Striking the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “Bombing Washington was not the same as bombing Berlin,” Moishe answered, picking up the old argument. “And now you cannot hold a rifle to my head to try to make me sing your praises and then use your machines to twist my words when I refuse. I was ready to die to tell the truth, and you would not let me. Of course I exposed you when I got the chance.”

  “Ready to die to tell the truth,” Zolraag echoed. He swung his eye turrets toward the Jews who might lead Palestine into rebellion for his people and against the British. “You are sensible, rational Tosevites, sirs. You must see the fanaticism, the futility of this attitude.”

  Moishe started to laugh. He didn’t intend to, but couldn’t help himself. The degree to which Zolraag misunderstood people in general and Jews in particular was breathtaking. The folk who had given the world Masada, who had stubbornly stayed Jews when slaughtered for sport or for refusing to convert to Christianity . . . and he expected them to choose the path of expedience? No, Russie couldn’t help but laugh.

  Then Menachem Begin laughed, too, and then Stern, and then all the underground leaders. Even the guard with the Sten gun, at first glance as humorless a mamzer as was ever spawned, chuckled under his breath. The idea of Jews choosing rationality over martyrdom was too deliciously absurd to resist.

  Now the underground leaders glanced at one another. How could you explain Zolraag’s unintentional irony? Nobody tried. Maybe you couldn’t explain it, not so it made sense to him. Didn’t that show the essential difference between Lizards and human beings? Moishe thought so.

  Before he could drive the point home, Stern said, “We will not turn Russie over to you, Zolraag. Get used to that idea. We take care of our own.”

  “Very well,” the Lizard answered. “We also do this. Here I think your behavior may be more stubborn than necessary, but I comprehend it. Your mirth, however, I find beyond understanding.”

  “You would have to know more of our history for it to make sense to you,” Moishe told him.

  That set Zolraag to making unhappy-teakettle noises again. Russie hid a grin. He’d said that with malice aforethought The Lizards had a history that reached far back into the depths of time, to the days when men still lived in caves and fire was the great new invention of the age. As far as they were concerned, mankind had no history to speak of. The idea that they should concern themselves with human ephemera hit a nerve.

  Menachem Begin spoke to Zolraag: “Suppose we do rise against the British. Suppose you help us in the fight. Suppose that helps you come into Palestine afterwards. What do we get from it besides a new master to lord it over us in place of the master we have now?”

  “Are you now as free as any Tosevites on this planet?” Zolraag asked, adding an interrogative cough to the end of the sentence.

  “If we were, the British wouldn’t be our masters,” Stern answered.

  “Just so,” the Lizard said. “After the conquest of Tosev 3 is over, though, you will be raised to the same status as any other nation under us. You will have the highest degree of—what is the word?—autonomy, yes.”

  “Which is not much,” Moishe put in.

  “You be silent!” Zolraag said with an emphatic cough.

  “Why?” Russie jeered when none of the Jewish underground leaders chose to back the Lizard. “I’m just being truthful, which is sensible and rational, isn’t it? Besides, who knows if the conquest of Tosev 3 will ever be over? You haven’t beaten us yet, and we’ve hurt you badly.”

  “Truth,” Zolraag admitted, which disconcerted Moishe for a moment. The Lizard went on, “And among the Tosevite not-empires that has hurt us worst is Deutschland, which also hurt you Jews worst. Do you cheer on the Deutsche now where you fought them before?”

  Russie tried not to show his wince. Zolraag might have had no notion of what the history of the Jews was like, but he knew mentioning the Nazis to Jews was like waving a red flag before a bull: he did it to take away their power of rational thought. Reckoning him a fool did not do.

  “We are not talking about the Germans now,” Moishe said. “We’re talking about the British, who have treated Jews well on the whole, on the one hand, and your chances for conquering the world, which do not look as good as they might, on the other.”

  “Of course we shall conquer Tosev 3,” Zolraag said. “The Emperor has ordered it”—he looked down at the floor for a moment—“and it shall be done.”

