Upsetting the Balance

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 avery 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 facade. 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.”