“Ah, but someone must understand the theory, or your stupid clot would have no motorcar to drive,” Basil Roundbush said.
“That’s true only to a limited degree,” Hipple said. “Even now, theory takes you only so far in aircraft design; eventually, you just have to go out and see how the beast flies. That was much more the case during the Great War, when practically everything, from what the older engineers have told me, was cut and try. Yet the aircraft they manufactured did fly.”
“Most of the time,” Roundbush said darkly. “I’m bloody glad I never had to go up in them.”
Goldfarb ignored that. Roundbush made wisecracks the same way other men fiddled with rosaries or cracked their knuckles or tugged at one particular lock of hair: it was a nervous tic, nothing more.
Clucking softly to himself, Goldfarb fixed a power source to one side of a Lizard circuit element and an ohmmeter to the other. He’d measure voltage and amperage next: with these strange components, you couldn’t tell what they were supposed to do to a current that ran through them except by experiment.
He turned on the power. The ohmmeter swung; the component did resist the current’s flow. Goldfarb grunted in satisfaction: He’d thought it would: it looked like others that had. He noted down the reading, as well as where the circuit element sat on its board and what it looked like. Then he turned off the power and hooked up the voltage meter. One tiny piece at a time, he added to the jigsaw puzzle.
As Vyacheslav Molotov turned the knob that led him into the antechamber in front of Stalin’s night office, he felt and suppressed a familiar nervousness. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, his word went unchallenged. In negotiating with the capitalist states that hated the Soviet revolution, even in discussions with the Lizards, he was the unyielding representative of his nation. He knew he had a reputation for being inflexible, and did everything he could to play it up.
Not here, though. Anyone who was unyielding and inflexible with Stalin would soon know the stiffness of death. Then Molotov had no more time for such reflections, for Stalin’s orderly-oh, the fellow had a fancy title, but that was what he was-nodded to him and said, “Go on in. He expects you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich.”
Molotov nodded and entered Stalin’s sanctum. This was not where the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was photographed with diplomats or soldiers. He had a fancy office upstairs for that. He worked here, at hours that suited him. It was one-thirty in the morning. Stalin would be at it for at least another couple of hours. Those who dealt with him had to adjust themselves accordingly.
Stalin looked up from the desk with the gooseneck lamp. “Good morning, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said with his throaty Georgian accent. His voice held no irony; morning it was, as far as he was concerned.
“Good morning, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov replied. Whatever his feelings about the matter were, he had schooled himself not to reveal them. He found that important at any time, doubly so around the ruler of the Soviet Union.
Stalin waved Molotov to a chair, then stood up himself. Though well-proportioned, he was short, and did not like other men looming over him. What he did not like did not occur. He filled his pipe from a leather tobacco pouch, lit a match, and got the pipe going.
The harsh smell of makhorka, cheap Russian tobacco, made Molotov’s nose twitch in spite of himself. Under the iron-gray mustache, Stalin’s lip curled. “I know it’s vile, but it’s all I can find these days. What shipping we get has no room aboard for luxuries.”
That said as much as anything about the plight in which mankind found itself. When the leader of one of the three greatest nations on the planet could not get decent tobacco even for himself, the Lizards were the ones with the upper hand. Well, if he understood what was in Stalin’s mind, this meeting was to be about how to tilt the balance back the other way.
Stalin sucked in more smoke, paced back and forth. At length he said, “So the Americans and Germans are pressing ahead with their programs to make bombs of this explosive metal?”
“So I have been given to understand, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov answered. “I am also told by our intelligence services that they had these programs in place before the Lizards began their invasion of the Earth.”
“We also had such a program in place,” Stalin answered placidly.
That relieved Molotov, who had heard of no such program. He wondered how far along Soviet scientists had been compared to those in the decadent capitalist and fascist countries. Faith in the strength of Marxist-Leninist precepts made him hope they might have been ahead; concern over how far the Soviet Union had had to come since the revolution made him fear they might have been behind. With hope and fear so commingled, he dared not ask Stalin which was the true state of affairs.
Stalin went on, “We now have an advantage over both the United States and the Hitlerites: in that raid against the Lizards last fall, we obtained a considerable supply of the explosive metal, as you know. I had hoped the German taking the metal back to the Hitlerites would be waylaid in Poland, and his share lost.” Stalin looked unhappy.
So did Molotov, who said, “This much I did know, and how he had to give up half his share, though not all, to the Polish Jews, who then passed it on to the Americans.”
“Yes,” Stalin said. “Hitler is a fool, do you know that?”
“You have said it many times, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov answered. That was true, but it had not kept Stalin from making his nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, or from living up to it for almost the next two years, or from being so confident Hitler would also live up to it that he’d ignored warnings of an impending Nazi attack, ignored them so completely that the Soviet state had almost crashed in ruins because of it. Since Molotov had supported Stalin in those choices, he could hardly bring them up now (if he hadn’t supported him then, he would be in no position to bring them up now).
Stalin drew on his pipe again. His cheeks, pitted from a boyhood bout of smallpox, twitched with distaste. “Not even from so close as Turkey can I get decent tobacco. But do you know why I say Hitler is a fool?”
“For wantonly attacking the peace-loving people of the Soviet Union, who had done nothing to deserve it.” Molotov gave the obvious answer, and a true one, but it left him unhappy. Stalin was looking for something else.
Sure enough, he shook his head. But, to Molotov’s relief, he was only amused, not angry. “That is not what was in my mind, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich. I say he was a fool because, when his scientists discovered the uranium atom could be split, they published their findings for all the world to see.” Stalin chuckled rheumily. “Had we made that finding here… Can you imagine such an article appearing in the Proceedings of the Akademia Nauk, the Soviet Academy of Sciences?”
“Hardly,” Molotov said, and he chuckled, too. He was normally the most mirthless of men, but when Stalin laughed, you laughed with him. Besides, this was the sort of thing he did find funny. Stalin was dead right here-Soviet secrecy would have kept such an important secret from leaking out where prying eyes could fasten on it.
“I will tell you something else that will amuse you,” Stalin said. “It takes a certain amount of explosive metal to explode, our scientists tell me. Below this amount, it will not go off no matter what you do. Do you understand? Oh, it is a lovely joke.” Stalin laughed again.
Molotov also laughed, but uncertainly. This time, he did not see the joke.
Stalin must have sensed that; his uncanny skill at scenting weakness in his subordinates was not least among the talents that had kept him in power for twenty years. Still in that jovial mood, he said, “Never fear, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich; I shall explain. I would far sooner the Germans and Americans had no explosive metal, but because the Polish Jews divided it between them, neither has enough for a bomb. Now do you see?”