When his name first cropped up in the news reports, it was just one more foreign name to worry about, like so many others. And like so many others, it graduated in due time to the level of potential crisis. But before it had gone any further than that, suddenly all the rules had been changed when we weren’t looking, and if you said “he” without an obvious antecedent you were talking about Arslan.
On TV and in the news weeklies he’d looked no different from a lot of them: young, jaunty, halfway Oriental like the second-row extras in Turandot, and every one of them a major general at the very least. “Turkistan—is that independent now?” Luella had asked me, one of the first times he showed up.
“I think it always has been.” I meant to look it up in the big atlas at school; but I was busy planning for quarterly exams, and that intention went the way of a lot of other things I meant to do. I never did get around to it till after the Emergency Broadcast Network began its terse announcements that martial law had been proclaimed throughout the United States and that all U.S. armed forces were under the command of General Arslan. Among other things that hectic day, I looked at the map of Central Asia. Turkistan. Cap: Bukhara. Pop: 1,369,000. Even South Vietnam would have been able to handle a place that size. Still, with China on one border and Russia on another, and an oil field begging for development, it was small wonder Arslan had made a splash at the U.N.
“Stay off the highways,” the EBS kept saying. Whether that was a friendly voice or a hostile one was anybody’s guess. “Only military transport is permitted on state, interstate, and national highways.” Military transport—that included, apparently, the great commercial trucks that rolled past the square and on through town. We stood and watched them in the early dusk, and I wondered if it was good luck or bad that Kraftsville happened to lie on a main highway.
“I’ve got to get home,” Paul Sears protested. “I can’t help it if I live on the hardroad.”
“If I were you, Paul, I’d go around by the back road.” That was Arnold Morgan, knowing all the answers. “Once the President invokes his emergency powers, we’re required to follow his instructions. That’s Federal law.”
Paul snorted. “It didn’t sound like the President to me.”
“I’d feel better if I knew who that General Arslan was,” somebody else put in. Which was about par for Kraftsville. Plenty of people in town had never heard of Premier Arslan, or didn’t remember it if they had.
“He’s the one that’s been talking to Red China,” I said. The last news I remembered hearing about him, Arslan and the Chinese premier had been in Moscow by invitation, presumably discussing their border dispute. The Russians had been offering for months to mediate it. Turkistan had been cagey, China had emphatically refused; but at last they had agreed to a Moscow summit meeting, agenda unspecified. Now, a few days after the meeting started, Arslan was Deputy Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. And the trucks were rolling. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Everybody was on the telephone. Long distance calls were getting through to some places, but none farther away than Louisiana, where Rachel Munsey talked to some of her relations and found out there was fighting going on down there. Maybe riot or maybe war—Rachel had managed not to find out that little detail; but there were people with uniforms and people without, and black and white in both categories. We couldn’t make connections with the East Coast or the West Coast, and even Chicago was cut off cold. There were open lines to St. Louis, our nearest city, for just two days. Then they went dead, sometime in the night.
And the next morning we got word from Monckton that a real, genuine army was driving west on Illinois 460, which meant straight towards us. But Kraftsville, Illinois, wasn’t likely to be anybody’s military objective, and the highway didn’t pass the school; I saw no reason to declare a holiday.
It was just after lunch when Luella came hurrying across Pearl Street to my office. “I thought I’d run over and tell you instead of tying up the phone. Helen Sears just called, and she says they’re passing her place right now; they ought to be in town in a few minutes.”
“You shouldn’t be alone,” I said. “Why don’t you go over to Rachel Munsey’s?”
“No, I’d rather be in my own house. And somebody might call.”
“All right. Call me or come over if you hear anything that sounds important. Otherwise just stay put. I want to know where you are.”
From Nita Runciman’s eighth-grade room, which was the southwest corner of the top floor, you could see a little bit of the highway four blocks away. I told Nita to post one or two of her students there as lookouts and let me know as soon as they saw anything. In less than ten minutes she was on the intercom. “They’re coming through,” she said. “Mr. Bond—” Her voice crackled. “Some of them are turning down Pearl Street. Trucks and jeeps.”
They didn’t pass the school; they stopped beside it. I watched them from the south window of my office while I talked on the intercom. They pulled up in a line right in front of me, their engines still running, stretching nearly the full block. The last jeep of the string drove past the others and turned into the parking lot. There was a driver, and a man with a submachine gun, and one passenger. I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but when I saw him, my heart went down a notch. He was too young, too young and too happy.
I had no doubt of who he was, much as I could have used a little doubt right then. The news pictures that had seemed so anonymous suddenly flashed into vivid focus. He gave orders exuberantly, waving his hands. Soldiers swarmed out from Pearl Street in both directions, into the schoolground and into the yard of my house. I searched the upstairs windows for a sight of Luella. But I didn’t have much time to look. Soldiers were at the south door, a few steps from my office, some of them with rifles reversed—ready to smash the glass if the double doors were locked, or maybe just for fun. I got there first, and they waited grinning while I opened up. We might be wanting those doors intact.
They pushed in. Whatever they were, they weren’t Americans. I got in front of a sergeant (I didn’t bother to count his stripes, but he looked like a sergeant) and braced my legs. “Wait a minute!” I said. He looked at me without much interest and gave an order, and three men backed me into my office. I guessed this was what was called token resistance; anyway, it seemed like the best idea available at the moment. Now it was my teachers’ turn. They had instructions to sit as tight as possible, cooperate without objection, volunteer nothing, and keep the children still. There wasn’t much else we could do on such short notice.
Boots thudded along the hall, up the stairs, down into the basement. Doors opened, doors slammed. A long barrage of thumps told me they were opening the desks. Then most of them came trooping back and out of the door. It had only taken a few minutes.
The sergeant held the south door open, saluting smartly, and General Arslan strode in, with quite a retinue behind him. He was stocky, but he moved with lightness and bounce, like a good welterweight boxer. He turned into the office as if he knew his way around. The soldiers let go of my arms and fell back, and I was face to face with him.
“You are in charge of this school?” His English was very clear, his voice a quick baritone.
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m the principal.”
“What is your name?”
“Franklin Bond.”
He had been smiling all the time. Now he tilted his head in a little hint of a bow, never taking his eyes off mine. There was nothing else impressive about him that you could put your finger on, but he did have the most piercing eyes I’d ever seen. “Good,” he said. “You will show me your school.”
“Gladly. But I’d like to know what you’re here for.”
He strode out, and a bayonet prodded the small of my back, in case I hadn’t gotten the message. My legs were a good deal longer than his; I caught up in two steps, and we went down the hall side by side. He glanced up at me with amusement. “I shall bivouac in your town.” Well, that sounded temporary. “I shall hold a dinner here tonight. You will be my guest.”
I showed him the new west wing first, with the kitchen and cafeteria and the wide folding doors opening into our gym that doubled as auditorium. He took it all in with those eyes of his, as if the fate of the world hung on everything he looked at. Then the library and the audiovisual room and the music room. Then I had to lead him back into the main block of the school.
“And what is this?”
“That’s the fire door.” Where he came from, it might be a revolutionary concept. “In case a fire ever broke out in one part of the building, we could pull this steel door down and keep it out of the other part.”
He nodded and ran his left hand up the tracks. “It is good,” he said. A connoisseur’s appreciation.
It wasn’t much different from a start-of-school guided tour for the PTA. A little pack of soldiers—half a dozen, maybe—seemed to be tied to General Arslan’s heels. I showed him the shop, the furnace room, the washrooms, the teachers’ lounges, the broom closets. We looked into every classroom. He asked the name of every teacher. The children sat subdued and uneasy at their desks; I was proud to see that the teachers were keeping them quietly busy.
The only classroom we actually went into was Nita Runciman’s eighth grade. Arslan paused a moment at the open door, resting his hand lightly on the frame, and then stepped in with a broad smile. He stood with arms akimbo, surveying the class. For the first time I noticed he wore a pistol on his left hip. The children watched him blankly.
Suddenly he stepped forward, down one aisle and back another, swiftly tapping three children on the shoulder as he passed. He was saying something, chuckling, to his men as he came back toward the door. Immediately the three were pulled from their seats and hustled after him. It was two girls and a boy—Paula Sears, LouAnn Williams, and Hunt Morgan. He had picked, very possibly, my three best eighth-graders.
“Wait a minute,” I said. He had to stop or walk into me. He stopped. “Where are you taking these children? And what for?”
He put on an expression of mocking innocence. Yes, he was too young. He shrugged. “Is it important that you should know this? However, I tell you. They will serve at my dinner tonight.” He stepped forward, and the faithful bayonet prodded me out of his way.
Back in my office, one hip perched on the edge of my desk, he lit cigarette after cigarette, smoking each one down in intense short drags till the live coal touched his fingers, flipping the smoldering butts onto my floor. He had a window opened, which let in a cold draft without clearing the air much. Meanwhile he was busy. The three eighth-graders had been led out and driven away in a truck. Soldiers kept coming and going, reporting to Arslan and receiving orders. Every one of them looked like a kid getting ready for a birthday party. I’d never seen so many jubilant faces on grown men at one time before. Whether it was a good sign or bad remained to be seen.
He wasn’t just planning a bivouac and a dinner. It was to be a feast. It was to be, all too obviously, a victory celebration. The cooks were put to work, not just in the kitchen but in the home ec room, with Maud Dollfus in charge there. Five of Maud’s best students were drafted to help, and so were the music teacher (Hunt Morgan’s mother Jean) and our new little librarian. The freezers were emptied. There was a regular procession of soldiers carrying cases of liquor. My phone kept ringing, and Arslan kept answering it himself, sounding brusque and casual in his ungodly language. I wasn’t much acquainted with the ways of generals, but it seemed to me he was an almighty informal commander.
I’d settled down in my desk chair at first, to keep him out of it; but the intrusion was getting to my stomach, and pretty soon I had to stand up and move around. I was just pacing back from the big window when he suddenly swung toward me with a friendly smile and announced, “Now it is your turn.” He waved his hand hospitably toward my phone. “You have three hours, twenty minutes; at five P.M. the telephone service stops. You will inform the parents of your students that their children are held as hostages for the good behavior of all citizens. You will inform them that they will surrender all vehicles and all weapons and ammunition to my soldiers on demand. You will inform them that each time one of my soldiers is attacked or resisted, two children will be executed—if possible, children belonging to the family of the guilty citizen. You will inform them that they may bring one blanket for each child, to be delivered to the southwest corner of the school grounds by five-thirty P.M. You will inform them that for each citizen seen outside his or her home after six P.M., one child will be executed—if possible, again, a child belonging to the family of the guilty citizen.” He straightened up suddenly from the desk and stepped close to me, thrusting his face up toward mine. He was alive with eager pleasure. “Have you understood?” he demanded exultantly. “Do you believe that I can do what I say—and that I will do it?”
Maybe and maybe not. I pushed past him, bumping his shoulder hard, and picked up the phone. He was still grinning as he led his retinue out.
There were about two hundred families represented in the school, and not all of them had telephones. I called first the ones who were most likely to be of help and gave each of them a list of others to contact, ticking off names in the school register. It wasn’t just a matter of spreading the news. Everybody had to be convinced. Everybody. The middle of southern Illinois might not be a very likely spot for military atrocities, but I was damned if I’d call his bluff. I wasn’t going to have children slaughtered—not my own students, not in my own school. And he looked like a man who could have a taste for blood.
The second call I made (I wanted to let Arslan’s men get out of the office first) was to Luella. “They’ve been here,” she said grimly. “They took the couch and the green armchair, for some reason. And they turned the whole house wrong side out. They just ransacked everything. It’ll take me days to get it cleaned up.”
“But they didn’t hurt you?”
“No, no. I just stayed out of their way.”
I gave her a list of names to work on and told her to be careful—good advice in a cyclone, but there wasn’t much else to say.
I was still on the phone at five, checking with people who’d helped make calls. The line went dead almost on the second by the master clock. That was it. I rubbed my face and said a little prayer.
They had left me alone all this time, and when I stepped out into the hall nobody bothered me. I walked down to the cafeteria and through it into the gym. My living-room couch was standing in the center of the stage at the opposite end, with my coffee table in front of it. Some of the cafeteria tables had been moved into the gym, and between them the floor was crowded with chairs—all of the school’s folding chairs, teachers’ desk chairs, and a medley of chairs that must have been confiscated from people’s homes. No doubt my armchair was in there someplace. I strolled back into the main block of the school.
Relays of children were being led into the A-V room and the shop room, and a couple of Arslan’s officers were interviewing them there. The officers were polite, but it wasn’t likely they’d get much information, considering that the scared kids couldn’t understand one word in four of their accented English. A lot of blankets had already been delivered, and more were coming all the time. Grinning soldiers were distributing them, as friendly as you please. Little Betty Hanson was very shaky, but the rest of the teachers made me proud. I sent Nita Runciman down to help Betty with her third grade, and took Nita’s class across the hall to join the other eighth-grade class under Jack Partridge.
This time there was a colonel in my office. He was in the process of going through my desk, taking a few notes and helping himself to a few of my papers, which he filed neatly in a large folder. He glanced up when I came in and introduced himself in an atrocious accent. It went with his dark, sharp features and wolfish eyes; he would have made a pretty good villain in an old movie. I couldn’t make out the name very well, but part of it sounded like Nizam. I stood and watched him till he got through with my desk and applied himself to the file cabinet. Then I sat down and watched him some more. He breezed through the files very rapidly, not seeming to find anything worth taking, thanked me, and stalked out.
After the five-thirty deadline no more blankets were accepted, though a few more people showed up with them. Maud Dollfus organized teams of seventh and eighth-grade boys to carry supper trays to the classrooms. (She was about to use the girls from her home ec classes, till I told her I wasn’t going to have girls running around with the halls full of soldiers.) It was a slow way to feed three hundred children, but keeping them out of the way was worth a little inefficiency.
Six o’clock came and went, and I felt my stomach tighten as the hand of the clock moved past that curfew mark. What I wanted most of all right then was to sit down somewhere and pray, but I wasn’t about to do it with all those grinning Turkistanis (assuming that was what they were) bustling around. Besides, the supper business was keeping me busy. We finished a little before seven-thirty. I was eating my own meal at last when a certain stir among the soldiers told me Arslan was coming back. He carried a sphere of motion and excitement around him. I knew the phenomenon very well. We didn’t see it so often in grade school, but it happened every few years in high school, whenever the basketball team had a star player who inspired the rest of the kids with pride instead of envy. There was exactly that feeling obvious in the looks of the Turkistanis; wherever Arslan went was where the action was.
He certainly moved with the style of an athlete riding a wave of popularity. He came in swinging along as if he heard cheers on every side. “Now.” He faced me, about a foot too close, considering the liquor on his breath. “You should see that your children are disposed for the night. Very soon they will be locked in their classrooms.”
“Quite a few of them are going to need to go to the bathroom in the night.”
“There will be a man on duty here.” He tapped the intercom on my desk. “The door will be opened for any adequate cause.” He grinned arrogantly. “You see, I am not unreasonable. You will return to this office with those members of your staff who are not required in the classrooms or in preparing food.” The corner of his mouth drew itself into a deep dimple of amusement, and he paused for just a second before he added, “Including Miss Hanson,” and it was only then that I began to understand what we were really in for.
“Miss Hanson is required in her classroom.”
“This is not true,” he told me reprovingly. “Mrs. Runciman is competent to replace her there. You yourself have arranged this.”
“By what authority are you acting, General?” It was a question I’d forgotten to ask before. He carried his credentials in his eyes.
He pursed his lips. “By authority of the President of the United States of America.”
I made sure that things were squared away in all of the rooms, and the intercom working. I said a few words to each class, and a few more to each teacher privately. Last of all, I brought Betty Hanson out. There was a lone soldier in my office now. We stood in the empty corridor. She hadn’t been crying for a while, from the looks of her, but she was shaking. I squeezed her arm, and she took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. “How old are you, Betty?”
“Twenty-three.”
“That makes you our youngest faculty member. But remember, Betty, there are about three hundred people in this building who are younger than you. A lot is going to be demanded of you, but a lot is being demanded of them, too. They’re my responsibility, and they’re your responsibility, and every teacher’s here. You understand that, don’t you?” She nodded. She’d stopped trembling, and a little color was coming back into her fragile face. “Nobody’s asking us to do anything heroic, Betty. I’m just asking you to remember you’re a teacher. I expect you to behave accordingly. Will you promise me that?”
She took another shuddering breath. “Yes, Mr. Bond.”
“Good girl. I know you will.” I put an arm around her and shepherded her into the office, which comforted her and saved me from having to look at her directly. She was too young and too scared—too pretty, aside from the temporary effects of the tears. Arslan’s hands had looked very hard.
It was mainly to provide cover and comfort for Betty that I pried loose Maud Dollfus and Jean Morgan from the cooking. Perry Carpenter had been helping the janitor bank down the old furnace. As shop teacher and coach Perry hadn’t had much to do all day, and he was pretty nervous. The six of us waited in the office, and at first nobody spoke.
“Franklin,” Jean said sharply, when she saw me watching her, “if you’re wondering whether to tell me that they took Hunt, I already know about it. But that’s all I know, so if there’s anything else, for Pete’s sake tell me.” Her chin was up and her voice firm. I didn’t need to worry about Jean Morgan.
“You know as much as I do, then, Jean. Hunt’s a levelheaded boy.”
“That’s what I’m telling myself,” she said doggedly.
The soldier lounging at the door came to eager attention. “Here it is,” I said. But Arslan didn’t bother to enter the office; he just returned the soldier’s salute and gestured us towards the cafeteria. Two of his followers dropped off to herd us down the hall after him.
The tables bristled with liquor bottles. The folding doors stood wide open, and we threaded our way through into the gym. It was filling up fast with soldiers. The moment Arslan appeared, they raised a shout of joy. There was no doubting the spontaneity of that cheer. He waved his arms and shouted back at them. He loved it; and to all appearances they loved him.
They were streaming in from the back door, filling the gym and starting now to flow on into the cafeteria, so that Arslan, in his progress toward the stage, breasted the full stream of them. They opened a path for him, closing in again in little eddies around us, and as he passed they laughed, shouted, shook their fists triumphantly. It was an impressive thing to walk through.
They were fresh and spruce. They didn’t look as though they’d been in any battles very recently, but it was a dead certainty they’d been in battles. Not a man of them but looked older and grimmer than their general, though there was nothing grim about their mood at the moment. In one word, they looked tough—not the desperate boy-toughness I’d seen in so many American veterans, but the unpretentious toughness of professionals.
Near the back door we were halted by the pressure of the stream. Arslan stood flushed and laughing—shaking hands, slapping backs, waving over shoulders at faces beyond. In half a minute we were cut off from him by the swarm, and gradually forced backwards. I steered us up against the wall, and we stuck there stubbornly.
No matter how well you knew your teachers, you could never predict for sure how they would act in a completely new situation. But you could make a pretty darned good guess—especially if one of them had been your next-door neighbor for four years. Perry Carpenter worried me. Perry with his breezy ways and red hair and long-handled basketball reach had been the most convenient hero for the boys of his teams and classes, but not a man I’d ask for anything out of the ordinary. Now, scared rotten, he was ready to sell the school or the whole country, whichever was in demand, to whoever held the gun. I couldn’t blame him, any more or less than I blamed myself for having a bad stomach. It was just another aggravating factor that had to be taken into account.
At last the stream stopped flowing. The tiers of seats were packed; the tables were crowded. Whoever had decided how many troops were to be squeezed into the gym and cafeteria tonight had figured it pretty close. But they were all in; I could see that only a couple of sentries were left outside when the door finally closed. Arslan waved his arms, and the soldiers jostled down into their seats. Now only he, and we, and the little pack that must be his bodyguard, were left standing. He turned to us, and the look that lit up his face made me stiffen. It was a devil’s look, a look of white-hot pleasure.
“You are my guests,” he said. Without turning his eyes away from us he gave an order, and suddenly his guards were at us, pinioning our arms, wheeling us face-forward against the wall, and in what seemed seconds we were helpless as papooses, our arms roped tight (they had had those ropes mighty handy) and our mouths choked with cloth gags. All except Betty Hanson.
They turned us again to face Arslan. He let his eyes drift relishingly over us all and settle on Betty. She was leaning against the wall beside me, trembling so hard that I felt it through the plaster. Slowly and thoughtfully he stretched out his left hand and closed it on her right breast. Slowly and thoughtfully he caressed it. “You,” he said tenderly, “will wait.” He nodded to one of the bodyguards, and instantly she was grabbed by the arm and hustled out the back door. The troops shouted applause and groaned disappointment. He threw them an acknowledging grin. Then he took two easy steps to stand in front of Perry Carpenter at my other side. The gleam of his eyes was intensely mocking. “You are not worth keeping alive,” he said. And he turned to another one of his men and gave a brusque order. The soldier looked regretful.
It wasn’t necessary to know the language. A quavering whisper of sound came from Perry, and he pitched limply against my shoulder. “You should not worry,” Arslan said consolingly. “I have ordered him to play no games with you. He will kill quickly.”
So he was willing to murder a man to make a point. The soldier who’d received the order pulled Perry off of me and prodded him to the door. Arslan looked us over coolly, wheeled, and mounted the steps to the stage. He waved down their cheers and settled himself on my couch, stretching out full length and sinking his head and shoulders luxuriously onto a pyramid of cushions in the corner. And the feast began.
