Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  He dressed, too, as fast as he could. Getting back into clothes in the backseat was even more awkward than escaping from them had been, but he managed. He opened the car door and slid out, Zofia right behind him. They stood for a couple of seconds, looking at each other. As people do in such circumstances, Mordechai wondered where that first coupling would end up taking them. He said, “You’d better get back to your house. Your father will wonder where you’ve been.” Actually, he was afraid Roman Klopotowski might know where she d been but he didn’t’ want to say that.

  She stood on tiptoe so she could kiss him on the cheek. “That’s for caring enough about me to worry what my father will think,” she said. Then she kissed him again, open-mouthed. “And that’s for the rest.”

  He squeezed her. “If I weren’t so tired from working in the fields-”

  She burst out laughing, so loud he twitched in alarm. “Men are such braggarts. It’s all right. We’ll find other times.”

  That meant he’d pleased her. He felt several centimeters taller. “I hope we do.”

  “Of course you hope we do. Men always hope that,” Zofia said without much anger. She laughed again. “I don’t know why you Jews go to so much trouble and hurt to make yourselves different. Once it’s in there, it’s the same either way.”

  “Is it? Well, I can’t help that,” Anielewicz said. “I am sorry about your Czeslaw. Too many people, Poles and Jews, haven’t come back from the war.”

  “I know.” She shook her head. “That’s God’s truth, it certainly is. It’s been a long time-three and a half years, more. I’m entitled to live my own life.” She spoke defiantly, as if Mordechai were going to disagree with her.

  But he said, “Of course you are. And now you had better go home.”

  “All right I’ll see you soon.” She hurried away.

  Anielewicz went back into the Ussishkins’ house. They came in a few minutes later, tired but smiling. Judah said, “We got a good baby, a boy, and Hannah I think will be all right, too. I didn’t have to do a cesarean, for which I thank God-no real chance for asepsis here, try as I will.”

  “That’s all good news,” Anielewicz said.

  “It is indeed.” The doctor looked at him. “But what are you doing still awake? You’ve been studying the chessboard, unless I miss my guess. I have noticed you don’t like to lose, however polite you may be. So what are you going to do?”

  The chess game hadn’t crossed Mordechai’s mind once since the sound of airplane engines made him go outside. Now he walked back over to the board. Thanks to the pawn move Ussishkin had crowed about, he couldn’t attack with his queen as he’d planned. He shifted the piece to a square farther back along the diagonal than he’d intended.

  Fast as a striking snake, Judah Ussishkin moved a knight. It neatly forked the queen and one of Mordechai’s rooks. He stared in dismay. Here was another game he wasn’t going to win-and Ussishkin was right, he hated to lose.

  All at once, though, it didn’t seem to matter so much. All right, so he’d lose at chess one more time. He’d played a different game tonight, and won it.

  Leslie Groves looked down the table at the scientists from the Metallurgical Laboratory. “The fate of the United States-and probably the world-depends on your answer to this question: how do we turn the theoretical physics of a working atomic pile into practical engineering? We have to industrialize the process as fast as we can.”

  “A certain amount of caution is indicated,” Arthur Compton said. “By what we’ve been told, they’re paying in Germany for rushing ahead with no thought for consequences.”

  “That was an engineering flaw we’ve already uncovered, wasn’t it?” Groves said.

  “A flaw? You might say so.” Enrico Fermi made a fine Latin gesture of contempt. “When their pile went critical, they had no way to shut it down again-and so the reaction continued, out of control. For all I know, it continues still; no one can get close enough to find out for certain. It cost the Germans many able men, whatever we may think of them politically.”

  “Heisenberg,” someone said softly. An almost invisible pall of gloom seemed to descend on the table. Many of the assembled physicists had known the dead German; you couldn’t be a nuclear physicist without knowing his work.

  “I am not about to let a foreign accident slow down our own program,” Groves said, “especially when it’s an accident we won’t have. What were they doing, throwing pieces of cadmium metal into the heavy water of their pile to try to slow it down? We’ve designed better than that.”

