Tilting the Balance

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.”