Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  Again, the Nipponese inside the chamber wore the white robes of scientists. The Big Ugly in the center chair spoke. Major Okamoto translated: “Dr. Nishina wishes to discuss today the nature of the bombs with which the Race destroyed the cities of Berlin and Washington.”

  “Why not?” Teerts answered agreeably. “These bombs were made from uranium. In case you do not know what uranium is, it is the ninety-second element in the periodic table.” He let his mouth fall slightly open in amusement. The Big Uglies were so barbarous, they would surely have not the slightest notion of what he was talking about.

  After Okamoto relayed his answer to the Nipponese scientists, he and they talked back and forth for some time. Then he returned his attention to Teerts, saying, “I do not have the technical terms I need to ask these questions in proper detail. Give them to me as we speak, please, and do your best to understand even without them.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said, agreeable still.

  “Good.” Okamoto paused to think; his rubbery Big Ugly features made the process easy to watch. At length, he said, “Dr. Nishina wishes to know which process the Race uses to separate the lighter, explosive kind of uranium from the more common heavy kind.”

  Teerts bit down on that as if it were an unsuspected bone in his meat. Not in his wildest nightmares—and he’d had some dreadful ones since his capture—had he imagined that the Big Uglies had the slightest clue about atomic energy, or even that they’d heard of uranium. If they did—He abruptly realized they might be dangerous to the Race, not just the horrid nuisances they’d already proved themselves.

  To Major Okamoto, he said, “Tell the learned Dr. Nishina that I do not know which processes he means.” He had to work not to turn an eye turret toward the instruments of torture in the interrogation chamber.

  Okamoto fixed him with a stare he’d come to identify as hostile, but passed his words on to Nishina without comment. Nishina spoke volubly in reply, ticking off points on his fingers as If he were a male of the Race.

  When he was through, Okamoto translated: “He says theory shows several ways which might accomplish this. Among them are successive barriers to a uranium-containing gas, heating the gas so that part of it which has the lighter kind of uranium rises more than the other, using a strong electromagnet”—a word that took a good deal of backing and filling to get across—“and using rapid spinning to concentrate the lighter kind of uranium. Which of these does the Race find most efficient?”

  Teerts stared at him. He was even more appalled than he had been when his killercraft got shot down. That had affected only his own fate. Now he had to worry about whether the Race had any idea what the Tosevites were up to. They might be barbarians—by everything Teerts had seen, they were barbarians—but they were also alarmingly knowledgeable . . . which meant it behooved Teerts to be more than cautious in his answers. He’d have to do his best to avoid giving away any information at all.

  He took so long figuring that out that Okamoto snapped, “Don’t waste time dreaming up lies. Answer Dr. Nishina.”

  “I beg your pardon, superior sir,” Teerts said, and added, “Gomen nasai—so sorry,” from his limited stock of Nipponese. “Part of the problem is my not having enough words to give a proper answer, and another part is my own ignorance, for which I again beg pardon. You must remember that I am—I was—a pilot. I had nothing at all to do with uranium.”

  “You certainly were glib enough talking about it a little while ago,” Okamoto said. “You do not want to make me disbelieve you. Some of the tools back there are very sharp, others can be made hot, and still others can be hot and sharp at the same time. Do you want to learn which is which?”

  “No, superior sir,” Teerts gasped with utmost sincerity. “But I truly am ignorant of the knowledge you seek. I am only a pilot, not a nuclear physicist. What I know of flying, I have freely told you. I am not an expert in the matter of atomic weapons. What little I know of nuclear energy I learned in school as I was growing from hatchlinghood. It is no more and no less than any other ordinary male of the Race would know.”

  “This is difficult to believe,” Okamoto said “You spoke quite a lot about uranium just a little while ago.”

  That was before I realized how much you knew about it, Teerts thought. He wondered how he was going to escape with his integument intact. He knew he couldn’t lie to the Nipponese; he didn’t know how much they knew, and the only way to find out—getting caught—would involve the painful penetration of that integument.

