“Nice to see the Lizards on the receiving end for a change instead of dishing it out,” Groves said.
Bradley nodded. “I hope those pilots can get down, get out of their planes, and get under cover before any Lizard rockets follow them home.” He had a reputation for being a soldiers’ general, for thinking of his men first. Groves felt a vague twinge of conscience that he hadn’t done the same.
As if to show how the job should be done, a Lizard fighter dove on the American lines like a swooping eagle. Instead of talons, it used two pods full of rockets to rend its foes. Men—and a few women—with red crosses in white circles on helmets and arm-bands ran forward to take the wounded back to aid stations.
“The Lizards don’t shoot at medics on purpose, do they?” Groves said. “They’re better at playing by the rules than the Japs were.”
“You can’t say things like that any more. Japan is on our side now.” A dry tone and a raised eyebrow warned that Bradley did not intend to be taken altogether seriously.
Another Lizard fighter pounded the American positions, this one close enough to Groves and Bradley that both men dove into a dugout to escape bomb fragments and cannon fire. Groves spat out mud. That wasn’t the taste of war he got in his usual theater of operations. He wasn’t used to looking down at himself and seeing a filthy uniform, either.
Bradley took it all in stride, although he wasn’t used to real live combat himself. As calmly as if he were still standing upright, he said, “We’ll want to site the bomb in an area where the Lizards are concentrating troops and matériel. In fact, we’ll do our best to create such an area. The tricky part will be doing it so the Lizards don’t notice what we’re up to till too late.”
“You tell me where you want it, sir, and I’ll get it there for you,” Groves promised, doing his best to match Bradley’s aplomb. “That’s how I earn my salary, after all.”
“No one has anything but praise for the way you’ve handled your project, General,” Bradley said. “When General Marshall—Secretary Marshall, I should say; his second hat takes precedence—sent me here to conduct the defense of Denver, he spoke very highly of you and of the cooperation I could expect from you. I haven’t been disappointed, either.”
Praise from George Marshall was praise indeed. Groves said, “We can get the bomb up to the front either by truck with reinforced suspension or by horse-drawn wagon, which is slower but might be less conspicuous. If we have to, I suppose we can send it up in pieces and assemble it where we’ll set it off. The beast is five feet wide and more than ten feet long, so it comes in a hell of a big crate.”
“Mm, I’ll have to think about that,” Bradley said. “Right now, I’m inclined to vote against it. If I understand correctly. If we lose any of the important parts, we could have all the rest and the thing still wouldn’t work. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. “If you try to start a jeep without a carburetor, you’d better hope you’re not going farther than someplace you can walk.”
Bradley had dirt all over his face, which made his grin seem brighter and more cheerful than it was. “Fair enough,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can to keep from having to use it—we’ve got a counterattack laid on for the Kiowa area, a little bit south of here, for which I have some hope. The Lizards had trouble on the plains southeast of Denver, and they still haven’t fully reorganized in that sector. We may hurt them.” He shrugged. “Or, on the other hand, we may just force them to concentrate and become more vulnerable to the bomb. We won’t know till we try.”
Groves brushed clinging dirt from his shirtfront and the knees of his trousers. “I’ll cooperate in any way you require, sir.” The words didn’t come easy. He’d grown used to being the biggest military fish in the pond in Denver. But he could no more have defended it from the Lizards than Bradley could have ramrodded the Metallurgical Laboratory project.
Bradley waved for his adjutant, a fresh-faced captain. “George, take General Groves back to the University of Denver. He’ll be awaiting our orders there, and prepared to respond to the situation however it develops.”
“Yes, sir.” George looked alarmingly clean and well pressed, as if mud knew better than to stick to him or his clothes. He saluted, then turned to Groves. “If you’ll come with me, sir—”
He had a jeep waiting. Groves had hoped he would; his office was most of a day’s ride away by horseback, and he was so heavy that neither he nor most horses enjoyed the process of equitation. He glanced skyward several times on the way back, though. The Lizards made a point of shooting at motor vehicles and those who rode in them. He managed to return to the university campus unpunctured, for which he was duly grateful.
