Striking the Balance

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.