Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Ludmila’s face turned incandescent. By Sholudenko’s snicker, the blush was quite visible, too. What would her mother have said if she heard her cursing like-like… she couldn’t think of any comparison dreadful enough. Going on two years in the Red Air Force had so coarsened her that she wondered if she would be fit for anything decent when peace returned.

  When she said that aloud, Sholudenko waved his arms to encompass the entire scene around them. Then he pointed at the deep ruts, already filling with water, the treads the Lizard tanks had carved in the road. “First worry if peace will ever return,” he said. “After that you can concern yourself with trifles.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “From where we stand, this war is liable to go on forever.”

  “History is always a struggle-such is the nature of the dialectic,” the NKVD man said: standard Marxist doctrine. All at once, though, he turned human again: “I wouldn’t mind if the struggle were a little less overt.”

  Ludmila pointed ahead. “There’s a village. With luck, we’ll be able to lay up for a while. With a lot of luck, we’ll even find some food.”

  As they drew closer, Ludmila saw the village looked deserted. Some of the cottages had been burned; others showed bare spots in their thatches, as if they were balding old men. A dog’s skeleton, beginning to fall apart into separate bones, lay in the middle of the street.

  That was the last thing Ludmila noticed before a shot rang out and kicked up mud a couple of meters in front of her. Her reflexes were good-she was down on her belly and yanking her own pistol out of the holster before she had time for conscious thought.

  Another shot-she still didn’t see the flash. Her head swiveled as if on a pivot Where was cover? Where was Sholudenko? He’d hit the dirt as fast as she had. She rolled through muck toward a wooden fence. It wasn’t much in the way of shelter, but it was a lot better than nothing.

  “Who’s shooting at us? And why?” she called to Sholudenko.

  “The devil’s uncle may know, but I don’t,” the NKVD man answered. He crouched behind a well, whose stones warded him better than the fence shielded Ludmila. He raised his voice: “Hold fire! We’re friends!”

  “Liar!” The shout was punctuated by a burst of submachine-gun fire from another cottage. Bullets sparked off the stone facing of the well. Whoever was in there yelled, “You can’t fool us. You’re from Tolokonnikov’s faction, come to run us out.”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea who Tolokonnikov is you maniac,” Sholudenko said. All he got for an answer was another shout of “Liar!” and a fresh hail of bullets from that submachine gun. Whomever the anti-Tolokonnikovites did favor, he gave them plenty of ammunition.

  Ludmila spied the flame the weapon spat. She was seventy or eighty meters away, very long range for a pistol, but she squeezed off a couple of shots anyway, to take the heat off Sholudenko. Then, quick as she could, she rolled away. The relentless submachine gun chewed up the place where she’d been.

  The NKVD man fired, too, and was rewarded by a scream and sudden silence from the submachine gun. Don’t get up, Ludmila willed at him, suspecting a trap. He didn’t. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes the gunner opened up again.

  By then, Ludmila had found a boulder behind which to shelter. From that more secure position, she called, “Who is this Tolokonnikov, and what do you have against him?” If the people who didn’t like him acted this way, her guess was that he probably had something going for him.

  She got no coherent answer out of the anti-Tolokonnikovites, only another magazine’s worth of bullets from the submachine gun and a yell of, “Shut up, you treacherous bitch!” Deadly as shell fragments, rock splinters knocked free by the gunfire flew just above her head.

  She wondered how long the stalemate could go on. The answer she came up with was glum: indefinitely. There wasn’t enough cover for either side to have much hope of moving to outflank the other. She and Sholudenko couldn’t very well retreat, either. That left sitting tight, shooting every so often, and hoping you got lucky.

  Then the equation suddenly grew another variable. Somebody showed himself for a moment: just long enough to chuck a grenade through the window from which the fellow with the submachine gun had been firing. A moment after it went off, he jumped in the window himself. Ludmila heard a rifle shot, then silence.

  The grenade chucker came out by way of the window, too, and vanished from her sight. “Whose side is he on?” she called to Sholudenko.

