Tilting the Balance

XIV

Heinrich Jager gave his interrogator a dirty look. “I have told you over and over, Major, I don’t know one damned thing about nuclear physics and I wasn’t within a good many kilometers of Haigerloch when whatever happened there happened. How you expect to get any information out of me under those circumstances is a mystery.”

The Gestapo man said, “What happened at Haigerloch is a mystery, Colonel Jager. We are interviewing everyone at all involved with that project in an effort to learn what went wrong. And you will not deny that you were involved.” He pointed to the German Cross in gold that Jager wore.

Jager had donned the garishly ugly medal when he was summoned to Berchtesgaden, to remind people like this needle nosed snoop that the Fuhrer had given it to him with his own hands: anyone who dared think him a traitor had better think again. Now he wished he’d left the miserable thing in its case.

He said, “I could better serve the Reich if I were returned to my combat unit. Professor Heisenberg was of the same opinion, and endorsed my application for transfer from Haigerloch months before this incident.”

“Professor Heisenberg is dead,” the Gestapo man said in a flat voice. Jager winced, nobody had told him that before. Seeing the wince, the man on the safe side of the desk nodded. “You begin to understand the magnitude of the-problem now, perhaps?”

“Perhaps I do,” Jager answered; unless he missed his guess, the interrogator had been on the point of saying something like “disaster,” but choked it back just in time. The fellow had a point. If Heisenberg was dead, the bomb program was a disaster.

“If you do understand, why are you not cooperating with us?” the Gestapo man demanded.

The brief sympathy Jager had felt for him melted away like a panzer battalion under heavy Russian attack in the middle of winter. “Do you speak German?” he demanded. “I don’t know anything. How am I supposed to tell you something I don’t know?”

The secret policeman took that in stride. Jager wondered what sort of interrogations he’d carried out, how many desperate denials, truer and untrue, he’d heard. In a way, innocence might have been worse than guilt. If you were guilty, at least you had something to reveal at last, to make things stop. If you were innocent, they’d just keep coming after you.

Because he was a Wehrmacht colonel with his share and more of tin plate on his chest, Jager didn’t face the full battery of techniques the Gestapo might have lavished on a Soviet officer, say, or a Jew. He had some notion of what those techniques were, and counted himself lucky not to make their intimate acquaintance.

“Very well, Colonel Jager,” the Gestapo major said with a sigh; maybe he regretted not being able to use such forceful persuasion on someone from his own side, or maybe he just didn’t think he was as good an interrogator without it. “You may go, although you are not yet dismissed back to your unit. We may have more questions for you as we make progress on other related investigations.”

“Thank you so much.” Jager rose from his chair He feared irony was lost on the Gestapo man, who looked to prefer the bludgeon to the rapier, but made the effort nonetheless. The bludgeon is for Russians; he thought.

Waiting in the antechamber to the interrogation room-as if the Gestapo man inside were a dentist rather than a thug-sat Professor Kurt Diebner, leafing through a Signals old enough to show only Germany’s human foes. He nodded to Jager. “So they have vacuumed you up, too, Colonel?”

“So they have.” He looked curiously at Diebner. “I would not have expected you-” He paused, unable to think of a tactful way to go on.

The physicist didn’t bother with tact. “To be among the living? Only the luck of the draw, which does make a man thoughtful. Heisenberg chose to take the pile over critical when I was away visiting my sister. Maybe not all luck, after all-he might not have wanted me around to share in his moment of fame.”

Jager suspected Diebner was right. Heisenberg had shown nothing but scorn for him at Haigerloch, though to the panzer colonel’s admittedly limited perspective, Diebner was accomplishing as much as anyone else and more than most people. Jager said, “The Lizards must have ways to keep things from going wrong when they make explosive metal.”

Diebner ran a hand through his thinning, slicked-back hair. “They have also been doing it rather longer than we have, Colonel. Haste was our undoing. You know the phrase festina lente?”

“Make haste slowly.” In his Gymnasium days, Jager had done his share of Latin.

“Just so. It’s generally good advice, but not advice we can afford at this stage of the war. We must have those bombs to fight the Lizards. The hope was that, if the reaction got out of hand, throwing a lump of cadmium metal into the heavy water of the pile would bring it back under control. This evidently proved too optimistic. And also, if I remember the engineering drawings correctly, there was no plug to drain the heavy water out of the pile and so shut down the reaction that way. Most unfortunate.”

“Especially to everyone who was working on the pile at the time,” Jager said. “If you know all this Dr. Diebner, and you’ve told it to the authorities, why are they still questioning everyone else, too?”

“First, I suppose, to confirm what I say-and I do not know everything that led up to the disaster, because I was out of town. And also, more likely than not, to find someone on whom to lay the blame.”

That made sense to Jager; after all, he’d been trying to escape being that someone. The Wehrmacht played games with assigning responsibility for maneuvers that didn’t work, too. Another old saying crossed his mind: “Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” That wasn’t true any more; these days, the powers that be launched a paternity suit to pin a failure on somebody. The results weren’t always just, but he suspected they weren’t supposed to be.

The Gestapo major came out, probably to find out why Diebner hadn’t gone in. He scowled to discover two of his subjects talking with each other. Jager felt guilty, then angry at the secret policeman for intimidating him. He stomped out of the waiting room-and almost bumped into a big man who was just coming in. “Skorzeny!” he exclaimed.

“So they dragged you into the net, too, did they?” the scar-faced SS colonel said. “They’re going to rake me over the coals even though, as far as I know, I’ve never been within a hundred kilometers of the little pissant town where the screw-up happened. Some major’s supposed to grill me in five minutes.”

“He’s running late,” Jager, said. “He just got done with me and started in on one of the physicists. Want to go someplace and drink some schnapps? Nothing much else to do around here.”

Skorzeny slapped him on the back. “First good idea I’ve heard since they hauled me back here, by God! Let’s go-even if the schnapps they’re making these days tastes like it’s cooked from potato peelings, it’ll put fire in your belly. And I was hoping I’d run into you, as a matter of fact. I’m working on a scheme where you just might fit in very nicely.”

“Really?” Jager raised an eyebrow. “How generous of the SS to look kindly on a poor but honest Wehrmacht man-”

“Oh, can the shit,” Skorzeny said. “You happen to know things that would be useful to me. Now let’s go get those drinks you were talking about. After I ply you with liquor, I’ll try seducing you.” He leered at Jager.

“Ahh, you only want me for my body,” the panzer man said.

“No, it’s your mind I crave,” Skorzeny, insisted.

Laughing, the two men found a tavern down the street from Gestapo headquarters. The fellow behind the bar wore uniform, as did just about everyone in Berchtesgaden these days. “Even the whores here are all kitted out with field-gray panties,” Skorzeny grumbled as he and Jager took a table in the dimly lit cave. He raised his snifter in salute, knocked back his schnapps, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s vile.”

Jager also took a healthy nip. “It is, isn’t it?” But warmth did spread out from his belly. “It’s got the old antifreeze in it, though, no doubt about that.” He leaned forward. “Before you jump on me, I’m going to pick your brain: what sort of goodies are they fishing out of that tank you stole? I want to pretend I’m still a panzer man, you see, not a physicist or a bandit like you.”

Skorzeny chuckled. “Flattery gets you nowhere. But I’ll talk-why the hell not? Half of it I don’t understand. Half of it nobody understands, which is part of the problem: the Lizards build machines that are smarter than the people we have trying to figure out what they do. But there’ll be new ammunition coming down the line by and by, and new armor, too-layers of steel and ceramic bonded together the devil’s uncle only knows how.”