  He said, “I do know that atomic weapons do not necessarily use uranium alone. Some involve, I am not sure how, hydrogen as well—the very first element.” Let the Japanese chew on that paradox for a while, he thought: how could a weapon involve the lightest and heaviest elements at the same time?

  After Okamoto interpreted, the team of Big Ugly scientists chattered for a while among themselves. Then Nisbina, who seemed to be their spokesman, put a question to Okamoto. The major translated for Teerts: “The uranium explosion, then, is hot enough to make hydrogen act as it does in the sun and convert large amounts of matter to energy?”

  Horror filled Teerts. Every time he tried to escape from this hideous mess in which he found himself, he sank deeper instead. The Big Uglies knew about fusion. To Teerts, the product of a civilization that grew and changed at a glacial pace, knowing about something was essentially the same as being able to do it. And If the Tosevites could make fusion bombs . . .

  Major Okamoto knocked him out of his appalled reverie by snapping, “Answer the learned Dr. Nishina!”

  “I beg your pardon, superior sir,” Teerts said. “Yes, everything the learned, doctor says is true.”

  There. He’d done it Any day now, he feared, the Nipponese would start using nuclear weapons against the Race on the mainland—which still struck Teerts as nothing more than a big island; he was used to water surrounded by land, not the other way around.

  He heard Okamoto say “Honto,” confirming his answer to the Nipponese scientist’s question. The cold of the interrogation room sank deeply into his spirit. The Nipponese hardly seemed to need him. By their questions, they had all the answers already, just waiting to be put into practice.

  Then Nishina spoke again: “We return to the question of getting the lighter uranium, the kind which is explosive, out of the other, more common, type. This as yet we have not succeeded in doing; indeed, we have only just begun the attempt. That is why we will learn from you how the Race solves this problem.”

  Teerts needed a moment to understand that The Race had been shocked when they reached Tosev 3 to discover how advanced the Big Uglies were. Before Teerts was captured, pilots had talked endlessly about that; they’d expected no opposition, and here the Tosevites were, shooting back—not very well, and from inadequate aircraft, but shooting back. How could they have learned to build combat aircraft in the eight hundred local years since the Race’s probe examined them?

  Now, for the first time, Teerts got a glimmering of the answer. The Race made change deliberately slow. When something new was discovered, extrapolationists performed elaborate calculations to learn in advance how it would affect a long-stable society, and how best to minimize those effects while gradually acquiring the benefits of the new device or principle.

  With the Big Uglies, the tongue was on the other side of the mouth. When they found something new, they seized it with both hands and squeezed until they got all the juice out. They didn’t care what the consequences five generations—or even five years—hence would be. They wanted advantages now, and worried about later trouble later, if at all.

  Eventually, they’d probably end up destroying themselves with that attitude. At the moment, it made them far more deadly opponents than they would have been otherwise.

  “Do not waste time thinking up lies. I warned you before,” Major Okamoto said. “Tell Dr. Nishina the truth at once.”

  “By what I know, superior sir, the truth is that we do not u
se any of these methods,” Teerts said. Okamoto drew back his hand for a slap. Afraid that would be the start of a torture session worse than any he’d yet known, Teerts went on rapidly, “Instead, we use the heavier form of uranium: isotope is the term we use.”

  “How do you do this?” Okamoto demanded after a brief colloquy with the Nipponese scientists. “Dr. Nishina says the heavier isotope cannot explode.”

  “There is another element, number ninety-four, which does not occur in nature but which we make from the heavier, nonexplosive—Dr. Nishina is right—isotope of uranium. This other element is explosive. We use it in our bombs.”

  “I think you are lying. You will pay the penalty for it, I promise you that,” Okamoto said. Nevertheless, he translated Teerts’ words for the Big Uglies in the white coats.

