Upsetting the Balance (54 page)

“A question, if I may,” Vesstil said. “How does your English have a word for spaceship and the idea of a spaceship without having the spaceship itself? Does not the word follow the thing it describes?”

“Not always, not with us,” Yeager answered with a certain amount of pride. “We have something called science fiction. That means stories that imagine what we’ll be able to build when we know more than we do now. People who write those stories sometimes have to invent new words or use old ones in new ways to get across the new things or ideas they’re talking about.”

“You Tosevites, you imagine too much and you move too fast to make what you imagine real—so the Race would say,” Vesstil answered with a sniffy hiss. “Change needs study, not—stories.” He hissed again.

Sam felt like laughing, or possibly pounding his head against the side of the buckboard. Of all the things
he’d
never imagined, a Lizard sneering at the concept of science fiction stood high on the list.

They came to a little hamlet called Couch. Yeager had been in a lot of little backwoods towns before. He’d waited for the locals to give them the suspicious once-over he’d got more times than he could count. Having Vesstil along should have made things worse. But the Couchians or Couchites or whatever they were went about their business. Sam wondered how many visiting firemen had come to look over the spaceship. Enough to get them used to the idea of strangers, anyway.

The driver pulled up at a general store across the street from a big shed, much the largest building in town. Yeager wondered what it had been for: curing tobacco, maybe. It had that look. But, to his surprise, Tompkins didn’t take them over to the shed. Instead, they walked into the general store.

The fellow behind the counter was on the scrawny side and had a scraggly gray beard. Those details and some bare shelves aside, he and his store might have been pulled out of a Norman Rockwell painting and set in motion. “Mornin’,” he said with the hillbilly twang Yeager had heard from players in ballparks scattered all across the country.

“Morning, Terence,” Major Tompkins answered. “Mind if we use your back room?” Terence (
hell of a name,
Sam thought) shook his head. Before the major could lead Yeager and Vesstil through the door to the back room, it opened, and three men came out into the store.

Sam stared. He knew he was staring, but he couldn’t help it. Of all the people he never would have expected to see in a small-town general store, Albert Einstein ranked high on the list—so high, in fact, that he needed a moment to realize one of the physicist’s companions was Benito Mussolini, complete with the enormous concrete jaw that showed up in all the newsreels.

Einstein eyed Vesstil with the same fascination Yeager felt toward
him.
Then the third man of the group spoke to Tompkins: “Bob’s still back there. He’s the one you’ll want to see, isn’t he, Major?”

“Yes, General Eisenhower,” the major answered. By then, Yeager had given up staring. When you got to the point where a mere general’s company made him not worth noticing till he opened his mouth, you’d come a hell of a long way from the Three-I League.

Eisenhower shepherded his VIPs out of the general store. Tompkins shepherded his not-so-VIPs into the backroom. Terence the storekeeper took everything in stride.

The back room had a trapdoor set into the floor. As soon as he saw it, Yeager figured out what was going on. Sure enough, it led not to a basement but to a tunnel, formidably shored up with timber. Tompkins carried an old-fashioned lantern to light the way. The lantern might once have burned kerosene, but now the smell of hot fat came from it.

The tunnel came out inside the shed, as Sam had expected it would. The interior of the building did smell powerfully of tobacco, though none was curing there now. Sam sighed. He still missed cigarettes, even if his wind was better these days than it had been for the past ten years.

But he forgot all about his longing when he looked around. These tanks and lines and valves and unnamable gadgets had come out of a veritable spaceship Vesstil had flown down from outer space to the surface of the earth. If people could figure out how to duplicate them—and the frame in which they’d flown—space travel would turn real for mankind, too.

Prowling among the disassembled pieces of the Lizard shuttlecraft was a tall, gray-haired man with slightly stooped shoulders and a long, thoughtful face. “Come on over with me—I’ll introduce you,” Tompkins said to Sam. Nodding to the tall man, he said, “Sir, this is Sergeant Sam Yeager, one of our best interpreters. Yeager, I’d like you to meet Robert Goddard. We filched him from the Navy when Vesstil brought Straha down in the shuttlecraft. He knows more about rockets than anyone around.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,” Yeager said, sticking out his hand. “I’ve read about your work in
Astounding
.”

