Striking the Balance Read online

  “Truth,” Kirel said.

  Leslie Groves sprang to his feet and forced his bulky body into as stiff a brace as he could take. “Mr. President!” he said. “It’s a great honor and privilege to meet you, sir.”

  “Sit down, General,” Cordell Hull said. He sat down himself, across from Groves in the latter’s office. Just seeing a President of the United States walk into that office jolted Groves. So did Hull’s accent: a slightly lisping Tennessee drawl rather than the patrician tones of FDR. The new chief executive did share one thing with his predecessor, though: he looked desperately tired. After Groves was seated, Hull went on, “I never expected to be President, not even after Vice President Wallace was killed and I knew I was next in line. All I ever wanted to do was go on doing my own job the best way I knew how.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves said. If he’d been playing poker with Hull, he would have said the new President was sandbagging. He’d been Secretary of State since Roosevelt became President, and had been Roosevelt’s strong right arm in resisting first the human enemies of the United States and then the invading aliens.

  “All right, then,” Hull said. “Let’s get down to brass tacks.”

  That didn’t strike Groves as sounding very presidential; to him, Hull looked more like an aging small-town lawyer than a President, too: gray-haired, bald on top with wisps combed over to try to hide it, jowly, dressed in a baggy dark blue suit he’d plainly been wearing for a good many years. Regardless of whether he looked like a President or sounded like one, though, he had the job. That meant he was Groves’ boss, and a soldier did what his boss said.

  “Whatever you need to know, sir,” Groves said now.

  “The obvious first,” Hull answered. “How soon can we have another bomb, and then the one after that, and then one more? You have to understand, General, that I didn’t know a thing, not one single solitary thing, about this project until our first atomic bomb went off in Chicago.”

  “Security isn’t as tight now as it used to be, either,” Groves answered. “Before the Lizards came, we didn’t want the Germans or the Japs to have a clue that we thought atomic bombs were even possible. The Lizards know that much.”

  “Yes, you might say so,” Hull agreed, his voice dry. “If I hadn’t happened to be out of Washington one fine day, you’d be having this conversation with someone else right now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves said. “We don’t have to conceal from the Lizards that we’re working on the project, just where we’re doing it, which is easier.”

  “I see that,” the President said. “As may be, though; President Roosevelt chose not to let me know till the Lizards came.” He sighed. “I don’t blame him, or anything of the sort. He had more important things to worry about, and he worried about them—until it killed him. He was a very great man. Christ”—he pronounced it Chwist—“only knows how I’ll fill his shoes. In peacetime, he would have lived longer. With the weight of the country—by God, General, with the weight of the world—on his shoulders, moving from place to place like a hunted animal, he just wore out, that’s all there is to it.”

  “That was the impression I had when he came here last year,” Groves said, nodding. “The strain was more than his mechanism could take, but he took it anyhow, for as long as he could.”

  “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” Hull said. “But, speaking of nails, we’ve forgotten about the brass tacks. The bombs, General Groves—when?”

  “We’ll have enough plutonium for the next one in a couple of months, sir,” Groves answered. “After that, we’ll be able to make several per year. We’ve about come to the limit of what we can do here in Denver without giving ourselves away to the Lizards. If we do need a lot more production, we’ll have to start a second facility somewhere else—and we have reasons we don’t want to do that, the chief one being that we don’t think we can keep it secret.”

  “This place is still secret,” Hull pointed out.

  “Yes, sir,” Groves agreed, “but we had everything set up and going here before the Lizards knew we were a serious threat to build nuclear weapons. They’ll be a lot more alert now—and if they catch us at it, they bomb us. General Marshall and President Roosevelt never thought the risk was worth it.”

  “I respect General Marshall’s assessment very highly, General Groves,” Hull said, “so highly that I’m naming him Secretary of State—my guess is, he’ll do the job better than I ever did. But he is not the Commander-in-Chief, and neither is President Roosevelt, not any more. I am.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves said. Cordell Hull might not have expected to become President, he might not have wanted to become President, but now that the load had landed on his shoulders, they looked to be wide enough to carry it.

  “I see two questions in the use of atomic bombs,” Hull said. “The first one is, are we likely to need more than we can produce here at Denver? And the second one, related to the first, is, if we use all we produce, and the Lizards retaliate in kind, will anything be left of the United States by the time the war is done?”

  They were both good questions. They went right to the heart of things. The only trouble was, they weren’t the sort of questions you asked an engineer. Ask Groves whether something could be built, how long it would take, and how much it would cost, and he’d answer in detail, whether immediately or after he’d gone to work with a slide rule and an adding machine. But he had neither the training nor the inclination to deal with the imponderables of setting policy. He gave the only answer he could: “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I don’t know, either,” Hull said. “I’ll want you to be prepared to split off a team from this facility to start up a new one. I don’t know whether I’ll decide to do that, but if I do, I’ll want to be able to do it as quickly and efficiently as I can.”

  “Yes, sir,” Groves repeated. As a contingency plan, what the new President proposed made good sense: you wanted to keep as many options as possible open for as long as you could.