  He didn’t sound particularly sensible or rational himself there. What he sounded like was an ultrapious Jew who got everything he knew from the Torah and the Talmud and rejected all secular learning: his faith sustained him in the face of all obstacles. Sometimes that kept you going through bad times. Sometimes it blinded you to things you should see.

  Moishe studied his captors. Would they see Zolraag’s blind spot, or would their own blind them to it? He picked a different argument: “If you choose to deal with the Lizards, you’ll always be a little fish next to them. They may think you’re useful now, but what happens after they have Palestine and they don’t need you any more?”

  Menachem Begin showed his teeth in what was not a grin of amusement. “Then we start giving them a hard time, the same as we do the British now.”

  “This I believe,” Zolraag said. “It would certainly follow the Polish pattern.” Did he sound bitter? Hard to tell with a Lizard, but that would have been Moishe’s guess.

  “If the Race conquers the whole world, though, who will back you against us?” he asked Begin. “What can you hope to gain?”

  Now Begin started to laugh. “We are Jews. No one will back us. We will gain nothing. And we will fight anyway. Do you doubt it?”

  “Not even slightly,” Moishe said. For a moment, captive and captor understood each other perfectly. Moishe had been Zolraag’s captive, too. They had stared at each other across a gap of incomprehension wide as the black gulf of space that separated the Lizards’ world from Earth.

  Zolraag did not fully follow what was going on now, either. He said, “What is your answer, Tosevites? If you must. If there is fire for him in your innards because he is of your clutch of eggs, keep this Russie. But what do you say about the bigger question? Will you fight alongside us when we move forward here and punish the British?”

  “Do you Lizards decide things on the spur of the moment?” Stern demanded.

  “No, but we are not Tosevites, either,” Zolraag answered with evident relish. “You do everything quickly, do you not?”

  “Not everything,” Stern said, chuckling a little. “This we have to talk about. We’ll send you back safe—”

  “I was hoping to bring an answer with me,” Zolraag said. “This would not only help the Race but improve my own status.”

  “But we don’t care about either of those, except insofar as they help us,” Stern said. He nodded to Russie’s guard. “Take him back to his room.” He didn’t call it a cell; even Jews used euphemisms to sugar-coat the things they did. Stern went on, “You can let his wife and son visit, or just his wife. If he’d rather. They aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Right. Come on, you,” the guard said to Moishe, as usual punctuating his orders with a jerk of the Sten gun’s barrel. As they walked down the corridor toward the chamber—however you wanted to describe it—in which Russie was confined, the fellow added, “No, you aren’t going anywhere—not alive, you’re not.”

  “Thank you so much. You do reassure my mind,” Moishe replied. For one of the rare times since the Jewish underground had stolen him from the British, he heard that hard-nosed guard laugh out loud.

  Ice was still floating in the Moscow River. A big chunk banged into the bow of the rowboat in which Vyacheslav Molotov sat, knocking the boat sideways. “Sorry, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the fellow at the oars said, and put the rowboat back on its proper course upstream.

  “It’s all right,” Molotov answered absently. Of course, the oarsman belonged to the NKVD. But he had such a heavy, bovine okane—a Gorky accent that turned a’s int
o o’s until he sounded as if he himself had been turned out to pasture—that no one, hearing him for the first time, could possibly take him seriously. A nice bit of maskirovka, that’s what it was.

  A couple of minutes later, another piece of ice ran into the boat. The NKVD man chuckled. “Bet you wish you’d taken a panje wagon to the kolkhoz now, eh, Comrade?”

  “No,” Molotov answered coldly. He waved a gloved hand over to the riverbank to illustrate why he said what he said. A panje wagon pulled by a troika of horses slowly struggled along. Even the Russian wagons, with their tall wheels and boatlike bottoms, had a tough time getting through the mud of the spring rasputitsa. The muddy season would vary in the fall, depending on how heavy the rains were. In spring, when a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted, the mud was always thick enough to seem bottomless.

  Not a bit put out at his abruptness, the rower chuckled again. When he wanted to, he showed skill with the oars, dodging more pieces of drift ice with almost a ballerina’s adroitness. (Molotov thought of Anastas Mikoyan, caught by rain at a party to which he’d come without an umbrella. When the hostess exclaimed that he would get wet, he’d just smiled and said, “Oh, no, I’ll dance between the raindrops.” If any man could do it, Mikoyan was the one.)

