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“Now we have only to get off this ship, get onto the train, and go home to Peking,” Liu Han said. “And, I think, before we do that, we have to stop somewhere and get something to eat. It will be good to eat proper food again.”
“Truth,” Liu Mei said, and used an emphatic cough. “The Americans eat some very strange things indeed. Fried potatoes are not bad once you get used to them, but cheese-how do they eat cheese?”
“I don’t know.” Liu Han shuddered. “What else is it but rotten milk? They should throw it away or feed it to pigs.”
Shortly thereafter, she conceived the identical opinion of the Chinese customs officials who manned the Shanghai customs office for the little scaly devils. She had hoped-she had, in fact, been assured-officials who sympathized with the Party and the People’s Liberation Army would ease her passage back into China. Hopes and assurances or not, it didn’t happen. The customs men who dealt with her daughter and her might have been working for the Kuomintang, or they might have completely prostituted themselves to the little devils. Liu Han never was sure of that. She was sure they thought her false papers were false papers, no matter how artfully they’d been forged.
“Stupid women!” one of the customs men shouted. “We know who you are! You are Reds! Do not deny it. You cannot deceive us.”
Liu Mei said nothing. Her face stayed expressionless, as it usually did, but her eyes blazed. She got angry at being called a Red, even though she was one. When Liu Han had time, she would laugh about that. She didn’t have time now.
“We are the people our papers say we are,” she said, over and over and over again.
“You are liars!” the boss customs man said. “I will haul you up in front of the little scaly devils. Let us see you tell your lies to them. They will know your papers are as false as a dragon’s wings on a duck.”
The threat worried Liu Han to some degree: the little scaly devils might be able to tell the papers were false where human beings could not. Underestimating their technical skill was always dangerous. But they were disastrously bad at interrogation; next to them, the Americans were paragons. And so, with a sneer, Liu Han said, “Yes, take us to the little scaly devils. I can tell them the truth and hope they will listen.” She could tell them a pack of lies and hope they believed her.
But her willingness to go before them rocked the customs man, as she’d thought it would. To most Chinese, the little devils remained objects of superstitious dread. Surely no one with anything to hide would want to talk to them. The customs man took a somewhat more conciliatory tone: “If you are not the people we think you are, how is it that you come off the American ship?”
“We got aboard in Manila,” Liu Han said for about the tenth time. The false papers said the same thing; a good many Chinese merchants lived in the Philippines. “Maybe, while you have been badgering us, the people you want, whoever they are, have gotten away. They are probably halfway to Harbin by now.”
“Harbin!” the customs man shouted. “Stupid woman! Foolish woman! Ignorant woman! The Reds are not strong in Harbin.”
“I do not know anything about that,” answered Liu Han, who knew quite a bit about it. “I have been telling you for a long, long time now, I do not know anything about that. And neither does my niece here, either.”
“You do not know anything about anything,” the customs man said. “Go on, get out of here, and your stupid turtle of a niece, too.”
“He is the stupid turtle,” Liu Mei said once they were well out of the boss customs man’s hearing.
Liu Han shook her head. “No, he did his job well-he was right to be suspicious of us, and I had to work hard to make him let us go. If he were stupid, I would have had an easier time. That was not the trouble. The trouble was that he serves the imperialist little devils-or maybe our enemies in the Kuomintang-with too much zeal.”
“Something should happen to him, then,” Liu Mei said.
“And maybe something will,” Liu Han said. “The Party here in Shanghai must know about him. And if they do not, we can pass the word from Peking. Yes, maybe something will happen to the running dog.”
The Shanghai train station stood not far from the docks: a large gray stone pile of a building, again in the Western style. Because it was not far, Liu Han and Liu Mei walked. To go with their assumption of the role of Chinese from the Philippines, they now had less baggage than they’d taken aboard the Liberty Princess in Los Angeles. Liu Han was glad not to have to exploit the labor of a rickshaw puller or a pedicab driver. Such work might be necessary, but it was degrading. Now that she had seen the United States, she felt that more strongly than ever.