  “In this particular regard, yes,” Leo Szilard said. “But who can say what other problems may be lurking in the metaphysical undergrowth?”

  Groves gave the Hungarian scientist an unfriendly look. However brilliant he was, he was always finding ways things could go wrong. Maybe he was so imaginative, he saw flaws no one else would. Or maybe he just liked to borrow trouble.

  Whichever it was, Groves didn’t intend to put up with it. He growled, “If we never tried anything new, we wouldn’t have to worry about anything going wrong. Of course, If we’d had that attitude all along, the Lizards would have conquered us about twenty minutes after they landed here, because we’d all have been living in villages and sacrificing goats whenever we had a thunderstorm. So we will go ahead and see what the problems are. Objections?”

  No one had any. Groves nodded, satisfied. The physicists were a bunch of prima donnas such as he’d never had to deal with in the Army, but no matter how high in the clouds their heads were, they had their hearts in the right place.

  He said, “Okay, back to square one. What do we have to do to turn our experimental pile here into a bomb factory?”

  “Get out of Denver,” Jens Larssen muttered. Groves glowered at him; he’d had enough of Larssen’s surly attitude.

  Then, to his surprise, he noticed several other physicists were nodding. Groves did his best to smooth out his features. “Why?” he asked as mildly as he could.

  Larssen looked around; maybe he didn’t want the floor. But he’d opened his mouth and so he had it. He reached into a shirt pocket, as if digging for a pack of cigarettes. Not coming up with one, he said, “Why? The most important reason is we don’t have the water we’ll need.”

  “Like any other energy source, a nuclear pile also generates heat,” Fermi amplified. “Running water makes an effective coolant. Whether we can divert enough water here from other uses is an open question.”

  Groves said, “How much are we going to need? The Mississippi? The Lizards are holding most of it these days, I’m afraid.”

  He’d intended that for sarcasm. Fermi didn’t take it as such. He said, “That being so, the Columbia is probably best for our purposes. It is swift-flowing, with a large volume of water, and the Lizards are not strong in the Northwest.”

  “You want this operation to move again, after we’ve just gotten set up here?” Groves demanded. “You want to pack everything up into wagons and haul it over the Rockies?” What he wanted to do was start heaving nuclear physicists out the window, Nobel laureates first.

  “A move like the move we made from Chicago, no, that would not be necessary,” Fermi said. “We can keep this facility intact, continue to use it for research. But production, as you call it, would be better placed elsewhere.”

  Heads bobbed up and down, all along the table. Groves sighed. He’d been given the power to bind and loose on this project, but he’d expected to wield it against bureaucrats and soldiers; he hadn’t imagined the scientists he was supposed to ride herd on would complicate his life so. He said, “If you’re springing this on me now, you probably have a site all picked out.”

  That’s what he would have done, anyhow. But then, he was a hardheaded engineer. The ivory-tower boys didn’t always think the way he did. This time, though, Fermi nodded. “From what we can tell by long-distance research, the town of Hanford, Washington, seems quite suitable, but we shall have to send someone to take a look at this place to make c
ertain it meets our needs.”

  Larssen stuck his hand in the air. “I’ll go.” A couple of other men also volunteered.

  Groves pretended not to see them. “Dr. Larssen, I think I may take you up on that. You have experience traveling through a war zone by yourself, and-” He let the rest hang. Larssen didn’t. “-and it’d be best for everybody if I got out of here for a while, you were going to say. Now tell me one I hadn’t heard.” He ran a hand through his shock of thick blond hair. “I’ve got a question for you. Will the Lizard POWs stay with the research end or go to the production site?”

  “Not my call.” Groves turned to Fermi. “Professor?”

  “I think perhaps they may be more useful to us here,” Fermi said slowly.

  “That’s kind of what I thought, too,” Larssen said. “Okay, now I know.” He didn’t need to draw anybody a picture. If the Lizards-and Sam Yeager, and Barbara Larssen-turned-Yeager-stayed here, Jens would likely end up at Hanford far good, assuming the place panned out.

