In the Balance & Tilting the Balance

by Harry Turtledove

  But he knew as well as Mutt that Mutt wasn’t going to call him on it. “I’m right glad o’ that,” Daniels said. “You go, ah, findin’ chickens where there is people around, you’ll have Miss Lucille diggin’ pellets outta your ass. Birdshot if you’re lucky, buckshot if you ain’t.”

  “Not while I’m luggin’ a BAR,” Szabo said with quiet assurance. “Didn’t Miss Lucille say something about an auditorium somewhere in this park? If there’s any roof at all, cooking these birds gets a lot easier.”

  Mutt looked around. Riverview Park was good-sized, and with the rain coming down in curtains he couldn’t see anything that looked like a building. “I’ll ask her where it’s at,” he said, and sloshed back to where she was playing mad scientist with the late, unlamented Lizard’s remains.

  “Look at this, Mutt,” Lucille said when he came up. She used her scalpel to point enthusiastically at the Lizard’s jaws. “Lots of little teeth, all pretty much the same, not specialized like ours.”

  “Yeah, I seen that when I captured a couple live ones not long after they invaded us,” Mutt answered, averting his eyes; the skull had enough rotting meat still on it to threaten to kill his appetite.

  “You captured Lizards, Sarge?” Freddie Laplace sounded impressed as all get-out. Lucille just took it in stride, the way she did most things. Mutt would have been happier had it been the other way around.

  Nothing he could do about it, though. He asked her where the auditorium was; she pointed eastward. He slogged in that direction, hoping some of the place was still intact. Sure enough, he discovered that, although it had taken a shell hit that left one wall only a baby brickyard, the rest seemed sound enough.

  In the rain, finding anything more than fifty yards away wasn’t easy. Mud thin as bad diarrhea slopped over his boot tops and soaked his socks. He hoped he wouldn’t come down with pneumonia or the grippe.

  “Halt! Who goes?” Szabo’s voice came out of the water, as if from behind a falls. Daniels couldn’t see him at all. Dracula might be a chicken thief, but he made a pretty fair soldier.

  “It’s me,” Mutt called. “Found that auditorium place. You want to give me them birds, I’ll cook ’em for you. I grew up on a farm; reckon I’ll do a better job than you would anyways.”

  “Yeah, okay. Come on this way.” Szabo stood up so Mutt could spot him. “Not gonna be any Lizards around for a while, though, Sarge—is it okay if I wander over there in an hour or so, and you’ll make sure there’s some dark meat left for me?”

  “I think maybe we can do that,” Daniels said. “You put somebody here on your weapon before you go wandering, though, you hear me? In case we do have trouble, we’re gonna need all the firepower we can get our hands on.”

  “Don’t you worry about that, Sarge,” Szabo said. “Even roast chicken ain’t worth gettin’ my ass shot off for.” He spoke with great conviction. From any other dogface in the squad, Daniels would have found that convincing. With Szabo, you never could tell.

  He took the chickens back to the auditorium. Whoever had been there last, Americans or Lizards, had chopped up a lot of the folding wooden seats that faced the stage: more than they’d used for their fires. Taking advantage of the free lumber, Mutt built his blaze on the concrete floor where others had made theirs before him.

  He pulled out his trusty Zippo. He wondered how long it would stay trusty. He had a package of flints in his shirt pocket, but the Zippo was burning kerosene these days, not lighter fluid, and he didn’t know when he’d come across any more kerosene, either. For now, it still gave him a flame on the first try.

  He quickly found out why the previous occupants of the auditorium had been so eager to use the seats for fuel: the varnish that made them shiny also made them catch fire with the greatest of ease. He went back out into the rain to throw away the chicken guts and to get some sticks on which to skewer the pieces of chicken he was going to cook.

  His belly growled when the savory smell of roasting meat came through the smoke from the fire. His grandfathers would have done their cooking in the War Between the States the same way he was now, except they’d have used lucifer matches instead of the Zippo to get the fire going.

