‘Sha! Sha!’
Comrade Professor Tung Li stood at the window of his cramped office with geological samples strewn in every nook and cranny of the tiny room. The distant chanting chilled him as he gazed down on the crowd of blue-jacketed students milling in the snow-swept university courtyard below. As they stared up at him with glazed expressions of hate, the professor of geology recognised many of those calling for blood as his students. The Great Leader had mobilised China’s youth for his cultural revolution to hold on to power and now the youth of China was tearing down what little the nation had managed to build.
Professor Tung Li shook his head and walked away from the window. He gazed at the rock on his desk. It had been delivered to him months earlier when a labourer toiling on the old legation site had unearthed the stone, wrapped in a rotting rag. That it was one of the most valuable finds the world had ever known had been confirmed that morning when one half of the puzzle as to the rock’s origin had been confirmed by colleagues from the West. Sadly, his liaison with the geological department in Paris had been another strike against the sixty-six-year-old teacher, whose fine features reflected the blood he had inherited from his mother, Naomi Wong and his father, Tung Chi.
Soon they would come for him and he knew that he would be berated for his revisionist, counter-revolutionary ideas. At best they might wave their copies of Mao’s thoughts in his face, and force him to confess his sins. At worst, he would be dragged from the office and executed in public. Tung Li had already lost friends in that manner to the insane hysteria that had gripped his country. The Great Leap Forward had failed miserably and scapegoats had to be rooted out and sacrificed. Who better than the intellectuals and scientists of the newly emerged nation free of foreign domination to blame for the Great Leader’s failure? Millions had starved to death and the purge had begun the year before. Tung Li had known that sending a fragment of the rock to a friend he had met years earlier studying geology in France was dangerous. But his whole life’s work as a geologist had centred on the small stone dragon discovered in the old foreign legation ruins and it would be worth it if his theory proved to be correct.
As a door below crashed open the geologist could hear the heavy clatter of boots on the stairs leading to the floor of his department. Wisely, the rest of the academic staff had already fled but Tung Li knew he must remain to protect the stone dragon.
Then it was his door that was being smashed down, spilling the young, blue-jacketed former students into his cramped office.
‘He is here!’ a girl cried to her comrades as Tung Li felt hands seize him, forcing him to kneel on the cold floor of his office.
‘We have the counter-revolutionary criminal,’ the girl called back to the mob, who cheered at her news.
Tung Li kept his head bowed, hoping that they might deliver little more then some rough handling and berating for his contacts with the Imperialist West, but when he chose to glance up at the girl who led the mob he could see no pity in her eyes. She was probably only seventeen years old and he vaguely remembered her as a student in one of his classes on the chemical composition of igneous rocks. He could not remember her name; she had been but one of many hundreds he had taught over the years at the Beijing University.
She reached forward and gripped the professor by the hair, wrenching his face up.
‘You are Comrade Professor Tung Li,’ she stated, rather than asking.
‘I am, but you know that,’ Tung Li answered, seeing the flame of a fanatic in her dark eyes.
‘You have been accused of harbouring old ideas and communicating with the enemies of the revolution,’ she spat. ‘It is useless to deny the charges, Comrade Professor.’
Tung Li felt the numbing fear begin to overwhelm him. It did not feel as if he would be just rough-handled and then let go. He sensed that his contact with the French university’s geological department had become public knowledge, and something as simple as having his results confirmed would be interpreted in political terms as subversion. Logic no longer prevailed in the new revolution unleashed on China. He knew it was better to remain silent and hoped that his dignity might impress some of his old students, now hanging back in the mob crushed into his office.
‘You have no need to answer the charges,’ the girl screamed in his face. ‘They are already proven.’
She let go her grip on his hair and glanced at the table where the stone dragon lay. With a strange smile on her face she picked up a large, metal hammer.
‘No!’ Tung Li yelled, realising what the girl was about to do.
‘Was this the rock that you used as an excuse to contact the foreign devils?’ she asked.
Tung Li attempted to rise to his feet but was forced down by the mob. Without waiting for an answer the former student brought the hammer down, pulverising the rock. Again and again the hammer fell until all that remained was a fine powder and a few minuscule chips. The little stone dragon, which had lived safely in his rock case for millions of years, ceased to exist.
Still brandishing the hammer, the girl called on her comrades to drag the counter-revolutionary criminal down the stairs to the courtyard, where he would be executed in the name of the Great Leader’s revolution.