“Good—we won’t be starting from scratch with you, then,” Goddard said with an encouraging smile. He was somewhere in his fifties, Yeager thought, but not very healthy . . . or maybe, like so many people, just working himself to death. He went on, “Hank—your Major Tompkins—is too kind. A good many Germans know more about this business than I do. They’ve made big ones; I’ve just made small ones. But the principles stay the same.”

“Yes, sir,” Yeager said. “Can we build—one of these?” He waved at the collection of hardware.

“The mechanical parts we can match—or at least we can make equivalents for them,” Goddard said confidently. Then he frowned. “The electric lines we can also match. The electronic controls are another matter altogether. There our friends here”—he nodded to Vesstil—“are years, maybe centuries, ahead of us. Working around that will be the tricky part.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam repeated. “What will you want me to do, sir?”

“You’re supposed to be a hot translator, aren’t you? You’ll run questions and answers back and forth between me and Vesstil. Between what we already know and what he can tell us—it’ll be a while before we get spaceships of our own, I expect, but even big rockets like the ones the Germans have would help us a lot. Hitting the Lizards from a couple of hundred miles away is a lot better than going at ’em face-to-face.”

“That’s true, sir.” Sam wondered how big a rocket would have to be to carry an atomic bomb. He didn’t ask. Vesstil had no business hearing of such things, and he didn’t know whether Goddard was cleared for them, either.

He laughed a little. The United States didn’t have a big rocket, and it didn’t have atomic bombs, either—and here he was, putting the two together. From everything he’d seen of the Lizards, they didn’t make leaps of imagination like that—which was why human beings still had a chance to win this war.

14

Nieh Ho-T’ing glowered at Liu Han. “You are the most exasperating woman in the history of the world,” he snarled.

Liu Han smiled back across the table at the dingy Peking rooming house. She sipped tea, nibbled at a rice cake, and said nothing. She’d been saying nothing ever since she’d let him know she had a good idea weeks before. He still had no notion what her idea was. She’d wanted to keep more control over it than he was willing to give: basically, she wanted to become one of the leaders in the Communists’ Peking underground. Nieh hadn’t been willing to pay that kind of price.

Beside him, Hsia Shou-Tao laughed raucously. “You sound like you’re in love with her, for heaven’s sake,” he said. Nieh glowered at him, too. Hsia thought of everything in terms of his crotch, not economics. But he also thought he knew how to get what he wanted. “If she won’t open up, we can always liquidate her. No one would miss her, that’s certain.”

Nieh glanced over to Liu Han to see if the threat had put her in fear. He didn’t think it had, and he was expert in gauging such things. She said, “If you kill me, you will never find out what I have in mind.”

“We don’t have to kill you,” Hsia said, his voice all the more frightening because he sounded so genial. “All we have to do is hurt you for a while.”

“Do what you want with me,” Liu Han said. “But who will trust you with his ideas if you torture me?”

That made Nieh wince. Mao had written that guerrillas should be like a fish concealed within the school of the people. If they scared the people away from them, they would stand alone and exposed to the wrath of the little scaly devils. Sighing, he made his first retreat: “I will give you what you ask, but only if I think your idea is good enough.”

“Then you will tell me you think it is bad, ignore me, and use it anyhow,” Liu Han said.

“I could do that now: make all the promises in the world and then break them,” Nieh Ho-T’ing reminded her. “If you want your idea used against the little devils, sooner or later you will have to tell me what it is. And if you want your reward, you will have to trust a promise that you will get it.”

Liu Han looked thoughtful when he was through. But then she said, “Any time anyone has promised me anything—men and little scaly devils both—it’s turned out to be a lie. Why should you be any different?”

“Because we are comrades in a fight against the same enemy,” Nieh answered. “If you show me a way to hurt the scaly devils, you
will
be rewarded. The People’s Liberation Army does not exploit the women who fight side by side with their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers.” He kicked Hsia Shou-Tao under the table. He had spoken sound doctrine, and wished Hsia were better at living up to it.