Maud’s scared boys served it—not bringing the food all the way, but forming a bucket-brigade line from the kitchen to just inside the gym door and passing the trays along it. From there the soldiers took them, and they flew, wavering wildly, through a forest of reaching arms, hand to hand up to the highest rows. There weren’t enough trays to go around, of course, and well before all the tiers were served, plates began to appear—confiscated plates, no doubt. All things considered, it was a pretty efficient operation.
And whether it was from being under their general’s eye or some other reason, for a mob of celebrating soldiers they were pretty gentlemanly. That dawned on me against my will when I saw the emptied trays being passed back. And so far as I’d been able to see all day, not a man had made an improper move—not a serious one—toward any of the girls or the women teachers. They looked wild, they sounded wild, but they were better disciplined than any troop of Boy Scouts I’d ever seen.
As fast as the top tiers finished their noisy meals and politely handed in their trays, they started to sing. There must have been a couple of hundred voices joined in by the time I realized that singing was what it was. It puzzled me, the mindless, tuneless, inhuman noise that came out of them, till I realized this must be what passed for music in Turkistan. Then it grated on me, hard. As noise, it was acceptable. As music, it was desecration.
How long we stood there, deserted and ignored, I wasn’t sure. Jean beside me held herself stiff as a poker and alert as a sentry, her face awkwardly strained around the gag. For myself, I was aching just to move—longing just to stretch, just to change position, just to shake off the ropes. I shook my head, shifted my feet, flexed my shoulder muscles. I felt like yelling and stamping and throwing a few things. The worst of it was the gag. It was a lot more than uncomfortable; it was insulting.
Meanwhile the show went on. Maybe we were an exhibit ourselves, but we were something else, too. General Arslan was on stage, all right, and playing to a double audience. It wasn’t enough that his own men should respond to him like an orchestra; some representatives of Kraftsville had to hear the performance and watch him conduct. Now he was in his glory. He proposed the toasts, he led the songs. The whole gym echoed and reeked with drunken happiness. Still there was a waiting air, an overture feeling, as if there was some expected climax yet to come. And it came.
Arslan, propped on one elbow, swung his glass arm’s-length high; at once they were all attending eagerly. He bellowed a few sentences at them, and each one drew its response of cheers and laughter. Then he drained off his drink, shouted a brisk order backstage, and sank again into his cushions.
A long, welling, multitudinous sound rose out of the relative silence that followed his last word; a growing, blossoming, self-renewing disharmony of whistles, laughter, cries, applause. Paula Sears was being led out from the left wing of the stage. Each of her elbows was gripped by a studiously poker-faced soldier. She was naked. She was thirteen years old.
They kneed the coffee table away, to give the spectators an unobstructed line of sight. They forced her down on her knees in front of the couch, and as Arslan’s hand went under her arm and clasped her back they released her and sprang aside, each to one end of the couch, and stood there at attention.
The khaki wave-trough of the gym grew suddenly rough and ragged, as men fought for a better view, climbed on chairs and tables, waved their arms enthusiastically. She was struggling, but it was hardly what you could call a contest. Already he had got her stretched out against himself, rolling upon her hard. The noise took on coherence and rhythm, and in a surging chant they cheered him on. When he was through, he heaved himself against the back of the couch, and with one knee and one elbow he nudged her off onto the floor. She lay tumbled there till the two soldiers hauled her up and walked her stumblingly off the stage and down the steps at our end. They passed within a yard of us on their way to the back door. I saw her face, and I saw the blood that drabbled her legs.
That would have been enough; surely, that would have been enough. But no—any man could have raped one little girl. He took time to enjoy another drink. Then he turned his head and gave his sharp order once more. And this time, to their delirious whoops, it was Hunt Morgan who was led naked onstage.
He was walking docilely enough when I first caught sight of him; but from the second he realized the scene that had been set for him, he was fighting. And the troops were crazy with delight. The whole gym shook with their shouting and stamping. Arslan had trouble keeping Hunt under. The boy fought with flailing arms and legs; the soldiers screamed and bellowed with a new ferocity; and I felt my flesh sag with a cold sadness. Then through a lull in the din I heard Hunt’s cry—a muffled, wordless squawl of anguish and shame and rage. It was a signal that set off their cheers again.
Jean Morgan was leaned against the wall, not slumped, but tense and quivering, her face drained. They led Hunt off and past us, and he walked upright, not half-collapsed like Paula, not struggling now, either, but with eyes fixed on the floor, his dark hair falling raggedly around his closed face, and his naked shoulders looked thin and pitiful.
When he was gone, and the troops had settled down a little, Arslan stood up. He made a little speech, and they cheered him, and the liquor detail hauled more bottles out from under the stage and started passing them out. A wiry little corporal, serious as a judge, suddenly bounded up on the stage and knelt to tie the lace of Arslan’s shoe, and the soldiers guffawed with happy humor. Arslan made as if to pat the man’s head, and then bowed gravely to him instead, doubling the joke. Finally he stooped to finish off his last drink, flipped the glass high over his shoulder in a comedian’s gesture, and walked down the steps.
He stopped directly in front of us. Whether the bronze of his skin was suntan or native color, it gave him a discordant look of wholesomeness. He was brimming with glee, glowing, disheveled, with heavy, drunken breath; and I swam in pure fury.
He cocked his head at Jean, his eyes crinkling with laughter. “You should be proud of your son, madam. He fights well—well.” He faced me square and laid the flat of his left hand lightly on my chest. Involuntarily I twisted. “You, sir, you give me much pleasure. You are good—good.” And the hand gave one real, very gentle pat. He beamed intensely on us, and passed us by.
In a little while they took us to the teachers’ lounges, unbound and ungagged us, and locked us in. For a long time yet the noises of the feast went on. I lay on the cot, trying to pray away the pain in my stomach and chest, concentrating everything I had on that simple task—to bur away, dissolve, drain out somehow some part of the killing hate that swelled in me. It was too much. It was too much.
“I have seen your mayor and your aldermen. I have seen your county supervisor and your commissioners. They are not adequate even for normal times. Their government is now dissolved. If they attempt to revive it, they will be executed. You, sir, will work with my officers. I have assigned an interpreter to you. Your task is to convert your district to self-sufficiency.”
It was morning. I was sitting at my desk, and he was sitting on it, or as near as made no difference—perched sideways on the far edge, his right hand planted flat on my papers and his weight leaned on it squarely. “What do you mean, ‘my district’?” The difficulty I had talking to Arslan was physical. My lips and tongue and vocal cords simply resisted. It was obscene and unnatural to use human speech to him.
“Approximately your county. The boundaries will be demonstrated to you. Any citizen attempting to cross those boundaries is liable to execution. Within the few simple rules that I have given, sir, your people are entirely free.”
They were simple enough. Anyone out after sunset (which he considerately defined for me as the moment the sun disappeared below the horizon) was liable to be shot on sight. Anyone resisting or disobeying a soldier was liable to be shot summarily. Anyone found in possession of firearms or ammunition was liable to be executed—no qualification on that one. Now the boundary rule. And the cruellest of all, the teaser, the killer, the one that knotted up my stomach in the worst spasm I’d felt in years: the billet rule. Every household—whether it was old Billy Moss living alone in his little ramshackle house, or Junior Boyle and his bride in their trailer behind his mother’s place, or the Felix Karchers with eight kids, two grandmothers, and a hired girl—every household was to have one soldier billeted in it. If any one of these soldiers died of any cause or was attacked in any way, anywhere, at any time, by anybody, all the members of “his” household were to be executed. Summarily, no doubt. I didn’t like the distinction between shot and executed, either. Shot was at least definite; it eliminated a lot of possibilities. As for my household, the billet rule didn’t quite apply to us. We had something a little extra. We had Arslan.
Upstairs we had four rooms and a bathroom. They had all been intended as bedrooms, but we’d never needed that many, and since the little boy died a dozen years ago, we’d needed only one. Luella used one of the smaller, back rooms for her sewing, and I had fixed up the other one as a den and home office, where I could play Verdi records as loud as I pleased, and work out the plans for next semester and next year that there was never enough time for in my office at school. The east front room we kept as a guestroom, and we slept in the other ourselves. I assumed that Arslan had taken over the guestroom.
I hadn’t been home yet; didn’t know, as things stood now, if I would ever get home. It looked as though the bivouac was settling into an occupation. The Turkistanis were busy after their debauch. A considerable arsenal was being collected in the school music room, as they brought in confiscated shotguns and rifles. The billet rule sounded like a permanent substitute for hostages; Arslan wouldn’t have any excuse for holding the children much longer. And while I didn’t expect that fact to influence him the way it would a human being, I did expect it to bring a turning point of some kind. Whether I was willing to “work with his officers” was doubtful, to say the least, but it might depend a lot on the direction of the turn.
We had served a breakfast of leftovers, as soon as possible after they had unlocked us. Only Jean Morgan stayed in seclusion in the women’s lounge. I’d known Jean through many years and more than one trouble, and it had taken this to daunt her. We put all the classes to doing calisthenics, and then a singing session, and got started on schoolwork at almost the normal time.
It was barely ten when Arslan appeared, with his twinkling eyes and his few simple rules and the news that he had quartered himself in my house. And gradually I got my vocal apparatus under control. Entirely free, he had said. “What about your soldiers? Aren’t there any restrictions on them?”
He smiled swiftly. “There are restrictions. It is not desirable that your people should know exactly what restrictions. This would encourage disputes and misjudgments. I myself will judge my men.”
I looked at him. “How old are you?” I asked him. My voice was still a little thick.
He gave my look back steadily, and soberly for the moment. Then he straightened up. “Twenty-five years,” he said softly. “Come.”
He motioned me ahead of him, into the cross-hall and out through the south door into the parking lot. It was the first time I’d been outside since yesterday morning. We had had a late fall, with off-again on-again weather that had put the forsythias in bloom at Thanksgiving, and now in the first week of December it was like October again, mild and sunny and breezy. The air was delicious.
There were soldiers all over the lot, buzzing in every direction like bees at the door of a hive. A good deal of their traffic was straight across Pearl Street to my house. That sharp-eyed colonel was expounding something, without gestures, to a little cluster of noncoms, making them look first west, then south, then east. Arslan spoke, and they all saluted him and stared at me, the noncoms grinning, Colonel Nizam with a mortal frown.
We crossed the street, but when I started up my front walk, Arslan laughed. “This way.” Some kind of armored truck was parked in my driveway—my car had disappeared—and a Land Rover behind it on the lawn. He slid into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover and motioned me toward the seat beside him.
I got in. He threw it into gear and plowed straight across the lawn and one of Luella’s flower beds before he turned down the Morrisville road. Even so, he drove well. He handled the car like a man who made his living driving. There wasn’t a bump or a pothole on the road that he didn’t foresee and compensate for. He was looking very smug.
“Would it be easy to kill me?” he asked pleasantly.
I imagined not. In any case, I wasn’t about to try it, with the school full of children and Luella alone with his soldiers. And it didn’t make any obvious sense for him to drive out into the country with me, alone and unguarded; there had to be a catch. “That’s not why I’m watching you,” I said. “I was thinking you may make some pretty big headlines, but this is the first time I’ve seen you do anything for yourself. It takes a corporal just to tie your shoes.”
He stopped the Land Rover right there in the middle of the road, turned off the engine, leaned his left elbow on the wheel, and slewed around on the seat to face me full. His eyes fairly danced, exactly like some fourth-grader bound to stir up mischief at any cost. And by God, it made me ache to look at him—ache to get my hands on his neck or my foot in his face. We were already out of sight of town, just before the road turned west, with Sam Tuller’s fields on our right and the woods of the old Karcher place on the left. There wasn’t a sign of life anywhere.
“I have brought you here for two reasons, sir. One, that you should tell me about these farms. Two, that you should see that I do things for myself.”
The little breeze stirred the heavy, dead-black hair above his foreign face. He was breathing fast and easily. His eager eyes were no more than two feet from mine. And I felt my blood surge up like a river rising. “Are you daring me to attack you?”
“Yes, sir,” he said softly.
I took a deep breath. “You’re a good seventeen years younger. You’re armed, and you’re a professional soldier. I’ll be damned if I’m going to throw away whatever chance I’ve got just to satisfy your sadistic whims. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to do it on your own initiative.”
He didn’t move a muscle; only the whole expression of his face changed. The smile was still there, but the eyes were serious. “Good.” He stared at me as if he was reading the fine print on the inside of my skull. “Your language has a beautiful saying, ‘Strike while the iron is hot.’ Now, sir, you are hot. You would like to kill me, yes. But you are afraid that if you tried, you would fail; and this is true. Also you are afraid that if you succeeded, my soldiers would take a great vengeance; and this is also true. But there will be times when it will be easy to kill me, for you or for others. I tell you now what will happen if I ever die within the borders of this district—even of what you call … natural causes.” His smile tightened. “Every effort will be made to exterminate the entire population of the district, beginning with Kraftsville, which will be surrounded and burned to the ground.”
I swallowed a swell of rage. “What you mean is, those are the orders you’ve given.”
“This has been sworn to me by Colonel Nizam,” he said portentously—there should have been a dark bass chord of accompaniment—but all at once he grinned. “Yes; yes, sir—orders and oaths are no more immortal than men. So I tell you this, sir: my soldiers are like a pack of hungry wolves; they need no whip to drive them to the kill.” He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it without taking his eyes off mine. “It is important for your people that you should understand this. Do you understand?”
I nodded. I understood it.
“Do you believe it?”
I nodded again. I believed it very well. Whatever was going on in the rest of the world didn’t matter much—this was what was happening in Kraftsville. “Do we have anything to gain by not killing you?”
He smiled sweetly—sweetly is the word. “That, of course, you cannot know with certainty. But it is a chance, and you cannot afford to lose any chance.”
I cleared my throat. “Second question. What if somebody decides to kill you anyway? How are you going to stop them?”
He shrugged. “That is your problem, sir.”
“I’d say it’s yours.”
He pursed his lips—considering, probably, how to make it sound plausible. “I desire to live, yes. But the desire ceases with the life. And the process of dying does not deter me. I am a soldier. Sir, I am Arslan. You should not expect me to think like a citizen of Kraftsville.”
No, not a citizen of Kraftsville. Looking into his eyes was like looking into the bottomless pit. “If you don’t mind dying,” I said, “why go to all this trouble?”
He smiled again. “I have said that I desire to live. It gives me pleasure; also there are plans to be fulfilled before I die. Therefore I take certain precautions. But when I am dead, I shall not remember these things. Only the living can suffer.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“I urge you to believe that it is my opinion.” He cocked his head. “I have a question for you also, sir. Why are you not afraid of me?”
“Because I can’t afford to be.” I’d no sooner said it than I felt my insides jerked by a cold convulsion. He must have seen it in my face, because he exploded suddenly into a laugh, gay and contemptuous. That made me hot again. “I’ve got a bad stomach,” I said steadily. “If I got upset, it would interfere with my work.”
“And exactly what is your work, sir?”
“I’m responsible for my school. If you don’t know what that means, I can’t tell you.”
He studied me. “I can make you afraid.”
“Maybe so, General. But why bother to try? I can’t do you any good if I’m disabled.”
He nodded agreeably. He finished his cigarette in silence, crushed out the butt between his thumb and fingers—he could be very careful, I noticed, when it suited him—and flipped it onto the road. “Now, sir, we shall show each other something. I shall show that I mean what I say; and you will show whether you have understood.” For the first time since he stopped the car his eyes left my face, as he unholstered his pistol. He took it loosely by the barrel and held it out to me.
I had to lick my lips before I could speak, and I could barely hear my own voice through the blood singing in my ears. What made him think he could play games with me? “You wouldn’t offer it to me, except you’re sure I won’t take it.”
“Ah, no,” he said quickly. “There is always risk. In every battle there is risk of death—even when victory is sure.” He smiled. “It is loaded, sir; with live ammunition.”
I thought that when I reached for the gun, or at least when I touched it, he would simply jerk it back. But he didn’t. For just an instant we both had hold of it, and I felt the solidity of that casual-looking grasp. And then it was all mine. It was years since I’d held a handgun, a lot of years. It felt very effective.
He wasn’t smiling any more, but his whole air was too comfortable. I could well imagine the gun wasn’t loaded, or was loaded with blanks. It was the sort of joke that might tickle his fancy. And if I fired a trial shot at something else, the report—if there was one—would bring his men down on me as fast as if I’d really killed him. No doubt the woods and fields were full of them already. But he was right about one thing—I couldn’t afford to pass up any chance.
“Start the car.”
“No,” he said. “You are not my master; I am yours.”
I had hit him—as hard as I could, lefthanded and backhanded in that cramped space—literally before I knew what I was doing. He took it full in the face without flinching, and it knocked him back against the frame. But as I struck, his hand came up and touched my left wrist—not a grab or a blow, just a touch like a cat’s playful pat.
He straightened up and leaned on the wheel again. Still, that had gotten to him. It took a minute for his eyes to clear—ten seconds, anyway—and when they did, he looked really hard for the first time, like a man fighting. “It is not your fault,” he went on smoothly. “You have the strength, and the courage, and the brain, and now the gun. You lack only the army.” I could see he was swallowing blood. “If my troops were not occupying your town, I should act differently. Perhaps I should even start the car. But now, sir, if you kill me"—he smiled thinly, swallowed again, and shrugged—"it is the end for me, but it is the beginning of very bad things for you and for Kraftsville, and for many other places.”
“Your little Turkistani wolf pack looks pretty small in the middle of the United States of America, General.”
His mouth pursed with amusement or a good imitation of it. “Do not forget, sir, that I command the armed forces of the United States of America.”
“You can’t tell me they’d fight for you.”
Another shrug. “Was it necessary for the armed forces of Vichy France to fight for Hitler? Do not deceive yourself with false hopes, sir. There is no United States government to help you. There is no Soviet government. There is no government in Canada, in England, in France, in Germany, in Egypt, in Israel, in Turkey, in India, in China, in Japan, in Australia. I am the government. I am the leash that holds my wolf packs. If you kill me now, sir"—he smiled a real smile—"hell breaks loose.”
“As far as I can see, it already has.”
He shook his head gently at me. “Then you have not seen war.”
“What happens if I don’t kill you now?”
He turned and spat over his shoulder, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “You will not be punished. You have asked how I can prevent others from killing me. There is no certain method. But you, sir, can help. Do you understand?”
“You mean spread the word that you’re worse dead than alive?”
“Exactly.”
“Before I did that, I’d have to believe it. And I’m not about to believe anything till I know a whole lot more about the situation. Just what the hell have you done, General? What the hell are you planning to do?”
He said nothing. He looked at me, cool and level. The gun felt warm and heavy in my hand. “Do you think I am some politician,” he said at last, “to feed upon power and praise?”
“I think you’re a devil. I think you’re a barbarian Hitler. Your idea of fun is raping children in front of their mothers.”
“Fun, yes,” he agreed comfortably. “If you cannot endure this, sir, shoot—and let my soldiers have their turn. But I have not conquered the world for … fun.”
Up the back of my neck I felt my scalp prickling. “There’s a lot of world not covered in that list you reeled off.”
An empty smile flitted across his face. He looked very thoughtfully at the pistol in my hand. “Well, I am a soldier. I do not pretend that I would have let the chance go by, once I saw it. But also I saw another chance.” He met my eyes suddenly. “More difficult, sir. But if I work quickly, it is conceivable that I can do it.”
I had to wet my lips again. “Do what?”
“Make the world a good place in which to live.”
I heard myself make a snorting noise. Somehow I had expected better from him.
He smiled innocently. “Or I could say, ‘destroy civilization,’ if you prefer that I should be … diabolical. But what is that civilization, sir? Is it so worthy of preservation? Tell me, what was wrong with the world, sir?”
“I’ll tell you exactly what is wrong with it. Too little Christianity.”
His eyebrows went up. “Christianity has had its chance. Now I have mine. No, sir; the two great curses of mankind are very simple: hunger and crowding. Crowd human beings together, and all miseries multiply. And there is no greater misery—believe me, sir—than hunger. Therefore there are two great needs: more food, more land. And this has always been true, even when food and land were absolutely plentiful. It is a problem of distribution.”
I stared at him, amazed as much as disgusted. It was incredible that a two-bit warlord from nowhere, infected with some outmoded Middle Eastern strain of agrarian socialism, could be kinging it over my town—let alone my whole country. I had it in my hand, if the gun was loaded, to end it right now. And if he was as crazy as he must be, it might really be loaded, and we might really be alone. I didn’t think it would take two weeks for this country to shake off Arslan’s wolf packs. If the gun was loaded.
And I would have the gun and the Land Rover, and maybe a little time. My hand was slippery with sweat. Good God, I had thought of the noise—why hadn’t I thought of silencing it? But with what?
“So you’re going to redistribute the wealth,” I said. “It’s been tried.” I scooted back as far away from him on the seat as I could get.
“No, sir. I am going to redistribute the people.” I flipped the chamber open, flipped it shut. It was loaded. Arslan watched, but he didn’t move. “And I am cutting lines of communication,” he said. “I intend that every community should be self-sufficient. It should produce everything it consumes, and contain no more people than it can support in comfort.” He was speaking dully, absently. His eyes were on the gun.
I had started to take off my suit coat. And just now, when I needed every speck of coolness I could manage, sweat ran into my eyes and I kept seeing faces in the corner of my mind’s eye: the children’s faces, Hunt and his mother, Betty white with fear, and Colonel Nizam’s face, and faces of soldiers; and over and behind what Arslan was saying now, I heard him saying to Perry, “No games,” and the noise Perry made.
