Upsetting the Balance

For once, diplomacy and truth came together. Men fought each other on more or less even terms. The Lizards were far ahead of all human nations. Go under to them and you would never come up again. Even Hitler, wretched madman that he was, recognized the truth there.

Atvar said, “Surely you realize this struggle is futile for you.”

“Class struggle is the engine of the historical dialectic,” Molotov answered. “It is never futile.”

“I understand these words one by one, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, but not their full meaning together,” the interpreter said. “How shall I render them for the exalted fleetlord?”

“Tell him we shall go on fighting, come what may, and that we shall use whatever weapons we have to destroy his forces within the Soviet Union,” Molotov said. “No threats he can make will keep us from defending ourselves.”

The translator hissed and popped and squeaked, and Atvar hissed and popped and squeaked back. The translator said, “You will regret this decision.”

“I would regret any other decision more,” Molotov replied. That was true in an immediate, personal sense: if he dared step so much as a centimeter outside the limits Stalin had set for him, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would have him shot and worry afterwards no more than if he’d trimmed a fingernail. But it was also true in the wider way in which he’d intended it. Surrender to the Lizards meant long-term slavery not just for the Soviet Union but for the human race.

Like any true believer, Molotov was certain the historical dialectic would one day produce a proletarian revolution among the Lizards. Given what scraps he knew of their history, though, he was not prepared for mankind to wait the thousands of years the dialectic was liable to take.

Brigadier General Leslie Groves had a sign over his desk in the Science Hall at the University of Denver: DO IT ANYHOW. He scrawled his signature on a report and got up from the desk: a big, ginger-haired man with a big belly and enough driving energy for any three ordinary mortals. That energy, and a gift for organization that went with it, had made him a first-rate military engineer and led to his being put in charge of America’s effort to build an atomic bomb.

As Groves put on his cap, he glanced back at the sign. He’d used all his impressive energy to make sure the United States built the first human-made atomic bomb, only to be beaten by the Russians, of all people.

That wounded his pride. Losing the race to the Germans would have been a catastrophe had the Lizards not come. Under the present circumstances, though, it wouldn’t have surprised him-the Germans were the ones who’d discovered nuclear fission, after all. But the Russians-

“The Russians,” he muttered to himself as he tramped down the hall. “Unfair advantages.” The Russians and Germans had split a load of plutonium they’d captured from the Lizards not far from Kiev. Thanks to Polish Jews who’d intercepted their courier, the Germans had had to split their half again; the American Metallurgical Laboratory physicists had the half the Germans had been forced to disgorge. Neither that half nor what the Germans bad left was enough by itself to make a bomb. If the Russians had kept as much as the Germans had started out with, though, they’d had plenty.

“All right, so they didn’t do it all by themselves,” Groves said. That they’d done it ahead of the United States in any way, shape, form, color, or size still rankled, no matter how much the bomb they’d used had helped the war effort against the Lizards.

It rankled more people than Groves, too. Ever since the Russian bomb went off, the Denver papers bad been screaming that the U.S.A. should have been the first country to blow the Lizards to hell and gone. None of the reporters and editorial writers had shown that he knew his atoms from third base, and none of them (thank God!) seemed to have a clue that the Met Lab was operating out of the University of Denver these days.

On his way from Science Hall to the football stadium that housed the atomic pile the physicists had built, Groves passed a sergeant leading a couple of Lizard POWs. The man and the aliens were almost friends by now; they chatted in a mixture of English and the Lizards’ language.

“Morning, General,” the sergeant said, saluting.

“Superior sir,” the two Lizards added in their hissing English.