Striking the Balance

From all he’d learned-Yeager and the Lizard prisoners came back to mind-the Lizards excelled at long-term planning. They looked down their snouts at people because people, measured by the way they looked at things, had no foresight. From a merely human perspective, though, the Lizards were so busy looking at the whole forest that they sometimes didn’t notice the tree next door was in the process of toppling over and landing on their heads.

“Sooner or later, we’ll find out whether they’re right or we are, or maybe that everybody’s wrong,” he said.

That wasn’t the sort of question with which he was good at dealing. Tell him you needed this built within that length of time for the other amount of money and he’d either make it for you or tell you it couldn’t be done-and why. Those were the kinds of questions engineers were supposed to handle.You want philosophy, he thought,

you should have gone to a philosopher.

And yet, in the course of his engineering work for this project, he’d listened to a lot of what the physicists had to say. Learning how the bomb did what it did helped him figure out how to make it. But when Fermi and Szilard and the rest of them got to chewing the fat, the line between engineering and philosophy sometimes got very blurry. He’d always thought he had a good head for math, but quantum mechanics made that poor head spin.

Well, he didn’t have to worry about it, not in any real sense of the word. What he did have to worry about was picking some luckless physicist and shipping him off to Russia. Of all the things he’d ever done in his nation’s service, he couldn’t think of one that roused less enthusiasm in him.

And, compared to the poor bastard who’d actually have to go, he was in great shape.

III

Panagiotis Mavrogordato pointed to the coastline off theNaxos’ port rail. “There it is,” he said in Greek-accented German. “The Holy Land. We dock in Haifa in a couple of hours.”

Moishe Russie nodded. “Meaning no offense,” he added in German of his own, with a guttural Yiddish flavor to it, “but I won’t be sorry to get off your fine freighter here.”

Mavrogordato laughed and tugged his flat-crowned black wool sailor’s cap down lower on his forehead. Moishe wore a similar cap, a gift from one of the sailors aboard theNaxos. He’d thought the Mediterranean would be warm and sunny all the time, even in winter. It was sunny, but the breeze that blew around him-blew through him-was anything but warm.

“There’s no safe place in a war,” Mavrogordato said. “If we got through this, I expect we can get through damn near anything,Theou thelontos.” He took out a string of amber worry beads and worked on them to make sure God would be willing.

“I can’t argue with you about that,” Russie said. The rusty old ship had been sailing into Rome when what had been miscalled the eternal city-and was the Lizards’ chief center in Italy-exploded in atomic fire. The Germans were still bragging about that over the shortwave, even though the Lizards had vaporized Hamburg shortly afterwards in retaliation.

“Make sure you and your family are ready to disembark the minute we tie up at the docks,” Mavrogordato warned. “The lot of you are the only cargo we’re delivering here this trip, and as soon as the Englishmen pay us off for getting you here in one piece, we’re heading back to Tarsus as fast as theNaxos

will take us.” He stamped on the planking of the deck. TheNaxos had seen better decades. “Not that that’s what you’d call fast.”

“We didn’t bring enough to have to worry about having it out of order,” Moishe answered. “As long as I make sure Reuven isn’t down in the engine room, we’ll be ready as soon as you like.”

“That’s a good boy you have there,” the Greek captain answered. Mavrogordato’s definition of a good boy seemed to be one who got into every bit of mischief imaginable. Moishe’s standards were rather more sedate. But, considering everything Reuven had been through-everything the whole family had been through-he couldn’t complain nearly so much as he would have back in Warsaw.

He went back to the cabin he shared with Reuven and his wife Rivka, to make sure he’d not been telling fables to Mavrogordato. Sure enough, their meager belongings were neatly bundled, and Rivka was making sure Reuven stayed in one place by reading to him from a book of Polish fairy tales that had somehow made the trip first from Warsaw to London and then from London almost to the Holy Land. If you read to Reuven, or if he latched onto a book for himself, he’d hold still; otherwise, he seemed a perpetual motion machine incarnated in the shape of a small boy-and Moishe could think of no more fitting shape for a perpetual-motion machine to have.

Rivka put up the book and looked a question at him. “We land in a couple of hours,” he said. She nodded. She was the glue that held their family together, and he-well, he was smart enough to know it.