Tilting The Balance (75 page)

The really crazy part of it was, whenever Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t make like a revolutionary or a Mafia soldier, he was as nice a guy as you’d ever want to meet. It was as if he put all the murderous stuff in a box and took it out whenever he needed it, but when he wasn’t using it, you wouldn’t guess it was there.

Now his smile was broad and happy, as if such things as liquidation had never crossed his mind.

He said, “I’m going to do you a favor in return for the one you did me. I am sure you will take it in the intended spirit.”

“Yeah? What kind of favor?” Fiore asked suspiciously. Favors always sounded good. Sometimes they were, as when Nieh had said it was okay for him to fool around with the girls’ downstairs. But sometimes…

This was one of fhose times. Still beaming, Nieh said, “I am going to keep the promise I made you: you will be part of our raiding team.”

“Uh, thank you.” That was the best Fiore could do in Chinese. If he’d been speaking English, it would have, come out, Oh boy, thanks a lot.

If Nieh Ho-Ting noticed the irony and lack of enthusiasm, he didn’t show it. “Aiding in the fight against the imperialist devils from another world is surely the duty of every human being. Those who do not join in the struggle are the devils’ running dogs, and we know the fate of running dogs, eh?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Bobby Fiore muttered. Talk about stuck between a rock and a hard place! If he came along for the ride, the Lizards would shoot him. If he didn’t, the Chinese Reds would take care of the job. Either way, he could forget about finding out how the latest serial over at the Nanking on Avenue Edward
VII
was going to end.

Musingly, Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “Your pistol is not a good enough weapon for this work. We will make certain you have a submachine gun.” He held up a hand. “No, don’t thank me. It is for the mission as much as for yourself.”

Bobby hadn’t planned on thanking him. He wished he were back in the Lizard prison camp with Liu Han, and that he’d never, ever tried to teach that Chinaman named Lo how not to throw like a girl.

With a slight curl to his lip – he really was a bluenose at heart – Nieh said, “Why don’t you go downstairs and amuse yourself for a time, if you have nothing better to do? I need to find out if we can do what needs doing on such short notice, and the best way to do it if we can.”

Fiore didn’t need any more urging to go downstairs. If he was going off to get shot at (he carefully didn’t think of it as to get shot) tomorrow, he’d have fun tonight. Not much later, he ended up back in one of those mirrored rooms with Shura the White Russian blonde. By any objective standard, she was prettier and better in the sack than Liu Han had been, so he wondered why he didn’t feel as happy as he might have when he went back to the room where he slept.

The only thing he could think of was that he’d cared about Liu Han and she about him, but Shura was just going through the motions, even if she played the mattress the way Billy Herman played second base. “Goddamn,” he muttered sleepily. “I guess it was love.” Next thing he knew, the sun was up.

He went down to breakfast like a condemned man heading off for his last meal. Even eyeing the girls couldn’t snap him out of his funk. He was finishing his cup of tea When Nieh HoT’ing stuck his head into the kitchen and waved to him. “Come here. We have things to talk about.”

Bobby came. Nieh handed Fiore a rattan suitcase. It was heavy. When Fiore opened it, he found a Russian submachine gun, several magazines of ammunition, and four potato-masher grenades.

“You will not go in with us,” Nieh said. “You loiter across from the front entrance to the British Consulate. When the time comes – you will know, I assure you – kill the guards there if you can and help any human beings who come out through those doors.”

“Okay,” Fiore said in English when he was sure he understood what Nieh wanted from him. The Red nodded; he got that. Fiore switched to his lousy Chinese: “How will you get in the consulate? How will you bring more guns in?”

“I should not tell you – security.” But Nieh Ho-T’ing looked too pleased with himself to keep his mouth shut altogether. He went on, “This much I will say: the consulate will have some new human cooks and waiters today, and they will be bringing in ducks to go with the lobsters for the commandant’s feast.”

He clammed up again – if Bobby couldn’t work it out from there, that was his tough luck. But he could, and started to laugh when he thought about how those ducks would be stuffed. No wonder Nieh looked so smug! “Good luck,” Fiore said. He stuck out his hand, but yanked it back; Chinamen didn’t go in for handshakes.

