In th Balance

by neetha Napew

  Nodding also helped Jens keep a straight face. Szilard was both brilliant and cultured,

  and expressed himself so. But the Hungarian scientist's accent never failed to remind Larssen of Bela Lugosi's in Dracula. He wondered if Szilard had ever seen the movie, but lacked the nerve to ask.

  More people drifted in, by ones and twos. Szilard looked pointedly at his watch every few minutes; his attitude declared that being bombarded by creatures from another planet wasn't a good enough excuse for missing an important meeting.

  Finally, at about twenty-five after seven, he decided he could wait no more. He said loudly, "We have a question to face today: in light of the Lizards' move on Chicago, what is our proper course? Shall we abandon our research here, and seek some new arid safer place to continue it, accepting all the loss of time and effort and probably also of material this would entail? Or shall we seek to persuade the government to defend this city

  with everything in its power for our sake, knowing the army may well fail and the Lizards succeed here as they have so many other places? Discussion, gentlemen?"

  Gerald Sebring said, "God knows I want an excuse to get out of Chicago—" That occasioned general laughter. Sebring had been planning to go do some research back in Berkeley in early June— and, incidentally, to marry another physicist's secretary while he was out there. The arrival of the Lizards changed his plans, as it did so many others' (come to that, Laura Fermi was still back in New York).

  Sebring waited for the chuckles to die down before he went on. "Everything we're doing here, though, feels like it's right on the point of coming to fruition. Isn't that so, people? We'd lose a year, maybe more, if we had to pull up stakes now. I don't think we can afford it. I don't think the world can afford it."

  Several people nodded. Larssen stuck up a hand. Leo Szilard saw him, aimed a stubby forefinger in his direction. He said, "Strikes me this doesn't have to be an either-or proposition. We can go on with a lot of our work here at the same time as we get ready to pull out as fast as possible if we have to." He found he had trouble baldly saying, if the Lizards take Chicago.

  "That is sensible, and practical for some of our projects," Szilard agreed. "The chemical extraction of plutonium, for instance, though it requires the most delicate balances, can proceed elsewhere— not least because we have as yet very little plutonium to extract. Other lines of research, however, the pile you are assembling among them—"

  "Tearing it down now would be most unfortunate, the more so if that proves unnecessary," Fermi said. "Our k factor on

  this one should be above 1.00 at least, perhaps as high as 1.04. To break off work just when we are at last on the point of achieving a sustained chain reaction, that would be very bad." His wide, mobile mouth twisted to show just how bad he thought it would be.

  "Besides," Sebring said, "where the heck are we likely to stay safe from the Lizards anyhow?" He was far from a handsome man, with a long face, heavy eyebrows, and buck teeth, but as usual spoke forcefully and seriously.

  Szilard said, "Are we agreed, then, that while, as Jens says, we take what precautions we can, we ought to stay here in Chicago as long as that remains possible?" No one spoke. Szilard clicked his tongue between his teeth. When he continued, he sounded angry: "We are not authoritarians here. Anyone who thinks leaving wiser, tell us why this is so.

  Persuade us if you can— if you prove right, you will have done us great service." Arthur Compton, who was in charge of the Metallurgical Laboratory, said, "I think Sebring put it best, Leo: where can we run that the Lizards will not follow?"

  Again, no one disagreed. That was not because Compton headed the project, nor because of his formidable physical presence— he was tall and lean and sternly handsome, and looked more like a Barrymore than the Nobel prize-winning physicist he was. But the rest of the talented crew in the commons room were far too independent to follow a leader simply because he was the leader. Here, though, they had all reached the same conclusion.

  Szilard saw that. He said, "If it is decided, then, that Chicago must be held, we must convince the army of the importance of this as well."

  "They will fight to hold Chicago anyhow," Compton said. "It is the hinge upon which the United States pivots, and they know it."

  "It is more important than that," Fermi said quietly. "With what we do here, Chicago is the hinge on which the world pivots, and the army, it does not know that We must send someone to tell them."

  "We must send some two," Szilard said, and all at once Larssen was certain he and Fermi had planned their strategy together ahead of time. "We must send two, and separately, in case one meets with misfortune along the way. The war is here among us now; this can happen."

  Sure enough, Fermi spoke up again, as if with the next line of dialogue in an ancient Greek play: "We should send also native-born Americans; officers are more likely to hear them with attention than some foreigner,

  some enemy alien who is not fully to be trusted even now when the Lizards, true aliens, have come."

  Larssen was nodding, impressed by Fermi's logic at the same time as he regretted the truths that underlay it, when Gerald Sebring raised a hand and said, "I'll go."

  "So will I," Larssen heard himself saying. He blinked in surprise; he hadn't known he was going to volunteer until the words were out of his mouth. But speaking up turned out to make sense, even to him: "Walt Zinn can ride herd, on the gang of hooligans working on the pile."

  Zinn nodded. "As long as I can keep 'em out of jail, I'll get along all right." He gave away his Canadian origins by saying oaf for out

  "Then it is settled." Szilard rubbed his hands in satisfaction. Fermi also looked pleased.

