Tilting The Balance (62 page)

Larssen’s eyes grew hard and cold. “You try sending anybody from the Army with me, General, and I won’t go. The Army’s already done me enough bad turns – I don’t need anymore. I’ll be there all by my lonesome, and I’ll get back, too. You don’t like that, put somebody else on the road.”

Groves glared. Larssen glared right back. Groves ran into the limits of his power to command. If he told Larssen to shut up and do as he was told, the physicist was liable to go on strike again and end up in the brig instead of Hanford. And even if he did leave Denver with a soldier tagging along, what would his report be worth when he got back? He’d already proved he could survive on his own.

Groves muttered under his breath. Sometimes you had to throw in your hand; no help for it. “Have it your way, then,” he growled. Larssen looked disgustingly smug.

Leo Szilard stuck a forefinger in the air. Groves nodded his way, glad of the chance to forget Larssen for a moment. Szilard said, “Building a pile is a large work of engineering. How do we keep the Lizards from spotting it and knocking it to pieces? Hanford now, I would say as a statement of high probability, has no such large works.”

“We have to make it look as if we’re building something else, something innocuous,” Groves said after a little thought. “Just what, I don’t know. We can work on that while Dr. Larssen is traveling. We’ll involve the Army Corps of Engineers, too; we won’t need to depend on our own ingenuity.”

“If I were a Lizard,” Szilard said, “I would knock down any large building humans began, on general principles. The aliens must know we are trying to devise nuclear weapons.”

Groves shook his head again, not in contradiction but in annoyance. He had no doubt Szilard was right; if he’d been a Lizard himself, he’d have done the same thing. “Hiding an atomic pile in the middle of a city isn’t the world’s greatest idea, either,” he said. “We’ve done it here because we had no choice, and also because this was an experiment. If something goes wrong with a big pile, we’ll have ourselves a mess just like the one the Germans got. How many people would it kill?”

“A good many – you are right about that,” Szilard said. “That is why we settled on the Hanford site. But we also do have to consider whether working out in the open would come to the enemy’s attention. Winning the war must come first. Before we go to work, we must weigh the risks to city folk against those to the project as a whole from starting up a pile out in the open, so to speak.”

Enrico Fermi sighed. “Leo, you presented this view at the meeting where we decided what we would advise General Groves. The vote went against you, nor was it close. Why do you bring up the matter now?”

“Because, whether in the end he accepts it or not, he needs to be aware of it,” Szilard answered. Behind glasses, his eyes twinkled. And to raise a little hell. Groves guessed.

He said, “We’ll need Dr. Larssen’s report on the area. I suspect we’ll also need to do some serious thinking about how we’ll camouflage the pile if we do build there.” His smile challenged the eggheads. “Since we have so many brilliant minds here, I’m sure that will be no trouble at all.”

A couple of innocents beamed; perhaps their sarcasm detectors were out of commission for the duration. A couple of people with short fuses – Jens Larssen was one – glared at him. Several people looked thoughtful: if he set them a problem,

they’d start working on it. He approved of that attitude; it was what he would have done himself.

“Gentlemen, I think that’s enough for today,” he said.

Major Okamoto seemed out of place in a laboratory, Teerts thought. What the Big Uglies called a lab wasn’t impressive to a male of the Race: the equipment was primitive and chaotically arranged, and there wasn’t a computer anywhere. One of the Nipponese who wore a white coat manipulated a curious device whose middle moved in and out as if it were a musical instrument.

“Superior sir, what is that thing?” Teerts asked Okamoto, pointing.

“What thing?” Okamoto looked as if he wanted to be interrogating, not interpreting and answering questions. “Oh, that. That’s a slide rule. It’s faster than calculating by hand.”

“Slide rule,” Teerts repeated, to fix the term in his memory. “How does it work?”

Okamoto started to answer, then turned and spoke in rapid-fire Nipponese to the Big Ugly who was wielding the curious artifact. The scientist spoke directly to Teerts: “It adds and subtracts logarithms – you understand this word?”

“No, superior sir,” Teerts admitted. Explanations followed, with considerable backing and filling. Eventually Teerts got the idea. It was, he supposed, clever in an archaic way. “How accurate is this slide rule?” he asked.

