Upsetting the Balance (64 page)

But Basil Roundbush had survived flying mission after mission against the Lizards while in an aircraft and with weapons far inferior to theirs. Luck undoubtedly had something to do with that. But a fighter pilot, unlike a ground-pounder, needed more than luck. You had to be good at what you did, or you wouldn’t keep doing it long.

And Roundbush had not merely survived. The Distinguished Flying Cross he wore on the front of his tunic testified to that. He wasn’t commonly given to boasting—most often when chatting up a barmaid—but Goldfarb had heath he’d brought down one of the Lizards’ immense transport aircraft, the ones that, when roaring overhead, looked as if they could carry a regiment. They made the Dakotas the RAF had started getting from the Americans not long before the Lizards came seem like children’s models of wood and paper by comparison—and the Dakotas had far outclassed anything the British had before them.

That kill had earned Roundbush his DFC. What he’d said about it was to the point: “Pack of ruddy fools back in London. The lasses must hate them, one and all—they think size is more important than technique. Even if it was the size of a whale, the transport couldn’t shoot back. Their fighter planes are another piece of business altogether.”

Goldfarb looked out at the rain splashing down from a leaden sky and said, “If the Lizards had been smart, they would have come now. We’d have been all but blind to them in the air, what with the autumn clouds and mist and rain, but their radars are good enough to let them carry on as if this were high summer.”

“They don’t fancy cold weather,” Roundbush said, “and I’ve heard it said they invaded us to get some of their own back after the Reds lit off that explosive-metal bomb under their scaly snouts.” He snorted. “Letting the politicians set strategy for their own reasons will make you sorry, no matter whether you’re a human being or a Lizard.”

“Now that we’ve won, I’m glad they did it.” Goldfarb waved to the electronic apparatus filling the shelves and tables of the room in which he and Roundbush labored. Some of it, like the gear they’d been analyzing at Bruntingthorpe, was wreckage, but some was intact, taken from aircraft and vehicles either captured after minimal damage or else abandoned in the retreat.

Basil Roundbush’s wave was similar but more extravagant, seeming to take in not just what was in the room but all the Lizard equipment the British had captured. He said, “As I see it, we have two jobs of work ahead of us. The first is putting to use the devices we’ve captured that are still in working order. After that comes cannibalizing the damaged ones for parts so that, say, we can build two working ones from the hulks of four.”

“Understanding how the bleeding things work as well as what they do might also be a good notion,” Goldfarb observed.

To his surprise, Roundbush shook his head. “Not necessary, not insofar as what we’re about now. The Red Indians hadn’t the faintest notion how to smelt iron or make gunpowder, but when they got muskets in their hands, they had no trouble shooting at the colonials in America. That’s where we are right now: we need to use the Lizards’ devices against them. Understanding can come at its own pace.”

“The Red Indians never did understand how firearms work,” Goldfarb said, “and look what became of them.”

“The Red Indians didn’t have the concept of research and development, and we do,” Roundbush said. “For that matter, we were on the edge of our own discoveries in these areas before the Lizards came. We had radar: not so good as what the Lizards use, I grant you, but we had it—you’d know more of that than I. And both we and the Jerries seem to have been playing about with the notion of jet propulsion. I’d love to fly one of their Messerschmitts, see how it stands against a Meteor.”

“I wonder where Fred Hipple is these days,” Goldfarb said, and then, more somberly, “I wonder if he’s alive.”

“I fear not,” Roundbush said. He too sounded more serious than was his wont. “I’ve not seen the little fellow, nor heard word of him, since the Lizards raided Bruntingthorpe. My guess is that he was one of the officers killed in the barracks. He wasn’t among those who reassembled afterwards: that much I know.”

“Well, neither was I,” Goldfarb answered. “I got separated in the fighting and ended up in the army.”

“They’d not have commandeered a group captain in quite so cavalier a fashion, nor would Fred Hipple have been shy about pointing out the error of their ways had they made the attempt,” Roundbush said. Then he sighed. “On the other hand, they might not have listened to him. No one paid the jet engine much heed before the war, and that’s a melancholy fact.”

