Then his face took on an expression of contrition. "I hope, venerable one, that you will not think this miserable creature too bold if he asks for your papers?"
"Not at all," said Candron, taking a billfold from his inside coat pocket. "Such is the law, and the law of the People of China is to be always respected."
He opened the billfold and spread the papers for the clerk"s inspection.
They were all there--identification, travel papers, everything. The clerk looked them over and jotted down the numbers in the register book on the desk, then turned the book around. "Your chop, venerable one."
The "chop" was a small stamp bearing the ideograph which indicated the name Candron was using. Illiteracy still ran high in China because of the difficulty in memorizing the tens of thousands of ideographs which made up the written language, so each man carried a chop to imprint his name. Officially, China used the alphabet, spelling out the Chinese words phonetically--and, significantly, they had chosen the Latin alphabet of the Western nations rather than the Cyrillic of the Soviets.
But old usages die hard.
Candron imprinted the ideograph on the page, then, beside it, he wrote "Ying Lee" in Latin characters.
The clerk"s respect for this old man went up a degree. He had expected to have to put down the Latin characters himself. "Our humble establishment is honored by your esteemed presence, Mr. Ying," he said.
"For how long will it be your pleasure to bestow this honor upon us?"
"My poor business, unimportant though it is, will require it least one week; at the most, ten days." Candron said, knowing full well that twenty-four hours would be his maximum, if everything went well.
"It pains me to ask for money in advance from so honorable a gentleman as yourself," said the clerk, "but such are the rules. It will be seven and a half yuan per day, or fifty yuan per week."
Candron put five ten-yuan notes on the counter. Since the readjustment of the Chinese monetary system, the yuan had regained a great deal of its value.
A young man who doubled as bellhop and elevator operator took Candron up to the third floor. Candron tipped him generously, but not extravagantly, and then proceeded to unpack his suitcase. He hung the suits in the closet and put the shirts in the clothes chest. By the time he was through, it looked as though Ying Lee was prepared to stay for a considerable length of time.
Then he checked his escape routes, and found two that were satisfactory.
Neither led downward to the ground floor, but upward, to the roof. The hotel was eight stories high, higher than any of the nearby buildings.
No one would expect him to go up.
Then he gave his attention to the room itself. He went over it carefully, running his fingers gently over the walls and the furniture, noticing every detail with his eyes. He examined the chairs, the low bed, the floor--everything.
He was not searching for spy devices. He didn"t care whether there were any there or not. He wanted to know that room. To know it, become familiar with it, make it a part of him.
Had there been any spy devices, they would have noticed nothing unusual.
There was only an old man there, walking slowly around the room, muttering to himself as though he were thinking over something important or, perhaps, merely reminiscing on the past, mentally chewing over his memories.
He did not peer, or poke, or prod. He did not appear to be looking for anything. He picked up a small, cheap vase and looked at it as though it were an old friend; he rubbed his hand over the small writing desk, as though he had written many things in that familiar place; he sat down in a chair and leaned back in it and caressed the armrests with his palms as though it were an honored seat in his own home. And, finally, he undressed, put on his nightclothes, and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling with a soft smile on his face. After ten minutes or so, his eyes closed and remained that way for three-quarters of an hour.
Unusual? No. An old man must have his rest. There is nothing unusual about an old man taking a short nap.
When he got up again, Spencer Candron was thoroughly familiar with the room. It was home, and he loved it.
Nightfall found the honorable Mr. Ying a long way from his hotel. He had, as his papers had said, gone to do business with a certain Mr. Yee, had haggled over the price of certain goods, and had been unsuccessful in establishing a mutual price. Mr. Yee was later to be able to prove to the People"s Police that he had done no business whatever with Mr.
Ying, and had had no notion whatever that Mr. Ying"s business connections in Nanking were totally nonexistent.
But, on that afternoon, Mr. Ying had left Mr. Yee with the impression that he would return the next day with, perhaps, a more amenable att.i.tude toward Mr. Yee"s prices. Then Mr. Ying Lee had gone to a restaurant for his evening meal.
He had eaten quietly by himself, reading the evening edition of the Peiping _Truth_ as he ate his leisurely meal. Although many of the younger people had taken up the use of the knife and fork, the venerable Mr. Ying clung to the chopsticks of an earlier day, plied expertly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He was not the only elderly man in the place who did so.
Having finished his meal and his newspaper in peace, Mr. Ying Lee strolled out into the gathering dusk. By the time utter darkness had come, and the widely-s.p.a.ced street lamps of the city had come alive, the elderly Mr. Ying Lee was within half a mile of the most important group of buildings in China.
The Peiping Explosion, back in the sixties, had almost started World War Three. An atomic blast had leveled a hundred square miles of the city and started fires that had taken weeks to extinguish. Soviet Russia had roared in its great bear voice that the Western Powers had attacked, and was apparently on the verge of coming to the defense of its Asian comrade when the Chinese government had said irritatedly that there had been no attack, that traitorous and counterrevolutionary Chinese agents of Formosa had sabotaged an atomic plant, nothing more, and that the honorable comrades of Russia would be wise not to set off anything that would destroy civilization. The Russian Bear grumbled and sheathed its claws.
