Upsetting the Balance

“All right, so they didn’t do it all by themselves,” Groves said. That they’d done it ahead of the United States in any way, shape, form, color, or size still rankled, no matter how much the bomb they’d used had helped the war effort against the Lizards.

It rankled more people than Groves, too. Ever since the Russian bomb went off, the Denver papers bad been screaming that the U.S.A. should have been the first country to blow the Lizards to hell and gone. None of the reporters and editorial writers had shown that he knew his atoms from third base, and none of them (thank God!) seemed to have a clue that the Met Lab was operating out of the University of Denver these days.

On his way from Science Hall to the football stadium that housed the atomic pile the physicists had built, Groves passed a sergeant leading a couple of Lizard POWs. The man and the aliens were almost friends by now; they chatted in a mixture of English and the Lizards’ language.

“Morning, General,” the sergeant said, saluting.

“Superior sir,” the two Lizards added in their hissing English.

“Morning, Yeager.” Groves returned the salute. He even grudged the Lizards a nod. “Ullhass, Ristin.” As individuals, they looked strange, but not particularly dangerous. They were about the size and build of ski

Groves tramped on. Science Hall was near the north end of the campus, a long way away from the stadium. The walk helped keep his weight down. So did the short rations everybody was on these days. He was a long way from ski

Outside the football stadium, a guard saluted Groves, who noted approvingly that the fellow was under cover so he couldn’t be spotted from the air. One of the keys to the American atomic bomb project was not letting the Lizards know it existed.

It was shadowy under the stadium, but not cool. During the day, Denver was like a bake oven in summer, even though the mile-high air shed heat fast at night. The physicists and technicians in charge of the pile nodded as Groves approached. They didn’t necessarily love him, but they took him seriously, which sufficed.

“How much closer are we?” he asked Enrico Fermi.

“We have gained another day,” the physicist answered. “The output of plutonium from this pile does continue to increase.”

“Not fast enough,” Groves growled. The pile produced grams of plutonium per day. The United States needed several kilograms of the stuff to add to what they received from inside the Soviet Union by way of a reluctant German courier, the Jewish irregulars in Poland, and a British submarine. Groves had shepherded that plutonium all the way from Boston to Denver, only to be told when he got it here that he hadn’t brought enough. The memory still rankled.

Fermi shrugged a large Latin shrug. “General, I ca

“That’s not going fast enough, either,” Groves said. Another pile was going up under the stands at the opposite end of the football field. They had plenty of uranium oxide for it. Getting the super-pure graphite they needed was another matter. Groves was an expediter supreme, but the transportation snarl into which the Lizards had thrown the United States was more than enough to drive even expediters mad.

“What we really need is to build piles of more efficient design,” Fermi said. “The Hanford site on the Columbia would be ideal-far more water for cooling than we can take from the South Platte, an area far removed from the Lizards-”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Groves broke in. “They’re supposed to have a base in Idaho, only a couple of hundred miles off to the east.”

“A small one.” Fermi pinched his thumb and forefinger together to show how small. “As soon as Professor Larssen returns to confirm that the site is as good as it appears to be, we will begin centering more and more of our activities there.”

“As soon as Larssen gets back, yeah,” Groves said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. As far as he was concerned, Jens Larssen could stay away indefinitely. Yeah, sure, the guy had a beef: he’d been away from the Met Lab crew for a long time on a dangerous mission (any cross-country travel counted as a dangerous mission these days), and his wife, figuring he had to be dead, had fallen for Sergeant Sam Yeager-he’d been a corporal then-married him, and got pregnant. When Larssen turned out to be alive after all, she’d decided to stay with Yeager. None of that was calculated to improve a man’s attitude.

But goddamn it, you couldn’t let how you felt drag down your work the way Larssen had. It wasn’t just his own work that had been hurting, either. He’d been taking his colleagues’ minds off what they were supposed to be doing, too. Groves hadn’t been sorry to see him volunteer to scout out Hanford, Washington, and would hold in his delight at seeing him come back.

“Professor Larssen has had a difficult time,” Fermi said, reacting to the dislike in Groves’ voice.

“Professor Fermi, the whole country-hell, the whole world-has had a difficult time,” Groves retorted. “It’s not like he’s the only one. He’d better stop whimpering and pull himself together.”

He leaned toward Fermi, using his physical presence to make his point for him. He wasn’t that much taller than the Italian, but he was wider, and harder and tougher to boot. Fermi said, “If you will excuse me, General, I have some calculations I must attend to,” and hurried away.

Groves grunted. Scoring a victory against a mild-ma

And besides, you couldn’t bite down too hard on Fermi. Without false modesty, Groves knew he was very good at what he did. There weren’t a whole lot of people who were both the engineer and administrator he was. But if he dropped dead tomorrow, George Marshall would pick somebody just about as good to replace him. Who was just about as good as a Nobel Prize-wi

The bombs would be built. He had no doubt of that: first the one that incorporated the plutonium stolen from the Lizards, then others made entirely with human-produced nuclear material. The know-how and resources were in place; the United States merely had to await results.

Only trouble was, the United States couldn’t wait. As things stood, that first bomb was a year away, maybe more. How much of the States would be left in American hands by the time it was ready to blow?Not enough, Groves thought gloomily; the guys with the guns and the tanks and the airplanes were doing all they could, but all they could was liable not to be enough.

That meant every day he could shave off getting the first bomb ready was a day that might save the country. Nobody in the United States had faced that weight of responsibility since the Civil War. He shrugged his broad shoulders. He had to hope they were strong enough to bear the burden.

Ristin threw a baseball to Sam Yeager. The Lizard POW handled the ball as if it were a grenade, but he threw pretty straight. The ball slapped leather in Yeager’s beat-up glove. “Good toss,” he said, and threw the baseball on to Ullhass.