  “Chow!” he yelled when he had a fair number of pieces finished. Men straggled in by ones and twos, ate quickly, and went back out into the rain. When Lucille Potter came in for hers, Mutt asked jokingly, “You wash your hands before supper?”

  “You’d best believe I did—and with soap, too.” Being a nurse, Lucille was in dead earnest about cleanliness. “Did you wash yours before you cleaned these birds and cut them up?”

  “Well, you might say so,” Mutt answered; his hands had certainly been wet, anyhow. “Didn’t use soap, though.”

  Had Lucille Potter’s stare been any fishier, she’d have grown fins. Before she could say anything, Szabo strolled into the auditorium. “You save me a drumstick, Sarge?”

  “Here’s a whole leg, kid,” Mutt said. The BAR man blissfully started gnawing away. Daniels took half a breast off the fire, waved it in the air to cool it down, and also began to eat. He had to pause a couple of times to spit out burnt bits of feather; he’d done a lousy job of plucking the chickens.

  Then he paused again, this time with the hunk of white meat nowhere near his mouth. Through the splashing rain came deep-throated engine rumblings and the mucky grinding noise of caterpillar tracks working hard to propel their burden over bad ground. The chicken Mutt had already swallowed turned to a small lump of lead in his stomach.

  “Tanks.” The word came out as hardly more than a whisper, as if he didn’t want to believe it himself. Then he bellowed it with all the fear and force he had in him: “Tanks!”

  Dracula Szabo dropped the mostly bare drumstick and thigh and sprinted back toward his BAR. What good it would do against Lizard armor, Mutt couldn’t imagine. He also didn’t think the rain would give him another chance to take out a Lizard tank with a bottle of ether—even assuming Lucille had any more, which wasn’t obvious.

  He threw down his own piece of meat, grabbed his submachine gun, and peered out ever so cautiously through the gaping hole in the auditorium wall. The tanks were out there somewhere not far away, but he couldn’t see them. They weren’t firing; maybe they didn’t know his squad was in the park.

  “That’s great,” he muttered. “Gettin’ trapped behind enemy lines is just what I had in mind.”

  “Enemy lines?” All his attention on the noises coming from the dripping gloom outside, Mutt hadn’t noticed Lucille Potter coming up behind him. She went on, “Those are our tanks, Mutt. They’re coming down from the north—either the Lizards haven’t taken out the bridges over the Vermilion or else we’ve repaired them—and they make a lot more racket than the machines the Lizards use.”

  Mutt listened again, this time without panic blinding his ears. After a two-beat pause he used around Lucille to replace a useful seven-letter word, he said, “You’re right. Lord, I was ready to start shooting at my own side.”

  “Some of the men are still liable to do that,” Lucille said.

  “Yeah.” Mutt stepped outside, shouted into the rain: “Hold your fire! American tanks comin’ south. Hold fire!”

  One of the granting, snorting machines rumbled by close enough for the commander to hear that cry. To Mutt, he was just a vague shape sticking up from the top of the turret. He called back in unmistakable New England accents, “We’re friendly all right, buddy. We’re usin’ the rain to move up without the Lizards spotting us—give the little scaly sons of bitches a surprise if they come after you guys.”

  “Sounds right good, pal,” Daniels answered, waving. The tank—he could tell it was a Sherman; the turret was too big for a Lee—rattled on toward the south edge of Riverview Park. In a way, Mutt envied the crew for having inches of hardened steel between them and the foe. In another way, he was happy enough to be just an infantryman. The Lizards didn’t particularly notice him. Tanks, though, drew their special fire. They had some fanc
y can openers, too.

  The tank commander had to know that better than Mutt did. He kept heading south anyhow. Mutt wondered how many times he’d been in action, and if this one would be the last. With a wave to the departing tank that was half salute, he went back into the ruined auditorium to finish his chicken.

  XIII

  Vyacheslav Molotov jounced along toward the farm outside Moscow in a panje wagon, as if he were a peasant with a couple of sacks of radishes he hadn’t been able to sell. From the way the NKVD man driving the wagon behaved, Molotov might have been a sack of radishes himself. The Soviet foreign commissar didn’t mind. He was rarely in the mood for idle chitchat, with today no exception to the rule.

