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Kekkonen said, “I presume we may now consider your ultimatum withdrawn?”
I ought to tell him no, Molotov thought. I ought to tell him we would be happy to go to war with the Finns and the Lizards both. That would jolt him out of his smug bourgeois complacency.
But it would also result in disaster for the Soviet Union. Molotov knew that only too well. Had he not known it, the recent horrid example of the Greater German Reich would have rubbed his nose in it. Fighting the Lizards was a tactic of last resort. And so, staring hatefully at Kekkonen through his spectacles, he bit off one word: “Da. ”
He took a certain amount of satisfaction in noting how relieved the Finn looked. Kekkonen hadn’t been sure he wouldn’t throw his country onto the funeral pyre for the sake of pride. The Nazis had, after all. But the Nazis weren’t rational, and never had been. The USSR was and would remain in the struggle against imperialism indefinitely. If he had to retreat today, he would advance tomorrow.
After Urho Kekkonen had left, Molotov summoned Andrei Gromyko and Marshal Zhukov. He told them what the Finns had done. Zhukov cursed. Gromyko came to the point: “What did you tell him, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich?”
“That we withdraw the ultimatum.” The words were sour as vomit in Molotov’s mouth, but he brought them out even so. Turning to Zhukov, he asked, “Or do you think I made a mistake?”
“No,” Zhukov said at once. “When the devil’s grandmother starts fooling with your plans, you have to change them.”
Molotov was relieved there. Unlike Kekkonen, he didn’t show it. Had Zhukov been bound and determined to fight the Lizards, he would have brushed Molotov aside and done it. But he’d fought them a generation before and wasn’t eager to repeat the experience, any more than Molotov was.
Gromyko’s shaggy eyebrows twitched. “Just when you think the Race too stupid to survive, you get a surprise like this.”
“What do you suggest to avoid similar unfortunate surprises, Andrei Andreyevich?” Molotov asked.
“Well, if we were going to present Romania with an ultimatum, this would be a good time to put it back on the shelf,” Gromyko answered. “Of course, we had no such plan in mind.”
“Of course,” Molotov said in a hollow voice. All three men looked at one another. Romania still held Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, lands the USSR had reclaimed under the 1940 Vienna Award, only to lose them again in the aftermath of the Hitlerite invasion. Now that the Reich could no longer come to the aid of its friends, the Romanian government would have been next on the list after Finland. But if the Romanians screamed for help and the Lizards answered, that would just give the Race a longer frontier with the USSR.
“Dammit, why wasn’t this anticipated?” Zhukov glared at Molotov. “We could have ended up with our dicks in the sausage machine.”
As he had with Kekkonen, Molotov had to fight for calm. If Zhukov got angry enough, the Red Army would start running the Soviet Union the very next day. But Molotov knew that acting as if he was afraid of that only made it more likely to happen. After a deep breath, he asked, “Georgi Konstantinovich, did you expect the Finns to seek support from the Lizards?”
“Me? No way in hell,” Zhukov answered. “But I’m a soldier. I don’t pretend to be a diplomat. I leave that kind of worrying to people who do pretend to be diplomats.” Now he glowered at Andrei Gromyko. Better at Gromyko than at me, Molotov thought.
Gromyko’s equanimity was almost as formidable as Molotov’s. The foreign commissar said, “We tried something. It didn’t work. The world will not end. No one reasonable could have imagined that the Finns would prefer the Race to their fellow humans.”
Zhukov grunted. “They preferred the Nazis to their fellow humans, back in ’41. They don’t much like us, for some reason or other.”
That would do as an understatement till a better one came along. As Zhukov said, the Finns had become Hitler’s cobelligerents as soon as they got the chance. Now they were teaching the Lizards to play balance-of-power politics? All that to avoid the influence of the peace-loving workers and peasants of the USSR? Molotov shook his head. “The Finns,” he said, “are an inherently unreliable people.”
