In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  Stars twinkled through gaps in the clouds. A couple of times, she spotted brief twinkles of light on the ground, too: muzzle flashes. They made the stars seem less safe and friendly.

  Watching the compass and her watch, she flew on toward the base. When she thought she was overhead, she looked down and saw—nothing. That failed to surprise her; finding it on the first try by dead reckoning was no likelier than plunging your hand into a haystack and bringing out a needle between thumb and forefinger.

  She began another search spiral. Now she watched her fuel gauge, too. If she was lost and had to set down in a field, she wanted to do it while she still had power, not dead stick.

  Just when she was beginning to worry she might have to do exactly that, she spied the lights she’d been looking for. She gratefully made for them; knowing where you were made you feel ever so much more in control of things.

  The airstrip had supposedly been leveled. As a matter of fact, it was no smoother than the one the partisans had marked off for her. Ludmila’s teeth clicked together at every jolt until the U-2 stopped. She told herself the roughness made the runway harder to spot. Was that consolation enough for the bruises she’d have wherever her safety harness touched her? Maybe.

  She unbuckled the harness, got out of the plane while the prop was still spinning. The groundcrew ran up, hauled the Kukuruznik away to its between-missions home in a camouflaged revetment. “Where’s Colonel Karpov?” she asked.

  “He went to bed an hour ago,” somebody answered. “It is close to three in the morning. You have anything so important it won’t keep till dawn?”

  “I suppose not,” she said. The Lizard artillery wasn’t something he had to know about right now. She followed the Kukuruznik toward its shelter.

  Ludmila would have bet as much money as she had that she’d find Georg Schultz waiting at the revetment. Sure enough, there he was. “Alles khorosho?” he asked in his usual mixture of German and Russian.

  “Gut, da,” she answered, mixing the languages the same way.

  He scrambled up into the cockpit. No lantern was lighted, not even beneath the camouflage netting; the Lizards had gadgets that could pick up the tiniest gleam. That didn’t stop Schultz from starting to work on Ludmila’s biplane. He tested the pedals and other controls, leaned out to say, “Left aileron cable not good—feels a little loose. Come light, I fix.”

  “Thank you, Georgi Mikhailovich,” Ludmila answered. She hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the cable, but if Schultz said it needed tightening, she was willing to believe him. His understanding for machinery was, to her way of thinking, all but uncanny. She flew the aircraft; Georg Schultz projected himself into it as if he were part plane himself.

  “Nothing else bad,” he said, “but here—you leave on floor.” He handed her a folded triangle of paper.

  “Thank you,” she said again. “Our post is unreliable enough without me losing a letter before it ever gets into the mail.” She wasn’t sure how much of that he understood, but found herself yawning enormously. She was too tired to try to dredge up German to make things clear for him. If Colonel Karpov was asleep, she saw no reason she shouldn’t grab a couple of hours for herself, too.

  She shrugged out of her parachute harness—not that she’d have much chance to use a chute if she got hit while she was hedgehopping the way she usually did—and stowed it in the cockpit, then started out of the revetment toward her sleeping quarters. As she passed Georg Schultz, he patted her on the backside.

  Ludmila took a skittering half step, half jump. She whirled around in fury. This wasn’t the first time such things had happened to her since she’d joined the Red Air Force, but somehow she’d thought Schultz too kulturny to try them.

  “Don’t you ever do that again!” she blazed in Russian, then switched to German to drive it home: “Nie wieder, verstehst du?” It was the du of insult, not intimacy. She added, “What would your Colonel Jäger think if he found out what you just did?”

  Schultz had been the gunner in the tank Jäger commanded; he thought highly of his former leader. Ludmila hoped reminding him of that would bring him to his senses. But he just laughed quietly and said, “He would think I wasn’t doing anything he hadn’t done himself.”

  A short, deadly silence followed. Ludmila broke it in tones of ice: “That is none of your business. If it will not make you keep your hands where they belong, maybe this will: remember, you are the only Nazi on a base full of Red Air Force men. They leave you alone because you work well. But they do not love you. Verstehst du das?”

