Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Mutt had seen plenty of explosions and their aftermaths. He’d seen an ammunition dump go up, too, maybe from a lucky hit, maybe because somebody got careless-not enough was left afterwards for anyone to be sure. But he’d never seen anything like this.

  He had no idea how high into the night the glowing cloud mounted. Miles, that was all he could be sure of. Other thing was, the base of that cloud looked a lot farther away than he’d figured it would-which meant the explosion was even bigger than he’d guessed.

  “Goodgodalmightydamnwillyoulookitthat!” Muldoon said, as if words had just been invented and nobody quite knew yet where they stopped and started. Mutt had the feeling that words to describe what he was seeing hadn’t been invented yet, and maybe never would be.

  Whatwas he seeing, anyhow? Pursuing his earlier thought, he said, “That ain’t no ammo dump. You could blow up all the ammo in the world, and it wouldn’t make a cloud like that there one.”

  “Yeah,” Muldoon agreed, almost with a sigh. “Whatever it is, it came down on the Lizards’ heads, not ours. Look where it’s at, Lieutenant-that’s the part of Shytown we retreated out of.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Mutt said. “Maybe we was lucky to get out of there when we did. Or maybe-” He stopped, his eyes going wide. “Or maybe, an’ I hate like hell to say it, the brass ain’t so dumb after all.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ about, uh, sir?” Muldoon said. Then he got a faraway look on his face, too. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Lieutenant, you think we pulled back on purpose so those scaly bastards could walk right into that big boom like they was moths divin’ into a fire?”

  “Don’t know if it’s so, but it stands to reason,” Daniels answered. “The Russians, they figured out last year how to make one of them big bombs the Lizards use, and the Nazis, they fired one off last week, I hear, ‘less’n the radio’s tellin’ more lies’n usual.”

  “Fat lot of good it did ’em, too,” Muldoon retorted. “The Lizards went and blew one of their cities to hell and gone right afterwards.”

  Mutt refused to let that distract him. “If the Reds can do it and the goddamn Nazis can do it, though, why the hell can’t we? You think we don’t got a bunch o’ guys with thick glasses and what d’you call ’ems-slide rules, that’s it-tryin’ to figure out how to make our own bombs? You’re crazy if you do. And you ain’t never seen an explosion like that, and neither have I, so what do you think it’s liable to be?”

  “That makes sense, sounds like,” Muldoon said reluctantly. Then he brightened. “Jeez, if that’s what it was, Lieutenant, a whole bunch o’ Lizards and all their gear just went up in smoke.”

  “Reckon that was the idea.” Daniels thought back to the crew who’d been hiding the big crate in what looked like more rubble. Had they been setting the bomb there so it would be waiting for the Lizards when they advanced in pursuit of the withdrawing Americans? He didn’t know for sure; no way he ever would, but he couldn’t think of any better reason for wanting to conceal a crate. He laughed. You’d have a devil of a time proving him wrong, that was for sure.

  “Let’s say it was one o’ those bombs, Lieutenant,” Muldoon persisted. “When the Germans used one, next thing you know the Lizards knocked one of their towns flat, like I said. They gonna do the same thing to us?”

  Mutt hadn’t thought about that. Now that he did, he found he didn’t fancy any of the answers that popped into his head. “Damfino,” he said at last. “We’ll just have to wait and find out, seems like to me. That’d be a damned ugly way to fight a war, wouldn’t it? You blew up all o’ my guys in this city over here, so I’ll go and blow up all o’ yours in that one over yonder.”

  “Shit, that’s what the krauts and the limeys were doin’ to each other when the Lizards got here,” Muldoon said. “But doin’ it with one bomb to a city makes you start runnin’ out o’ cities pretty damn quick.”

  “Lordy, don’t it just,” Mutt said. “Like two guys playin’ Russian roulette, ‘cept they’re pointin’ the guns at each other an’ five o’ the chambers are loaded. Maybe all six of ’em, you come to that.”

  The cloud to the south of them was fading now, dispersing, the wind sweeping it away toward Lake Michigan. Pretty soon it would be gone. But the horrible dilemmas it raised would not disappear so soon.