Lines in front of the ticket sellers were not neat and orderly, as they would have been back in the USA. They were hardly lines at all. People jostled and shouted and cursed one another, all shoving forward to wave money in the faces of the clerks. Liu Han felt swamped, smothered in humanity. Shanghai was no more crowded than Peking, but her most recent standard of comparison was Los Angeles, a town far more spread out than either Chinese city. Liu Mei at her back, she elbowed her way forward.
After much bad blood, she managed to buy two second-class tickets north to Peking. The platform on which she and her daughter had to wait was as crowded as the cramped space in front of the ticket sellers. She’d expected that. The train came into the station three hours late. She’d expected that, too.
But, after she and Liu Mei fought their way to seats on the hard benches of a second-class car, she relaxed. In spite of all inconveniences, they were going home.
Johannes Drucker muttered something unpleasant under his breath as he floated weightless in Kathe, the upper stage of his A-45. The radio wasn’t set to transmit, so nobody down on the ground could hear him. That was doubtless just as well.
He checked himself. He hoped nobody down on the ground could hear him. He remained politically suspect, and knew it. He wouldn’t have put it past the SS to sneak a secret microphone and transmitter into Kathe, in the hope he would say something damning when he thought no one was listening. If he had any opinions about Heinrich Himmler and sheep, he’d be smart to pull the wool over them.
“Baah!” he said, softly and derisively. Let the boys in the black coats figure out what that meant, if they were listening. He had more important things to worry about. Had he been wearing a hat, he would have tipped it in the direction of General Dornberger. The commandant at Peenemunde had been able to keep him in space. As far as he was concerned, this was the most fun he could have with his clothes on.
A radar ping almost bright enough to make him blink appeared on his screen. “Du lieber Gott,” he said, not caring at all whether anyone was listening to him. “I think the Americans are building New York City up here.” The station was noticeably bigger than it had been on his last trip up into orbit, and it had been enormous even then. Its German equivalent could not compete.
He turned his radio receiver to the bands the Americans favored. They got careless with their signals traffic every so often. Not often enough. They were up to Wehrmacht standards-or perhaps a little beyond-when they talked with one another. His best hope was catching them in the middle of an accident, so he could hear what they said when they weren’t thinking so much of whether he was listening.
Thinking that way made him feel a little guilty. Wishing an accident on anybody in space probably meant wishing death on him, too. Very few minor accidents happened out beyond the atmosphere-everything worked fine, or else you were dead. Drucker didn’t want anybody wishing that kind of misfortune on him.
He listened to the chatter that went on around the space station. The workers expanding it complained more than their German counterparts would have done. “I’m so damn tired, I’d be grateful to be dead,” one of them said.
That proved too much even for the other Americans. “Oh, shut up, Jerry,” one of them said, a sentiment with which Drucker heartily agreed.
After a little while, Drucker decided not to wait and see if some
thing would happen, but to try to make something happen instead. “You certainly are getting large there,” he radioed to the American space station. “When do you intend to attack the colonization fleet again?”
That again made him particularly proud. If it didn’t make any listening Lizard sit up and take notice, he didn’t know what would. He must have struck a nerve inside the station, too, for the answer came back in a tearing hurry: “Go peddle your papers, you Nazi bastard! If you guys didn’t blow up the Lizards, Molotov’s boys sure as hell did, on account of it wasn’t us.”
“Ha!” Drucker said. “You Americans the crazy ones are, making this great huge… thing up here.” He’d done his duty by his country. Anybody who didn’t think the SS was crazy, though, didn’t know the current Fuhrer ’s precious pets.
And the American radio operator kept jeering at him: “You’re just jealous ’cause you don’t have a big one yourself.”
Only belatedly did Drucker realize the American might not be talking about space stations. “I have never on that score any complaints had,” he said smugly.
“Another Nazi superman, eh?” the radio operator said. “Listen up, pal-what do you think your wife is doing while you’re up here?”
