Lines fore and aft moored the Liberty Explorer fast to the pier. The gangplank thudded down. “Come on, Mother,” Liu Mei said when Liu Han didn’t move right away. “We have to get the arms for the People’s Liberation Army.”

“You are right, of course,” Liu Han said. “Just let me make sure these stupid turtles don’t lose our baggage or run off with it.” Actually, she did not think the sailors would. They struck her as being unusually honest. Maybe they were just unusually well paid. She had heard that Americans were, but hadn’t taken it seriously till that one sailor spoke of his brother the factory worker owning a sailboat.

When she was satisfied the few belongings she and Liu Mei had brought from China would accompany them off the freighter, she went down the gangplank, her daughter following. The man holding the Chinese sign came up to them. “You are Miss Liu Han?” he asked, speaking Mandarin with an accent that said he was more at home in Cantonese.

“I am Comrade Liu Han, yes,” Liu Han answered in English. “This is my daughter, Comrade Liu Mei. Who are you?” She was wary of traps. She would be wary of traps as long as she lived.

The Chinese man grinned, set down the sign, and clapped his hands together. “Nobody told me you spoke English,” he said in that language, using it rapidly and slangily. “My name’s Frankie Wong. I’m supposed to be your helper-your driver, your translator, whatever you need. You follow me?”

“I understand most, yes,” Liu Han said, and took more than a little pleasure in disconcerting him. Still in English, she went on, “You with Kuomintang?”

“I’m not with anybody,” Frankie Wong said. He dropped back into Chinese: “Why would I want to be with any faction over there? My grandfather was a peasant when he came here to help build the railroads. All the round-eyes hated him and called him filthy names. But he was a laborer, and I am a lawyer. If he’d stayed in China, he would have stayed a peasant all his life, and I would be a peasant, too.”

“That does not have to be true,” Liu Mei said. “Look at my mother. She was born a peasant, and now she is on the Central Committee.”

Frankie Wong looked from mother to daughter and back again. “I think maybe Mao did a better job of picking people to come to the United States for him than anyone over here thought he did,” he said slowly. A sailor with a dolly brought a crate down the gangplank and rolled it toward the Chinese women. Wong eyed it. “Is that your stuff?” At Liu Han’s nod, he spoke to the sailor in rapid-fire English, now faster than she could keep up with. He turned back to her. “Okay. It’ll follow us to the hotel. Come on; I’ll take you to my car.”

That a lawyer would own an automobile did not surprise Liu Han. Lawyers were important people in China; she had no reason to believe they wouldn’t be important people here. But a lot of the people who drove automobiles here were plainly not important. Liu Han could judge that by the way they dressed, and by the battered, rusty cars some of them had. She could also judge it by how many automobiles were on the streets: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, enough to clog them the way people on foot and on bicycles clogged the streets of Peking.

Liu Mei noticed that, and noticed something else as well. “Look how wide all the streets are, Mother,” she said. “They hold the automobiles so well, I think they were made to hold them.”

“You are right,” Frankie Wong said. “You are right, and you are clever. A hundred years ago, Los Angeles was only a village. These streets were made with cars in mind.”

Liu Han thought about that as he drove them past the buildings and houses of the city, which also seemed to her to be set very far apart from one another. A large city growing from a village in only a hundred years? All of China’s great cities had been great for many centuries. She laughed a little. Los Angeles struck her the same way Earth as a whole struck the little scaly devils: it had grown too great too fast to seem quite natural.

In front of the hotel, a crowd of people had gathered. Some waved U.S. flags. Some waved red flags. Some waved Kuomintang flags, too, with their twelve-pointed stars. “Don’t worry about that,” Frankie Wong said. “It just means they know you’re from China.”

Warily, Liu Han let herself be reassured. “When will we see officials who can help us?” she asked. “Will they come to this”-she read the letters slowly and carefully-“Biltmore Hotel, or will we have to travel to them?”

Now Wong looked at her with frank respect. “From what I heard, you didn’t have any English before you got ready to come to the USA.”

“A little. A very little, from a long time ago,” Liu Han answered with a glance over toward Liu Mei. “But I could not read it then. Learning this alphabet is easier than learning Chinese characters, I think. It would be easier still if the letters sounded the same way all the time.” Her daughter, who had studied with her, nodded agreement to that.

Frankie Wong laughed. “A lot of people who grow up speaking English would agree with you there. I’m one of them, as a matter of fact. But let’s get you settled in here first before we worry about reforming English. How does that sound?”

“It will have to do,” Liu Han said. Wong laughed again, though she didn’t think she’d been joking.

Sam Yeager knotted his khaki tie, then checked the result in the mirror on the sliding door to the bedroom closet. “You look very handsome, dear,” Barbara said.

“Take more than a uniform to do that for me,” Yeager answered. His wife snorted. He eyed her. “You now, babe, you look good.”

Barbara examined herself. Her azure dress played up her eyes. She tapped a curl back into place. “If you like middle-aged women, I may possibly do,” she said. “Possibly.”

He slid an arm around her waist and brushed her lips with his, not hard enough to disturb her lipstick. “I don’t know about middle-aged women in general, but I can think of one in particular I like.” His hand closed on her hipbone. “And I like what you do, too. I just wish I could do it more often. But I’m middle-aged, too.”

“Middle-aged going on seventeen, by the way you’re pawing me,” Barbara said as she twisted away. But she had a smile on her face and a smile in her voice. “Now-is our son ready?”

“He’d better be,” Sam said. Both as a ballplayer and as a soldier, his life had run by the clock. That was second nature to him. It wasn’t yet second nature to Jonathan, which produced friction every now and then, or sometimes more often than every now and then. Sam raised his voice: “You ready to go, Jonathan?”

“Just about,” Jonathan answered, something less than a smile in his voice. “Do I really have to come to this thing, Dad?”

“Yes, you do.” Yeager held on to his temper with both hands. “We’ve been over this before, you know. This is officially an informal reception, which means family and all. What would you do if we weren’t here-call Karen and see if she could come over?” He made it seem as if being alone in the house with her didn’t sound like fun.

“Well, yeah, I might do that.” Jonathan made it seem as if his father were the one who’d put that thought in his mind, as if he never would have had it without Sam’s help. They were both lying through their teeth, and they both knew it.

“You’ll have to find another time, that’s all,” Sam said. “But cheer up. I hear this emissary has a daughter about your age. Maybe she’ll be cute.”

“Fat chance,” Jonathan said.

Sam shook his head. He hadn’t been so cynical at that age. He was sure he hadn’t. And if anybody had offered him a chance to meet a girl who might be cute, he’d have been off like a shot. He was sure of that, too. After another glance at his watch, he said, “Come on, let’s have a look at you. We’ve got to get going, you know.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” When Jonathan came into the bedroom, he did pass muster. He couldn’t do anything about his shaved head, but that was far from unique among kids his age. His suit wasn’t of flashy cut or color, and, if his tie bore a pattern that looked like body paint, it wasn’t gaudy body paint.