The vast intelligence system of the United States had reported that (A) the explosion had been caused by carelessness, not sabotage, but the Chinese had had to save face, and (B) the Soviet Union had no intention of actually starting an atomic war at that time. If she had, she would have shot first and made excuses afterwards. But she _had_ hoped to make good propaganda usage of the blast.
The Peiping Explosion had caused widespread death and destruction, yes; but it had also ended up being the fastest slum-clearance project on record. The rebuilding had taken somewhat more time than the clearing had taken, but the results had been a new Peiping--a modern city in every respect. And nowhere else on Earth was there one hundred square miles of _completely_ modern city. Alteration takes longer than starting from scratch if the techniques are available; there isn"t so much dead wood to clear away.
In the middle of the city, the Chinese government had built its equivalent of the Kremlin--nearly a third of a square mile of ultra-modern buildings designed to house every function of the Communist Government of China. It had taken slave labor to do the job, but the job had been done.
A little more than half a mile on a side, the area was surrounded by a wall that had been designed after the Great Wall of China. It stood twenty-five feet high and looked very quaint and picturesque.
And somewhere inside it James Ch"ien, American-born physicist, was being held prisoner. Spencer Candron, alias Mr. Ying Lee, had to get him out.
Dr. Ch"ien was important. The government of the United States knew he was important, but they did not yet know _how_ important he was.
Man had already reached the Moon and returned. The Martian expedition had landed safely, but had not yet returned. No one had heard from the Venusian expedition, and it was presumed lost. But the Moon was being jointly claimed by Russian and American suits at the United Nations, while the United Nations itself was trying to establish a claim. The Martian expedition was American, but a Russian ship was due to land in two months. The lost Venusian expedition had been Russian, and the United States was ready to send a ship there.
After nearly forty years, the Cold War was still going on, but now the scale had expanded from the global to the interplanetary.
And now, up-and-coming China, defying the Western Powers and arrogantly ignoring her Soviet allies, had decided to get into the race late and win it if she could.
And she very likely could, if she could exploit the abilities of James Ch"ien to the fullest. If Dr. Ch"ien could finish his work, travel to the stars would no longer be a wild-eyed idea; if he could finish, spatial velocities would no longer be limited to the confines of the rocket, nor even to the confines of the velocity of light. Man could go to the stars.
The United States Federal Government knew--or, at least, the most responsible officers of that government knew--that Ch"ien"s equations led to interstellar travel, just as Einstein"s equations had led to atomic energy. Normally, the United States would never have allowed Dr.
Ch"ien to attend the International Physicists Conference in Peiping. But diplomacy has its rules, too.
Ch"ien had published his preliminary work--a series of highly abstruse and very controversial equations--back in "80. The paper had appeared in a journal that was circulated only in the United States and was not read by the majority of mathematical physicists. Like the work of Dr. Fred Hoyle, thirty years before, it had been laughed at by the majority of the men in the field. Unlike Hoyle"s work, it had never received any publicity. Ch"ien"s paper had remained buried.
In "81, Ch"ien had realized the importance of his work, having carried it further. He had reported his findings to the proper authorities of the United States Government, and had convinced that particular branch of the government that his work had useful validity. But it was too late to cover up the hints that he had already published.
Dr. James Ch"ien was a friendly, gregarious man. He liked to go to conventions and discuss his work with his colleagues. He was, in addition, a man who would never let anything go once he had got hold of it, unless he was convinced that he was up a blind alley. And, as far as Dr. Ch"ien was concerned, that took a devil of a lot of convincing.
The United States government was, therefore, faced with a dilemma. If they let Ch"ien go to the International Conferences, there was the chance that he would be forced, in some way, to divulge secrets that were vital to the national defense of the United States. On the other hand, if they forbade him to go, the Communist governments would suspect that Ch"ien knew something important, and they would check back on his previous work and find his publications of 1980. If they did, and realized the importance of that paper, they might be able to solve the secret of the interstellar drive.
The United States government had figuratively flipped a coin, and the result was that Ch"ien was allowed to come and go as he pleased, as though he were nothing more than just another government physicist.
And now he was in the hands of China.
How much did the Chinese know? Not much, evidently; otherwise they would never have bothered to go to the trouble of kidnaping Dr. James Ch"ien and covering the kidnaping so elaborately. They _suspected_, yes: but they couldn"t _know_. They knew that the earlier papers meant something, but they didn"t know what--so they had abducted Ch"ien in the hope that he would tell them.
James Ch"ien had been in their hands now for two months. How much information had they extracted by now? Personally, Spencer Candron felt that they had got nothing. You can force a man to work; you can force him to tell the truth. But you can _not_ force a man to create against his will.
Still, even a man"s will can be broken, given enough time. If Dr. Ch"ien weren"t rescued soon....
_Tonight_, Candron thought with determination. _I"ll get Ch"ien tonight._ That was what the S.M.M.R. had sent him to do. And that"s what he would--_must_--do.
Ahead of him loomed the walls of the Palace of the Great Chinese People"s Government. Getting past them and into the inner court was an act that was discouraged as much as possible by the Special Police guard which had charge of those walls. They were brilliantly lighted and heavily guarded. If Candron tried to levitate himself over, he"d most likely be shot down in midair. They might be baffled afterwards, when they tried to figure out how he had come to be flying around up there, but that wouldn"t help Candron any.