  “I keep telling you, ask the devil’s uncle,” he answered. “Maybe Tolokonnikov’s, maybe his own, maybe even ours, though I wouldn’t bet my life on that.”

  The anti-Tolokonnikovite with the pistol, the one who’d fired first, took a fatal moment too long to realize his comrade had been disposed of. Ludmila wasn’t sure what was happening because she couldn’t see, but she heard another grenade, a rifle shot, a pistol shot, and then two rifle shots closer together; After that came silence all the more deafening because of the clamor that had gone before.

  “Now what?” Ludmila asked.

  “I think we wait some more,” Sholudenko answered. “After they got cute when I fired at them, I don’t fancy taking any more chances, thank you very much.”

  The highly charged silence persisted. At last, from out of the village, came a cautious call: “Ludmila, bist du da?”

  She shook her head. “Someone here knows you?” Sholudenko asked quietly. “Someone German here knows you?” That was not a good thing to admit to an NKVD man, but she did not see she had much choice.

  “Georg, is that you?” she asked, also in German. If Sholudenko spoke it, well and good. If he didn’t, she’d already become an object of suspicion in his eyes, and so had little more to lose.

  “Ja,” he answered, still not showing himself. “Tell me the name of the general who commands our base, so I can be sure it is truly you.”

  “Tovarishch Feofan Karpov is a colonel, as you know perfectly well,” she said. “He is also certain to be furious with you for leaving the base without his leave, as I guess you did-you’re the best mechanic he has.”

  “I begin to see,” Sholudenko said-so he did understand German, then. “Is he your, ah, special friend?”

  “No,” Ludmila answered angrily. “But he wishes he were, which sometimes makes him a nuisance.” Then, as if she were reading the NKVD man’s mind, she added hastily, “Don’t harm him for that. He is an excellent mechanic, and has given the Red Air Force good service even if he is a fascist.”

  “This I will hear,” Sholudenko said. “Had you been sentimental-” He let the sentence hang, but Ludmila had no trouble completing it for herself.

  Through the front window of the hut where Schultz had disposed of the second anti-Tolokonnikovite, Ludmila spied something move. She couldn’t quite tell what it was. A few seconds later Georg Schultz came out, still holding an old rag on the end of a stick. Ludmila realized that was what she’d seen. Had anyone fired at it, Schultz would have sat tight. Yes, he’s been through combat once or twice, hasn’t he? she thought with reluctant admiration.

  Schultz certainly looked like a veteran. He wore his usual mixture of Russian and German gear, though the Nazi helmet on his head gave his nonuniform uniform a Germanic cast Stuffed into his belt, along with a couple of potato-masher grenades, was a pistol He held a Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun, and had slung his rifle over his back.

  The panzer gunner’s teeth showed in a grin that seemed all the whiter because of the beard surrounding it-a beard that did nothing to hinder his piratical aspect “Who’s your Kamerad?” he asked Ludmila.

  Sholudenko answered for himself, giving his name and patronymic but not announcing he was NKVD (Ludmila would have been astonished had he admitted it). He went on in German: “So what’s this? Did you desert your post to seek the fair maiden here? Your colonel will not be happy with you.”

  Shultz shrugged. “Fuck him. It s not my army or even my air force, If you know what I mean. And when I get b
ack with her”-he jerked a thumb at Ludmila-“old man Karpov’ll be glad enough to see both of us that he won’t bellyache all that much. You should have heard him-“My best pilot gone. Whatever shall I do?’ ” He raised his voice to a falsetto nothing like the colonel’s but comically effective all the same.

  “How did you know where to look for me?” Ludmila asked.

  “I can follow a compass bearing, and I figured you were smart enough to be doing the same if you were able.” Schultz sounded affronted. Then his face cleared. “You mean, how did I find out which bearing to follow?” He set a finger alongside his nose. “Believe me, there are ways.”

  Ludmila glanced over at Sholudenko, who was undoubtedly taking all that in. But the NKVD man just asked, “How far from the airstrip are we?”

  “Eighty, ninety kilometers, something like that.” Schultz looked from him to Ludmila and back again before asking her, “Who is this fellow?”