“Why not?” Goldfarb asked. “Do you know, sir? It seems so obviously a better way of doing things. Try as you will, you’ll never tweak a Spitfire to the point where it can match a Meteor’s performance.”

“All true. I’ve flown both; I should know.” Roundbush thought for a moment. When he put his mind to it, he was quite a clever chap. He was also handsome and brave. When Goldfarb was in an intolerant mood, he found the combination depressing. Roundbush went on, “A couple of things went into it, I think. We had a large investment in piston engines, an investment not just in the factories that made them but also in close to forty years’ thinking they were the right and proper way to go about powering aircraft. The other factor is, piston engines were
proved
by those forty years. It takes a bold man, or a desperate one, to make the leap into the unknown and abandon the tried and true.”

“Something to that, I expect,” Goldfarb said. “Against the Germans, we could make gains by squeezing out an extra fifty horsepower here or a hundred there. They were doing the same against us, I expect, or those jet Messerschmitts of theirs would have started showing up over England a year ago and more. But against the Lizards, it’s pretty clear we had to try something new or go under.”

“There you have it in a nutshell,” Basil Roundbush agreed. “Now, to business: are we going to be able to mount these Lizard radars in any of our aircraft? They’re small and light enough, that’s certain, and we’ll finally be able to see as far as the Lizards can.”

“I think it should be possible, if we have enough sets,” Goldfarb answered. “They don’t draw a lot of power, and we’ve figured out the voltage and cycles per second they use—about two-thirds of the way from our standard down towards what the Americans prefer. We are still working to calibrate their ranges, though, and we still have to decide how many we want to mount on the ground to add to our air defense. Seeing the Lizards counts there, too.”

“That’s so,” Roundbush admitted reluctantly. “The other side of the coin is, the Lizards’ radar should be less susceptible to being tracked by their missiles and confused by their interference. That matters a great deal when you’re up past Angels twenty.”

“It matters when you’re on the ground, too.” Goldfarb remembered the opening days of the Lizards’ invasion of Earth, when their missiles had homed unerringly on radar transmitters throughout the British Isles, knocking them out again and again. “Try tracking their fighter-bombers with binoculars, if you want a treat for yourself.”

“Binoculars? Old chap, try tracking them with the Mark One eyeball.” Roundbush could also deliver a convincing impersonation of an overbred, underbrained aristocratic twit, of the sort who made Bertie Wooster seem a philosopher-king by comparison. Now he leered horribly, aiming a pair of Mark One eyeballs (rather bloodshot) at Goldfarb. “Bit of a bore in the cockpit, don’t you know?”

“I know you’re quite mad,” Goldfarb retorted. “Sir.”

Roundbush stopped twisting his features into that bucktoothed grimace and let his voice lose the nasal whine he’d affected. “What I know is that I need a pint or three after we knock off today. What’s the name of that pub you dragged me to, the one with the blonde and the redhead?”

“That’s the White Horse Inn, sir. I don’t think Daphne, the blond one, works there any more; she was just visiting old friends.” From what he’d heard, Daphne was in a family way, but he kept that to himself. He hadn’t done it, and in any case he’d been sweet on Sylvia when last he was in Dover.

“The White Horse Inn, that’s it Couldn’t recall the name for love nor money.” Roundbush coughed significantly. “Only thing about the place I’m likely to forget though. The beer’s not bad—made locally, I’d say—and that little redhead . . . Ah!” He kissed his fingertips, like an actor playing a comic Italian. “She’s quite a piece of work, she is.”

“Can’t argue with you there, sir.” Goldfarb had been trying to get back into Sylvia’s good graces—to say nothing of her bed—ever since he returned to Dover. He’d been making progress with the one, if not the other. Now he waved a fond farewell to any hope of seeing the inside of Sylvia’s flat again. Women had a way of throwing themselves at Basil Roundbush—his problem wasn’t in catching them but in throwing back the ones he didn’t want. If he did want Sylvia, odds for anyone else’s drawing her notice were abysmally poor.

Sighing, Goldfarb bent low over the radar he’d been working on when Roundbush came in. Work couldn’t make you forget your sorrows, but if you kept at it you found yourself too busy to do much fussing over them. In a world that showed itself more imperfect with every passing day, that was about as much as any man had a right to expect.

