Upsetting the Balance Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a bake oven in summer, even though the mile-high air shed heat fast at night. The physicists and technicians in charge of the pile nodded as Groves approached. They didn’t necessarily love him, but they took him seriously, which sufficed.
    “How much closer are we?” he asked Enrico Fermi.
    “We have gained another day,” the physicist answered. “The output of plutonium from this pile does continue to increase.”
    “Not fast enough,” Groves growled. The pile produced grams of plutonium per day. The United States needed several kilograms of the stuff to add to what they received from inside the Soviet Union by way of a reluctant German courier, the Jewish irregulars in Poland, and a British submarine. Groves had shepherded that plutonium all the way from Boston to Denver, only to be told when he got it here that he hadn’t brought enough. The memory still rankled.
    Fermi shrugged a large Latin shrug. “General, I cannot change the laws of nature. I can learn to apply them more efficiently, and this I try to do: this is how we gain time on the date I first predicted. But to increase production to any really great degree, we need to build more piles. That is all there is to it.”
    “That’s not going fast enough, either,” Groves said. Another pile was going up under the stands at the opposite end of the football field. They had plenty of uranium oxide for it. Getting the super-pure graphite they needed was another matter. Groves was an expediter supreme, but the transportation snarl into which the Lizards had thrown the United States was more than enough to drive even expediters mad.
    “What we really need is to build piles of more efficient design,” Fermi said. “The Hanford site on the Columbia would be ideal—far more water for cooling than we can take from the South Platte, an area far removed from the Lizards—”
    “I’m not so sure of that,” Groves broke in. “They’re supposed to have a base in Idaho, only a couple of hundred miles off to the east.”
    “A small one.” Fermi pinched his thumb and forefinger together to show how small. “As soon as Professor Larssen returns to confirm that the site is as good as it appears to be, we will begin centering more and more of our activities there.”
    “As soon as Larssen gets back, yeah,” Groves said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. As far as he was concerned, Jens Larssen could stay away indefinitely. Yeah, sure, the guy had a beef: he’d been away from the Met Lab crew for a long time on a dangerous mission (any cross-country travel counted as a dangerous mission these days), and his wife, figuring he had to be dead, had fallen for Sergeant Sam Yeager—he’d been a corporal then—married him, and got pregnant. When Larssen turned out to be alive after all, she’d decided to stay with Yeager. None of that was calculated to improve a man’s attitude.
    But goddamn it, you couldn’t let how you felt drag down your work the way Larssen had. It wasn’t just his own work that had been hurting, either. He’d been taking his colleagues’ minds off what they were supposed to be doing, too. Groves hadn’t been sorry to see him volunteer to scout out Hanford, Washington, and would hold in his delight at seeing him come back.
    “Professor Larssen has had a difficult time,” Fermi said, reacting to the dislike in Groves’ voice.
    “Professor Fermi, the whole country—hell, the whole world—has had a difficult time,” Groves retorted. “It’s not like he’s the only one. He’d better stop whimpering and pull himself together.”
    He leaned toward Fermi, using his physical presence to make his point for him. He wasn’t that much taller than the Italian, but he was wider, and harder and tougher to boot. Fermi said, “If you will excuse me, General, I have some calculations I must attend to,” and hurried away.
    Groves grunted. Scoring a victory against a mild-mannered physics prof was like shooting fish in a barrel—yeah,