  “The man I was supposed to meet. Instead of bringing back the information he had, I find I’m bringing him, too.”

  By way of reply, Schultz just grunted. Ludmila felt like laughing at him. If he’d found her alone on the steppe, as he’d probably figured he would, he’d have had several days to try to seduce her or, failing that, just to rape her. Now he had to be wondering if she’d slept with Sholudenko.

  None of your business, Nazi, she thought. With the first smile of genuine amusement she’d worn since she flipped her aircraft, she said, “Shall we be off, comrades?” The rest of the trek back to the airstrip was liable to be interesting.

  Along with the rest of the physicists, Jens Larssen watched tensely as Enrico Fermi manipulated the levers that raised the cadmium control rods from the heart of the rebuilt atomic pile under the University of Denver football stadium.

  “If we have the design correct, this time the k-factor will be greater than one,” Fermi said quietly. “We will have our self-sustaining chain reaction.”

  Beside him, Leslie Groves grunted. “We should have reached this point months ago. We would have, if the damned Lizards hadn’t come.”

  “This is true, General,” Fermi said, though Groves still wore colonel’s eagles. “But from now on work will be much faster, partly because of the radioactives we have stolen from the Lizards and partly because they have shown us that what we seek is possible.”

  Larssen thought about Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bringing it down to mankind. He thought about what happened to Prometheus afterwards too: chained to a rock somewhere, with an eagle gnawing his liver forever. He suspected a lot of his colleagues had had that image at one time or another.

  Unlike most of them, of course, he didn’t need the Met Lab to have a feel for the myth of Prometheus. Every time he saw Barbara hand in hand with that Sam Yeager, the eagle took another peck at his liver.

  The project was an anodyne of sorts, though the pain never left him, not entirely. He watched the instruments, listened to the growing chatter and then the steady roar of the Geiger counter as it let the world know about the growing cloud of neutrons down in the heart of the pile. “Any second now,” he breathed, more than half to himself.

  Fermi drew out the rods another couple of centimeters. He too glanced at the dials, worked his slide rule, scrawled a quick calculation on a scrap of paper. “Gentlemen, I make the k-factor here to be 1.0005. This pile produces more free. neutrons than it consumes.”

  A few of, the physicists clapped their hands. More just nodded soberly. This was what the numbers predicted. All the same, it remained a solemn moment. Arthur Compton said, “The Italian navigator has discovered the New World.”

  “Gentlemen, this means you can now produce the explosive metal we need to make bombs like the ones the Lizards use?” Groves said.

  “It means we are a long step closer,” Fermi said. With that, he lowered the control rods back into the pile. Needles swung to the left on the instrument board beside him; the rhythm of the Geiger counter’s clicks slowed. Fermi let out a small sigh of relief. “And, it seems, we can control the intensity of the reaction. This is also of some considerable importance.”

  Most of the scientists smiled; Leo Szilard laughed out loud. Larssen had the urge to yank the cadmium rods all the way out of the pile and leave them out until the uranium spat radiation all over, the stadium, all over the university, all over Denver. He fought it down, as he had other lethal, but less spectacular, impulses over the past weeks.

  “What do we do next?” Groves demanded. “What exactly do we have to accomplish to turn what we’ve got here into a bomb?” The big man was not a nuclear physicist, but he had more determination than any four Nobel Prize winners Jens could think of. If anybody could drive the project to, success by sheer force of will, Groves was probably the one.

  Leo Szilard, on the other hand, had his own sort of practicality. “There is in my office a bottle of good whiskey,” he remarked. “What we do next, I say, is to have a drink.”

  The motion passed by acclamation. Jens trooped over to the science building with everyone else. It was good whiskey; it filled his mouth with the taste of smoke and left a smooth, warm trail down to his stomach. The only thing it couldn’t do was make him feel good, which was why people had started distilling whiskey in the first place.

  Szilard raised the bottle. A couple of fingers’ worth, coppery bright like a new penny, still sloshed there. Jens held out his glass (actually, a hundred-milliliter Erlenmeyer flask he devoutly hoped had never held anything radioactive) for a refill.

