Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  He clammed up again-if Bobby couldn’t work it out from there, that was his tough luck. But he could, and started to laugh when he thought about how those ducks would be stuffed. No wonder Nieh looked so smug! “Good luck,” Fiore said. He stuck out his hand, but yanked it back; Chinamen didn’t go in for handshakes.

  Nieh Ho-T’ing surprised him, though, by reaching out and taking his hand. “My Soviet comrades have this custom; I know what it means,” he said, then looked at his watch. “Take your place at noon. The banquet is supposed to begin at half past the hour, and will not last long.”

  “Okay,” Fiore said. If he’d been in a town where he spoke the language, he would have thought about taking it on the lam with the arsenal. Getting the Reds mad at him, though, seemed a worse bet than taking his chances on the Lizards.

  He had plenty of time for another screw before he took off. Shura came back upstairs with him willingly enough. Afterwards, she blinked when he gave her an extra couple of dollars Mex; he was usually as cheap as he could get away with. “You rob a bank, Bobby?” she asked.

  “Two of ’em, babe,” he said, deadpan, as he started to dress. She blinked again, then decided it was a joke and laughed.

  Suitcase in hand, he headed for the Bund. He knew Nieh Ho-T’ing and his buddies were taking the real risk; if the Lizards inside the British Consulate were on their toes, the scheme was dead in the water.

  He got to Number 33, the Bund, just as clocks were striking twelve. Nieh would be pleased with him; when he said noon, he meant on the dot. Now Bobby had to hang around and look inconspicuous till the fireworks started. He bought a bowl of watery soup from a passing vendor, then had an inspiration and bought the bowl itself. He sat down on the pavement with it beside him and made like a beggar.

  Every once in a while, somebody tossed a copper in the bowl, or even some silver. Bobby kept track-when the shooting started, he had just over a dollar, Mex.

  The British Consulate was a large, imposing building. Not even its stonework, though, could muffle the rattle of automatic weapons fire. The Lizard guards at the main entrance whirled around and stared, as if unsure what to do next and unable to believe the ears they didn’t have.

  Fiore didn’t give them much of a chance to think it over. As soon as he heard guns, he opened the suitcase, yanked out a grenade, unscrewed the metal cap at the bottom, pulled the porcelain bead inside to work the friction igniter, and let fly as if he were making a throw to the plate.

  Had there been a runner, he would have been out. The grenade landed right in the middle of the four Lizards. When it went off a second later, people who had been exclaiming over the shots inside the consulate started screaming and running instead.

  The only trouble was, it didn’t knock out all the Lizards. A couple of them started shooting, even if they didn’t know just where it had come from. The screams along the Bund turned into shrieks. Fiore dove behind a solid bench of wood and iron; he opened up with the submachine gun. He hoped he didn’t hit anybody on the street, but he wasn’t going to lose any sleep if he did-those Lizards had to go down. And down they went.

  More shots from inside the British Consulate, then those entry doors burst open. Nieh and half a dozen other Chinamen, some wearing cooks’ clothes the rest looking like penguins in fancy waiter getup (though waiters didn’t commonly tote automatic weapons), sprinted down the steps and then down the street.

  Lizards opened up on them from the roof and from second-story windows. The fleeing humans started spinning and dropping and kicking, like flies swatted not quite hard enough to die right away. “You just talked about the bastards at the door, goddammit,” Bobby muttered, as if Nieh Ho-T’ing were close enough to hear. “You didn’t say nothin’ about the rest of ’em.”

  He raised the submachine gun and blazed away at the Lizards till his magazine ran dry. He grabbed another one, slammed it into the weapon, and had just started shooting again when a burst of three bullets stitched across his chest. The submachine gun fell out of his hands. He tried to reach for it, found he couldn’t. He didn’t hurt. Then he did. Then he didn’t, ever again.

