Upsetting the Balance

“Japan’s smashed, England’s invaded,” he said. Astonishing how much the destruction of Tokyo worried him. Not much more than a year before, Jimmy Doolittle had won himself a Congressional Medal of Honor for bombing the Japanese capital, and the whole U.S.A. had stood up and cheered. Now-“If we go under now, everything rides on the Reds and the Nazis,” Groves said, scowling. That was a hell of a thought, depending on a couple of the nastiest regimes ever invented to save the day for everybody else. Living under the Lizards might almost be better…

Groves shook his head. Nothing was worse than living under the Lizards. He held one finger in the air, as if to show he’d had a good idea. “The thing to do is not to let them know,” he declared. So far, they hadn’t tumbled. With luck and care, they wouldn’t.

What really worried him, though, was that they wouldn’t have to figure out that the Americans were doing nuclear research to want to conquer Denver. If they decided to head west from where they already were, it was the biggest city in sight. Maybe the Met Lab team would escape, the way they had from Chicago, but where would they go next? He hadn’t the faintest idea. How much precious time would they lose? He didn’t know that, either, but a lot. Could the United States-could the world-afford to have them lose all that time? There, for once, he knew the answer. No.

He got up from his desk, stretched, and headed out the door. Instead of his officer’s cap, he grabbed a civilian-style fedora. He was finally wearing a brigadier general’s stars on his shoulders, but he’d daubed gray paint on them so they wouldn’t sparkle and perhaps draw the notice of Lizard aerial reconnaissance. The last thing he wanted the Lizards wondering was what a general was doing on a university campus. If they were smart enough to figure out that that meant military research, they might also be smart enough to figure out what kind of research it meant… in which case, good-bye, Denver.

The walk to the pile under the football stadium was, aside from eating and sleeping, almost the only break Groves allowed himself in his days of relentless toil. Off to the east, civilians, men and women alike, were out digging tank traps and trenches. Those might not come to anything without the soldiers and guns they’d need to make them effective, but the civilians were giving their all. He could hardly do anything less-and it wasn’t in his nature to do anything less, anyhow.

A chart was thumbtacked to a hallway wall of the stadium by the atomic pile. It kept track of two things: the amount of plutonium produced each day, and how much had been produced overall. That second number was the one Groves watched like a hawk.

Leo Szilard came round the corner. “Good morning, General,” he said in the thick Hungarian accent that always made Groves-and a lot of other people-think of Bela Lugosi. Something else besides the accent lurked in his voice. Groves suspected it was scorn for anybody who put on his country’s uniform. Groves’ reaction to that was returned scorn, but he did his best to hide it. He was, after all, fighting to keep the United States a free country.

And besides, he might have been reading altogether too much into a three-word greeting, although other encounters with the physicist made him doubt that “Good morning, Dr. Szilard,” he answered as cordially as he could-and the chart gave him some reason for cordiality. “We’ve been up over ten grams a day this past week. That’s excellent.”

“It is certainly an improvement. Having the second pile operational has helped a good deal. More than half the production now comes from it. We were able to improve its design with what we learned from this one.”

“That’s always the way things go,” Groves said, nodding. “You build the first one to see if it will work and how it will work, whatever ‘it’ happens to be. Your second one’s a better job, and by the third or fourth you’re about ready to enter regular production.”

“Adequate theory would enable the first attempt to be of proper quality,” Szilard said, now with a touch of frost. Groves smiled. That was just the difference between a scientist, who thought theory could adequately explain the world, and an engineer, who was sure you had to get in there and tinker with things before they’d go the right way.

Groves said, “We’re bringing down the time until we have enough plutonium for a bomb every time I look at the chart, but next year still isn’t good enough.”

“We are now doing everything we can here at Denver, given the materials and facilities available,” Szilard answered. “If the Hanford site is as promising as it appears to be, we can begin producing more there soon, assuming we can set up the plant without the Lizards’ noticing.”

“Yes, assuming,” Groves said heavily. “I wish I’d sent Larssen out as part of a team. If something goes wrong with him… we’ll just have to judge going ahead at Hanford on the basis of theory rather than experience.”