Upsetting the Balance w-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Moishe ran onto the pitch, too. The boy he swept up into the air was too small to have been a player. The boy squeaked in surprise. Then he shouted, “Papa!” The word was English, not Yiddish or Polish, but Moishe didn’t care. Reuven stared at him and said, “What happened to your beard, Papa?”

  “The gas mask won’t fit over it tight enough, so I shaved it off,” Russie answered. Naked cheeks, however strange they felt, were better than a lungful of mustard gas. He’d seen that. Heart pounding in his chest, he asked the next question: “Where is your mother?”

  “In the flat,” Reuven said indifferently, as if to ask,Where would she be? “Could you put me down, please? They’re starting to play again, and I want to watch.”

  “I’m sorry,” Moishe said, his voice full of mock humility. However important his homecoming was to him, his son seemed well able to take it in stride. Moishe got out of the street just in time to evade a football flying past his ear. Reuven squirmed and again demanded to be released. Moishe set him on the scarred sidewalk and climbed the stairs to his flat as fast as he could.

  From behind the door across the hall came the sounds of a hideous row: Mr. and Mrs. Stephanopoulos were going at it hammer and tongs. Russie couldn’t understand a word of the Greek they were using to slang each other, but it made him feel at home anyway. The Stephanopouloi cared about each other, cared enough to yell. Englishmen and — women seemed much more given to cold, deadly silences.

  He tried the knob to the door of his own flat. It turned in his hand. He opened the door. Rivka was bustling across the front room toward the kitchen. Her gray eyes widened in astonishment; maybe the racket the Stephanopouloi were making had kept her from hearing him in the hall. Maybe, too, she needed a moment to recognize him, clean-shaven as he was and in the khaki battledress of a British soldier.

  Astonishment of one sort turned to astonishment of another. “Moishe!” she whispered, still sounding disbelieving, and ran to him. They held each other. She squeezed him so tight, he could hardly breathe. Against his shoulder, she said, “I can’t believe you’re really here.”

  “I can’t believeyou’re here, you and Reuven,” he answered. “I’ve prayed you would be, but we know what prayers are worth these days. And with everything the Lizards have done to London…” He shook his head. “In this war, civilians behind the line are liable to catch it worse than soldiers at the front. We’ve seen that ever since the Nazis started bombing Warsaw. I was so afraid for you.”

  “We’re all right.” Rivka’s hands flew to her hair in an automatic, altogether unconscious effort to spruce up. “The kitchen is full of soot because I’ve had to cook with wood since the gas went out, but that’s all. I was goingmeshuggeh worrying over you, there without even a gun in the middle of all the bullets and bombs and the terrible gas. The bombs here-” She shrugged. “It was terrible, yes, but nothing we haven’t known before. If they don’t land right on top of you, you’re all right. And if they do, you probably won’t know about it anyhow. That’s not so bad.”

  “No,” Moishe agreed. After almost three years of slow starvation and disease in the Warsaw ghetto, such fatalism came easy. Next to them, sudden, probably painless death could look downright attractive.

  Rivka said, “There’s still some-veal left from last night, if you’re hungry.”

  The slight hesitation told Moishe the “veal” was probably pork, and that his wife was trying to shield him from knowingly eating forbidden food. He’d done the same for her in Warsaw. Accepting the pretense at face value, he said, “I can always eat. Field rations are thin.”

  Civilian rations were even thinner, and he knew it. He left a good deal on the plate. Rivka hadn’t expected him to show up. She and Reuven would need to make a meal, or more than one, out of what she’d fixed. When he said he couldn’t possibly hold another bite, she looked knowingly at him, but did not protest as she would have before the war.

  She dipped water out of a bucket to accompany the meal. It was lukewarm, and had the flat, airless taste that said it had been boiled. He smiled. “I’m glad you’re being careful with what you drink.”

  “I’ve seen what happens when people aren’t careful,” she answered seriously. “Being married to a medical student taught me that much, anyhow.”