“I thought there were too many people to go around.” I had my left arm out of the sleeve. I reached across my chest and pulled the coat loose from behind me, pulled it down from my right shoulder, leaving my right arm in its sleeve, and began to wrap the loose folds around the gun.
“Of course. It is too late to solve the problem by distribution alone. But it is better to die quickly than by starvation or malnutrition. And those who remain alive will have enough. Also, there is more land than you may think, sir. Very much is now wasted.” He watched the gun. It was the first time I had seen that face dead serious, without a trace of mockery or humor. No games, I heard his voice saying, and I saw the soldier’s rueful look, and Paula’s face.
“Destruction of civilization sounds like a good name for it, all right. What about industry?”
“Only local industry. No trade. Total self-sufficiency based on the land.” He glanced from the gun to my face and smiled faintly. “Yes, these are clichés. You yourself live by clichés, sir. But mine are enforceable.”
“Not for long.”
“No. But for long enough to change the pattern of society, the pattern of human life. If I succeed, I think it will be several hundred years before the world becomes again as bad as it was last summer.”
“In other words, you want to set the world back several hundred years. What about medicines? What about training doctors and dentists?”
“They can be trained like other craftsmen, by apprenticeship. There will be less disease, because conditions will be more healthful; less contagion, because less travel. Medicines enough can be produced locally.”
“What are you doing here? Why Kraftsville?”
“There was a cause for celebration. It was convenient to halt here. And then—”
It was the first time I’d seen him hesitate over anything. “And then?”
His grin came back, just for a second. “Kraftsville pleases me.”
I had the gun as well muffled as I was likely to get it. “You said there’s no United States government. What happened to it?”
“It abdicated to me.”
“That’s unbelievable,” I said. “And I don’t believe it. Any of it.”
No, he wasn’t really very much interested in agrarian socialism at the moment. Blood showed rusty at the corner of his mouth. “Believe this, then, that I will not die easily. I have put my death into your hands, sir; but at the end I must fight it. The range is very short, yes, the caliber is large; but I am very quick, and I am strong. And do not hope to disable me and hold me as hostage. This pistol is not a precision instrument. You will not stop me with less than a fatal wound.” He paused, his eyes preoccupied with the gun, and went on again. “If you kill me, sir, I think your best chance will be to fire the town yourself, immediately.” I stared at him. “Do not imagine that you can surprise the school. But with a few good men and a sufficient diversion, you might save very many of the children.” Slowly he fingered another cigarette out of his pocket, but he didn’t put it in his mouth. “Your wife,” he said, “sleeps in your own bedroom. The boy Hunt is in the southwest room. There is a guard on the stairs, and one on each side of the house outside.”
“Where are those two girls?”
“At the high school.”
“Where’s Betty Hanson?”
“In the northwest room.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He shrugged. He put the cigarette in his mouth. He looked at me. And I felt an anger that burned and ached to my fingertips. He had started this. He had come here, occupied my town, taken over my school. And now he was passing the buck to me, to decide, on the shabbiest sort of data, which of two intolerable directions the world should take. Well, I didn’t want it. I wasn’t God. The most I could do was choose for myself, for Luella and the children.
“All right,” I said finally. “You can light your cigarette.”
He lit it in a hurry, and dragged deep. Apparently he was part human, at least.
“What happens,” I asked, “if I just get out of the car and go away?”
He shook his head. “I will stop you.”
I shifted the gun to my left hand while I got the coat off of myself and it. I opened the breech and took out the cartridges. I half turned, and flung them broadcast into Sam Tuller’s oat field, and the gun after them.
Arslan didn’t seem to have moved an eyelash. He offered his cigarette pack, and I shook my head. I felt sick and cold. His whole face was shiny with triumph.
“You threatened me with a weapon, sir,” he said quietly. “I threatened you with a more powerful one. I still hold that weapon. I could use it now to make you search this field on hands and knees until you found every cartridge. But I do not.” He straightened in his seat and switched on the ignition, and that little flick of the fingers was a swagger in itself. “I wish to know about the farms we pass: who lives in each house, how much land, what crops, what livestock. You should not lie to me about anything today, sir. It is important for your people.”
We covered practically the whole of Kraft County, and a little of three neighboring counties. We went down roads I hadn’t been on in years, and some I’d never been on. In fact we covered, by actual driving or by sight, every passable backroad in the whole area. He wasn’t interested in the main roads; or maybe he thought he knew them already. And all the way he kept me busy with his questions. “Who lives there? How old? How many sheep? Is that wheat? Is that soybeans?” (He was always right.) “What is their water supply? Is there a basement in that church? Does this stream flood?” And every now and then, “What bird was that?”
I usually hadn’t seen the bird. I was busy thinking a few miles ahead, searching for something that I could profitably lie to him about. The thing was to save any weapons we could, and a reserve of people willing and able to use them. He didn’t ask me about guns, but he asked me a lot about people and about farm equipment. And it was on those points that I did slip in a few outright lies and several exaggerations.
When we pulled up at the south door of the school and got out and he faced me across the car and said pleasantly, “You will find ways, sir, to spread the word,” I couldn’t speak—couldn’t have spoken if my life depended on it, which for all I knew it did. It was the most I could do to hold myself upright against the pain in my stomach. I just looked at him. He smiled and turned away toward the street—toward my house—and a soldier behind me opened the school door.
But it wasn’t for me; it was for Colonel Nizam coming out. He passed me with a carnivorous look and saluted his general. Everybody in the parking lot was looking very attentively at Arslan’s face. His mouth and cheek were swollen, with a little discoloration around the lips; and even while my stomach was rolling into itself, it made me proud to see the mark of my fist on him. Nizam asked him something, sharp and low, and Arslan answered briefly, with a smile and a sidelong glance at me. But the look that Nizam turned my way was pure murder. I gave him one straight stare for answer, and went in. So now Colonel Nizam had it in for me, and General Arslan thought it was very amusing.
Well, there were two things I could hold on to. For one, there were a high-caliber pistol and eight cartridges somewhere in Sam Tuller’s oat field. For another, this earthshaking Arslan had a suicidal streak a mile wide. And both those facts might be useful; but they might also be very dangerous.
I dreamed about it. It seemed to me I dreamed about nothing else for weeks. I had the pistol in my hand (sometimes it was so real I could feel it) and I was facing him—in spitting distance, as my father used to say. Sometimes I did spit in his face. We were in the Land Rover, or my office, or different rooms of my house. We talked, talked, talked. Once in a while we would be fighting hand to hand; but every time it switched back to the thick gun butt against my palm and the little distance between us. Sometimes I pulled the trigger, with various results. The gun would refuse to fire; or the bullet would have no effect; or, on the other hand, it would blow him into bloody pieces that kept on struggling stubbornly. Most often I woke up before I did anything. But sometimes I threw the gun away, or hid it under something, and sometimes I even handed it to him. Now and then I turned it on myself and pulled the trigger; and nothing happened.
That same evening, before the first of my dreams, the schoolbus drivers were brought in, glum and scared, and the children were loaded up and driven home. Three soldiers rode with every busload. I didn’t begin to breathe easier till the first bus got back and the driver told me they really had taken the kids home—even delivered every child to his own door. That made it a long evening.
The teachers went with the last loads. When the buses were all back and the drivers were escorted away (the confiscation of motor vehicles had started, and they weren’t allowed to drive home), the young officer who seemed to be in charge gave me a pleasant smile and waved me toward the south door.
The street lights weren’t on, though it was past nine o’clock. None of the soldiers wandering in the darkness paid much attention to me. As an experiment, I turned west past my house—almost anything was worth a try—but I wasn’t surprised when a rifle turned me back.
A sentry on my front porch eyed me insolently as I opened the door, though he didn’t make a move. There was a hot, hard fireball burning in the pit of my stomach. But the first thing I saw was Luella sitting stiffly in the green armchair. She jumped up and touched my arm. “You haven’t had any supper, have you? I’ll get you something right this minute.”
The couch was back, too, and the coffee table, both of them strewn with papers. The rug was littered with cigarette butts. Two soldiers lounged on the windowseat, and two more leaned against the built-in bookcase, their elbows on the shelves among Luella’s bric-a-brac, all smoking, all looking very much off duty. They broke off their chatting to eye me for a minute.
I followed Luella into the kitchen. Another soldier was sitting at the table, also smoking, also much at his ease, dropping ashes on his dirty plate. “Just give me a glass of milk,” I said. She looked pained, but she managed to pour it without a word. “Where’s Arslan?”
“The General? He’s upstairs,” she said gloomily. “And the Morgan boy,” she added. “And Betty Hanson.”
“I know.” I took a drink of my milk and looked at the soldier. “All right; you can bring me a plate in the dining room. And you sit down and tell me everything that’s happened and everything you’ve heard.”
There wasn’t much I didn’t already know or at least expect. Betty had been brought over straight from the banquet and locked into the sewing room, and that was when the guards were posted around the house and on the stairs. Luella had been in the bedroom when Hunt was brought in; she had just got a quick sight of him in the hall, but that was enough to stop her from asking any questions. She hadn’t seen Arslan come in at all, but she had heard him, sounding like a whole new invasion. “And then this morning,” she said, “Betty started screaming.”
And that morning at ten-fifteen he had been in my office, saying, “Your people are entirely free,” with a face like a cat just wiping the feathers off of its mouth.
Neither Hunt nor Betty had been out of the rooms since they went in, except for one guarded trip each to the bathroom. That was after the one meal Luella had been allowed to fix for them, carried up on trays a while after noon by Arslan’s men. She hadn’t seen them; hadn’t heard any sounds out of the rooms since the screaming stopped, a little while before Arslan left that morning. He had come back around suppertime, eaten a big meal, and disappeared into the guestroom. Since then everything had been very quiet.
She hadn’t been out of the house the whole time since the Turkistanis arrived, hadn’t seen anybody else or heard anything else. And she was almost at the end of her rope. By the time she had finished her story she was shaking all over, just the faint animal quivering of weariness and strained nerves. “I’m sorry, Franklin,” she said. “I’ve had all I can take for one day. I’ll be all right tomorrow.”
And she would, I knew that. I could rely on Luella. But unfortunately the world wasn’t made of Luellas.
If you couldn’t use your anger constructively, it poisoned you; I’d found that out a long time ago. Raging and raving against Arslan would just get in the way of working against him. And I was beginning to see that I could work against him. Not that I hadn’t done a beautiful job of asking all the wrong questions; but I’d learned a few things, in spite of myself, and I was going to make the most of them.
By next morning, Arslan’s version of normality was already in force. Entirely free. I made myself eat a good breakfast, ignoring all spectators, and walked out of my front door as if I still owned it; and the first civilian I met was Wallace Ford, coming to look for me. His pale face colored up with relief.
“There you are. They wouldn’t let me get into school, and I was afraid—”
I steered him out of the crowded parking lot, and we strolled quietly toward the square. It was silly not to have any place to go, but that was the truth of it. “All right, let’s hear your story,” I said.
He looked hopefully back toward the house. “Any chance you could invite me to sit down? I walked in to town this morning, and I didn’t get any sleep much last night.”
Wallace Ford was principal of Kraft County Consolidated High School. Their new school building was located a mile out of town, which had raised considerable opposition from the people who thought the only place to build a new building was where the old one was torn down.
“I could invite you to sit down, and I could offer you some breakfast, too. But any talking we do had better be outside.”
He shrugged hopelessly. “Forget it, then. That’s all right, I’ve had breakfast; I stopped at home a minute. I just thought—” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “What are they going to do with the kids, Franklin?”
“Nothing—not with my kids. They’ll be safe at home unless some grown-up does something stupid.”
He gave me a wild look, the very picture of a man longing to go crazy and get away from it all. “My kids are still locked up at school.”
“Then why in heaven’s name aren’t you with them?”
“They sent the faculty home this morning.”
And he had let himself be sent. “All right, Wally, tell me about it.”
“Oh, my God, Franklin.” But that was something of an exaggeration. What he had to tell wasn’t much. I’d known from the first day that the high school had been shut up the same as we were; some of the parents I phoned had already heard from Wally about their older children. “But the kids are still there,” he mourned. “Franklin, you’ve had a night’s sleep, at least. I just can’t think any more. What in God’s name am I supposed to do?”
“That’s your problem, Wally. I’ve got all the responsibility I need right now.” It was a shame to disappoint Wally when he wanted to impress me, but I just didn’t feel inclined to hold his hand for him. I had both hands full. “What you really ought to do is go back home and get some sleep yourself. Come on, I’ll walk you over.”
By dawn the next morning the high school was empty. During the day and night every single student had been trucked away toward the west.
He hadn’t abducted my students, but in the next two weeks he did a pretty thorough job of taking over my school. He informed me that my office was now his office—meaning, in a nutshell, that it wasn’t my office any more; he never did any work there, to my knowledge. He was all over the rest of the school, though, directing operations I didn’t like the look of. Electronic equipment, canned goods, and God only knew what else, was being brought in by the truckload and installed on every floor. Floodlights were mounted all around the schoolground. There were more and more rooms I wasn’t allowed to enter. The whole building rattled with carpentry. Walls were torn down, partitions set up. All of the children’s desks were knocked apart and the pieces neatly stacked on racks in the basement. “Firewood,” Arslan explained with lifted eyebrows, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. He was stockpiling a real conglomeration of things, from pumpkins to transistors. It looked as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to expect a Vicksburg siege or a computerized space battle.
Meanwhile, Colonel Nizam had quietly moved into Frieda Althrop’s house. Frieda’s place was one of the biggest in town, built by her grandfather back when people knew how to build big houses, and modernized a time or two since then. It also commanded the intersection of Pearl Street and Illinois 460, looking north from its high-shouldered yard to the square, east to the school, and south along the hardroad out of town as far as the curve. Here my wolfish colonel had established his own headquarters—whatever it might be headquarters for. He disappeared into the house like a broody termite into a timber, and that was that.
The Althrops were out-of-county people to start with, and Frieda had never married, so she didn’t have many relations in town. She moved in with her neighbors, the Schillingers, till she could get a place of her own. Frieda had lived alone for a long time, and she didn’t want to change. “She’s not thinking about the billet rule, though,” Luella remarked to me.
We gave her a day to get settled at the Schillingers’, and then paid her a call. And while Luella led Mrs. Schillinger into another room to talk about some sort of women’s business, I had a little conversation with Frieda. Frieda had done all her own cleaning in that big house, except once or twice a year when she’d get a woman in to help with some of the heavy jobs; and I just felt it would be a good idea for somebody else in town to have a clear picture of the structure and layout of all three stories.
Two nights later, Frieda Althrop died in her sleep. That was the first death, except for Perry, that we owed directly to Arslan. Frieda was getting on in years, and, as people said, it was too much for her to be uprooted that way. But we’d all been uprooted, and we couldn’t all afford the luxury of dying.
The sixth day—the day after Frieda died—a new army marched into town. People stood around dumbfounded, watching as if it was some kind of a parade. We had one of the best views in town. Like Arslan’s first army, they came in from the east and turned down Pearl Street; but these marched straight on past the school, headed out of town towards the fairground. I made Luella stay inside, but I stood out on the front steps to watch them. I wasn’t about to crawl into a hole.
It was a very different bunch from the others, and that went beyond the different uniform they wore. They were younger and fairer than the swarthy veterans of the first wave, and not half as well disciplined. They stared and craned their necks and grinned, like a gang of kids on an outing.
There were long gaps now and then between blocks of marching men, which meant people could cross over every so often to compare notes with the opposite side, and there were more grown-ups than children trotting along parallel with the parade. Fred Gonderling was one who came down my side of Pearl Street, working his way briskly along from one watcher to the next. I waved him up onto my porch steps. “What’s the news from the square?” I asked him, which was a favor I was in the habit of doing him. He’d moved into his new office on the square that very spring.
“Morning, Franklin. I suspect that they’ll be out of your school before long.”
“Why?”
“A detachment of these fellows is taking over the Court House. I should imagine that that will be their new headquarters.”
“I hope so.” As a matter of fact, I hoped not. If we had to have them at all, I was just as glad to have their pulse right under my fingers.
“Incidentally,” he added after a minute, “I assume you know who these are.”
One time a news item in the Kraft County Register-Blade had referred to Fred Gonderling as a “rising young attorney,” and he had been almighty pleased. Personally, I wasn’t exactly sure how far he would rise, or would have risen. He was a spruce little fellow, intelligent and well-spoken; but it had always seemed to me that he was more interested in making a good show than in doing a good job. He was just at the point in his career of deciding whether he’d rather grow up to be a big frog in Kraftsville’s puddle or go seek his fortune someplace else. I’d had my try at that when I was his age and found out I could make a lot more money in the city, and aim for a lot bigger position, but I’d also found out I didn’t want it—not at the price of being cut off from the people I understood and the things I believed in. And till Arslan turned up, I never doubted I’d made the right bet. “Invaders,” I said sourly.
“They’re Russians.”
"Russians!"
“You bet they are. I remember that uniform from TV. And I’ve heard Russian. I took it in college.”
“Can you tell what they say?”
He shook his head shamefacedly. “They talk too fast for me. To tell the truth, I don’t remember it that well. But it’s Russian, all right.”
They camped on the fairground. They took over the existing structures, and next day they went right to work building more, with lumber from the local lumber yards. Fred Gonderling’s prediction was dead wrong. The Russian detachment stayed in the Court House just long enough to seal it up pretty thoroughly—every window barred, and every door locked. Colonel Nizam and his boys had already nosed through the county records and carried off heaven knew what to his den in Frieda Althrop’s house. Every citizen in the county must have been recorded in some form or another in the Court House. And it did occur to me that one way to find out what Nizam considered interesting enough to take would be to have a look at what he’d left.
The high school stood empty, but not for long. On the heels of the Russians, a regular little truck convoy delivered the new occupants to the door. They were girls—not women, girls; girls in their teens. As well as you could judge from a distance, they were American, and scared stiff. “But what—” Luella began, when I told her about it, and stopped.
“I’m afraid that tells us what happens to about half the high-school student body when Arslan moves in.”
Maybe it was his version of a sense of decency that prompted him to stock his brothel with out-of-county girls. More likely it was his idea of how to avoid trouble. And if you started from the premise that there had to be a brothel and that it had to be staffed with conscripted American high-school girls, that was about as unprovocative a way as you could find to do it.
There was a Russian captain in charge at the high school and another one in charge of the new stable they were building on the little stretch of dirt road that connected the Morrisville road with the highway. There were plenty of horses in the county. Nobody with a field to plow lacked a tractor, but Kraft County didn’t let go of anything in a hurry; there were still work horses to pull an occasional mudboat or work in the woods or brush where anything on wheels or tracks would look silly. There were mules—in fact, there were still a few people proud of their wagon mules; and there were enough saddle horses to stock a couple of dude ranches. Arslan was rounding them all up.
He might have international affairs on his mind, but his hands would have made him a pretty good farmer. He not only knew how to pick a good horse, he knew how to handle one. Every decent saddle horse in the district was brought around for his personal inspection. The really good stock went to the Russian camp. The others were returned to their owners. He saved out a few—ultimately four—for himself and had the storage shed behind my house cleared out, built a little longer, and fitted up to stable them. He didn’t give the same individual attention to the work horses and mules, which meant that people with enough sense were able to save some of their good stock. Even so, the Turkistanis and Russians didn’t seem to be any more fools than other people, and they ended up with a pretty good stable.
“I won’t say this is the only way to look at it,” Fred Gonderling said, hedging his bets as if he had something to lose, “but it’s one way: we only have Arslan’s word for anything outside the district.” At any rate, it was a pretty good seal. There was a half-mile-wide sanitary cordon all around the perimeter. The people who lived there had been moved out—"chased out” would be more accurate—and a mixed guard of Russians and Turkistanis had moved in. Any citizen sighted within that border area was liable to be shot on sight. And since the half-mile limit wasn’t very clearly defined by any landmarks for most of its length, people generally chose to be on the safe side and gave it a wide berth.
On the other hand, saying we had to take Arslan’s word for everything was a little bit like saying we’d had to take the Weather Bureau’s word for the weather. Maybe we didn’t get explicit information from outside the district, but we got evidence, even if it was mostly negative—just as no cordon of armed foreigners could keep the clouds from sailing across the border. And any time you were tempted to think that it was somehow a fake, that the normal United States existed right over there on the other side of the boundary, you came smack up against the fact of what didn’t come across.
We still had radios, and nobody was broadcasting any jamming signals. After dark in the old days—meaning two weeks ago—you could pick up stations as far away as Canada and Mexico, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City. Now there was nothing, not even the EBS—nothing except on shortwave, where we listened in on Arslan’s business, and might have learned God only knew what, if any of us had understood Russian or Turkistani. I made a special effort to locate the Cuban propaganda station we used to hear sometimes. There wasn’t a sign of it. TV screens showed nothing at all, except some variegated static.
Then there were the maps. Arslan was forever on the move, shuttling up and downstairs, in and out of the house, to school, to Nizam’s, to the stable, out of the district, and back to my house every time. And the maps followed him. There always seemed to be a messenger trotting up with another bunch of them. Arslan labored over those maps morning and night, brooding, scribbling, comparing, like a boy who’d just discovered the new world of geography. And since he did a good deal of it on my coffee table, it didn’t take the CIA to figure out that Kraftsville was being turned into a nerve center for some intercontinental operation. Which was all very interesting, of course; but for right now the question of what Arslan and his army were doing in America and the rest of the world had to take a back seat—pretty far back—to the question of what they were going to do in Kraftsville.
