Striking the Balance Read online

  “In any case, he has strong opinions,” Molotov remarked, hiding his amusement. “Can you do anything about the equipment of which he complains?”

  “No, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Kurchatov answered. “It is the best available in the USSR.”

  “Then he will have to use it and make the best of it,” Molotov said. “As for the others, this kolkhoz already has better food than most, but we shall see what we can do to improve it. And if he does not want the NKVD man to accompany him, the NKVD man will not do so.”

  Kurchatov relayed that to Max Kagan. The American answered at some length. “He will do his best with the equipment, and says he will design better,” Kurchatov translated. “He is on the whole pleased with your other answers.”

  “Is that all?” Molotov asked. “It sounded like more. Tell me exactly what he said.”

  “Very well, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” Igor Kurchatov spoke with a certain sardonic relish: “He said that, since I was in charge of this project, I ought to be able to take care of these matters for myself. He said I should be able to do more than wipe my own arse without a Party functionary’s permission. He said that having the NKVD spy on scientists as if they were wreckers and enemies of the people would turn them into wreckers and enemies of the people. And he said that threatening scientists with the maximum punishment because they have not fulfilled norms impossible of fulfillment is the stupidest thing he has ever heard of. These are his exact words, Comrade.”

  Molotov fixed his icy stare on Max Kagan. The American glared back, too ignorant to know he was supposed to wilt. A little of his aggressive attitude was bracing. A lot of it loose in the Soviet Union would have been a disaster.

  And Kurchatov agreed with Kagan. Molotov saw that, too. For now, the state and the Party needed the scientists’ expertise. The day would come, though, when they didn’t. Molotov looked forward to it.

  If you were going to keep your clothes on, you couldn’t have a whole lot more fun than riding a horse down a winding road through a forest in new springtime leaf. The fresh, hopeful green sang in Sam Yeager’s eyes. The air had that magical, spicy odor you didn’t get at any other season of the year: it somehow smelled alive and growing. Birds sang as if there was no tomorrow.

  Yeager glanced over to Robert Goddard. If Goddard sensed the spring magic, he didn’t show it. “You okay, sir?” Yeager asked anxiously. “I knew we should have put you in a buggy.”

  “I’m all right,” Goddard answered in a voice thinner and raspier than Yeager was used to hearing from him. His face was more nearly gray than the pink it should have been. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then made a small concession to the evils the flesh is heir to: “Not much farther, eh?”

  “No, sir,” Sam answered, as enthusiastically as he was able. Actually, they had another day of hard riding ahead of them, maybe two days if Goddard didn’t get over being poorly. “And when we do get there, we’ll give the Lizards’ stumpy little tails a hell of a tweak, won’t we?”

  Goddard’s smile wasn’t altogether exhausted. “That’s the plan, Sergeant. How well it works remains to be seen, but I do have hopes.”

  “It’s got to work, sir, doesn’t it?” Yeager said. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to hit the Lizards’ spaceships any other way but long-range rockets. A lot of brave men have died trying, anyhow—that’s a fact.”

  “So it is—a melancholy one,” Goddard said. “So now we see what we can do. The only problem is, the aiming on these rockets could be a lot finer.” He let out a wry chuckle. “It couldn’t be much worse, when you get down to it—and that’s another fact.”

  “Yes, sir,” Yeager said. All the same, he still felt like somebody in the middle of a John Campbell story: invent the weapon one day, try it the next, and put it into mass production the day after that. Goddard’s long-range rockets weren’t quite like that. He’d had help on the design not only from the Lizards but also from the Germans, and they hadn’t been built in a day any more than Rome was. But they had come along pretty darn quick, and Sam was proud to have had a hand in that.

  As he’d feared, they didn’t make it into Fordyce by sunset. That meant camping by the side of US 79. Yeager didn’t mind for himself, but he worried about what it was doing to Goddard, even with sleeping bags and a tent among their gear. The rocket scientist needed all the pampering he could get, and, with the war on, he couldn’t get much.

  He was as game as they came, and didn’t complain. He had some trouble choking down the rations they’d packed, but drank a couple of cups of the chicory brew that made do for coffee. He even made jokes about mosquitoes as he slapped at them. Sam joked, too, but wasn’t fooled. When Goddard got into his sleeping bag after supper, he slept like a dead man.