“You served on the Russian front, all right,” Jager said. “New ammunition, new armor-that’s not bad. One day I may even get to use them. Probably not one day soon, though, eh?” Skorzeny did not deny it. Jager sighed, finished his shot, went back to the bar for another round, and returned to the table Skorzeny pounced on the fresh drink like a tiger. Jager sat down, then asked, “So what is this scheme you have that involves me?”

“Ah, that. You were going to be an archaeologist before the first war sucked you into the Army, right?”

“You’ve been poking through my records,” Jager said without much malice. He drank more schnapps. It didn’t seem so bad now-maybe the first shot had stunned his taste buds. “What the devil does archaeology have to do with the price of potatoes?”

“You know the Lizards have Italy,” Skorzeny said. “They’re not as happy there as they used to be, and the Italians aren’t so happy with them, either. I had a little something to do with that, getting Mussolini out of the old castle where they’d tucked him away for safekeeping.” He looked smug. He’d earned the right, too.

“You’re planning to go down there again, and you want me along?” the panzer colonel asked. “I’d stick out like a sore thumb-not just my looks, mind you, but I don’t speak much Italian.”

But Skorzeny shook his massive head. “Not Italy. The Lizards are messing about on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, over in Croatia. I have trouble stomaching Ante Pavelic, but he’s an ally, and we don’t want the Lizards getting a toehold over there. You follow so far?”

“The strategy, yes.” Jager didn’t say that he marveled at an SS man’s having trouble stomaching anything. Word had trickled through the Wehrmacht that the Croat allies, puppets, whatever you wanted to call them, took their fascism-to say nothing of their blood feuds-very seriously indeed. Maybe Skorzeny s admission was proof of that Jager went on, “I still don’t see what it has to do with me, though.”

Skorzeny looked like a fisherman trying out a new lure. “Suppose I were to tell you-and I can, because it’s true-the main Lizard base in Croatia is just outside Split. What would that mean to you?”

“Diocletian’s palace,” Jager answered without a moment’s hesitation. “I even visited there once, on holiday eight or ten years ago. Hell of an impressive building even after better than sixteen hundred years.”

I know you visited, the report you wrote probably went into the operational planning for Operation Strafgericht. Strafgericht indeed; we punished the Yugoslavs properly for ducking out of their alliance with us. But that’s by the way. What counts is that you know the area, and not just from that visit but from study as well. That’s why I say you could be very useful to me.”

“You’re not planning on blowing up the palace, are you?” Jager asked with sudden anxiety Monuments suffered in wartime; that couldn’t be helped. He’d seen enough Russian churches in flames during Barbarossa, but a Russian church didn’t carry the same weight for him as a Roman Emperor’s palace.

“I will if I have to,” Skorzeny said. “I understand what you’re saying, Jager, but if you’re going to let that kind of attitude hold you back, then I’ve made a mistake and you’re the wrong fellow for the job.”

“I may be anyhow. I’ve got a regiment waiting for me south of Belfort, remember.”

“You’re a good panzer man, Jager, but you’re not a genius panzer man,” Skorzeny said. “The regiment will do well enough under someone else. For me, though, your special knowledge would truly come in handy. Do I tempt you, or not?”

Jager rubbed his chin. He had no doubt Skorzeny could cut through the chain of command and get him reassigned: he’d pulled off enough coups for the brass to listen to him. The question was, did he want to go on fighting the same old war himself or try something new?

“Buy me another schnapps,” he said, to Skorzeny.

The SS colonel grinned. “You want me to get you drunk first, so you can say you didn’t know what I was doing when I had my way with you? All right, Jager, I’ll play.” He strode to the bar.

Lieutenant General Kurt Chill turned a sardonic eye on his Soviet opposite numbers-or maybe, George Bagnall thought, it was just the effect the torches that blazed in the Pskov Krom created. But no, the general’s German was sardonic, too: “I trust, gentlemen, we can create a united front for the defense of Pleskau? This would have been desirable before, but cooperation has unfortunately proved limited.”

The two Russian partisan leaders, Nikolai Vasiliev and Aleksandr German, stirred in their seats. Aleksandr German spoke Yiddish as well as Russian, and so followed Chill’s words well enough. He said, “Call our city by its proper name, not the one you Nazis hung on it. Cooperation? Ha! You at least had that much courtesy before.”

Bagnall, whose German was imperfect, frowned as he tried to keep track of the Jewish partisan leader’s Yiddish. Vasiliev had no Yiddish or German; he had to wait until an interpreter finished murmuring in his ear. Then he boomed “Da!” and followed it up with a spate of incomprehensible Russian.

The interpreter performed his office: “Brigadier Vasiliev also rejects the use of the term ‘united front.’ It is properly applied to unions of progressive organizations, not associations with reactionary causes.”

Beside Bagnall, Jerome Jones whistled under his breath. “He shaded that translation. ‘Fascist jackals’ is really what Vasiliev called the Nazis.”

“Why does this not surprise me?” Bagnall whispered back. “If you want to know what I think, that they’ve come back to calling each other names instead of trying to kill each other is progress.”

“Something to that,” Jones said.

He started to add more, but Chill was speaking again: “If we do not join together now, whatever the name of that union may be, what we call this city will matter no more. The Lizards will give it their own name.”

“And how do we stop that?” As usual, German got his comment in a beat ahead of Vasiliev.

The Russian partisan leader amplified what his comrade had said: “Yes, how do we dare put our men on the same firing line as yours without fearing they’ll be shot in the back?”

“The same way I dare put Wehrmacht men into line alongside yours,” Chill said: “by remembering the enemy is worse. As for being shot in the back, how many Red Army units went into action with NKVD men behind them to make sure they were properly heroic?”

“Not our partisans” German said. Then he fell silent, and Vasiliev had nothing to add, from which Bagnall inferred General Chill had scored a point.

Chill folded his arms across his chest. “Does either of you gentlemen propose to take overall command of the defenses of Pleskau-excuse me, Pskov?”

Aleksandr German and Vasiliev looked at each other. Neither seemed overjoyed at the prospect of doing as Chill had suggested. In their valenki, Bagnall wouldn’t have been overjoyed either. Conducting hit-and-run raids from the forest wasn’t the same as fighting a standup campaign. The partisans knew well how to make nuisances of themselves. They also had to be uneasily aware that partisan warfare hadn’t kept the Germans from Pskov or driven them out of it.

Finally Vasiliev said, “Nyet.” He went on through his interpreter. “You are best suited to lead the defense provided you do it so that you are defending the town and the people and the Soviet fighters in the area as well as your own Nazis.”

“If I defend the area, I defend all of it, or as much as I can with the men and resources I have available,” Chill answered. “This also means that if I give an order to one of your units, I expect it to be obeyed.”

“Certainly,” Vasiliev answered, “so long as the unit’s commander and political commissar judge the order to be in the best interest of the cause as a whole, not just to the advantage of you Germans.”

“That is not good enough,” Chill replied coldly. “They must take the overall well-being, as their governing assumption, and obey whether they see the need or not. One of the reasons for having an overall commander is to have a man in a position where he can see things his subordinates do not.”

“Nyet,” Vasiliev said again. Aleksandr German echoed him.

“Oh, bugger, here we go again,” Bagnall whispered to Jerome Jones. The radarman nodded. Bagnall went on, “We’ve got to do something, before we go through another round of the idiocy that had the Bolshies and Nazis blazing away at each other a few weeks ago. I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy getting stuck between them again.”

