in. So, when his unit captured some Lizards back in Illinois, he’d volunteered to try to communicate with the things… and here he was in Denver, working hand in hand not only with the aliens but also with the high foreheads who were taking what Ullhass and Ristin knew and using it to help build an atomic bomb for the U.S.A.Not bad for an overage ballplayer, he thought.

  Ullhass threw the baseball to Ristin. Ristin was a better natural athlete than the other Lizard, or maybe just smarter. He’d figured out how to catch with a glove, anyhow: let the ball come to him, then close his meat hand over it to make sure it didn’t get out.

  He still threw funny, though; Sam had to jump high to catch his next fling. “Sorry, superior sir,” Ristin said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s keeping score.” Yeager brushed back into place a lock of dark blond hair that had escaped from under the fore-and-aft Army cap he wore. He threw Ullhass the ball. But for the nature of his friends, it was an all-American scene: three guys playing catch on a college campus on a bright summer’s day. You didn’t get any more Norman Rockwell than that-except Norman Rockwell had never painted a Lizard with a baseball glove.

  Just to add to theSaturday Evening Post quality of the scene, here came Barbara. Sam waved and grinned enormously, partly because he was always glad to see her and partly because she was wearing the calico blouse and blue jeans in which she’d married him up in the great metropolis of Chugwater, by God, Wyoming. Even for Yeager, who in seventeen years of pro ball thought he’d seen every small town in the U.S. of A., that had been a new one.

  He wondered how long she’d be able to keep wearing those jeans. Not that they didn’t look good on her-she was a little on the lean side, but she definitely had hips and a pert posterior-but her pregnancy was just beginning to show with her clothes off. As best as he could tell, they’d started Junior their wedding night.

  “Hi, honey,” he said as she drew near. “What’s up?” The question came out more seriously than he’d expected; she wasn’t smiling as she usually did.

  “General Groves sent me out to find you himself,” she answered. “You’ve got new orders, he said.”

  “New orders?” Sam pulled a face. “I was just thinking how much I liked what I was doing here. Did he say what they were?”

  Barbara shook her head. Her hair, a couple of shades darker than his, flew around her head. “I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said he wanted to give them to you in person.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Yeager said. Any time a general gave a sergeant orders in person, something out of the ordinary was going on, maybe something liable to get the sergeant killed. But if General Groves wanted to see him, he couldn’t very well say no. He turned to Ullhass and Ristin, speaking in the mix of English and Lizard he usually used with them: “Come on, boys, let’s go see what the exalted projectlord wants with me.”

  Ristin’s mouth fell open in a Lizardy chuckle. “You’re a funny Big Ugly, superior sir.” He used the Lizards’ slang name for people as unselfconsciously as Sam saidLizard instead ofmale of the Race around him.

  The two humans and two Lizards strolled across the University of Denver campus toward Science Hall. A couple of times, people they knew waved to them. Ullhass and Ristin waved back as casually as Barbara and Sam did; they were an accepted part of the Met Lab staff by now. Technically, they remained prisoners, but nobody worried much about their trying to escape.

  Groves was a big enough wheel to rate a guard outside his office: the same guard who’d been assigned to Jens Larssen for a while. Yeager didn’t hold that against him. “Morning, Oscar,” he said. “You want to keep an eye on these two tough guys while the general tells me whatever he tells me? Try to keep ’em from stealing all our secrets here.”

  “Sure, Sam,” Oscar answered. Even without his rifle, Yeager would have bet on him against Ristin and Ullhass both; dark and quiet he might be, but he’d seen nasty action somewhere-he had the look. Now he nodded to Barbara. “Morning, ma’am.”

  “Good morning, Oscar,” she answered. She spoke more precisely than Sam did. Hell, she spoke more precisely than most people did. She’d been a graduate student in medieval English out at Berkeley before the war; that was where she’d met Jens.

  Oscar turned back to Sam. “Go on in. General Groves, he’s expecting you.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Yeager turned the doorknob, feeling the same willies he’d had whenever a manager called to him in a certain tone of voice after a game.Oh, God, he thought.Where have they gone and traded me to now?

  He went through the door, closed it after him. General Groves looked up from the notes he was scribbling on a typed report. Sam came to attention and saluted. “Sergeant Samuel Yeager reporting as ordered, sir,” he said formally.

  “At ease, Yeager. You’re not in trouble,” Groves said, returning the salute. He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down if you care to.” When Sam had, Groves went on, “Is it your opinion that we’ve wrung just about everything your two scaly accomplices know about nuclear physics out of them?”

  “Yes, sir, I’d say that’s probably true,” Yeager answered after a moment’s thought.

  “Good. I’d have thrown you out of here on your ear if you’d tried to tell me anything else,” Groves said. By the way the muscles shifted in his big shoulders, he’d meant it literally. “The United States can still learn a lot about the
Lizards from Ullhass and Ristin, though, even if what we learn has nothing directly to do with the Metallurgical Laboratory. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”

  “No doubt about it, sir,” Yeager said. “The more we know about the Lizards, the better. They’ll still be around from now on even if we manage to beat them, and that’s not counting this colonization fleet of theirs. It’s due in-what? — twenty years?”

  “That’s about right, yes.” General Groves looked intently across the desk at Sam. “The way you answered that last question convinced me these are absolutely the right orders for you: you casually came to the same conclusion a staff of government experts has needed months to reach.”

  Probably comes from reading science fiction,Yeager thought. He didn’t say that out loud; he had no idea how Groves felt about that Buck Rogers stuff. He did say, “You haven’t told me what the orders are, sir.”

  “So I haven’t.” Groves glanced down at some papers behind hisIN basket that Yeager couldn’t see. “We’ve established a center for interrogation and research on Lizard POWs down in Arkansas. I’m going to send Ristin and Ullhass there, and I’m ordering you to accompany them. I think you can best serve your country by using your rapport with the Lizards, and that’s the place for you to do it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sam said. He’d been traded, all right, but to a place he didn’t mind going… assuming he could get there. “Uh, sir, what sort of transportation will we have? There’s a lot of Lizards between here and Arkansas that aren’t prisoners, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. Nevertheless, you’ll fly,” Groves answered.