Striking the Balance (28 page)

Ice was still floating in the Moscow River. A big chunk banged into the bow of the rowboat in which Vyacheslav Molotov sat, knocking the boat sideways. “Sorry, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” the fellow at the oars said, and put the rowboat back on its proper course upstream.

“It’s all right,” Molotov answered absently. Of course, the oarsman belonged to the NKVD. But he had such a heavy, bovine
okane—
a Gorky accent that turned a’s into o’s until he sounded as if he himself had been turned out to pasture—that no one, hearing him for the first time, could possibly take him seriously. A nice bit of
maskirovka,
that’s what it was.

A couple of minutes later, another piece of ice ran into the boat. The NKVD man chuckled. “Bet you wish you’d taken a
panje
wagon to the
kolkhoz
now, eh, Comrade?”

“No,” Molotov answered coldly. He waved a gloved hand over to the riverbank to illustrate why he said what he said. A
panje
wagon pulled by a
troika
of horses slowly struggled along. Even the Russian wagons, with their tall wheels and boatlike bottoms, had a tough time getting through the mud of the spring
rasputitsa. The
muddy season would vary in the fall, depending on how heavy the rains were. In spring, when a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted, the mud was always thick enough to seem bottomless.

Not a bit put out at his abruptness, the rower chuckled again. When he wanted to, he showed skill with the oars, dodging more pieces of drift ice with almost a ballerina’s adroitness. (Molotov thought of Anastas Mikoyan, caught by rain at a party to which he’d come without an umbrella. When the hostess exclaimed that he would get wet, he’d just smiled and said, “Oh, no, I’ll dance between the raindrops.” If any man could do it, Mikoyan was the one.)

Like a lot of riverside collective farms,
Kolkhoz
118 had a rickety pier sticking out into the turbid brown water of the river. The NKVD boatman tied up the rowboat at the pier, then scrambled up onto it to help Molotov out. When Molotov started toward the farm building, the oarsman didn’t follow him. The foreign commissar would have been astonished if he had. He might have been NKVD, but he surely didn’t have the security clearance he’d need for this project.

Cows lowed, which made Molotov think again of the rower’s intonation. Pigs grunted. They didn’t mind mud—on the contrary. Neither did ducks and geese. Chickens struggled, puffing one foot out of the muck and then the other and looking down with little beady black eyes as if wondering why the ground kept trying to grab them.

Molotov wrinkled his nose. The
kolkhoz
had a fine barnyard odor, no doubt about that. Its buildings were typical for those of collective farms, too: unpainted and badly painted wood, all looking decades older than they were. Men in cloth caps, collarless shirts, and baggy trousers tucked into boots tramped here and there, some with pitchforks, some with shovels.

It was all
maskirovka,
carried out with Russian thoroughness. When Molotov rapped on the door to the barn, it opened quickly.
“Zdrast’ye,
Comrade Foreign Commissar,” his welcomer said, closing the door behind him. For a moment, he was in complete darkness. Then the man opened the inner door of what might as well have been an airlock, and bright electric light from inside flooded into the chamber.

Molotov shed his coat and boots in there. Igor Kurchatov nodded approvingly. The nuclear physicist was about forty, with sharp features and a pointed chin beard that gave his handsome face almost a satanic aspect. “Hello, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” he repeated, his tone somewhere between polite and fawning. Molotov had pushed his enterprise and had kept Stalin from gutting it when results flowed more slowly than he liked. Kurchatov and all the other physicists knew Molotov was the only man between them and the
gulag.
They were
his.

“Good day,” he answered, as always disliking the time polite small talk wasted. “How is progress?”

“We are working like a team of super-Stakhanovites, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” Kurchatov answered. “We advance on many fronts. We—”

“Do you yet produce this plutonium metal, which will yield the large explosions the Soviet Union desperately requires?” Molotov interrupted.

Kurchatov’s devilish features sagged in dismay. “Not yet,” he admitted. His voice went high and shrill: “I warned you when this project began that it was a matter of years. The capitalists and fascists were ahead of us in technique when the Lizards came to Earth, and they remain ahead of us. We tried and failed to separate U-235 from U-238. The best chemical for this is uranium hexafluoride, which is as poisonous as mustard gas and hideously corrosive to boot. We do not have the expertise we need for that separation process. We have had no other choice but to seek to manufacture plutonium, which has also proved difficult.”

