Upsetting the Balance

“Which means only that they hold us in contempt,” Stalin snapped. “The Nazis, they think, are more dangerous to them. But us? They can deal with us at any time. And why do they think this? Because the Nazis can make these bombs on their own and we, it seems, cannot. It all comes down to these bombs.”

Molotov thought about pointing out that the Lizards had reduced their forces in the north and west of Russia to attack Germany before they knew the Nazis had explosive-metal bombs, and that the one the Germans set off came as a complete and most unpleasant surprise to them.

He kept quiet, though. This once, it wasn’t because he feared what would happen if he contradicted Stalin-although that would be bad. In the end, though, the General Secretary was right. It did all come down to those bombs. If the Soviet Union could make more, it might survive. If it couldn’t, it would go under, if not to the Lizards, then to the Germans and Americans.

Kurchatov and his crewcould make more bombs; Molotov was certain of that. He was just as certain nobody else in the Soviet Union could in any conceivably useful amount of time.

Stalin glared at Molotov, in lieu of glaring at the entire world. “These bunglers you have gathered together, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, have six months. If they have not made an explosive-metal bomb by then, they shall suffer the consequences-and so shall you.”

Molotov licked his lips. Stalin did not forget threats like that. Molotov took a deep breath. “Comrade General Secretary, if that is how you feel, call the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and have them deal with me now. The Kurchatov group cannot make us a bomb within six months. No one else you can find will do better.”

He hated taking such a risk. Stalin might very well ring up the NKVD, in which case the Soviet Union would have a new foreign commissar in short order. But defusing Stalin now would also defuse the threat half a year away.

Stalin kept staring at him, now musingly. Molotov did not talk back to him; that was like a law of nature. Molotov went hot and cold at the same time; his legs felt like jelly. Facing Churchill, even facing Hitler, was one thing, facing Stalin quite another. He was in Stalin’s power, and he knew it.

At last, the General Secretary said, “Well, we shall see.” Molotov almost spilled out of his chair and onto the floor in relief-he’d won. He’d managed to talk the leader of his country into not destroying it-and, incidentally, into not destroying him. It shouldn’t have been as hard as it was. Hard or easy, though, he’d survived. So had Kurchatov’s team. The war would go on, and the Soviet Union, too.

Liu Han hated Peking winter. She was from hundreds and hundreds ofli farther south; the cold months were bad enough there. Here, every time she went outdoors she was acutely reminded the Mongolian steppe lay just to the west. She piled on quilted garments till she looked like a perambulating pile of bedding, and she was still cold.

Nevertheless, tonight she was out on the streets, making her way onhutungs and broader avenues toward the Forbidden City, where the little scaly devils, like the Chinese Emperors before them, made their headquarters. Let the icy wind do with her as it would. Tonight, she wanted to be close to the little devils’ center.

She turned to Nieh Ho-T’ing. “I hope their Emperor has a happy birthday,” she said savagely.

“Yes.” His smile was more a predator’s grimace than one of genuine mirth. “They are the strangest creatures in all the world-the little devils, I mean. They celebrated their Emperor’s birthday-they call it hatching day-six months ago, too, in summertime. How can a man, or even a scaly devil, have two birthdays each year?”

“They tried to explain this to me when I was on their plane that never came down,” Liu Han said. “They were talking about different worlds and different years. I didn’t understand much of it, I’m afraid.” She hung her head. Time in the plane that never came down, in the scaly devils’ camp, and in the city had shown her how ignorant she was. If she’d stayed in her village the rest of her life, as most Chinese peasant women did, she never would have known.

Nieh said, “Yes, they are from a different world. That is so. I had not thought on what it might mean for birthdays and such, to have a world with a different year from ours.”

Even knowing things, sometimes, was not enough. She’d seen that, too. You also had to know how the things you knew fit together. Knowing one thing here and one there wasn’t worth much. If you could put them together, you had something.

“How much longer?” she asked him.