Striking the Balance

“No.” Barbara typed a few more sentences before she came to the end of a page. She took it out and ran a fresh sheet into the typewriter. Instead of going back to the report, she looked up at Sam from under half-lowered eyelids. “Do you remember? This is what I was doing back in Chicago, the first time we met. You brought Ullhass and Ristin in to talk with Dr. Burkett. A lot of things have changed since then.”

“Just a few,” Sam allowed. She’d been married to Jens Larssen then, though already she’d feared he was dead: otherwise, she and Sam never would have got together, never would have had Jonathan, never would have done a whole lot of things. He didn’t know about literature or fancy talk; he couldn’t put into graceful words what he thought about all that. What he did say was, “It was so long ago that when you asked me for a cigarette, I had one to give you.”

She smiled. “That’s right. Not even two years, but it seems like the Middle Ages, doesn’t it?” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’m the one who feels middle-aged these days, but that’s just on account of Jonathan.”

“Me, I’m glad he’s old enough now that you feel easy about letting the mammies take care of him during the day,” Sam said. “It frees you up to do things like this, makes you feel useful again, too. I know that was on your mind.”

“Yes, it was,” Barbara said with a nod that wasn’t altogether comfortable. She lowered her voice. “I wish you wouldn’t call the colored women that.”

“What? Mammies?” Sam scratched his head. “It’s what they are.”

“I know that, but it sounds so-” Barbara groped for the word she wanted and, being Barbara, found it. “So antebellum, as if we were down on the plantation with the Negroes singing spirituals and doing all the work and the kind masters sitting around drinking mint juleps as if they hadn’t the slightest idea their whole social system was sick and wrong-and so much of what was wrong then is still wrong now. Why else would the Lizards have given guns to colored troops and expected them to fight against the United States?”

“They sure were wrong about that,” Sam said.

“Yes, some of the Negroes mutinied,” Barbara agreed, “but I’d bet not all of them did. And the Lizards wouldn’t have tried it in the first place if they hadn’t thought it would work. The way they treat colored people down here… Do you remember some of the newsreels from before we got into the war, the ones that showed happy Ukrainian peasants greeting the Nazis with flowers because they were liberating them from the Communists?”

“Uh-huh,” Sam said. “They found out what that was worth pretty darn quick, too, didn’t they?”

“That’s not the point,” Barbara insisted. “The point is that the Negroes here could have greeted the Lizards the same way.”

“A good many of them did.” Sam held up a hand before she could rhetorically rend him. “I know what you’re getting at, hon: the point is that so many of ’em didn’t. Things down here would have been mighty tough if they had, no two ways about it.”

“Now you understand,” Barbara said, nodding. She always sounded pleased when she said things like that, pleased and a little surprised: he might not have a fancy education, but it was nice that he wasn’t dumb. He didn’t think she knew she was using that tone of voice, and he wasn’t about to call her on it. He was just glad he could come close to keeping up with her.

He said, “Other side of the coin is, whatever the reasons are, these colored women-I won’t call ’em mammies if you don’t want me to-they can’t do the job you’re doing right now. Since theyare

on our side, shouldn’t we give ’em jobs theycan do, so the rest of us can get on with doing the things they can’t?”

“That isn’t just,” Barbara said. But she paused thoughtfully. Her fingernails clicked on the home keys of the typewriter, enough to make the type bars move a little but not enough to make them hit the paper. At last, she said, “It may not be just, but I suppose it’s practical.” Then she did start typing again.

Sam felt as if he’d just laced a game-winning double in the ninth. He didn’t often make Barbara back up a step in any argument. He set a fond hand on her shoulder. She smiled up at him for a moment. The clatter of the typewriter didn’t stop.

Liu Han cradled the submachine gun in her arms as if it were Liu Mei. She knew what she had to do with it if Ttomalss got out of line: point it in his direction and squeeze the trigger. Enough bullets would hit him to keep him from getting out of line again.

From what Nieh Ho-T’ing had told her, the gun was of German manufacture. “The fascists sold it to the Kuomintang, from whom we liberated it,” he’d said. “In the same way, we shall liberate the whole world not only from the fascists and reactionaries, but also from the alien aggressor imperialist scaly devils.”