Upsetting the Balance

“We have people manufacturing some of them,” Nieh answered. “If we want to get them fast and in quantity, though, we’d do best to dicker with the Japanese. They don’t have many vehicles of their own left in this part of China, so they shouldn’t mind trading us some mines. I wonder what we’d have to give in exchange. Food, probably. They’re always hungry.”

“As if we aren’t.” But Hsia nodded. After a few seconds, he nodded again, for a different reason: “You’re right, Comrade-thisis a complicated war.”

Heinrich Jager felt like a soccer ball, with the continent of Europe his pitch. Since the war started in 1939, he’d been to just about every corner of it: Poland, France, the Soviet Union, France again, back to Germany, Croatia, France one more time… and now Germany again.

He turned to Kurt Diebner, who stood beside him on the walls of Schloss Hohentubingen. “Professor, I tell you again that I am not needed for this recovery operation. I would be of far more use to theVaterland leading panzer troops against the Lizards.”

Diebner shook his head. “It has to be you, Colonel,” the physicist said, running a hand through his greasy, dark brown hair. “We need someone with a military background to supervise those engaged in recovering the material from the failed pile down in Hechingen, and you also have the required security clearances. We prefer you to anyone from theSchutzstaffel, and the SS itself has no objection to your employment. So you see-” He beamed at Jager through thick, black-rimmed spectacles and spread his hands, as if he’d just proved some abstruse piece of math relating to quantum mechanics.

The explanation made sense to Jager, which did not mean he liked it. He wondered how he’d got a good character from the SS: Otto Skorzeny’s doing, most likely. Skorzeny no doubt thought he was doing him a favor. Jager supposed itwas a favor, but having Himmler’s approval, however useful it might be, was also slightly chilling.

Jager also noted the bloodless language Diebner used: the “failed pile” twenty kilometers south in Hechingen had poisoned a good stretch of the local landscape, and would have poisoned Tubingen, too, had the wind been blowing out of the south rather than from the north and west after the accident. Soldiers talked the same way; they spoke of “maintaining fire discipline” when they meant not shooting until the enemy was right on top of you.

A Geiger counter sat on the wall between Jager and Diebner. It rattled away, a good deal more quickly than it would have had everything gone right in Hechingen. Diebner insisted the level of radiation they were getting wasn’t dangerous. Jager hoped he knew what he was talking about. Of course, nobody had thought the pile would go berserk before it did, either.

Diebner glanced down at the Geiger counter. “It’s good enough,” he said. Maybe he needed to reassure himself every so often, too.

“Good enough for us, yes,” Jager said. “What about the poor devils who’re getting that stuff out of there?” Getting pulled away from the front line was one reason he hated the assignment here. Having to deal with the men who went into Hechingen to recover uranium from the pile was another.

Kurt Diebner shrugged. “They are condemned by the state,” he said, as if he were Pilate washing his hands. “If this did not happen to them, something else would.”

Nothing like this,Jager started to say, but the words did not cross his lips. Some of the men who went into the underground chamber with shovels and lead boxes wore pink triangles on their striped uniforms; others wore six-pointed yellow stars. In theReich, anything was liable to happen to Jews and homosexuals.

“You have of course told them the sickness from which they are suffering is only temporary, and that they will make a full recovery,” Diebner said.

“Yes, I’ve told them?the first group, and then the ones who replaced them when they got too sick to work.” No one had argued with Jager when he spoke what he knew to be a lie. The thin, weary men just stared back at him. They didn’t believe a word he said. He didn’t blame them.

Diebner shifted uncomfortably. Like Jager, he was a fairly decent man in a nation whose regime did horrible things as a matter of course. If you weren’t directly involved in them, you could pretend they weren’t there. Even if you were directly involved, pretending not to see was one way of preserving in your own mind your sense of personal decency. Very fewWehrmacht officers admitted to knowing what the SS had done to Jews in Poland and Russia; Jager hadn’t admitted it to himself until a Russian Jew rubbed his nose in it.

Diebner said, “If we do not recover the nuclear material, Colonel Jager, we are all the more likely to lose the war against the Lizards, at which point all ethical arguments become irrelevant. Whatever we must do to get it back, we have to have it.”