“Nor I,” Jones whispered back. “If that’s what the ground-pounders call war, thank God for the RAF, is all I have to say.”

“You get no arguments from me,” Bagnall said. “Remember, I’d already found that out. You weren’t along for the raid on the Lizard base south of here.” They thought you were too valuable to risk he thought without much rancor. Ken and poor dead Alf and I, we were expendable, but not you-you know your radars too well.

As if thinking along similar lines, Jones answered, “I tried to come along. The bloody Russians wouldn’t let me.”

“Did you? I didn’t know that.” Bagnall’s opinion of Jones went up a peg. To volunteer to get shot at when you didn’t have to took something special.

As most Englishmen would, Jones brushed that aside. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We have to worry about now, as you said.” He got up and said loudly, “Tovarishchi!” Even Bagnal knew that one-it meant Comrades! Jones went on, in Russian and then in German, “If we want to hand Pskov to the Lizards on a silver platter, we can go on just as we are now.”

“Yes? And so?” Kurt Chill asked. “What is your solution? Shall we all place ourselves under your command?” His smile was hard and bright and sharp, like a shark’s.

Jones turned pale and sat down in a hurry. “I’ve got a picture of that, I do, bloody generals kowtowing to a radarman. Not flipping likely.”

“Why not?” Bagnall got to his feet. He had only German, and not all he wanted of that, but he gave it his best shot: “The Red Army doesn’t trust the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht doesn’t trust the Red Army. But have we English done anything to make either side distrust us? Let General Chill command. If Russian units don’t like what he proposes, let them complain to us. If we think the orders are fair, let them obey as if the commands came from Stalin. Is that a fair arrangement?”

Silence followed, save for the murmur of Vasiliev’s interpreter as he translated Bagnall’s words. After a few seconds, Chill said, “In general, weakening command is a bad idea. A commander needs all the authority over his troops he can get. But in these special circumstances-”

“The Englishmen would have to decide quickly,” Aleksandr German said. “If they cannot make up their minds, orders may become irrelevant before they give their answer.”

“That would be part of the packet,” Bagnall agreed.

“The Englishmen would also have to remember that we are all allies together here against the Lizards, and that England is not specially aligned with the Russians against the Reich,” Lieutenant General Chill said. “Decisions which fail to show this evenhandedness would make the arrangement unworkable in short order-and we would start shooting at each other again.”

“Yes, yes,” Bagnall said impatiently. “If I didn’t think we could do that, I wouldn’t have advanced the idea. I might also say I’m not the only one in this room who has had trouble remembering we are all allies together and that plans should show us much.”

Chill glared at him, but so did German and Vasiliev. Jerome Jones whispered, “You did well there, not to single out either side. This way each of them can pretend to be sure you’re talking about the other chap. Downright byzantine of you, in fact.”

“Is that a compliment?” Bagnall asked.

“I meant it for one,” the radarman answered.

Chill spoke to the Russian partisan leaders. “Is this agreeable to you, gentlemen? Shall we let the Englishmen arbitrate between us?”

“He rides that ‘gentlemen’ hard,” Jones murmured. “Throws it right in the face of the comrades-just to irk ’em, unless I miss my guess. Gentlemen don’t fit into the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Bagnall listened with but half an ear. He was watching the two men who’d headed the “forest republic” before the Lizards arrived. They didn’t look happy as they muttered back and forth. Bagnall didn’t care whether they were happy. He just hoped they could live with the arrangement.

Finally, grudgingly, Nikolai Vasiliev turned to General Chill and spoke a single sentence of Russian. The translator turned it into German: “Better the English than you.”

“On that, if you’reverse roles, we agree completely,” Chill said. He turned to Bagnall, gave him an ironic bow. “Congratulations. You and your British colleagues have just become a three-man board of field marshals. Shall I order your batons and have a tailor sew red stripes to your trouser seams?”

“That won’t be necessary,” Bagnall said. “What I need is assurance from you and from your Soviet counterparts that you’ll abide by whatever decisions we end up making. Without that, we might as well not start down this road.”

The German general gave him a long look, then slowly nodded. “You do have some understanding of the difficulties with which you are involving yourself. I wondered if this was so. Very well, let it be as you say. By my oath as a soldier and officer of the Wehrmacht and the German Reich, I swear that I shall accept without question your decision on cases brought before you for arbitration.”

“What about you?” Bagnall asked the two Soviet brigadiers. Aleksandr German and Vasiliev seemed imperfectly delighted once more, but German said, “If in a dispute you rule against us, we shall accept your decision as if it came from the Great Stalin himself. This I swear.”

“Da,” Vasiliev added after the interpreter had translated for him. “Stalin.” He spoke the Soviet leader’s name like a religious man invoking the Deity-or perhaps a powerful demon.

Kurt Chill said, “Enjoy the responsibility, my English friends.” He sent Bagnall and Jones a stiff-armed salute, then strode out of the meeting chamber in the Krom.

Bagnall felt the responsibility, too, as if the air had suddenly turned hard and heavy above his shoulders. He said, “Ken won’t be pleased with us for getting him into this when he wasn’t even at the meeting.”

“That’s what he gets for not coming,” Jones replied.

“Mm-maybe so.” Bagnall looked sidelong at the radarman. “Do you suppose the Germans will want you to give up the fair Tatiana, so as to have no reason to be biased toward the Soviet side?”

“They’d better not,” Jones said, “or I’ll bloody well have reason to be biased against them. The one good thing in this whole pestilential town-if anyone tries separating me from her, he’ll have a row on his hands, that I tell you.”

“What?” Bagnall raised an eyebrow. “You’re not enamored of spring in Pskov? You spoke so glowingly of it, I recall, when we were flying here in the Lanc.”

“Bugger spring in Pskov, too,” Jones retorted, and stomped off.

In fact, spring in Pskov was pretty enough. The Velikaya River, ice-free at last, boomed over the rapids as it neared Lake Pskov. Gray boulders, tinted with pink, stood out on steep hillsides against the dark green of the all-surrounding woods. Grass grew tall on the streets of deserted villages around the city.

The sky was a deep, luminous blue, with only a few puffy little white clouds slowly drifting across it from west to east Along with those clouds, Bagnall saw three parallel lines of white, as straight as if drawn with a ruler. Condensation trails from Lizard jets, he thought, and his delight in the beauty of the day vanished. The Lizards might not be moving yet, but they were watching.

Mordechai Anielewicz looked up from the beet field at the sound of jet engines. Off to the north he saw three small silvery darts heading west. They’ll be landing at Warsaw, he thought with the automatic accuracy of one who’d been spotting Lizard planes for as long as there had been Lizard planes to spot-and German planes before that. Wonder what they’ve been up to.

Whoever headed the Jewish fighters these days would have someone at the airport fluent enough at the Lizards’ speech to answer that for him. So would General Bor-Komorowski of the Polish Home Army. Anielewicz missed getting information like that, being connected to a wider world. He hadn’t realized his horizons would contract so dramatically when he left Warsaw for Leczna.

Contract they had. The town had had several radios, but without electricity, what good were they? Poland’s big cities had electricity, but nobody’d bothered repairing the lines out to all the country towns. Leczna probably hadn’t had electricity at all until after the First World War. Now that it was gone again, people just did without.

Anielewicz went back to work. He pulled out a weed, made sure he had the whole root, then moved ahead about half a meter and did it again. An odd task he thought: mindless and exacting at the same time. You wondered where the hours had gone when you knocked off at the end of the day.

