“Gentlemen, I think that’s enough for today,” he said.
Major Okamoto seemed out of place in a laboratory, Teerts thought. What the Big Uglies called a lab wasn’t impressive to a male of the Race: the equipment was primitive and chaotically arranged, and there wasn’t a computer anywhere. One of the Nipponese who wore a white coat manipulated a curious device whose middle moved in and out as if it were a musical instrument.
“Superior sir, what is that thing?” Teerts asked Okamoto, pointing.
“What thing?” Okamoto looked as if he wanted to be interrogating, not interpreting and answering questions. “Oh, that. That’s a slide rule. It’s faster than calculating by hand.”
“Slide rule,” Teerts repeated, to fix the term in his memory. “How does it work?”
Okamoto started to answer, then turned and spoke in rapid-fire Nipponese to the Big Ugly who was wielding the curious artifact. The scientist spoke directly to Teerts: “It adds and subtracts logarithms-you understand this word?”
“No, superior sir,” Teerts admitted. Explanations followed, with considerable backing and filling. Eventually Teerts got the idea. It was, he supposed, clever in an archaic way. “How accurate is this slide rule?” he asked.
“Three significant figures,” the Nipponese answered.
Teerts was appalled. The Big Uglies hoped to do serious scientific research and engineering with accuracy to only one part in a thousand? That gave him a whole new reason to hope their effort to harness nuclear energy failed. He didn’t want to be anywhere close if it succeeded: it was liable to succeed altogether too well, and blow a big piece of Tokyo into radioactive slag.
The Nipponese added, “For finer calculations, we go back to pen and paper, but pen and paper are slow. Do you understand?”
“Yes, superior sir.” Teerts revised his opinion of the Big Uglies’ abilities-slightly. Because they had no electronic aids, they did what they could to calculate more quickly. If that meant they lost some accuracy, they were willing to make the trade.
The Race didn’t work that way. If they came to a place where they needed two different qualities and had to lose some of one to get some of the other, they generally waited instead, until in the slow passage of time their arts improved to the point where the trade was no longer necessary. Because of that slow, careful evolution, the Race’s technology was extremely reliable.
What the Big Uglies called technology was anything but. Not only didn’t they seem to believe in fail-safes, he sometimes wondered if they believed in safety at all. Much of Tokyo, which was not a small city even by the standards of the Race, looked to be built from wood and paper. He marveled that it hadn’t burnt down a hundred times. Traffic was even more horrifying than it had been in Harbin, and if a vehicle ran into another one, or over a male who was also using the street, too bad. Along with inaccuracy, the Big Uglies accepted a lot of carnage as the price they had to pay for getting things done.
That thought put Teerts in mind of something he thought he’d heard a couple of the Nipponese scientists discussing. He turned to Major Okamoto. “Excuse me, superior sir, may I ask another question?”
“Ask,” Okamoto said with the air of an important male granting a most unimportant underling a boon beyond his station. Despite so many differences between them, in some ways the Race and Big Uglies weren’t that far apart.
“Thank you for your generosity, superior sir.” Teerts played the inferior role to the hilt, as if he were addressing the fleetlord rather than a rather tubby Tosevite whom he devoutly wished dead. “Did this humble one correctly hear that some other Tosevites also experimenting with explosive metal suffered a mishap?”
Again Okamoto and the scientist held a quick colloquy. The latter said, “Why not tell him? If he is ever in a position to escape, the war will be so badly lost that that will be the least of our worries.”
“Very well.” Okamoto gave his attention back to Teerts. “Yes, this did happen. The Germans had an atomic pile-what is the phrase? — reach critical mass and get out of control.”
Teerts let out a horrified hiss. The Big Uglies didn’t just accept risk, they pursued it with insane zeal. “How did this happen?” he asked.
“I am not certain the details are known, especially since the accident killed some of their scientists,” Okamoto said. “But those who still live are pressing ahead. We shall not make the mistakes they did. The Americans have succeeded in running a pile without immediately joining their ancestors, and they are sharing some of their methods with us.”
“Oh.” Teerts wished he had some ginger to chase away the lump of ice that formed in his belly. When the Race came to Tosev 3, the patchwork of tiny empires that dotted the planet’s surface had been a matter for jokes. It wasn’t funny any more. Back on Home, only one line of experiment at a time would have been pursued. Here, all the competing little empires worked separately. Disunion usually was weakness, but could also prove strength, as now.
Yoshio Nishina came into the room. His alarmingly mobile lips-or so they seemed to Teerts-pulled back so that he showed what was for a Big Ugly a lot of teeth. Teerts had learned that meant he was happy. He spoke with the other scientist and with Major Okamoto. Teerts did his best to follow, but found himself left behind.
Okamoto eventually noticed he’d got lost. “We have had a new success,” the interpreter said. “We have bombarded uranium with neutrons and produced the element plutonium. Production is still very slow, but plutonium will be easier to separate from uranium-238 than uranium-235 is.”
“Hai,” Nishina echoed emphatically. “We prepared uranium hexafluoride gas to use to separate the two isotopes of uranium from each other, but it is so corrosive that we are having an impossible time working with it. But separating plutonium from uranium is a straightforward chemical process.”
Major Okamoto had to translate some of that, too. He and Teerts used a mixture of terms from Nipponese and the language of the Race to talk about matters nuclear. Teerts took for granted a whole range of facts the Big Uglies were just uncovering, but though he knew that things could be done, he often had no idea as to how. There they were ahead of him.
Nishina added, “Once we accumulate enough plutonium, we shall surely be able to assemble a bomb in short order. Then we will meet your people on even terms.”
Teerts bowed, which he found a useful way of responding without saying anything. The Nipponese didn’t seem to have any idea how destructive nuclear weapons really were. Maybe it was because they’d never had any dropped on them. As he had a dozen times before, Teerts tried to get across to them that nuclear combat wasn’t anything to anticipate with relish. They wouldn’t listen, any more than they had those other dozen times. They thought he was just trying to slow down their research (which he was, and which, he knew, compromised his position). Okamoto said, “My country was backward until less than a hundred years ago. We saw then that we had to learn the ways of the Tosevite empires that knew more than we did, or else become their slaves.”
Less than two hundred of our years, Teerts thought. Two hundred of his years before, the Race had been just about where it was now, leisurely contemplating the conquest of Tosev 3. Best wait till all was perfectly ready. What difference could a few years make, one way or the other?
They’d found out.
Okamoto went on, “Less than fifty years ago, our soldiers and sailors beat the Russians, one of the empires that had been far ahead of us. Less than two years ago, our airplanes and ships smashed those of the United States, which had been probably the strongest empire on Tosev 3. By then we were better than they. Do you see where I am leading with this?”