  “Good,” Hull said, taking it for granted that Groves would do as he’d been told. The President stabbed out a blunt forefinger. “General, I’m still getting into harness here. What should I know about this place that maybe I don’t?”

  Groves chewed on that for a minute or so before he tried answering. It was another good question, but also another open-ended one: he didn’t know what Hull did or didn’t know. At last, he said, “Mr. President, it could be that nobody’s told you we’ve detached one of our physicists from the facility and sent him off to the Soviet Union to help the Russians with their atomic project.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.” Hull clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Why do the Russians need help? They set off their atomic bomb before we did, before the Germans, before anybody.”

  “Yes, sir, but they had help.” Groves explained how the Russians had built that bomb out of nuclear material captured from the Lizards, and how some of that same material had also helped the Germans and the United States. He finished, “But we—and the Nazis, too, by the look of things—have been able to figure out how to make more plutonium on our own. The Russians don’t seem to have managed that.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Hull said. “Under any other circumstances, I can’t think of anybody I’d less rather see with the atomic bomb than Stalin—unless it’s Hitler.” He laughed unhappily. “And now Hitler has it, and if we don’t help Stalin, then odds are the Lizards beat him. All right, we’re helping him blow the Lizards to kingdom come. If we win that one, then we worry about him trying to blow us to kingdom come, too. Meanwhile, I don’t see what choice we have but to help him. What else is there that I ought to know?”

  “That was the most important thing I could think of, sir,” Groves said, and then, a moment later, “May I ask you a question, Mr. President?”

  “Go ahead and ask,” Hull said. “I reserve the right not to answer.”

  Groves nodded. “Of course. I was just wondering . . . It’s 1944, sir. How ar
e we going to hold an election this November with the Lizards occupying so much of our territory?”

  “We’ll probably hold it the same way we held Congressional elections November before last,” Hull answered, “which is to say, we probably won’t. The officials we have will go on doing their jobs for the duration, and that looks like it will include me.” He snorted. “I’m going to stay unelected a good while longer, General. It’s not the way I’d like it, but it’s the way things are. If we win this war, the Supreme Court is liable to have a field day afterwards. But if we lose it, what those nine old men in black robes think will never matter again. I’ll take the chance of their crucifying me, so long as I can put them in a position of being able to do so. What do you think of that, General?”

  “From an engineering standpoint, it strikes me as the most economical solution, sir,” Groves answered. “I don’t know for a fact whether it’s the best one.”

  “I don’t, either,” Hull said, “but it looks like it’s what we’re going to do. The old Romans had dictators in emergencies, and they always thought the best ones were the ones most reluctant to take over. I qualify there, no two ways about it.” He got to his feet. He wasn’t very young and he wasn’t very spry, but he did manage. Again, seeing a President not only upright but mobile in that position reminded Groves things would never be the same again.

  “Good luck, sir,” he said.

  “Thank you, General; I’ll take all of that I can get.” Hull started to walk toward the door, then stopped and looked back at Groves. “Do you remember what Churchill told Roosevelt when Lend-Lease was just getting rolling? ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ That’s what the United States needs from the Metallurgical Laboratory. Give us the tools.”

  “You’ll have them,” Groves promised.

  The white cliffs of Dover stretched a long way, and curved as they did. If one—or even two—walked along them, that one—or those two—could look down at the sea crashing against the base of those cliffs. David Goldfarb had read somewhere that. If the wave action continued with no other factor to check it, in some millions of years—he couldn’t remember how many—the British Isles would disappear and the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic commingle.

  When he said that aloud, Naomi Kaplan raised an eyebrow. “The British Isles have plenty of things to worry about before millions of years go by,” she said.

  The wind from off the North Sea tried to blow her words away. It did the same for her hat. She saved that with a quick grab and set it more firmly on her head. Goldfarb didn’t know whether to be glad she’d caught it or sorry he hadn’t had the chance to be gallant and chase it down. Of course, the wind might have turned and flung it over the cliff, which wouldn’t have done his chances for gallantry much good.

  Feigning astonishment, he said, “Why, what ever can you mean? Just because we’ve been bombed by the Germans and invaded by the Lizards in the past few years?” He waved airily. “Mere details. Now. If we’d had one of those atomic bombs or whatever they’re called dropped on us, the way Berlin did—”

  “God forbid,” Naomi said. “You’re right; we’ve been through quite enough already.”

  Her accent—upper-crust British laid over German—fascinated him (a good many things about her fascinated him, but he concentrated on the accent for the moment). It was a refined version of his own: lower-middle-class English laid over the Yiddish he’d spoken till he started grammar school.

  “I hope you’re not too chilly,” he said. The weather was brisk, especially so close to the sea, but not nearly so raw as it had been earlier in the winter. You no longer needed to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe spring would get around to showing up one of these days, even if not right away.

  Naomi shook her head. “No, it’s all right,” she said. As if to give the lie to her words, the wind tried to flip up the plaid wool skirt she wore. She smiled wryly as she grabbed at it to keep it straight. “Thank you for inviting me to go walking with you.”