  Brigadier General Leslie Groves strode across the campus of the University of Denver with his head down, as if he were a bull looking to trample anyone who got in his way. That hard-charging attitude had been instinctive in him until one day he noticed and deliberately cultivated it. Thanks in no small part to that, not a whole lot of people got in his way these days.

  “Physicists,” he snorted under his breath, again bullishly. The trouble with them was they were so lost in their own rarefied world a lot of the time that they didn’t always feel the pressure he put on them, let alone yield to it.

  He didn’t note anything out of the ordinary about the day until he walked into the Science building and discovered he didn’t recognize any of the soldiers crowding the downstairs lobby. That made him frown; Sam Yeager and the rest of the dogface with the Met Lab crew were as familiar to him as his shoelaces.

  He looked around for the highest-ranking officer he could find. “Why have we been invaded, Major?” he asked.

  The fellow with the gold oak leaves on his shoulders saluted. “If you’d be so kind as to come with me, General-” he said in the polite phrases lower-ranking officers use to give their superiors orders.

  Groves was so kind as to come with him until he figured out where he was going, which didn’t take long. “Major, if I need an escort to find my own office, I’m the wrong man to head this project,” he growled. The major didn’t answer, he just kept walking. Groves fumed but followed. Sure enough, they were heading for his office. In front of it stood a couple of men who looked as tough and alert as soldiers but wore medium-snappy civilian suits. A light went on in Groves’ head. He turned to the major and asked, “Secret Service?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  One of the T-men, after checking Groves’ face against a little photo he held in the palm of his hand, nodded to the other.

  The second one opened the door and said, “General Groves is here, sir.”

  “Well, he’d better come in, then, hadn’t he?” an infinitely familiar voice replied from within. “It being his office, after all.”

  “Why the devil didn’t I get any warning President Roosevelt was coming to Denver?” Groves hissed to the major.

  “Security,” the other officer whispered back. “We have to assume the Lizards monitor everything we broadcast, and we’ve lost couriers, too. The less we say, the safer FDR is. Now go on in; he’s been waiting for you.”

  Groves went in. He’d met Roosevelt before, and knew the President wasn’t as vibrant in person as he appeared in the newsreels: being cooped up in a wheelchair would do that to you. But since the last time he’d seen FDR, a year earlier at White Sulphur Springs, the change was shocking. Roosevelt’s flesh seemed to have fallen in on his bones; he might have aged a decade or more in that year. He looked like a man worn to death’s door.

  For all that, though, his grip was still strong when he reached out to shake General Groves’ hand after the engineer had saluted. “You’ve lost weight, General,” he observed, amusement in his eyes-his body might be falling to pieces around it, but his mind was still sharp.

  “Yes, sir,” Groves answered. Roosevelt had lost weight, too, but he wasn’t about to remark on it.

  “Sit down, sit down.” The President waved him to the swivel chair behind his desk. Groves obediently sat. Roosevelt turned the wheelchair to face him. Even his hands had lost flesh; the skin hung loose on them. He sighed and said, “I wish to God I had a cigarette, but that’s neither here nor there-certainly not here, worse luck.” FDR sighed again. “Do you know, General, when Einstein sent me that letter of his back in ‘39, I had the feeling all his talk of nuclear weapons and bombs that could blow up the world was likely to be so much moonshine, but I couldn’t take the chance of being wrong. And, it turns out, I was right-and how I wish I hadn’t been!”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves repeated, but
then added, “If you hadn’t been right, though, sir, we’d have been in no position to resist the Lizards and to copy what they’ve done.”

  “That’s true, but it’s not what I meant,” Roosevelt said. “I wish I’d been right, and that all the talk about nuclear weapons and atomic power and who knows what were so much moonshine. Then all I’d have to worry about would be beating Hitler and Hirohito, and the Lizards would be back on the second planet of the star Tau Ceti where they belong, and people wouldn’t meet them for another million years, if we ever did.”

  “Is that where they’re from?” Groves asked with interest. “I’ll have to have our liaison man put the question to the Lizard POWs we have here.”