A couple of rows over, a Pole looked up from his weeding and said, “Hey you, Jew! What does the creature that says he’s governor of Warsaw call himself again?”

The fellow spoke quite without malice, using Anielewicz’s religion to identify him not particularly to scorn him. That he might feel scorned anyhow never entered the Pole’s mind. Because he knew that, Anielewicz didn’t feel scorned, or at least not badly. “Zolraag,” he answered, carefully pronouncing the two distinct a sounds.

“Zolraag,” the Pole echoed, less clearly. He took off his cap, scratched his head. “Is he as little as all the others like him? It hardly seems natural.”

“All the males I’ve ever seen are about the same size,” Mordechai answered. The Pole scratched his head again. Anielewicz had worked with the Lizards almost every day; he knew them as well as any man could. Here in Leczna, Lizards were hardly more than a rumor. The locals might have seen them when they ran the Nazis out of town, or when they went to Lublin to buy and sell. Other than that, the aliens were a mystery here.

“They are as nasty as people say?” the Pole asked.

How was he supposed to answer that? Slowly, he said, “They aren’t as vicious as the Germans, and they aren’t as smart, either-or maybe it’s just that they don’t understand people any better than we understand them, and that makes them seem dumber than they are. But they can do more with machines than the Germans ever dreamed of, and that makes them dangerous.”

“you’reason like a priest,” the farmworker said. It wasn’t quite a compliment, for he went on, “Ask a simple question and you get back, ‘Well, sort of this but sort of that, too, because of these things. And on the other hand-’ ” He snorted. “I just wanted a yes or a no.”

“But some questions don’t have simple yes-or-no answers,” Anielewicz said. Though he’d been a secular man, his ancestry had generations of Talmudic scholars in it-and just being a Jew was plenty to teach you things were rarely as simple as they looked at first glance.

The Pole didn’t believe that; Anielewicz could see as much. The fellow took a flask of vodka off his hip, swigged, and offered it to Anielewicz. Mordechai took a nip. Vodka helped you get through the day.

After a while, the Pole said, “So what did you do to get yourself run out of Warsaw and show up in a little town like this?”

“I shot the last man who asked me a question like that,” Anielewicz replied, deadpan.

The farmworker stared at him, then let out a hoarse guffaw. “Oh, you’re a funny one, you are. We got to watch you every minute, hey?” He leered at Mordechai. “Some of the girls are watching you already, you know that?”

Anielewicz grunted. He did know that. He didn’t quite know what to do about it. As leader of the Jewish fighters, he hadn’t had time for women, and they might have endangered security. Now he was just an exile. His training in underground work insisted he still ought to hold himself aloof. But he was a man in his mid-twenties, and emphatically not a monk.

Grinning, the Pole said, “You go out to the backhouses at night, you have to be careful not to look toward the haystacks or under the wagons. Never can tell when you’re liable to see something you’re not supposed to.”

“Is that a fact?” Mordechai said, though he knew it was. The Poles were not only less straitlaced than the Jews who lived among them, they also used vodka or brandy to give themselves an excuse for acting that way. Anielewicz added, “I don’t see how anyone is up to doing anything except sleep after a day in the fields.”

“You think this is work, wait till harvest comes,” the Pole said, which made Anielewicz groan. The local laughed, then went on more soberly: “All the old-timers, the ones left alive, they’re sneering at us, on account of we’re having to make do without tractors and such, so I shouldn’t give you a hard time, friend. You pull your weight, and every pair of hands we can find is welcome. We want to keep ourselves fed through winter, we better work now.” He stooped, tore out a weed, moved ahead.

He probably didn’t care what happened two kilometers outside Leczna, but he’d put his finger on a worldwide truth there. With so much farm machinery out of commission or out of fuel, people everywhere were having to do all they could just to stay alive. That meant they were able to do less to fight the Lizards, too.

Anielewicz wondered if the aliens had planned it that way. Maybe not; some of the things Zolraag had said suggested they hadn’t expected people to have machines, let alone readapt to doing without them. But if the Lizards reduced all of mankind to nothing more than peasants grubbing a bare living from the soil, would people ever be able to get free of them? He shook his head like a horse bedeviled by gnats. He couldn’t see it.

Then rational thought went away for a while as the ancient rhythm of the fields took over. The next time he looked up from the furrows, the sun hung low in the west, sinking into the mist that rose from the flat, moist land as it cooled with approaching evening.

“Where does the time go?” he said, startled.

He’d spoken more to himself than to anyone else, but the Polish farmworker was still close enough to hear him. The Pole laughed, loud and long. “Got away from you, did it? That happens sometimes. You wonder what the devil you’ve been doing all day, till you look back and see what you’ve done.”

Mordechai looked back. Sure enough, he’d done a lot. He was an educated man, a city man. No matter how necessary farmwork was, he’d been sure it would drive him mad with boredom. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed that that hadn’t happened. Relief seemed natural, but if someone like him could sink down to the level of a farmer with no thought past his fields, what did that say about the rest of humanity? If the Lizards pressed the yoke of serfdom down on their necks, would they wear it?

He shook his head again. If he was going to start thinking, he would have preferred to start with something more cheerful. The mist rose; the sun sank until he could stare straight at its blood-red disk without hurting his eyes. The Pole said, “Hell with it. We’re not going to get any more done today. Let’s go back to town.”

“All right by me.” Anielewicz’s back protested when he stood up straight. If aches bothered the Pole, he didn’t show it. He’d worked on a farm all his life, not just for a couple of weeks.

Leczna was an ordinary Polish town, bigger than a village, not nearly big enough to be called a city. It was small enough for people to know one another, and for Mordechai to stand out as a stranger. People still greeted him in a friendly enough way, Jews and Poles alike. The two groups seemed to get on pretty well-better than in most places in Poland, anyhow.

Maybe the friendly greetings came because he was staying with the Ussishkins. Judah Ussishkin had been doctoring Jews and gentiles alike for more than thirty years; his wife Sarah, a midwife herself, must have delivered half the population of the town. If the Ussishkins vouched for you, you were good as gold in Leczna.

Most of the Jews lived in the southeastern part of town. As was fitting for one who worked with both halves of the populace, Dr. Ussishkin had his house at the edge of the Jewish district. His next-door neighbors on one side, in fact, were Poles. Roman Klopotowski waved to Anielewicz as he came down the street toward the doctor’s house. So did Klopotowski’s daughter Zofia.

Mordechai waved back, which made Zofia’s face light up. She was a pretty blond girl-no, woman; she had to be past twenty. Anielewicz wondered why she hadn’t married. Whatever the reason, she’d plainly set her sights on him.

He didn’t know what to do about that (he knew what he wanted to do, but wasn’t nearly so sure it was a good idea). For the moment, he did nothing but walk up the steps onto the front porch of Dr. Ussishkin’s house and, after wiping his feet, on into the parlor.

“Good evening, my guest,” Judah Ussishkin said with a dip of his head that was almost a bow. He was a broad-shouldered man of about sixty, with a curly gray beard, sharp dark eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles, and an old-fashioned courtliness that brought with it a whiff of the vanished days of the Russian Empire.

“Good evening,” Mordechai answered, nodding in return. He’d grown up in a more hurried age, and could not match the doctor’s manners. He might even have resented them had they not been so obviously genuine rather than affectation. “How was your day?”

“Well enough, thank you for asking, although it would have been better still had I had more medicines with which to work.”