Nieh Ho-T’ing surprised him, though, by reaching out and taking his hand. “My Soviet comrades have this custom; I know what it means,” he said, then looked at his watch. “Take your place at noon. The banquet is supposed to begin at half past the hour,

and will not last long.”

“Okay,” Fiore said. If he’d been in a town where he spoke the language, he would have thought about taking it on the lam with the arsenal. Getting the Reds mad at him, though, seemed a worse bet than taking his chances on the Lizards.

He had plenty of time for another screw before he took off. Shura came back upstairs with him willingly enough. Afterwards, she blinked when he gave her an extra couple of dollars Mex; he was usually as cheap as he could get away with. “You rob a bank, Bobby?” she asked.

“Two of ‘em, babe,” he said, deadpan, as he started to dress. She blinked again, then decided it was a joke and laughed.

Suitcase in hand, he headed for the Bund. He knew Nieh Ho-T’ing and his buddies were taking the real risk; if the Lizards inside the British Consulate were on their toes, the scheme was dead in the water.

He got to Number 33, the Bund, just as clocks were striking twelve. Nieh would be pleased with him; when he said noon, he meant on the dot. Now Bobby had to hang around and look inconspicuous till the fireworks started. He bought a bowl of watery soup from a passing vendor, then had an inspiration and bought the bowl itself. He sat down on the pavement with it beside him and made like a beggar.

Every once in a while, somebody tossed a copper in the bowl, or even some silver. Bobby kept track – when the shooting started, he had just over a dollar, Mex.

The British Consulate was a large, imposing building. Not even its stonework, though, could muffle the rattle of automatic weapons fire. The Lizard guards at the main entrance whirled around and stared, as if unsure what to do next and unable to believe the ears they didn’t have.

Fiore didn’t give them much of a chance to think it over. As soon as he heard guns, he opened the suitcase, yanked out a grenade, unscrewed the metal cap at the bottom, pulled the porcelain bead inside to work the friction igniter, and let fly as if he were making a throw to the plate.

Had there been a runner, he would have been out. The grenade landed right in the middle of the four Lizards. When it went off a second later, people who had been exclaiming over the shots inside the consulate started screaming and running instead.

The only trouble was, it didn’t knock out all the Lizards. A couple of them started shooting, even if they didn’t know just where it had come from. The screams along the Bund turned into shrieks. Fiore dove behind a solid bench of wood and iron; he opened up with the submachine gun. He hoped he didn’t hit anybody on the street, but he wasn’t going to lose any sleep if he did – those Lizards had to go down. And down they went.

More shots from inside the British Consulate, then those entry doors burst open. Nieh and half a dozen other Chinamen, some wearing cooks’ clothes the rest looking like penguins in fancy waiter getup (though waiters didn’t commonly tote automatic weapons), sprinted down the steps and then down the street.

Lizards opened up on them from the roof and from second-story windows. The fleeing humans started spinning and dropping and kicking, like flies swatted not quite hard enough to die right away. “You just talked about the bastards at the door, goddammit,” Bobby muttered, as if Nieh Ho-T’ing were close enough to hear. “You didn’t say nothin’ about the rest of ‘em.”

He raised the submachine gun and blazed away at the Lizards till his magazine ran dry. He grabbed another one, slammed it into the weapon, and had just started shooting again when a burst of three bullets stitched across his chest. The submachine gun fell out of his hands. He tried to reach for it,

found he couldn’t. He didn’t hurt. Then he did. Then he didn’t, ever again.

Brigadier General Leslie Groves strode across the campus of the University of Denver with his head down, as if he were a bull looking to trample anyone who got in his way. That hard-charging attitude had been instinctive in him until one day he noticed and deliberately cultivated it. Thanks in no small part to that, not a whole lot of people got in his way these days.

“Physicists,” he snorted under his breath, again bullishly. The trouble with them was they were so lost in their own rarefied world a lot of the time that they didn’t always feel the pressure he put on them, let alone yield to it.

He didn’t note anything out of the ordinary about the day until he walked into the Science building and discovered he didn’t recognize any of the soldiers crowding the downstairs lobby. That made him frown; Sam Yeager and the rest of the dogface with the Met Lab crew were as familiar to him as his shoelaces.

