In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  “They babble about three or four years, as if this were not an emergency,” Stalin said dismissively. “I have given them eighteen months. They shall do as the Party requires of them, or else suffer the consequences.”

  Molotov chose his words with care: “It might be better if they did not undergo the supreme penalty, Iosef Vissarionovich. Men of their technical training would be difficult to replace adequately.”

  “Yes, yes.” Stalin sounded impatient, always a danger sign. “But they are the servants of the peasants and workers of the Soviet Union, not their masters; we must not let them get ideas above their station, or the virus of the bourgeoisie will infect us once again.”

  “No, that cannot be permitted,” Molotov agreed. “Let us say that they do all they have promised. How do we protect the Soviet Union in the time between our using the bomb we have made from the Lizards’ explosive metal and that in which we begin to manufacture it for ourselves?”

  “For one thing, we do not use that one bomb immediately,” Stalin answered. “We cannot use it immediately, for it is not yet made. But even if it were, I would wait to pick the proper moment. And besides, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich”—Stalin looked smug—“how will the Lizards be certain we have only the one bomb? Once we use it, they shall have to assume we can do it again, not so?”

  “Unless they assume we used their explosive metal for the first one,” Molotov said.

  He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Stalin didn’t shout or bluster at him; that he would have withstood with ease. Instead, the General Secretary fixed him with a glare as cold and dark and silent as midwinter at Murmansk. That was Stalin’s sign of ultimate displeasure; he ordered generals and commissars shot with just such an expression.

  Here, though, Molotov’s point was too manifestly true for Stalin to ignore. The glare softened, as winter’s grip did at last even in Murmansk. Stalin said, “This is another good argument for carefully choosing the time and place we use the bomb. But you also must remember, if we face defeat without it, we shall surely use it against the invaders no matter what they do to us in return. They are more dangerous than the Germans, and must be fought with whatever means come to hand.”

  “True enough,” Molotov said. The Soviet Union had 190,000,000 people; throw twenty or thirty million on the fire, or even more, and it remained a going concern. Just getting rid of the kulaks and bringing in collectivized agriculture had killed millions through deliberate famine. If more deaths were what building socialism in the USSR required, more deaths there would be.

  “I am glad you agreed, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Stalin said silkily. Under the silk lay jagged steel; had Molotov persisted in disagreeing, something most disagreeable would have happened to him.

  The Foreign Commissar of the Soviet Union was fearless before the leaders of the decadent capitalist states; he had even confronted Atvar, who led the Lizards. Before Stalin, Molotov quailed. Stalin genuinely terrified him, as he did every other Soviet citizen. Back in revolutionary days, the little mustachioed Georgian had not been so much, but since, oh, but since …

  Nevertheless, Molotov owed allegiance not just to Stalin, but to the Soviet Union as a whole. If he was to serve the USSR properly, he needed information. Getting it without angering his master was the trick. Carefully, he said, “The Lizards have taken a heavy toll on our bombing planes. Will we be able to deliver the bomb once we have it?”

  “I am told the device will be too heavy and bulky to fit in any of our bombers,” Stalin said. Molotov admired the courage of the man who had told—had had to tell—that to Stalin. But the Soviet leader did not seem nearly so angry as Molotov would have guessed. Instead, his face assumed an expression of genial deviousness that made Molotov want to make sure he still had his wallet and watch. He went on, “If we can dispose of Trotsky in Mexico City, I expect we can find a way to put a bomb where we want it.”

  “No doubt you are right, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said. Trotsky had thought he was safe enough to keep plotting against the Soviet Union, but several inches of tempered steel in his brain proved that a delusion.

  “No doubt I am,” Stalin agreed complacently. As undisputed master of the Soviet Union, he had developed ways not altogether different from those of other undisputed masters. Molotov had once or twice thought of saying as much, but it remained just that—a thought.