  He drew himself to stiff attention, did his best to click his heels in soft felt valenki, shot out his arm in a defiant Hitlerite salute. “I remember very well, and I do understand.” He stomped away.

  Ludmila wanted to kick him. Why couldn’t he have just said he was sorry and gone on about his business instead of getting angry, as if she had somehow wronged him instead of the other way round? Now what was she supposed to do? If he was that angry with her, did she still want him working on her aircraft? But if he didn’t, who would?

  The answer to that formed in her mind with the question: some quarter-trained Russian peasant who hardly knew the difference between a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. She could do some work herself, but not all, and she knew she didn’t have Schultz’s artist’s touch with an engine. Her show of temper was liable to end up getting her killed.

  But what should she have done? Let him treat her like a whore? She shook her head violently. Maybe she should have responded with a joke instead of a blast, though.

  Too late to worry about it now. Slowly, tiredly, she walked over to the building that sheltered the women pilots. It wasn’t much of a shelter: the walls were dirt-filled sandbags and bales of hay like the revetments that protected the aircraft, the roof camouflage netting over straw over unchinked boards. It leaked and let in the cold. But no one here, Colonel Karpov included, had quarters any better.

  The door to the improvised barracks had no hinges, and had to be pushed aside. Inside was a blackout curtain. Ludmila pulled the door closed before she went through the curtain. Let no light leak out was a rule she took as much for granted as take off into the wind.

  The barracks held little light to leak, anyhow: a couple of candles and an oil lamp were enough to keep you from stumbling over blanket-wrapped women snoring on straw pallets, but that was about all. Yawning, Ludmila stumbled toward her own place.

  A white rectangle lay on top of her folded blankets. It hadn’t been there when she went out on her mission a few hours earlier. “A letter!” she said happily—and from a civilian, too, or it would have been folded differently. Hope flared in her, painfully intense: she hadn’t heard from anyone in her family since the Lizards came. Maybe they were safe after all, when she’d almost given up on them.

  In the dim light, she had to pick up the letter to realize it was in an envelope. She turned it over, bent her head close to it to look at the address. She needed a moment to notice part of it was written in the Roman alphabet, and the Cyrillic characters were printed with a slow precision that said the person who used them wasn’t used to them.

  Then her eyes fixed on the stamp. Had anyone told her a year before that she’d have been glad to see a picture of Adolf Hitler, she’d either have thought him mad or been mortally insulted—probably both. “Heinrich,” she breathed, doing her best to pronounce the H at the beginning of the name, which was not a sound the Russian language had.

  She tore the envelope open, eased out the letter. To her relief, she saw Jäger had considerately printed: she found German handwriting next to indecipherable. She read, My dear Ludmila, I hope this finds you safe and well. In fact, I have to hope it finds you at all.

  In her mind’s eye she could see one corner of his mouth quirking upwards as he set his small joke down on paper. The perfection and intensity of the image told her how much she missed him.

  I was on duty in a town I cannot name lest the censor reach for his razor,
he went on. I will be leaving in the next day or two, though, and going back to a panzer outfit I also cannot name. I wish I were returning to you instead, or you to me. So much easier to travel long distance by plane than by horse or even by panzer.

  She remembered some of his stories of crossing Lizard-occupied Poland on horseback. That made anything she’d done in her U-2 seem tame by comparison. In the letter, he went on, I wish we could be together more. Even at best, we have so little time on this world, and with the war we do not have the best. Yet without it, we would not have met, you and I, so I suppose I cannot say it is altogether a bad thing.

  “No, it isn’t,” she whispered. Having an affair with an enemy might be stupid (a feeling Jäger no doubt shared with her), but she couldn’t make herself believe it was a bad thing.

  The letter continued, I thank you for looking out for my comrade Georg Schultz; your country is so vast that only great luck could have brought him to your base, as you said when we were last together. Greet him for me; I hope he is well.