Arslan was as good, or as bad, as his word. The interpreter he provided was a pleasant-faced, serious-faced young lieutenant with a mustache, whose name I never did exactly catch—something that started with a sharp “Z” sound. He escorted me silently to Frieda’s—Nizam’s—wearing a peculiar strained look all the way. I didn’t know enough yet to recognize it as the expression of a frustrated longing to practice English small talk.
The big front room was being transformed into Colonel Nizam’s office, though a burrow would have been more appropriate. He looked hunched and blinking, at his desk in the middle of that spacious parlor. The big windows let in too much light, even in December, and opened too many walls. He was doing what he could to make himself a homey atmosphere, though. Filing cabinets stood among Frieda’s overstuffed divans and shelves of bric-a-brac. There were three subsidiary desks, all busy. Two soldiers in a corner were putting a just-uncrated tape recorder through its paces. A crew of half a dozen or so seemed to be operating on the house wiring, yelling at each other up and down the big staircase that climbed from the back of the room. A piece of the wall was knocked open there, and thick black electrical cords trailed around the floor and up the stairs like endless leeches, barely alive enough to wriggle and suck.
We stood in front of Nizam’s desk, observed but not acknowledged, till he deigned to look up. My polite little lieutenant saluted—not very snappily, I thought—and presented me. Colonel Nizam’s eyes scraped over my face like claws. If I’d known where we were going, I’d have had one of my stomach pills before we started, or maybe two. Then he lowered his eyes to his deskful of papers and uttered a quantity of Turkistani in an unencouraging voice. The lieutenant translated, with about as much feeling for the original as a sixth-grader reading Shakespeare: “Mr. Bond, will you please supply all the information about the conditions of District Three-Two-Eight-One?”
“What?” I said blankly. The words registered, but they didn’t mean anything. He repeated them. “I don’t know what District 3281 is. I certainly can’t supply all the information about it.” Not that I’d undertaken to supply anybody with anything.
Lieutenant Z looked apologetic and surprised and a little uncertain—running over his English lessons in his mind to see if he’d forgotten anything vital. He made a little circular gesture with his hand, forefinger pointing down. “District 3281 is this district,” he said.
So there it was, and Colonel Nizam was to be the officer I worked with.
The colonel and I didn’t make a very good team. That first day I got off on the wrong foot by declining to pour forth “all the information about the conditions” at the flick of a switch. But I was as tactful as I could figure out how to be in those circumstances. I very politely indicated that I couldn’t answer him on such short notice and very politely asked him just exactly what he wanted to know and just exactly what he wanted to know it for.
I got the impression that Colonel Nizam had a constitutional impediment to answering questions. But after a certain amount of dickering he unbent enough to give me, via Lieutenant Z, a very lucid account of what was wanted. Arslan was serious about his economic theory, at least as far as Kraft County went—or District 3281, which wasn’t quite the same thing. There was no telling—not right now—how good a seal that guarded border was from the military point of view, but there was no doubt about it economically. My role in the Turkistani scheme of things was to work out a plan that would keep the local economy from collapsing altogether. If I could get it done before anybody starved, fine; if not, well, it would have been an interesting experiment. Nizam was ready, Lieutenant Z assured me, to cooperate in every way; but the plan was my responsibility.
It was clear enough. I thanked him—for the clarity—and I got to work.
That evening, in the kitchen, Arslan passed me with a knowing smile. “You are busy, sir?”
I was scribbling figures while I ate. “It’s a long winter yet, General.” Already the food was sticking in my throat. A long, hungry winter.
He paused beside the table, resting the blunt fingertips of one hand on my papers. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up, and his bare forearms were burly but smooth, like a store-window dummy or a polished statue. “You will not find Colonel Nizam unreasonable. Probably some form of relief can be arranged.” With the other hand he was holding the wrist of a very pretty, very bored-looking girl, the way he might have held a dog’s leash.
“Can you do something with this another time?” I asked Luella, pointing to what was left on my plate.
“Oh, yes,” she said abstractedly. “It will keep.”
I pulled my papers out from under his hand and got up, starting for the door and upstairs. With a broad grin he shouldered in ahead of me, dragging the girl against me and past. I went on steadily up the stairs behind them.
So, like it or not, I was in the economic planning business. It didn’t suit my politics or my experience, but it looked like a job somebody had to do. There wasn’t time enough to let supply adjust itself to demand—or supply enough, maybe. I got the basic figures from the County welfare people, and went at them with old-fashioned arithmetic.
I had to take Arslan at his word. We were cut off from the rest of the world, and we had to survive with what we were and what we had—survive maybe two weeks, maybe two years. It might not be true at all, but there wasn’t anything to gain from betting it wasn’t.
Back in the eighteen-hundreds, southern Illinois had done pretty good business in castor beans, sunflower seeds, sorghum, cotton, and tobacco. Times had changed, and the crop land had nearly all gone into newer cash crops—corn and soybeans, mostly, then oats and wheat. Well, we could grow the old crops again. There were still private patches to seed from. There were sheep in the county, beef cattle, clean milk cows, good hogs, good poultry, some beehives. Deer and small game hunting was pretty good, fishing just passable but with a few good spots. Plenty of vegetables, plenty of fruit and nuts. Wood to burn, and stoves that could burn it. It would be primitive, all right, but Kraft County wasn’t going to suffer as much of a shock as a lot of places might. And there were worse things than old-fashioned smoked ham and hot cornbread with sweet cream butter and sorghum molasses on it.
Nizam’s English turned out to be nearly as adequate as Lieutenant Z’s, when he chose to exercise it, except that his accent was a lot nastier. The lieutenant was dispensed with after our first few meetings. I was sorry to see him go. For one thing, it nearly broke his heart, to judge from his woeful look; and for another, it meant I had to deal with Nizam directly, without a shock-absorber.
I took care of the real work of planning in my own bedroom. When I needed information from the Turkistani side, I went to Nizam. At first that meant a wait of anywhere from one hour to six on Frieda Althrop’s front porch, in full view of Pearl Street and the hardroad—and if Nizam didn’t have enough business on hand to keep me waiting that long, he would find some. As soon as that became clear, I quit waiting. If he wasn’t ready to see me when I got there, or within a few minutes, I went away and came back exactly two hours later. The longest streak of such visits we ever worked up to was a day and a half, with time out for a night’s sleep. After that, I never had to come back more than once, and those few occasions I was perfectly willing to put down to genuine business.
I never tried to analyze Nizam’s motives, any more than I’d analyze a snake’s; but I learned to tell which way he was likely to wriggle. And by a combination of growling and playing possum, I managed to get some fine cooperation out of him. But it was a hassle and a haggle, day after day, and no Sundays off. It gave me a feeling like listening to a record played at the wrong speed.
The relief operation alone took an almighty lot of dickering. Colonel Nizam’s ideas of what constituted adequate sustenance were based on Turkistani standards, maybe, or else on a desire to starve us gradually. It was possible to reason with him, but not pleasant. Every little thing had to be argued out, with figures and documents.
The food Nizam delivered—and he did deliver it, and delivered on schedule, or pretty nearly so—was U.S. government surplus, the same as had been doled out to us as part of the old school lunch program. The question that came to mind was, how many districts could be nursed through the winter this way? Presumably there was food—Arslan’s mere existence didn’t alter the world’s food supply—but, to put it in his own terms, it was a problem of distribution. He’d cut the normal distribution channels very effectively in Kraft County, and it took my best efforts and Colonel Nizam’s organization to replace them. Nobody could tell me that that was being duplicated in a minimum of three thousand two hundred and eighty other districts.
Unfortunately, Arslan’s troops didn’t limit themselves to confiscating movable goods. They had taken over for their own use an area that incuded most of our best corn land, the two biggest beef herds in the county, and the only commercial dairy herd. The farmers inside the confiscated area weren’t evacuated, they were simply reduced to their houses and yards.
That made things harder. The Government surplus wouldn’t last forever; and I not only had to get us through this winter, I had to figure on getting us through the next one. There was more to it than raising the crops and the livestock, too. We did have a feed mill; and according to Morris Schott, the manager, it might just as well turn out cornmeal and crude wheat flour. But that looked unlikelier after the twenty-first of December.
By now I was well used to Nizam’s standard procedure. He accepted a sheaf of papers from me, shuffled it to the bottom of a stack and cleared his throat a little in preparation for English. He very seldom looked at me, except to deliver one of his venomous stares, and he didn’t look at me now. “You will extinguish the power plant before midnight twenty-four December,” he said.
“You mean close it down?”
He watched the top paper of his stack, as if it had made a suspicious move. “Yes,” he decided.
“Colonel, if it has to be closed at all, which I fail to see, is there any strong reason for that particular date? Two or three days later could save you some opposition.”
He nodded—at least I thought it was a nod—and shuffled the suspicious paper to the bottom of the stack. “Midnight twenty-four December,” he repeated. “You are dismissed.”
That night, I put the question to Arslan. “We can do without electric lights and electric stoves,” I said. “But that power plant pumps our water, and it’s the only practical hope I see for grinding our grain.”
He looked at me without expression. “I have assigned your task,” he said. “Do you forget?”
I could feel myself getting hotter. “Self-sufficiency was the word you used. What’s wrong with producing our own electricity?”
“Nothing, if you can also produce your own fuel and your own spare parts. Remember that henceforth your district imports nothing. Nothing.”
That wasn’t even true; but if I reminded him that we were already starting to import food, he might just decide to cut off the supply. “I see your point,” I said. “But the plant’s there, General. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to let us down a little bit easy?”
He laughed. “With all deliberate speed, as your country integrated its schools? No, sir, I have no time for this.”
“Then why not put us back to stone axes right now and get it over with?”
“Again, I have no time for this. I am directing you to follow the path of greatest operational simplicity.”
“All right, then. But why Christmas Eve? I assume that’s not coincidental.”
“My soldiers are Moslems, sir.”
“Your soldiers. What about you?”
“Yes, sir, I am a Moslem—as you are a Christian.”
“Most of your troops are Russians. They’re not Moslems, are they?”
He grinned sardonically. “Even worse, they are Communist. On the other hand, they have vestiges of Christian tradition. Those who desire to celebrate this Christmas will be permitted to do so. But they will do it without benefit of electricity. Why should your citizens enjoy privileges that my troops lack?”
“General,” I said, “tyrants have been trying to stamp out Christianity for a couple of thousand years, and it hasn’t worked yet.”
“Ah, no, sir!” he cried exuberantly. “I do not plan to stamp out any religion. On the contrary, sir! Perhaps I shall crucify one of your citizens, to help the others understand what is involved in Christianity.”
“Do you understand?” I asked as coolly as I could.
He looked good-humoredly up at me from under his eyelids. “Ah, perhaps not, sir. No, in candor, I do not understand Christianity. Can you explain it to me?”
“I don’t know. But I’d like very much to try.”
“Good. But not at present.”
“Of course not. You have no time for this.” That made him grin, and I took the opportunity to go on. “If you don’t have time for me to tell you anything, how about you telling me something?” He lifted his eyebrows inquiringly. “You say the Government abdicated to you.”
“Various governments.”
“The only reason I even consider believing that, is that it’s too unbelievable to be a lie. What pressure could the Premier of Turkistan bring to bear on the President of the United States?”
He put on one of his sweet and gay looks. “Why do you assume that there was pressure? Perhaps it was entirely voluntary.” I didn’t say anything. He discarded that look and added smoothly, “Or perhaps the Premier of Turkistan was more powerful than you knew. Or had more powerful allies.”
“China? Or Russia? China and Russia, wasn’t it? That was a summit meeting in Moscow, not an arbitration.”
He shrugged, shutting off the conversation right there. “You have your instructions, sir. I think that you understand them now.”
“China, Russia, and Turkistan. Who’s running the show, General?”
The look that flared from his eyes was like an axe-stroke. “I run it,” he said quietly.
Black Christmas. That was what we called it. There were gifts given, and maybe a few people had the heart to sing a few carols in their own homes, in spite of the billeted soldiers. God knows there were prayers said.
But electricity wasn’t really basic. What was basic was fuel.
On any ordinary-scale map, we were located in the coal belt of southern Illinois, but in fact there wasn’t a single coal mine in the district. I gave some thought to the possibility of starting one ourselves, and gave it up; no matter how you figured it, the thing just wasn’t feasible. Coal was one of the oldest industries in the state. This whole area had been surveyed and explored and evaluated time after time, and Nizam had reluctantly pulled the local records out of the sealed Court House for me. There was certainly coal in Kraft County, but it was too low-grade and too hard to get at; and while we would have gladly settled for a lot less than commercial quality, we didn’t have the equipment or the know-how to mine anything that didn’t just about jump out of the ground at us.
That left wood, wind, and muscle. A windmill and a good rationing system might be all we needed for our water supply. But the wind wasn’t reliable enough for anything that needed steady power. I set all the local talent I could scrape up onto putting together a wood-burning steam engine for Morris Schott’s feed mill. I was proud to see that Kraftsville people could work together, even if it took a catastrophe or the end of the world to get them started. It wasn’t all smooth, either.
I ran into Leland Kitchener on foot one day, which was unusual. He was a shabby little old fellow to look at (probably not as old as he looked, for that matter), but there was more to Leland than showed on the outside.
“Morning, Mr. Bond. How’s your house guest?”
“Making himself very comfortable, Leland. What’s new?”
He walked with his hands in his pockets and his head and shoulders hunched forward, so when he looked you in the eye he had to peer through his eyebrows. He grinned up at me. “Well, to hear people talk, I guess about the newest is you buying Perry Carpenter’s house.”
“What do they say about it?”
“Well, there’s some says it don’t look just right.”
“Then there’s some that don’t know what they’re talking about, Leland. I’m buying that house as a kindness to Christine. She can’t live there alone, a young widow and a baby—not with this billet rule. And she won’t want to be responsible for a house. This way she’s able to move back in with her folks and forget it. I’m taking the responsibility off her hands.”
“That’s what I tell them, Mr. Bond. Nobody wouldn’t think any different if it wasn’t for him being your coach at school, and the house being right next door to yours. They’re saying—some people are saying—you bought it for these Turks.”
“I tell you what, Leland. We’re all in this together, and we can’t afford not to trust each other. You tell them so. I didn’t buy the house for anybody else, and nobody’s going to be able to say I did. By next week there won’t be any house.”
His smile went sly and sweet. “You need any help, Mr. Bond, I’m your man.”
It was true the Turkistanis looked interested in Perry’s house. It would be convenient to barrack the bodyguards, at least, next door to General Arslan. But it would be more convenient from my point of view to have an empty lot there. The house belonged to me now, and legally I could tear it down any time I wanted to, but it was just as well not to confront Arslan head-on—not with anything less than a fait accompli.
That meant getting busy before the Turkistanis moved in and made it impossible. Even now, it was tricky. We had to get the fire well started before they noticed it; and there was some remote chance of it blowing across the side yards and catching on my house. But we were lucky enough to have a dry, windless night. The Turkistanis got there with the city firetruck in time to save the shell of the house, nothing else.
That brought me on the carpet before Arslan himself. I didn’t deny I’d had the place burned.
“Why do you destroy your own property, sir?”
“Why take over the world and then start tearing it down?”
He laughed outright, but his face hardened again in a hurry. “Who are your subordinates? Who have helped you?”
“You wanted me to spread the word, General. I can’t do that unless people know they can trust me.”
He eyed me steadily for a while—and those eyes could be pretty damned steady. Then the hardness relaxed, and he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “Let them trust.”
There were other kinds of planning besides economic, and other kinds of survival. Above all, there was one thing I was anxious to keep from getting started. I didn’t need a preacher to tell me that the best of us at the best of times were no more than poor ornery sinners. And Arslan had put a terrible weapon within our reach—a weapon to use not against him but against ourselves: the billet rule.
I didn’t think there had ever been a murder in Kraft County in my lifetime, or, in the normal course of things, ever would be. But who was to say there might not have been, if there had been a really sure and safe and well-established method handy? Now we were living in a time of violence and stress and permanent emergency, and we had that kind of a method. To get rid of your enemy and his whole household, you only had to throw a rock at his billeted soldier. There were risks, of course, but they didn’t amount to much, compared with the certainty of the return. There was the little matter of incidentally murdering maybe three or four innocent children; but these were desperate times, and anyway, you wouldn’t have to pull the trigger on them yourself.
I worked as hard at it as I’d ever worked at anything. What with this, and laying the groundwork for the economic plan, and a few other things, I had become a first-class rumor mill. I started a lot of talk under the pretense of just passing it on, and I learned to convey a lot of information and opinion by asking questions. Some people I could talk to straight, which was more comfortable, but most of it was sideways and round-about.
We had to keep up the faith that there was a viable United States and a viable Christian Church somewhere over the boundary of District 3281; that the old rules were still essentially valid, however much we might have to twist them to fit new cases, and that the old penalties would descend all the harder after the time out.
We needed that assurance. Arslan’s brothel was more than a convenience for his soldiers; it was a deliberate focus of corruption for the county. In other words, it was free and public. There would even have been a useful side to that, except that the American girls were reserved for the troops. A truckload of foreign girls (it was one of them that Arslan had led up the stairs, and not the last one) had been installed in the north wing of the high school, and that wing was open to all comers. It emerged—emerged pretty fast for a supposedly Christian town—that these girls were Russians. And, not to make it worse than it was, most of the north wing’s business was Russian soldiers. You might put it down to homesickness.
There were bound to be a few failures; you couldn’t expect any better. I came home one day and found Luella waiting for me in the bedroom.
“I just couldn’t face it down there,” she said. Down there was downstairs, among Arslan’s men.
“What’s the matter?”
Her face was anguished. “You know Mattie Benson, don’t you?” she said tremulously. “Howard Benson? Mattie was a Schuster. I can’t remember their boy’s name. He graduated from high school about three years ago and went to Chicago or somewhere.”
“That would be Paul Benson. I don’t remember ever knowing his folks especially. What about them, anyway?”
She looked away from me desolately. “Well, you know the billet rule…”
The soldier had been jumped down by the railroad embankment and beaten—how badly, and by how many, nobody seemed to know. He was said to be one of a bunch who had raped a young farm wife near Blue Creek a couple of weeks before. Whether that was true or not didn’t matter. Whether the soldier deserved his beating, whether Kraftsville was satisfied or shocked—all that was immaterial. The billet rule had been broken.
“I’ll try to see Arslan.”
He saw me readily enough, but only to put me under temporary arrest (he actually called it that) till the executions had been carried out. That was interesting, too. Because just what was it he was afraid I might do in the interval?
We got used to people being killed. Arslan’s rules were one hundred percent enforced—which was, after all, a lot better than unpredictable terrorism. He had a peculiarly unattractive way of disposing of the bodies. They would be dragged behind a jeep or truck, like Hector’s corpse in the Iliad—dragged all the way out to the city dump, which was three miles on a dirt road, and deposited there. Some of us saw to it that everybody got buried eventually. It wasn’t pleasant to collect the remains of your kinfolk from out there, and some people didn’t have kin. There were two funeral parlors in town, but of course their hearses had been confiscated. Two months later, they were still discussing deals for suitable conveyances, and meanwhile anybody that wanted to be buried had better have his own transportation.
But Leland Kitchener had been shrewd enough to trade himself into a wagon and a team of lethargic but durable mules within two weeks of Arslan’s arrival. They were too old, slow, and dilapidated to tempt confiscation, but they served Leland’s turn all right. They were just about exactly the unmechanized equivalent of the old stave-sided truck he’d limped about his business with, before Arslan. The business was junk and trash generally, but he would haul anything that could take a rough ride. It was Leland who always made the trip to the city dump.
We could have used a lot more like Leland. It was funny how many people didn’t really believe in Arslan—seemed to take him for some sort of optical illusion that would probably disappear when the weather changed. Meanwhile they went on doing what they’d always done, like a bunch of stubborn robots tying to march forward with their noses pressed against a wall. Then there were those who fell all over themselves to lick Arslan’s boots before he kicked them. I preferred Leland’s attitude.
You couldn’t accuse Arslan of laziness, anyhow. He would be up and working long before daylight, and he didn’t really stop till after supper—sometimes long after. He worked, too, he didn’t just diddle with papers and assign jobs to other people. He worked, though God only knew what he was working at, and though he was restive as a hot-blooded colt, interrupting his day at odd times for a bath, a shave, a meal. He had the appetite of a field hand in harvest-time, and he washed every meal down with milk. The liquor didn’t come out till the day’s work was done.
He’d taken over everything except our bedroom and as much of the kitchen as Luella absolutely required for cooking. Anywhere else in my own house I might be refused admittance—at the very best, I had to share space and facilities with a bunch of enemy aliens—and those three upstairs rooms were completely off limits to me, where he presumably slept and certainly practiced his obscenities. What this came to in terms of practical living was one continual aggravating hassle. The bathroom had to serve a minimum of eleven people, counting Arslan’s bodyguard, and with the daily and nightly comers and goers there seemed to be no maximum.
It cost me an effort to open my bedroom door in the morning; and coming back to the house from outside, I could feel my neck prickle as soon as I got near the front walk. I had had that house built when I could ill afford it, when Luella and I were first married, the year after I came back to Kraftsville for good; and nobody but my family and myself had ever lived in it, and nobody had ever set foot in it without my invitation till now. And now I might as well have invited a circus in.
None of his soldiers lived in the house, strictly speaking. But there was an orderly forever popping up (the same corporal who had jumped onto the stage to tie his shoe), and there was a bodyguard of six men attending him every moment of the day and night. I counted seventeen individual guards, once I learned to tell them apart. They relieved each other according to some complicated system of rotation, so there always seemed to be a different combination of them on duty. “If it was my bodyguard,” I told Luella, “I’d have them set up in teams. You can train a team to work together.”