“We would all be better off if we had more of everything,” Mordechai said.

The doctor raised a forefinger. “There I must disagree with you, my young friend: of troubles we have more than a sufficiency.” Anielewicz laughed ruefully and nodded, yielding the point.

Sarah Ussishkin came out of the kitchen and interrupted: “Of potatoes we also have a sufficiency, at least for now. Potato soup is waiting, whenever you tzaddiks decide you’d rather eat than philosophize.” Her smile belied the scolding tone in her voice. She’d probably been a beauty when she was young; she remained a handsome woman despite gray hair, the beginning of a stoop, and a face that had seen too many sorrows and not enough joys. She moved with a dancer’s grace, making her long black skirt swirl about her at every step.

The potato soup steamed in its pot and in three bowls on the table by the stove. Judah Ussishkin murmured a blessing before he picked up his spoon. Out of politeness to him, Anielewicz waited till he was done, though he’d lost that habit and his stomach was growling like an angry wolf.

The soup was thick not only with grated potatoes but also with chopped onion. Chicken fat added rich flavor and sat in little golden globules on the surface of the soup. Mordechai pointed to them. “I always used to call those ‘eyes’ when I was a little boy.”

“Did you?” Sarah laughed. “How funny. Our Aaron and Benjamin said just the same thing.” The laughter did not last long. One of the Ussishkins’ sons had been a young rabbi in Warsaw, the other a student there. No word had come from them since the Lizards drove out the Nazis and the closed ghetto ended. The odds were mournfully good that meant they were both dead.

Mordechai’s soup bowl emptied with amazing speed. Sarah Ussishkin filled it again, and he emptied it the second time almost as fast as the first. “You have a healthy appetite,” Judah said approvingly.

“If a man works like a horse, he needs to eat like a horse, too,” Anielewicz replied. The Germans hadn’t cared about that; they’d worked the Jews like elephants and fed them like ants. But the work they’d got out of the Jews was just a sidelight; they’d been more interested in getting rid of them.

Supper was just ending when someone pounded on the front door. “Sarah, come quick!” a frightened male voice bawled in Yiddish. “Hannah’s pains are close together.”

Sarah Ussishkin made a wry face as she got up from her chair. “It could be worse, I suppose,” she said. “That usually happens in the middle of a meal.” The pounding and shouting went on. She raised her voice: “Leave us our door in one piece, Isaac. I’m coming.” The racket stopped. Sarah turned to her husband for a moment “I’ll probably see you tomorrow sometime.”

“Very likely,” he agreed. “God forbid you should have to call me sooner, for that could only mean something badly wrong. I have chloroform, a little, but when it is gone, it is gone forever.”

“This is Hannah’s third,” Sarah said reassuringly. “The first two were so simple I could have stayed here for them.” Isaac started banging on the door again. “I’m coming,” she told him again, this time following words with action.

“She’s right about that,” Judah told Anielewicz after his wife had gone. “Hannah has hips like-” Having caught himself about to be ungallant, he shook his head in self-reproach. As if to make amends, he changed the subject “Would you care for a game of chess?”

“Why not? You’ll teach me something.” Before the war, Anielewicz had fancied himself as a chess player. But either his game had gone to pot after close to four years of neglect or Judah Ussishkin could have played in tournaments, because he’d managed only one draw and no wins in half a dozen or so games against the doctor.

Tonight proved no exception. Down a knight, his castled king’s position not well enough protected to withstand the attack he saw coming, Mordechai tipped the king over, signifying surrender. “You might have gotten out of that,” Ussishkin said.

“Not against you,” Mordechai answered. “I know better. Do you want to try another game? I can do better than that.”

“Your turn for white,” Judah said. As they rearranged the pieces on the board, he added, “Not everyone would keep coming back after a string of losses.”

“I’m learning from you,” Anielewicz said. “And maybe my game is coming back a little. When I’m playing as well as I can, I might be able to put you to some trouble, anyhow.” He pushed his queen’s pawn to open.

They were in the middle of a hard-fought game with no great advantage for either side-Mordechai was proud of avoiding a trap a few moves before-when more pounding on the door made them both jump. Isaac shouted, “Doctor, Sarah wants you to come. Right away, she says.”

“Oy,” Judah said, cultivated manner for once forgotten. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “The game will have to keep, I’m afraid.” He moved a pawn. “Think about that while I’m gone.” He snatched up his bag and hurried out to the anxious Isaac.

Anielewicz studied the board. The pawn move didn’t look particularly menacing. Maybe Judah was trying to make him think too much… or maybe he really was missing something.

He looked at the board again, shrugged, and started to get ready to go to sleep.

He hadn’t even pulled his shirt off over his head when the thrum of aircraft engines, overhead made him freeze. They were human-made planes; he’d heard and hated that heavy drone for most of a month on end in 1939, when the Luftwaffe systematically pounded a Warsaw that could hardly defend itself. These aircraft, though, were coming out of the east. Red Air Force? Anielewicz wondered; the Russians had flown occasional bombing raids after Hitler invaded them. Or are the Nazis still in business over there, too? He knew German ground forces had kept fighting inside the Soviet Union even after the Lizards came; was the Luftwaffe still a going concern, too?

He went outside. If the bombers unloaded on Leczna, that was the worst place to be, but he didn’t think the little town was anybody’s primary target-and it had been a while since humans tried an air raid on Lizard-held territory.

Several other people stood in the street, too, their heads craning this way and that as they tried to spot the planes. Cloud cover was thick; there wasn’t anything to see. The pilots probably hoped the bad weather would help shield them. Then, off to the south, a streak of fire rose into the sky, and another and another. “Lizard rockets,” somebody close by said in Polish-Zofia Klopotowski.

The rockets vanished into the clouds. A moment later, an enormous explosion rattled windows. “A whole plane, bombs and all,” Anielewicz said sadly.

A streak of fire came out of the clouds-falling, not rising. “He’s not going to make it,” Zofia said, her tone echoing Mordechai’s. Sure enough, the stricken bomber smashed into the ground a few kilometers south of Leczna. Another peal of man-made thunder split the air.

The rest of the planes in the flight droned on toward their goal. Had Anielewicz been up there and watched his comrades hacked from the sky, he would have reversed course and run for home. It might not have done him any good. More missiles rose. More aircraft blew up in midair or tumbled in ruins to the ground. Those that survived kept stubbornly heading west.

As the engines faded out of hearing, most people headed for their homes. A few lingered. Zofia said, “I wonder if I should be glad the Lizards are shooting down the Russians or Germans or whoever was in those planes. We live better now than we did under the Reds or the Nazis.”

Mordechai stared at her. “But they’re making slaves of us,” he exclaimed.

“So were the Reds and the Nazis,” she replied. “And you Jews were quick enough to hop in bed with the Lizards when they pushed this way.”

Her choice of language made him cough, but he said, “The Nazis weren’t just making slaves of us, they were killing us in carload lots. We had nothing to lose-and we didn’t see at the start, that the Lizards wanted only servants, not partners. They want to do to the whole world what the Germans and Russians did to Poland. That’s not right, is it?”

“Maybe not,” Zofia said. “But if the Lizards lose and the Germans and Russians come back here, Poland still won’t be free, and we’ll all be worse off.”

Anielewicz thought about the revenge Stalin or Hitler would exact against people who had supported-the dictators would say “collaborated with”-the Lizards. He shuddered. Still, he answered, “But if the Lizards win, there won’t be any free people at all left on Earth, not, here, not in England, not in America-and they’ll be able to do whatever they want with the whole world, not just with one country.”