That evening, a great rumble of gunfire came from the southeast, with flashes lighting the horizon like distant lightning. Groves went up to the roof of the Science Building for a better view, but still could not see much. He hoped the barrage meant the Army was giving the Lizards hell and not the other way around.
The next morning, an aide woke him before the sun rose. “Sir, General Bradley on the telephone for you.”
Groves yawned, rubbed his eyes, ran his hands through his hair, and scratched at his unruly mustache, which was tickling his nose. By the time he’d picked up the telephone, perhaps forty-five seconds after he’d been awakened, he sounded competent and coherent, even if he didn’t feel that way yet. “Groves here.”
“Good morning, General,” Bradley said through static that came from the telephone rather than from Groves’ fuzzy brain—or so he hoped, anyhow. “You remember that package we were discussing yesterday. It looks like we’re going to need it delivered.”
What felt like a jolt of electricity ran up Groves’ spine. All at once, he wasn’t sleepy any more. “Yes, sir,” he said. “As I told you, we’re ready. Ahh—will you want it all in one piece, or shall I send it by installments?”
“One piece would be sooner, wouldn’t it?” Without waiting for an answer, Bradley went on, “You’d better deliver it that way. We’ll want to open it as soon as we can.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll get right on it,” Groves said, and hung up. He threw off his pajamas and started scrambling into his uniform, begrudging even that little time wasted. When Groves said he’d get right on something, he didn’t mess around. He bulled past his aide without a Good morning and headed for the reprocessing plant, where the latest atomic bomb was stored. Soon enough, part of Colorado would go into the fire.
Liu Han’s heart pounded as she approached the little scaly devils’ pavilion that so marred the beauty of the island in the midst of the lake in the Forbidden City. Turning to Nieh Ho-T’ing, she said, “At last, we have a real victory against the little devils.”
Nieh glanced over to her. “You have a victory, you mean. It matters little in the people’s fight against imperialist aggression, except in the propaganda advantages we can wring from it.”
“I have a victory,” Liu Han conceded. She didn’t look back at Nieh. As far as she could see, he put ideology and social struggle even ahead of love, whether between a man and a woman or between a mother and a child. A lot of the members of the central committee felt the same way. Liu Han sometimes wondered if they were really human beings, or perhaps little scaly devils doing their best to impersonate people but not quite grasping what made them work.
Nieh said, “I hope you will not let your personal triumph blind you to the importance of the cause you also serve.” He might have less in the way of feelings than an ordinary person—or might just keep those feelings under tighter rein—but he was far from stupid.
A little scaly devil pointed his automatic rifle at the approaching humans. In fair Chinese, he said, “You will enter the tent. You will let us see you bring no concealed weapons with you. You will pass through this machine here.” He pointed to the device.
Liu Han had gone through it once before, Nieh Ho-Ting many times. Neither of them had ever tried sneaking armaments through. Nieh had Intellige
nce that the machine made a positively demonic racket if it did detect anything dangerous. So far, the People’s Liberation Army hadn’t found a way to fool it. Liu Han suspected that would come, sooner or later. Some very clever people worked for the Communist cause.
The machine kept quiet. Beyond it, another armed little devil said, “Pass on.” His words were almost unintelligible, but no one could mistake the gesture he made with the barrel of the gun.
Inside the tent, the little scaly devil called Ppevel sat behind the table at which Liu Han had seen him before. Beside him sat another male with much plainer body paint: his interpreter. Ppevel spoke in his own hissing, popping language. The interpreter turned his words into Chinese: “You are to be seated.” He pointed to the overstuffed chairs in front of Nieh and Liu Han. They were different from the ones that had been there on Liu Han’s last visit, and perhaps implied higher status for the envoys of the People’s Liberation Army.