  All around him, the land burgeoned with Russian spring. The sun rose early now, and set late, and everything that had lain dormant through winter flourished in the long hours of daylight. Fresh green grass pushed up through and hid last year’s growth, now gray-brown and dead. The willows and birches by the Moscow River wore new bright leafy coats. Concealed by those new leaves, birds chirped and warbled. Molotov did not know which bird went with which song. He could barely tell a titmouse from a toucan, not that you were likely to find a toucan in a Russian treetop even in springtime.

  Ducks stuck their behinds in the air as they tipped up for food in the river. The driver looked at them and murmured, “I wish I had a shotgun.” Molotov saw reply as unnecessary; the driver would likely have said the same thing had he been alone in the wagon.

  Molotov wished not for a shotgun but a car. Yes, gasoline was in short supply, with almost all of it earmarked for the front. But as the number two man in the Soviet Union behind Stalin, he could have arranged for a limousine had he wanted one. The Lizards, however, were more likely to shoot up motor vehicles than horse-drawn wagons. Molotov played it safe.

  When the driver pulled off the road and onto a meandering path, Molotov thought the fellow had lost his way. The farm ahead looked like an archetypical kolkhoz, maybe a little smaller than most of its ilk. Chickens ran around clucking and pecking, fat pigs wallowed in mud. In the fields, men walked behind mules. The only buildings were row houses for the kolkhozniks and barns for the animals.

  Then one of the men, dressed like any farmer in boots, baggy trousers, collarless tunic, and cloth cap, opened the door to a barn and went inside. Before he closed it after himself, the foreign commissar saw that the inside was brightly lit by electric light. Even before the Germans and the Lizards came, that would have been unusual for a kolkhoz. Now it was inconceivable.

  His smile came broader and more fulsome than most who knew him would have imagined his face could form. “A splendid job of maskirovka,” he said enthusiastically. “Whoever designed and implemented the deception plan, he deserves to be promoted.”

  “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am given to understand the responsible parties have been recognized,” the driver said. He looked like a peasant—he looked like a drunk—but he talked like an educated man. Maskirovka again, Molotov thought. He knew intellectually he would not have a drunken peasant taking him to arguably the most important place in the Soviet Union, but the man played his role well.

  Molotov pointed to the barn. “That is where they do their research?”

  “Comrade, all I know is that that is where I was told to deliver you,” the driver answered. “What they do in there I could not tell you, and I do not want to know.”

  He pulled back on the reins. The horse drawing the highwheeled panje wagon obediently stopped. Molotov, who was not a large man (even if he was taller than Stalin), scrambled down without grace but also without falling. As he headed for the barn door, the driver took a flask from his hip pocket and swigged from it. Maybe he was an educated drunk.

  The barn door looked like a barn door. After that, though, the maskirovka failed: the air that came out of the barn did not smell as it should. Molotov supposed that didn’t matter; if the Lizards got close enough to go sniffing around, the Soviet Union was likely to be finished, anyhow.

  He opened the door, closed it behind him as quickly as the fellow who looked like a farmer had done. Inside, the wooden building was uncompromisingly clean and uncompromisingly scientific. Even the “farmer’s” costume, when seen close up, was spotless.

  The fellow hurried up to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am delighted to see you here,” he said, extending a hand. He was a broad-shouldered man of about forty, with a chin beard and alert eyes in a tired face. “I am Igor Ivanovich Kurchatov, director of the explosive metal project.” He brushed back a lock of hair that drooped (Hitlerlike, Molotov thought irrelevantly) onto his forehead.

  “I have questions on two fronts, Igor Ivanovich,” Molotov said. “First, how soon will you finish the bomb built from the captured Lizard explosive metal? And second, how soon will this facility begin producing more of this metal for us to use?”

  Kurchatov’s eyes widened slightly. “You come straight to the point.”

  “Time-wasting formalities are for the bourgeoisie,” Molotov replied. “Tell me what I need to know so I can report it to Comrade Stalin.”

