In the Balance

Jens Larssen’s thumb throbbed fiercely. The nail was already turning black; he suspected he’d lose it. He scowled as darkly as his fair, sunny features allowed. He was a physicist, damn it, not a carpenter. What hurt worse than his maimed digit was the snickers from the young punks who made up most of the work crew that was building strange things in the west stands of Stagg Field.

The evening sun at his back, he tramped along Fifty-seventh Street toward the Quadrangle Club. His appetite wasn’t what it had been before he’d tried driving his thumbnail into a two-by-four, but food and coffee kept him going in place of sleep. As soon as he’d gulped his meal, he’d be back at the pile again, hammering away-this time, with luck, a little more carefully.

He sucked in a lungful of muggy Chicago air. Having been born and raised in San Francisco, he wondered why three million people chose to live in a place that was too hot and sticky half the time and too damned cold most of the rest.

“They have to be crazy,” he said aloud.

A student going the other way gave him an odd look. He felt himself flush. Dressed as he was in a dirty undershirt and a pair of chinos, he didn’t look like anyone who belonged on the University of Chicago campus, let alone a faculty member. He’d draw more looks in the Quadrangle Club. Too bad for the Latin professors in their moth-eaten Harris tweeds, he thought.

He walked past Cobb Gate; the grotesques carved on the big stone pile that was the northern entrance to Hull Court always made him smile. Botany Pond, surrounded on three sides by the Hull Biological Laboratories, was a nice place to sit and read when he had the time. Lately, he hadn’t had the time very often.

He was coming up to Mitchell Tower when his shadow disappeared. One second it stretched out ahead of him, all fine and proper, the next it was gone. The tower, modeled after that of Magdalen College at Oxford, was suddenly bathed in harsh white light.

Larssen stared up into the sky. The glowing spot there grew and faded and changed color as he watched. Everyone around was pointing at it and exclaiming: “What’s that?” “What could it be?” “Have you ever seen anything like that in all your life?” People stuck their heads out of windows and came running outside to see.

The physicist watched and gaped with everyone else. Little by little, the new light dimmed and his old, familiar shadow reasserted itself. Before it had fully recovered, Larssen wheeled and began running back the way he had come. He dodged past dozens of people who were still just standing and gawking. “Where’s the fire, buddy?” one of them yelled.

He didn’t answer. He just ran harder toward Stagg Field. The fire was in the sky. He knew what sort of fire it had to be, too: the fire he and his colleagues were seeking to call forth from the uranium atom. So far, no atomic pile in the United States had even managed a self-sustaining chain reaction. The crew in the west stands was trying to put together one that would.

No one in his most horrid nightmares imagined the Germans had already devised not just a pile but a bomb, even if the uranium atom had first been split in Germany in 1938. As he ran, Larssen wondered how the Nazis had exploded a bomb over Chicago. So far as he knew, their planes couldn’t reach even New York.

For that matter, he wondered why the Germans had set off their bomb so high overhead-too high, really, for it to do any damage. Maybe, he thought, they had it aboard some oceanbestriding rocket like the ones the pulp magazines talked about. But no one had dreamed the Germans could do that, either.

Nothing about the bomb made any rational sense. The dreadful thing was up there, though, and had to be German. It surely wasn’t American or English.

Larssen had an even more horrid thought. What if it was Japanese? He didn’t think the Japs had the know-how to build an atomic bomb, but he hadn’t thought they had the know-how to bomb Pearl Harbor so devastatingly well, or to take the Philippines, or Guam, or Wake, or Hong Kong and Singapore and Burma from the British, or practically drive the Royal Navy out of the Indian Ocean, or… The further he went, the longer the melancholy list in his head grew.

“Maybe it is the goddamn Japs,” he said, and ran harder than ever.

Sam Yeager had the curtain closed over the train window by his seat, to keep the westering sun out of Bobby Fiore’s eyes while his roommate slept. In his younger days, he would have resented that: having grown up without traveling more than a couple of days’ ride from his folks’ farm, he was wild to see as much of the country as he could when he started playing ball. Train and bus windows were his openings on a wider world.