“It does seem inefficient this way,” she agreed. But maybe it wasn’t. They kept on their toes; they didn’t all get bored at once. Besides, it meant sharing the goodies all round. Because that bodyguard was with him enough to make voyeurism one of the main fringe benefits of their job.
Betty Hanson was still cloistered, if the word can be applied, in the northwest room. A cot had been brought in for her, and—after I insisted on it to Arslan—Luella’s sewing machine had been brought out. Luella cooked her meals, but one of the bodyguards always carried them up. As far as we were concerned, she might as well have been invisible. Even her trips to the bathroom were guarded sneak operations.
I could have wished, if only for Luella’s sake, that she was inaudible, too. She seemed to go into an explosion of some sort every few days—screams of what might have been fear or pain, sounding unpleasantly genuine sometimes; or long, heartbroken wails of sorrow; but most often just an outburst of assorted hysterics. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, short of suicide, so I got into the habit of ignoring these commotions right away. There was enough on my mind that I could do something about. But it was hard on Luella, no question of that.
Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but I noticed that Hunt Morgan rated a real bed, even if it was just a little rollaway. I didn’t ask for my record player out of that room; I thought it might be of some help to him. But I never heard it play except when Arslan was in there. There were no disturbances from Hunt. I’d have felt better if there had been.
Arslan must have been born in a crowd—or maybe picked up in the middle of a desert. Whatever the reasons, he couldn’t seem to get too much of human company. He was literally never alone, as far as I could tell, or not more than five minutes at a time now and then.
Not just human company, either, and not just the horses. Sam Tuller told me the fairground camp was full of dogs and puppies; and in a very short time my house was, too. “Every time he goes out in that Land Rover,” Luella complained to me, “he brings back another animal.” The first pup was a beagle. The next was a bluetick hound. Then came a German shepherd bitch with a litter of puppies that didn’t look much like German shepherds. In between he had picked up half a dozen kittens and Paula Sears’s pet monkey. All of them except the monkey had the run of the house, and all of us were under orders to let them in or out whenever they wanted—which wasn’t the kind of order I was going to pay any attention to.
Luella had to feed them most of the time and clean up after them all of the time, but it was Arslan who trained them, and did it very well, too—if you didn’t count the monkey. “To be fair,” I told Luella, “I don’t think you can housebreak a monkey.”
She sniffed. “Not without trying, I’m sure of that. But if he just won’t, he could at least keep it in a cage. Paula had a perfectly nice, big cage for it.”
He kept it in the coal bin. A couple of his men shoveled what little coal there was left into a corner of the furnace room, and mopped out the bin. From then on, it was Luella’s job to go in every day and clean up; and of course that was on top of all the damage it managed to do around the house when Arslan had it out. I objected, not only because it was a dirty, mean job, and it was his monkey, or rather Paula Sears’s, but because Luella was getting physically worn out.
“You are wrong, sir; it is woman’s work. My men have other occupations.”
“Then let one of those girls help her—or Betty. It wouldn’t hurt Betty to do a little work around here.”
He shook his head. “They do woman’s work also,” he said cheerfully, “but of another type.”
I hadn’t ridden a horse in ten years, hadn’t owned a hunting dog in six, and I had missed them. In a way, it did me good to have them around the place again. And Arslan was undeniably good with all of the animals. He would pet a cat about the same way he petted his girls—expertly and with interest, but a little offhandedly. I’d never had anything against cats, but it still looked peculiar to me, a grown man fondling one like a little girl with her doll. What was beautiful was to see him with the dogs. He reminded me of a good teacher—the kind whose technique is so good it looks like all rapport and no technique. The dogs wanted to please him, wanted to understand what he was telling them to do, and do it; and he could make them understand. He knew something about training, no doubt of that.
Which didn’t mean I liked having my house transformed into something between a barracks and a menagerie. Just the smell disgusted me every time I came in the door: the smell of the monkey, of too many cats and too many dogs, of too many soldiers and too many muddy boots, of too much cooking and too much laundry, of liquor, of tobacco. And it was never really quiet. There were always people moving around, if not inside the house, then in the yard. All day there was tramping in and out, up and down the stairs, doors slamming, foreign voices. And there was always some uproar or other likely to erupt at any hour of the day or night. It would be a dog fight, or Betty Hanson in hysterics, or some indecipherable Turkistani crisis that had soldiers gallumphing down the walk, radios crackling, Arslan machinegunning out orders. I was used to spending my workdays amid noise and confusion—yes, and some smells, too; but I was used to peace and quiet and cleanliness in my own house.
Along about lettuce-planting time, which was February 11 by Kraft County tradition, I had the year’s outline pretty well set. The details remained to be filled in. “I can’t do all this from an office chair,” I told the Colonel. “I’ve got to get out and talk to people, and look at what we’ve got.”
He contemplated his cigarette, while he constructed his clauses. “You will give me two lists. Of people to whom you wish to talk. Of things at which you wish to look. Before noon tomorrow.”
I gave him his lists first thing in the morning. A little past ten he sent for me. Lieutenant Z and two soldiers were waiting in his office. “You will follow this route,” said Nizam, holding up a paper for me to take. He didn’t bother to look at me; after all, he’d glanced up when I came in. “You will return between noon and curfew, eighteen February. Dismissed.”
Nizam, or his staff, had laid out a very sensible route. It not only took in all the people and places on my lists with just about the minimum of wasted miles and minutes, but it also made allowance for the type and condition of different roads. In fact, unless we were just peculiarly lucky, it made allowance for the visibility from different spots. I’d learned to respect the Turkistani organization, if nothing else. They were thorough, and they digested information fast. I came back with two notebooks full of data, and raring to get on with the job. Lieutenant Z watched me sidelong but wide-eyed. It was the first time he’d seen me with my hands on really solid material I knew I could work with.
We checked in with Nizam first, and from there I started home on foot. But Leland Kitchener’s wagon came moseying out of the last alley before my house. Leland had a very handy way of just happening to run into you when he wanted to tell you something. We said hello, and I asked him how things had been while I was gone.
“Pretty quiet. The Commies got their stable about finished. Nothing new out of your houseguest, that I know of—except he’s sent Miss Hanson somewhere out of county, and he’s got a girl for Hunt Morgan.”
“A what?”
“A girl—you know what I mean; one of them little Russian girls. A girl for Hunt. Now ain’t that something?”
Arslan wasn’t in the living room, or the dining room, or the kitchen. The guard at the guestroom door put his rifle to my chest. I wasn’t there to beg anybody’s permission. I opened my mouth and yelled, “Arslan!”
Instantly his voice came back, what sounded like a single word in his ungodly language, and the guard moved aside. I opened the door and slammed it behind me.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed. There were dented pillows behind him, just starting to swell back into shape, and maps and papers on the bed and the floor. The rest of his bodyguards were distributed around the room, like statuary in an old-fashioned garden. He had a glass of beer in his hand (he had taken up beer lately) and he was smiling. “Welcome home, sir.”
I walked up to him. I wanted to be at close range, and maybe I wanted to see him looking up. “Leave Hunt Morgan alone,” I said.
He did look up, and looked down at his glass, and drank; and when he looked up again it was his smart-aleck look, a look that begged for a spanking. He gestured toward the chair. “Will you sit, sir?” he said silkily. “We can talk.”
I hit the glass sideways with the heel of my hand. He didn’t drop it; beer and shattered glass sprayed like an explosion. And at the same time his left hand came up and closed on my wrist, and he wrenched me down onto the bed beside him. For a little bit I couldn’t see much, let alone speak. I hadn’t known till then that a simple twist of the wrist could be so effective. “Now, sir,” I heard him saying, “you should tell me what you mean.”
“You know damn well what I mean.”
“Unfortunately no.” I could see him all right by now. He looked interested. The guards had surged forward a step, their faces dangerous and confused. “What do you wish me to do?”
“I want you to stop systematically corrupting that boy.”
“I am wooing Hunt,” he said smugly. “First the rape, then the seduction.”
I shook my head. “What are you getting out of it—another kick?”
“Do you imagine that I require ‘another kick,’ sir?”
“Some people never lose their appetite for cheap thrills.”
He put on a little studied frown—giving courteous consideration to a silly idea. “Is every pleasure a cheap thrill? Thrills of any price do not attract me; but it is true that I enjoy pleasure. For what else do we live?”
“I thought you didn’t conquer the world for fun.”
“Your memory is good, sir. Most men forget. Yes, this is also true. There are patterns to be completed without regard to pleasure.” He tilted the broken stub of glass in his right hand and let the last of the beer dribble onto my rug. “And yet you know, sir, that every pleasure has its own character, its own … shape. For example, under certain circumstances, rape gives a very beautiful pleasure, a unique pleasure.”
I felt my throat swell. “What about that girl? What kind of pleasure do you get from turning a boy over to a whore?”
He looked at me sidelong and humorously for a moment. The glass dropped quietly, and he wiped his wet hand on the bedclothes. “Consider. When a woman is raped, then she is perhaps by so much more a woman—do you understand? But when a boy is raped, he is by so much less a man. And at Hunt’s age, a boy questions already whether he can attain manhood. I wish Hunt to know that he is a man.”
“He’s not a man. He’s a child. You’re not doing him any favor. You put him into hell, and now you’re trying to make him like it.”
He smiled broadly at me. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. This is true. And if he must live in hell, do you not also wish him to be happy there?”
“No, I don’t.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Why not, sir?”
“Because in hell only the devils are happy.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Good! And you believe that I am a devil. Good! Then you can well believe that I desire to make Hunt happy.”
“Leave him alone. You’ve played with him long enough.”
“Yes, I have played. I am not playing now.”
“Then let him go.”
“Not yet.”
Sometimes his eyes were as deep as hell itself. But I wasn’t about to let him stare me down. “Why not?”
“Because, sir,” he answered slowly, “I have taken something from Hunt. I desire to give him something.”
“And what do you think you have to give him?”
“Strength. Strength. And if I cannot give him enough, then I shall do him the favor of killing him.”
“Why do you care?”
Very slowly his mouth pursed into a half smile, and the creases of amusement showed around his eyes again. “Why do you care what happens to your wife, or to the children of your school?”
I looked at him in disgust. “I don’t think you could understand why.”
“Yes, sir, I understand.” He held up two fingers, and touched one of them. “You are connected with them. If they are hurt, you feel the pain.” He touched the second finger. “Also you are responsible for them. If they are hurt, you have failed in your duty.” He nodded assertively. “It is the same with Hunt and me. I am connected. I am responsible.”
He kept the boy with him most of the time, physically beside him; and the rest of the time he kept him locked in that back upstairs room, either alone or with the girl. Hunt never left the house. Getting ready to go out, Arslan himself would turn the key in Hunt’s door and pocket it. But when he came in, he was as likely as not to toss the key, without a word, to one of his bodyguards, and the grinning soldier would tramp up the stairs and tramp down again with Hunt docilely at his heels. Or when Arslan was busy and had no time for Hunt, he would send him upstairs with a curt word, handing the key to the nearest guard. And he talked about giving the boy strength!
The girl couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Even so, she was enough older than Hunt to matter; and in some ways, of course, she was ages older. She was slight and dark, pretty in a gypsy way, and her whole occupation, outside of whatever she did in bed, seemed to be singing songs and beautifying herself. She was a cheery little creature, I had to say that for her, but at absolute maximum she was worthless. Most of her time was spent in Hunt’s room or monopolizing the bathroom—though she didn’t dare start that till Arslan was definitely out of the house. In between, she would wander airily around the house, getting into everybody’s way and poking into everybody’s things, chattering saucily in what she seemed to think was English. She was absolutely the first child I’d ever met (and in every way except her profession she was a child) on whom I couldn’t seem to make any impression—and there were times when I was red in the face from shouting at her. She was a little too old, and the situation a little too touchy, for me to turn her over my knee. Even so, I was mightily tempted.
She made herself very scarce whenever Arslan appeared. I saw him look at her sometimes, but I never heard him speak to her. For that matter, I didn’t hear him say much to Hunt. “Read to me.” That was his usual greeting. He would pluck a book from the shelves, or his pocket, or most often from one of the piles that littered the floor and the furniture (Luella wasn’t allowed to touch them), and flip it carelessly at Hunt. If the boy caught it clumsily or missed it altogether, the bodyguard would grin in derision. And Hunt, God help him, was still vulnerable enough to flush.
He would read—read until he was hoarse, until sometimes his voice cracked and broke, and Arslan would stop him impatiently, as he might have switched off a staticky radio. He read while Arslan ate, while Arslan was being shaved, while Arslan skimmed through reports and pored over maps. He read to him in the bathroom, in Arslan’s bedroom and his own—or at least they carried a good many books in and out. He read, read; and it was touching to see him lose himself in his reading. Since that first night, he had hardly spoken voluntarily. Every move he made, every look of his dark eyes, showed how badly he was being hurt. But when he read aloud, you could literally see and hear him sink into the words, shutting out everything else. He had always read well by school standards, two or three grade levels ahead of himself all the way; but now he was beginning to read really well, not just “putting in the expression,” but living the words.
So I was concerned about what he read. It was certainly a strange mixture. They always had about half a dozen different books in process, scattered around the house. Arslan seemed to pick up whichever one was handiest. Most of them came out of my bookcases, and to tell the truth I was surprised to be reminded of what all I had on hand. They read Shakespeare, and Shaw, and Oscar Wilde, and an old manual of beekeeping, and Stories of the Great Operas, and the introductions to Luella’s cookbooks, and Paradise Lost, and (so help me God) Fowler’s Dictionary of English Usage from cover to cover, and books on vegetable gardening and evolution and hunting rifles, and Moby Dick, and Nietzsche, and the Bible. Those were all from my shelves, and so were the old histories: Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, and Cook’s Voyages, and a few volumes left from a nineteen-hundred set of histories of the principal nations of the world. The books that Arslan produced from somewhere were mostly histories, too, but modern ones, and technical works on electronics, medicine, biology.
And it was this hodgepodge that Hunt read day by day, sitting a little hunched with the book on his knees, never looking up except for occasional furtive glances at Arslan, and all the life of his young body and soul concentrated in his voice.
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right.
And as Hunt read, Arslan listened. Sometimes his eyes would take on a tranced expression, his eyelids would droop, and he would look, for the time being, genuinely Oriental.
For we cannot call it reasoning to make pain a
presumption of death, while, in fact, it is rather a
sign of life. For though it be a question whether that
which suffers can continue to live for ever, yet it is
certain that everything which suffers pain does live,
and that pain can exist only in a living subject.
Meanwhile, if it was one of his irregular mealtimes, he would be chewing slowly, seeming to consider and savor every mouthful. He liked to eat like a Roman emperor, reclining on the living-room couch, with his meal on the coffee table. Chairs certainly weren’t invented for Arslan. If he wasn’t standing up, or riding something, he was sure to be stretched out somewhere.
His movement was prompt and his hand heavy;
the staff of Ivan IV. seems to have passed into his grasp.
We have seen him strike with his cane the greatest
lords, Prince Menchikof among the number. He bent
to his will men, things, nature, and time; he realized
his end by despotic blows.
Or he would be leaning back in my armchair beside the kitchen sink, in the blissful trance of a hot shave, the little orderly operating with all the grim delicacy of a brain surgeon. And Arslan would look like a petted cat.
Locks so grey did never grow but from out some
ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old,
Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped,
as though I was Adam, staggering beneath the piled
centuries since Paradise.
It was strange fare for a Turkistani general. He never commented, never asked questions; and, almost always, he was doing something else while he listened. But he listened. Sometimes a passage would make him smile. More often, he would turn his snake’s eyes abruptly on Hunt, with an expressionless spotlight intensity that it almost hurt to watch. Hunt seemed to feel it, always; a flush would start upward from his neck, and his voice would burn all the more earnestly. But those were never the times when he stole his glances at Arslan.
His mother had been after me all along to arrange some way for her to talk to Hunt. She had lost weight, and she’d never had a lot to spare. Her freckled face was pinched and grim, but she went about business as briskly as ever. On my way to Nizam’s—or more often on my way back, because I’d be in better humor—she would waylay me. “Any chance, Franklin?”
“Nothing new, Jean, but you know there’s always a chance.”
What was less common was for me to hear anything from her husband. Arnold Morgan was generally considered the best attorney in town, or anyway the sharpest, and in my opinion he’d raised a fine son; but I didn’t think any the better of him for the way he was acting now.
I caught up with him one day just coming out of his office. Business was still being conducted, Arslan or no Arslan. A lot of legal requirements were in abeyance, for lack of a government, and we weren’t allowed to hold court, but there was still plenty to keep the lawyers busy. “Hello, Arnold.” I slowed down to fall into step beside him, and he looked a little annoyed.
“Good afternoon, Franklin. How’s it going?”
“Not too bad.” I waited; sooner or later he would have to ask about his son.
“Of course, Jean keeps us pretty well posted about Hunt,” he said reluctantly, “and I know he’s in good hands at your house. The best thing we can do for him now is not make waves.”
“He’s in General Arslan’s hands,” I said.
He threw a furious look at me and checked himself. “Fortunately, Hunt has been brought up to think for himself. He’s a very mature boy.” He settled his hat more firmly on his head, and added, “All this must be pretty hard on your ulcer.”
“It’s not an ulcer. It’s a spastic pylorus.”
“I beg your pardon.”
What that came to was that Arnold Morgan was in no hurry to get his son back. A bright, polite, good-looking child was an asset, no matter how much it took to support him, but now Hunt was tainted. It wasn’t a question of morals. It would have been the same if he had lost his looks, or his grade average. But Jean was dying for him.
It wasn’t often Hunt was alone with Luella and me, or either of us. But sometimes Arslan would trot upstairs for a few minutes, or swing out of the house for half an hour, leaving Hunt unoccupied. He would sit in his little pool of self-consciousness, waiting for whatever somebody might choose to do to him next. I always took the opportunity to speak to him and try to get some reaction, if it was nothing but a faint nod in response to some remark on the weather.
“Isn’t there a poem with something about Bukhara in it? Something about ‘lonely Bukhara’?” Arslan had just gone out with one of his officers, and the word Bukhara hung in the air.
Hunt nodded. He got up silently, took an old high school literature book from the shelf, and leafed straight to the page he wanted. He held the book out toward me without a word.
“Will you read it to me, please, Hunt?” I didn’t want him to feel that reading was just part of the regimen Arslan inflicted on him.
He sat down, docile as always. “Matthew Arnold,” he said quietly, smoothing the page. “’Sohrab and Rustem.’” He began to read. I didn’t pay much attention to the words at first—
My terrible father’s terrible horse—
But Hunt was reading it as if he’d been born to read it.
O Ruksh, thou art more fortunate than I;
For thou hast gone where I shall never go,
And snuff’d the breezes of my father’s home.
And thou hast trod the sand of Seistan—
It didn’t sound exactly like what I remembered.
—But I
Have never known my grandsire’s furrow’d face—
His voice shook with feeling. It was a question whether he would make it through.
But lodged among my father’s foes, and seen
Afrasiab’s cities only, Samarcand,
Bokhara, and lone Khiva in the waste,
And the black Toorkmun tents; and only drunk
The desert rivers, Moorgab and Tejend,
Kohik, and where the Kalmuks feed their sheep,
The northern Sir; and this great Oxus stream,
The yellow Oxus, by whose brink I die.
He stopped. “That’s all,” he said, without lifting his eyes. “It’s not much.” But he was struggling to bring out something else, so I waited. “He,” he began, and swallowed hard, and then got it out steadily enough, “he told me they really do ferment the milk of mares. I was surprised.”
It didn’t matter much what he had said; he had said something. His hands jammed the book shut convulsively, and he shot me a naked, stricken look—confessing everything, that he was a child, that he was alive, that Arslan was his grown-up. His eyes fell again; his shoulders shook, but before I could cross the room to him he stiffened again, and the look he flung at me this time stopped me dead—it was so plainly a look of fear.
I held out my hand for the book, and I saw his shoulders relax. “Thank you, Hunt,” I said.
“That Morgan boy’s a pitiful case, isn’t he?” Fred Gonderling made it sound sympathetic, which was better than most people managed to do.
“He’s in a tough spot, if that’s what you mean. But he keeps his wits about him. I think he’ll come out of it all right.” It made me a little mad to hear Hunt Morgan dismissed as pitiful, like a failing patient in a nursing home. There was no telling what kind of a future lay ahead of that boy, except that it wouldn’t be an easy one; but I thought he had more of a future than most of the people who were shaking their heads over him. There was something in Hunt that could hold out for a long time against everything Arslan was doing to him—given a little luck, long enough to come through on the other side.
By midsummer, he had been granted some of the trappings of freedom. He was never locked up now. He was allowed to come and go pretty much at will, except when Arslan had a use for him. He was even allowed to take a horse out of the Russians’ stable and ride anywhere in the district, apparently. But the district was sown with soldiers, and I thought one of the permanent duties of every one of them was keeping an eye out for Hunt Morgan. Every time Jean had tried lying in wait along his usual routes—and she had tried it often enough, if not more—some Russian or Turkistani had sent her about her business. After a while I persuaded her to quit trying and wait till I could arrange something. Partly I wanted to keep her out of official trouble, and partly I wanted to keep her from finding out in the bluntest way that Hunt didn’t want to see her.
“She’s on your side, Hunt,” I told him. “Forget about everybody else.”
Usually his answer was silence; but once he brought himself to say, “I know her opinions.”
