Turtledove: World War

by In the Balance

  “More exact answers to the questions we have been putting to you on explosive metals might make us more pleased with you,” Okamoto said.

  Teerts knew that was a lie. Because he’d let himself be taken prisoner, the Nipponese would never be happy with him, no matter what he did. But they might find him more useful; he’d already seen how his treatment varied with their perception of his value. If he satisfied them, they would give him ginger. The thought tolled in his head like the reverberations from a big bass drum.

  Despite it, he had to say, “I have already given you the best and truest answers I can.”

  “So you claim now,” Okamoto answered. “We shall see how you’reply when you want ginger more than you can imagine now. Maybe then you will remember better than you do today.”

  The teeth of the trap were not only sharp, they were jagged as well. The Nipponese didn’t just want Teerts to be their prisoner, they wanted him to be their slave, Slavery had vanished from the culture of the Race long before Home was unified, but the Rabotevs (or was it the Hallessi?—Teerts had always dozed through history lessons) practiced it whenever their world, whichever it was, came into the Empire. They returned the concept, if not the institution, to the notice of the Race. Teerts feared it wasn’t just a concept on Tosev 3.

  He also feared that if he went without ginger, he would go mad. The craving ate at him like acid dripping on his scaly skin. “Please, let me taste it now,” he begged.

  Some of his Nipponese captors had been wantonly cruel, and exulted in their cruelty in the exact proportion that they enjoyed power over his helplessness. They would have refused, merely to experience the pleasure they took from watching him suffer. Okamoto, to give him his limited due, did not daub on that pattern of body paint. Having shown Teerts he was indeed trapped, the Big Ugly let him sample the bait once more.

  The feeling of power and wisdom flooded through Teerts again. While he reached that ecstatic, exalted peak, he did his best to come up with a way to escape the prison where the Nipponese held him. For an all but omnipotent genius, it should have been easy.

  But no brilliant ideas came. Maybe the ginger did sharpen his analytical faculty a little: he swiftly concluded the feeling of brilliance it gave him was just that, a feeling, and nothing more. Had the powder not been coursing through his veins, he would have been bitterly disappointed. As things were, he noted the problem, then dismissed it.

  Tosevites were impetuous, hot-blooded, always doing things. The Race’s virtues were study, patience, careful planning. So Teerts had been indoctrinated, and little he had seen inclined him to doubt what his killercraft squadron’s briefing officers had said. But now, out in the hallway, Okamoto stood quietly and waited as patiently as any male of the Race.

  And Teerts? As the joy from the ginger ebbed in him, leaving only a memory of sensation, Teerts became a veritable parody of a Big Ugly, grabbing at the bars of his cell, shouting curses, reaching uselessly for Okamoto in a foredoomed effort to get more ginger onto his tongue: in short, he acted blindly, without the slightest concern for consequences. He should have been ashamed of himself. He was ashamed of himself—but not enough to stop.

  Okamoto waited until his blustering had died away, swallowed in the crushing depression that followed ginger euphoria. Then, at just the right instant, the Nipponese said, “Tell me everything you know about the process that transforms element 92 to element 94.”

  “The special word for this in our language is ‘transmutes,’ ” Teerts said. “It takes place in several steps. First—” He wondered how much Okamoto would make him talk before he got another taste.

  Bobby Fiore threw an easy peg to the young Chinese man who stood waiting to catch the ball. The fellow actually did catch it, too; it slapped into the leather glove (a duplicate of Fiore’s) he wore, and he covered it with his bare hand.

  “Good job!” Fiore said, using tone and expression and dumb show to get across what he still had trouble saying in Chinese. “Now throw it back.” Again, gesture showed what he wanted.

  The Chinese, whose name was Lo, threw high. Fiore sprang and caught the ball. He landed lightly, ready to throw again himself: after so many years on so many infields, he could probably do that in his sleep. Drop a ball anywhere near him and he’d be on it like a cat.

  “Don’t throw like a girl,” he told Lo; this once, it was just as well that his pupil didn’t understand exactly what he had to say. He demonstrated, exaggerating the from-the-elbow style the Chinese had used and shaking his head violently to show it wasn’t the best way to do the job. Then he showed the full-arm motion American kids picked up on farmyards, parks, and vacant lots.