The tears that flowed from the old geologist’s eyes were not for himself – but for the death of the stone dragon. ‘You fools,’ he roared above the calls to kill him. ‘You have just destroyed mankind’s greatest find.’
But his tirade against the insanity of what was happening in his country was lost in the hysteria of a youth out of control. Tung Li fell and was kicked but fought to regain his feet and by the time they had dragged him to the snow-swept courtyard he was on his feet, battered and bruised.
The girl still held the geological hammer and waved it over her head.
‘It is the judgment of the people that you be executed here and now,’ she said, stepping forward. ‘Hold him down,’ she shouted.
‘You will not execute him,’ a deep voice roared above the murmuring of the young students ringed around their battered former teacher.
The students fell silent, turning their angry attention on a high-ranking officer of the People’s Liberation Army, accompanied by a large contingent of armed soldiers holding their bayonet-tipped rifles at the high port across their chests. Many in the mob recognised the feared soldier and fell back to allow the representative of China’s formidable army to stride forward to where the girl stood over Tung Li with her hammer raised.
‘This man is my prisoner and you will hand him over to me immediately,’ the officer commanded.
Tung Li looked to the girl and saw a fury in her eyes at having been usurped by the senior officer of the PLA.
‘Comrade General,’ the girl said angrily, ‘you do not have the authority to interfere in the deliverance of the people’s justice.’
With blurring speed, the general raised his pistol and fired point blank into the girl’s face. A fine mist of red stained the snowdrifts as the girl toppled, still gripping the hammer.
‘This man will come with me,’ the general said, reaching down to assist Tung Li to his feet.
The shock of the girl being killed still hung in the air and, without any attempt to interfere, the crowd parted to allow the general and Tung Li through, with the general’s escort falling in protectively as they made their way from the university grounds.
‘Brother,’ Tung Li said when they were a safe distance from the mob of students, ‘I thought that you were stationed on the Manchurian border.’
‘I was,’ Tung Han replied. ‘But the Great Leader requested that I return to Beijing to keep control of his revolutionary guards.’
Tung Han was a year older than Tung Li, and had chosen the life of a soldier, whereas Tung Li the life of a man of science. Despite their different paths the two men had remained as close as any two half-brothers could. Tung Han had been told of his different blood by his mother on her deathbed. That he was the son of a man who had fought the foreign devils at the turn of the century had helped the young man choose the life of a soldier, and he had wisely chosen to fight with the young Chinese poet who would lead them on the historic Long March, and eventually into nationhood. The Great Leader had purged many of those who previously had been faithful to him but with luck and good judgment Tung Han had survived and was known to many as a close confidant of the Great Leader and a man to be feared.
‘Will the incident at the university have repercussions for you?’ Tung Li asked as they walked.
‘I was exercising my right to control the crowd,’ Tung Han replied bluntly. ‘Nothing more.’
Tung Li knew that his brother had risked much in rescuing him. In many circles of the Party he was considered suspect on account of his Western contacts and that was not good for his half-brother’s career. ‘What will you do with me?’ Tung Li asked.
‘You will be sent to a little village in the north of the country until this insanity abates,’ Tung Han answered. ‘There, you will work as a stonemason until it is safe for you to return. I cannot understand why you did not comply with my earlier suggestions to flee.’
‘It was the stone dragon,’ Tung Li said. ‘I had to wait for the results to be confirmed. And now it has all been a waste of time. The evidence has been completely obliterated.’
‘What was so important about the rock?’ Tung Han asked.
‘It was confirmed as coming from the planet Mars, and thus the fossil had to be a creature originating from that world. It would have answered one of mankind’s most asked questions, about whether life existed beyond our own world.’
Tung Han ceased walking and turned to his brother. ‘I am sorry that you have lost the stone dragon,’ he said sympathetically. ‘But you are alive, as I swore to our mother to protect you. I cannot mourn for your loss, as I am a soldier who has fought for my country. We need to find peace among ourselves before we find the answer to mankind’s philosophical questions. It will pass.’
Tung Li gazed down the cold street. Maybe his brother was right, he mused. What good was the answer to the question of life on other worlds when on his own there was no peace. Ah, but at least he’d had the opportunity to gaze upon the little stone dragon and, for a brief moment, wondered who else had seen the creature from another world. That was a question to which he would not have an answer. For now his country was a sleeping dragon, awakening to make the world tremble.