Tilting The Balance (54 page)

Ducks stuck their behinds in the air as they tipped up for food in the river. The driver looked at them and murmured, “I wish I had a shotgun.” Molotov saw reply as unnecessary; the driver would likely have said the same thing had he been alone in the wagon.

Molotov wished not for a shotgun but a car. Yes, gasoline was in short supply, with almost all of it earmarked for the front. But as the number two man in the Soviet Union behind Stalin, he could have arranged for a limousine had he wanted one. The Lizards, however, were more likely to shoot up motor vehicles than horse-drawn wagons. Molotov played it safe.

When the driver pulled off the road and onto a meandering path, Molotov thought the fellow had lost his way. The thrill ahead looked like an archetypical kolkhoz, maybe a little smaller than most of its ilk. Chickens ran around clucking and pecking, fat pigs wallowed in mud. In the fields, men walked behind mules. The only buildings were row houses for the kolkhozniks and barns for the animals.

Then one of the men, dressed like any farmer in boots, baggy trousers, collarless tunic, and cloth cap, opened the door to a barn and went inside. Before he closed it after himself, the foreign commissar saw that the inside was brightly lit by electric light. Even before the Germans and the Lizards came, that would have been unusual for a kolkhoz. Now it was inconceivable.

His smile came broader and more fulsome than most who knew him would have imagined his face could form. “A splendid job of maskirovka.” he said enthusiastically. “Whoever designed and implemented the deception plan, he deserves to be promoted.”

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am given to understand the responsible parties have been recognized,” the driver said. He looked like a peasant – he looked like a drunk – but he talked like an educated man. Maskirovka again. Molotov thought. He knew intellectually he would not have a drunken peasant taking him to arguably the most important place in the Soviet Union, but the man played his role well.

Molotov pointed to the barn. “That is where they do their research?”

“Comrade, all I know is that that is where I was told to deliver you,” the driver answered. “What they do in there I could not tell you, and I do not want to know.”

He pulled back on the reins. The horse drawing the high-wheeled panje wagon obediently stopped. Molotov, who was not a large man (even if he was taller than Stalin), scrambled down without grace but also without falling. As he headed for the barn door, the driver took a flask from his hip pocket and swigged from it. Maybe he was an educated drunk.

The barn door looked like a barn door. After that, though, the maskirovka failed: the air that came out of the barn did not smell as it should. Molotov supposed that didn’t matter, if the Lizards got close enough to go sniffing around, the Soviet Union was likely to be finished, anyhow.

He opened the door, closed it behind him as quickly as the fellow who looked like a farmer had done. Inside, the wooden building was uncompromisingly clean and uncompromisingly scientific. Even the “farmer’s” costume, when seen close up, was spotless.

The fellow hurried up to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am delighted to see you here,” he said, extending a hand. He was a broad-shouldered man of about forty, with a chin beard and alert eyes in a tired face. “I am Igor Ivanovich Kurchatov, director of the explosive metal project.” He brushed back a lock of hair that drooped (Hitlerlike. Molotov thought irrelevantly) onto his forehead.

“I have questions on two fronts, Igor Ivanovich,” Molotov said. “First, how soon will you finish the bomb built from the captured Lizard explosive metal? And second, how soon will this facility begin producing more of this metal for us to use?”

Kurchatov’s eyes widened slightly. “You come straight to the point.”

“Time-wasting formalities are for the bourgeoisie,” Molotov replied. “Tell me what I need to know so I can report it to Comrade Stalin.”

Stalin, of course, received regular reports from the project. Beria had been here to see how things went, too. But Molotov, along with being foreign commissar, also served as deputy chairman to Stalin on the State Committee on Defense.

Kurchatov licked his lips before he answered; he was well aware of that. He said, “In the first area, we have made great progress. We are almost ready to begin fabricating the components for the bomb.”

“That is good news,” Molotov agreed.

“Yes, Comrade,” Kurchatov said. “Since we have the explosive metal in place, it becomes a straightforward engineering matter of putting two masses of it, neither explosive alone, together so they exceed what is called the critical mass, the amount required for an explosion.”