  “I’m glad,” he said again. He carried plate and fork over to the sink. It was full of soapy water: even now, it made a good washbasin. He washed his dishes and set them by the sink. Rivka watched him, somewhere between amusement and bemusement. Defensively, he said, “Being apart from you, I’ve learned to do these things, you see.”

  “Yes, I do see,” she said. From her tone, he couldn’t tell whether she approved or was scandalized. She went on, “What else have you learned, being apart from me?”

  “That I don’t like being apart from you,” he answered. Through the window came fresh cheers from the street below; one of the boys’ football teams had just scored. In a speculative voice, Moishe remarked, “Reuven really seems to enjoy watching the match down there.”

  “Enough for us to hope he won’t come upstairs for the next little while, do you mean?” Rivka asked. Moishe nodded, his head jerking up and down in hopeful eagerness. From the way his wife giggled, he suspected he looked like a perfectshlemiel. He didn’t care, especially not after she said, “I suppose we can do that. Privacy is where you find it, or make it.”

  He tried to remember the last time he’d lain on a bed. It hadn’t happened more than once or twice since he’d been shoehorned into the forces fighting desperately to keep Britain free of the invading aliens. They’d given him a bag of medical supplies, a uniform, an armband, and a gas mask, and they’d sent him out to do his best. Comfort hadn’t been part of the bargain.

  As if by way of experiment, Rivka kissed his bare cheek. “Bristly,” she said. “I think I like your beard better, unless you can shave your face very smooth.”

  “Getting my hands on a razor hasn’t always been easy,” he answered. “I never would have done it at all, but it makes a mask fit properly.”

  He didn’t want to think about gas masks and the things that could go wrong if they failed to fit properly, not when he lay beside his wife in an oasis of peace and calm in the midst of chaos and war. For the next little while, he didn’t think about anything but Rivka.

  But try as you would to stretch such moments, they had to end. Rivka sat up and began to dress as fast as she could. Partly that was ingrained modesty, and partly a well-justified fear that Reuven would choose the most inconvenient time possible to walk into the flat. Both those concerns also drove Moishe back into his clothes. The shoddy serge of his battledress scraped his skin as he pulled it on.

  Rivka reached behind her neck to fasten the last catch. As if that were a signal that the everyday, dangerous world had returned, she asked, “How long will you be able to stay here?”

  “Just tonight,” he answered. “I have to go south tomorrow, to help the wounded in the fighting against the Lizards there.”

  “How is the fight really going?” Rivka asked. “When there’s power for the wireless and when they can print newspapers, they say they’re smashing the Lizards the way Samson smote the Philistines. But Lizard planes keep on pounding London, the boom of the artillery never goes away, and shells keep falling on us. Can I believe what they claim?”

  “The northern pocket is gone-kaputt,” Moishe said, borrowing a word he’d heard German soldiers use. “As for the southern one, your guess is as good as mine. All I know about the fighting is what I’ve seen for myself, and that’s like asking a fish in a pool to tell you everything about the Vistula. If England were losing the fight badly, though, you’d be talking with a Lizard right now, not with me.”

  “That is so,” she said thoughtfully. “But after people-human beings-have lost so many fights, it’s hard to believe that just holding the Lizards back should count as a victory.”

  “When you think of how many people couldn’t slow the Lizards down, let
alone stop them, then holding them backis a victory, and a big one. I don’t ever remember them pulling back from a fight the way they did from the northern pocket. The English have hurt them.” Moishe shook his head in wonder. “For so long, we didn’t think anything or anyone could hurt them.”

  The front door to the flat opened, then closed with a slam. Reuven shouted, “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry!” Moishe and Rivka looked at each other and started to laugh. The noise let Reuven find them. “What’s so funny?” he demanded with the indignation of a child who knows a joke is going over his head.

  “Nothing,” his father answered gravely. “We slipped one by you, that’s all.”

  “One what?” Reuven said. Rivka sent Moishe a warning glance: the boy was really too young. Moishe just laughed harder. Even with the rumble of artillery always in the background, for this little while he could savor being with his wife and son. Tomorrow the war would fold him in its bony arms once more. Today he was free, and reveled in his freedom.

