Striking the Balance (67 page)

“Arigato,”
the major said, giving him a politely sardonic seated bow.

“We have worked together against the scaly devils before.” Nieh knew he was pleading, and knew he should not plead. But the Japanese, man for man, were better soldiers than either the troops of the People’s Liberation Army or the forces of the Kuomintang. Having Mori’s detachment as part of the local popular front would give the little scaly devils a great deal of added grief. And so Nieh went on, “The artillery shells with which you supplied me were put to good use, and caused the little devils many casualties.”

“Personally, I am glad this is so,” Mon replied. “But at the time you got those shells from me, the little devils and Japan were at war with each other. That does not now seem to be the case. If we join in attacks against the scaly devils and are identified, any chance of peace may be destroyed. I will not do that without a direct order from the Home Islands, no matter what my feelings are.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing got to his feet. “I will return to Peking, then.” Unspoken was the warning that, if the Japanese kept him from returning or shot him, they would find themselves rather than the little devils the focus of Chinese efforts from then on.

Even though he was but an eastern devil, Mori had enough subtlety to catch the warning. He too rose, and bowed once more to Nieh. “As I say, I wish you personal good luck against the little scaly devils. But, when set against the needs of the nation, personal wishes must give way.”

He would have phrased it differently had he been a Marxist- Leninist, but the import was the same. “I bear you no personal ill-will, either,” Nieh said, and left the Japanese camp in the countryside for the hike back to Peking.

Dirt scuffed under his sandals as he trudged along. Crickets chirped in the undergrowth. Dragonflies skimmed by, darting and twisting with maneuvers impossible for any fighter plane. Farmers and their wives bent their backs in fields of wheat and millet, endlessly weeding. Had Nieh been an artist instead of a soldier, he might have paused a while to sketch.

What he was thinking about, though, had nothing to do with art. He was thinking Major Mori’s Japanese had lingered close by Peking too long already. The little scaly devils. If they ever thought to do it, could use the Japanese against the popular front in the same way the Kuomintang had used warlord forces against the People’s Liberation Army. That would let the little devils fight the Chinese without committing their own troops to the effort.

He had nothing personal against the Japanese major, no. But, because he respected Mori as a soldier, he found him all the more worrisome: he had the potential to be more dangerous. With the razor-sharp logic of the dialectic, that led to an ineluctable conclusion: Major Mori’s pocket would have to be liquidated as soon as possible.

“It might even work out for the best,” Nieh said aloud: no one to hear him but for a couple of ducks paddling in a pond. If the little scaly devils were subtle enough to understand indirect hints, the disappearance of possible allies would give them the idea that the popular front would not only prosecute a campaign against them, but would do so vigorously.

He reached Peking in the middle of the night. Off in the distance, gunfire rattled. Someone was striking a blow for the progressive cause. “What are you doing here at this hour?” a human gate guard asked.

“Coming in to see my cousin.” Nieh showed a false identity card, and handed the guard a folded banknote with it.

The guard returned the card, but not the money. “Pass in, then,” he said gruffly. “But if I see you coming around again so late, I am going to decide you’re a thief. Then it will go hard for you.” He brandished a spiked truncheon, reveling in his tiny authority.

Nieh had all he could do not to laugh in the fellow’s face. Instead, he ducked his head as if in fright and hurried past the guard into Peking. The roominghouse was not far away.

When he got there, he found Liu Han chasing Liu Mei around the otherwise empty dining room. Liu Mei was squealing with glee. She thought it a wonderful game. Liu Han looked about ready to fall over. She shook a finger at her daughter. “You go to sleep like a good girl or maybe I will give you back to Ttomalss.”

Liu Mei paid no attention. By Liu Han’s weary sigh, she hadn’t expected Liu Mei to pay any attention. Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “What will you do with the little scaly devil called Ttomalss?”

“I don’t know,” Liu Han said. “It’s good to have you back, but ask me hard questions another time. Right now I’m too tired to see straight, let alone think straight.” She ran and kept Liu Mei from overturning a chair on top of herself. “Impossible daughter!” Liu Mei thought it was funny.