Zofia looked thoughtful, or Mordechai thought she did-the night was too dark for him to be sure. She said, “That’s true. I have trouble worrying about anything outside Leczna. This is the only place I’ve ever known. But you, you’ve been lots of places, and you can hold the world in your mind.” She sounded wistful, or perhaps even jealous.

He wanted to laugh. He’d done some traveling in Poland, but hardly enough to make him a cosmopolitan. In an important way, though, she was right: books and school had taken his mind places his body had never gone, and left him with a wider view of things than she had. And having a pretty girl look up to him, for whatever reason, was a long way from the worst thing that had ever happened.

He glanced around and realized with some surprise that he and Zofia were the last two people left on the street. Everyone else was snug inside, and probably snug in bed, too. He waited for Zofia to notice the lull in their talk, say good night, and go back to her father’s house. When she didn’t, but kept standing quietly by him, he reached out and, quite in the spirit of experiment, let his hand rest on her shoulder.

She didn’t shrug him off. She stepped closer, so that his arm went around her. “I wondered how long that would take you,” she said with a small laugh.

Miffed, he almost said something sharp, but luckily had a better idea: he bent his face down to hers. Her lips were upturned and waiting. For some time, neither of them said anything. Then he whispered, “Where can we go?”

“The doctor didn’t take his car, did he?” she whispered back. Ussishkin owned an ancient Fiat, one of the handful of automobiles in town. She answered her own question: “No, of course he didn’t. No one has any petrol these days. So it’s right in back of his house. If we’re quiet.”

The Fiat’s back door squeaked alarmingly when Anielewicz opened it for Zofia, who let out an almost soundless giggle. He slid in beside her. They were cramped, but managed to loosen and eventually pull off each other’s clothes all the same. His hand strayed down from her breasts to her thighs and the warm, moist softness between them.

She gripped him, too. When she did, she paused a moment in surprise, then giggled again, deep down in her throat. “That’s right,” she said, as if reminding herself. “You’re a Jew. It’s different.”

He hadn’t really thought he was her first, but the remark jolted him a little just the same. He made a wordless questioning noise.

“My fiance-his name was Czeslaw-went to fight the Germans,” she said. “He never came back.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” He wished he’d ignored her. Hoping he hadn’t ruined the mood, he kissed her again. Evidently he hadn’t; she sighed and lay back as well as she could on the narrow seat of the car. He poised himself above her. “Zofia,” he said as they joined. She wrapped her arms around his back.

When he paid attention to anything but her again, he saw the old Fiat’s windows, which Ussishkin kept closed against pests, had steamed up. That made him laugh. “What is it?” Zofia asked. Her voice came slightly muffled; she was pulling her blouse back on over her head. He explained. She said, “Well, what would you expect?”

He dressed, too, as fast as he could. Getting back into clothes in the backseat was even more awkward than escaping from them had been, but he managed. He opened the car door and slid out, Zofia right behind him. They stood for a couple of seconds, looking at each other. As people do in such circumstances, Mordechai wondered where that first coupling would end up taking them. He said, “You’d better get back to your house. Your father will wonder where you’ve been.” Actually, he was afraid Roman Klopotowski might know where she d been but he didn’t’ want to say that.

She stood on tiptoe so she could kiss him on the cheek. “That’s for caring enough about me to worry what my father will think,” she said. Then she kissed him again, open-mouthed. “And that’s for the rest.”

He squeezed her. “If I weren’t so tired from working in the fields-”

She burst out laughing, so loud he twitched in alarm. “Men are such braggarts. It’s all right. We’ll find other times.”

That meant he’d pleased her. He felt several centimeters taller. “I hope we do.”

“Of course you hope we do. Men always hope that,” Zofia said without much anger. She laughed again. “I don’t know why you Jews go to so much trouble and hurt to make yourselves different. Once it’s in there, it’s the same either way.”

“Is it? Well, I can’t help that,” Anielewicz said. “I am sorry about your Czeslaw. Too many people, Poles and Jews, haven’t come back from the war.”

“I know.” She shook her head. “That’s God’s truth, it certainly is. It’s been a long time-three and a half years, more. I’m entitled to live my own life.” She spoke defiantly, as if Mordechai were going to disagree with her.

But he said, “Of course you are. And now you had better go home.”

“All right I’ll see you soon.” She hurried away.

Anielewicz went back into the Ussishkins’ house. They came in a few minutes later, tired but smiling. Judah said, “We got a good baby, a boy, and Hannah I think will be all right, too. I didn’t have to do a cesarean, for which I thank God-no real chance for asepsis here, try as I will.”

“That’s all good news,” Anielewicz said.

“It is indeed.” The doctor looked at him. “But what are you doing still awake? You’ve been studying the chessboard, unless I miss my guess. I have noticed you don’t like to lose, however polite you may be. So what are you going to do?”

The chess game hadn’t crossed Mordechai’s mind once since the sound of airplane engines made him go outside. Now he walked back over to the board. Thanks to the pawn move Ussishkin had crowed about, he couldn’t attack with his queen as he’d planned. He shifted the piece to a square farther back along the diagonal than he’d intended.

Fast as a striking snake, Judah Ussishkin moved a knight. It neatly forked the queen and one of Mordechai’s rooks. He stared in dismay. Here was another game he wasn’t going to win-and Ussishkin was right, he hated to lose.

All at once, though, it didn’t seem to matter so much. All right, so he’d lose at chess one more time. He’d played a different game tonight, and won it.

Leslie Groves looked down the table at the scientists from the Metallurgical Laboratory. “The fate of the United States-and probably the world-depends on your answer to this question: how do we turn the theoretical physics of a working atomic pile into practical engineering? We have to industrialize the process as fast as we can.”

“A certain amount of caution is indicated,” Arthur Compton said. “By what we’ve been told, they’re paying in Germany for rushing ahead with no thought for consequences.”

“That was an engineering flaw we’ve already uncovered, wasn’t it?” Groves said.

“A flaw? You might say so.” Enrico Fermi made a fine Latin gesture of contempt. “When their pile went critical, they had no way to shut it down again-and so the reaction continued, out of control. For all I know, it continues still; no one can get close enough to find out for certain. It cost the Germans many able men, whatever we may think of them politically.”

“Heisenberg,” someone said softly. An almost invisible pall of gloom seemed to descend on the table. Many of the assembled physicists had known the dead German; you couldn’t be a nuclear physicist without knowing his work.

“I am not about to let a foreign accident slow down our own program,” Groves said, “especially when it’s an accident we won’t have. What were they doing, throwing pieces of cadmium metal into the heavy water of their pile to try to slow it down? We’ve designed better than that.”

“In this particular regard, yes,” Leo Szilard said. “But who can say what other problems may be lurking in the metaphysical undergrowth?”

Groves gave the Hungarian scientist an unfriendly look. However brilliant he was, he was always finding ways things could go wrong. Maybe he was so imaginative, he saw flaws no one else would. Or maybe he just liked to borrow trouble.

Whichever it was, Groves didn’t intend to put up with it. He growled, “If we never tried anything new, we wouldn’t have to worry about anything going wrong. Of course, If we’d had that attitude all along, the Lizards would have conquered us about twenty minutes after they landed here, because we’d all have been living in villages and sacrificing goats whenever we had a thunderstorm. So we will go ahead and see what the problems are. Objections?”