  The silvery metal did not look like much. It was so dense that what the Metallurgical Laboratory had managed to produce seemed an even smaller amount than it really was. Appearances mattered not at all to Leslie Groves. He knew what he had here: enough plutonium, when added together with what the Germans and Russians had stolen from the Lizards and the British brought over to the U.S.A., to make an atomic bomb that would go boom and not fizzle.

  He turned to Enrico Fermi. “There’s the first long, hard step, by God! After this, we have a downhill track.”

  “An easier track, General, yes, but not an easy one,” the Italian physicist answered. “We still have to purify the plutonium, to shape it into a bomb, and to find a way to explode the bomb where we want it.”

  “Those are all engineering concerns,” Groves said. “I’m an engineer; I know we can meet them. The physics was what worried me-I wasn’t sure we’d ever see enough plutonium metal.” He waved toward the small silver lump.

  Fermi laughed. “For me, it is just the opposite. The physics, we have found, is straightforward enough. Advancing from it to the finished bomb, though, is a challenge of a different sort.”

  “Whatever sort of challenge it is, we’ll meet it,” Groves declared. “We can’t afford to be like the Russians-one shot and out. We’ll hit the Lizards again and again, until we make ’em say uncle.”

  “From what I understand of the Russians’ design, they are lucky to have achieved any explosion at all,” Fermi said. “A gun-type device with plutonium-” He shook his head. “It must have been a very large gun, with a very high velocity to the slab of plutonium it accelerated into the larger plug. Otherwise, fission would have begun prematurely, disrupting the mass before the full power of the nuclear reaction built up.”

  “They could build it any size they wanted, I suppose,” Groves said. “They weren’t going to load it in a bomber, after all.” He laughed at that, a laugh edged with bitterness. “For one thing, they don’t have a bomber big enough to carry even a small nuclear bomb. For another, if they did, the Lizards would shoot it down before it got where it was supposed to go. So why not build big?”

  “No reason I can see,” Fermi answered. “The same applies to us, in large degree: we will not be able to deliver the bomb from the air once we have it. Putting it in the proper place at the proper time will not be easy.”

  “I know.” Groves rubbed his chin. He didn’t like thinking about that. “The way the Russians did it, from what they say, was to leave the bomb hidden in a position they knew the Lizards were going to overrun in a few hours. They set their timer and waited for the big boom. We’d have a harder time finding a position of that sort.”

  “Chicago,” Fermi said quietly.

  “Mm, yeah, maybe,” Groves admitted. “That’s a meat grinder, no mistake about it. I see two problems with it, though. Getting the bomb from here to Chicago once it’s done is one. Hell, getting a bomb from here to anywhere is going to be a problem. So that’s number one. And number two is pulling our boys back so we don’t take out one of our own divisions along with the Lizards.”

  “Why should that be a problem?” the physicist asked. “They simply retreat, allowing the Lizards to move forward, and that is that.”

  Leslie Groves smiled down at him. Groves had been an engineer throughout his years in the military; he’d never led troops in combat, nor wanted to. But he’d forgotten more about strategy than Fermi had ever learned-nice to be reminded there were still some things he knew more about than the eggheads he was supposed to be bossing. As patiently as he could, he answered, “Professor, we’ve been fighting the Lizards tooth and toenail outside of Chicago, and now in it, ever since they came down from space. If we all of a sudden start pulling back without an obvious good reason, don’t you think they’re going to get suspicious about why we’re changing our ways? I know I would, if I were their C.O.”

  “Ahh,” Fermi said. He might have been naive, but he wasn’t dumb, not even a little bit. “I see what you mean, General. The Russians were already in full-scale retreat, so the Lizards noticed nothing out of the ordinary when they passed the point where the bomb was hidden. But if we go from stout resistance to quick withdrawal, they will observe something is amiss.”

  “That’s it,” Groves agreed. “That’s it exactly. We’d have to either convince ’em that they’d licked us and we were getting out of Dodge-”

  “I beg your pardon?” Fermi interrupted.