“Three significant figures,” the Nipponese answered.

Teerts was appalled. The Big Uglies hoped to do serious scientific research and engineering with accuracy to only one part in a thousand? That gave him a whole new reason to hope their effort to harness nuclear energy failed. He didn’t want to be anywhere close if it succeeded: it was liable to succeed altogether too well, and blow a big piece of Tokyo into radioactive slag.

The Nipponese added, “For finer calculations, we go back to pen and paper, but pen and paper are slow. Do you understand?”

“Yes, superior sir.” Teerts revised his opinion of the Big Uglies’ abilities – slightly. Because they had no electronic aids, they did what they could to calculate more quickly. If that meant they lost some accuracy, they were willing to make the trade.

The Race didn’t work that way. If they came to a place where they needed two different qualities and had to lose some of one to get some of the other, they generally waited instead, until in the slow passage of time their arts improved to the point where the trade was no longer necessary. Because of that slow, careful evolution, the Race’s technology was extremely reliable.

What the Big Uglies called technology was anything but. Not only didn’t they seem to believe in fail-safes, he sometimes wondered if they believed in safety at all. Much of Tokyo, which was not a small city even by the standards of the Race, looked to be built from wood and paper. He marveled that it hadn’t burnt down a hundred times. Traffic was even more horrifying than it had been in Harbin, and if a vehicle ran into another one, or over a male who was also using the street, too bad. Along with inaccuracy, the Big Uglies accepted a lot of carnage as the price they had to pay for getting things done.

That thought put Teerts in mind of something he thought he’d heard a couple of the Nipponese scientists discussing. He turned to Major Okamoto. “Excuse me, superior sir, may I ask another question?”

“Ask,” Okamoto said with the air of an important male granting a most unimportant underling a boon beyond his station. Despite so many differences between them, in some ways the Race and Big Uglies weren’t that far apart.

“Thank you for your generosity, superior sir.” Teerts played the inferior role to the hilt, as if he were addressing the fleetlord rather than a rather tubby Tosevite whom he devoutly wished dead. “Did this humble one correctly hear that some other Tosevites also experimenting with explosive metal suffered a mishap?”

Again Okamoto and the scientist held a quick colloquy. The latter said, “Why not tell him? If he is ever in a position to escape, the war will be so badly lost that that will be the least of our worries.”

“Very well.” Okamoto gave his attention back to Teerts. “Yes, this did happen. The Germans had an atomic pile – what is the phrase? – reach critical mass and get out of control.”

Teerts let out a horrified hiss. The Big Uglies didn’t just accept risk, they pursued it with insane zeal. “How did this happen?” he asked.

“I am not certain the details are known, especially since the accident killed some of their scientists,” Okamoto said. “But those who still live are pressing ahead. We shall not make the mistakes they did. The Americans have succeeded in running a pile without immediately joining their ancestors, and they are sharing some of their methods with us.”

“Oh.” Teerts wished he had some ginger to chase away the lump of ice that formed in his belly. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the patchwork of tiny empires that dotted the planet’s surface had been a matter for jokes. It wasn’t funny any more. Back on Home, only one line of experiment at a time would have been pursued. Here, all the competing little empires worked separately. Disunion usually was weakness, but could also prove strength, as now.

Yoshio Nishina came into the room. His alarmingly mobile lips – or so they seemed to Teerts – pulled back so that he showed what was for a Big Ugly a lot of teeth. Teerts had learned that meant he was happy. He spoke with the other scientist and with Major Okamoto. Teerts did his best to follow, but found himself left behind.

Okamoto eventually noticed he’d got lost. “We have had a new success,” the interpreter said. “We have bombarded uranium with neutrons and produced the element plutonium. Production is still very slow, but plutonium will be easier to separate from uranium-238 than uranium-235 is.”

“Hai,” Nishina echoed emphatically. “We prepared uranium hexafluoride gas to use to separate the two isotopes of uranium from each other, but it is so corrosive that we are having an impossible time working with it. But separating plutonium from uranium is a straightforward chemical process.”

Major Okamoto had to translate some of that, too.