  Like a lot of riverside collective farms, Kolkhoz 118 had a rickety pier sticking out into the turbid brown water of the river. The NKVD boatman tied up the rowboat at the pier, then scrambled up onto it to help Molotov out. When Molotov started toward the farm building, the oarsman didn’t follow him. The foreign commissar would have been astonished if he had. He might have been NKVD, but he surely didn’t have the security clearance he’d need for this project.

  Cows lowed, which made Molotov think again of the rower’s intonation. Pigs grunted. They didn’t mind mud—on the contrary. Neither did ducks and geese. Chickens struggled, puffing one foot out of the muck and then the other and looking down with little beady black eyes as if wondering why the ground kept trying to grab them.

  Molotov wrinkled his nose. The kolkhoz had a fine barnyard odor, no doubt about that. Its buildings were typical for those of collective farms, too: unpainted and badly painted wood, all looking decades older than they were. Men in cloth caps, collarless shirts, and baggy trousers tucked into boots tramped here and there, some with pitchforks, some with shovels.

  It was all maskirovka, carried out with Russian thoroughness. When Molotov rapped on the door to the barn, it opened quickly. “Zdrast’ye, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” his welcomer said, closing the door behind him. For a moment, he was in complete darkness. Then the man opened the inner door of what might as well have been an airlock, and bright electric light from inside flooded into the chamber.

  Molotov shed his coat and boots in there. Igor Kurchatov nodded approvingly. The nuclear physicist was about forty, with sharp features and a pointed chin beard that gave his handsome face almost a satanic aspect. “Hello, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” he repeated, his tone somewhere between polite and fawning. Molotov had pushed his enterprise and had kept Stalin from gutting it when results flowed more slowly than he liked. Kurchatov and all the other physicists knew Molotov was the only man between them and the gulag. They were his.

  “Good day,” he answered, as always disliking the time polite small talk wasted. “How is progress?”

  “We are working like a team of super-Stakhanovites, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Kurchatov answered. “We advance on many fronts. We—”

  “Do you yet produce this plutonium metal, which will yield the large explosions the Soviet Union desperately requires?” Molotov interrupted.

  Kurchatov’s devilish features sagged in dismay. “Not yet,” he admitted. His voice went high and shrill: “I warned you when this project began that it was a matter of years. The capitalists and fascists were ahead of us in technique when the Lizards came to Earth, and they remain ahead of us. We tried and failed to separate U-235 from U-238. The best chemical for this is uranium hexafluoride, which is as poisonous as mustard gas and hideously corrosive to boot. We do not have the expertise we need for that separation process. We have had no other choice but to seek to manufacture plutonium, which has also proved difficult.”

  “I am painfully aware of this, I assure you,” Molotov said. “Iosef Vissarionovich is also painfully aware of it. But if the Americans succeed. If the Hitlerites succeed, why do you continue to fail?”

  “Design of the requisite pile is one thing,” Kurchatov answered. “There the American’s arrival has already helped us. Having worked with one in full running order, Maksim Lazarovich has given us many valuable insights.”

  “I hoped he might,” Molotov said. Learning that Max Kagan had reached Kolkhoz 118 was what had brought him up here. He hadn’t yet told Stalin the Americans had chosen to send a clever Jew. Stalin was no Russian, but had a thoroughly Russian dislike for what he called rootless cosmopolites. Being married to a clever Jew himself, Molotov didn’t. Now he went on, “This is one problem. What others have you?”’

  “The worst one, Comrade, is getting both the uranium oxide and the graphite in the nuclear pile free enough from impurities to serve our purposes,” Kurchatov said. “There Kagan, however learned and experienced he is in his own field, cannot help us, much as I wish he could.”

