Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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