“Forget about opinions. And when you do see her, never mind what she says to you. When it comes to family, those things don’t really matter—not if you can remember they’re just words.”
“Sticks and stones,” he said.
In a way, Arnold Morgan had been right when he called Hunt mature, but not in a very important way. Compared to most of his classmates, with their raw country boyishness, he’d always seemed both younger and older. But that had been superficial, just the self-confident sophistication of any well-bred child. Now he was definitely, irreversibly older. It had been close, but Hunt had proved me right. He had had just barely the necessary toughness to get him through. He didn’t blush any more.
Hunt would survive, no doubt of that. What I worried about now was what kind of a person he would survive as. He listened when he was talked to—listened seriously but distantly. There was a kind of impediment in his communication. He volunteered practically nothing, and when he answered a question it was most often with a shrug, a sidelong look, or a cool stare.
Toward Arslan, he had the manner of a well-trained servant—sometimes he was disconcertingly like the little orderly. Arslan was the sun around which Hunt had to revolve, and it was only on the side illuminated by Arslan that he showed much sign of life. On that unique subject he was able and willing to talk, or at least answer questions articulately. And then again he would clam up, and I couldn’t get any more out of him except a shrug and “He doesn’t tell me everything.”
Either he told him an almighty lot, or Hunt had a very fertile imagination and didn’t mind farming it. “He says he has American troops in Russia and China, and Chinese troops in Europe, and European troops in the Middle East, and Arab and Israeli troops in Africa. All commanded by his officers.”
“Hunt, I don’t see how he could have that many officers.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Why does he stay in Kraftsville? Has he told you that?”
One of the things I’d noticed about Hunt lately was that he held his head upright even when he bowed it. His shoulders might hunch and droop, his eyes and chin might sink, but his spine stayed straight and tall. Now he lowered those big eyes and shrugged his little shrug, and his mouth stirred briefly.
“Of course,” I said, “we don’t have to believe everything he says.”
“Free will,” he observed constrainedly.
“And common sense. If he’d really conquered the world, would he set up his capital in Kraftsville, Illinois?”
He took on a struggling look—trying to enunciate an answer that would suit me—but after a minute he gave it up and relaxed in silence.
“And what’s he doing with those troops, if he commands them all?”
“Dividing the world into small, self-sufficient communities,” he parroted patiently.
“How ready does he have to be, General?”
Arslan looked up blankly from his coffee-tableful of papers. He had sent Hunt upstairs a few minutes before, and he had called for a bottle, but it still stood unopened. Lately he had started to break his unstated rule of no hard liquor while there was still work to do. “How ready?”
“How strong. Strength was the idea, wasn’t it?”
He fingered the top of his bottle. “He is ready now,” he said finally. “Let him go to his people.”
I wasted no time setting up a meeting between Hunt and Jean—and when it came right down to it, Hunt raised no objection. They talked in what had been the music room at school and was now an office supply storeroom. (The Turkistanis used a considerable amount of memo paper.) Hunt was back in twenty minutes, and I felt better as soon as I saw his face. There was a freshness and childhood there that had been missing for too long. And a vulnerability. He didn’t say anything; he just started to pack a little toilet kit. Hunt didn’t have very many belongings. Still, he managed to put off his departure till after supper, dawdling through his preparations and taking individual leave of every animal on the place. Arslan wasn’t there.
And when Arslan came in at last, not half an hour after he finally left, he didn’t mention Hunt.
A little after dark (it would have been about eight—there was no Daylight Saving Time this year) we heard a single rifle shot, not far away. On the couch Arslan swung himself upright, his face gone hard, and spoke an order. Two soldiers jumped to put out the lights, and another one rushed past me and out of the door. I heard low voices, running feet, one cautious shout; then in scarcely a minute the man was back with a word to Arslan, the door was shut, the lamps being lit again.
“What’s the matter?” I demanded. But Arslan was giving more orders, brisk and easy. One man disappeared through the kitchen door, another up the stairs. Luella came in from the kitchen, white-faced. There was a pause. We were all on our feet, except Arslan.
He knew too damned well what was coming, and I knew it, too. Anger was building up in me like compressed air, so tight I could hardly hear the slow steps on the porch. A guard held the door open for Hunt and closed it after him.
He looked straight towards me. “Would you mind if I came back, Mr. Bond?” His voice was clear, level, and bitter.
“As far as I’m concerned you are back, Hunt, and always welcome.”
Luella came to him anxiously. “What happened, Hunt?”
“Forget it.” He was leaning against the door, his little bag in his hands. His eyes flared at me as he burst out, “He’s willing to take me back—on conditions! How about that? If you’ve got any conditions, I’d appreciate hearing them now.”
“No conditions, Hunt,” I said. “Never.”
Luella gasped wordlessly, and I followed her look. Hunt’s left pant leg was streaked with wet from thigh to ankle; the blood dribbled silently off his shoe onto the rug. “Yeah,” he said. She was trying to help him away from the door, but he leaned against it stubbornly. “I can walk very well, thanks.” His eyes were alight with fury. I touched Luella’s arm, and she stepped back.
It was Arslan’s turn now. He stood up at last, and Hunt limped across the room and allowed himself to be let down onto the couch. Arslan was on his knees beside him in an instant, ripping open the pant leg with his knife.
Luella surprised me. “You get your hands off him!” she snapped. “You’re the one that had him shot!”
“My own fault,” Hunt said calmly. “I know the curfew rule. I’m surprised, though,” he added to Arslan. “I thought you had better marksmen. Or don’t they shoot to kill?”
Arslan glanced up appreciatively. “Not to kill, no. To immobilize. It is often desirable to question those who break rules.”
“I wasn’t even immobilized,” Hunt said tightly.
“Yes. The sentry will be reprimanded.” The guards were reappearing with water, bandages, medicines. There was a well-rehearsed air about the whole thing. “For your information, Hunt,” Arslan was saying, “I have given standing orders not to fire on you unless you should actually attack me. Otherwise you would have been shot as soon as you left your parents’ house. But the man who fired was unable to recognize you in the darkness. I consider him justified.”
“How about a doctor?” I said.
“Unnecessary. It is a very simple wound.”
Maybe it hadn’t quite been rehearsed. Conceivably—just conceivably—the shot had been accidental. But, to whatever extent he had manipulated for it, I didn’t doubt that this was exactly the scene Arslan had planned. But Hunt had come to my house for shelter, and I’d given it, without conditions. That was what mattered.
I went to see Arnold Morgan first thing the next morning. He looked half relieved to see me and half belligerent. “Did Hunt get back to your place all right?” he demanded.
“Well, he got there, and by good luck he’s only got a bullet hole in his leg. Didn’t you people ever hear of the curfew?”
He went as white as if he’d been bleached. “We tried to keep him, Franklin. I did everything I could. How is he?”
“He’s all right. What I’d like to know is, if he started off intending to stay with you, and you did everything you could to keep him, what made him come back?”
He firmed up at that, and flushed angrily. “When Hunt comes home, it’s going to be the real thing, Franklin. Nobody’s going to use my house as a … a…”
“In other words, you sent your son out to be shot at because he couldn’t promise he wouldn’t be assaulted.”
“No, sir—and you ought to know me better than to say that to me. I didn’t send him anywhere. The only thing I asked for was that he wouldn’t volunteer himself to that greasy devil. For God’s sake, Franklin, what do you expect me to do—encourage him?”
“I did expect a little Christian charity and a little understanding for your own child. But it looks like that was too much to ask for.” We weren’t quite shouting yet, but we were getting close.
“You’re not in a very good position to—”
“—So how about a little common sense instead? The only things you’ve accomplished are convincing Hunt he can’t get back to a normal life—not that anything’s normal these days—and pushing him right into Arslan’s corner. His own father drives him out, and who takes him in? Arslan! Arslan! Just putting it bluntly, Arnold, anytime Arslan wants his body he can have it, and neither you nor I nor Hunt can stop him; and it doesn’t matter whose house he’s living in, either. What you’ve done is help Arslan get hold of his soul.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say to me.” His voice shook. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to stop. He wouldn’t even agree—” He broke off, waving his open hand spasmodically, as if he was looking for something to hit with it. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s not too late even now. My door’s open whenever he’s ready to come home.”
“On your terms.”
“Now, listen, Franklin. If you’ve got anything practical to tell me, go ahead and say it. But if you’re just here to pass insults, let’s call a halt right now. Jean’s upstairs trying to get some rest, and I’ve got better things to do.”
“Yes, I’ve got one thing very practical—”
But he was so worked up now that he couldn’t let me go on till he got in his counterattack. “And I’ll tell you something, Franklin, there’s a lot of people who don’t think much of the way you’ve toadied up to that stinking Turk. Collaborator’s a dirty word, but that’s exactly—”
“I didn’t come to discuss myself.”
“No, you came to pull that holier-than-thou act because I’ve insisted on a little basic morality and loyalty—and coming from you it doesn’t look very good. Ever since they came shooting their way in here—”
“Nobody shot their way in.”
“—you’ve been preaching. ‘Cooperate! Cooperate!’ Well, I say that’s just the coward’s way to pronounce ‘collaborate.’”
If you think so, why haven’t you done something about it?”
“If we’d had a chance, we would have! You were so damn quick to inform on anybody who had a gun.”
“Do you have any idea what this town would look like now if we’d tried to fight?”
“We’d be able to hold our heads up, anyway.”
“After you’d scraped them out of the mud, maybe. I’m not hanging mine. Now, just shut up and listen to me for five seconds. For God’s sake—for Jean’s sake, Arnold—get word to Hunt that you want him back, no strings attached. Don’t do it through me if you don’t want to. You’re welcome to think whatever you want to about me, but it’s more important what you do about your son.”
I left that little scene with a feeling of satisfaction, all in all. Collaborator. Well, in a sense I certainly was. I’d gone all out to get people to do what Arslan and his henchmen demanded, and I’d been working hand-in-glove with Nizam on the economic plan. What Arnold Morgan didn’t know about—what nobody knew much about, I hoped, except a few people like Sam Tuller’s family and Leland Kitchener the junk man—was a little nonexistent organization that we called the Kraft County Resistance.
Arslan’s pistol and its eight cartridges were hidden in nine separate spots. They might as well be separate, for now. There was no possible way for that gun to do us any good tangibly, except the way I’d failed to use it in the Land Rover; but the fact that it existed was a solid rock to build a faith on. Sam Tuller and two of his boys had crawled in that oat field night after night, till they found every last cartridge. It had to be careful crawling, too. Aside from the matter of getting out of the house and back in again without disturbing their billeted soldier, it was likelier than not that Arslan would have the field watched. But we got them all, and got them safely squirreled away, without rousing the least suspicion. Or so we had to tell ourselves.
I had thought long and hard before I told Sam about the gun in his field. But he was a reliable man, the kind who could shoulder a risk like that, and I felt justified in giving it to him. If there was going to be any real Resistance at all, quite a few people would have to take quite a few risks. And, by God, there was going to be a Resistance.
That was why I had planted some rumors within a week of Arslan’s banquet. People needed something to hang onto, if it was only a name or an idea, and they needed it right from the start. It didn’t hurt that there was nothing to back it up at first—you couldn’t arrest a name without a body. The real organization developed very slowly. It had to be solid. It had to be built man by man.
Naturally, there was a lot of resistance, with a small “r,” to Arslan, and not everybody had the patience to wait for a solid organization. There were other names besides ours going the rumor rounds, names with “Freedom” and “America” in them. It was partly by talking to people who seemed to be getting themselves involved with those things that I had gotten my reputation, in certain circles, as a collaborator. Some of those people were the gun-owners I had informed on, as Arnold chose to call it. But I’d managed to discourage others before it was too late—good people who didn’t need to throw away their lives for nothing.
The would-be patriots hadn’t found much to do but talk—except, of course, that some of them were responsible for the deaths of Howard and Mattie Benson back at the beginning of spring. There hadn’t been any noticeable investigation of that incident. Arslan—or Nizam—apparently felt the deterrent effect of promptly enforcing the billet rule was enough, and apparently he’d been right. But one night at the end of August somebody tried to set fire simultaneously to the stable, Nizam’s headquarters, and my house. Nizam’s men were not only waiting for them with open arms; before the night was over, they had also arrested not just the entire membership of the particular organization that had undertaken the arsons, but every other resistance movement in the district. Except, of course, the Kraft County Resistance.
It was mid-October when I came upstairs one evening to find my door open and Hunt sitting listlessly on the windowsill.
“Take a chair, Hunt.” He stood up hastily—remembering his manners—and I closed the door and waved him towards my armchair.
“Thanks.” He sat down awkwardly and gave me a smile as an afterthought. One thing Arslan had done for him was destroy his gracefulness. He had been one of those easy-moving boys that take to bikes and horses and skis as if they’d been born in motion. Now he acted like somebody who’d been bedridden and hadn’t quite got his muscles under control yet. It made me wonder sometimes how much sheer physical abuse he had to put up with.
I turned my desk chair around to face him, sat down, and stretched out my legs. Hunt had never visited me in my room before, and it obviously meant something to him, but he wasn’t going to open up without some priming. So I began to talk, about what I’d done that day, about the weather prospects, about the dogs and the cats and the monkey.
“I hate the damned monkey,” he said suddenly. He hated something, all right. His voice shook and his cheeks flamed. I nodded. He dropped his eyes. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Well, you know, a monkey can’t really help itself.”
He sank back in the chair, turning his face half away—wondering, I realized, whether it was worth the trouble to disabuse me. “I didn’t mean the monkey,” he said. “I meant him.”
Well, there it was. I heaved a sigh. No, under the circumstances, I didn’t think he was going to kill anybody. Hunt had been building up steam for nearly a year now, and with a little bit more, maybe he would have killed Arslan, or tried; but now he had let it out in words. And, after all, he was only fourteen. He was breathing deeply now, and his face was exhausted and calm.
“Why tell me about it?” I asked gently.
“I thought you might want to make preparations.”
“Thank you.” He looked at me at last, rolling his head against the chair back, and smiled wanly. I took a deep breath and leaned forwards. “Hunt. Just what preparations do you think I could make that would save Kraftsville from absolute destruction? I’m not God.”
“Neither is Arslan,” he offered mildly.
And on that cue the door opened, quietly but not stealthily, and Arslan stood leaning against the doorframe. He had a bottle under his arm and a roll of papers in one hand. He looked as if he might have been there a while.
We were as still as mice. Gently Arslan lifted his hand and tossed the papers, and they splayed out across the bed and onto the floor at Hunt’s feet. He took the bottle by the neck, hefting it thoughtfully for a minute as if he was considering it as a weapon. Then he tossed it after the papers. It bounced softly on the bed. “I am tired, sir,” he said matter-of-factly.
I looked hard at his face and the set of his body. Was it possible for Arslan to be tired? His eyes were bloodshot and a little puffy, and there were lines around them, but the rest of his face was smooth and fresh-looking, neither drawn nor drooping, a very youthful face. There wasn’t a trace of slump in his leaning. He was relaxed like a coiled copperhead or a dozing cat—comfortable, but ready to kill on a split second’s notice. Still, he would probably look like that if he was about to drop from exhaustion. It was no wonder Arslan ate so much; he must have used up a lot of energy just standing around.
He lit a cigarette, took one drag, looked at it, and pinched it out, dropping it back into his shirt pocket. “Africa and South America may be the most difficult problems in the end,” he said conversationally, “but Asia is of course the most massive problem.” He turned his steady, humorous gaze on me. Yes, I thought he looked tired. “It is probable that I shall fail in Asia.”
Probable. It would be silly to forget that everything he said had a purpose. But all the same, that one word probable lit a little blaze of hope. If he failed anywhere, he failed everywhere; unless every wall stood, his house of cards would come tumbling down.
He came on into the room, shouldering the door shut behind him, leaned back against it, and surveyed us. “I give myself six years. Six years. Then, if I have not succeeded, I will apply my second plan.”
I nodded involuntarily. I’d seen too much of Arslan to be sure his grand scheme would fail, but on the other hand, I couldn’t really imagine it succeeding; and when it failed, Arslan wasn’t the man to go home to Bukhara and raise sheep.
There figured to be a second plan, and I had a kind of an idea what it would be.
“Plan Two is also difficult,” he went on, “but it is more practicable, and also more permanent.” He straightened himself, and smiled coolly at me as he crossed over to the bed. “You have refused to drink with me in your kitchen and in your living room, sir. Will you drink with me in your bedroom?”
“I don’t drink,” I told him for the twentieth time. “Anywhere.”
He stepped over my feet, swept the scattered papers to one side, and settled himself on the bed, with my pillow tucked behind his shoulders and his shoes on Luella’s clean bedspread. “Strong drink is raging,” he said, carefully opening his vodka. “You have promised to explain Christianity to me, sir. I am ready to listen.” He tilted the bottle with loving care and took a long, slow swallow.
“I don’t think so.”
He lowered the bottle long enough to shrug, and drank again, drew a deep breath, and prodded his papers with the butt of the bottle. “These are the messengers that tell me my failure is probable,” he said. “Hunt, pick up those.” Hunt stooped and gathered up the papers from the floor; he looked blankly across Arslan as he laid them on the bed, and met my eyes. “The current demographic analyses. Always they insist upon this message. I cannot make them change their story.” He smiled to himself. You could literally see the liquor hitting him. Something like a shudder went down the length of him, as if he were settling more comfortably into his skin; the lines around his eyes smoothed out, and his face flushed.
I watched him pretty sourly. I didn’t like his dirty boots, and I didn’t like his jibes at religion. “Does that mean you’re giving up?” He made a little grunt of amusement. “At any rate,” I said, “it means there’s a little bit of hope for the world.”
“Hope,” he said thoughtfully. He drank deep again, and then suddenly he collected himself like a cat going into a crouch. He turned to me, leaning hard on his elbow, his face and voice indignant and venomous. “You are not a child, sir. You have seen something of life and death. Tell me, are they what you have pretended them to be? You call yourselves a Christian people; and that, sir, is a lie, and you are wise enough to know that it is a lie. You would have called Kraftsville a safe and pleasant place to live, before I came, would you not? But answer this for yourself, sir. How many households do you know personally in Kraftsville? Two hundred, perhaps—three hundred? How many of these are free of serious evil—serious evil, sir? Aggression, exploitation, cruelty—lust to possess, lust to destroy—hatred, envy, deceit—have not these been always commonplace in Kraftsville? I did not import pain, sir; it is a local product.” His mouth tightened emphatically. He went on staring at me with remote eyes while he bit at his underlip. “And yet it is true,” he announced sternly. “It is true that Kraftsville was a safe and pleasant place, in comparison with other places. Your hungriest paupers have been better fed than the chiefs of towns. Your people have slept in security. They were free, they were healthy, as human health and freedom go. They had never suffered war. But you know that in most of the world, sir, there has been war and war again, and again, and again war, so that every generation learns again. Strange. It is very strange.” He shook his head like a man in real puzzlement.
“What is?”
“More than one hundred years without war. A strange way of life.”
“What do you mean, without war? My God, we’ve—”
“You have made war, you have not suffered it! Your nation, sir, has been perhaps the happiest to exist in the world. And yet consider its history. The natives despoiled, displaced, cheated, brutalized, slaughtered. The most massive and the most cynical system of slavery since the fall of Rome. A civil war spectacular in its dimensions. A century of labor troubles, of capitalist exploitation and union exploitation. And in the very ascendancy of your power, disintegration! The upheaval, the upswelling, of savagery, of violence. Not revolution, sir, for revolution requires coherence. Not eighteenth-century France, but fifth-century Rome. The exposure, the revelation, of that all-pervading rottenness that is the fruit of your hypocrisy.” He pursed his mouth like a disapproving old woman. “Grotesque, sir, this combination of a primitive puritanism and a frantic decadence; very like the Romans whom you so much resemble. Name me a happy nation, sir!”
“Switzerland,” I hazarded.
“Ah, Switzerland! The parody of Protestantism! All lusts sublimated into the pure lust of cleanliness and profit. The prudent, virtuous nation fattening upon the viciousness and greed and folly of all the world. Would you exchange your own life, sir, your life now or a year ago, for the life of those pious, prosperous people?” He shook his head dogmatically. “I tell you, sir, not even the Japanese have been more rigidly inhibited.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised at this tirade. After all, as he’d said himself, you didn’t conquer the world for fun—nor for theory, either. There had to be some kind of emotional force powering Plan One. Why it came out now, this particular evening, was understandable enough, if he was really tired, if his plan was really in trouble, if he’d just heard Hunt plotting to murder him.
He leaned a little towards me again, blazing at me like an evangelist on fire with his message. “Sir, you have been shocked by things I have done in Kraftsville, by things my soldiers have done. But I tell you we have been restrained, my soldiers and I. I tell you—and, sir, you know this already, you have known it for years—all these things, and worse, much worse things than these, have been done every day, in every country, all over the world, for thousands of years. You knew this, sir; your history, your newspapers, your eyes, your brain, your body and blood have told you. Were you shocked then? Was your Christian faith shaken? Did you vow vengeance for those wrongs?”
He leaned back abruptly against the pillows and drank again. It was my turn. “All right, General, let me tell you something. You don’t shake my faith, either. Sure, I know about the hell that goes on in this world. That’s the whole point of Chirstianity—to keep from sinking into it all the way. It takes all the strength a man has, to deal with evil—that’s nothing new. But that’s what we’re alive for. And let me tell you something else, General; we can win. You’re trying to tar the whole world with one brush; you’re saying it’s all bad, and that’s a lie. Kraftsville certainly wasn’t perfect before you came, but it was paradise compared to what you’ve made of it, and it was a better and happier place than a lot of other places.”
