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Liu Mei nodded. “Yes, that’s true,” she said. “Thank you, Mother. That does make it easier to bear. I thought my family was being all uprooted.”
“I understand.” No one had tended the graves of Liu Han’s ancestors for a long time. She didn’t even know if the village near Hankow had any people left in it these days. How many times had the red-hot rake of war passed through it since the little scaly devils carried her off into captivity?
A roar in the air that might have come from a furious dragon’s throat warned her the little devils’ airplanes were returning for another attack run. All over Peking, machine guns started shooting into the air even though their targets weren’t yet in sight. Before long, those bullets would start falling back to earth. Some would hit people in the head and kill them, too.
All that passed through Liu Han’s mind in a couple of seconds. Then the scaly devils’ killercraft roared low overhead. One of their pilots must have spied the swarm of people in the street because of the fire, for he cut loose with his cannon. When one of those shells struck home, it tore two or three people into bloody gobbets of flesh that looked as if they belonged in a butcher’s shop, then exploded and wounded another half a dozen. In that tight-packed crowd, the little scaly devil had a target he could hardly miss.
The attack itself lasted only a moment. Then the killercraft that had fired was gone, almost as fast as the sound of its passage. The horror lasted longer. Men and women close by Liu Han and Liu Mei were ripped to bits. Their blood splattered the two women. Along with its iron stink, Liu Han smelled the more familiar reek of night soil as shells and their fragments ripped guts open. The wounded, those unlucky enough not to die at once, shrieked and howled and wailed. So did men and women all around them, seeing what they had become.
Liu Han shouted: “Don’t scream! Don’t run! Help the injured! People must be strong together, or the little scaly devils will surely defeat us.”
More because hers was a calm, clear voice than because what she said made sense, people listened and obeyed. She was bandaging a man with a shattered arm when the roar of jet engines and the pounding of machine guns again cut through every other sound. Though she ground her teeth, she kept on working on the injured man. Peking was a vast city. Surely the killercraft would assail some distant part.
But they roared right overhead. Instead of ordinary bombs, they released swarms of little spheres. “Be careful of those!” Liu Han and Liu Mei cried together. Some of the spheres were tiny mines that were hard to see but could blow up a bicycle or a man unlucky enough to go over them. Others…
Others started squawking in Chinese: “Surrender! You cannot defeat the scaly devils! Give up while you still live!” Someone stomped one of those to silence it. It exploded, a sharp, flat bark. The woman stared at the bloody stump that had replaced her foot, then toppled screeching to the ground.
“Even if we hold Peking, I wonder if anyone will be left alive inside the walls,” Liu Han said glumly.
“That is not a proper revolutionary sentiment,” Liu Mei said. Her mother nodded, accepting the criticism. But Liu Han, twice her daughter’s age, had seen far too much to be certain proper revolutionary sentiment told all the truth there was to tell.
As Lieutenant Colonel Johannes Drucker stopped his Volkswagen at one of the three traffic lights Greifswald boasted, drizzle began to fall. That was nothing out of the ordinary in the north German town: only a few kilometers from the Baltic, Greifswald knew fog and mist and drizzle and rain with great intimacy. It knew snow and ice, too, but the season for them was past-Drucker hoped so, anyhow.
He pulled the windshield-wiper knob. As the rubber blades began traveling streakily across the glass in front of him, he rolled up the driver’s-side window to keep the rain out of the automobile. His wife, Kathe, did the same thing on the passenger’s side.
With the two of them in the front, and with Heinrich, Claudia, and Adolf squeezed into the back, the inside of the hydrogen-burning VW’s windows began to steam up. Drucker turned on the heater and vented the warm air up to the inside of the windshield. He wasn’t sure how much good it did, or if it did any good at all.
The light turned green. “Go, Father,” Heinrich said impatiently, even as Drucker put the auto into first gear. Heinrich was sixteen now, and learning to drive. Had he known half as much about the business as he thought he did, he would have known twice as much as he really did.
As the Volkswagen went through the intersection-no more slowly than anyone else-a great roar penetrated the drizzle and the windows. Peenemunde was only about thirty kilometers east of Greifswald. When a rocket went up, everybody in town knew about it.