  Uneasily, Mutt looked north, east, west, and then last of all south once more, toward and past the dissipating cloud. “What you tryin’ to do, Lieutenant?” Muldoon asked. “You tryin’ to figure out where the Lizards are gonna drop the one they use to answer ours?”

  Daniels scowled. He didn’t like being that obvious. But he didn’t want to be a liar, either, not when he was talking about something as important as this. He sighed. “Yeah,” he said.

  The alarm hissed hideously. When Atvar woke, for a moment he thought he was dreaming about the last time the alarm had gone off. Then, incontestably, his senses came to full alertness, and the alarm was still yammering away. And there was Pshing’s face in the communicator screen, just as it had been that dreadful, all-too-recent night.

  “Activate two-way voice,” Atvar said to the computer, as he had then. Whatever disaster his adjutant had to report, it couldn’t be so hideous as news of the Deutsche with nuclear weapons. So the fleetlord told himself, even as he was asking Pshing, “What now?”

  “Exalted Fleetlord-” Pshing began, and then had trouble going on. Gathering himself, he finally managed to continue: “Exalted Fleetlord, I regret to have to inform you that the Tosevites of the not-empire of the United States detonated a fission bomb in the northern sector of the city known as Chicago. As our males had only just succeeded in occupying this sector, and as the front lay not far north, our concentrations in the area of the explosion, and thus our losses, appear to have been heavy.”

  A predator in the warm, friendly deserts of Home dug a pit in the sand and hid at the bottom. When an animal stumbled into the pit, it would scrabble at the loose sand, but generally slide down deeper and deeper until the trapmaker came out and devoured it with a minimum expenditure of effort. Atvar felt now like a creature trapped in one of those sand pits. No matter what he did on Tosev 3, things kept getting worse.

  He gathered himself. “Tell me the rest,” he said, as if knowing the rest could somehow restore what the Race had lost.

  Pshing clung to what had been normality with some of the same desperation Atvar felt “Exalted Fleetlord, the bomb appears to have been of the same type as that which the Deutsche employed against us: that is to say, some of the plutonium in it was stolen from us, while the Big Uglies produced the rest for themselves.”

  “But the American Big Uglies are on the other side of an immense ocean from the Deutsche and the Russkis,” Atvar said, “and we have made air passage between the continental masses rare, difficult, and dangerous for the Tosevites to attempt. To think they could have smuggled the explosive metal across in one of the few successful flights-” He checked himself. “Wait I am overlooking something.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord?” By the tone of his interrogative cough, Pshing didn’t see what Atvar was missing.

  “Water. It is the curse of this world whether liquid or frozen,” Atvar said. “The Big Uglies have so much of it to deal with, they transport goods on it much more readily than ever became the norm back on Home. We’ve not properly dealt with their ships and boats because we’ve assumed them to be of relatively small importance-and because we’ve had so many other commitments on this miserable iceball of a world that seemed more urgent We may now be paying the price for our inability to think as the Big Uglies do.”

  Pshing made an eloquent gesture of distaste. “If becoming like the Big Uglies is a condition for victory over them, I for one would almost rather lose.”

  “A distinct point,” Atvar admitted. “Were it only my own personal choice, I should agree with you. But we have committed ourselves to bringing this world and its noxious inhabitants under the rule of the Emperor.” He cast down his eyes. W
hat would his sacred sovereign think when he learned of the difficulties the Race was having in annexing Tosev 3? First reports of combat were already on the way Home, but at laggard lightspeed would have completed only about a sixth part of their journey.

  “For the Emperor, I would brave anything,” Pshing said, seeming to take fresh spirit. Sometimes Atvar thought loyalty and reverence to the Emperor were all that kept his males performing as they should on a world where the weather and the natives both seemed calculated to drive them mad.

  Atvar forced himself to think clearly, even if not like a Tosevite. “The composition of the bomb, like the one the Deutsche used, means the Americans will soon have more such weapons, of production entirely native. For that matter,” he added, as if reminding himself, “they may already have more such weapons, and be saving them for future strikes against us.”