  Not even more of the chicory ersatz got him out of first gear the next morning, either. But, after he’d managed to heave himself up into the saddle, he said, “Today we give the Lizards a surprise.” That seemed to hearten him where rest and not-quite-coffee hadn’t.

  Fordyce, Arkansas, bustled in a way Yeager had seen in few towns since the Lizards came. It boasted several lumber mills and cotton-ginning establishments and a casket factory. Wagons hauled away the output of the last-named establishment, which had never had slack time even during the lost days of peace and probably stayed busy round the clock these days.

  The country south and west of Fordyce along US 79 looked to be a hunter’s paradise: stands of oak and pine that had to be full of deer and turkey and who could say what all else. They’d given Sam a tommy gun before he set out from Hot Springs. Hunting with it wasn’t what you’d call sporting, but when you were hunting for the pot sportsmanship went out the window anyhow.

  Four or five miles outside of Fordyce, a fellow sat on the rusted hood of an abandoned Packard, whittling something out of a stick of pine. The guy had on a straw hat and beat-up overalls and looked like a farmer whose farm had seen a lot of better days, but he didn’t have a drawl or a hillbilly twang in his voice when he spoke to Yeager and Goddard: “We been waitin’ for youse,” he said in purest Brooklyn.

  “Captain Hanrahan?” Yeager asked, and the disguised New Yorker nodded. He led Goddard and Yeager off the highway into the woods. After a while, they had to dismount and tie their horses. A soldier in olive drab appeared as if from nowhere to look after the beasts. Sam worried about looking after Goddard. Tromping through the woods was not calculated to make him wear longer.

  After about fifteen minutes, they came to a clearing. Hanrahan waved to something—a camouflaged shape—under the trees on the far side. “Dr. Goddard’s here,” he shouted. By the reverence in his voice, that might have been, God’s here.

  A moment later, Sam heard a sound he’d long since stopped taking for granted: a big diesel engine starting up. Whoever was inside the cabin let it get warm for a minute or two, then drove it out into the middle of the clearing. Things started happening very quickly after that. Soldiers dashed out to strip off the branch-laden tarp that covered the back of the truck.

  Captain Hanrahan nodded to Goddard, then pointed to the rocket revealed when the tarp came off. “Dere’s your baby, sir,” he said.

  Goddard smiled and shook his head. “Junior’s been adopted by the U.S. Army. I just come visit to make sure you boys know how to take care of him. I won’t have to do that much longer, either.”

  A smooth, silent hydraulic ram started raising the rocket from horizontal to vertical. It moved much more slowly than Sam would have liked. Every second they were out in the open meant one more second in which the Lizards could spot them from the air or from one of those instrument-laden artflicial moons they’d placed in orbit around the Earth. A fighter plane had shot up the woods a couple of launches ago, and scared him into the quivering fidgets: only fool luck the rockets hadn’t wrecked a lot of this scraped-together equipment.

  As soon as the rocket was standing straight up, two smaller trucks—tankers—rolled up to either side of it. “Douse your
butts!” a sergeant in coveralls shouted, though nobody was smoking. A couple of soldiers carried hoses up the ladder that was part of the launch frame. Pumps started whirring. Liquid oxygen went into one tank, 200-proof alcohol into the other.

  “We’d get slightly longer range from wood alcohol, but good old ethanol is easier to cook up,” Goddard said.

  “Yes, sir,” Hanrahan said, nodding again. “This way, the whole crew gets a drink when we’re done, too. We’ll have earned it, by God.” Oined was what he really said. “And the Lizards over by Greenville, they get a hell of a surprise.”

  Ninety miles, Yeager thought, maybe a few more. Once it went off—if it didn’t do anything stupid like blowing up on the launcher—it would cross the Mississippi River and land in Mississippi in the space of a couple of minutes. He shook his head. If that wasn’t science fiction, what was it?

  “Fueled!” the driver of the launch truck sang out—he had the gauges that let him see how the rocket was doing. The soldiers disconnected the hoses, climbed down the ladder, and got the hell out of there. The two fuel tankers went back into the woods.

