Upsetting the Balance

Groves also took special care in describing what had gone wrong with the Germans’ first effort to set up a pile that went critical. Though the Germans seemed to have been spectacularly careless about safety precautions, it wasn’t as if running a pile was an exact science. Things could go wrong here, too.

“What of the Russians?” Enrico Fermi echoed. “They were first with their bomb, but only silence from them since-a long silence now.”

“They say they’ll be ready with another bomb come spring,” Groves answered. “If I had to make a guess, I’d say you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for them. They got a jump start with the plutonium they and the Germans stole from the Lizards. That was enough to give them the one bomb. Past that…” He shook his head. “Russia simply does not have the precision industry, technical skill, or scientific numerical strength to come even close to manufacturing their own. Not yet.”

“How long do you think they’ll need?” In almost identical words, three people asked the same question.

“Oh, I don’t know-1955, maybe,” Groves answered, deadpan. That got another laugh. He didn’t really think the Reds would take that long, but he didn’t look for a new bomb from them next Tuesday, either.

“And the Japanese?” Leo Szilard asked, as if he expected Groves to forget. “What of them?”

Groves spread his hands. “Dr. Szilard, there I just don’t know what to tell you. They were on the track of something, or the Lizards wouldn’t have blown Tokyo off the map. How much they knew, how many of their top people got killed when the bomb hit, how far they’ve come toward rebuilding their program-I don’t know, and I’d be lying if I said I did.”

Szilard nodded. “That is fair, General. So often, people are in the habit of saying they know more than they do. Seeing a case where this is not so makes a pleasant change.”

That was the first compliment Groves had got from Szilard in as long as he could remember. He cherished it for that very reason. For the sake of his own peace of mind, though, he wished he could give the Hungarian physicist a more authoritative answer. The Japanese worried him. Before Pearl Harbor, the United States hadn’t taken Japan seriously: not a white man over there, for one thing, he thought. But whether the Japs were white, yellow, or bright blue, their warships had proved as good as those Americans made, and their airplanes probably better. Buck-toothed, slant-eyed little bastards they might be, but if you thought they couldn’t fight-if you thought they couldn’t engineer-you had another think coming.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said the technician who’d asked him about getting the bomb out of the reprocessing plant “How come that arrow that says ‘this end up’ is pointing down at the floor?”

“What arrow?” Groves blurted, a split second before he realized the technician was pulling his leg. “Wise guy,” he said, through the laughter sent at him. He didn’t mind it. He knew hostility aimed at him was sometimes what kept the crew working together and working hard. That was fine. As long as theywere working together and working hard, he couldn’t kick.

He walked out of the reprocessing plant to let the gang cuss at him when he wasn’t there to hear it. His breath smoked. To the west, the Rockies were white. It had snowed in Denver more than once, but not for the past week. He hoped it would hold off a bit longer. Moving the Fat Lady with ice on the ground wasn’t something he wanted to think about, though he would if he had to. Actually, getting the bomb moving wouldn’t be such a problem. Stopping it, though…

Ice wasn’t something Pharaoh’s engineers had had to worry about.Lucky dogs, he thought.

His office back in the Science Building wasn’t what you’d call warm, either. He refused to let it get him down. Like a bear before hibernation, he had enough adipose tissue to shield him from the chill. So he told himself, at any rate.

He pulled an atlas off the shelf and opened it to a map of the United States. The one thing you couldn’t do without aircraft, at least not easily, was deliver a bomb to the heart of enemy’s territory. You had to place the weapon somewhere along the frontier between what you held and what he did. Given the state of the war between humanity and the Lizards, that didn’t strike Groves as an insurmountable obstacle to using it effectively.

Once the Fat Lady got aboard a freight car and headed out of Denver, where would they use it? That wasn’t his responsibility, which would end when the bomb went onto the train. Even so, he couldn’t help thinking about it.

His eyes kept coming back to one place. Nowhere else in the whole country had a rail network that even approached the one going into and out of Chicago. The Lizards had cut a lot of those routes, of course, but you could still reach the outskirts of town from the north or from the east. And with all the fighting going on there, you couldn’t help but knock out a lot of Lizards if the bomb went off there.