Читаем Upsetting the Balance полностью

“Our timetable is tightly similar to yours,” Molotov answered. For years, he had trained himself to reveal nothing with his face, with his voice, with his stance. That training served him in good stead now. The Soviet program would not produce a bomb of its own next spring, and probably not for a couple of years thereafter.

Molotov wished he could pace. What to do, what to do? If Ribbentrop was telling the truth, the Nazis had not only recovered from the disaster their nuclear program had suffered but were also ready to produce their own explosive metal in large amounts.

What to do? Ribbentrop had let slip that the heart of the German effort lay somewhere not far from the Rhine. Word ever so discreetly leaked to the Lizards would mean they-and the Soviet Union-might be freed of the threat of explosive-metal bombs in the hands of a madman like Hitler.

But the Nazis were also putting up a stubborn resistance against the Lizards. If they collapsed under a cloud of nuclear fire, the imperialist aggressors from the stars would be able to turn more force on the peaceloving people of the Soviet Union. They were already giving signs of realizing the USSR was not in a position to deploy more nuclear weapons against them. Keeping Germany in the fight might keep the Soviet Union alive, too.

It was a delicate calculation. Molotov knew the final decision would not be his. Only Stalin would make it. Stalin’s cult of personality maintained that the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was never wrong. Molotov knew better, but this time Stalin had to be right.

Nieh Ho-T’ing maneuvered his pedicab through the streets of Peking. He swerved to avoid a horse-drawn wagon, then again to keep from being run down by a lorry full of Lizards with guns. He wished he could fling a grenade into the back of the truck, but no, not now. If you couldn’t be patient, you didn’t deserve to win.

Men on foot got out of the way for Nieh. When they didn’t move fast enough to suit him, he screamed at them: “Move, you stupid wooden-headed sons of a turtle mother!” The men he abused shouted insults back at him. They also grinned and waved, as did he. It was all good fun, and helped pass the time.

Nieh did not swear at men afoot who were dressed in Western-style clothes. Instead, he called out to them in beseeching tones: “Ride, noble sir?” Sometimes he varied that by using the little scaly devils’ phrasing: “Ride, superior sir?” Other pedicab drivers also loudly solicited the little devils’ running dogs. So did rickshaw men, who toiled between the shafts of their carts like bullocks. Anyone rich enough to dress like a foreign devil was also rich enough to pay for a ride.

Little scaly devils patrolled the streets on foot. No one asked them if they wanted a ride: people knew better. The scaly devils skittered along in squad-sized packs. They didn’t go out in Peking by ones and twos: they knew better.

“Ride, superior sirs?” Nieh Ho-T’ing called to a couple of men in white shirts and ties who walked along with jackets slung over their shoulders. They looked tired, the poor running dogs.

They climbed into the back of the pedicab. “Take us to theCh’i Nien Tien,” one of them said. “Go fast, too; we need to be there quickly.”

“Yes, sir.” Nieh Ho-T’ing started to pedal. “The Hall of Annual Prayers it is. You pay me five dollars Mex, all right?”

“Stop the cab. We will get out,” the man answered. “We do not need to ride with a thief. If you asked for two dollars Mex, that would still be too much.”

Nieh slowed down but did not stop. “If I let you out, gentlemen, you will be late on your important journey. Suppose you give me four Mex fifty; I suppose, if I am stingy, my wife and children will not starve on that fare.”

“Do you hear the gall of this man?” one of the scaly devils’ henchmen said to the other. “He talks of his wife and children, but thinks nothing of ours, who will suffer if we meet his extortionate demands. Anyone who expects to get more than three dollars Mex for such a short journey would surely steal coppers from a blind beggar.”

“Rich men who refuse to share their bounty-something dreadful will surely happen to them in the next life if not in this one,” Nieh said. “Even four Mex twenty-five would not be altogether without virtue.”

They finally settled on three Mex dollars seventy-five cents, by which time they’d nearly reached the Hall of Annual Prayers. Nieh scorned the running dogs as inept hagglers; anything over three dollars Mex was too much to pay for that ride. When he worked as a pedicab driver, hebecame a pedicab driver. Anything else, anything less, was dangerous.