“Has the scaly devil been punished enough?” Nieh persisted.

“He could never be punished enough, not for what he did to me, not for what he did to my daughter, not for what he did to Bobby Fiore and other men and women whose names I do not even know,” Liu Han said fiercely. Then she calmed somewhat “Why do you ask?”

“Because it may be useful, before long, to deliver either the little devil himself or his body to the authorities his kind have set up here in Peking,” Nieh answered. “I wanted to know which you would prefer.”

“That would be a decision for the central committee, not for me alone,” Liu Han said, frowning.

“I know.” Nieh watched her more warily than he’d ever expected when they first met. She’d come so far from the peasant woman grieving over her stolen child she’d been then. When class was ignored, when ability was allowed, even encouraged, to rise as in the People’s Liberation Army, astonishing things sometimes happened. Liu Han was one of those astonishments. She hadn’t even known what the central committee was. Now she could manipulate it as well as a Party veteran. He said, “I have not discussed the matter before the committee. I wanted to learn your opinion first”

“Thank you for thinking of my personal concerns,” she said. She looked through Nieh for a little while as she thought. “I do not know,” she went on. “I suppose I could accept either. If it helped our cause against the little scaly devils.”

“Spoken like a woman of the Party!” Nieh exclaimed.

“Perhaps I would like to join,” Liu Han said. “If I am to make myself all I might be here, I should join. Is that not so?”

“It is so,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “You shall have instruction. If that is what you want. I would be proud to instruct you myself, in fact.” Liu Han nodded. Nieh beamed. Bringing a new member into the Party gave him the feeling a missionary had to have on bringing a new convert into the church. “One day,” he told her, “your place will be to give instruction, not to receive it.”

“That would be very fine,” Liu Han said. She looked through him again, this time perhaps peering ahead into the future. Seeing her so made Nieh nervous: did she see herself ordering him about?

He started to smile, then stopped. If she kept progressing at the rate she had thus far, the notion wasn’t so unlikely after all.

The clop of a horse’s hooves and the rattle of a buggy’s iron tires always took Leslie Groves back in time to the days before the First World War, when those noises had been the normal sound of getting from one place to another. When he remarked on that, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley shook his head. “It’s not quite right, General,” he said. “Back in those days, the roads this far outside of town wouldn’t have been paved.”

“You’re right, sir,” Groves admitted. He didn’t often yield points to anyone, not even to the nuclear physicists who sometimes made the Metallurgical Laboratory such a delight to administer, but this one he had to concede. “I remember when a little town felt medium-sized and a medium-sized one felt like a big city because they’d paved all the streets downtown.”

“That’s how it was,” Bradley said. “You didn’t have concrete and asphalt all over the place, not when I was a boy you didn’t. Dirt roads were a lot easier on a horse’s hooves. It was an easier time, a lot of ways.” He sighed, as any man of middle years will when he thinks back on the days of his youth.

Almost any man. Leslie Groves was an engineer to the core. “Mud,” he said. “Dust Lap robes, so you wouldn’t be filthy by the time you got where you were going. More horse manure than you could shake a stick at. More flies, too. Give me a nice, enclosed Packard with a heater on a good, flat, straight stretch of highway any old time.”

Bradley chuckled. “You have no respect for the good old days.”

“To hell with the good old days,” Groves said. “If the Lizards had come in the good old days, they’d have smashed us to bits so fast it wouldn’t even have been funny.”

“There I can’t argue with you,” Bradley said. “And going out to a two-hole Chick Sale with a half-moon window wasn’t much fun in the middle of winter.” He wrinkled his nose. “Now that I think back on it, it wasn’t much fun in hot weather, either.” He laughed out loud. “Yeah, General, to hell with the good old days. But what we’ve got now isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, either.” He pointed ahead to show what he meant.

Groves hadn’t been out to the refugee camp before. He knew of such places, of course, but he’d never had occasion to seek them out. He didn’t feel guilty about that; he’d had plenty to do and then some. If he hadn’t done what he’d done, the U.S.A. might well have lost the war by now, instead of sitting down with the Lizards as near equals at the bargaining table.