He looked around for the highest-ranking officer he could find. “Why have we been invaded, Major?” he asked.

The fellow with the gold oak leaves on his shoulders saluted. “If you’d be so kind as to come with me, General-” he said in the polite phrases lower-ranking officers use to give their superiors orders.

Groves was so kind as to come with him until he figured out where he was going, which didn’t take long. “Major, if I need an escort to find my own office, I’m the wrong man to head this project,” he growled. The major didn’t answer, he just kept walking. Groves fumed but followed. Sure enough, they were heading for his office. In front of it stood a couple of men who looked as tough and alert as soldiers but wore medium-snappy civilian suits. A light went on in Groves’ head. He turned to the major and asked, “Secret Service?”

“Yes, sir.”

One of the T-men, after checking Groves’ face against a little photo he held in the palm of his hand, nodded to the other.

The second one opened the door and said, “General Groves is here, sir.”

“Well, he’d better come in, then, hadn’t he?” an infinitely familiar voice replied from within. “It being his office, after all.”

“Why the devil didn’t I get any warning President Roosevelt was coming to Denver?” Groves hissed to the major.

“Security,” the other officer whispered back. “We have to assume the Lizards monitor everything we broadcast, and we’ve lost couriers, too. The less we say, the safer
FDR
is. Now go on in; he’s been waiting for you.”

Groves went in. He’d met Roosevelt before, and knew the President wasn’t as vibrant in person as he appeared in the newsreels: being cooped up in a wheelchair would do that to you. But since the last time he’d seen
FDR
, a year earlier at White Sulphur Springs, the change was shocking. Roosevelt’s flesh seemed to have fallen in on his bones; he might have aged a decade or more in that year. He looked like a man worn to death’s door.

For all that, though, his grip was still strong when he reached out to shake General Groves’ hand after the engineer had saluted. “You’ve lost weight, General,” he observed, amusement in his eyes – his body might be falling to pieces around it, but his mind was still sharp.

“Yes, sir,” Groves answered. Roosevelt had lost weight, too, but he wasn’t about to remark on it.

“Sit down, sit down.” The President waved him to the swivel chair behind his desk. Groves obediently sat. Roosevelt turned the wheelchair to face him. Even his hands had lost flesh; the skin hung loose on them. He sighed and said, “I wish to God I had a cigarette, but that’s neither here nor there – certainly not here, worse luck.”
FDR
sighed again. “Do you know, General, when Einstein sent me that letter of his back in ‘39,1 had the feeling all his talk of nuclear weapons and bombs that could blow up the world was likely to be so much moonshine, but I couldn’t take the chance of being wrong. And, it turns out, I was right – and how I wish I hadn’t been!”

“Yes, sir,” Groves repeated, but then added, “If you hadn’t been right, though, sir, we’d have been in no position to resist the Lizards and to copy what they’ve done.”

“That’s true, but it’s not what I meant,” Roosevelt said. “I wish I’d been right, and that all the talk about nuclear weapons and atomic power and who knows what were so much moonshine. Then all I’d have to worry about would be beating Hitler and Hirohito, and the Lizards would be back on the second planet of the star Tau Ceti where they belong, and people wouldn’t meet them for another million years, if we ever did.”

“Is that where they’re from?” Groves asked with interest. “I’ll have to have our liaison man put the question to the Lizard POWs we have here.”

FDR
made a gesture of indifference. “As you like, and if you have the time; otherwise don’t trouble yourself about it. These Lizards are an astonishing intelligence resource, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Groves said enthusiastically. “The ones we have here have been extremely cooperative.”

“Not just them, General. With what we’re learning from systematic interrogation of all our captives,

we’ll leap forward by decades, maybe centuries.” Roosevelt’s expression, which had brightened, turned cloudy again. “If we win the war, that is – which is what I came to talk about. What I want to know is, how soon will we have nuclear weapons of our own to use against the Lizards?” He leaned forward in his chair, intently awaiting Groves’ reply.

Groves nodded; he’d expected the question. “Sir, I am told we can have one nuclear bomb fairly soon. England supplied us with enough plutonium that we need to manufacture only a few more kilograms of our own to have enough for a bomb. Within a. year, the scientists here tell me.”