He and Teerts used a mixture of terms from Nipponese and the language of the Race to talk about matters nuclear. Teerts took for granted a whole range of facts the Big Uglies were just uncovering, but though he knew that things could be done, he often had no idea as to how. There they were ahead of him.

Nishina added, “Once we accumulate enough plutonium, we shall surely be able to assemble a bomb in short order. Then we will meet your people on even terms.”

Teerts bowed, which he found a useful way of responding without saying anything. The Nipponese didn’t seem to have any idea how destructive nuclear weapons really were. Maybe it was because they’d never had any dropped on them. As he had a dozen times before, Teerts tried to get across to them that nuclear combat wasn’t anything to anticipate with relish. They wouldn’t listen, any more than they had those other dozen times. They thought he was just trying to slow down their research (which he was, and which, he knew, compromised his position). Okamoto said, “My country was backward until less than a hundred years ago. We saw then that we had to learn the ways of the Tosevite empires that knew more than we did, or else become their slaves.”

Less than two hundred of our years, Teerts thought. Two hundred of his years before, the Race had been just about where it was now, leisurely contemplating the conquest of Tosev 3. Best wait till all was perfectly ready. What difference could a few years make, one way or the other?

They’d found out.

Okamoto went on, “Less than fifty years ago, our soldiers and sailors beat the Russians, one of the empires that had been far ahead of us. Less than two years ago, our airplanes and ships smashed those of the United States, which had been probably the strongest empire on Tosev 3. By then we were better than they. Do you see where I am leading with this?”

“No, superior sir,” Teerts said, though he feared he did.

Major Okamoto drove the point home with what Teerts had come to think of as customary Tosevite brutality: “We do not let anyone keep a lead on us in technology. We will catch up with you, too, and teach you to learn better than to attack us without warning.”

Nishina and the other scientist nodded emphatically at that. In the abstract, Teerts didn’t suppose he could blame them. Had other starfarers attacked Home, he would have done everything he could to defend it. But war with nuclear weapons was anything but abstract – and if the Nipponese did build and use one, the Race would surely respond in kind, most likely on the biggest city Nippon had. Right on top of my head in other words.

“This is not your concern,” Okamoto said when he worried about it out loud. “We will punish them for the wounds they have inflicted on us. Past that, all I need say is that dying for the Emperor is an honor.”

He meant the Nipponese emperor, whose line was said to run back more than two thousand years and to be astonishingly ancient on account of that. Teerts was tempted to bitter laughter. Dying for the Emperor was an honor, too, but he didn’t want to do it any time soon, especially not at the hands of the Race.

Nishina turned toward him. “Let’s go back to what we were discussing last week: the best arrangement for the uranium in a pile. I have the Americans’ report. I want to know how the Race does the same thing. You are likely to have more efficient procedures.”

I should hope so, Teerts thought “How do the Americans do it, superior sir?” he asked as innocently as he could, hoping to get some idea of the Big Uglies’ technical prowess.

But the Nipponese, though technically backward, were old in games of deceit. “You tell us how you do it,” Okamoto said. “We do the comparing. The rest is none of your business, and you would be sorry if you made it so.”

Teerts bowed once more. That was how the Nipponese apologized. “Yes, superior sir,” he said, and told what he knew. Anything was preferable to giving Okamoto the excuse to start acting like an interrogator again.

Ristin let his mouth hang open, showing off his pointy little teeth and Lizardy tongue: he was laughing at Sam Yeager. “You have what?” he said in pretty fluent if accented English. “Seven days in a week? Twelve inches in a foot? Three feet in a mile?”

“A yard,” Sam corrected.

“I thought something with grass growing in it was a yard,” Ristin said. “But never mind. How do you’remember all these things? How do you keep from going mad trying to remember?”

“All what you’re used to,” Yeager said, a little uncomfortably: he remembered trying to turn pecks into bushels into tons in school. That was one of the reasons he’d signed a minor-league contract first chance he got – except for banking and his batting average, he’d never worried about math since. He went on, “Most places except the United States use the metric system, where everything is ten of this and ten of that.” If he hadn’t read science fiction, he wouldn’t have known about the metric system, either.