No one had any. Groves nodded, satisfied. The physicists were a bunch of prima donnas such as he’d never had to deal with in the Army, but no matter how high in the clouds their heads were, they had their hearts in the right place.

He said, “Okay, back to square one. What do we have to do to turn our experimental pile here into a bomb factory?”

“Get out of Denver,” Jens Larssen muttered. Groves glowered at him; he’d had enough of Larssen’s surly attitude.

Then, to his surprise, he noticed several other physicists were nodding. Groves did his best to smooth out his features. “Why?” he asked as mildly as he could.

Larssen looked around; maybe he didn’t want the floor. But he’d opened his mouth and so he had it. He reached into a shirt pocket, as if digging for a pack of cigarettes. Not coming up with one, he said, “Why? The most important reason is we don’t have the water we’ll need.”

“Like any other energy source, a nuclear pile also generates heat,” Fermi amplified. “Running water makes an effective coolant. Whether we can divert enough water here from other uses is an open question.”

Groves said, “How much are we going to need? The Mississippi? The Lizards are holding most of it these days, I’m afraid.”

He’d intended that for sarcasm. Fermi didn’t take it as such. He said, “That being so, the Columbia is probably best for our purposes. It is swift-flowing, with a large volume of water, and the Lizards are not strong in the Northwest.”

“You want this operation to move again, after we’ve just gotten set up here?” Groves demanded. “You want to pack everything up into wagons and haul it over the Rockies?” What he wanted to do was start heaving nuclear physicists out the window, Nobel laureates first.

“A move like the move we made from Chicago, no, that would not be necessary,” Fermi said. “We can keep this facility intact, continue to use it for research. But production, as you call it, would be better placed elsewhere.”

Heads bobbed up and down, all along the table. Groves sighed. He’d been given the power to bind and loose on this project, but he’d expected to wield it against bureaucrats and soldiers; he hadn’t imagined the scientists he was supposed to ride herd on would complicate his life so. He said, “If you’re springing this on me now, you probably have a site all picked out.”

That’s what he would have done, anyhow. But then, he was a hardheaded engineer. The ivory-tower boys didn’t always think the way he did. This time, though, Fermi nodded. “From what we can tell by long-distance research, the town of Hanford, Washington, seems quite suitable, but we shall have to send someone to take a look at this place to make certain it meets our needs.”

Larssen stuck his hand in the air. “I’ll go.” A couple of other men also volunteered.

Groves pretended not to see them. “Dr. Larssen, I think I may take you up on that. You have experience traveling through a war zone by yourself, and-” He let the rest hang. Larssen didn’t. “-and it’d be best for everybody if I got out of here for a while, you were going to say. Now tell me one I hadn’t heard.” He ran a hand through his shock of thick blond hair. “I’ve got a question for you. Will the Lizard POWs stay with the research end or go to the production site?”

“Not my call.” Groves turned to Fermi. “Professor?”

“I think perhaps they may be more useful to us here,” Fermi said slowly.

“That’s kind of what I thought, too,” Larssen said. “Okay, now I know.” He didn’t need to draw anybody a picture. If the Lizards-and Sam Yeager, and Barbara Larssen-turned-Yeager-stayed here, Jens would likely end up at Hanford far good, assuming the place panned out.

That set off an alarm bell in Groves’ mind. “We will need a scrupulously accurate report on Hanford’s suitability, Dr. Larssen.”

“You’ll get one,” Jens promised. “I won’t talk it up just so I can move there, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Okay.” Groves thought for a minute, then said, “We ought to send a GI with you, too. That would help make sure you got back here in one piece.”

Larssen’s eyes grew hard and cold. “You try sending anybody from the Army with me, General, and I won’t go. The Army’s already done me enough bad turns-I don’t need anymore. I’ll be there all by my lonesome, and I’ll get back, too. You don’t like that, put somebody else on the road.”

Groves glared. Larssen glared right back. Groves ran into the limits of his power to command. If he told Larssen to shut up and do as he was told, the physicist was liable to go on strike again and end up in the brig instead of Hanford. And even if he did leave Denver with a soldier tagging along, what would his report be worth when he got back? He’d already proved he could survive on his own. Groves muttered under his breath. Sometimes you had to throw in your hand; no help for it. “Have it your way, then,” he growled. Larssen looked disgustingly smug.

Leo Szilard stuck a forefinger in the air. Groves nodded his way, glad of the chance to forget Larssen for a moment. Szilard said, “Building a pile is a large work of engineering. How do we keep the Lizards from spotting it and knocking it to pieces? Hanford now, I would say as a statement of high probability, has no such large works.”

“We have to make it look as if we’re building something else, something innocuous,” Groves said after a little thought. “Just what, I don’t know. We can work on that while Dr. Larssen is traveling. We’ll involve the Army Corps of Engineers, too; we won’t need to depend on our own ingenuity.”

“If I were a Lizard,” Szilard said, “I would knock down any large building humans began, on general principles. The aliens must know we are trying to devise nuclear weapons.”

Groves shook his head again, not in contradiction but in annoyance. He had no doubt Szilard was right; if he’d been a Lizard himself, he’d have done the same thing. “Hiding an atomic pile in the middle of a city isn’t the world’s greatest idea, either,” he said. “We’ve done it here because we had no choice, and also because this was an experiment. If something goes wrong with a big pile, we’ll have ourselves a mess just like the one the Germans got. How many people would it kill?”

“A good many-you are right about that,” Szilard said. “That is why we settled on the Hanford site. But we also do have to consider whether working out in the open would come to the enemy’s attention. Winning the war must come first. Before we go to work, we must weigh the risks to city folk against those to the project as a whole from starting up a pile out in the open, so to speak.”

Enrico Fermi sighed. “Leo, you presented this view at the meeting where we decided what we would advise General Groves. The vote went against you, nor was it close. Why do you bring up the matter now?”

“Because, whether in the end he accepts it or not, he needs to be aware of it,” Szilard answered. Behind glasses, his eyes twinkled. And to raise a little hell, Groves guessed.

He said, “We’ll need Dr. Larssen’s report on the area. I suspect we’ll also need to do some serious thinking about how we’ll camouflage the pile if we do build there.” His smile challenged the eggheads. “Since we have so many brilliant minds here, I’m sure that will be no trouble at all.”

A couple of innocents beamed; perhaps their sarcasm detectors were out of commission for the duration. A couple of people with short fuses-Jens Larssen was one-glared at him. Several people looked thoughtful: if he set them a problem, they’d start working on it. He approved of that attitude; it was what he would have done himself.

“Gentlemen, I think that’s enough for today,” he said.

Major Okamoto seemed out of place in a laboratory, Teerts thought. What the Big Uglies called a lab wasn’t impressive to a male of the Race: the equipment was primitive and chaotically arranged, and there wasn’t a computer anywhere. One of the Nipponese who wore a white coat manipulated a curious device whose middle moved in and out as if it were a musical instrument.

“Superior sir, what is that thing?” Teerts asked Okamoto, pointing.

“What thing?” Okamoto looked as if he wanted to be interrogating, not interpreting and answering questions. “Oh, that. That’s a slide rule. It’s faster than calculating by hand.”

“Slide rule,” Teerts repeated, to fix the term in his memory. “How does it work?”

Okamoto started to answer, then turned and spoke in rapid-fire Nipponese to the Big Ugly who was wielding the curious artifact. The scientist spoke directly to Teerts: “It adds and subtracts logarithms-you understand this word?”