  That set off an alarm bell in Groves’ mind. “We will need a scrupulously accurate report on Hanford’s suitability, Dr. Larssen.”

  “You’ll get one,” Jens promised. “I won’t talk it up just so I can move there, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Okay.” Groves thought for a minute, then said, “We ought to send a GI with you, too. That would help make sure you got back here in one piece.”

  Larssen’s eyes grew hard and cold. “You try sending anybody from the Army with me, General, and I won’t go. The Army’s already done me enough bad turns-I don’t need anymore. I’ll be there all by my lonesome, and I’ll get back, too. You don’t like that, put somebody else on the road.”

  Groves glared. Larssen glared right back. Groves ran into the limits of his power to command. If he told Larssen to shut up and do as he was told, the physicist was liable to go on strike again and end up in the brig instead of Hanford. And even if he did leave Denver with a soldier tagging along, what would his report be worth when he got back? He’d already proved he could survive on his own. Groves muttered under his breath. Sometimes you had to throw in your hand; no help for it. “Have it your way, then,” he growled. Larssen looked disgustingly smug.

  Leo Szilard stuck a forefinger in the air. Groves nodded his way, glad of the chance to forget Larssen for a moment. Szilard said, “Building a pile is a large work of engineering. How do we keep the Lizards from spotting it and knocking it to pieces? Hanford now, I would say as a statement of high probability, has no such large works.”

  “We have to make it look as if we’re building something else, something innocuous,” Groves said after a little thought. “Just what, I don’t know. We can work on that while Dr. Larssen is traveling. We’ll involve the Army Corps of Engineers, too; we won’t need to depend on our own ingenuity.”

  “If I were a Lizard,” Szilard said, “I would knock down any large building humans began, on general principles. The aliens must know we are trying to devise nuclear weapons.”

  Groves shook his head again, not in contradiction but in annoyance. He had no doubt Szilard was right; if he’d been a Lizard himself, he’d have done the same thing. “Hiding an atomic pile in the middle of a city isn’t the world’s greatest idea, either,” he said. “We’ve done it here because we had no choice, and also because this was an experiment. If something goes wrong with a big pile, we’ll have ourselves a mess just like the one the Germans got. How many people would it kill?”

  “A good many-you are right about that,” Szilard said. “That is why we settled on the Hanford site. But we also do have to consider whether working out in the open would come to the enemy’s attention. Winning the war must come first. Before we go to work, we must weigh the risks to city folk against those to the project as a whole from starting up a pile out in the open, so to speak.”

  Enrico Fermi sighed. “Leo, you presented this view at the meeting where we decided what we would advise General Groves. The vote went against you, nor was it close. Why do you bring up the matter now?”

  “Because, whether in the end he accepts it or not, he needs to be aware of it,” Szilard answered. Behind glasses, his eyes twinkled. And to raise a little hell, Groves guessed.

  He said, “We’ll need Dr. Larssen’s report on the area. I suspect we’ll also need to do some serious thinking about how we’ll camouflage the pile if we do build there.” His smile challenged the eggheads. “Since we have so many brilliant minds here, I’m sure that will be no trouble at all.”

  A couple of innocents beamed; perhaps their sarcasm detectors were out of commission for the duration. A couple of people with short fuses-Jens Larssen was one-glared at him. Several people looked thoughtful: if he set them a problem, they’d start working on it. He approved of that attitude; it was what he would have done himself.

  “Gentlemen, I think that’s enough for today,” he said.

  Major Okamoto seemed out of place in a laboratory, Teerts thought. What the Big Uglies called a lab wasn’t impressive to a male of the Race: the equipment was primitive and chaotically arranged, and there wasn’t a computer anywhere. One of the Nipponese who wore a white coat manipulated a curious device whose middle moved in and out as if it were a musical instrument.

  “Superior sir, what is that thing?” Teerts asked Okamoto, pointing.

  “What thing?” Okamoto looked as if he wanted to be interrogating, not interpreting and answering questions. “Oh, that. That’s a slide rule. It’s faster than calculating by hand.”

