Tilting The Balance (61 page)

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 Gl with you, too. That would help make sure you got back here in one piece.”