Hsia, for a wonder, kept his mouth shut. And, after keeping silent so long, Liu Han at last wavered. “I wish I could do this on my own,” she muttered. “Then I wouldn’t have to believe another pack of lies. But if I want to hurt the little devils—and I do—I need help. So—”

She talked for some time. The longer Nieh Ho-T’ing listened to her low-voiced description of what she had in mind, the more impressed he got. Hsia Shou-Tao said “A beast show!” in disparaging tones, but Nieh kicked him again. He wanted to hear every word of this.

When Liu Han finished, he dipped his head to her and said, “I think you may deserve everything you have been saying you wanted for so long. If it works as it should, this will let us get in among the scaly devils: to spy certainly, and maybe, as you say, to kill.”

“That is what I want,” Liu Han said. “I want the little devils to know I did it to them, too. They will know my name. It is in their records, and the machines that think for them will find it. They stole my child, my tiny daughter. Maybe I can force them to give her back.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing sent her a severe look. “And if they returned the child to you, you would abandon the campaign against the scaly imperialist aggressors?” he demanded. If she said yes to that, he would throw her out of the rooming house and think hard about having her liquidated. The dialectic of the class struggle was more important than merely personal concerns.

But Liu Han shook her head. “Nothing would make me stop fighting the little scaly devils. I owe them too much for that. You Communists seem to be doing more to fight them than anyone except maybe the Japanese, and I hate the eastern devils, too. So I will work with you whether or not I have my child—but I want her back.”

“Good enough,” Nieh said, relaxing. Injuries suffered at the hands of oppressors often led folk to the People’s Liberation Army. Once they learned the true doctrines the Communist Party espoused, they were likely to remain loyal members all their lives, and to be eager to help others escape from similar maltreatment.

Liu Han said, “Our best chance to smuggle weapons and explosives in amongst the little scaly devils, I think, is to use the men who display dung beetles and mice. The scaly devils, I have seen, are squeamish about these little creatures. They will not search the containers that carry them as thoroughly as they would if something else were inside.”

“That is a very good thought,” Nieh said.

“That is a
very
good thought,” Hsia Shou-Tao echoed. He looked at Liu Han as if he’d never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn’t, in any real sense of the word. He certainly hadn’t taken her seriously until this moment.

“The idea has one weakness,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said. “If the scaly devils search only by hand, we shall defeat them, and yours is a good way to do it. But if they use the machines that see into things, we shall be discovered.”

“That is true of any scheme for bringing weapons in among the little devils,” Liu Han said. Nieh Ho-T’ing nodded; she was right.

“Two weaknesses,” Hsia said. “The other is that those who will use the guns and grenades probably will not come out alive. It is hard to find men willing to die like that. Every time you use them up, too, finding more like them gets harder.”

“Do not tell the men giving the shows what we’re loading in among their creatures,” Liu Han said.

Nieh and Hsia both laughed. “You’re ruthless enough, that’s plain,” Nieh said. “But bombs and grenades aren’t light and are bulky. They would know the containers for their beetles or mice had been altered.”

“They would not know why, though,” Liu Han answered. “If the explosives were in a metal case painted black, we could say it was one of the scaly devils’ machines for making the films that they show on their little cinema screens. The animal-show men will be honored to believe that, and they probably will not ask the little devils about it.”

Nieh and Hsia Shou-Tao looked at each other. “This woman has the spirit of a people’s commissar in her,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said admiringly.

“Maybe she does, maybe she does,” Hsia said. He leered at Liu Han across the table. “She has other assets, too.”

Nieh wished Hsia would stop evaluating women principally on how beddable they were. He, too, had noticed that Liu Han was far from bad-looking, but that did not mean he thought she was beddable. He had the idea that any man who tried to force his way through her Jade Gate was likely to end up a eunuch like one of those who had served at the court of the old, corrupt Ch’ing emperors. If Hsia wasn’t smart enough to realize as much, he might have to find out the hard way.

“You have the idea now—I’ve given it to you,” Liu Han said, sounding unsure whether or not that had been wise. “Now to use it.”

