Striking the Balance

“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 aGood 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.”

“Ihave 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 Intelligence 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.