Striking the Balance

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. Thekolkhoz 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 allmaskirovka, 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 thegulag. They werehis.

“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 reachedKolkhoz 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.”