  Ludmila didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she read that. Schultz was well, all right, and she had looked out for him, and all he wanted was to get her pants down. She wondered whether he had enough sense of shame to be embarrassed if she showed him Jäger’s letter.

  She didn’t have to decide now. She wanted to finish the letter and get a little sleep. Everything else could wait. She read, If fate is kind, we will meet again soon in a world at peace. If it is less kind, we will meet again though the war goes on. It would have to be very cruel to keep us from meeting again at all. With love and the hope you stay safe—Heinrich.

  Ludmila folded the letter small and stuck it in a pocket of her flying suit. Then she took off her leather helmet and goggles, but none of the rest of the outfit, not even her valenki. The inside of the barracks was cold. She lay down on the straw, pulled the blanket up over her head, and fell asleep almost at once.

  When she woke the next morning, she found one hand in the pocket where she’d put the letter. That made her smile, and resolved her to answer it right away. Then she had to figure out whether to show it to Schultz. She decided she would, but not this minute. Time enough when they were calmer, not actively angry at each other. Meanwhile, she still had to make her report to Colonel Karpov.

  The Nipponese guard handed Teerts his bowl of food. He bowed polite thanks, turned one eye toward it to see what he’d got. He almost hissed with pleasure: along with the rice, the bowl was full of chunks of some kind of flesh. The Big Uglies had been feeding him better lately; by the time he finished the meal, he was almost content.

  He wondered what they were up to. Captivity had taught him they were not in the habit of doing gratuitous favors for anybody. Up till now, captivity had taught him they weren’t in the habit of doing any favors whatever. The change made him suspicious.

  Sure enough, Major Okamoto and the usual stone-faced, rifle-toting guard marched up to the cell door not long after the bowl was taken away. As the door swung open, Okamoto spoke in the language of the Race: “You will come with me.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts agreed. He left the cell with no small relief. His step seemed lighter than it had in a long time; going upstairs to the interrogation chamber of the Nagasaki prison felt like good exercise, not a wearing burden. Amazing what something close to proper food can do, he thought.

  Again, the Nipponese inside the chamber wore the white robes of scientists. The Big Ugly in the center chair spoke. Major Okamoto translated: “Dr. Nishina wishes to discuss today the nature of the bombs with which the Race destroyed the cities of Berlin and Washington.”

  “Why not?” Teerts answered agreeably. “These bombs were made from uranium. In case you do not know what uranium is, it is the ninety-second element in the periodic table.” He let his mouth fall slightly open in amusement. The Big Uglies were so barbarous, they would surely have not the slightest notion of what he was talking about.

  After Okamoto relayed his answer to the Nipponese scientists, he and they talked back and forth for some time. Then he returned his attention to Teerts, saying, “I do not have the technical terms I need to ask these questions in proper detail. Give them to me as we speak, please, and do your best to understand even without them.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said, agreeable still.

  “Good.” Okamoto paused to think; his rubbery Big Ugly features made the process easy to watch. At length, he said, “Dr. Nishina wishes to know which process the Race uses to separate the lighter, explosive kind of uranium from the more common heavy kind.”

  Teerts bit down on that as if it were an unsuspected bone in his meat. Not in his wildest nightmares—and he’d had some dreadful ones since his capture—had he imagined that the Big Uglies had the slightest clue about atomic energy, or even that they’d heard of uranium. If they did—He abruptly realized they might be dangerous to the Race, not just the horrid nuisances they’d already proved themselves.

  To Major Okamoto, he said, “Tell the learned Dr. Nishina that I do not know which processes he means.” He had to work not to turn an eye turret toward the instruments of torture in the interrogation chamber.

  Okamoto fixed him with a stare he’d come to identify as hostile, but passed his words on to Nishina without comment. Nishina spoke volubly in reply, ticking off points on his fingers as if he were a male of the Race.

