Upsetting the Balance

“That I don’t like being apart from you,” he answered. Through the window came fresh cheers from the street below; one of the boys’ football teams had just scored. In a speculative voice, Moishe remarked, “Reuven really seems to enjoy watching the match down there.”

“Enough for us to hope he won’t come upstairs for the next little while, do you mean?” Rivka asked. Moishe nodded, his head jerking up and down in hopeful eagerness. From the way his wife giggled, he suspected he looked like a perfectshlemiel. He didn’t care, especially not after she said, “I suppose we can do that. Privacy is where you find it, or make it.”

He tried to remember the last time he’d lain on a bed. It hadn’t happened more than once or twice since he’d been shoehorned into the forces fighting desperately to keep Britain free of the invading aliens. They’d given him a bag of medical supplies, a uniform, an armband, and a gas mask, and they’d sent him out to do his best. Comfort hadn’t been part of the bargain.

As if by way of experiment, Rivka kissed his bare cheek. “Bristly,” she said. “I think I like your beard better, unless you can shave your face very smooth.”

“Getting my hands on a razor hasn’t always been easy,” he answered. “I never would have done it at all, but it makes a mask fit properly.”

He didn’t want to think about gas masks and the things that could go wrong if they failed to fit properly, not when he lay beside his wife in an oasis of peace and calm in the midst of chaos and war. For the next little while, he didn’t think about anything but Rivka.

But try as you would to stretch such moments, they had to end. Rivka sat up and began to dress as fast as she could. Partly that was ingrained modesty, and partly a well-justified fear that Reuven would choose the most inconvenient time possible to walk into the flat. Both those concerns also drove Moishe back into his clothes. The shoddy serge of his battledress scraped his skin as he pulled it on.

Rivka reached behind her neck to fasten the last catch. As if that were a signal that the everyday, dangerous world had returned, she asked, “How long will you be able to stay here?”

“Just tonight,” he answered. “I have to go south tomorrow, to help the wounded in the fighting against the Lizards there.”

“How is the fight really going?” Rivka asked. “When there’s power for the wireless and when they can print newspapers, they say they’re smashing the Lizards the way Samson smote the Philistines. But Lizard planes keep on pounding London, the boom of the artillery never goes away, and shells keep falling on us. Can I believe what they claim?”

“The northern pocket is gone-kaputt,” Moishe said, borrowing a word he’d heard German soldiers use. “As for the southern one, your guess is as good as mine. All I know about the fighting is what I’ve seen for myself, and that’s like asking a fish in a pool to tell you everything about the Vistula. If England were losing the fight badly, though, you’d be talking with a Lizard right now, not with me.”

“That is so,” she said thoughtfully. “But after people-human beings-have lost so many fights, it’s hard to believe that just holding the Lizards back should count as a victory.”

“When you think of how many people couldn’t slow the Lizards down, let alone stop them, then holding them backis a victory, and a big one. I don’t ever remember them pulling back from a fight the way they did from the northern pocket. The English have hurt them.” Moishe shook his head in wonder. “For so long, we didn’t think anything or anyone could hurt them.”

The front door to the flat opened, then closed with a slam. Reuven shouted, “Is there anything to eat? I’m hungry!” Moishe and Rivka looked at each other and started to laugh. The noise let Reuven find them. “What’s so funny?” he demanded with the indignation of a child who knows a joke is going over his head.

“Nothing,” his father answered gravely. “We slipped one by you, that’s all.”

“One what?” Reuven said. Rivka sent Moishe a warning glance: the boy was really too young. Moishe just laughed harder. Even with the rumble of artillery always in the background, for this little while he could savor being with his wife and son. Tomorrow the war would fold him in its bony arms once more. Today he was free, and reveled in his freedom.

The silvery metal did not look like much. It was so dense that what the Metallurgical Laboratory had managed to produce seemed an even smaller amount than it really was. Appearances mattered not at all to Leslie Groves. He knew what he had here: enough plutonium, when added together with what the Germans and Russians had stolen from the Lizards and the British brought over to the U.S.A., to make an atomic bomb that would go boom and not fizzle.

He turned to Enrico Fermi. “There’s the first long, hard step, by God! After this, we have a downhill track.”