“I see,” Molotov said, though he really didn’t. If something was explosive, it seemed to him, the only difference between a little and a lot should have been the size of the boom. But all the Soviet physicists and other academicians insisted this strange metal did not work that way. If they achieved the results they claimed, he supposed that would prove them right. He asked, “And how have you decided to join the pieces together?”

“The simplest way we could think of was to shape one into a cylinder with a hole through the center and the other into a smaller cylinder that would fit precisely into the hole. An explosive charge will propel it into the proper position. We shall take great care that it does not go awry.”

“Such care is well-advised, Comrade Director,” Molotov said. But although he kept his voice icy, he intuitively liked the design Kurchatov had described. It had a Russian simplicity to it: slam the one into the other and bang! Molotov knew his own people well enough to know also that they had more trouble keeping complicated plans on track than did, say, the Germans; Russians had a way of substituting brute force for sophistication. They’d held the Nazis outside Moscow and Leningrad that way. Now they were on the edge of striking a mighty blow against the Lizards, more deadly invaders still.

A mighty blow… “After we use up our stock of explosive metal, we have no more – is that correct?” Molotov asked.

“Yes Comrade Foreign Commissar.” Kurchatov licked his lips and went no further.

Molotov frowned. He had been afraid this would happen. The academicians had a habit of promising Stalin the moon, whether they could deliver or not. Maybe the horse will learn to sing, he thought, an echo from some ancient history read in his student days. He shook his head, banishing the memory. The here and now was what counted He knew the dilemma the scientists faced. If they told Stalin they could not give him something he wanted, they’d head for the gulag… unless they got a bullet in the back of the neck instead. But if, after promising, they failed to come through, the same applied again.

And the Soviet Union desperately needed a continuous supply of explosive metal. In that Molotov agreed with Stalin. (He tried to remember the last time he had disagreed with Stalin. He couldn’t. It was too long ago.) He said, “What are the difficulties in production, Igor Ivanovich, and how are you working to overcome them?”

As if on cue, another man in farmer’s clothes came up. Kurchatov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar, let me present to you Georgi Aleksandrovich Flerov, who recently discovered the spontaneous fission of the uranium nucleus and who is in charge of the team investigating these difficulties.”

Flerov was younger than Kurchatov; even in the clothes of a peasant, he looked like a scholar. He also looked nervous. Because he was in charge, he was responsible for what his team did – and for what it didn’t do.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, the answer to your first question, or to the first part of it, is simple,” he said, trying to hold his rather light voice steady. “The chief difficulty in production is that we do not yet know how to produce. Our techniques in nuclear research are several years behind those of the capitalists and fascists, and we are having to learn what they already know.”

Molotov gave him a baleful stare. “Comrade Stalin will not be pleased to hear this.”

Kurchatov blanched. So did Flerov, but he said, “If Comrade Stalin chooses to liquidate this team, no one in the Soviet Union will be able to produce these explosives for him. Everyone with that expertise who is still alive is here. We are what the rodina has, for better or worse.”

Molotov was not used to defiance, even frightened, deferential defiance. He harshened his voice as he replied, “We were promised full-scale production of explosive metal within eighteen months. If the team assembled here cannot accomplish this-”

“The Germans are not likely to have that within eighteen months, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Flerov said. “Neither are the Americans, though the breakdown in travel has left us less well-informed about their doings.”

Has played hob with espionage, you mean, Molotov thought: Flerov had a little diplomat in him after all. That, however, was a side issue. Molotov said, “If you cannot produce as promised, we will remove you and bring in those who can.”

“Good luck to you and goodbye to the rodina,” Flerov said. “You may find charlatans who tell you worse lies than we could ever imagine. You will not find capable physicists – and if you dispose of us, you may never see uranium or plutonium produced in the Soviet Union.”

He was not bluffing. Molotov had watched too many men trying to lie for their lives; he knew nonsense and bluff when he heard them. He didn’t said, “You direct this project. Why have you not kept us informed about your trouble in holding to the schedule?”

