"Have you examined the dossier of Apprentice Feng Avery?"
"I have. He was arrested twice while a university student. Both arrests were for counterrevolutionary activities. The first was for participating in a rightist meeting. The second was for defacing the people's property by spray-painting graffiti. He painted such slogans as 'America for Americans' and 'Chinese Go Home' on the walls of his dormitory. Apprentice Feng was expelled from the university after the second arrest and has since been the subject of observation."
By then Castor was riveted to his seat. He was almost afraid to look around for fear of drawing attention to himself. This was dangerous territory! It was not just a simple murder. It entailed a state crime! An act, perhaps even a series of acts, against the people! And what could have made this boy so criminally irresponsible? He had been given everything! The Yankee Chinese were even less likely to be allowed into universities than pure-bred Yanks like Castor himself. The boy must have been something special—and had been given special privileges; for such a person to have betrayed his trust was almost unbelievable!
The whole courtroom was tense now, with stirrings and whisperings. Castor could hear no sound from the penned spectators, but he could see them leaning toward each other in excitement; body language was not screened out by the glass. In the front of the room the head judge was peremptorily recalling the old slaughterhouse boss to the stand, and his body language, too, was clearer than words. Head down, face stricken, steps slow, he took his seat and waited for the blow to fall.
"Did you know that Apprentice Feng was missing from his post?"
The old man took a bitter breath and flared, "Of course I did! He was my grandson, how could I not know?" Two seats down from Castor, the baseball-playing boy began to cry.
"And you did not report his absence?"
"I didn't have to!" yelled the old man. "I knew! Always in trouble, never satisfied! He had stolen a gun; he was going to attack the radio-telescope. I followed him; I begged him not to—" And then as, at a signal from one of the judges, Tsoong Delilah and the other police rose to approach him, he bawled, "I didn't mean to do it, but he gave me no choice. He would have destroyed us all..."
So the day in court was over, the courtroom emptying. Castor sat waiting for someone to tell him what to do, glumly contemplating the long bus ride back to the village and the scolding of Fat Rhoda and the endless stoop labor of the rice paddies, when he heard his name called.
It was the policewoman. "Well, Scholar, what are your plans?" she asked, her face bright. Obviously she was pleased with herself over the easy solution of the case. He shrugged.
"Back to the village, I suppose."
"Back to the village, of course," she agreed, "but there is no reason to hurry. The buses run every day, and you might as well stay here tonight."
"Really?" He began to feel pleasure: the rest of the day in the city, some quick shopping in the morning, the pleasures of the transient hotel that night, this time with money in his pocket. "I can watch some Indian programs in my room," he said happily.
"Return to that slum? Certainly not!" she scoffed. "No, I insist. Dinner at my place, and we will find a bed for you there. No argument! It is decided."
IV
Tsoong Delilah's "place" didn't mean her place of residence—"My city apartment! No! That's not much better than your damned transient flophouse!"—but the "place" she kept for herself on the water, way down the Delta to the Gulf Coast. It took more than an hour to drive, even in Tsoong Delilah's zippy little sports car, while the afternoon darkened into full night.
Castor, sitting next to her in the two-seater, was alternately glowing with delight and sick with envy. How skillfully her gloved hands turned the wheel, dimmed the lights, operated the radio, sounded the horn; how briskly the little car slipped through gaps in the stream of trucks and taxis! The envy was just as powerful. Castor had never driven anything more exciting than one of the village trucks. What must it be like to have a machine like this for one's own? And under the excitement and the envy, another feeling, partly sexual, partly fearful, as he wondered what this woman had in mind for him that night.
When they were out of the city traffic she rummaged in her pocket and passed him her little lacquered pipe. "Fill it from the pouch in my bag," she ordered, not taking her eyes off the road to see that he did so. When he started to hand the filled pipe back to her she scoffed, "Oh, Scholar, what's the use of a pipe not lighted? The plug on the dash—use it!"
When Castor succeeded in figuring out how the plug lighted, he took a reckless deep puff. Mistake. He was sent coughing and strangling, head down, almost dropping the pipe. When he recovered, the policewoman was laughing. He passed it over, wondering what he had inhaled. Not tobacco, certainly, but if it was marijuana it was something orders of magnitude more potent than the homegrown from the private plots of the village.
Still, it certainly did make one feel good. Relaxing, he asked a question that had been on his mind: "What will happen to the old man?"
"The murderer? He will be convicted in the people's court, of course, and sentenced no doubt to many years of reeducation," said the policewoman righteously; and then, "But if I were the judge I would suspend the sentence."
"Because he is so old?"
"No. Because he did nothing malicious or evil. I almost admire him, Scholar. He saw something that threatened the people, and he took steps to stop it. He did not mean to kill Feng Avery. When he saw what had happened he grew frightened and careless. It's too bad you found the head; he would have got off clean otherwise."
She took a deep draft on the pipe and handed it back to him in silence. Then she exploded: "You Yanks! How many of you secretly hate us?"
"It is natural to hate one's conquerors," Castor said boldly, sucking at the pipe.
"But we are not conquerors! We came here to help, when you and the Russians had stung each other to death— and nearly killed the whole world, too! We brought you doctors and teachers! We helped you rebuild your land!" When Castor was silent, she turned her eyes from the road for a moment to look at him. "Don't you know that?" she demanded. "Don't you know that without us you might all have perished? We did right to come!"
The pipe was burned out now. Castor turned it over in his fingers thoughtfully. What the woman said was true enough, or almost true enough, except—
"Except that you are still here," he said at last.
The moon was setting, on the heels of the sun, as they pulled into a parking space overlooking the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Castor got out and waited while the policewoman rummaged in the trunk of the car, gazing about. There were four or five houses, most of them dark, in this little colony. They were on a bluff, and that was strange. There were no bluffs there. Mud from the old course of the Mississippi River had made all the land within a dozen kilometers or more, and mud does not heap itself into hills. It took Castor only a moment to realize this, and to realize that Police Inspector Tsoong's home was built on the heaped-up ruins of what had once been some sort of town. From the reek of petroleum in the air he realized another fact. No matter what Tsoong Delilah had jokingly promised, there would be no tandem skin diving for them this time. There had obviously been an oil surge from the rickety old wells a hundred kilometers out on the Gulf, and swimming would be no pleasure.
Still, it was a delightful place. The sliver of a moon did not obscure the stars. "There's Jupiter," he said suddenly. "And Vega and Altair—this would be a marvelous place for a telescope!" Tsoong Delilah looked at him curiously, but said only, "Here, take our dinner while I get my bag. The house is just up that path."