  “Sorry. I mean, retreating as fast as we can go,” Groves said. Fermi spoke with a thick accent, but he usually understood what you said to him. Groves reminded himself to be less colloquial. “Either we do that or else we pull back secretly-under cover of night, maybe. That’s how I see it, anyhow.”

  “To me, this is a sensible plan,” Fermi said. “If the time comes, will they think of it in Chicago?”

  “They should. They’re solid professional soldiers.” But Groves wondered. Fermi was naive about the way soldiers handled their job. Every reason he should have been, too. But why should anyone assume the generals out there actually fighting the Lizards were anything but naive about what an atomic bomb could do? Calculations from a bunch of scholarly people who went around carrying slide rules instead of carbines wouldn’t mean much to them.

  Groves decided he’d better sit his fanny down and bang out a memo. He couldn’t be sure anyone would pay any attention to that, either, but at least it would haveBrigadier General, U.S. Army under his name, which might make soldiers sit up and take notice. The only real thing he was sure of was that they certainly wouldn’t know what to expect if hedidn’t sit down and write. That was all a man of action needed to know.

  “Excuse me, Professor Fermi,” he said, and hurried away. The typewriter was waiting.

  Atvar studied the computer display of the slow track of Tosev 3 around its parent sun. “Equinox,” he said, as if it were blasphemy against the revered name of the Emperor.

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel didn’t sound any happier at the self-evident astronomical fact than had his superior. He put the reason for his distaste into words: “Winter will now approach in the northern hemisphere, where so many Tosevite not-empires remain unsubdued.”

  Both high-ranking males contemplated that for a while in unhappy silence. The probe the Race had sent to Tosev 3 centuries before had warned that the planet’s weather grew extremely intemperate in winter. Still, the Race’s equipment was imperfectly adapted for such climates: the ruling assumption had been that the conquest would be over and done long before such things mattered. And no one back on Home had imagined that the Tosevites could have industrialized in the space of a few short centuries, let alone developed equipment better designed than anything the Race had for dealing with all the appalling varieties of muck and frozen water indigenous to Tosev 3 in winter.

  Still gloomily, Kirel resumed, “During the last winter, we lost the strategic advantage over broad areas of the planet. When bad weather begins, the Big
Uglies will assail us with more sophisticated weapons than they employed two of our years ago. This does not cause me to look on the likely results of the upcoming combat with optimism unrestrained.”

  “I assure you, Shiplord, I have not looked on this conquest with optimism unrestrained since we discovered the Big Uglies knew enough to employ radio,” Atvar answered. “But we are not in an entirely disadvantageous position in regard to the Tosevites, either. We have made serious inroads on their industrial capacity; they produce far less than they did when we first arrived.”

  “Our own industrial capacity on Tosev 3, however, remains effectively nil,” Kirel said. “We can produce more ammunition: all well and good, though even there we rely to some degree on captured Tosevite factories. But who in his wildest nightmares would have thought of the need to manufacture landcruisers and killercraft in large numbers to replace combat losses?”

  “No one, but it remains a reality whether we thought of it or not,” Atvar said. “We have serious weaknesses in both areas, as well as in antimissile missiles. We were lucky to have brought any of those at all, but now our stocks are nearly exhausted, and demand remains unrelenting.”

  “The Deutsche, may their eggshells be thinned by pest-control poisons, not only throw missiles at us but load them with their poisonous gases rather than with ordinary explosives. These missiles must be shot down before they reach their targets, or they can do dreadful damage. Our ability to accomplish this is degraded with every antimissile missile we expend.”

  “We have knocked the island of Britain out of the fight against us for some indefinite time,” Atvar said. That was true, but it was also putting the best possible face on things, and he knew it. The campaign on Britain had been intended to annex the island. Like a lot of intentions on Tosev 3, that one had not survived contact with the Big Uglies. The losses in males and materiel were appalling, and certainly had cost the Race far more than the temporary neutralization of Britain could repay.