  “You know the measures your producers are required to take to furnish you with materials of requisite purity?” Molotov asked. When Kurchatov nodded, Molotov asked another question: “The producers know they will suffer the highest form of punishment if they fail to meet your demands?” He’d scribbled VMN—for vysshaya mera nakazamiya—beside the names of plenty of enemies of the Revolution and the Soviet state, and they’d been shot shortly thereafter. Such deserved—and got—no mercy.

  But Kurchatov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar. If you liquidate these men, their less experienced successors will not deliver improved supplies to us. The required purities, you see, are on the very edge—perhaps just over the edge—of what Soviet chemistry and industry can achieve. We are all doing everything we can in the fight against the Lizards. Sometimes what we do is not enough. Nichevo—it can’t be helped.”

  “I refuse to accept nichevo from an academician in a time of crisis, any more than I would accept it from a peasant,” Molotov said angrily.

  Kurchatov shrugged. “Then you will go back and tell the General Secretary to replace us, and good luck to you and the rodina with the charlatans who will take over this laboratory.” He and his men were in Molotov’s power, true, for Molotov held Stalin’s wrath at bay. But. If Molotov exercised that power, he would hurt not only the physicists but the Soviet motherland. That made for an interesting and unpleasant balance between him and the laboratory staff.

  He exhaled angrily, a show of temper as strong with him as pounding a shoe on a desk would have been for another man. “Have you any more problems standing between you and building these bombs?”

  “Yes, one small one,” Kurchatov answered with an ironic glint in his eye. “Once some of the uranium in the atomic pile is transmuted to plutonium, we have to get it out and shape it into the material required for a bomb—and we have to do all this without letting any radioactivity leak into the air or the river. We knew this already, and Maksim Lazarovich has been most insistent on it.”

  “Why is it a difficulty?” Molotov asked. “I confess, I am no physicist, to understand subtle points without explanation.”

  Kurchatov’s smile grew most unpleasant. “This point is not subtle. A leak of radioactivity is detectable. If it is not only detectable but detected by the Lizards, this area will become much more radioactive shortly thereafter.”

  Molotov needed a moment to realize exactly what Kurchatov meant. When he did, he nodded: a single sharp up-and-down jerk of his head. “The point is taken, Igor Ivanovich. Can you bring Kagan here to me or take me to him? I wish to extend to him the formal thanks of the Soviet workers and peasants for his assistance to us.”

  That was business of
a different sort. “Please wait here, Comrade Foreign Commissar. I will bring him. Do you speak English or German? No? Never mind; I will interpret for you.” He hurried down along a white-painted corridor utterly alien to the rough-hewn exterior of the laboratory building.

  Kurchatov returned a couple of minutes later with another fellow in a white lab coat in tow. Molotov was surprised at how young Max Kagan looked; he couldn’t have been much past thirty. He was a medium-sized man with curly, dark brown hair and intelligent Jewish features.

  Kurchatov spoke to Kagan in English, then turned to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I present to you Maksim Lazarovich Kagan, the physicist on loan from the Metallurgical Laboratory project of the United States.”

  Kagan stuck out his hand and vigorously pumped Molotov’s. He spoke in voluble English. Kurchatov did the honors: “He says he is pleased to meet you, and that he aims to blow the Lizards to hell and gone. This is an idiom, and means about what you would think.”

  “Tell him I share his aspirations and hope they are realized,” Molotov answered. He eyed Kagan and was bemused to find Kagan eyeing him back. Soviet scientists were properly deferential to the man who was second in the USSR only to the General Secretary of the Communist Party. To judge by Kagan’s attitude, he thought Molotov was just another bureaucrat to deal with. In small doses, the attitude was bracing.

  Kagan spoke in rapid-fire English, Molotov had no idea what he was saying, but his tone was peremptory. Kurchatov answered hesitantly in the same language. Kagan spoke some more, slamming a fist into an open palm to emphasize his point. Again, Kurchatov’s answer sounded cautious. Kagan threw his hands in the air in obvious disgust.

  “Tell me what he is saying,” Molotov said.

  “He is complaining about the quality of the equipment here, he is complaining about the food, he is complaining about the NKVD man who accompanies him whenever he goes outside—he attributes to the man unsavory sexual practices of which he can have no personal knowledge.”