Because it was large and round, the Met Lab crew had dubbed their first completed bomb the Fat Lady. Leslie Groves eyed the metal casing’s curves with as much admiration as if they belonged to Rita Hayworth. “Gentlemen, I’m prouder than I can say of every one of you,” he declared. “Now we have only one thing left to do—build another one.”

The physicists and technicians stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter and applause. “You had us worried there for a moment, General,” Enrico Fermi said. “We are not used to unadulterated praise from you.”

Another man might have taken that for an insult Groves took it in stride. “Dr. Fermi, when the war is over and the United States has won, I will praise all of you to the skies and ten miles further. Till that day comes, we have too much work to do to waste time saying nice things.”

“No one ever accused you of wasting time in this fashion,” Leo Szilard said, drawing a fresh round of laughter from the Met Lab crew. Groves even saw a smile flicker on the face of Jens Larssen, who had been more gloomy and taciturn than ever since he got back from Hanford, Washington, and found the whole program not only wasn’t moving there but had moved on without him. Groves understood how all that could grate on a man, but didn’t know what to do about it.

It was, in any case, far down on his list of worries. He knew what was at the top of the list: “I wasn’t joking there, my friends. We had help with this bomb: the plutonium we got from the British, who got it from the Polish Jews, who got it from the Germans, who got it from the Lizards with help from the Russians. Next time, we make it all ourselves, all by ourselves. How long till the next bomb?”

“Now that we have made the actual product once, doing it again will be easier; we will make fewer mistakes,” Szilard said. That drew nods from almost everyone, Groves included. Any engineer knew half the trouble in making something for the first time lay in figuring out what you were doing wrong and figuring out how to do it right.

“We have almost enough plutonium for the second weapon now,” Fermi said. “Once we use it in the bomb, though, we will for a time be low. But production is steady, even improving. With what we have now, with the third atomic pile coming into full production, from now on we will be manufacturing several bombs a year.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” Groves said. The production numbers had told him the same thing, but hearing it from the man in charge of the piles was better than inferring it from figures.

“The next question is, now that we have these bombs, how do we place them where we want to use them?” Szilard said. He waved a stubby hand toward the Fat Lady. “This one would have to go on a diet before it could fit in an airplane, and the Lizards would shoot down any airplane before it got where it was going, anyhow.”

Both those points were true. The Fat Lady weighed nearly ten tons, which was more than any bomber could carry. And anything bigger than a Piper Cub drew the Lizards’ immediate and hostile attention. Groves didn’t know how to make a nuclear weapon small enough to fit into a Piper Cub, but he did know that, no matter what the
Luftwaffe
thought, you didn’t have to deliver a bomb by air.

“I promise you, Dr. Szilard: we will manage when the time comes,” he said, and let it go at that. He didn’t want everybody to hear what the delivery plans were. Security wasn’t as tight as it had been with the Japs and Nazis to worry about; he had trouble imagining anybody vile enough to want to betray American atomic secrets to the Lizards. But he was just an engineer, and knew his imagination had limits. What was unthinkable for him might not be for someone else.

“How do we even get the thing out of the reprocessing plant?” a technician asked. He worked at one of the piles, not here where the plutonium was extracted and the bomb made. Groves just pointed to the wooden cart on which the Fat Lady sat. It had wheels. The technician looked foolish.

He needn’t have. Moving ten tons was no laughing matter, especially when those ten tons included complicated gadgetry and had to be moved in utmost secrecy. Groves had most of the answers now. Inside a week, he needed all of them. He was confident he’d get them. Moving heavy things from one place to another was a technology mankind had had under control since the days of the Pharaohs.

Somebody said, “We got our bombs now. How soon will the Germans have theirs? When will the Russians set off another one? What about the Japs?”

“If there are no other questions, class is dismissed,” Groves said solemnly. That got the laugh he’d hoped for. When it was over, he went on, “The Germans aren’t very far behind us. If they hadn’t had their, ah, accident, they might be ahead of us.”

The intelligence information on which he based that wasn’t firsthand. Much of it came from things Molotov had said when he was in New York. Where Molotov had got it, Groves didn’t know. The Russians had been wrong about the Germans before, generally to their sorrow.