“Yes, sir, yes!” He was smiling his triumphant, now you-understand-how-right-I-was smile. “Have you read Candide, sir? Three hundred pages of catastrophe and misery and injustice, of which the moral is, ‘We must cultivate our garden.’ Was not this the virtue of Kraftsville, that it cultivated its own garden? Sir, I am trying to reduce the world to Kraftsvilles.”
“’Reduce it’! You’re reducing it, all right, reducing it to a wasteland. You think you get gardens out of ashes?”
“No!” he cried gladly. “Out of death and excrement. Out of garbage and corpses. You cut the weeds before you sow the crop, do you not? Consider the world as it was before I came, sir. Throughout Asia hunger, disease, fear, tyranny of landlords or of rulers, and war or the threat of it. In Africa, chaos and corruption. In South America, unconquerable poverty breeding still new revolutions. And everywhere, dread of nuclear war and busy preparation for it. Was this a happy world, sir? A safe and pleasant place to live?”
His voice rang and throbbed, a parade-ground voice—except, I realized, he wasn’t actually speaking very loud. His eyes burned. He looked as if he’d hit anybody who dared to answer one of his rhetorical questions. On the other side of the bed, Hunt was watching him with a kind of motionless frenzy—frozen on the verge of some explosion.
“And this was not an accident of the times. What came before, sir? Colonialism; and I assure you—I assure you, sir—that the evils of colonialism have not been exaggerated. Before the Second World War, the First. Before that, more than half a century of revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution that powered them all. Before that, the wars of Islam and the wars of Christianity. How far back do you wish to go, sir? Do you remember the Chinese general who took Canton in fifteen-hundred and gave that perfect order to his troops: ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill’? Can you smell the stink of the galleys, sir—the most elegantly efficient means of transportation for twenty centuries? An invention of the Romans, sir, those famous practicians. Do you remember the battle of Lepanto, which saved the West for Christianity and proved the virtue of heavy firepower? Was there a really significant difference between the stench of the Turkish Moslem galleys and the stench of the Spanish Christian galleys? On the one hand the smell of Christian slaves and Moslem convicts, on the other that of pagan slaves and Christian convicts. There were still galleys in the nineteenth century, sir; and the latest belonged to France, that most humane flower of Western civilization. Which do you prefer, sir? That holy St. Vladimir of the Russian church who used cavalry to drive his subjects to the river to be baptized or drowned; or that holy Emir of my country who kept a snake pit into which uncooperative ambassadors could be lowered; or those prudent American pioneers who massacred a village of Christian Indians as a preventive measure; or those loyal Vietnamese patriots who tied their Communist neighbors together in live bundles and dropped them into rivers—a technique they may have learned from a study of French history? An English soldier of Cromwell’s army was surprised to see the little children of a woman dead of starvation eating the flesh of their mother’s corpse, and yet there is a natural logic in this. Passing over gas ovens and human vivisection, penal colonies and sharecropping, you have heard of the battered-child syndrome?” He gave me a blank ghost of his angelic smile. “A worldwide, an age-old phenomenon, though perhaps especially a modem American one. Are these things tolerable? Clearly yes; they have always been tolerated. But there are more important things. Consider, sir. It is natural to man to build a civilization, and it is natural to civilization to destroy itself and to wreck the world.”
“You think so?” I broke in roughly.
He glared at me a moment, and then half-relaxed—remembering, no doubt, that he was talking to humans. “I think so, yes. If war were not natural to man, there would be no wars. And what is natural is inevitable. Do you know the fable of Venus and the cat? No?” He laughed. “Read it.” He waved his hand impatiently, disposing of the human race with a gesture. “Man is a mistake of evolution. He is too potent. Any species will foul or exhaust its habitat in time, unless it is checked by counterforces.” He wiped his hard palm across the mouth of his bottle and drank in violent gulps. Something seemed to have given way in Hunt. He sat docile and still now, his eyes following automatically every movement Arslan made. “Counterforces,” Arslan said, “internal or external. When the food supply is inadequate, the does drop fewer fawns. But man, man is too strong. He fouls and exhausts too rapidly, and nothing checks him for long. There is only one end for such a species: extinction; quick extinction. It only remains to be seen if the end comes by holocaust or by poisoning and starvation.” He chuckled. “A bang or a whimper.”
I started to speak, but again he crowded in ahead of me. “Is this important? Not in itself, except to those who die. But man has taken all the world as his habitat. Therefore this is important. Not man alone, but the whole world is dying. Your scientists have spoken of the web of life. Yes. It is a web, in four dimensions. And man hangs in the web above the void. But man has strained and twisted and torn the web. Man has pruned the web to make for himself a cozy hammock, and now"—he snorted a contemptuous laugh, or maybe it wasn’t a laugh—"now he dangles, now he feels the runs and ravels in the fabric, and the void is so cold, so cold!” He drew a harsh breath through his open mouth, and nodded dogmatically. “Yes, sir. The natural is the inevitable.”
“Then what’s the use of what you’re doing?” I got in.
He nodded again. “Good. A good point. If man is set back to his beginnings, will he not build another civilization? If he can, yes; but he must have the raw materials, and his environment must not be too strong for him. Now, sir, do you understand?”
“No, I don’t. You say what’s natural is inevitable, and I say that at least what we’ve done before we can do again. Man has proved he can handle any environment in the world—and out of this world, too. If you’re talking about depletion of natural resources, a civilization just getting started doesn’t need the resources that we’ve depleted.”
“On the contrary, sir! It is exactly the resources it needs that are gone forever. Where now is the ore that can be mined and smelted without modern equipment—the equipment that I am destroying? Where is the coal that lay exposed on hillsides, the oil that oozed from the ground? There is wood, yes, I grant that, there is water, yes, there is air, and these will survive—if I succeed. If I succeed.” He stopped for another drink, a hasty one this time. “But consider the environment, sir, the environment as a whole. Drouth, flood, fire, vermin, disease, all the enemies that man boasts of controlling—he has armed them, trained them, fed them, laid himself down in their path. Man has unbalanced the world, unbalanced so literally, sir, that he creates earthquakes. Earth breaks beneath his tread and he falls, he drowns in his leaking oil. He burns the oxygen of the land, he smothers the oceans with his grease. These abuses must cease, sir—I tell you, these abuses must cease at once! You have complained"—his face twisted in a genuine sneer of contempt—"because your little pollution machines have been turned off—your clumsy little coal-burning power plant—” Something internal interrupted him; his eyes went blank and private, and he chuckled and muttered. He was drunk.
“So we cut down the trees instead,” I said.
He grunted and shrugged. “Reversible. Correctable. You understand? What you do to the trees is very little. Man is man; yes. But it is possible to eliminate the practices that cause irreversible damage. It is possible to reduce the population within tolerable limits. District by district.”
“I thought you’d already stopped everything, abuses included.”
“I have halted these abuses, sir. It is the first step—only the first step. No doubt the world can heal itself, but already it has been permanently scarred—disfigured—maimed. This is my hope, sir: that, once destroyed, civilization will not rise again, or at worst will rise only very slowly.”
I heard Hunt draw a long, weary-sounding breath. Arslan was tending to his bottle again, and I said bitterly, “If civilization’s going to destroy itself anyway, why do you have to step in and do it?”
He waved his hand impatiently. “Is this so hard to understand? I do it for two great reasons. The first, but the less important, is this, to save mankind from much suffering.”
“Save it!” I was on my feet and he was looking up at me. “You call this saving mankind from suffering?”
“Yes, sir,” he said coolly. “But in any case, my second reason is sufficient.”
“And what is that?”
“To save the world from mankind.”
I swung away from him and paced around the room, stopping at the foot of the bed to face him. “Plan Two,” I said. “What’s Plan Two?”
A new kind of smile spread across his face, thin and cold. “If civilization cannot be thoroughly eradicated, it remains necessary to exterminate the human species.”
“That’s what I thought. Damn you, that’s what I thought.” My own voice sounded small and thin in the silence before it and after it.
“This plan contains its own problems,” he was saying. “The Nazis eliminated with difficulty only a few million persons. And passing over all operational problems, the final problem remains: Who will exterminate the exterminators?” He dropped his head back on the pillow and smiled at me. “There are, however, other approaches. For example, a program of disease dissemination could be managed to end with the spread of contagion to my armies.”
I stared down at him. His smile deepened and faded, and his eyes flicked away, finished with me, to rest on the ceiling. I raised my hand, and let it drop again. I would no more have hit him than I would have hit a corpse.
“But there are unavoidable risks,” he went on after a moment. “Your liberals have prattled of the dangers of biological weapons, the danger of inadvertently destroying mankind. But in fact it is very difficult. No disease can be trusted to produce perfect mortality. There is always, always, the possibility of undiscovered pockets of survivors. Are you familiar with the screwworm fly, sir?” He turned his bland face back to me.
“Screwworms,” I said, when that non sequitur had gotten through to me. “I’m familiar with screwworms.”
“Then perhaps you know that they were exterminated in Florida by releasing sterilized males into the wild population for two consecutive years.”
I shook my head, partly to clear it, partly because that didn’t sound logical.
“Yes, sir.” He was warming to his subject again. “Naturally, the species was particularly vulnerable to such treatment. With the human species, one entire sex would have to be sterilized. There are certain advantages of sterilization over killing, as no doubt you can see. There are two possible disadvantages; death is irreversible, sir, and it is recognizable.” And again he gave me a small, horrible smile.
I turned slowly back to my chair and sat down. We were walking through a mine field; but there were ways out of it, if we could just feel our way into them. Who exterminates the exterminators?
It dawned on me presently that for a minute, or a few minutes, or maybe more, we had all three been silent, sunk and oblivious in our separate contemplations of the same horror. Well, contemplation didn’t win wars. I took a deep breath and cleared my throat.
“General,” I said, “I don’t know the details of how you came to power in your own country. We didn’t get too much news of it, and frankly I’ve forgotten most of what little we did hear. But I have an idea you started out as a patriot.”
“My country,” he mocked throatily. “My country.” He pressed himself back into the pillows, stretching his legs and lifting the bottle at arm’s length, then relaxed again. “This I have never understood,” he said mildly, “how people forget. By what mechanism do your minds shut out parts of themselves? I, I do not forget.”
Hunt laughed haggardly. Arslan looked at him, and slowly an intense, warm smile lit up his face. “I do not forget,” he said again. “You speak of my country, sir. Do you think Turkistan is a country? Ah, no. Turkistan is an invention, sir, of the British.”
It was interesting to hear bitterness in Arslan’s voice. It helped bring him down to size. Now he was drawing maps in the air with his hand. “Turkistan is a dying fish. In the time of Herodotus—not so very long ago—here” (he stabbed the air with his bottle) “was a great sea. What is it now? A salt pond—a puddle—fifty, sixty feet deep. And here the Caspian; a great sea still, but also dying. Once rivers flowed into these seas from the mountains here on the south. The mountains still stand. The rains fall, the snows melt, the rivers start out bravely into Turkistan. But only two are strong enough to live. And the others, that flow into nothing, that are blotted up by the desert and the sun, they are not rivers, sir. Can you call them rivers?” He drank, and added to his imaginary map. “Here, the Amu Darya, the famous Oxus. Northeast, the Syr Darya, the little brother of the Amu.” Hunt’s eyes, across the bed from me, glinted like wellwater. “These are the only streams that feed our salt puddle, which is called the Aral Sea. But the Aral Sea is a Russian lake. Do you begin to understand?” Another stroke at the air. “Between the Syr and the Amu live a people with Mongol eyes and little leather caps.”
“Not your people,” I said. Not if you could judge from his tone of voice.
“Not my people, but my mother’s people.” What kind of a mother could Arslan have had, I wondered. “They call themselves Uzbek, the people of Uzbek Khan, who led them across the Syr Darya a few hundred years ago—not so very long. But between the Syr and the Amu they found Bukhara—Bukhara the old city. Bukhara the Noble; the Dome of Islam; the city of the pure faith. Bukhara, my city; not my mother’s city. And beyond the Amu they could not go, because of the Turkmens.” He drank again. His voice had turned heavy with the liquor. He managed his words and his sentences all right, but you could hear him managing them. “Turkmens—Turkistan—Turkey—you understand? If my people had traveled a little farther west, as their cousins did, I would have been born a Turk. The Uzbeks, too, call themselves Turkish; but in the old language Turkmen means ‘pure Turk.’” A drunken frown darkened his face. “Although some have claimed ‘Turklike’; but that is a lie. In any case, you see, sir, there are differences…” He faded out for a moment, and then collected himself again. “All over the map of Central Asia, sir, you will find Turkistans—towns, provinces, regions. Sinkiang is not Chinese, and its right name is not Sinkiang; it is East Turkistan. Afghanistan south to its center is not Afghan; it is another Turkistan. My country,” he said again, and chuckled. “This is not a country, it is a … diaspora. And this Turkistan that the British made and sold to the Emir of Bukhara—is not even Turkistani, except for my Turkmens. My father’s Turkmens. You understand, sir, that the British were very anxious to stop the expansion of Russia in Central Asia. Russia itself was not a country, it was an empire, and an empire has no natural boundaries. Therefore the British manufactured their buffer states and sold them to the greediest local rulers: Iraq, Afghanistan—and the northern borderland, the most expendable buffer, Turkistan. So the Emir of Bukhara ruled over Turkmens and Uzbeks and Tajiks, and the British had their buffer state, their treaty of friendship, and their oil concession.
“Did I begin as a patriot? Ah, no, sir; I began as a child of a general of the Air Force, the air force that the British had given. My father was the patriot, who bombed the Emir’s palace and began the civil war—the Generals’ War. When it was over, there were no generals except my father.
“But before it was over, he had allowed my mother to take her children to Samarkand—Samarkand the city of delights, the city of Uzbek Khan and Timur the Lame. She believed that we would be safer among Uzbeks. Nevertheless, it was an Uzbek general who imprisoned us, and took time from his revolt against my father to rape personally my mother—my first experience of rape, sir, although not, as you know, my last. But it was a time of countercoups and counterrevolts. We were freed, and we fled into the desert of the Black Sands—my first and last experience of flight. We reached Bukhara, the city of wisdom, exactly in time for the countercoup of the loyalists—loyalists, you understand, to the dead Emir. So we were imprisoned again. This time my father came with his fighter-bombers. He sent a warning to the loyalists that if his family were not released within six hours he would strike. The loyalists replied that if he struck, his family would be killed. We were not released. He struck. And while the bombs fell, we were stoned in the courtyard of the old prison.” He smiled thinly. “Until my father ordered the courtyard strafed.”
He lifted his eyes questioningly to the ceiling, took a long breath, and went on. “So in due time the attack was successfully completed, and I was removed from the rubble, and survived, as you regret to see. Do you care to consider this, sir—how merely another stone, or another bullet, or another hour would have spared the world the affliction of Arslan? But the past is what we have.”
Suddenly he sat up, crossing his legs under him, making the bed shake. “Yes, Hunt, yes, this is a disillusionment. Yes, it is sad, is it not, to find one’s angels or one’s devils driven also? The superman himself is human-all-too-human.” He groped in his pocket for a cigarette, looking humorously from one to the other of us. “You have considered me a monster, and indeed you have reason. But—alas for the sublimity of your feelings!—the monster is also a man. I must confess this in humility.”
Certainly Hunt was hanging on his words, pale and tense. Arslan’s bottle was empty. He rolled it off the edge of the bed, and got his cigarette lit with a little difficulty. “Did I begin as a patriot, sir? In ten years my father was as powerful, and as rich, as any emir of Bukhara had been, and ready to send his only surviving son to Oxford like any satellite princeling. But I did not choose to be sent to Oxford. I studied one year at Moscow, two at Peking. You will understand, sir, that the Chinese saw me as a tool which they might shape for their own hands. When I returned to Bukhara, I took charge of the army—the simple utility, sir, of being a dictator’s son. However, I disagreed with my father on several points of policy, and I was not disposed to obey his orders on those points. For these reasons he arranged to have me assassinated. It was a good plan, you understand. Whether the assassination succeeded or failed, he could put the blame on certain rebellious elements in the army, whom he very rightly suspected of plotting against him, and thus arm himself with an excuse to crush them.” He paused and smiled. “Nizam,” he said fondly, “was one of these. And Nizam’s private intelligence system, even then, was better than my father’s. It was Nizam who raised the revolt, but he raised it in my name, broadcasting a full confession by one of the assassins.
“I was not prepared to execute my father. I owed him something, did I not? I planned only to hold him in protective custody. But the choice was not given me. We took Bukhara, but not my father. He had preferred to shoot himself.”
“I think that was the first news we heard of you,” I said.
“And yet you could believe that I began as a patriot?”
“I’m curious, General. What makes you so eager to deny that you might have been one?”
“But I do not deny it! Ah, no, sir. If love and hate are brother and sister, why not pride and shame also? You understand, then, that I have had four years in which to rule my country. My country. Yes. My artificial buffer state. And for four years I worked hard to do what I am now undoing: to unite, to centralize, to modernize. It is possible that I would have made Turkistan a country that could have patriots.” Abruptly he swung his feet to the floor and stood up, swayed and recovered, and laughed softly. “Bring them, Hunt,” he ordered, gesturing loosely towards the papers on the bed, and walked out.
Hunt stooped slowly to the papers, his face withdrawn and haggard. I got up and put my hand on his arm. “Give him a minute,” I said. “He may go to sleep.”
He nodded. He sat himself stiffly on the edge of the bed and began brushing away at the dirt Arslan’s boots had left. “Mr. Bond.”
“Hunt,” I said, “I’m not your principal any more. I wish you’d call me Franklin.”
He nodded again, and moved his mouth in his little inward humorless smile. “It would be very useful,” he said at last, “to be brave.”
“I believe you’re as brave a person as I’ve ever known.” We looked at each other. “Hunt, I’ll talk to you again later. I’m not just sure yet what has to be done. Will you try not to rock the boat for a little while?”
“Okay,” he said wearily. He straightened the papers and stood up. “Thanks for something.”
One week later, Arslan was standing across the table from me as I finished my breakfast, his knuckles on his hip, his garrison cap on his head. He beamed with youth, health, and vitality. “I am saying goodbye, sir,” he announced. “I leave Nizam in command. Kraftsville has given me much pleasure.”
I was on my feet by that time “You’re leaving? For good?”
He laughed happily. “For good, for evil, who knows? It is very possible that I shall return. In a year, two years, twenty years perhaps. If not, sir"—his dark eyes flashed and fixed me hard—"I am very happy to have known you.”
Hunt was standing in the kitchen doorway. Arslan swung halfway around, to follow my look. “Yes, sir, Hunt goes with me.” The whole idea tasted good to him. He stood there for a minute watching the boy and rocking a little on his feet. “Go, Hunt,” he ordered cheerfully.
“Wait a minute,” I said. Hunt hesitated just inside the living room. I clasped his right hand in both of mine. His face flushed; his eyes were bright with fear and excitement. “Do you want to go?”
His head twitched. “Yes,” he said huskily, and followed that with a quick, painful grin. “Under the circumstances.” His eyes fell. “I’m sorry…” he began indefinitely.
“Can I do anything for you here? Can I tell your folks anything?”
He made a little sardonic grimace. “Could they tell me anything? Tell them goodbye, I guess.” Now he looked up, faintly returning my handclasp.
“Come back if you can, Hunt,” I said. “But whatever happens, don’t give up.”
He gave me a sudden wild look. Luella had followed from the kitchen, wiping her hands. “Hunt—”
“Goodbye, sir,” he said. “Also thank you. Both.” He walked out briskly, eyes straight ahead.
Arslan stood where I had left him, smoking a cigarette, his eyes dancing. “I suggest that you cooperate with Nizam, sir. You should not expect as much indulgence from him as from me.”
“I have a pretty good idea what to expect. How many of these troops are you taking with you?”
He grinned delightedly. “Have I appointed you my adjutant? What you need to know, you will learn without my help.” He touched his cap in salute, or what passed for a salute with him—almost correct, almost genuine, like a good amateur actor who wants his audience to know he doesn’t have to make his living at it. “Good luck,” he said.
“It could be worse, Mr. Bond,” Leland Kitchener said. “There’s no taxes, anyway.”
There were no taxes, and no forced labor—except for the girls in the brothel. But there was the sunset curfew. There was the no-meetings rule. There was the soldier billeted in every home. Arslan hadn’t moved a one of them, but he had taken all the surplus Turkistanis—the ones from the camp. A few days later, about half the Russians followed, or anyway headed east. And District 3281 belonged to Colonel Nizam.
NOTICE. The following items are declared contra-
band: Wire, all types. Electrical equipment, all types.
Engines, all types. Petroleum products, combustible.
By February, Nizam’s notices didn’t bother to include the instructions any more. Everybody knew the blacklisted items had to be delivered immediately to the school, the camp, or Nizam’s headquarters. Immediately (we had learned the definition the hard way) meant today. The notice would be up at daybreak; if you didn’t see it, or understand it, or have the means to comply with it, that was your hard luck. The next day, and unpredictably after that, there would be spot checks and sometimes sweeping searches. Possession of contraband was punishable (not always punished, though) by death. So we kept a sharp and early eye on the notice boards, and passed the word fast.