  They started talking excitedly among themselves. Nishina, who looked to be the senior male, sorted things out and relayed an answer to Okamoto. He said to Teerts, “I may have been wrong. Dr. Nishina tells me the Americans have found this new element as well. They have given it the name plutonium. You will help us produce it.”

  “Past what I have already said, I know little,” Teerts warned: Despair threatened to consume him. Every time he’d revealed something new to the Nipponese, it had been with the hope that the technical difficulties of the new revelation would force them off the road that led toward nuclear weapons. Instead, everything he told them seemed to push them further down that road.

  He wished a plutonium bomb would fall on Nagasaki. But what were the odds of that?

  VI

  WELCOME TO CHUGWATER, POPULATION 286, the sign said. Colonel Leslie Groves shook his head as he read it. “Chugwater?” he echoed. “Wonder why they call it that.”

  Captain Rance Auerbach read the other half of the sign. “ ‘Population 286,’ ” he said. “Sounds like Jerkwater’d be a better name for it.”

  Groves looked ahead. The cavalry officer had a point. It didn’t look like much of a town. But cattle roamed the fields around it. This late in winter, they were on the scrawny side, but they were still out there grazing. That meant Chugwater had enough to eat, anyhow.

  People came out to look at the spectacle of a cavalry company going through town, but they didn’t act as impressed as townsfolk had in Montana and farther north in Wyoming. One boy in ragged blue jeans said to a man in overalls who looked just like him, “I liked the parade a couple of weeks ago better, Dad.”

  “You had a parade through here a couple of weeks ago?” Groves called to a heavyset man whose black coat, white shirt, and string tie argued that he was a person of some local importance.

  “Sure as hell did.” The pear-shaped man spat a stream of tobacco juice into the street. Groves envied him for having tobacco in any form. He went on, “Only thing missing then was a brass band. Had us a whole slew o’ wagons and soldiers and foreigners who talked funny and even a couple of Lizards—silly-lookin’ little things to cause all the trouble they do, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, now that you mention it.” Excitement coursed through Groves. That sounded very much like the Met Lab crew. If he was only a couple of weeks behind them, they’d be into Colorado by now, not too far from Denver. He might even catch them before they got there. Whether he did or not, the lead-lined saddlebag in his wagon would push their work forward once they got themselves settled. Trying to make his hope a certainty, he asked, “Did they say what they were up to?”

  The heavyset man shook his head. “Nope. They were right close-mouthed, as a matter of fact. Friendly enough people, though.” His chest inflated, although not enough to stick out over his belly. “I married off a couple of ’em.”

  One of the other men on the sidewalk, a stringy, leathery fellow who looked like a real cowboy, not the Hollywood variety, said, “Yeah, go on, Hoot, tell him how you laid the bride, too.”

  “You go to hell, Fritzie,” the pear-shaped man—Hoot—said. A cowboy named Fritzie? Groves thought. Before he had time to do more than marvel, Hoot turned back to him. “Not that I would’ve minded: pretty little thing, a widow I think she was. But I do believe the corporal she married would have kicked my ass around the block if I’d even looked at her sideways.”

  “You’d’ve deserved it, too,” Fritzie said with a most uncowboylike giggle.

  “Oh, shut up,” Hoot told him. Again, he returned to Groves: “So I don’t know what they were doing, Colonel, only that there were a lot of ’em, heading south. Toward Denver, I think, not Cheyenne, but don’t make me swear to that.”

  “Thank you very much. That helps,” Groves said. If they weren’t talking about the crew from the University of Chicago, he’d eat his hat. He’d made better time coming across Canada and then down through Montana and Wyoming than they had traveling straight west across the Great Plains. Of course, his party had only the one wagon in it, and that lightly loaded, while theirs was limited to the speed of their slowest conveyance. And they’d have been doing a lot more scrounging for fodder than his tight band. If you couldn’t think in terms of logistics, you didn’t deserve to be an Army engineer.

  “You folks going to put up here for the night?” Hoot asked. “We’ll kill the fatted calf for you, like the Good Book says. ‘Sides, there’s nothin’ between here and Cheyenne but miles and miles of miles and miles.”

