Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

The dismissal was polite, but a dismissal nonetheless. Groves rose and saluted. Jens got up, too. He decided not to shake hands again; General Marshall’s attention had already returned to the papers that clogged his desk. The general’s aide took charge of them as they came Out of the office, led them back to the door by which they’d entered.

“I think you did pretty well there, Dr. Larssen,” Groves said, making slow headway against the tide of officers that flowed toward the entrance.

“Call me Jens,” Larssen said.

“Then I’m Leslie.” The heavyset colonel made an extravagant gesture. “Where now? The world lies at your feet.”

Larssen laughed. Till now, he hadn’t known any senior military men. They were different from what he’d thought they’d be-Marshall scholarly and precise, plainly a first-class mind (a judgment Jens did not make lightly, not after working with several Nobel laureates); Groves without the Chief of Staff’s unbounded mental horizons, but full of bulldog competence and just enough whimsy to leaven the mix. Neither was the singleminded fighting man evoked by the label “general” or “colonel.”

After a little thought, Larssen decided that made sense. The group, at the Met Lab weren’t the effete eggheads layfolk thought of when they imagined what nuclear physicists were like, either. People were more complicated than any subatomic particles.

He wondered what the Lizards made of people. If the invaders were as compulsively orderly as Marshall had said, mankind’s aggressive randomness likely confused them no end. He hoped so-every weakness of theirs, no matter how tiny, was a corresponding strength for humanity.

He also wondered what it would be like in one of their spaceships, cruising along far above the surface of the Earth, flying between planets, perhaps even between stars. They were the ones who could literally have the world under their feet. Cold, clear envy pierced him.

Despite his musings, he was only a beat slow in answering Groves: “Unless you’ve got FDR up your sleeve there, Leslie, I think you’ve done as much as any man could. Thanks more than I can say for all your help.”

“My pleasure.” Groves stuck out a hand. He had a grip like a hydraulic press. “You convinced me you and your group are on to something important, and my superiors need to understand that, too, so they can factor it into their calculations. As for Roosevelt, hmm…” He actually did look up his sleeve. “Sorry, no. He seems to have stepped out.”

“Too bad. If you do happen to see him”-Larssen had no idea how probable that was, but believed in covering his bets-“mention the project if you get the chance.”

“I’ll do that, Jens.” Groves glanced at his wrist again, this time just to check his watch. “I’d best get back to it. I’ve been away too long already. God only knows what’s stacking up on my desk. No rest for the weary, as they say.” With a last nod, he turned and headed back toward the Methodist church. Larssen hadn’t been able to park any closer than several blocks away. Watching Groves’ broad back recede, he concluded the colonel got results from those around him by working twice as hard as any of them. In that, he would have fit in well at the Metallurgical Lab.

The physicist looked at his own watch. Nearly noon-no wonder his stomach was sounding reveille. He wondered what epicurean delight the Greenbrier was offering for lunch. Yesterday it had been canned pork and beans, canned corn, and canned fruit cocktail. Wryly shaking his head, he wondered about the consequences of excessive tin in the diet.

Today’s menu, he discovered when he got to the hotel restaurant, was extravagant by current standards: Spam and canned peas. The peas were more nearly olive drab than green, but he ate them all the same, hoping they retained at least some of their vitamins. He also put down an extra buck and a half for a nickel bottle of Coke-that, nobody could snafu. The bottle, he noted, was closer to the color peas ought to be than the peas themselves were.

As he was chasing the last sad, soft, overcooked peas with his fork, there was a stir at the entrance to the dining room. A couple of people started to clap. Larssen looked up, saw a short, pale, bullet-headed man wearing a homburg, steel-rimmed spectacles, and a suit of European cut. That face had looked out at him from countless newsreels, but he’d never thought to encounter Vyacheslav Molotov in the flesh.

Something else occurred to him. His gaze flicked from table to table. Sure enough, there sat Hans Thomsen, also with a plate of Spam. The German charge d’affaires was affable, genial, a fluent English-speaker who’d worked hard to put the best face on the activities of the Nazi government until Hitler declared war on the United States. Larssen wondered how he felt to be in the presence of the Soviet foreign minister after Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Russia. He also wondered how Molotov would react to finding a Nazi representative here in the heart of the American government in refuge.

Nor was his the only such curiosity. The dining room grew silent for a few seconds as people stopped talking and suspended forks in midair to see what would happen next Thomsen, Jens thought, recognized Molotov before the latter saw him. Maybe Molotov would not have noticed him at all but for the Nazi party badge he wore on his left lapel.

The Russian had a face as impassive as any Larssen had ever seen. He did not change expression now, but he did hesitate be-fore proceeding into the dining room. Then he turned to the man beside him, a squarely built fellow whose suit was similar in cut to his own but much more poorly fitted. He spoke a single sentence of Russian.

From the explosive coughs that went up, a few people understood what he had to say in the original. The squarely built man’s function was then revealed; he translated Molotov’s words into elegant, Oxford-accented English: “The foreign commissar of the USSR observes that, having already entered into diplomatic discussions with the Lizards, he has no objection to speaking to serpents as well.”

More coughs rose, Larssen’s among them. His eyes swung back to Hans Thomsen. He doubted he could have been as politely insulting as Molotov, given what the Nazis had done to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, all of humanity was supposed to be joining together to resist the invaders from another planet. If everyone kept remembering what was going on before the Lizards came, the united front would come crashing down. And if it did, that literally handed the Lizards the world.

Thomsen was a trained diplomat. If he noticed Molotov had given him the glove, he never let on. He was smiling as he replied, “There is in English an old saying about the enemy of one’s enemy.”

The interpreter murmured to Molotov. Now the Communist official looked straight back at the German. “It was on this basis, no doubt, that the imperialist powers of Great Britain and the United States allied with the peace-loving people of the USSR against the Hitlerite regime.”

Watch out for this guy, Jens thought. He’s dangerous. Thomsen kept his smile, but it looked held in place by force of will Still, he had a counterthrust ready: “No doubt it was also on this basis that Finland allied with Germany after being invaded by the peace-loving people of the USSR.”

As if at a tennis match, Larssen turned his head to look at Molotov. The match here, though, he thought, used a live hand grenade for a ball. Molotov’s lips might have drawn back from his teeth a millimeter or two. Through his interpreter, the Soviet foreign minister replied, “As we have both noted, the principle admits of broad application. Thus I am willing to discuss our own differences at another time.”