  The launcher had a rotating table at the base. It turned slightly, lining up the azimuth gyro with the planned course east to Greenville. The driver stuck his fist out the window and gave a thumbs-up: the rocket was ready to fly.

  Goddard turned to Captain Hanrahan. “There—you see? You didn’t need me here. I could have been back at Hot Springs, playing tiddlywinks with Sergeant Yeager.”

  “Yeah, when everything goes good, it goes great,” Hanrahan agreed. “But when it’s snafu, you like having the guy who dreamed up the gadget around, you know what I mean?”

  “Sooner or later, you’ll be doing it without me,” Goddard said, absently scratching at the side of his neck. Sam looked at him, wondering how he’d meant that. Probably both ways—he knew he was a sick man.

  Hanrahan took the statement at face value. “Whatever you say, Doc. Now whaddaya say we get the hell out of here?” Before Hanrahan could do that, he had to make a connection at the base of the rocket. Then, trailing a wire after him, he loped for the cover of the woods where the rest of the crew already waited. Goddard’s trot was slow but dogged. Sam stayed with him. When they were out of the clearing, Hanrahan gave Goddard the control box. “Here you go, sir. You wanna do the honors?”

  “I’ve done it before, thanks.” Goddard passed the box to Sam. “Sergeant, why don’t you take a turn?”

  “Me?” Sam said in surprise. But why not? You didn’t need to know atomic physics to figure out how the control box worked. It had one large red button, right in the middle. “Thank you, Dr. Goddard.” He pushed the button, hard.

  Flame spurted from the base of the rocket, blue for a moment then sun-yellow. The roar of the engine beat at Yeager’s ears. The rocket seemed to hang unmoving above the launcher for a moment. Sam nervously wondered if they were far enough away—when one of those babies blew, it blew spectacularly. But it didn’t blow. All at once, it wasn’t hanging any more, it was flying like an arrow, like a bullet, like nothing on God’s green earth. The roar sank down toward the merely unbearable.

  The blast shield at the base of the launcher kept the grass from catching fire. The driver sprinted out toward the cab of the truck. The launcher sank back toward the horizontal once more.

  “Now we get the hell outta here,” Hanrahan said. “Come on, I’ll take youse back to your horses.”

  He set a brisk pace. Yeager needed no urging to keep up. Neither did Goddard, though he was breathing harshly by the time they reached the soldier in charge of the animals. Yeager had just swung one foot into the stirrup when a flight of helicopters buzzed by overhead and started lashing the clearing from which the rocket had flown and the surrounding woods with gunfire and little rockets of their own.

  None of the ordnance came close to him. He grinned at Goddard and Captain Hanrahan as the helicopters headed east, back toward the Mississippi. “They don’t like us,” he said.

  “Hey, don’t blame me,” Hanrahan said. “You’re the guy shot that thing off.”

  “Yeah,” Yeager said, almost dreamily. “How about that?”

  “This is unacceptable,” Atvar declared. “That the Deutsch Tosevites fire missiles at us is one thing. That some other Big Uglies have now acquired the art presents us with severe difficulties.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “This one impacted uncomfortably close to the 17th Emperor Satla, and would surely have destroyed it had the targeting been better.” He paused, then tried to look on the bright side: “Like the Deutsch rockets, it is very inaccurate—more an area weapon than a pinpoint one.”

  “If they fire enough of them, that ceases to matter,” Atvar snapped. “The Deutsche have killed a starship, though I don’t believe their intelligence realizes as much: if they knew such a thing, they would boast of it. But those losses we absolutely cannot afford.”

  “Nor can we hope to prevent them altogether,” Kirel said. “We have expended the last of our antimissile missiles, and close-in weapons systems offer only a limited chance of a target kill.”

  “I am all too painfully aware of these facts.” Atvar felt uncomfortable, unsafe, on the surface of Tosev 3. His eye turrets nervously swiveled this way and that. “I know we are a long distance from the nearest sea, but what if it occurs to the Big Uglies to mount their missiles on those ships they use to such annoying effect? We have not been able to sink all of them. For all we know, a missile-armed ship may be approaching Egypt while we are holding this conversation.”

