Tilting the Balance

Vyacheslav Molotov jounced along toward the farm outside Moscow in a panje wagon, as if he were a peasant with a couple of sacks of radishes he hadn’t been able to sell. From the way the NKVD man driving the wagon behaved, Molotov might have been a sack of radishes himself. The Soviet foreign commissar didn’t mind. He was rarely in the mood for idle chitchat, with today no exception to the rule.

All around him, the land burgeoned with Russian spring. The sun rose early now, and set late, and everything that had lain dormant through winter flourished in the long hours of daylight. Fresh green grass pushed up through and hid last year’s growth, now gray brown and dead. The willows and birches by the Moscow River wore new bright leafy coats. Concealed by those new leaves, birds chirped and warbled. Molotov did not know which bird went with which song. He could barely tell a titmouse from a toucan, not that you were likely to find a toucan in a Russian treetop even in springtime.

Ducks stuck their behinds in the air as they tipped up for food in the river. The driver looked at them and murmured, “I wish I had a shotgun. ” Molotov saw reply as unnecessary; the driver would likely have said the same thing had he been alone in the wagon.

Molotov wished not for a shotgun but a car. Yes, gasoline was in short supply, with almost all of it earmarked for the front. But as the number two man in the Soviet Union behind Stalin, he could have arranged for a limousine had he wanted one. The Lizards, however, were more likely to shoot up motor vehicles than horse-drawn wagons. Molotov played it safe.

When the driver pulled off the road and onto a meandering path, Molotov thought the fellow had lost his way. The thrill ahead looked like an archetypical kolkhoz, maybe a little smaller than most of its ilk. Chickens ran around clucking and pecking, fat pigs wallowed in mud. In the fields, men walked behind mules. The only buildings were row houses for the kolkhozniks and barns for the animals.

Then one of the men, dressed like any farmer in boots, baggy trousers, collarless tunic, and cloth cap, opened the door to a barn and went inside. Before he closed it after himself, the foreign commissar saw that the inside was brightly lit by electric light. Even before the Germans and the Lizards came, that would have been unusual for a kolkhoz. Now it was inconceivable.

His smile came broader and more fulsome than most who knew him would have imagined his face could form. “A splendid job of maskirovka, ” he said enthusiastically. “Whoever designed and implemented the deception plan, he deserves to be promoted. ”

“Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am given to understand the responsible parties have been recognized, ” the driver said. He looked like a peasant-he looked like a drunk-but he talked like an educated man. Maskirovka again, Molotov thought. He knew intellectually he would not have a drunken peasant taking him to arguably the most important place in the Soviet Union, but the man played his role well.

Molotov pointed to the barn. “That is where they do their research? ”

“Comrade, all l know is that that is where l was told to deliver you, ” the driver answered. “What they do in there I could not tell you, and I do not want to know. ”

He pulled back on the reins. The horse drawing the high-wheeled panje wagon obediently stopped. Molotov, who was not a large man (even if he was taller than Stalin), scrambled down without grace but also without falling. As he headed for the barn door, the driver took a flask from his hip pocket and swigged from it. Maybe he was an educated drunk.

The barn door looked like a barn door. After that, though, the maskirovka failed: the air that came out of the barn did not smell as it should. Molotov supposed that didn’t matter, if the Lizards got close enough to go sniffing around, the Soviet Union was likely to be finished, anyhow.

He opened the door, closed it behind him as quickly as the fellow who looked like a farmer had done. Inside, the wooden building was uncompromisingly clean and uncompromisingly scientific. Even the “farmer’s” costume, when seen close up, was spotless.

The fellow hurried up to Molotov. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, I am delighted to see you here, ” he said, extending a hand. He was a broad-shouldered man of about forty, with a chin beard and alert eyes in a tired face. “I am Igor Ivanovich Kurchatov, director of the explosive metal project. ” He brushed back a lock of hair that drooped (Hitlerlike, Molotov thought irrelevantly) onto his forehead.

“I have questions on two fronts, Igor Ivanovich, ” Molotov said. “First, how soon will you finish the bomb built from the captured Lizard explosive metal? And second, how soon will this facility begin producing more of this metal for us to use? ”

Kurchatov’s eyes widened slightly. “You come straight to the point. ”

“Time-wasting formalities are for the bourgeoisie, ” Molotov replied. “Tell me what I need to know so I can report it to Comrade Stalin. ”

Stalin, of course, received regular reports from the project. Beria had been here to see how things went, too. But Molotov, along with being foreign commissar, also served as deputy chairman to Stalin on the State Committee on Defense. Kurchatov licked his lips before he answered; he was well aware of that. He said, “In the first area, we have made great progress. We are almost ready to begin fabricating the components for the bomb. ”

“That is good news, ” Molotov agreed.

“Yes, Comrade, ” Kurchatov said. “Since we have the explosive metal in place, it becomes a straightforward engineering matter of putting two masses of it, neither explosive alone, together so they exceed what is called the critical mass, the amount required for an explosion. ”

“I see, ” Molotov said, though he really didn’t. If something was explosive, it seemed to him, the only difference between a little and a lot should have been the size of the boom. But all the Soviet physicists and other academicians insisted this strange metal did not work that way. If they achieved the results they claimed, he supposed that would prove them right. He asked, “And how have you decided to join the pieces together? ”

“The simplest way we could think of was to shape one into a cylinder with a hole through the center and the other into a smaller cylinder that would fit precisely into the hole. An explosive charge will propel it into the proper position. We shall take great care that it does not go awry. ”

“Such care is well-advised, Comrade Director, ” Molotov said. But although he kept his voice icy, he intuitively liked the design Kurchatov had described. It had a Russian simplicity to it: slam the one into the other and bang! Molotov knew his own people well enough to know also that they had more trouble keeping complicated plans on track than did, say, the Germans; Russians had a way of substituting brute force for sophistication. They’d held the Nazis outside Moscow and Leningrad that way. Now they were on the edge of striking a mighty blow against the Lizards, more deadly invaders still.

A mighty blow… “After we use up our stock of explosive metal, we have no more-is that correct? ” Molotov asked.