“That’s true enough,” Marshal Zhukov agreed. In musing tones, he went on, “We could probably win a war in Finland, even against the Race. The Lizards’ logistics are very bad.”
“We could probably win a war against the Race in Finland,” Gromyko said acidly. “The Nazis more or less won a war against the Race in Poland. But they didn’t win their war against the Race. Could we?”
“Of course not,” Zhukov answered at once.
“Of course not. I agree,” Molotov said. “That is why, when Kekkonen presented me with a fait accompli, I saw no choice but to withdraw our note. We cannot anticipate everything, Georgi Konstantinovich. Even the dialectic shows only trends, not details. We shall have other chances.”
“Oh, very well.” Zhukov sounded like a sulky child.
“It is not as if our own sovereignty were weakened,” Gromyko said, and the marshal nodded. That satisfied him, as least for the moment. It salved Molotov, but it didn’t satisfy him. The Soviet Union’s sovereignty survived; its prestige, as he knew too well, had taken a beating.
Something would have to be done about that. Not in Europe, barring desperate times he didn’t foresee. The Lizards’ eye turrets were looking that way. But the USSR had the longest land frontier of any nation-any human nation-on Earth. “Persia,” Molotov murmured. “Afghanistan. China, of course. Always China.”
With considerable pleasure, Atvar studied the reports he had received from Helsinki and Moscow. Swinging one eye turret toward Pshing, he said, “Here is something that, for once, appears to have worked very well indeed. The Soviet Union has retreated from its threats against Finland, and our influence over that small not-empire is increased.” His mouth fell open in a laugh. “Since we had essentially no influence over Finland up until this time, any influence is an increase.”
“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” his adjutant agreed. After a moment, though, he added, “A pity we could not arrange to incorporate the not-empire into the territory we administer directly.”
“I too would have liked that,” Atvar said. “But when our representative broached the idea to the leaders of the Finnish not-empire, they flatly refused. We have taken what we could get-not everything we wanted, but much better than nothing.”
Pshing sighed. “On this world, Exalted Fleetlord, we have never been able to get everything we wanted. Too often, we have had to count ourselves lucky to get any of what we wanted.”
“That, unfortunately, is also truth,” the fleetlord said. “It is why I agreed to this half measure-in fact, something less than a half measure. But it did succeed in making the SSSR pull back.”
“What would
you have done had the SSSR chosen to invade this small not-empire in spite of our presence there?” Pshing asked.
“Let me put it this way: I am glad we did not have to put it to the test.” Atvar felt like adding an emphatic cough to that, but didn’t; he didn’t care to have his adjutant know just how glad he was. “One thing we have done since coming to Tosev 3 is show the Big Uglies that they can-indeed, that they must-rely on our word. Because of that, the Russkis were convinced we would honor our commitment to Finland, and so did not presume to test it. If you think this makes me unhappy, you are mistaken.”
“What can we do to increase our influence over the Finns now that we have established this presence?” Pshing asked.
“I do not yet know that,” Atvar answered. “We have had little to do with that subgroup of Big Uglies up till now, not least because of the truly horrendous climate of their not-empire. Reports from both the Russkis and the Deutsche indicate that they are first-rate fighters. Our own experts indicate that the Deutsche have not stinted in keeping them supplied with the most sophisticated Tosevite weaponry.”
“Not explosive-metal bombs, I hope,” his adjutant exclaimed.
“Not to my knowledge, for which I praise the spirits of Emperors past.” Atvar cast down his eye turrets for a moment. “No, we are nearly certain the Finns do not possess weapons of that type.”
“Then, in case of emergency, we can use the threat of employing such weapons against them to bring them toward meeting our requirements,” Pshing said.
But Atvar made the negative hand gesture. “That has been considered. It has also been rejected. Analysis indicates that the Finnish Tosevites would be more likely either to resist on their own or to call on the Russkis for aid against us.”
“How could they do that?” Pshing asked. “They are presently calling on us for aid against the SSSR.”