“Now to use it,” Nieh Ho-T’ing agreed. “First we need to find the animal-show men we will need, and to get them to cooperate with us. Then we have to spread this idea far and wide throughout China. We need to learn of some great holiday the little scaly devils will be celebrating, and to attack them in many places at the same time. Each time we come up with a way to get inside their quarters, we can only use it once. We want to wring the most advantage we can from this.”

“Yes,” Liu Han said. “That would be a good beginning to my revenge.”

Nieh sipped tea as he studied her. A good beginning to her revenge? Most people would have been satisfied with that as the whole of it. He nodded thoughtfully. The demands she’d made of him before she would reveal her idea seemed more and more reasonable. Even if she was a woman, she had a soldier’s ruthless spirit.

He lifted the handleless cup in salute to her. “To the people’s revolution and to liberation from all oppression!” he said loudly. She smiled at him and drank to the toast.

A new idea slid through his mind: if a woman was already a revolutionary, did that not give wanting her a sound ideological basis? It was, he told himself, purely a theoretical question. Had he not already told himself Liu Han was not beddable? He glanced her way again. It was a pity . . .

The freighter drew close to New York City. Vyacheslav Molotov stared at the great towers with loathing and envy he concealed behind his usual expressionless façade. As he had when he visited Hitler in Berlin, he felt he was entering a citadel of the enemy of everything he and the Soviet Union stood for. Molotov on Wall Street! If that wasn’t an acting-out of the struggle inherent in the historical dialectic, he didn’t know what was.

And yet, just as fascist Germany and the Soviet Union had found common cause a few years before, so now the Soviet Union and the United States, already allies against Hitlerism, joined forces against a worse invader. When you looked at life without the dialectic to give it perspective, it could be very strange.

Pointing ahead to the arrogant, decadent skyline, Molotov’s interpreter said, “The Americans have taken their share of damage in this war, Comrade Foreign Commissar.”

“So they have,” Molotov said. Most of the glass in the windows of the tall, thrusting skyscrapers had been shattered. Black scorchmarks running up the sides of the buildings showed where fires had blazed out of control. A couple leaned drunkenly to one side, as if unlikely to stand much longer. Molotov surveyed the scene with a cold eye, then added, “Only fit that they be reminded they are in a war. Against the Germans, they did the building and we did the dying.”

A tugboat came puffing out to greet the freighter. A man with a megaphone stood at the bow and bellowed something in English. The interpreter translated: “He says, ‘Ahoy, Lithuanian ship! You’re a long way from home.’ This, I believe, is intended as a joke.”

“Heh, heh,” Molotov said, just like that. He’d forgotten his vessel still flew the extinct gold, green, and red banner of what was now, and rightfully, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (he also managed to forget that the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic had been under Nazi occupation till the Lizards came, and still showed no delight at the prospect of bowing to the authority of Moscow).

“How shall I reply?” the interpreter asked.

Molotov was tempted to send the American greetings in the name of the Lithuanian Congress of People’s Deputies, but refrained. “Tell him I greet him in the name of the Soviet people and of General Secretary Stalin.”

More shouts in English. The interpreter said, “This time he replies correctly. He says we are to let him assist us in berthing.”

“Then we shall do so,” Molotov answered. “Take this up with the ship’s officers, not with me. I had thought they might bring proper diplomatic personnel to meet with us here, but if this is not the case, we shall proceed into New York.” He spoke as if he were about to enter some jungle filled with wild and savage tribesmen. That was how he felt: to him, capitalists were no more than predatory wild beasts, and New York their principal lair.

Following the lead of the tug, the freighter sailed into the East River. The battered ship left behind the Statue of Liberty, standing tall and proud on Bedloe’s Island. Molotov had nothing in principle against the ideals the statue epitomized, but thought the United States, with its exploitation of Negroes by whites, of poor by rich, of proletarians by capitalists (which was not quite the same thing), did a poor job of living up to them.

The freighter tied up at Pier 11, quite near the shore. The interpreter pointed to a sign in English. “Comrade Foreign Commissar, do you know what there is between this and Pier 12, the next one over?” he said, his voice quivering with indignation. “There is what is called the Municipal Skyport, where the rich capitalists can land their private seaplanes conveniently close to their Wall Street offices.”