  “Underestimating the capacity of the Big Uglies has caused us grief and misfortune ever since we arrived here,” Pshing said.

  “Truth,” Atvar answered wearily. “Even when we build their advances in technology into our planning, as we did with the campaign against the Deutsche, we still underestimate them-and pay the price for it.” He let out a long, hissing sigh. “Rouse the targeting specialists. Also rouse the shiplord Kirel and summon him to the operations chamber. We must plan our response to the American bomb.”

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.”

  When Kirel reached the operations chamber, Atvar couldn’t decide if he looked sleepy or stunned. A bit of both, perhaps. “Another nuclear weapon, your adjutant tells me,” the shiplord said. “From the Americans this time? Did I hear that correctly?”

  “You did,” Atvar said. “As at Breslau, our progress at Chicago has been halted, and the spearhead of our forces destroyed.” He hissed again, this time thoughtfully. “In both instances, we were led to impale ourselves on the bomb by unforced or lightly forced retreats on the part of the Big Uglies. In future, we shall be more wary.”

  “A worthy plan, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said, “but the very recent past has been extremely damaging to us. Have we any notion where the Americans prepared their fission bomb?”

  “I wish we did,” Atvar said. “That site would no longer exist. The Americans cannot hide their program in an already radioactive area, as the Deutsche seem to be doing. They are simply careful about allowing leaks to pinpoint their atomic piles and reprocessing plants.”

  “That is a problem,” Kirel said-a good-sized understatement. “If they destroy fighting males with their bombs and we only civilians with ours, do they not gain advantage from that?”

  “Some, certainly, but we also destroy industrial sites, and, were this planet not industrialized, it would long since have been incorporated into the Empire,” Atvar answered. Kirel could not disagree with that Atvar went on, “We also put pressure on the Tosevites’ not-empires to accommodate themselves to us while they still have a significant civilian population.”

  “None of the Tosevite empires and not-empires we have bombed has yet chosen to accommodate itself to us,” Kirel remarked, but he let it go at that. He knew better, these days, than to criticize Atvar. After a moment, he called up the map of the United States and highlighted two cities the targeting specialists had chosen. Pointing to one, he said, “Here is a centrally located target, Exalted Fleetlord, if you want one.”

  Atvar read the name of the place. “Denver? No, I don’t want that one. See how relatively close our males to the east of it are. The prevailing wind will sweep radioactive waste in among them.”

  “Truth,” Kirel said. “Very well, then. Your adjutant gave me to understand that you are concerned about the Big Uglies’ traffic on the water.” He brightened the light that showed the other town. “This one is a waterside city, and we have no great numbers of males nearby.”

  “Seattle?” Atvar considered. “Yes, that is a good choice, for exactly the reasons you name. We shall bomb it. The Tosevites have begun this game-let us see if they have the liver to play it out to the end.”

  19

  Leslie Groves stared down at his hands. They were big and blunt and battered, the hands of a working engineer. He didn’t bite his nails, though. He was proud of that. If he hadn’t been so proud of it, he probably would have started.

  He’d led the team that made the Fat Lady. The bomb had worked exactly as advertised, maybe better than advertised. A big chunk of the North Side of Chicago would never be the same-but a whole bunch of Lizards would never be the same, either, and that was the point of the exercise.

  “So I should be on Easy Street, right?” he asked the walls. In the privacy of his office, he sometimes talked to himself. One of these days, he’d do it in public. “So what?” he said, out loud again. People who didn’t like him already thought he was crazy. He didn’t care if he gave them more ammunition. He’d got the job done, crazy or not.

  But he wasn’t on Easy Street. All he knew about Jens Larssen was that he’d shot two people and then headed east. The sentries at Lowry had seen him ride by, but they hadn’t stopped him. They hadn’t known he’d shot anybody. They also hadn’t known Groves had ordered him back to his quarters in the BOQ to calm down.

  Groves slammed a fist onto the desk, making papers and theIN andOUT trays jump. “If I hadn’t sent him back to Lowry, would he still be all right now?” he asked. The walls didn’t give him any answers.