“I am painfully aware of this, I assure you,” Molotov said. “Iosef Vissarionovich is also painfully aware of it. But if the Americans succeed. If the Hitlerites succeed, why do you continue to fail?”

“Design of the requisite pile is one thing,” Kurchatov answered. “There the American’s arrival has already helped us. Having worked with one in full running order, Maksim Lazarovich has given us many valuable insights.”

“I hoped he might,” Molotov said. Learning that Max Kagan had reached
Kolkhoz
118 was what had brought him up here. He hadn’t yet told Stalin the Americans had chosen to send a clever Jew. Stalin was no Russian, but had a thoroughly Russian dislike for what he called rootless cosmopolites. Being married to a clever Jew himself, Molotov didn’t. Now he went on, “This is one problem. What others have you?”’

“The worst one, Comrade, is getting both the uranium oxide and the graphite in the nuclear pile free enough from impurities to serve our purposes,” Kurchatov said. “There Kagan, however learned and experienced he is in his own field, cannot help us, much as I wish he could.”

“You know the measures your producers are required to take to furnish you with materials of requisite purity?” Molotov asked. When Kurchatov nodded, Molotov asked another question: “The producers know they will suffer the highest form of punishment if they fail to meet your demands?” He’d scribbled VMN—for
vysshaya mera nakazamiya—
beside the names of plenty of enemies of the Revolution and the Soviet state, and they’d been shot shortly thereafter. Such deserved—and got—no mercy.

But Kurchatov said, “Comrade Foreign Commissar. If you liquidate these men, their less experienced successors will not deliver improved supplies to us. The required purities, you see, are on the very edge—perhaps just over the edge—of what Soviet chemistry and industry can achieve. We are all doing everything we can in the fight against the Lizards. Sometimes what we do is not enough.
Nichevo—
it can’t be helped.”

“I refuse to accept
nichevo
from an academician in a time of crisis, any more than I would accept it from a peasant,” Molotov said angrily.

Kurchatov shrugged. “Then you will go back and tell the General Secretary to replace us, and good luck to you and the
rodina
with the charlatans who will take over this laboratory.” He and his men were in Molotov’s power, true, for Molotov held Stalin’s wrath at bay. But. If Molotov exercised that power, he would hurt not only the physicists but the Soviet motherland. That made for an interesting and unpleasant balance between him and the laboratory staff.

He exhaled angrily, a show of temper as strong with him as pounding a shoe on a desk would have been for another man. “Have you any more problems standing between you and building these bombs?”

“Yes, one small one,” Kurchatov answered with an ironic glint in his eye. “Once some of the uranium in the atomic pile is transmuted to plutonium, we have to get it out and shape it into the material required for a bomb—and we have to do all this without letting any radioactivity leak into the air or the river. We knew this already, and Maksim Lazarovich has been most insistent on it.”

“Why is it a difficulty?” Molotov asked. “I confess, I am no physicist, to understand subtle points without explanation.”

Kurchatov’s smile grew most unpleasant. “This point is not subtle. A leak of radioactivity is detectable. If it is not only detectable but detected by the Lizards, this area will become much more radioactive shortly thereafter.”

Molotov needed a moment to realize exactly what Kurchatov meant. When he did, he nodded: a single sharp up-and-down jerk of his head. “The point is taken, Igor Ivanovich. Can you bring Kagan here to me or take me to him? I wish to extend to him the formal thanks of the Soviet workers and peasants for his assistance to us.”

That was business of a different sort. “Please wait here, Comrade Foreign Commissar. I will bring him. Do you speak English or German? No? Never mind; I will interpret for you.” He hurried down along a white-painted corridor utterly alien to the rough-hewn exterior of the laboratory building.

Kurchatov returned a couple of minutes later with another fellow in a white lab coat in tow. Molotov was surprised at how young Max Kagan looked; he couldn’t have been much past thirty. He was a medium-sized man with curly, dark brown hair and intelligent Jewish features.

Kurchatov spoke to Kagan in English, then turned to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I present to you Maksim Lazarovich Kagan, the physicist on loan from the Metallurgical Laboratory project of the United States.”