  He did ask, “How soon can the Germans and Americans begin producing their own explosive metal?” The Americans didn’t much worry him; they were far away and had worries closer to home. The Germans … Hitler had talked about using the new bombs against the Lizards in Poland. The Soviet Union was an older enemy, and almost as close.

  “We are working to learn this. I expect we shall be informed well in advance, whatever the answer proves to be,” Stalin answered, complacent still. Soviet espionage in capitalist countries continued to function well; many there devoted themselves to furthering the cause of the socialist revolution.

  Molotov cast about for other questions he might safely ask. Before he could come up with any, Stalin bent over the papers on his desk, a sure sign of dismissal. “Thank you for your time, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov said as he stood to go.

  Stalin grunted. His politeness was minimal, but then, so was Molotov’s with anyone but him. When Molotov closed the door behind him, he permitted himself the luxury of a small sigh. He’d survived another audience.

  For getting his consignment of uranium or whatever it was safely from Boston to Denver, Leslie Groves had been promoted to brigadier general. He hadn’t yet bothered replacing his eagles with stars; he had more important things to worry about. His pay was accumulating at the new rate, not that that meant much, what with prices going straight through the roof.

  At the moment what galled him worse than inflation was the lack of gratitude he was getting from the Metallurgical Laboratory scientists. Enrico Fermi looked at him with sorrowful Mediterranean eyes and said, “Valuable as this sample may be, it does not constitute a critical mass.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not a term I know,” Groves said. He knew nuclear energy could be released, but nobody had done much publishing on matters nuclear since Hahn and Strassmann split the uranium atom, and, to complicate things further, the Met Lab crew had developed a jargon all their own.

  “It means you have not brought us enough with which to make a bomb,” Leo Szilard said bluntly. He and the other physicists round the table glared at Groves as if he were deliberately holding back another fifty kilos of priceless metal.

  Since he wasn’t, he glared, too. “My escort and I risked our lives across a couple of thousand miles to get that package to you,” he growled. “If you’re telling me we wasted our time, smiling when you say it isn’t going to help.” Even relatively lean as the journey had left him, he was the biggest man at the conference table, and used to using his physical presence to get what he wanted.

  “No, no, this is not what we mean,” Fermi said quickly. “You could not have known exactly what you had, and we could not, either, until you delivered it.”

  “We did not even know that you had it until you delivered it,” Szilard said. “Security—pah!” He muttered something under his breath in what might have been Magyar. Whatever it was, it sounded pungent. Groves had seen his dossier. His politics had some radical leanings, but he was too brilliant for that to count against him.

  Fermi added, “The material you brought will be invaluable in research, and in combining with what we eventually produce ourselves. But by itself, it is not sufficient.”

  “All right, you’ll have to do here what you were going to do at Chicago,” Groves said. “How’s that coming?” He turned to the one man from the Met Lab crew he’d met before. “Dr. Larssen, what is the status of getting the project up and running again here in Denver?”

  “We were building the graphite pile under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago,” Jens Larssen answered. “Now we’re reassembling it under the football stadi
um here. The work goes—well enough.” He shrugged.

  Groves gave Larssen a searching once-over. He didn’t seem to have the driving energy he’d shown in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the summer before. Then, he’d passionately urged the federal government-in-hiding to do all it could to hold Chicago against the Lizards. But the Met Lab had had to move even though Chicago was held, and now—well, it just didn’t seem as if Larssen gave a damn. That kind of attitude wouldn’t do, not when the work at hand was so urgent.

  The meeting with the physicists went on for another half hour, over lesser but still vital issues like keeping electricity coming into Denver and into the University of Denver in particular so the men could do their jobs. People in the United States had taken electricity for granted until the Lizards came. Now, over too much of the country, it was a vanished luxury. But if it vanished in Denver, the Met Lab would have to find somewhere else to go, and Groves didn’t think the country—or the world—could afford the delay.

  Unlike nuclear physics, electricity was something with which, by God, he was intimately familiar. “We’ll keep it going for you,” he promised, and hoped he could make good on the vow. If the Lizards got the idea humans were experimenting with nuclear energy here, they’d have something to say about the matter. Keeping them from finding out, then, was going to be a sizable part of keeping the lights on.