  “Exalted Fleetlord, this is indeed possible, but strikes me as unlikely,” Kirel said. “We have enough genuine concerns to contemplate without inventing fresh ones.”

  “The Tosevites use missiles. The Tosevites use ships. The Tosevites are revoltingly ingenious. This does not strike me as an invented concern,” Atvar said, adding an emphatic cough. “This whole North African region is as salubrious to us as any on the planet. If all of Tosev 3 were like it, it would be a far more pleasant world. I do not want our settlements here to come into danger from Big Ugly waterborne assaults.”

  “No male would, Exalted Fleetlord.” Kirel drew back from the implied criticism he’d aimed at Atvar. “One way to improve our control over the area would be to annex the territory to the northeast of us, the region known as Palestine. I regret that Zolraag did not succeed in gaining the allegiance of the rebellious males there; they would reduce requirements for our own resources if they rose against the British.”

  “Truth,” Atvar said, “but only part truth. Tosevite allies have a way of becoming Tosevite enemies. Look at the Mexicanos. Look at the Italianos. Look at the Jews and Poland—and are these Big Uglies not Jews, too?”

  “They are, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel replied. “How these Jews pop up in such widely separated areas is beyond my understanding, but they do.”

  “They certainly do, and they cause trouble wherever they appear, too,” Atvar said. “Since the ones in Poland were so unreliable, I entertain no great hope that we shall be able to count on the ones in Palestine, either. They would not turn Moishe Russie over to Zolraag, for instance, which makes me doubt their good faith, however much they try to ascribe their failure to group solidarity.”

  “We may yet be able to use them, though, even if we cannot trust them,” Kirel said, a sentiment the Race had employed with regard to a large variety of Big Uglies since coming to Tosev 3. The shiplord sighed. “A pity the Jews discovered the tracking device Zolraag planted in their conference chamber, or we could have swept down on the building that housed it and plucked Russie away from them.”

  “It is a pity, especially when the device was so small that their crude technology cannot come close to duplicating it,” Atvar agreed. “They must be as suspicious of us as we are of them.” His mouth dropped open in a wry chuckle. “They also have a nasty sense of humor.”

  “Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “Finding that the tracker le
d directly to the largest British base in Palestine was—a disappointment.”

  Males of the Race had been saying that about a large variety of things since they came to Tosev 3, too.

  When Mordechai Anielewicz left Lodz, as had been true when he’d left Warsaw, he was reminded that the Jews, however numerous they were in Poland, remained a small minority of its population. Most of them had guns now, and they could call on their militias, which could bring heavier weapons to bear, but they were thin on the ground.

  That meant dealing with the Poles when he went out into the countryside, and dealing with the Poles made him nervous. A large majority of Poles had either done nothing or applauded when the Nazis shut the Jews away in big-city ghettos or massacred them in the towns and villages. A lot of those Poles hated the Lizards not for having driven out the Germans but for arming the Jews who’d helped them do it.

  And so, when a message came into Lodz that a Polish peasant urgently needed to speak to him, Mordechai wondered if he was walking into a trap. Then he wondered who might be setting the trap. If it was such. The Poles might want his scalp. So might the Lizards. So, for that matter, might the Germans. If they wanted to rid the Jews of a fighting leader. And the Jews who worried about the Nazis more than the Lizards might want revenge on him for shipping David Nussboym off to the Russians.

  Bertha Fleishman had spelled out all those possibilities in detail when the request for a meeting came in. “Don’t go,” she’d urged. “Think of all the things that can go wrong, and how few can go right.”

  He’d laughed. Back inside what had been the Jewish ghetto of Lodz, among his own people, laughter had come easily. “We didn’t get out from under the Nazis’ thumbs by being afraid to take chances,” he’d said. “What’s one more, among so many?” And so he’d prevailed, and so here he was, somewhere north of Lodz, not far from where Lizard control gave way to German.

  And so here he was, regretting he’d come. Now, when the only people in the fields were Polish, everyone sent a stranger suspicious looks. He himself didn’t look like a stereotypical Jew, but he’d seen on previous travels that he couldn’t readily pass for a Pole among Poles, either.