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, we are ahead of schedule in preparing the first bomb,” Kurchatov said. “That ought to count in our favor, even if the other half of the project is going more slowly than we thought it would. We can rock the Lizards back on their heels with one explosion.”

“Igor Ivanovich-” Flerov began urgently.

Molotov raised a hand to cut him off. He glared at Kurchatov. “You may be an excellent physicist, Comrade, but you are politically naive. If we rock the Lizards with one explosion, with how many will they rock us?”

Under the harsh electric lights, Kurchatov’s face went an ugly yellowish-gray. Flerov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar, this has been a matter of only theoretical discussion.”

“You need to make it one of the theses of your dialectic,” Molotov said. He was convinced Stalin had the right of that: the Lizards would hit back hard at any nation that used the explosive metal against them.

“We shall do as you say,” Kurchatov said.

“See that you do,” Molotov answered. “Meanwhile, the Soviet Union – to say nothing of all mankind – requires a supply of explosive metal. You cannot make it within eighteen months, you say. How long, then?” Molotov was not large, nor physically imposing. But when he spoke with the authority of the Soviet Union in his voice, he might have been a giant.

Kurchatov and Flerov looked at each other. “If things go well, four years,” Flerov said.

“If things go very well, three and a half,” Kurchatov said. The younger man gave him a dubious look, but finally spread his hands, conceding the point.

Three and a half years? More likely four? Molotov felt as if he’d been kicked in the belly. The Soviet Union would have its one weapon, which it could hardly use for fear of bringing hideous retaliation down on its head? And the Germans and the Americans – and, for all he knew, maybe the English and the Japanese, too – ahead in the race to make bombs of their own?

“How am I to tell this to Comrade Stalin?” he asked. The question hung in the air. Not only would the scientists incur Stalin’s wrath for being too optimistic, but it might fall on Molotov as well, as the bearer of bad news.

If the academicians were as irreplaceable as they thought, the odds were good that Stalin wouldn’t do anything to them.

Over the years, Molotov had done his best to make himself indispensable to Stalin, but indispensable wasn’t the same as irreplaceable, and he knew it.

He asked, “Can I tell the General Secretary you will succeed within two and a half to three years?” If he could arrange to present a small disappointment rather than a big one, he might yet deflect Stalin’s anger.

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, you can of course tell the Great Stalin whatever you please, but that will not be the truth,” Kurchatov said. “When the time passes and we do not succeed, you will have to explain why.”

“If the Lizards give us so much time for research and engineering,” Flerov added; he looked to be enjoying Molotov’s discomfiture.

“If the Lizards overrun this place, Comrades, I assure you that you will have no more joy from it than I,” Molotov said stonily. Had the Germans defeated the Soviet Union, Molotov would have gone up against a wall (with a blindfold if he was lucky), but nuclear physicists might have been useful enough to save their skins by turning their coats. The Lizards, however, would not want human beings to know atoms existed, let alone that they could be split. Driving that home, Molotov added, “And if the Lizards overrun this place, it will be in large measure because you and your team have failed to give the workers and people of the Soviet Union the weapons they need to carry on the fight.”

“We are doing everything men can do,” Flerov protested. “There are too many things we simply do not know.”

Now he was the one who sounded uncertain, querulous. That was how Molotov wanted it. He snapped, “You had better learn, then.”

Softly, Igor Kurchatov said, “It is easier to give orders to generals, Comrade Foreign Commissar, than to nature. She reveals her secrets at a pace she chooses.”

“She has revealed altogether too many of them to the Lizards,” Molotov said. “If they can find them, so can you.” He turned his back to show the interview was over. He thought he’d recovered well from the shocking news the academicians had given him. How well he would recover after he gave Stalin that news was, unfortunately, another question.

The peddler smiled in appreciation as David Goldfarb handed him a silver one-mark piece with Kaiser Wilhelm’s mustachioed image stamped on it. “That’s good money, friend,” he said. Along with the baked apple on a stick that Goldfarb had bought, he gave back a fistful of copper and potmetal coins by way of change. His expression turned sly. “You have money that good, it doesn’t matter how funny your Yiddish sounds.”