  Groves looked at Auerbach. Auerbach looked back, as if to say, You’re the boss. Groves said, “I know things are tight, Mister, uh—”

  “I’m Joshua Sumner, but you may as well call me Hoot; everybody else does. We got plenty, at least for now. Feed you a nice thick steak and feed you beets. By God, we’ll feed you beets till your eyeballs turn purple—we had a bumper crop of ’em. Got a Ukrainian family up the road a couple miles, they showed us how to cook up what they call borscht—beets and sour cream and I don’t know what all else. They taste a sight better that way than what we were doing with ’em before, I tell you for a fact.”

  Groves was unenthusiastic about beets, with or without sour cream. But he didn’t think he’d get anything better farther south on US 87. “Thanks, uh, Hoot. We’ll lay over, then, if it’s all right with you people.”

  Nobody in earshot made any noises to say it wasn’t. Captain Auerbach raised his hand. The cavalry company reined in. Groves reflected that a couple of the old-timers on the street had probably seen cavalry go through town before, back before the turn of the century. The idea left him unhappy; it was as If the Lizards were forcing the United States—and the world—away from the twentieth century.

  Such worries receded after he got himself outside of a great slab of fat-rich steak cooked medium-rare over a wood fire. He ate a bowl of borscht, too, not least because the person who pressed it on him was a smiling blonde of about eighteen. It wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be, either. And somebody in Chugwater made homebrew beer better than just about anything that came out of a big Milwaukee brewery.

  Hoot Sumner turned out to be sheriff, justice of the peace, and postmaster all rolled into one. He gravitated to Groves, maybe because they were the leaders of their respective camps, maybe just because they were about the same shape. “So what brings you through town?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” Groves said. “The less I say, the less chance the Lizards have of finding out.”

  “As If I’m gonna tell ’em,” Sumner said indignantly.

  “Mr. Sumner, I have no way of knowing whom you’d tell, or whom they’d tell, or whom they’d tell,” Groves said. “What I do know is that I have orders directly from President Roosevelt that I tell no one. I intend to obey those orders.”

  Sumner’s eyes got big. “Straight from the President, you say? Must be something important, then.” He cocked his head, studied Groves from under the brim of his Stetson. Groves looked back at him, his face expressionless. After close to a minute of that tableau, Sumner scowled in frustration. “Goddamn, Colonel, I’m glad I don’t play
poker against you, or I’d be walking home in my long johns, I think.”

  “Hoot, If I can’t tell you anything, that means I really can’t tell you anything,” Groves said.

  “Thing is, though, a small town like this one here runs on gossip. If we can’t get any, we’ll just shrivel up and die,” Sumner said. “The folks who came through a couple weeks ago were just as tight-lipped as you people are—they wouldn’t’ve said shit if they had a mouthful, if you know what I mean. All this stuff going through us, and we don’t even get to find out what the hell it is?”

  “Mr. Sumner, it’s altogether possible that you and Chugwater don’t want to know,” Groves said. His face did twist then, in annoyance at himself. He shouldn’t have said anything at all. How many mugs of that good home brew had he drunk?

  He consoled himself with the thought that he’d learned something from Sumner. If the previous set of travelers had been as secretive as he was, the odds were even better than good that they came from the Metallurgical Laboratory.

  The justice of the peace said, “Hellfire, man, those people even had an Eyetalian with ’em, and ain’t Eyetalians supposed to be the talkingest people on the face of the earth? Brother, not this one! Nice enough feller, but he wouldn’t give you the time of day. What kind of an Eyetalian is that?”

  A smart one, Groves thought. It sounded like Enrico Fermi to him . . . which just about nailed things down.

  “Only time he unbent a-tall,” Sumner went on, “was when he did best man duty at the wedding I told you about—kissed the bride right pert, he did, even though his own wife—not a bad looker herself—was standing right there beside him. Now that sounds like an Eyetalian to me.”