Harry Turtledove: Upsetting the Balance

He leaned toward Fermi, using his physical presence to make his point for him. He wasn’t that much taller than the Italian, but he was wider, and harder and tougher to boot. Fermi said, “If you will excuse me, General, I have some calculations I must attend to,” and hurried away.

Groves grunted. Scoring a victory against a mild-mannered physics prof was like shooting fish in a barrel-yeah, you’d done it, but so what? When you’d cut your teeth on hard cases, you barely even noticed biting down on a Fermi.

And besides, you couldn’t bite down too hard on Fermi. Without false modesty, Groves knew he was very good at what he did. There weren’t a whole lot of people who were both the engineer and administrator he was. But if he dropped dead tomorrow, George Marshall would pick somebody just about as good to replace him. Who was just about as good as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist? In a word, nobody.

The bombs would be built. He had no doubt of that: first the one that incorporated the plutonium stolen from the Lizards, then others made entirely with human-produced nuclear material. The know-how and resources were in place; the United States merely had to await results.

Only trouble was, the United States couldn’t wait. As things stood, that first bomb was a year away, maybe more. How much of the States would be left in American hands by the time it was ready to blow? Not enough, Groves thought gloomily; the guys with the guns and the tanks and the airplanes were doing all they could, but all they could was liable not to be enough.

That meant every day he could shave off getting the first bomb ready was a day that might save the country. Nobody in the United States had faced that weight of responsibility since the Civil War. He shrugged his broad shoulders. He had to hope they were strong enough to bear the burden.

Ristin threw a baseball to Sam Yeager. The Lizard POW handled the ball as if it were a grenade, but he threw pretty straight. The ball slapped leather in Yeager’s beat-up glove. “Good toss,” he said, and threw the baseball on to Ullhass.

Ullhass’ mitt was even more battered than Yeager’s, but that wasn’t his problem. He lunged at the ball with the glove, as if he were trying to push it away rather than catch it. Not surprisingly, he didn’t catch it. “Stupid egg-addled thing,” he said in his own language as he stooped to pick the ball up off the grass, and added the emphatic cough to show he really meant it.

Yeager felt a surge of pride at how automatically he understood what the Lizard was saying. He wasn’t any big brain; he’d had his third stripe only a few days. He hadn’t been a prof before the Lizards came, either. He’d been an outfielder for the Decatur Commodores of the Class B Three-I League; the only reason the draft hadn’t grabbed him was that he wore full dentures, uppers and lowers, a souvenir of the 1918 influenza epidemic that had almost killed him, and had left him so weak and debilitated that his teeth rotted in his head.

But prof or no, he’d been an avid reader of Astounding and the other science-fiction pulps. After the Lizards came, the Army didn’t care any more whether you had teeth; all they worried about was a pulse-if you had one, you were in. So, when his unit captured some Lizards back in Illinois, he’d volunteered to try to communicate with the things… and here he was in Denver, working hand in hand not only with the aliens but also with the high foreheads who were taking what Ullhass and Ristin knew and using it to help build an atomic bomb for the U.S.A. Not bad for an overage ballplayer, he thought.

Ullhass threw the baseball to Ristin. Ristin was a better natural athlete than the other Lizard, or maybe just smarter. He’d figured out how to catch with a glove, anyhow: let the ball come to him, then close his meat hand over it to make sure it didn’t get out.

He still threw funny, though; Sam had to jump high to catch his next fling. “Sorry, superior sir,” Ristin said.

“Don’t worry about it. Nobody’s keeping score.” Yeager brushed back into place a lock of dark blond hair that had escaped from under the fore-and-aft Army cap he wore. He threw Ullhass the ball. But for the nature of his friends, it was an all-American scene: three guys playing catch on a college campus on a bright summer’s day. You didn’t get any more Norman Rockwell than that-except Norman Rockwell had never painted a Lizard with a baseball glove.

Just to add to the Saturday Evening Post quality of the scene, here came Barbara. Sam waved and grinned enormously, partly because he was always glad to see her and partly because she was wearing the calico blouse and blue jeans in which she’d married him up in the great metropolis of Chugwater, by God, Wyoming. Even for Yeager, who in seventeen years of pro ball thought he’d seen every small town in the U.S. of A., that had been a new one.

He wondered how long she’d be able to keep wearing those jeans. Not that they didn’t look good on her-she was a little on the lean side, but she definitely had hips and a pert posterior-but her pregnancy was just beginning to show with her clothes off. As best as he could tell, they’d started Junior their wedding night.

“Hi, honey,” he said as she drew near. “What’s up?” The question came out more seriously than he’d expected; she wasn’t smiling as she usually did.

“General Groves sent me out to find you himself,” she answered. “You’ve got new orders, he said.”

“New orders?” Sam pulled a face. “I was just thinking how much I liked what I was doing here. Did he say what they were?”

Barbara shook her head. Her hair, a couple of shades darker than his, flew around her head. “I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said he wanted to give them to you in person.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Yeager said. Any time a general gave a sergeant orders in person, something out of the ordinary was going on, maybe something liable to get the sergeant killed. But if General Groves wanted to see him, he couldn’t very well say no. He turned to Ullhass and Ristin, speaking in the mix of English and Lizard he usually used with them: “Come on, boys, let’s go see what the exalted projectlord wants with me.”

Ristin’s mouth fell open in a Lizardy chuckle. “You’re a funny Big Ugly, superior sir.” He used the Lizards’ slang name for people as unselfconsciously as Sam said Lizard instead of male of the Race around him.

The two humans and two Lizards strolled across the University of Denver campus toward Science Hall. A couple of times, people they knew waved to them. Ullhass and Ristin waved back as casually as Barbara and Sam did; they were an accepted part of the Met Lab staff by now. Technically, they remained prisoners, but nobody worried much about their trying to escape.

Groves was a big enough wheel to rate a guard outside his office: the same guard who’d been assigned to Jens Larssen for a while. Yeager didn’t hold that against him. “Morning, Oscar,” he said. “You want to keep an eye on these two tough guys while the general tells me whatever he tells me? Try to keep ’em from stealing all our secrets here.”

“Sure, Sam,” Oscar answered. Even without his rifle, Yeager would have bet on him against Ristin and Ullhass both; dark and quiet he might be, but he’d seen nasty action somewhere-he had the look. Now he nodded to Barbara. “Morning, ma’am.”

“Good morning, Oscar,” she answered. She spoke more precisely than Sam did. Hell, she spoke more precisely than most people did. She’d been a graduate student in medieval English out at Berkeley before the war; that was where she’d met Jens.

Oscar turned back to Sam. “Go on in. General Groves, he’s expecting you.”