“No, superior sir,” Teerts admitted. Explanations followed, with considerable backing and filling. Eventually Teerts got the idea. It was, he supposed, clever in an archaic way. “How accurate is this slide rule?” he asked.

“Three significant figures,” the Nipponese answered.

Teerts was appalled. The Big Uglies hoped to do serious scientific research and engineering with accuracy to only one part in a thousand? That gave him a whole new reason to hope their effort to harness nuclear energy failed. He didn’t want to be anywhere close if it succeeded: it was liable to succeed altogether too well, and blow a big piece of Tokyo into radioactive slag.

The Nipponese added, “For finer calculations, we go back to pen and paper, but pen and paper are slow. Do you understand?”

“Yes, superior sir.” Teerts revised his opinion of the Big Uglies’ abilities-slightly. Because they had no electronic aids, they did what they could to calculate more quickly. If that meant they lost some accuracy, they were willing to make the trade.

The Race didn’t work that way. If they came to a place where they needed two different qualities and had to lose some of one to get some of the other, they generally waited instead, until in the slow passage of time their arts improved to the point where the trade was no longer necessary. Because of that slow, careful evolution, the Race’s technology was extremely reliable.

What the Big Uglies called technology was anything but. Not only didn’t they seem to believe in fail-safes, he sometimes wondered if they believed in safety at all. Much of Tokyo, which was not a small city even by the standards of the Race, looked to be built from wood and paper. He marveled that it hadn’t burnt down a hundred times. Traffic was even more horrifying than it had been in Harbin, and if a vehicle ran into another one, or over a male who was also using the street, too bad. Along with inaccuracy, the Big Uglies accepted a lot of carnage as the price they had to pay for getting things done.

That thought put Teerts in mind of something he thought he’d heard a couple of the Nipponese scientists discussing. He turned to Major Okamoto. “Excuse me, superior sir, may I ask another question?”

“Ask,” Okamoto said with the air of an important male granting a most unimportant underling a boon beyond his station. Despite so many differences between them, in some ways the Race and Big Uglies weren’t that far apart.

“Thank you for your generosity, superior sir.” Teerts played the inferior role to the hilt, as if he were addressing the fleetlord rather than a rather tubby Tosevite whom he devoutly wished dead. “Did this humble one correctly hear that some other Tosevites also experimenting with explosive metal suffered a mishap?”

Again Okamoto and the scientist held a quick colloquy. The latter said, “Why not tell him? If he is ever in a position to escape, the war will be so badly lost that that will be the least of our worries.”

“Very well.” Okamoto gave his attention back to Teerts. “Yes, this did happen. The Germans had an atomic pile-what is the phrase? — reach critical mass and get out of control.”

Teerts let out a horrified hiss. The Big Uglies didn’t just accept risk, they pursued it with insane zeal. “How did this happen?” he asked.

“I am not certain the details are known, especially since the accident killed some of their scientists,” Okamoto said. “But those who still live are pressing ahead. We shall not make the mistakes they did. The Americans have succeeded in running a pile without immediately joining their ancestors, and they are sharing some of their methods with us.”

“Oh.” Teerts wished he had some ginger to chase away the lump of ice that formed in his belly. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the patchwork of tiny empires that dotted the planet’s surface had been a matter for jokes. It wasn’t funny any more. Back on Home, only one line of experiment at a time would have been pursued. Here, all the competing little empires worked separately. Disunion usually was weakness, but could also prove strength, as now.

Yoshio Nishina came into the room. His alarmingly mobile lips-or so they seemed to Teerts-pulled back so that he showed what was for a Big Ugly a lot of teeth. Teerts had learned that meant he was happy. He spoke with the other scientist and with Major Okamoto. Teerts did his best to follow, but found himself left behind.

Okamoto eventually noticed he’d got lost. “We have had a new success,” the interpreter said. “We have bombarded uranium with neutrons and produced the element plutonium. Production is still very slow, but plutonium will be easier to separate from uranium-238 than uranium-235 is.”

“Hai,” Nishina echoed emphatically. “We prepared uranium hexafluoride gas to use to separate the two isotopes of uranium from each other, but it is so corrosive that we are having an impossible time working with it. But separating plutonium from uranium is a straightforward chemical process.”

Major Okamoto had to translate some of that, too. He and Teerts used a mixture of terms from Nipponese and the language of the Race to talk about matters nuclear. Teerts took for granted a whole range of facts the Big Uglies were just uncovering, but though he knew that things could be done, he often had no idea as to how. There they were ahead of him.

Nishina added, “Once we accumulate enough plutonium, we shall surely be able to assemble a bomb in short order. Then we will meet your people on even terms.”

Teerts bowed, which he found a useful way of responding without saying anything. The Nipponese didn’t seem to have any idea how destructive nuclear weapons really were. Maybe it was because they’d never had any dropped on them. As he had a dozen times before, Teerts tried to get across to them that nuclear combat wasn’t anything to anticipate with relish. They wouldn’t listen, any more than they had those other dozen times. They thought he was just trying to slow down their research (which he was, and which, he knew, compromised his position). Okamoto said, “My country was backward until less than a hundred years ago. We saw then that we had to learn the ways of the Tosevite empires that knew more than we did, or else become their slaves.”

Less than two hundred of our years, Teerts thought. Two hundred of his years before, the Race had been just about where it was now, leisurely contemplating the conquest of Tosev 3. Best wait till all was perfectly ready. What difference could a few years make, one way or the other?

They’d found out.

Okamoto went on, “Less than fifty years ago, our soldiers and sailors beat the Russians, one of the empires that had been far ahead of us. Less than two years ago, our airplanes and ships smashed those of the United States, which had been probably the strongest empire on Tosev 3. By then we were better than they. Do you see where I am leading with this?”

“No, superior sir,” Teerts said, though he feared he did.

Major Okamoto drove the point home with what Teerts had come to think of as customary Tosevite brutality: “We do not let anyone keep a lead on us in technology. We will catch up with you, too, and teach you to learn better than to attack us without warning.”

Nishina and the other scientist nodded emphatically at that. In the abstract, Teerts didn’t suppose he could blame them. Had other starfarers attacked Home, he would have done everything he could to defend it. But war with nuclear weapons was anything but abstract-and if the Nipponese did build and use one, the Race would surely respond in kind, most likely on the biggest city Nippon had. Right on top of my head in other words.

“This is not your concern,” Okamoto said when he worried about it out loud. “We will punish them for the wounds they have inflicted on us. Past that, all I need say is that dying for the Emperor is an honor.”

He meant the Nipponese emperor, whose line was said to run back more than two thousand years and to be astonishingly ancient on account of that. Teerts was tempted to bitter laughter. Dying for the Emperor was an honor, too, but he didn’t want to do it any time soon, especially not at the hands of the Race.

Nishina turned toward him. “Let’s go back to what we were discussing last week: the best arrangement for the uranium in a pile. I have the Americans’ report. I want to know how the Race does the same thing. You are likely to have more efficient procedures.”

I should hope so, Teerts thought “How do the Americans do it, superior sir?” he asked as innocently as he could, hoping to get some idea of the Big Uglies’ technical prowess.

But the Nipponese, though technically backward, were old in games of deceit. “You tell us how you do it,” Okamoto said. “We do the comparing. The rest is none of your business, and you would be sorry if you made it so.”

Teerts bowed once more. That was how the Nipponese apologized. “Yes, superior sir,” he said, and told what he knew. Anything was preferable to giving Okamoto the excuse to start acting like an interrogator again.