Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“Come in, Colonel Groves, and bring your companion,” General Marshall called from behind his desk. Jens noticed that he got the name straight.

“Thank you, sir,” Groves said, obeying. “Sir, let me present Dr. Jens. Larssen; as I told your adjutant, he’s reached us from the project at the University of Chicago.”

“Sir.” As a civilian, Larssen reached across the desk to shake hands with the Army Chief of Staff. The general’s grip was firm and precise. Jens’s first impression was that despite the uniform, despite the three rows of campaign ribbons, Marshall looked more like a senior research scientist than a soldier. He was in his early sixties, spare and trim, with hair going from iron gray toward white. Under a wide forehead, his face was rather narrow. He looked as though he seldom smiled. His eyes were arresting; they said he’d seen a lot and thought hard about every bit of it.

If not warm, he was gracious enough, waving Larssen and Groves to chairs and listening closely to Jens’ brief retelling of his trip across the eastern half of the United States. Then he put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Tell me the status of the Metallurgical Laboratory as you know it, Dr. Larssen. You may speak freely; I am cleared for this information.”

“If you’d like me to step outside, sir-” Groves started to get up again.

Marshall raised a hand to stop him. “That will not be necessary, Colonel. Security requirements have changed considerably since the end of May. The Lizards already know the secrets we are trying to extract from nature.”

“Do the Germans?” Larssen asked. Being a civilian had advantages; he could question the Army Chief of Staff where military discipline held Groves silent. “Do we want the Germans to learn them from us? I’d better know the answer to that, sir, not least because Hans Thomsen has the room across the hall from mine at the Greenbrier.”

“The Germans have an atomic research program of their own,” Marshall said. “It is in our interest to keep them fighting the Lizards, not least because, to speak frankly, they are doing a better job of it than anyone else at the moment They have their army and their economy already geared to war on a large scale, while we were still readying our resources when the Lizards came.”

Larssen nodded before he realized General Marshall hadn’t really answered his question. Being able to talk like a politician, he supposed, was one of the job qualifications for Army Chief of Staff.

As if thinking along, with him, Marshall said, “Before I tell you what you may say to the German charge, Dr. Larssen-and you may say nothing without direct authorization from me or someone at a higher level-I do need to know where the Metallurgical Laboratory presently stands in its researches.”

“Of course, sir.” But Larssen remained bemused as he mustered his thoughts. Who was at a higher level than General Marshall? Only two men he could think of-the secretary of war and President Roosevelt. Was Marshall implying he might meet them? Jens shook his head. It didn’t matter now. He said, “When I left Chicago, sir, we were assembling an atomic pile which, we hoped, would have a k -factor greater than one.”

“You’ll have to explain a bit further than that, I’m afraid,” Marshall said. “While I have studied your group’s report with great attention, I do not pretend to be a nuclear physicist”

“It means arranging the uranium so that, as atomic nuclei are split -fission, the term is-the neutrons they release will split more atoms, and so on. Think of it as a positive feedback cycle, sir. In a bomb like the ones the Lizards have, it happens in a split second and releases enormous energy.”

“What you are working toward is not a bomb in and of itself, then,” Marshall said.

“That’s right” Larssen eyed the older man with respect. As Marshall had said, he was no nuclear physicist, but he had no trouble drawing implications from data. Jens continued, “It is an essential first step, though. We’ll control the nuclear reaction with cadmium rods that capture excess neutrons before they strike uranium atoms. That will keep it from getting out of hand. We have to walk before we can run, sir, and we need to understand how to produce a controlled chain reaction before we can think about making a bomb.”

“And Chicago is the place where this research is going on?” Marshall said musingly.

“In the United States, yes,” Larssen said.

He’d hoped Marshall might tell him what, if anything, was happening elsewhere. The Chief of Staff, however, had taken security for granted longer than Jens had been alive. He did not even change expression to acknowledge he’d noticed the hint. He said, “We intended to fight for Chicago for other reasons. This gives us one more. Thank you for your courage in coming here to report on the Metallurgical Laboratory’s progress.”

“Yes, sir.” Larssen wanted to ask more questions, but General Marshall did not strike him as a man given to loose talk even in private circumstances, which these emphatically were not. Nevertheless, he blurted what was uppermost in his mind: “General, can we beat the damned Lizards?”

Colonel Groves shifted weight in his chair, making it squeak; Jens abruptly realized that wasn’t the way you were supposed to talk to the Army Chief of Staff. He felt himself flushing. He was so fair, he knew the flush would show. That only embarrassed him more.

But Marshall did not seem angry. Maybe the perfectly unmilitary question touched a responsive chord in him, for he said, “Dr. Larssen, if you find anybody who knows the answer to that one, he wins the prize. We’re doing everything we can, and we’ll go on doing everything we can. The alternative is to surrender and live in slavery. Americans won’t accept that-maybe your grandfather was one who helped prove it.”

“Sir, if you mean the Civil War, my grandfather was still back in Oslo then, trying to make a living as a cobbler. He came to the United States in the 1880s.”

“Looking for something better than he had over there, no doubt,” Marshall said, nodding. “That’s a very human thing to do. I’ll be frank with you, Dr. Larssen: in purely military terms, the Lizards have us outclassed. Up to now, no one-not us, not the Germans, not the Russians, not the Japs-has been able to stop them. But no one has stopped trying, and we’ve put most of our own conflicts on the back shelf for the time being, as witness Mr. Thomsen’s presence here-across the hail from you, didn’t you say?”

“That’s right.” Cooperating with the Third Reich still left a bad taste in Larssen’s mouth. “Didn’t I hear that Warsaw fell when the people there rose against the Nazis and for the Lizards?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Marshall said soberly. “From the intelligence we have of what those people were suffering, I can see how the Lizards might have seemed the better bargain to them.” His voice went flat, emotionless. The very blankness of his face convinced Jens he wasn’t telling all he knew there. After a moment, that blankness lifted. “On a global scale, however, it is a small matter, as are the Chinese uprisings against the Japs and in favor of the Lizards. But the Lizards have weaknesses of their own.”

Colonel Groves leaned forward. His chair squeaked again. “May I ask what some of those weaknesses are, sir? Knowing them may help me assign priorities in allocating materiel.”

“The chief one, Colonel, is their rigid adherence to doctrine. They are methodical to a fault, and slow to adapt tactics to fit circumstances. Some of our nearest approaches to success have come from creating situations where we used their patterns to lure units into untenable situations and then exploited the advantages we gained in so doing. And now, if you will excuse me…”