Harry Turtledove - Upsetting the Balance

“So I should be on Easy Street, right?” he asked the walls. In the privacy of his office, he sometimes talked to himself. One of these days, he’d do it in public. “So what?” he said, out loud again. People who didn’t like him already thought he was crazy. He didn’t care if he gave them more ammunition. He’d got the job done, crazy or not.

But he wasn’t on Easy Street. All he knew about Jens Larssen was that he’d shot two people and then headed east. The sentries at Lowry had seen him ride by, but they hadn’t stopped him. They hadn’t known he’d shot anybody. They also hadn’t known Groves had ordered him back to his quarters in the BOQ to calm down.

Groves slammed a fist onto the desk, making papers and theIN andOUT trays jump. “If I hadn’t sent him back to Lowry, would he still be all right now?” he asked. The walls didn’t give him any answers.

He wished Larssen hadn’t gone east. East was where the Lizards lived. You wouldn’t think anybody would go running off to the Lizards, but you wouldn’t think anybody would gun down a colonel and a noncom in cold blood, either. Once Larssen had done the shooting, taking refuge with the Lizards looked a lot more likely than it had before.

They hadn’t managed to catch the son of a bitch, either. One thing Larssen had proved, traveling cross-country from White Sulphur Springs to Chicago and then from Denver to Hanford and back again: he knew how to live off the land. You couldn’t count on him freezing to death in a Colorado winter or doing something dumb to give himself away. If he was heading toward the Lizards, he might well get to them.

“Next question,” Groves said in his orderly fashion: “What will he do if he does get to them? Will he spill his guts?”

By all the signs, Larssen hated the Met Lab and anybody who had anything to do with it. Sure, he’d blamed Hexham for the breakup with his wife, but that had sprung from the secrecy surrounding the project, too. So, the sixty-four dollar question was, if he got to the Lizards, would he blab about what was going on in Denver? If he did, the town would become radioactive gas and dust in short order. No less than the Americans, the Lizards were playing for keeps.

As if he needed more proof of that, he turned on the battery-powered radio he’d ordered into the office when news of the destruction of Seattle came over the wires. When the set warmed up, he caught an announcer in the middle of a word: “-veral hundred thousand believed dead, as we’ve told you before. Newly released information from the Secret White House indicates that one of them was Vice President Henry Wallace, who was visiting war workers in the stricken city to improve their morale.”

Groves whistled softly and turned off the radio. That was news. The last time he’d seen FDR, a few months before, the president had looked like death warmed over. If he did drop dead, who was next in line now? The Secretary of State, assuming he was still alive-Groves didn’t know for sure. President Cordell Hull? He thought about that. He’d always figured Wallace for a custardhead, so Hull might be an improvement All the same, he hoped Roosevelt would die of old age at about a hundred and thirty-one.

He turned the radio back on. The newsman was still talking about the hideous things that had happened to Seattle. The same kinds of things had happened to Berlin and Washington and Tokyo and Munich, and to the Lizards outside Moscow and Breslau and inside Chicago. After a while, hearing them repeated numbed the brain, not so they seemed unreal but so their horrors no longer struck the mind as quite so horrific. As with anything else, acquaintance made what had once been unimaginable take on the comforting cloak of familiarity.

Men had gone through four years of trench warfare in World War I, and thought man’s inhumanity to man could sink no lower. Then, just to prove they were wrong, they’d found ways to bomb noncombatants from the air. And now more than half a dozen atomic bombs had been used, with more liable to come. How soon would those dreadful clouds come to be taken for granted-by those who survived them?

“But if it’s that or letting the Lizards conquer us?” Groves asked. Again, the walls were silent. He didn’t need their answer, not to that question. The second bomb had already gone out of Denver. When the time came, people would use it, and a Lizard force would go up in fiery ruin. And then, very likely, an American city would join that force on the pyre. Would anything be left of the country when it was over?

What was that line doctors used? The operation was a success, but the patient died. If the Lizards finally gave up, but you presided over nothing but devastation afterwards, had you won? That had a flip side, though. If you didn’t do everything you could to stop the Lizards and they ended up conquering you, what then? You couldn’t plan revenge against them down the line, the way you could against an Earthly neighbor. If you lost now, it was forever.

“Maybe there’ll be some pieces left to pick up after all this is done,” Groves said. “Have to hope so, anyhow.”

Vyacheslav Molotov did not care for meetings that convened at two in the morning. Stalin was notorious for calling meetings at hours like that. Molotov concealed his distaste. The stony countenance he raised as a shield against rapacious capitalists and alien imperialist aggressors also helped protect him from his own superior.

Stalin seemed amiable enough at the moment, offering him vodka, a glass of tea (it was made from leaves flavored with blackberry extract, and pretty vile), cakes sweetened with honey, and cigarettes of coarse Russian tobacco. The condemned man ate a hearty meal, ran through Molotov’s mind. Stalin could be most appalling just after he’d been most polite.

Now he drank and ate and blew smoke up toward the ceiling of the little Kremlin room he used as his own. At last, quite casually, he remarked, “I have learned something interesting about the explosive-metal bombs the Germans and Americans used against the Lizards.”

“And what is that, Iosef Vissarionovich?” Molotov asked. “That they were made with metal that damned German managed to smuggle back through Poland? A pity, I know, but we couldn’t reasonably have expected him to survive.”

“Reasonably.” Stalin said it as if it were a swear word; his throaty Georgian accent made the term sound even more menacing. But then he went on, “No, we’ve known he got through for some time; nothing we can do about that now but make sure no similar mistakes happen in future.” Molotov wondered how many men had died or gone to the gulag expiating such mistakes. Stalin continued, “No, this thing I have learned has nothing to do with that. It was obtained by our diligent wireless operators monitoring Lizard frequencies.”

“This is good,” Molotov said, nodding. “We cannot place inconspicuous intelligence operatives among them, so we had better learn something by monitoring their communications.” He waited. Stalin did not go on. At last, he had to ask, “What did the diligent wireless operators learn from the Lizards?”

In the space of a heartbeat, Stalin’s face went from mild and serene to coldly furious. A film seemed to draw itself over his eyes, giving his gaze the menacing steadiness of a serpent’s. Molotov had seen the transition many times; it never failed to alarm him. When that unwinking stare appeared on the General Secretary’s countenance, dreadful things followed.

Hissing out the words, Stalin said, “Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, they learned the bombs the Hitlerites and capitalists used were made partly from the explosive metal stolen from the Lizards and partly from that which they manufactured themselves.”