  Szilard went on, "You will leave as soon as possible. One of you will go by car— Larssen, that will be you, I think. Gerald, you will take the train. I hope both of you get to Washington safe and sound— and I hope Washington will still be in human hands when you arrive."

  That sent a nasty chill through Larssen. He hadn't imagined Lizards marching up Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House. But if they could move on Chicago, they could surely move on Washington. He wondered if the invaders from another world had figured out it was the capital of the United States.

  Looking at Szilard's smug expression, he realized the Hungarian had gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his devotion to democracy, Szilard had maneuvered the meeting like a Chicago wardheeler. Larssen chuckled. Well, if that wasn't democracy, what was it? A question better left unanswered in Chicago, perhaps.

  The chuckle turned into a guffaw that Larssen fortunately managed to strangle before it got loose. If you played with the letters in Dr. Szilard's name just a little... Larssen wondered if Szilard himself had noticed, and how one said lizard in Magyar.

  I can report one riddle solved, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said

  "That will be a pleasant novelty;" Atvar snapped; the longer he wrestled with Tosev 3; the testier he became. But he could not afford to irk Kirel excessively. All bowed to the Emperor, yes, but those below him competed. Even officers' cabals were not unknown. And so Atvar softened his tone: "What new things have you learned of the Big Uglies, then?"

  "Our technicians have discovered why the high-burst nuclear weapons of our initial

  bombardment failed to completely disrupt their radio communications."

  Kirel beckoned to, one of those technicians, who floated up with a captured Tosevite radio set. Atvar opened his jaws in mocking laughter. "Big and ugly and clumsy, just like the Tosevites themselves," he said.

  "You speak truth, Exalted Fleetlord," the technician said. "Also clumsy and primitive. The electronics are not even solid-state, as ours have been through almost all our recorded history. The Tosevites use as clumsy makeshifts these large vacuum-filled tubes here." He pulled off the back plate of the set to point to the parts he meant. "They are bulky, as you see, Exalted Fleetlord, and the amount of waste heat they produce is appalling— they are most inefficient. But exactly because the
y are so large and so— so gross, if I may use an imprecise word, they are much less susceptible to electromagnetic

  pulse than unshielded integrated circuits would be."

  "Thank you, Technician-Second," Atvar said, reading the male's body paint for his rank. "Your data are valuable. Service to the Emperor." Hearing himself dismissed, the technician cast down his eyes in salute to the sovereign, then took back the radio set and pushed himself away from the fleetlord's presence.

  "You see, Exalted Fleetlord, the Tosevites' communications system retained its utility only because it is so primitive," Kirel said.

  "Their radios are primitive, and that ends up being useful to them. They don't yet know how to make decent missiles, so they fling outsized artillery shells instead, and that ends up being useful. Now they are trying to build missiles. Where will it end, Shiplord?"

  "In our victory," Kirel said stoutly.

  Atvar gave him a grateful look. Maybe the only reason Kirel was acting so loyally was that he did not want command of what looked like an effort that promised more in the way of trouble than glory. At the moment, Atvar didn't care. Just having someone to whom he could complain worked wonders.

  And complain he did: "When the Tosevites aren't primitive, they hurt us, too. By the memories of all the ancient Emperors, who would have been mad enough to imagine making boats big enough to put airplanes on them? Who but the Big Uglies, I mean?"

  Home, Rabotev 2, and Halless 1 all had free water, yes, but in the form of rivers and ponds and lakes (Rabotev 2 even had a couple of smallish seas). None of them was troubled by the vast, world-bestriding oceans of Tosev 3, and neither the Race, the Rabotevs, nor the

  Hallessi used their waters to anything like the extent the Big Uglies did. Having planes appear out of nowhere, as when they raided the base on the Chinese Coast, was a rude surprise. So were the ships with big guns that pounded bases anywhere near water.

  Kirel waggled his fingers in a shrug. "Now that we know they fight from the sea, we can sink their big boats, and faster than they can hope to build them. The boats aren't exactly inconspicuous, either. That problem will go away, and soon."

  "May it, be so." But once Atvar got to worrying out loud, he wasn't about to let himself be mollified so easily, "These missiles they're trying to build— how are we supposed to shoot them all down? We came here intending, to fight savages whose only missiles came from bows. And do you know what the latest is?"

  "Tell me, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said, in the tones of a male who understands he'd better listen sympathetically if he knows what's good for him.

  "In the past few days, for the first time, jet planes rose against our aircraft from both Deutschland and Britain, They're still badly inferior to ours— especially the Britainish ones— but not nearly so much so as the primitive crates with revolving airfoils we've been facing."

  "I— hadn't heard that, Exalted Fleetlord." Now Atvar really had Kirel's attention again. After that moment of surprise, the shiplord continued, "Wait a bit. Deutschland and Britain were enemies to each other before we landed, am I right?"

  "Yes, yes. Britain and the U.S.A. and the SSSR and China against Deutschland and Italia; Britain and the U.S.A. and China

  against Nippon; but not, for some eggless reason, Nippon against the SSSR. If the Tosevites didn't keep coming up with new things to throw at us, I'd swear on the Emperor's name they were all mad."