  When the meeting broke up, Groves fell into step with Larssen and ignored the physicist’s efforts to break away. “We need to talk, Dr. Larssen,” he said.

  “No we don’t, Colonel—sorry, General—Groves,” Larssen said, loading the title with all the scorn he could. “The Army’s already done enough to screw up my life, thanks very much. I don’t need any more help from you.” He turned his back and started to stamp off.

  Groves shot out a big, meaty hand and caught him by the arm. From the way Larssen whirled around, Groves thought he was going to swing on him. Decking a physicist wasn’t part of his own job description, but if that was what it took, that was what he’d do.

  Maybe Larssen saw that in his eyes, for he didn’t throw the punch. Groves said, “Look, your life is your business. But when it makes you have trouble with your job, well, your particular job is too important to let that happen. So what’s eating you, and how come you think it’s the Army’s fault?”

  “You want to know? You really want to know?” Larssen didn’t wait for an answer from Groves, but plowed ahead: “Well, why the hell shouldn’t I tell you? Somebody else will if I don’t. After I saw you last year, I managed to get all the way to western Indiana on my own. That’s when I ran into General Patton, who wouldn’t let me send my wife a message so she’d know I was alive and okay.”

  “Security—” Groves began.

  “Yeah, security. So I couldn’t get her a message then, and by the time I got to Chicago, it was too late—the Met Lab team had already taken off. And I couldn’t get a message to Barbara after that—security again. So she figured I was dead. What was she supposed to think?”

  “Oh,” Groves said. “I’m sorry. That must have been a shock when she came into Denver. But I’ll bet you had quite a reunion.”

  “It was great,” Larssen said, his voice deadly cold. “She thought I was dead, so she fell for this corporal who rides herd on Lizard POWs. She married him up in Wyoming. I was already in Denver, but Colonel Hexham, God bless him, still wouldn’t let me write. Security one more time. Now she’s gonna have the guy’s baby. So as far as I’m concerned, General Groves, sir, the U.S. Army can go fuck itself. And if you don’t like it, throw me in the brig.”

  Groves opened his mouth, closed it again. He’d been through Chugwater just after that wedding in Wyoming. He’d known something was eating Larssen, but not what. No wonder the poor bastard was in a blue funk. Mahatma Gandhi wouldn’t have stayed cool, calm, and collected with this landing on him.

  “Maybe she’ll come back to you,” he said at last. It sounded lame, even in his own ears.

  Larssen laughed scornfully. “Doesn’t look that way. She’s still going to bed with Sam stinking Yeager, that’s for sure. Women!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “You can’t live without ’em and they won’t live with you.”

  Groves hadn’t seen his own wife in months, either, or sent her a note or anything else. He didn’t worry about her running around, though; he just worried about her being all right. Maybe that just meant he was older and more settled than Larssen and his wife. Maybe it meant his marriage was in better shape. Or maybe (unsettling thought) it meant he didn’t know what to worry about.

  He fell back on his own training: “Dr. Larssen, you cannot let it get you down to the point where it affects your work. You cannot. More than just you and your wife depends on what you do here, more even than your country. I am not exaggerating when I say the fate of humanity rests on your shoulders.”

  “I know that,” Larssen said. “But it’s hard to give a damn about the fate of humanity when the one human being who really matters to you goes and does something like this.”

  There Groves could not argue with him, nor did he try. He said, “You’re not the only one in that boat. It happens all the time—maybe more in war than in peace, because things are more broken up nowadays—but all the time. You have to pick up the pieces and keep going.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Larssen said. “I tell myself the same thing twenty times a day. But it’s damned hard when I keep seeing her there with that other guy. It hurts too much to stand.”