  Lo didn’t seem to think one better than the other. Instead of using his handmade, expensive baseball to prove the point, Bobby Fiore bent down to get an egg-sized rock. He and Lo were not far from the razor-wire fence around the Lizards’ camp. He turned and threw the rock as far as he could into the green fields beyond the perimeter.

  He found another rock, tossed it underhand to Lo. “Let’s see you top that, throwing like you do,” he said. Again, gestures eked out meaning. Lo nodded and let fly, grunting with effort. His rock flew barely half as far as Fiore’s had. He looked at the American, nodded thoughtfully, and tried the full-arm motion. Fiore clapped his hands. “That’s the idea!”

  The truth was, he couldn’t antagonize a cash customer. He and Liu flan still put on their baseball show, but it didn’t pull in as much as it had when it was new. A few Chinese had been interested enough to pay to learn more, so he was teaching them to hit and catch and throw. Had the camp had enough open space, they could have put on a real game.

  He didn’t care to kowtow to Chinamen, but he’d grown used to the little luxuries spare cash allowed him to buy. And it wasn’t as if he was selling something they had to have. If he got ’em mad at him, they’d just leave. So he did his best to stay on good behavior.

  “Come on, try it with the ball,” he said, and tossed it to Lo. The Chinese threw it back, still not too straight but with a better motion. “That’s the way to do it!” Fiore said, clapping his hands in encouragement.

  After several more throws that showed he was starting to get the idea, Lo picked up another rock and flung it out over the razor wire into the field. Throwing with his whole arm, he made it go a good deal farther than he’d managed before, but still not as far as Fiore had flung it. The ballplayer puffed out his chest, thinking no Chink was going to get the better of him.

  Maybe Lo thought the same thing, for he bowed to Fiore and spoke several sharp sentences. Almost in spite of himself, Fiore was starting to understand Chinese. He didn’t follow all of this, but, got the idea that Lo was praising his arm and wanted to bring by some friends who would also be interested in the way he threw.

  “Yeah, sure, that’d be fine,” Fiore answered in English, and then did his best to turn it into Chinese. Evidently Lo got the idea, because he bowed again and nodded, then gave the glove back to Fiore and went on his way.

  Well enough pleased with how the afternoon had gone, Fiore headed back toward the house he shared with Liu Han. He started whistling “Begin the Beguine” to himself as he walked along, but had to cut it out when the Chinese he walked past stared at him. As far as he was concerned, Chinese music sounded as if it were made by stepping on cats’ tails—out-of-tune cats, at that. The locals returned the sentiment when he made melodies he liked. Since there were lots of them and one of him, he shut up.

  When he opened the door to the hut the Lizards had given him and Liu Han, his nostrils twitched appreciatively. Something tasty was cooking, even if the vegetables that went with it would be strange and underdone for his taste. “Smells good,” he said, and added the Lizards’ emphatic cough.

  Liu Han looked up from the pan in which she was cooking. It was, to Fiore’s way of thinking, a funny kind of pan, being shaped like the wide, conical hats a lot of Chinese wore. It had a funny name, too: she called it a walk. Whenever he heard that
, he pictured the pan tossing away its bat and trotting down to first base.

  Liu Han tilted the walk on its stand so he could see the bite-sized pieces of chicken in it. “Cooked with five spices,” she said. He nodded, smiling. He didn’t know what all five spices were, but they made for mighty tasty cooking.

  After supper, he gave her the trade dollars Lo had paid him for learning the art of throwing straight. “He has other people he may want me to teach, too,” he said. “If they all pay as well as he did, that should keep us in groceries a good long while.”

  He said it first in English, then added Chinese and Lizard words till he was sure she’d got the idea. When she talked to him, she used a Chinese frame padded with English and Lizard. As time passed, they gained more and more words in common.

  She said, “If they pay silver like this Lo, I be fat even without baby.” She was starting to show now, her belly pressing against the cotton tunic that had been loose.