  Stalin, of course, received regular reports from the project. Beria had been here to see how things went, too. But Molotov, along with being foreign commissar, also served as deputy chairman to Stalin on the State Committee on Defense. Kurchatov licked his lips before he answered; he was well aware of that. He said, “In the first area, we have made great progress. We are almost ready to begin fabricating the components for the bomb.”

  “That is good news,” Molotov agreed.

  “Yes, Comrade,” Kurchatov said. “Since we have the explosive metal in place, it becomes a straightforward engineering matter of putting two masses of it, neither explosive alone, together so they exceed what is called the critical mass, the amount required for an explosion.”

  “I see,” Molotov said, though he really didn’t. If something was explosive, it seemed to him, the only difference between a little and a lot should have been the size of the boom. But all the Soviet physicists and other academicians insisted this strange metal did not work that way. If they achieved the results they claimed, he supposed that would prove them right. He asked, “And how have you decided to join the pieces together?”

  “The simplest way we could think of was to shape one into a cylinder with a hole through the center and the other into a smaller cylinder that would fit precisely into the hole. An explosive charge will propel it into the proper position. We shall take great care that it does not go awry.”

  “Such care is well-advised, Comrade Director,” Molotov said. But although he kept his voice icy, he intuitively liked the design Kurchatov had described. It had a Russian simplicity to it: slam the one into the other and bang! Molotov knew his own people well enough to know also that they had more trouble keeping complicated plans on track than did, say, the Germans; Russians had a way of substituting brute force for sophistication. They’d held the Nazis outside Moscow and Leningrad that way. Now they were on the edge of striking a mighty blow against the Lizards, more deadly invaders still.

  A mighty blow … “After we use up our stock of explosive metal, we have no more—is that correct?” Molotov asked.

  “Yes, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” Kurchatov licked his lips and went no further.

  Molotov frowned. He had been afraid this would happen. The academicians had a habit of promising Stalin the moon, whether they could deliver or not. Maybe the horse will learn to sing, he thought, an echo from some ancient history read in his student days. He shook his head, banishing the memory. The here and now was what counted.

  He knew the dilemma the scientists faced. If they told Stalin they could not give him something he wanted, they’d head for the gulag … unless they got a bullet in the back of the neck instead. But if, after promising, they failed to come through, the same applied again.

  And the Soviet Union desperately needed a continuous supply of explosive metal. In that Molotov agreed with Stalin
. (He tried to remember the last time he had disagreed with Stalin. He couldn’t. It was too long ago.) He said, “What are the difficulties in production, Igor Ivanovich, and how are you working to overcome them?”

  As if on cue, another man in farmer’s clothes came up. Kurchatov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar, let me present to you Georgi Aleksandrovich Flerov, who recently discovered the spontaneous fission of the uranium nucleus and who is in charge of the team investigating these difficulties.”

  Flerov was younger than Kurchatov; even in the clothes of a peasant, he looked like a scholar. He also looked nervous. Because he was in charge, he was responsible for what his team did—and for what it didn’t do.

  “Comrade Foreign Commissar, the answer to your first question, or to the first part of it, is simple,” he said, trying to hold his rather light voice steady. “The chief difficulty in production is that we do not yet know how to produce. Our techniques in nuclear research are several years behind those of the capitalists and fascists, and we are having to learn what they already know.”

  Molotov gave him a baleful stare. “Comrade Stalin will not be pleased to hear this.”

  Kurchatov blanched. So did Flerov, but he said, “If Comrade Stalin chooses to liquidate this team, no one in the Soviet Union will be able to produce these explosives for him. Everyone with that expertise who is still alive is here. We are what the rodina has, for better or worse.”

  Molotov was not used to defiance, even frightened, deferential defiance. He harshened his voice as he replied, “We were promised full-scale production of explosive metal within eighteen months. If the team assembled here cannot accomplish this—”

  “The Germans are not likely to have that within eighteen months, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Flerov said. “Neither are the Americans, though the breakdown in travel has left us less well-informed about their doings.”