  “Thanks for coming,” he answered. A lot of the chaps who visited the White Horse Inn had invited Naomi to go walking with them; some had invited her to do things a great deal cruder than that. She’d turned everybody down—except Goldfarb. His own teeth were threatening to chatter, but he wouldn’t admit even to himself that he was cold.

  “It is—pleasant—here,” Naomi said, picking the adjective with care. “Before I came to Dover, I had never seen, never imagined, cliffs like this. Mountains I knew in Germany, but never cliffs at the edge of the land, straight down for a hundred meters and more and then nothing but the sea.”

  “Glad you like them,” Goldfarb said, as pleased as if he were personally responsible for Dover’s most famous natural feature. “It’s hard to find a nice place to take a girl these days—no cinema without electricity, for instance.”

  “And how many girls did you take to the cinema and other nice places when there was electricity?” Naomi asked. She might have made the question sound teasing. David would have been easier about it if she had. But she sounded both curious and serious.

  He couldn’t fob her off with a light, casual answer, either. If he tried that, she could get the straight goods—or a large chunk of them—from Sylvia. He hadn’t taken Sylvia to the cinema, either; he’d taken her to bed. She was friendly enough to him now when he dropped into the White Horse Inn for a pint, but he couldn’t guess what sort of character she’d give him if Naomi asked. He’d heard women could be devastatingly candid when they talked with each other about men’s shortcomings.

  When be didn’t answer right away, Naomi cocked her head to one side and gave him a knowing look that made him feel about two feet high. But, instead of pounding away at him on the point, as he’d expected her to do, she said, “Sylvia tells me you did something very brave to get one of your—was it a cousin? she wasn’t sure—out of Poland.”

  “Does she?” he said in glad surprise; maybe Sylvia hadn’t given him such a bad character after all. He shrugged; having been born in England, he’d taken as his own at least part of the notion of British reserve. But if Naomi already knew some of the story, telling more wouldn’t hurt. He went on, “Yes, my cousin is Moishe Russie. Remember? I told you that back at the pub.”

  She nodded. “Yes, you did. The one who broadcast on the wireless for the Lizards—and then against them after he’d seen what they truly were.”

  “That’s right,” Goldfarb said. “And they caught him, too, and clapped him in gaol in Lodz till they figured out what to do with him. I went over with a few other chaps and helped get him out and spirited him back here to England.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” Naomi said. “Weren’t you frightened?”

  That fight had been his first taste of ground combat, even if it had only been against Lizard and Polish prison guards too taken by surprise to put up all the resistance they might have. Since then, he’d got sucked into the infantry when the Lizards invaded England. That had been much worse. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine why some men presumably in their right minds chose the infantry as a career.

  He realized he hadn’t answered Naomi’s question. “Frightened?” he said. “As a matter of fact, I was ruddy petrflied.”

  To his relief, she nodded again; he’d been afraid his candor would put her off. “When you tell me things like this,” she said, “you remind me you are not an Englishman after all. Not many English soldiers would admit to anyone who is not one of their—what do you call them?—their mates, that is it—that they feel fear or much of anything else.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen that,” Goldfarb said. “I don’t understand it, either.” He laughed. “But what do I know? I’m only a Jew whose parents got out of Poland. I won’t understand Englishmen down deep if I live to be ninety, which doesn’t strike me as likely, the way the world wags these days. Maybe my grandchildren will have the proper stiff upper lip.”

  “And my parents got me out of Germany just in time,” Naomi said
. Her shiver had nothing to do with the sea breeze. “It was bad there, and we escaped before the Kristallnacht. What—” She hesitated, perhaps nerving herself. After a moment, she finished the question: “What was it like in Poland?”

  Goldfarb considered that. “You have to remember, the Nazis had been out of Lodz for a year, more or less, before I went in there.” She nodded. He went on, “Keeping that in mind, I think about what I saw there and I try to imagine how it was when the Germans were there.”

  “Nu?” Naomi prodded.

  He sighed. His breath smoked in the chilly air. “From everything I saw, from everything I heard, there might not be any Jews left alive there by now if the Lizards hadn’t come. I didn’t see all of Poland, of course, only Lodz and the road to and from the sea, but there might not be any Jews left in the whole country if the Lizards hadn’t come. When the Germans said Judenfrei, they weren’t joking.”

  Naomi bit her lip. “This is what I have heard on the wireless. Hearing it from someone I know who has seen it with his own eyes makes it more real.” Her frown deepened. “And the Germans, the wireless says, are pushing deeper into Poland again.”

  “I know. I’ve heard that, too. My friends—my goyishe friends—cheer when they hear news like that. When I hear it, I don’t know what to think. The Lizards can’t win the war, but the bloody Nazis can’t, either.”

  “Shouldn’t,” Naomi said with the precision of one who had learned English from the outside instead of growing up with it. “They can. The Lizards can. The Germans can. They shouldn’t.” She laughed bitterly. “When I was a little girl going to school, before Hitler came to power, they taught me I was a German. I believed it, too. Isn’t that peculiar, thinking about it now?”

  “It’s more than peculiar. It’s—” Goldfarb groped for the word he wanted. “What do they call those strange paintings where it’s raining loaves of bread or you see a watch dribbling down a block as if it were made of ice and melting?”