  He wished Larssen hadn’t gone east. East was where the Lizards lived. You wouldn’t think anybody would go running off to the Lizards, but you wouldn’t think anybody would gun down a colonel and a noncom in cold blood, either. Once Larssen had done the shooting, taking refuge with the Lizards looked a lot more likely than it had before.

  They hadn’t managed to catch the son of a bitch, either. One thing Larssen had proved, traveling cross-country from White Sulphur Springs to Chicago and then from Denver to Hanford and back again: he knew how to live off the land. You couldn’t count on him freezing to death in a Colorado winter or doing something dumb to give himself away. If he was heading toward the Lizards, he might well get to them.

  “Next question,” Groves said in his orderly fashion: “What will he do if he does get to them? Will he spill his guts?”

  By all the signs, Larssen hated the Met Lab and anybody who had anything to do with it. Sure, he’d blamed Hexham for the breakup with his wife, but that had sprung from the secrecy surrounding the project, too. So, the sixty-four dollar question was, if he got to the Lizards, would he blab about what was going on in Denver? If he did, the town would become radioactive gas and dust in short order. No less than the Americans, the Lizards were playing for keeps.

  As if he needed more proof of that, he turned on the battery-powered radio he’d ordered into the office when news of the destruction of Seattle came over the wires. When the set warmed up, he caught an announcer in the middle of a word: “-veral hundred thousand believed dead, as we’ve told you before. Newly released information from the Secret White House indicates that one of them was Vice President Henry Wallace, who was visiting war workers in the stricken city to improve their morale.”

  Groves whistled softly and turned off the radio. Thatwas news. The last time he’d seen FDR, a few months before, the president had looked like death warmed over. If he did drop dead, who was next in line now? The Secretary of State, assuming he was still alive-Groves didn’t know for sure. President Cordell Hull? He thought about that. He’d always figured Wallace for a custardhead, so Hull might be an improvement All the same, he hoped Roosevelt would die of old age at about a hundred and thirty-one.

  He turned the radio back on. The newsman was still talking about the hideous things that had happened to Seattle. The same kinds of things had happened to Berlin and Washington and Tokyo and Munich, and to the Lizards outside Moscow and Breslau and inside Chicago. After a while, hearing them repeated numbed the brain, not so they seemed unreal but so their horrors no longer struck the mind as quite so horrific. As with
anything else, acquaintance made what had once been unimaginable take on the comforting cloak of familiarity.

  Men had gone through four years of trench warfare in World War I, and thought man’s inhumanity to man could sink no lower. Then, just to prove they were wrong, they’d found ways to bomb noncombatants from the air. And now more than half a dozen atomic bombs had been used, with more liable to come. How soon would those dreadful clouds come to be taken for granted-by those who survived them?

  “But if it’s that or letting the Lizards conquer us?” Groves asked. Again, the walls were silent. He didn’t need their answer, not to that question. The second bomb had already gone out of Denver. When the time came, people would use it, and a Lizard force would go up in fiery ruin. And then, very likely, an American city would join that force on the pyre. Would anything be left of the country when it was over?

  What was that line doctors used?The operation was a success, but the patient died. If the Lizards finally gave up, but you presided over nothing but devastation afterwards, had you won? That had a flip side, though. If you didn’t do everything you could to stop the Lizards and they ended up conquering you, what then? You couldn’t plan revenge against them down the line, the way you could against an Earthly neighbor. If you lost now, it was forever.

  “Maybe there’ll be some pieces left to pick up after all this is done,” Groves said. “Have to hope so, anyhow.”

  Vyacheslav Molotov did not care for meetings that convened at two in the morning. Stalin was notorious for calling meetings at hours like that. Molotov concealed his distaste. The stony countenance he raised as a shield against rapacious capitalists and alien imperialist aggressors also helped protect him from his own superior.

  Stalin seemed amiable enough at the moment, offering him vodka, a glass of tea (it was made from leaves flavored with blackberry extract, and pretty vile), cakes sweetened with honey, and cigarettes of coarse Russian tobacco.The condemned man ate a hearty meal, ran through Molotov’s mind. Stalin could be most appalling just after he’d been most polite.