Liu Han noticed that only peripherally. She had hoped to see Ttomalss sitting at the table with Ppevel, and had hoped even more to see her daughter. She wondered what the baby would look like, with her for a mother and the foreign devil Bobby Fiore for a father. Then a really horrible thought struck her if the little devils wanted to substitute another baby of the right age and type for the one she had borne, how would she know?
The answer to that was simple and revolting: she wouldn’t, not with any certainty. She muttered an inaudible prayer to the Amida Buddha that such a thought had not occurred to the devils. Nieh Ho-T’ing, she knew, had no more use for the Amida Buddha than for any other god or demon, and did not think anyone else should, either. Liu Han shrugged. That was his ideology. She did not discern certain truth in it.
Ppevel spoke again. The interpreter translated: “We will return this hatchling to the female as a token of our willingness to give in exchange for getting. We expect in return a halt to your guerrilla attacks here in Peking of half a year. Is this the agreement?” He added an interrogative cough.
“No,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered angrily. “The agreement is for three months only—a quarter year.” Liu Han’s heart sank. Would she lose her daughter again for the sake of a quarter of a year?
Ppevel and the interpreter went back and forth in their own tongue. Then the interpreter said, “You will please pardon me. A quarter of a year for you people is the correct agreement. This is half a year for my people.”
“Very well,” Nieh said. “We are agreed, then. Bring out the girl child you stole as part of your systematic exploitation of this oppressed woman.” He pointed to Liu Han. “And, though we did not agree, I tell you that you should apologize to her for the treatment she suffered at your hands, and also for the propaganda campaign of vilflication you recently conducted against her in an effort to keep from returning the smallest victim of your injustice.”
The interpreter translated that for Ppevel. The little devil with the fancy body paint spoke a single short sentence by way of reply, ending it with an emphatic cough. The interpreter said, “There is no agreement for the apology, so there shall be no apology.”
“It’s all right,” Liu Han said softly to Nieh. “I don’t care about the apology. I just want my baby back.”
He raised an eyebrow and didn’t say anything. She realized he hadn’t made his demand for the apology for her sake, or at least not for her sake alone. He was working for the cause, trying to win a moral advantage over the scaly devils as he would have done over the Japanese or the Kuomintang clique.
Ppevel turned both his eye turrets away from the human beings, back toward an opening that led to the rear part of the large tent. He spoke in his own language. Liu Han’s hands knotted into fists—she caught Ttomalss’ name. Ppevel repeated himself. Ttomalss came out. He was carrying Liu Han’s daughter.
For a moment, she couldn’t see what the baby looked like—her eyes blurred with tears. “Give her to me,” she said softly. The rage she’d expected to feel on confronting the little devil who’d stolen her child simply wasn’t there. Seeing the little girl had dissolved it.
“It shall be done,” Ttomalss answered in his own language, a phrase she understood. Then he switched to Chinese: “My opinion is that returning this hatchling to you is an error, that it would have served a far more useful purpose as a link between your kind and mine.” That said, he angrily thrust the baby out at Liu Han.
“My opinion is that you would serve a more useful purpose as night soil than you do now,” she snarled. The rage wasn’t gone after all, merely suppressed. She snatched her daughter away from the scaly devil.
Now, for the first time, she took a good look at the little girl. Her daughter was not quite the same color as a purely Chinese baby would have been: her skin was a little lighter, a little ruddier. Her face was a little longer, a little more forward-thrusting, too, with a narrow chin that reminded Liu Han of Bobby Fiore’s and laid to rest any fears that the little devils had switched children on her. The baby’s eyes had the proper shape; they weren’t round and staring like those of a foreign devil.
“Welcome back to your home, little one,” Liu Han crooned, hugging her daughter tightly to her. “Welcome back to your mother.”
The baby began to cry. It looked not to her but to Ttomalss, and tried to get away from her to go back to him. That look was like a knife in her heart. The sounds her daughter made were not like those of Chinese, nor even like those of the foreign devil language Bobby Fiore had spoken. They were the hisses and pops of the little scaly devils’ hateful speech. Among them was an unmistakable emphatic cough.
