Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

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.