  FDR made a gesture of indifference. “As you like, and if you have the time; otherwise don’t trouble yourself about it. These Lizards are an astonishing intelligence resource, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves said enthusiastically. “The ones we have here have been extremely cooperative.”

  “Not just them, General. With what we’re learning from systematic interrogation of all our captives, we’ll leap forward by decades, maybe centuries.” Roosevelt’s expression, which had brightened, turned cloudy again. “If we win the war, that is-which is what I came to talk about. What I want to know is, how soon will we have nuclear weapons of our own to use against the Lizards?” He leaned forward in his chair, intently awaiting Groves’ reply.

  Groves nodded; he’d expected the question. “Sir, I am told we can have one nuclear bomb fairly soon. England supplied us with enough plutonium that we need to manufacture only a few more kilograms of our own to have enough for a bomb. Within a. year, the scientists here tell me.”

  “That’s not soon enough.” Roosevelt made a sour face. “It may do, but every day they shave off it will bring the country one day closer to being saved. How long for more after the first?”

  Now it was Groves’ turn to look unhappy. “You understand, sir, that we have to come up with all the explosive material for them on our own. The pile-that’s, what they call it-the Met Lab staff has built here isn’t ideally designed for that, although we are improving it as we gain experience. And one of our physicists is scouting a site where we can build a pile that will give us larger amounts of plutonium.” He wondered how Jens Larssen was doing.

  “I know about Hanford,” Roosevelt said impatiently. “I don’t need the technical details, General-that’s why you’re here. But I do need to know how long I have to wait for my weaponry so I can make sure there’s a country left when I get it.”

  “I understand,” Groves said. “If all goes well-if the pile goes up on schedule and works as advertised, and if the Lizards don’t overrun Hanford or wherever we put it-you should have more bombs starting about six months after the first one: by the end of 1944, more or less.”

  “Not soon enough,” Roosevelt repeated. “Still, we’re better off than the rest. The Germans might have been right there with us, but you’ve no doubt heard about the mistakes they made with their pile. The British are relying on us; we’re passing information to the Japanese, who are well behind us; and the Russians-I don’t know about the Russians.”

  Groves’ opinion of Soviet scientific prowess was not high. Then he remembered the Russians had got some plutonium from that raid on the Lizards, too. “A wild card,” he said.

  “That’s right.” Roosevelt nodded emphatically. His famous jaw still had granite in it, no matter how badly the rest of his features had weathered. “I’ve been in touch with Stalin. He’s worried-the Lizards are pushing hard against Moscow. If it falls, who can say whether the Russians will keep on listening to their government, and if they don’t, we’ve lost a big piece of the war.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves said. Although he was as security-conscious as a man in his position had to be, he also had a well-honed curiosity-and how often did you get to pick the brain of the President of the United States? “How bad is it over in the Soviet Union, sir?”

  “It’s not good,” FDR said. “Stalin told me that if I had any men to spare, he’d leave them under their own officers, leave them under my direct personal command if that was wanted, as long as they went over there and fought the Lizards.”

  Groves’ lips puckered into a soundless whistle. That was a cry of pain if ever he’d heard one. “He’s not just worried, sir, he’s desperate. What did you tell him?”

  “I answered no, of course,” Roosevelt said. “We have a few small differences with the Lizards on our own soil at the moment.” The high-pitched laugh so familiar from the radio and the newsreel screen filled the office. As it had so often in the past, it lifted Groves’ spirits-but only for a moment. The danger facing-filling-the United States was too great to be laughed off. The President continued, “For instance, the Lizards are pushing hard against Chicago, too. They have us cut in half along the Mississippi almost as badly as the North did with the South during the Civil War, to say nothing of the other areas they’ve carved out of the country. It hinders us every way you can think of, militarily and economically both.”

  “Believe me, sir, I understand that,” Groves said, remembering how he’d had to bring the plutonium to Denver by way of Canada. “What can we do about it, though?”

