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.
Candron had a better method.
* * * *
When the automobile carrying the People’s Minister of Finance, the Honorable Chou Lung, went through the Gate of the Dog to enter the inner court of the Palace, none of the four men inside it had any notion that they were carrying an unwanted guest. How could they? The car was a small one; its low, streamlined body carried only four people, and there was no luggage compartment, since the powerful little vehicle was designed only for maneuvering in a crowded city or for fast, short trips to nearby towns. There was simply no room for another passenger, and both the man in the car and the guards who passed it through were so well aware of that fact that they didn’t even bother to think about it. It never occurred to them that a slight, elderly-looking gentleman might be hanging beneath the car, floating a few inches off the ground, holding on with his fingertips, and allowing the car to pull him along as it moved on into the Palace of the Great Chinese People’s Government.
Getting into the subterranean cell where Dr. James Ch’ien was being held was a different kind of problem. Candron knew the interior of the Palace by map only, and the map he had studied had been admittedly inadequate. It took him nearly an hour to get to the right place. Twice, he avoided a patrolling guard by taking to the air and concealing himself in the darkness of an overhead balcony. Several other times, he met men in civilian clothing walking along the narrow walks, and he merely nodded at them. He looked too old and too well-dressed to be dangerous.
The principle that made it easy was the fact that no one expects a lone man to break into a heavily guarded prison.
After he had located the building where James Ch’ien was held, he went high-flying. The building itself was one