In the Balance

Another bomb had landed on the jail. Whatever the crimes for which the prisoners had been confined, they’d suffered the maximum penalty. Shrieks said some were suffering still. Villagers were already going through the yamen, scavenging what they could and dragging out bodies and pieces of bodies. The thick, meaty smell of blood fought with those of smoke and freshly upturned earth. Liu Han shuddered, thinking how easily others might have been smelling her blood right now.

Her own house stood a couple of blocks beyond the yamen. She saw smoke rising from that direction, but thought nothing of it. No one willingly believes disaster can befall her. Not even when she rounded the last corner and saw the bomb crater where the house had stood did she credit her own eyes. Less was left here than at the county head’s office.

I have no home. The thought took several seconds to register, and hardly seemed to mean anything even after Liu formed it. She stared clown at the ground, dully wondering what to do next. Something small and dirty lay by her left foot. She recognized it in the same slow, sluggish way she had realized her house was gone. It was her little sons hand. No sign of the rest of him remained.

She stooped and picked up the band, just as if he were there, not merely a mutilated fragment. The flesh was still warm against hers. She heard a loud cry, and needed a little while to know it came from her own throat. The cry went on and on, seemingly without her: when she tried to stop, she found she couldn’t.

Slowly, slowly, it stopped being the only sound in her universe. Other noises penetrated, cheerful pop-pop-pops like strings of firecrackers going off. But they were not firecrackers. They were rifles. Japanese soldiers were on the way.

David Goldfarb watched the green glow of the radar screen at Dover Station, waiting for the swarm of moving blips that would herald the return of the British bomber armada. He turned to the fellow technician beside him. “I’m sure as hell gladder to be looking for our planes coming back than I was year before last, watching every German in the whole wide world heading straight for London.”

“You can say that again.” Jerome Jones rubbed his weary eyes. “It was a bit dicey there for a while, wasn’t it?”

“Just a bit, yes.” Goldfarb leaned back in his uncomfortable chair, hunched his shoulders. Something in his neck went snap. He grunted with relief, then grunted again as he thought about Jones’s reply. He’d lived surrounded by British reserve all his twenty-three years, even learned to imitate it, but it still seemed unnatural to him.

His newlywed parents had fled to London to escape Polish pogroms a little before the start of the first World War. A stiff upper lip was not part of the scanty baggage they’d brought with them; they shouted at each other, and eventually at David and his brothers and sister, sometimes angrily, more often lovingly, but always at full throttle. He’d never learned at home to hold back, which made the trick all the harder anywhere else.

The reminiscent smile he’d worn for a moment quickly faded. By the news dribbling out, pogroms rolled through Poland again, worse under the Nazis than ever under the tsars. When Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia, Saul Goldfarb had written to his own brothers and sisters and cousins in Warsaw, urging them to get out of Poland while they could. No one left. A few months later, it was too late to leave.

A blip on the screen snapped him out of his unhappy reverie. “Blimey,” Jones breathed, King’s English cast aside in surprise, “lookit that bugger go.”

“I’m looking,” Goldfarb said. He kept on looking, too, until the target disappeared again. It didn’t take long. He sighed. “Now we’ll have to fill out a pixie report.”

“Third one this week,” Jones observed. “Bloody pixies’re getting busier, whatever he hell they are.”

“Whatever,” Goldfarb echoed. For the past several months, radars in England-and, he gathered unofficially, the United States as well-had been showing phantom aircraft flying impossibly high and even more impossibly fast; 90,000 feet and better than 2,000 miles an hour were the numbers he’d heard most often. He said, “I used to think they came from something. wrong in the circuits somewhere. I’ve seen enough now, though, that I have trouble believing it.

“What else could they be?” Jones still belonged to the circuitry-problem school. He fired off the big guns of its argument: “They aren’t ours. They don’t belong to the Yanks. And if they were Jerry’s they d be dropping things on our heads. What does that leave? Men from Mars?

“Laugh all you like” Goldfarb said stubbornly. “If there’s something wrong in the machinery’s guts, why can t the boffins find it and fix it?”

“Crikey, I don’t think even the blokes who invented this beast know what all it can and can’t do,” Jones retorted.