That didn’t make the camp any easier to take. He’d been shielded from just how bad war could be for those who got stuck in the gears. Because the Met Lab was so important, he’d always had plenty to eat and a roof over his head. Most people weren’t so lucky.

You saw newsreels of things like this. But newsreels didn’t usually show the worst The people in newsreels were black and white, too. And you didn’t smell them. The breeze was at his back, but the camp smelled like an enormous version of the outhouses Bradley had mentioned all the same.

People in newsreels didn’t come running at you like a herd of living skeletons, either, eyes enormous in faces with skin stretched drum-tight over bones, begging hands outstretched. “Please!” came the call, again and again and again. “Food, sir?” “Money, sir?” “Anything you’ve got, sir?” The offers the emaciated women made turned Groves’ ears red.

“Can we do anything more for these people than we’re doing, sir?” he asked.

“I don’t see what,” Bradley answered. “They’ve got water here. I don’t know how we’re supposed to feed them when we don’t have food to give.”

Groves looked down at himself. His belly was still ample. What there was went to the Army first, not to refugees and to people from Denver whose jobs weren’t essential to the war effort. That made good, cold, hard logical sense. Rationally, he knew as much. Staying rational wasn’t easy, not here.

“With the cease-fire in place, how soon can we start bringing in grain from up north?” he asked. “The Lizards won’t be bombing supply trains the way they used to.”

“That’s so,” Bradley admitted, “but they gave the railroads a hell of a pasting when they made their big push on the city. The engineers are still trying to straighten things out. Even when the trains start rolling, though, the other question is where the grain’ll come from. The Lizards are still holding an awful lot of our bread-basket. Maybe the Canadians’ll have some to spare. The scaly bastards haven’t hit them as hard as they did us, seems like.”

“They like warm weather,” Groves said. “There are better places to find it than north of Minnesota.”

“You’re right about that,” Bradley said. “But watching people starve, right here in the middle of the United States, that’s a damned hard thing to do, General. I never thought I’d live to see the day when we had to bring in what little we do have with armed guards to keep it from being stolen. And this is on our side of the line. What’s it like in territory the Lizards have held for the last couple of years? How many people have died for no better reason than that the Lizards didn’t give a damn about trying to feed them?”

“Too many,” Groves said, wanting to quantify that but unable to with any degree of certainty. “Hundreds of thousands? Has to be. Millions? Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

Bradley nodded. “Even if the Lizards do pull out of the U.S.A. and leave us alone for a while—and that’s the most we can hope for—what kind of country will we have left? I worry about that, General, quite a lot. Remember Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the Technocrats? A man with nothing in his belly will listen to any sort of damn fool who promises him three square meals a day, and we’ve got a lot of people with nothing in their bellies.”

As if to underscore his words, three horse-drawn wagons approached the refugee camp. Men in khaki who wore helmets surrounded the supply wagons on all sides. About half of them carried tommy guns; the rest had rifles with fixed bayonets. The surge of hungry people toward the wagons halted at a respectful distance from the troops.

“Hard to give shoot-to-kill orders to keep starving people from mobbing your food wagons,” Bradley said glumly. “If I hadn’t, though, the fast and the strong would get food, nobody else but. Can’t let that happen.”

“No, sir,” Groves agreed. Under the hard and watchful eyes of the American soldiers, their fellow citizens lined up to get the tiny handfuls of grain and beans the quartermasters had to dole out. By comparison, Depression soup kitchens had been five-star restaurants with blue-plate specials. The food then had been cheap and plain, but there’d always been plenty of it, once you swallowed enough of your pride to take charity.

Now . . .  Watching the line snake forward, Groves realized he’d been so busy working to save the country that General Bradley’s question never once crossed his mind: what sort of country was he saving?

The more he looked around the refugee camp, the less he liked the answers he came up with.

For once in his life, Vyacheslav Molotov had to fight with every fiber of his being to maintain his stiff face.
No!
he wanted to scream at Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Let it go, you fool! We have so much of what we came here for. If you push too hard, you’ll be like the greedy dog in the story, that dropped its bone into the river trying to grab the one its reflection was holding.