“Who would that be, Father?” Adolf asked, sounding as excited as any eleven-year-old would have at the prospect of blasting into space.
“It’s Joachim’s-uh, Major Spitzler’s-turn in the rotation,” Drucker answered. “Unless he came down with food poisoning”-a euphemism for getting drunk, but Adolf didn’t need to know that-“last night, he’s heading for orbit right now.”
“When do you go up again?” Claudia sounded wistful, not excited. She enjoyed having her father down on the ground.
Drucker enjoyed it, too. But, as he had to be, he was intimately familiar with the duty roster. As the roar from the A-45 slowly faded, he said, “I’m scheduled for next Thursday.” Claudia sighed. So did Kathe. He glanced over at his wife. “It won’t be so bad.”
She sighed again. He prudently kept driving. She knew how much he loved going into space; he knew better than to rhapsodize about it. He even enjoyed weightlessness, which put him in a distinct minority. And coming back after being away gave him several honeymoons a year. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, he thought, cheerfully butchering Shakespeare-American spaceman had taught him the pun, which didn’t work in German.
When they got back to their neat, two-story home on the outskirts of Greifswald, the children hurried to the door and went inside. Drucker didn’t bother locking it unless everyone was going to be away longer than for an hour’s shopping. Greifswald had few thieves. Few people were rash enough to want to risk falling foul of the Ministry of Justice.
“Let’s get the packages out of the boot,” Kathe said.
“You have to wait for me-I’ve got the key,” Drucker reminded her. He pulled it from the ignition switch and walked up to the front of the car. As he walked, his mouth twisted. He, or rather Kathe, had fallen foul of the Ministry of Justice. They’d found out she had, or might have had, a Jewish grandmother-which, under the racial-purity laws of the Reich, made her a Jew, and liable to liquidation.
Because Drucker was a Wehrmacht officer, and one with important duties, he’d been able to pull strings. The Gestapo had set Kathe free, and given her a clean bill of racial health. But pulling those strings had cost him. He’d never rise above his present rank, not if he served his country till he was ninety. From what the commandant at Peenemunde said, he was lucky he hadn’t been thrown out of the service altogether.
He opened the boot. Kathe scooped up the bundles-clothes for the children, who outgrew them or, with the boys, wrecked them faster than he thought they had any business doing. He didn’t really want to think about clothes, though. He slipped an arm around his wife’s waist. Kathe smiled up at him. He leaned over and planted a quick kiss on her mouth. “Tonight…” he murmured.
“What about it?” By the smile in her voice, she knew just what he had in mind, and liked the idea, too.
Before he could answer, the telephone rang inside the house. He let out a snort of laughter. “We don’t have to worry about that. It’ll be Ilse calling Heinrich or else one of Claudia’s school friends. Nobody bothers with old folks like us.”
But he was wrong. Claudia came hurrying to the door, pig-tails flying. “It’s for you, Father-a man.”
“Did he say which man he was?” Drucker asked. Claudia shook her head. Drucker scratched his. That eliminated everyone military, and most of his civilian friends,
too-though his daughter would have recognized their voices. Still scratching, he said, “All right, I’m coming.” He slammed down the Volkswagen’s boot lid and went inside.
He’d shed his overcoat by the time he got to the phone; the furnace kept the house toasty warm. Picking up the handset, he spoke briskly: “Johannes Drucker here.”
“Hello, Hans, you old son of a bitch,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “How the hell are you? Been a goddamn long time, hasn’t it?”
“Who is this?” Drucker demanded. Whoever he was, he sounded not only coarse but more than a little drunk. Drucker couldn’t place his voice, but couldn’t swear he’d never heard it before, either.
Harsh, raucous laughter dinned in his right ear. “That’s how it is, all right,” the-stranger? — said “People go up in the world, they forget their old pals. I didn’t think it would happen with you, but fuck me if I’m too surprised, either.”
“Who is this?” Drucker repeated. He was beginning to be sure this fellow was looking for some other Hans. Drucker had given his last name, but how often did drunks bother to listen?