  Groves thought about shipping out the other guy—Yeager, Larssen had said his name was. With the war on, keeping a physicist happy counted for more than the feelings of a Lizard liaison man. But even if he did that, he had no guarantee it would bring Barbara back into Jens’ arms, not if she was carrying Yeager’s baby.

  And she and Yeager wouldn’t have got married if they hadn’t thought Larssen was dead. They’d tried to make things right, the best way they knew how. It hadn’t worked, but they hadn’t had all the data they needed, and humans couldn’t be engineered like electrons, anyhow.

  Just the same, Groves wished he could order Barbara to go to bed with Jens for the good of the country. It would have made things a lot simpler. But, while a medieval baron might have gotten away with an order like that, a twentieth-century woman would spit in his eye if he tried it. That was what freedom was about. He believed in freedom … no matter how inconvenient it was at the moment.

  “Professor Larssen, you’ve got yourself a mess,” he said heavily.

  “Yeah. Now tell me one I haven’t heard.”

  When Larssen broke away this time, Groves didn’t try to stop him. He just stood and watched till the physicist turned a corner and disappeared. Then he shook his head. “That’s trouble, waiting to happen,” he muttered, and started slowly down the hall himself.

  Atvar turned one eye turret to the left side of the audience chamber, the other to the right. The assembled shiplords stared back at him. He tried to gauge their temper. They’d been struggling for close to two years, almost one of Tosev 3’s slow revolutions around its star, to bring the miserable world into the Empire. By all they’d known when they left from Home, the conquest should have been over in a matter of days—which only proved they hadn’t known much.

  “My fellow males, let us consider the status of our enterprise,” he said.

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the shiplords chorused in a show of the perfect obedience the Race so esteemed. No virtue was more fundamental than obedience. So Atvar had been taught since he came from his egg; so he’d believed till he came to Tosev 3.

  He still believed it, but not as he had back on Home. Tosev 3 corroded every assumption the Race made about how life should be lived. The only thing the Big Uglies knew about obedience was that they weren’t very good at it. They’d even overthrown and murdered emperors: to Atvar, whose ruling dynasty had held the throne for tens of thousands of years, a crime almost incomprehensibly heinou
s.

  He said, “We do continue to make progress in our campaigns. Our counterattacks south of the Tosevite city known as Chicago on the smaller continental mass have pushed back the enemy, and—”

  Straha, shiplord of the 206th Emperor Yower, raised a hand. Atvar wished he could ignore the male. Unfortunately, Straha was next most senior shiplord after Kirel, who commanded the bannership itself. Even more unfortunately, from Atvar’s point of view, Straha headed a loud and vocal faction of males whose principal amusement seemed to be carping about the way the war against the Tosevites was going.

  Having been (reluctantly) recognized, Straha said, “May it please the exalted fleetlord, I would respectfully note that the campaign continues to have obvious shortcomings. I hope I shall not try his patience if I elucidate?”

  “Proceed,” Atvar said. Maybe, he thought hopefully, Straha will say something really unforgivable and give me the excuse I’ve been looking for to sack him. It hadn’t happened yet, worse luck.

  Straha stood a little straighter, the better to display his elaborate, punctiliously applied body paint. He had his own agenda, Atvar knew: if he could persuade enough males that the fleetlord was botching his leadership of the war, he might become fleetlord himself. It would be irregular, but everything about the conquest—the attempted conquest—of Tosev 3 was irregular. If Straha succeeded where Atvar had failed, the Emperor would turn his eye turrets away from the irregularity.

  The fractious shiplord said, “First and most important is the increased punishment our armor is taking at the hands of the Big Uglies. Loss rates are up significantly from last year’s fighting to this. Such a toll cannot continue indefinitely.”

  There Atvar, try as he would, could not disagree with Straha. He made his voice sharp, though, as he answered, “I cannot produce landcruisers out of thin air, nor can the Big Uglies under our control manufacture any that meet our needs. Meanwhile, those out of our control continue to improve their models, and to introduce new weapons such as antilandcruiser rockets. Thus our losses are higher of late.”