  "Wait a bit," Kirel repeated. "If Deutschland and Britain were foes until we landed, it's not likely they'd share jet plane technology, is it?"

  "/wouldn't think so, but who can tell for certain what the Big Uglies would do? Maybe it's having so many different empires on so little land that makes them the way they are." The scrambled, convoluted way the Tosevites played the game of politics made even the maneuvers of the imperial court tame by comparison. Dealing with any one Tosevite official made Atvar feel out of his league. As for playing them off against one another, as the manuals suggested, he counted himself lucky that they weren't exploiting him.

  But Kirel was still worrying over the jets: "Exalted Fleetlord, if they don't share technology, that means they can only have each developed it independently. They are like a bad virus, Fleetlord; they mutate— not physically, but technically, which is worse— too fast, maybe faster than we can handle. Perhaps we should sterilize the planet of them."

  The fleetlord turned both eye sockets to bear on his subordinate. This, from the male who had urged giving the Big Uglies a chance to surrender before the Race choked off their communications?— or rather, failed to choke off their communications? "You think they represent so great a danger to us, Shiplord?"

  "I do, Exalted Fleetlord. We are at a high level, and have been steady there for ages. They are lower, but rising quickly. We must smash them down while we still can."

  "If only the filthy creatures hadn't hit the 56th Emperor Jossano."Atvar said mournfully. If only we hadn't kept so many of our bombs aboard one ship, he added mentally. But no, he was not to blame for that; ancient doctrine ordained entrusting large stores of nuclear weapons only to the most reliable shiplords. As an officer of the Race should, he'd followed that ancient doctrine. No one could possibly think less of him for that— except that in so doing, he'd suffered a disaster. The way ancient doctrine corroded whenever it touched matters Tosevite worried him even more than the fighting down on the surface of Tosev 3.

  "We still have some of the devices left," Kirel persisted. "Maybe the Big Uglies will be more willing to submit if they see what we can do to their cities."

  Atvar threw back his head in disagreement.

  "We do not destroy the world toward which a settler fleet is already traveling." That was what ancient doctrine said, doctrine based on the conquests of Rabotevs and Hallessi.

  "Exalted Fleetlord, Tosev 3 appears to me to be dissimilar to our previous campaigns," Kirel said,' pressing his superior up to the edge of politeness. "The Tosevites have a greater capacity to resist than did the other subject races, and so seem to require harsher measures. The Deutsche in particular, Exalted Fleetlord— the cannon that wrecked the 56th Emperor Jossano was theirs, even if it was on the land of the SSSR, and the missile the Big Uglies tried to launch, and now, you tell me, they fly jet planes as well."

  "No," Atvar said. Ancient doctrine declared that new planets were not to be spoiled by radioactivity, which was apt to linger long after the war of subjugation ended. After all, the Race would be living here in perpetuity,

  integrating Tosev into the fabric of the Empire... and Tosev 3 didn't have that much land to begin with.

  But it did have hideously troublesome natives. Just moments before, the fleetlord had thought how poorly ancient doctrine worked when dealing with the Big Uglies. Moving away from it frightened him as he'd never been frightened before, as if he were cut off from the Emperor's favor, adrift and alone. Yet would he deserve the Emperor's favor if he led the Race to more disasters?

  "Wait, Shiplord— I have changed my mind," he told Kirel, who had begun to turn away. "Go ahead and use one on— what is the name of the place?"

  "Berlin, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel answered. "It shall be done."

  5

  "Paris," George Bagnall said wearily. "I was here on holiday a couple of years before the war started. It's not the same."

  "Nothing's the same as it was before the war started," Ken Embry said. "Hell, nothing's the same as it was before the Lizards came, and that was bare weeks ago."

  "A good thing, too, else we'd all be kriegies by now, sitting behind, barbed wire and waiting for our next Red Cross packages," Alf Whyte said. The navigator lifted a leg and shook his tired foot, then laughed wryly. "If we were kriegies with Red Cross packages, we'd likely see better grub than we've had on the way up here."

  "Right on both counts," Bagnall said. The German occupiers of northern and central France could have swept up the English fliers

  a dozen times over on their hike to Paris, but hadn't bothered. Some,
in fact, cheered the men they might have shot under other circumstances. French peasants shared what they had with the Englishmen, but what they had was mostly potatoes and greens. Their rations made the ones back home sybaritic by comparison, a true testimonial to how meager they were.

  Ken Embry said, "Talk about the Lizards, who'd've dreamt he'd be sorry to hear Berlin was smashed to flinders?"

  The French papers, still German-dominated, had screamed of nothing else the past few days, shrieked about the fireball that consumed the city, wailed over unbelievable devastation, wept at the hundreds of thousands reported dead. Bagnall understood most of what the sheets proclaimed; his French was better than he'd giddily claimed in the moment of relief after the Lanc got down

  safe. Now he said, "I'd not have shed a tear if they'd managed to toast Hitler along with everyone else."