Kagan stuck out his hand and vigorously pumped Molotov’s. He spoke in voluble English. Kurchatov did the honors: “He says he is pleased to meet you, and that he aims to blow the Lizards to hell and gone. This is an idiom, and means about what you would think.”

“Tell him I share his aspirations and hope they are realized,” Molotov answered. He eyed Kagan and was bemused to find Kagan eyeing him back. Soviet scientists were properly deferential to the man who was second in the USSR only to the General Secretary of the Communist Party. To judge by Kagan’s attitude, he thought Molotov was just another bureaucrat to deal with. In small doses, the attitude was bracing.

Kagan spoke in rapid-fire English, Molotov had no idea what he was saying, but his tone was peremptory. Kurchatov answered hesitantly in the same language. Kagan spoke some more, slamming a fist into an open palm to emphasize his point. Again, Kurchatov’s answer sounded cautious. Kagan threw his hands in the air in obvious disgust.

“Tell me what he is saying,” Molotov said.

“He is complaining about the quality of the equipment here, he is complaining about the food, he is complaining about the NKVD man who accompanies him whenever he goes outside—he attributes to the man unsavory sexual practices of which he can have no personal knowledge.”

“In any case, he has strong opinions,” Molotov remarked, hiding his amusement. “Can you do anything about the equipment of which he complains?”

“No, Comrade Foreign Commissar,” Kurchatov answered. “It is the best available in the USSR.”

“Then he will have to use it and make the best of it,” Molotov said. “As for the others, this
kolkhoz
already has better food than most, but we shall see what we can do to improve it. And if he does not want the NKVD man to accompany him, the NKVD man will not do so.”

Kurchatov relayed that to Max Kagan. The American answered at some length. “He will do his best with the equipment, and says he will design better,” Kurchatov translated. “He is on the whole pleased with your other answers.”

“Is that all?” Molotov asked. “It sounded like more. Tell me exactly what he said.”

“Very well, Comrade Foreign Commissar.” Igor Kurchatov spoke with a certain sardonic relish: “He said that, since I was in charge of this project, I ought to be able to take care of these matters for myself. He said I should be able to do more than wipe my own arse without a Party functionary’s permission. He said that having the NKVD spy on scientists as if they were wreckers and enemies of the people would turn them into wreckers and enemies of the people. And he said that threatening scientists with the maximum punishment because they have not fulfilled norms impossible of fulfillment is the stupidest thing he has ever heard of. These are his exact words, Comrade.”

Molotov fixed his icy stare on Max Kagan. The American glared back, too ignorant to know he was supposed to wilt. A little of his aggressive attitude was bracing. A lot of it loose in the Soviet Union would have been a disaster.

And Kurchatov agreed with Kagan. Molotov saw that, too. For now, the state and the Party needed the scientists’ expertise. The day would come, though, when they didn’t. Molotov looked forward to it.

If you were going to keep your clothes on, you couldn’t have a whole lot more fun than riding a horse down a winding road through a forest in new springtime leaf. The fresh, hopeful green sang in Sam Yeager’s eyes. The air had that magical, spicy odor you didn’t get at any other season of the year: it somehow smelled alive and growing. Birds sang as if there was no tomorrow.

Yeager glanced over to Robert Goddard. If Goddard sensed the spring magic, he didn’t show it. “You okay, sir?” Yeager asked anxiously. “I knew we should have put you in a buggy.”

“I’m all right,” Goddard answered in a voice thinner and raspier than Yeager was used to hearing from him. His face was more nearly gray than the pink it should have been. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then made a small concession to the evils the flesh is heir to: “Not much farther, eh?”

“No, sir,” Sam answered, as enthusiastically as he was able. Actually, they had another day of hard riding ahead of them, maybe two days if Goddard didn’t get over being poorly. “And when we do get there, we’ll give the Lizards’ stumpy little tails a hell of a tweak, won’t we?”

Goddard’s smile wasn’t altogether exhausted. “That’s the plan, Sergeant. How well it works remains to be seen, but I do have hopes.”

“It’s got to work, sir, doesn’t it?” Yeager said. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to hit the Lizards’ spaceships any other way but long-range rockets. A lot of brave men have died trying, anyhow—that’s a fact.”