  “Babe, you still look good to me,” he said, which made her smile. He got the idea she was surprised he kept wanting her even though she was pregnant. He hadn’t been sure he would, either, but the growing mound of her belly didn’t bother him. It meant he couldn’t just climb on top all the time, but doing it other ways was broadening his horizons.

  Thinking about it made him want to do it. One nice thing about the way Liu Han cooked was that it didn’t leave him feeling as if he’d swallowed an anvil, the way pasta did sometimes. If you got too full, you had trouble staying interested in other things. As it was . . .

  Before he could get up and head for the blankets on the kang, somebody knocked on the door. He made a sour face. Liu Han giggled; she must have known what was on his mind. “Whoever it is, I’ll get rid of him in a hurry,” he said, climbing to his feet.

  But when he opened the door, there stood Lo with several other men behind him. Business, Fiore thought. He waved them in. Business counted, too, and Liu Han would still be there after they’d gone. Now she’d be hostess and interpreter. She offered the newcomers tea. Fiore still missed his coffee, thick with cream and sugar, but tea, he’d decided, would do in a pinch.

  The last of the newcomers shut the door behind him. Lo and his Friends—six men in all—crowded the hut. They sat quietly and seemed polite, but the longer Fiore looked at them, the more he wished he hadn’t let them all in at once. They were all young and on the hard side and, with their silence, more disciplined than the usually voluble Chinese of the camp. He carefully didn’t glance over to the corner where he’d leaned his bat against the wall, but he didn’t let them get between him and it.

  He knew about shakedowns. His uncle Giuseppe, a baker, had paid protection money for a while for the privilege of going to work every day without getting his arms broken. He wasn’t going to let that happen to him, not from a bunch of Chinamen. They could do their stuff on him tonight, but he’d have the Lizards on them tomorrow.

  Then he realized the only one whose name he knew was Lo, and even Lo was only half a name. The rest—would he recognize them again? Maybe. Maybe not.

  He grabbed the bull by the horns, asking, “What can I do for you guys? You’re interested in learning to throw the right way, yeah?” He made a proper, full-arm throwing motion without any ball.

  “We are interested in throwing, yes,” Lo answered through Liu Han. Then he asked a question of his own: “Are you and your woman lackeys and running dogs of the little scaly devils or just their prisoners?”

  Bobby Fiore and Liu Han looked at each other. Though he had been thinking of siccing the Lizards on these guys if they turned out to be hoodlums, that question had only one possible answer. “Prisoners,” he said, and mimed holding his hands up to the bars of a cell.

  Lo smiled. So did two or three of his buddies. The others just sat, still and watchful. Lo said, “If you are prisoners, you must want to help the oppressed peasants and workers strike a blow for freedom.”

  Liu Han’s translation wasn’t anywhere near as smooth as that. Fiore cocked his head to one side anyway. Traveling through small and medium-sized towns in an America staggered by the Depression, he’d heard plenty of guys standing on crates at street corners who talked like that. He pointed a finger at Lo. “You’re a Red, that’s what you are—a Communist, a Bolshevik.”

  Liu Han didn’t recognize any of the English (or Russian). She stared and spread her hands, at a loss to interpret. But one of the terms made sense to Lo. He nodded soberly to Bobby Fiore, as if to say he was smarter than the Chinese had figured. Then he spoke to Liu Han, letting her know what was going on.

  She didn’t gasp as if she’d just seen a rat scurry across the floor, the way a lot of American women would have. She just nodded and tried to explain to Fiore, then fell silent when she realized he already understood. “They not bad,” she told him. “They fight Japanese, more than Kuomintang does.”

  “Okay,” he said. “The Reds were on our side before the Lizards came, sure. And everybody wants to give them a good swift kick. But what do these guys want with me?”

  Lo didn’t answer, not with words. Instead, he nudged one of his comrades. The young man reached under his tunic and pulled out a grenade. He didn’t say anything, either. He just let it sit in the palm of his hand.

  Bobby didn’t need more than a heartbeat before the light went on in his head. He started to laugh. “So you want me to do your pitching for you, huh?” he said, not caring that neither Lo nor Liu Han understood what he was talking about. “I wish Sam Yeager was here. You think my arm’s hot stuff, you oughta see his.”