  When he was through, Okamoto translated: “He says theory shows several ways which might accomplish this. Among them are successive barriers to a uranium-containing gas, heating the gas so that part of it which has the lighter kind of uranium rises more than the other, using a strong electromagnet”—a word that took a good deal of backing and filling to get across—“and using rapid spinning to concentrate the lighter kind of uranium. Which of these does the Race find most efficient?”

  Teerts stared at him. He was even more appalled than he had been when his killercraft got shot down. That had affected only his own fate. Now he had to worry about whether the Race had any idea what the Tosevites were up to. They might be barbarians—by everything Teerts had seen, they were barbarians—but they were also alarmingly knowledgeable … which meant it behooved Teerts to be more than cautious in his answers. He’d have to do his best to avoid giving away any information at all.

  He took so long figuring that out that Okamoto snapped, “Don’t waste time dreaming up lies. Answer Dr. Nishina.”

  “I beg your pardon, superior sir,” Teerts said, and added, “Gomen nasai—so sorry,” from his limited stock of Nipponese. “Part of the problem is my not having enough words to give a proper answer, and another part is my own ignorance, for which I again beg pardon. You must remember that I am—I was—a pilot. I had nothing at all to do with uranium.”

  “You certainly were glib enough talking about it a little while ago,” Okamoto said. “You do not want to make me disbelieve you. Some of the tools back there are very sharp, others can be made hot, and still others can be hot and sharp at the same time. Do you want to learn which is which?”

  “No, superior sir,” Teerts gasped with utmost sincerity. “But I truly am ignorant of the knowledge you seek. I am only a pilot, not a nuclear physicist. What I know of flying, I have freely told you. I am not an expert in the matter of atomic weapons. What little I know of nuclear energy I learned in school as I was growing from hatchlinghood. It is no more and no less than any other ordinary male of the Race would know.”

  “This is difficult to believe,” Okamoto said. “You spoke quite a lot about uranium just a little while ago.”

  That was before I realized how much you knew about it, Teerts thought. He wondered how he was going to escape with his integument intact. He knew he couldn’t lie to the Nipponese; he didn’t know how much they knew, and the only way to find out—getting caught—would involve the painful penetration of that integument.

  He said, “I do know that atomic weapons do not necessarily use uranium alone.
Some involve, I am not sure how, hydrogen as well—the very first element.” Let the Japanese chew on that paradox for a while, he thought: how could a weapon involve the lightest and heaviest elements at the same time?

  After Okamoto interpreted, the team of Big Ugly scientists chattered for a while among themselves. Then Nishina, who seemed to be their spokesman, put a question to Okamoto. The major translated for Teerts: “The uranium explosion, then, is hot enough to make hydrogen act as it does in the sun and convert large amounts of mattet to energy?”

  Horror filled Teerts. Every time he tried to escape from this hideous mess in which he found himself, he sank deeper instead. The Big Uglies knew about fusion. To Teerts, the product of a civilization that grew and changed at a glacial pace, knowing about something was essentially the same as being able to do it. And if the Tosevites could make fusion bombs …

  Major Okamoto knocked him out of his appalled reverie by snapping, “Answer the learned Dr. Nishina!”

  “I beg your pardon, superior sir,” Teerts said. “Yes, everything the learned doctor says is true.”

  There. He’d done it. Any day now, he feared, the Nipponese would start using nuclear weapons against the Race on the mainland—which still struck Teerts as nothing more than a big island; he was used to water surrounded by land, not the other way around.

  He heard Okamoto say “Honto,” confirming his answer to the Nipponese scientist’s question. The cold of the interrogation room sank deeply into his spirit. The Nipponese hardly seemed to need him. By their questions, they had all the answers already, just waiting to be put into practice.

  Then Nishina spoke again: “We return to the question of getting the lighter uranium, the kind which is explosive, out of the other, more common, type. This as yet we have not succeeded in doing; indeed, we have only just begun the attempt. That is why we will learn from you how the Race solves this problem.”