  “You have earned it,” Szilard said, pouring. “All that work on the pile-”

  Jens knocked back the second shot. It hit hard, reminding him he hadn’t had any lunch. It also reminded him he didn’t have any business celebrating; no matter how well his work was doing, his life was strictly from nowhere.

  “Good booze,” said one of the engineers who’d worked under him. “Now we all oughtta go out and get laid.”

  Larssen set the flask on a bookshelf and slithered out of the crowded office. His eyes filled with tears which he knew came out of the whiskey bottle but which humiliated him all the same. A week before, he’d picked up a floozy in Denver. He’d been drunk then, not two drinks tiddly but plastered. He wasn’t able to get it up. The girl had been kind about it, which only made things worse. He wondered when he’d have the nerve to try that again. Failure once was bad enough. Failure twice? Why go on living?

  With that cheerful thought echoing in his head, he went downstairs to reclaim his bicycle. Oscar the guard stood by the newly built wooden bike rack to make sure none of the machines walked with Jesus. He nodded when he saw Jens. “Back to BOQ, sir?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Jens said through clenched teeth. He hated his Army cot, he hated the base, he hated having to go to the base and sleep on the cot, and he hated Colonel Hexham with a deep and abiding loathing that matured like a fine burgundy as the days went by. He wished he could have used Hexham as a control rod in the nuclear pile. If only the man had a neutron capture cross-section like cadmium’s…

  And then, to make his day complete, Barbara came strolling up the walk toward the apartment she and Sam Yeager were using. Sometimes she just ignored him; that his own behavior might have had something to do with that hadn’t crossed his mind. But Barbara wasn’t the sort to be rude in public. She nodded to him and slowed down a little.

  He walked over to her. Oscar was good at sticking with him-all the physicists had bodyguards these days-but knew better than to follow real close this time. A small voice inside Jens warned him he’d only end up bruising himself, but two nips of Szilard’s good hooch made him selectively deaf.

  “Hello, dear,” he said.

  “Hello,” Barbara answered-the lack of a return endearment set a fire under his temper. “How are you today?”

  “About the same as usual,” he said: “not so good. I want you back.”

  “Jens, we’ve been over this a hundred times,” she said, her voice tired. “I
t wouldn’t work. Even if it might have right after I got to Denver, it wouldn’t any more. It’s too late.”

  “What the devil is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

  Her eyes narrowed; she took half a step back from him. Instead of answering, she said, “You’ve been drinking.”

  He didn’t explain that they were drinks of triumph. “What if I have?” he said. “You going to tell me Mr. Sam Walk-on-Water Yeager never takes a drink?”

  He knew the words were a mistake as soon as he said them. That, of course, did him no good. Barbara’s face froze. “Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see you some other time.” She started walking again.

  He reached out and grabbed her arm. “Barbara, you’ve got to listen to me-”

  “Let me go!” she said angrily! She tried to twist away. He held on.

  As if by malign magic, Oscar appeared. He stepped between Jens and Barbara. “Sir, the lady asked you to let go,” he said, quietly as usual, and detached Larssen’s hand from Barbara’s forearm. He wasn’t what you’d call gentle, but Jens got the feeling he could have been a lot rougher if he felt like it.

  Sober he never would have swung on Oscar. With two whiskeys in him, he didn’t give a damn any more. He’d seen some action himself, by God-and, by God, Barbara was his wife… wasn’t she?

  Oscar knocked his fist aside and hit him in the pit of the stomach. Jens folded up like a fan, trying to breathe and not having much luck, trying not to puke and doing a little better with that. Even as he went down on his knees, he was pretty sure Oscar had pulled that punch, too; with arms like those, Oscar could have ruptured his spleen if he really got annoyed.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” Oscar asked Barbara.

  “Yes,” she said, and then, a moment later, “Thank you. This has been hell on everybody, and on Jens especially. I know that, and I’m sorry, but I’ve done what I have to do.” Only then did her voice change: “You didn’t hurt him, did you?”