Tilting the Balance

Then Nishina spoke again: “We return to the question of getting the lighter uranium, the kind which is explosive, out of the other, more common, type. This as yet we have not succeeded in doing; indeed, we have only just begun the attempt. That is why we will learn from you how the Race solves this problem.”

Teerts needed a moment to understand that The Race had been shocked when they reached Tosev 3 to discover how advanced the Big Uglies were. Before Teerts was captured, pilots had talked endlessly about that; they’d expected no opposition, and here the Tosevites were, shooting back-not very well, and from inadequate aircraft, but shooting back. How could they have learned to build combat aircraft in the eight hundred local years since the Race’s probe examined them?

Now, for the first time, Teerts got a glimmering of the answer. The Race made change deliberately slow. When something new was discovered, extrapolationists performed elaborate calculations to learn in advance how it would affect a long-stable society, and how best to minimize those effects while gradually acquiring the benefits of the new device or principle.

With the Big Uglies, the tongue was on the other side of the mouth. When they found something new, they seized it with both hands and squeezed until they got all the juice out. They didn’t care what the consequences five generations-or even five years-hence would be. They wanted advantages now, and worried about later trouble later, if at all.

Eventually, they’d probably end up destroying themselves with that attitude. At the moment, it made them far more deadly opponents than they would have been otherwise.

“Do not waste time thinking up lies. I warned you before,” Major Okamoto said. “Tell Dr. Nishina the truth at once.”

“By what I know, superior sir, the truth is that we do not use any of these methods,” Teerts said. Okamoto drew back his hand for a slap. Afraid that would be the start of a torture session worse than any he’d yet known, Teerts went on rapidly, “Instead, we use the heavier form of uranium: isotope is the term we use.”

“How do you do this?” Okamoto demanded after a brief colloquy with the Nipponese scientists. “Dr. Nishina says the heavier isotope cannot explode.”

“There is another element, number ninety-four, which does not occur in nature but which we make from the heavier, nonexplosive-Dr. Nishina is right-isotope of uranium. This other element is explosive. We use it in our bombs.”

“I think you are lying. You will pay the penalty for it, I promise you that,” Okamoto said. Nevertheless, he translated Teerts’ words for the Big Uglies in the white coats.

They started talking excitedly among themselves. Nishina, who looked to be the senior male, sorted things out and relayed an answer to Okamoto. He said to Teerts, “I may have been wrong. Dr. Nishina tells me the Americans have found this new element as well. They have given it the name plutonium. You will help us produce it.”

“Past what I have already said, I know little,” Teerts warned: Despair threatened to consume him. Every time he’d revealed something new to the Nipponese, it had been with the hope that the technical difficulties of the new revelation would force them off the road that led toward nuclear weapons. Instead, everything he told them seemed to push them further down that road.

He wished a plutonium bomb would fall on Nagasaki. But what were the odds of that?

VI

WELCOME TO CHUGWATER, POPULATION 286, the sign said. Colonel Leslie Groves shook his head as he read it. “Chugwater?” he echoed. “Wonder why they call it that.”

Captain Rance Auerbach read the other half of the sign. “ ‘Population 286,’ ” he said. “Sounds like Jerkwater’d be a better name for it.”

Groves looked ahead. The cavalry officer had a point. It didn’t look like much of a town. But cattle roamed the fields around it. This late in winter, they were on the scrawny side, but they were still out there grazing. That meant Chugwater had enough to eat, anyhow.

People came out to look at the spectacle of a cavalry company going through town, but they didn’t act as impressed as townsfolk had in Montana and farther north in Wyoming. One boy in ragged blue jeans said to a man in overalls who looked just like him, “I liked the parade a couple of weeks ago better, Dad.”

“You had a parade through here a couple of weeks ago?” Groves called to a heavyset man whose black coat, white shirt, and string tie argued that he was a person of some local importance.

“Sure as hell did.” The pear-shaped man spat a stream of tobacco juice into the street. Groves envied him for having tobacco in any form. He went on, “Only thing missing then was a brass band. Had us a whole slew o’ wagons and soldiers and foreigners who talked funny and even a couple of Lizards-silly-lookin’ little things to cause all the trouble they do, aren’t they?”