  Lo politely waited till he was done before speaking. Liu Han hesitantly translated: “They want you—” She forgot the English for throw, but made a gesture to show what she meant. Fiore nodded. Then she pointed at the grenade.

  “Yeah, I already worked that out,” Fiore said. He’d worked out some other things, too: if he said no, for instance, he and Liu Han were liable to end up wearing whatever Chinamen used for concrete overshoes. This wasn’t just a shakedown. If he said no, he was a big danger to these people. From everything he’d ever heard, Bolsheviks didn’t let people who were dangerous to them keep walking and breathing.

  And besides, he didn’t want to say no. He wished he could have chucked some grenades at the Lizards back in Cairo, Illinois, after they caught him the first time. That would have kept him out of this whole mess. Even though he did care for Liu Han, he would have given a lot to be back in the good old U.S. of A.

  Since he couldn’t have that, giving the little scaly bastards a hard time here on the other side of the world would have to do. “So what do you want me to blow up?” he asked Lo.

  Maybe the Red hadn’t expected such enthusiastic cooperation. He talked in low tones with his friends before he turned back to Liu Han. She sounded worried as she told Fiore, “They want you to go with them. No say where.”

  He wondered if he ought to insist that Lo tell Liu Han where he’d be. After a second’s doubt, he decided that would be stupid. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell anybody, especially the Lizards . . . and, if she didn’t know, the Reds would have less reason to come after her to shut her up in case things went wrong.

  He got to his feet. “Let’s go take care of it,” he said to Lo.

  He felt edgy, almost bouncy, as he walked, as if Mutt Daniels (and he wondered what had happened to old Mutt) had flashed him the sign to steal home on the next pitch. Well, why not? He wasn’t just trying to steal home. He was going into combat.

  Sooner or later, he was sure, he would have volunteered for the Army. But even then, he would have trained for months before he got the chance to see action. Now—it was as if he’d got his rifle and headed up to the front line one right after the other. No wonder he felt all loosey-goosey.

  He blew Liu Han a kiss. Lo and his fellow Bolsheviks snickered and said things that were probably rude to one another: Chinese men weren’t in the habit of showing they gave a damn about their women. Well, to hell with them, to
o, he thought. Liu Han managed a return smile, but he could see she was frightened about this whole business.

  Night in the prison camp was darker than anything Fiore had known back in the States, even in the panicky blackouts that had followed Pearl Harbor. Few of the huts had any windows, and few of what windows there were had lights showing through them. If the moon was up in the sky, a thick layer of clouds made sure nobody could see it. Though that made Fiore stumble along, he didn’t bellyache, not even to himself: darkness would give the Lizards a harder time spotting him. That he liked.

  The Chinese picked their way through the black as if they had headlights. A couple of times, Bobby Fiore heard people getting out of their way in a hurry. A large group of disciplined men traveling confidently was something few wanted to mess with. He liked that, too.

  Before long, he had no idea where in the camp Lo was taking him. It all looks alike to me, he thought, and stifled a nervous giggle. He didn’t know if the Bolsheviks were walking him around in circles to get him lost or if it just worked out that way, but lost he undoubtedly was.

  Lo opened the door of a shabby little hut, gestured for his companions and Fiore to go in. The inside of the hut was darker than the alley had been. That didn’t stop Lo. He shoved aside a heavy wooden chest—by all appearances, the only furniture in the place—and pulled up a square piece of board underneath it. He and two of his friends dropped down into the tunnel the board concealed.

  One of the remaining Reds nudged Fiore and pointed to the round mouth of the tunnel. He went into it with all the eagerness of a man walking to the electric chair. As he had when he left the hut he shared with Liu Han, he learned new lessons about how dark darkness could be. As far as his eyes were concerned, he’d just gone blind. But with Chinese ahead and Chinese pushing him on from behind, he could have no doubt about which direction to go.

  The tunnel wasn’t tall enough for him to stand upright, or even to crouch. He had to crawl along on hands and knees, and even then the top of his head kept bumping on the roof and showering clods of dirt down onto his neck. The air in the tunnel smelled like moist earth, dank and musty, and felt dead, as if nobody had any business breathing down here.