Ttomalss spoke with what sounded like spiteful satisfaction: “As you see, the hatchling is now used to the company of males of the Race, not to your kind. Such language as it has learned is our language. Its habits are our habits. It looks like a Big Ugly, yes, but its thoughts are those of the Race.”
Liu Han wished she had somehow smuggled a weapon into the tent. She would cheerfully have slain Ttomalss for what he’d done to her daughter. The baby kept twisting in her arms, trying to get away, trying to go back to the slavery with Ttomalss that was all it had ever known. Its cries dinned in her ears.
Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “What has been done can be undone. We shall reeducate the child as a proper human being. This will take time and patience, but it can be done and it shall be done.” He spoke the phrase in Chinese.
“It shall be done.” Liu Han used the little devils’ language, throwing the words in Ttomalss’ face and adding an emphatic cough of her own for good measure.
Her daughter stared up at her, eyes wide with wonder, at hearing her use words it understood. Maybe it would be all right after all, Liu Han thought. When she’d first met Bobby Fiore, the only words they’d had in common had been a handful from the speech of the little scaly devils. They’d managed, and they’d gone on to learn fair amounts of each other’s languages. And babies picked up words at an astonishing rate once they began to talk. Nieh was right—before long, with luck, her daughter would pick up Chinese and would become a proper human being rather than an imitation scaly devil.
For now, she’d use whatever words she could to make the baby accept her. “All good now,” she said in the little devils’ language. “All good.” She grunted out another emphatic cough to show how good having her daughter back was.
Again, the little girl gaped in astonishment. She gulped and sniffed and then made a noise that sounded like an interrogative cough. She might have been saying, “Is it really?”
Liu Han answered with one more emphatic cough. Suddenly, like the sun coming out from behind rain clouds, her daughter smiled at her. She began to cry, and wondered what the baby would make of that.
“Ready for takeoff,” Teerts reported. A moment later, the air traffic control male gave him permission to depart. His killercraft roared down the runway and flung itself into the sky.
He was glad he’d climbed quickly, for an antiaircraft gun not far west of the Kansas air base threw several shells
at him. The Race had been in nominal control of the area for some time, but the Big Uglies kept smuggling in weapons portable on the backs of their males or beasts and made trouble with them. It wasn’t so bad here as he’d heard it was in the SSSR, but it wasn’t a holiday, either.
He radioed the approximate position of the antiaircraft gun back to the air base. “We’ll tend to it,” the traffic control male promised. So they would—eventually. Teerts had seen that before. By the time they got around to sending out planes or helicopters or infantrymales, the gun wouldn’t be there any more. But it would pop up again before long, somewhere not far away.
Nothing he could do about that. He flew west, toward the fighting outside of Denver. Now that he’d carried out several missions against the Tosevite lines outside the city, he understood why his superiors had transferred him from the Florida front to this one. The Big Uglies here had fortflied their positions even more strongly than the Nipponese had outside Harbin in Manchukuo. They had more antiaircraft guns here, too.
He didn’t like thinking about that. He’d been shot down outside Harbin, and still shuddered to remember Nipponese captivity. The Americans were said to treat captives better than the Nipponese did, but Teerts was not inclined to trust the mercies of any Tosevites, not if he could help it.
Before long, he spied the mountains that ridged the spine of this landmass like the dorsal shields of an eruti back on Home. Rising higher than any of the peaks were the clouds of smoke and dust from the fighting.
He contacted forward air control for guidance to the targets that most urgently needed hitting. “We are having success near the hamlet known to the Tosevites as Kiowa. The assault they launched in that area has failed, and they are ripe for a counterattack.” The male gave Teerts targeting coordinates, adding, “If we break through here, we may be able to roll up their line. Strike them hard, Flight Leader.”
Striking the Balance Page 37