  “Slide rule,” Teerts repeated, to fix the term in his memory. “How does it work?”

  Okamoto started to answer, then turned and spoke in rapid-fire Nipponese to the Big Ugly who was wielding the curious artifact. The scientist spoke directly to Teerts: “It adds and subtracts logarithms-you understand this word?”

  “No, superior sir,” Teerts admitted. Explanations followed, with considerable backing and filling. Eventually Teerts got the idea. It was, he supposed, clever in an archaic way. “How accurate is this slide rule?” he asked.

  “Three significant figures,” the Nipponese answered.

  Teerts was appalled. The Big Uglies hoped to do serious scientific research and engineering with accuracy to only one part in a thousand? That gave him a whole new reason to hope their effort to harness nuclear energy failed. He didn’t want to be anywhere close if it succeeded: it was liable to succeed altogether too well, and blow a big piece of Tokyo into radioactive slag.

  The Nipponese added, “For finer calculations, we go back to pen and paper, but pen and paper are slow. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, superior sir.” Teerts revised his opinion of the Big Uglies’ abilities-slightly. Because they had no electronic aids, they did what they could to calculate more quickly. If that meant they lost some accuracy, they were willing to make the trade.

  The Race didn’t work that way. If they came to a place where they needed two different qualities and had to lose some of one to get some of the other, they generally waited instead, until in the slow passage of time their arts improved to the point where the trade was no longer necessary. Because of that slow, careful evolution, the Race’s technology was extremely reliable.

  What the Big Uglies called technology was anything but. Not only didn’t they seem to believe in fail-safes, he sometimes wondered if they believed in safety at all. Much of Tokyo, which was not a small city even by the standards of the Race, looked to be built from wood and paper. He marveled that it hadn’t burnt down a hundred times. Traffic was even more horrifying than it had been in Harbin, and if a vehicle ran into another one, or over a male who was also using the street, too bad. Along with inaccuracy, the Big Uglies accepted a lot of carnage as the price they had to pay for getting things done.

  That thought put Teerts in mind of something he thought he’d heard a couple of the Nipponese scientists discussing. He turned to Major Okamoto. “Excuse me, superior sir, may I ask another question?”


  “Ask,” Okamoto said with the air of an important male granting a most unimportant underling a boon beyond his station. Despite so many differences between them, in some ways the Race and Big Uglies weren’t that far apart.

  “Thank you for your generosity, superior sir.” Teerts played the inferior role to the hilt, as if he were addressing the fleetlord rather than a rather tubby Tosevite whom he devoutly wished dead. “Did this humble one correctly hear that some other Tosevites also experimenting with explosive metal suffered a mishap?”

  Again Okamoto and the scientist held a quick colloquy. The latter said, “Why not tell him? If he is ever in a position to escape, the war will be so badly lost that that will be the least of our worries.”

  “Very well.” Okamoto gave his attention back to Teerts. “Yes, this did happen. The Germans had an atomic pile-what is the phrase? — reach critical mass and get out of control.”

  Teerts let out a horrified hiss. The Big Uglies didn’t just accept risk, they pursued it with insane zeal. “How did this happen?” he asked.

  “I am not certain the details are known, especially since the accident killed some of their scientists,” Okamoto said. “But those who still live are pressing ahead. We shall not make the mistakes they did. The Americans have succeeded in running a pile without immediately joining their ancestors, and they are sharing some of their methods with us.”

  “Oh.” Teerts wished he had some ginger to chase away the lump of ice that formed in his belly. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the patchwork of tiny empires that dotted the planet’s surface had been a matter for jokes. It wasn’t funny any more. Back on Home, only one line of experiment at a time would have been pursued. Here, all the competing little empires worked separately. Disunion usually was weakness, but could also prove strength, as now.

  Yoshio Nishina came into the room. His alarmingly mobile lips-or so they seemed to Teerts-pulled back so that he showed what was for a Big Ugly a lot of teeth. Teerts had learned that meant he was happy. He spoke with the other scientist and with Major Okamoto. Teerts did his best to follow, but found himself left behind.