  “Fight ’em,” Roosevelt answered. “If they’re going to beat us, they’ll have to beat us, no other way. From what we hear from prisoners we’ve captured, they’ve taken over two other whole worlds before they attacked us, and they’ve ruled them for thousands of years. If we lose, General, if we lay down and. give up, it’s for keeps. That’s why I came to talk about the atomic bomb: if I have any weapon I can use against those dastardly creatures, I want to know about it.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t give you better news, sir.”

  “So am I.” Roosevelt hunched his shoulders and let out another long sigh. His shirt and jacket both seemed a couple of sizes too big. The burden of the war was killing him; Groves realized with a jolt that that was literally true. He wondered where Vice President Henry Wallace was and what sort of shape he was in.

  He couldn’t t say that to the President. What he did say was “The trick will be to get through the time between using the one bomb we can make fairly quickly and the rest, which will take longer.”

  “Yes indeed,” FDR said. “I‘d hoped that would be a shorter gap. As it is we’ll have to be very careful picking the time when we use the first one. you’re right that we would be very vulnerable to whatever atomic response the Lizards make.”

  Groves had seen pictures of the slag heap the Lizards had made of Washington, D.C. He heard men who’d seen it talk about the incongruous beauty of the tall cloud of dust and hot gas that had sprouted over the city like a gigantic, poisonous toadstool. He imagined such toadstools springing into being above other cities across the United States, across the world. A bit of Latin from his prep school days came back to haunt him: they make a desert and they call it peace.

  When he murmured that aloud, the President nodded and said, “Exactly so. And in a curious way, that may turn out to be one of our greatest strengths. Our Lizard prisoners insist to a man-well, to a Lizard-that they don’t want to use their atomic weapons here on a large scale. They say it would do too much damage to the planet: they want to control Earth and settle colonists on it, not just smash us by any means that come to hand.”

  “Whereas, we can do anything we have to, to get rid of them,” Groves said. “Yes, sir, I see what you mean. Odd that we should have fewer constraints on our strategy than they do when they have the more powerful weapons.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” Roosevelt agreed. “If we-humanity, that is-can say, ‘If we don’t get to keep our world, you won’t use it, either,’ that will give our scaly friends something new and interesting to think about. Their colonization fleet will be here in a generation’s time, and I gather it can’t be conveniently recalled. If the Lizards lay Earth to waste, the colonists are like somebody invited to a party at a house tha
t’s just burnt to the ground: all dressed up with no place to go.”

  “And no one to pass them a hose to put out the fire, either,” Groves observed.

  That won a chuckle from FDR. “Nice to know you were paying attention when I made my Lend-Lease speech.”

  Any military man who didn’t pay attention to what his commander-in-chief said was an idiot, as far as Groves was concerned. He replied, “The question is how far we can push that line of reasoning, sir. If the Lizards are faced with the prospect of either losing the war or hurting us as badly as we hurt them, which will they choose?”

  “I don’t know,” Roosevelt said, which made Groves respect his honesty. “I tell you this, though, General: compared to the problems we have right now, I shouldn’t mind facing that one at all. I want you and your crew here to exert every effort possible to producing that first atomic bomb and then as many more as fast as you can. If we go down, I’d sooner go down with guns blazing than with our hands in the air.”

  “Yes, sir, so would I,” Groves said. “We’ll do everything we can, sir.”

  “I’m sure you will, General.” Roosevelt turned his wheelchair and rolled toward the door. He got to it and opened it before Groves could come around the desk to do the job for him. That made the old jaunty look come back to his haggard features, just for a moment. He liked to preserve as much independence as his circumstances allowed.

  And in that, Groves thought, he was a good representative for the whole planet.

  XVIII

  Mordechai Anielewicz had never imagined he would be relieved that the Lizards had set up a rocket battery right outside Leczna, but he was. That gave him an excuse to stay indoors, which meant he didn’t have to see Zofia Klopotowski for a while.