Kurchatov and Flerov looked at each other. “If things go well, four years,” Flerov said.
“If things go very well, three and a half,” Kurchatov said. The younger man gave him a dubious look, but finally spread his hands, conceding the point.
Three and a half years? More likely four? Molotov felt as if he’d been kicked in the belly. The Soviet Union would have its one weapon, which it could hardly use for fear of bringing hideous retaliation down on its head? And the Germans and the Americans-and, for all he knew, maybe the English and the Japanese, too-ahead in the race to make bombs of their own?
“How am I to tell this to Comrade Stalin?” he asked. The question hung in the air. Not only would the scientists incur Stalin’s wrath for being too optimistic, but it might fall on Molotov as well, as the bearer of bad news.
If the academicians were as irreplaceable as they thought, the odds were good that Stalin wouldn’t do anything to them.
Over the years, Molotov had done his best to make himself indispensable to Stalin, but indispensable wasn’t the same as irreplaceable, and he knew it.
He asked, “Can I tell the General Secretary you will succeed within two and a half to three years?” If he could arrange to present a small disappointment rather than a big one, he might yet deflect Stalin’s anger.
“Comrade Foreign Commissar, you can of course tell the Great Stalin whatever you please, but that will not be the truth,” Kurchatov said. “When the time passes and we do not succeed, you will have to explain why.”
“If the Lizards give us so much time for research and engineering,” Flerov added; he looked to be enjoying Molotov’s discomfiture.
“If the Lizards overrun this place, Comrades, I assure you that you will have no more joy from it than I,” Molotov said stonily. Had the Germans defeated the Soviet Union, Molotov would have gone up against a wall (with a blindfold if he was lucky), but nuclear physicists might have been useful enough to save their skins by turning their coats. The Lizards, however, would not want human beings to know atoms existed, let alone that they could be split. Driving that home, Molotov added, “And if the Lizards overrun this place, it will be in large measure because you and your team have failed to give the workers and people of the Soviet Union the weapons they need to carry on the fight.”
“We are doing everything men can do,” Flerov protested. “There are too many things we simply do not know.”
Now he was the one who sounded uncertain, querulous. That was how Molotov wanted it. He snapped, “You had better learn, then.”
Softly, Igor Kurchatov said, “It is easier to give orders to generals, Comrade Foreign Commissar, than to nature. She reveals her secrets at a pace she chooses.”
“She has revealed altogether too many of them to the Lizards,” Molotov said. “If they can find them, so can you.” He turned his back to show the interview was over. He thought he’d recovered well from the shocking news the academicians had given him. How well he would recover after he gave Stalin that news was, unfortunately, another question.
The peddler smiled in appreciation as David Goldfarb handed him a silver one-mark piece with Kaiser Wilhelm’s mustachioed image stamped on it. “That’s good money, friend,” he said. Along with the baked apple on a stick that Goldfarb had bought, he gave back a fistful of copper and potmetal coins by way of change. His expression turned sly. “You have money that good, it doesn’t matter how funny your Yiddish sounds.”
“Geh kak afen yam,” Goldfarb said genially, doing his best to hide the sudden pounding of his heart. “Where I come from, everybody talks like me.”
“What a miserable, ignorant place that must be,” the peddler retorted. “At first, I thought you had a nice Warsaw accent. The more I listen to you, though, the more I figure you’re from Chelm.”
Goldfarb snorted. The legendary town was full of shlemiels. What he really spoke, of course, was Yiddish with a Warsaw accent corrupted by living his whole life in England. He hadn’t thought it was corrupted till the British sub dropped him on the flat, muddy coast of Poland. Now, comparing the way he spoke to the Yiddish of people who used it every day of their lives, he counted himself lucky that they understood him at all.
As an excuse not to say where he really did come from, he bit into the apple Hot, sweet juice flooded into his mouth. “Mmm,” he said, a wordless, happy sound.
“It would be really good if I could get some cinnamon,” the peddler said. “But there’s none to be had, not for love nor money.”
“Good anyhow,” Goldfarb mumbled, his full mouth muffling whatever odd accent the King’s English gave him. With a nod to the peddler, he walked south down the dirt track toward Lodz. He was, he thought, just a couple of hours away. He hoped that wouldn’t be too late. From what he’d heard just before he sailed from England, his cousin Moishe was in jail somewhere in Lodz. He wondered how he was supposed to get Moishe out.
With a noncom’s fatalism, he put, that out of his mind. He’d worry about it when the time came. First he had to get to Lodz. He’d already discovered that a couple of years of fighting the war electronically had left his wind a shadow of what it was supposed to be. His physical-training sergeant would not have approved.
“Something to be said for not laying about puffing on fags all day long-it’d be even shorter if I’d had more to smoke,” he said in low-voiced English. “All the same, I miss ’em.”
He looked around. Just a glimpse of the endless flat farmland of the Polish plain had been plenty to tell him all he needed to know about that country’s unhappy history. Besides the shelter of the English Channel, the United Kingdom had mountains in the west and north in which to take refuge: witness the survival of Welsh and Scots Gaelic over the centuries.
Poland, now-all the Poles had was the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, and nothing whatever to keep either one of them out except their own courage. And when the Germans outweighed them three to one and the Russians two or three times as badly as that, even suicidal courage too often wasn’t enough.
No wonder they give their Jews a hard time, he thought with a sudden burst of insight: they’re sure they can beat the Jews After losing so many wars to their neighbors, having in their midst people they could trounce had to feel sweet. That didn’t make him love the people who had driven his parents from Poland, but it did help him understand them.
Goldfarb looked around again. Almost everywhere in England, he’d been able to see hills on the horizon. Here, it went on forever. The endless flat terrain made him feel insignificant and at the same time conspicuous, as if he were a fly crawling across a big china platter.
The green of Polish fields was different from what he’d known in England, too: duller somehow. Maybe it was the light, maybe the soil; whatever it was, he’d noticed it almost at once.
He’d noticed the workers in those fields, too. Englishmen who labored on the land were farmers. The Poles were inarguably peasants. He had trouble defining the difference but, as with the colors of the fields, it was unmistakable. Maybe part of it lay in the way the Polish farmers went about their work. By the standards Goldfarb was used to, they might as well have been moving in slow motion. Their attitude seemed to say that how hard they worked didn’t matter-they weren’t going to realize much from their labors, anyway.
A noise in the sky, like an angry cockchafer… Goldfarb had heard that noise more times than he cared to remember, and his reaction to it was instinctive: he threw himself flat. Hugging the ground, a flight of German bombers roared by, heading east.