That had come to be the most obvious function of the Kraft County Resistance: to watch the boards, to pass the word, to help people shed their “contraband.” The KCR was an established fact of Kraft County life now, but it was an invisible fact. Everybody knew it existed—which meant we had to assume Nizam knew it—but nobody called it by name. It was always “they” or “people” or “somebody.” Keeping the membership secret was easier than I’d expected, for the very good reason that nobody wanted to know. “Somebody told me” was all the authorization needed, and instructions were passed along from neighbor to neighbor just as efficiently as gossip used to be. That first spring of Arslan’s absence, we had it down so pat that we could inform every household in the district inside of two hours. Then there would be a quietly frantic time. Definitions were matters of life and death. Was paraffin a combustible petroleum product? What about plastics? Did you have to cart your whole useless refrigerator to town, or was it good enough if you brought the motor? Did you have to take down your wire fences? What about phone wires and electric lines, that weren’t exactly in anybody’s possession?
We took down the fences. We climbed poles and took down the wires. We carted refrigerators. We ran regular wagon trains through the district all afternoon, picking up stuff. We tried to put ourselves in Nizam’s place and imagine what he had in mind (though that didn’t work entirely—one thing he had in mind was that at least part of whatever we decided would be wrong), and in cases of doubt we figured better safe than sorry. We also cached a few thousand feet of electrical wire, two generators, and about two bushels of assorted radio equipment.
Arslan had been satisfied to let us wither on the vine; Nizam went at us with an axe. You could say that Arslan had hit us like an avalanche, but after the dust had settled he really hadn’t tried to shake us any further. You might even say he’d been fair, according to his lights. At least he’d stuck by his own rules. But Nizam’s whole idea was to shake us and keep us shaken.
He had a little bit of a problem. Wherever Arslan was now, it was pretty evident he was still keeping a tight rein on his colonel. The look in Nizam’s eye told me very plainly what would happen to me if the choice were up to him. It wasn’t one of my biggest worries. Nizam was nothing if not scrupulous, and he had to play by Arslan’s rules, too. It was Nizam who assigned a loud-mouthed corporal to my house, making me as vulnerable to the billet rule as the Bensons had been; it was Arslan who must have decreed free medical service for all citizens, including inoculations against all the foreign diseases his troops might have brought in. It was Nizam who instituted a system of bribing informers with extra rations; it was Arslan who had seen to it that nobody would have to starve in District 3281.
Even working within limitations, Nizam showed himself an expert at pure, plain harassment. He was keeping the district in a state that varied from nervous tension through misery and frustration to panic. Not to speak of the families of the people who were shot.
That Petroleum products, combustible was a typical example. At one unexpected stroke it deprived us of all our lights. No kerosene for lamps, no paraffin for candles. The town went black—except for Nizam’s termite nest. Meanwhile every housewife was muttering unladylike things under her breath about the paraffin seals she’d had to pry off her jelly jars. It was a confiscation with no material excuse for it. If he wanted our kerosene, why wait till it was practically used up? If he wanted to deprive us of it, why not just wait a little longer, till we ran out? But about two weeks later, Nizam informed me that kerosene would be issued on a strict ration to selected households.
“We don’t need it,” I told him. Selected households meant collaboration and broken morale. Rationing meant black-marketing and dependence. I already had a little project started for the manufacture of tallow candles, and we were experimenting with sunflower-seed oil.
The households were selected and the kerosene ration authorized. Nobody came to the camp to pick it up. All the lucky families had received a message from the KCR the same day they got their notification. Everybody had lived without kerosene for better than two weeks now. Some of them really wanted it, but not badly enough to cast what amounted to a vote for Nizam and against America. Not when it was put to them clearly in those terms. And the first tallow candles were being distributed free. After that, it would be a commercial enterprise.
So we had our successes. We held the line. But it wasn’t only people we had to contend with. That year the bugs began in earnest.
Naturally Nizam had confiscated all the pesticide and herbicide and fertilizer he could find in the district for the troops’ use. And their fields looked to be in relatively good shape. I thought it was only relative. Because that summer was like nothing I’d ever seen before, unless it was Arslan’s advent. It was heartbreaking to see the potato bugs demolish a field in a day. People began to panic. We had worked hard the year before, but we had worked with confidence. Men had been masters of Kraft County for a long time, and just taking away their tractors didn’t change that. But this year we were fighting for our lives. It wasn’t possible there could be a famine in Kraft County, we kept telling ourselves. But we weren’t exactly Kraft County any more. And then another blow hit us.
The corn was blighted. The stalks had tended to be leggy and a little pale from the start, like a slight case of mineral deficiency—nothing to worry anybody much. But the ears just didn’t fill. What kernels did form were small and misshapen. Sweet corn wasn’t very much affected. But all the field corn was hard hit; and our precious hybrids, that the County Farm Advisor had literally made by hand on his seed plots the year before, were a total loss.
And it was right then, while I was figuring how many livestock we could winter on practically no corn, that Roley Munsey brought me the news of Evergreen.
Roley was the youngest Munsey boy. He would have been in high school if he hadn’t dropped out in his freshman year. As a matter of fact, he had just barely managed to graduate from eighth grade, a year behind his age. But he was a good boy—a good-natured kid, clever with his hands, and one who tried his best. And, very importantly for us, he had been a radio ham. Not Citizens’ Band stuff, but a real, licensed amateur. There had been some others in the district, before Arslan, but it was remarkable how many of them had been high school students.
What radio equipment we had saved from Nizam’s confiscations didn’t look too impressive, but it was plenty for Roley to work with. He had a shortwave receiver that picked up signals, sporadically, from all around the world. Unfortunately, not one of them in the past year had ever sounded like anything but the internal communications of Arslan’s organization. It was that fact, more than any other, that made me believe in the reality of Arslan’s Plan One.
“Mr. Bond, I hate to bother you when you’re busy, but I never heard nothing like this before.”
“Just sorry I couldn’t get here faster. Tell me about it.”
“Well, it was an American voice, no damn Turk. The only words I could make out was, ‘Both sunk. Sorry about that, Arslan. Evergreen signing off.’ But he laughed, see? He said ‘Sorry about that, Arslan,’ and he laughed. So I figure he got to be American.”
“Where did it come from?”
“East. I don’t know where from, only east of here. It come in clear enough.”
“Nothing else?”
“No, sir, nothing, not a thing. He just said ‘sunk.’ ‘Both sunk.’”
“Roley, you mean to tell me there are still American ships at sea? After nearly two years?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Bond, I sure don’t know. But I know he said ‘sunk.’”
“Well, if we heard it, Nizam must have heard it, Roley. You can bet Arslan’s organization knows a lot more about it than we do.”
Roley nodded, which he always did, but he rubbed the back of his head doubtfully. “Well, yeah, sure, Mr. Bond, but maybe not. Maybe not. Like if they wasn’t expecting it, they likely wouldn’t be listening on that band. If they wasn’t right there on the right frequency at the right second, they wouldn’t of heard it. That signal never lasted but half a minute.”
“Roley, you figure out exactly what you’d need to hook into Nizam’s power. We just might want to transmit a long-distance signal. I’ll talk to you later. You boys be sure there’s one of you listening every second. Now get on it and stay on it.”
Evergreen. It sounded more like a code word than the name of a ship. I felt ten years younger. My mind was happily jumping to conclusions. Evergreen. It would be appropriate for, say, a nuclear-powered ship, or a group of them. What else could be still functioning? Hunt had told me, and it sounded plausible, that Arslan was destroying fuel production facilities. He would have taken over the navies as he had the armies, of course; but it would be a lot easier for a recalcitrant ship to hold out against him than a recalcitrant regiment. He could have starved out any conventional-powered ship by this time, for lack of fuel. But even if you commanded the combined fleets of the world, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to track down one or two or a dozen nuclear-powered vessels, especially if some of them were submarines. And he couldn’t actually have the combined fleets of the world in operation; he must have felt the fuel squeeze himself, long since, plus all the maintenance problems that would intensify as he phased out industries or smashed them cold.
Evergreen. It would be appropriate, of course, for any unit of resistance that had survived the cold wave of Arslan’s first great sweep. Suppose a mosquito fleet of private boats had maintained itself in the creeks and coves of some ragged coast or island chain—motorboats that could operate for years on a few well-rationed barrels of oil, reconverted steamers burning wood, sailboats. It wouldn’t be much of a combat navy; but suppose there were a hundred such little fleets. It was the old, old story; no force, no force could destroy a popular movement, if it was popular enough. Not without destroying the population.
Evergreen… The fields looked naked, stripped, like burned-over ground. A potato plant or a beanstalk with all the leaves eaten off was awkward and obscene, not like the honest stubble of any harvested field. I knew it had gotten to me the day I found myself clenched up with fear, not for the county but for my personal stomach. The medicines that Doc Allard had kept me in shape with were all used up, and I had to depend on diet and willpower. If I couldn’t guarantee myself a supply of milk and cream—The thought sent me to bed, doubled up.
Well, that wasn’t only cowardly, it was un-Christian. And besides, it got in the way of doing anything.
It took plenty of effort and plenty of prayer, but I got my stomach quieted down—and not for just that day, either. The thing was, I had to live calmly. I had to rely on God in an ultimate way, not for little things like enough milk or a miracle to save the crops. I had to believe that everything I did, as long as I did my best, was for the best.
Livestock, after all, were a luxury. It was August, which meant we still had time, but not time for experiments and failures. We burned off the blighted and bug-eaten fields, plowed up some pastures, and planted what would do us more good: carrots, turnips, beets. Our oats were doing well, comparatively—compared to our wheat, for example—but it was too late to plant more oats this year. We slaughtered stock as fast as we could use the meat or put it up. We salted and pickled as much as we could spare the salt for, canned as much as we had cans to hold, dried as much as we had room to spread in the sun, and smoked the rest. Plenty of people protested killing the stock and plowing up the grass, and the Farm Advisor protested that smoking didn’t actually preserve meat; but we didn’t have time to let everybody follow their own whims. Later we would plant winter wheat and keep our fingers crossed. We’d have enough grain and hay to winter what few livestock we were keeping.
Evergreen… After all, it didn’t have to mean anything. Roley had picked up what sounded like American voices before, that had obviously been working for Arslan. Not a doubt in the world, whether I liked it or not, that Arslan’s Americans were in Russia just as much as Arslan’s Russians were in America. And it would be a miracle if some of those Americans didn’t make remarks like “Sorry about that, Arslan” now and then. Whatever were “both sunk,” they might have been anti-Arslan as well as pro. “Sorry about that"—there might have been an order to capture instead of destroy.
Yes, we would last the winter, and every spring was a new start. Kraft County wasn’t crowded—the population had been declining for years—and by the grace of God, or maybe the exercise of common sense, people just weren’t having babies these days. There were the troops, of course; but, if anything, they were an economic asset now. On the average, they not only took care of themselves, but produced a little surplus that found its way by various means into the hands of Kraft County citizens.
Even if we couldn’t do much farming, we could live. A few chickens for eggs, a few cattle for milk, a few hogs to keep up the breed; fish and game would be our staple meat sources. Every field abandoned meant that much more game-cover. And the game, like the bugs, thrived. The soldiers were permitted only very limited hunting privileges, but that didn’t apply to us.
“Franklin, how the hell are you going to shoot anything without guns?”
“Who said shoot?” We weren’t even allowed to have bows and arrows, but we did have traps and nets. It was a new style of hunting for us, but we learned it. The Indians had done all right in this territory, and maybe there was even more game now than there had been back then, when it was all deep woods. We held drives for the small game, rotating them around the district and learning as we worked. With good dogs, it wasn’t hard to walk quail and rabbits and even doves into a fine-mesh seine. Getting it closed on them was a little harder. We used the seines for what they were made for, too, and got all the fish we could use, not to mention cleaning out a lot of mud turtles while we were at it. We hunted coons and possums with the dogs, trapped muskrats, snared rabbits—snared deer, too, when we’d learned the trick. We had long enough to learn it.
It must have been very near the fourth anniversary of Arslan’s departure when a boy I didn’t know came galloping into town with the news that a mechanized force was coming east on 460. His horse was still blowing when we heard their motors—a chilling sound these days, now that Nizam only used his vehicles for emergencies.
Starting home from the square, I saw a procession of jeeps and one truck draw up in front of my house. By the time I got there, the street and yard were swarming. Soldiers were prodding their way through the garden as if it were a minefield. The Russians were cheering from the school windows and popping out of the doors. My front door stood open, and a flock of women were trotting in and out helter-skelter, some of them carrying bundles and all of them chattering. One in a scarlet headscarf and a swinging blue skirt was directing operations, running from jeep to jeep, then halfway up the walk, then back to the street. Only one stood by silently, with a child in her arms. Arslan was leaning against the side of the truck, smoking.
I stopped beside him, and we eyed each other. He looked thriving. He might have put on a little flesh; otherwise he was the identical brash welterweight who had stridden out of my kitchen four years ago.
“Good morning, sir.”
“How’s Plan One going, General?”
He grinned. “Very well.”
“Then things could be worse.”
Luella stepped out on the porch. “Franklin, come here!” She sounded excited and glad.
“But first, sir,” Arslan put in smoothly, “you will meet my son.”
He dropped his cigarette and beckoned the quiet woman. I took a quick look at her face (she was on the far edge of middle age, and homely—definitely not the mother of Arslan’s son), and he took the baby from her.
The nape of my neck prickled. There he stood beside me—Arslan Khan, and Genghiz’s pyramid of skulls was no more than a steppingstone to him—there he stood, smiling, with a baby in his arms. “This is Sanjar,” he said.
I focused on the child. “Sander?”
“San-jar!” He rolled the name joyously, all but singing it.
Arslan’s son. He was either small for his age or advanced for it. From a distance I had taken him for no more than a babe in arms, but he had the bright boy-face of a three-year-old. Now he put his hand commandingly on Arslan’s mouth and said something that sounded very clear, though it certainly wasn’t English. Arslan chuckled, shaking his head away from the little brown fingers. He might have been any proud young soldier-father.
Then Hunt Morgan walked out onto the porch beside Luella. He’d been gone four years at the fastest-changing time of a boy’s life, but I knew him at once. I hurried up the walk to shake his hand, and Arslan followed.
He was taller than Arslan; almost as tall as I. He had grown a soft little fringe of beard, as dark as his hair, and with his big dark eyes and soft mouth he looked like a Persian prince out of the Arabian Nights.
“Hello, Mr. Bond.” His handshake was solid. He wore Turkistani fatigues, with a sheath knife at his belt.
“Franklin,” I corrected.
Arslan set down the child, who promptly trotted over to the porch rail and started trying to climb it. With a clatter of heels, the red-scarfed woman flashed up the steps, swooped him up in her arms, and whirled on Arslan. I stood back comfortably against the house wall and watched. Arslan as a family man was a spectacle I’d never thought to see.
Whatever you could say for her temper, there was nothing wrong with her looks. Halfway through her tirade, she jerked off the red scarf, underlining her argument with a long loop of auburn hair. Her crackling eyes were blue, though her skin was the color of buckwheat honey. Arslan stood rocking on his feet, laughing at her. The child struggled down from her arms and went back to his rail-climbing unnoticed. With a final burst, the woman spun away and stalked into the house. Arslan lit a fresh cigarette and turned to Hunt and me. He was obviously charmed with the whole affair.
“I am taking the same room for myself, sir,” he announced. “And the same room for Hunt. Sanjar and Rusudan will use the southwest room.”
“Nice of you to leave me my bedroom.”
I didn’t realize at the moment how nice it was. The southwest room wasn’t big to start with, and Arslan’s orders crowded into it not only the mother and child, but four of the attendant women. The others—there were three or four more of them—disappeared in the course of the afternoon, touching off a general flutter of protest from the rest and a storm from Rusudan (if she had any more name or title than that, I never heard it). This time Arslan was roused to shout back at her, and she retreated up the stairs, spitting defiance with every step. Rusudan—her harsh name matched the metallic timbre of her voice and her harridan temper, but her features were clear and sweet. Arslan stood with hands on hips and grinned after her.
Not one of the women seemed to speak anything that could pass as English, though Rusudan made one or two stabs at it. Luella had her hands full, getting them settled in. I walked out of the confusion early, and into what would be Hunt’s room again.
Hunt stood in the middle of the floor, gazing mildly around. “Welcome home,” I said.
He gave me a sharp look—not sure if that was meant kindly. “How have things been?”
“Not too good, Hunt, but we’re surviving. Your folks are well.”
His mouth quirked with humor. “Which of us invites the other to sit down?”
“It’s your room.”
“It’s your house. Let’s sit down, shall we?”
We did, he on the bed and I on the one chair. “Well, there’s a lot to fill in,” I said. “Where have you been, and what’s happened?”
He spread his hand, palm down, a foreign kind of gesture. “Bukhara.” That seemed to be the end of the sentence. He hunched forward confidentially, but he was looking at his hands, not at me. “I tried to kill him once.” He shot me a glance, smiled faintly, and lowered his eyes again. “Like old times, isn’t it? Except that this time I can say I really tried to do it.” Now he drew the knife from his sheath and laid it across his knees, stroking his fingertips along the steel. It was a very practical-looking blade. “Not with this one,” he said. “This one was his own; he gave it to me, afterwards.”
No doubt there was a very interesting story there, as well as a very romantic one, but I didn’t want to hear it—not right now. Hunt wasn’t talking to me, he was playing a role, and, from the sound of it, one he’d acted out in his head till he knew it by heart. “What did you see of Turkistan?” I asked him.
He raised his eyes to me. “The Black Sands are gray. The Red Sands are pink.” He made the motion of a smile.
“Were you disappointed?”
He shrugged, eyes drifting downward again. “It’s a question of viewpoint. You can walk up and down hill all day and think you’ve gotten somewhere; but if you fly over the same area at ten thousand feet, you see that it’s really only—”
“No, I don’t!” He looked up, startled. “If it is a question of viewpoint,” I said, “then you can forget about that ‘really.’ I don’t think much of the objectivity of anybody who spends his life on the ground, and then the first time he goes up in a plane he hollers, ‘Oh, that’s what the world really looks like!’ If he’d spent his life in the plane, then the first time he got down on the ground he’d say, ‘Oh, this is how the world really is!’ That’s all hogwash. Reality is whatever you’ve got to deal with.”
His eyes lightened a moment. Then he closed his hand on the knife hilt and stood up abruptly, sheathing the knife with a practiced motion. “I ought to warn you. In case you’re involved in any plots against Arslan, or happen to get involved, or happen to hear of any, don’t tell me. Don’t even give me a hint. I’m afraid there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect him.”
“If that were true, Hunt, you wouldn’t have warned me.” We smiled at each other cordially, without contact.
“Ah,” he said. “Do robots have souls? That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“You’re not a robot,” I told him. “Don’t flatter yourself with that idea. You’re a human being endowed with free will, and you can’t get rid of it.”
“Ah.” He was—what?—eighteen now. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I’m talking about responsibility. You’re still responsible for your actions. And your decisions.”
He tilted his head in polite incredulity. It was one of Arslan’s mannerisms. “Aren’t free will and responsibility distinct?”
“Not to me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t act. I don’t decide.”
“You can’t help it,” I said. “You’re doing both of them all the time. How do you know? You may have changed the course of history right here and now by warning me not to trust you with any plots. There are things you can’t control, sure, outside of you and inside of you; but you decide what to do about those things, and you act on that decision—whether you know it or not.” He was listening closely. Hunt had always been a courteous boy. “And not many people are decisive and active enough to try sticking a knife into Arslan.”
He couldn’t hold back a pleased little private smile at that. “Think about it, Hunt. And remember I’m always on your side. Your side, not Arslan’s.” I patted his shoulder once, and I left him.
I wanted information, not bungled assassination attempts. I wanted to know what Arslan had been doing to the world for four years, and what brought him back here now. And what, if anything, Evergreen had been.
He had been back three weeks, spending most of his time with Nizam, when the changes started. One morning there was an unobtrusive placard on the notice boards. Announcement, it said modestly. The curfew is abolished, effective immediately. By order of General Arslan.
There wasn’t any rush to take advantage of that order. For one thing, nobody wanted to be the first to test its validity. For another, people were used to the curfew; they stayed in after dark as much from habit now as from necessity. But gradually they began to try it—neighbors visiting in their yards a little later and a little later, people daring to go for the doctor when they got sick, and (because, after all, we were getting squared away for winter, and could make good use of the extra time) farmers and hunters working after dark.
By that time the billet rule was well on the way out. It was never officially suspended, but every week a few more of the billeted soldiers were withdrawn. They went first to the camp. After a few weeks, a company of them marched north out of the district, and later another detachment, a little larger if anything, went south. There was no doubt but what the whole atmosphere of the district was relaxing. Compared to Nizam, Arslan was making himself look pretty good.
At first I hoped we might eat a little better that winter, but Arslan’s troops brought no supplies with them. They did bring something that promised to be more useful in the long run—seed corn that Arslan claimed was resistant to the blight. He kept his fleet of trucks and jeeps and armored cars serviced and ready to go, but he didn’t use them much. The whole district was geared to horses now. The remaining Turkistanis constituted a cavalry troop, and there was another all-Russian one. Horse-breeding and horse-trading had become important parts of the economy again, and there was constant friction between troops and civilians over horses. The floodlights on the schoolground had been dark for four years, like all the other electric lights outside of Nizam’s headquarters. Now Arslan formalized the situation by taking out the floodlights, and installed a windmill to supplement Nizam’s oil-burning generators. On the other hand, he imported generous supplies of liquor, coffee, and tobacco for his own use, in fact for the whole household. I didn’t mind having the coffee.
Arslan had set up shop in my office at school again, and he worked like any young-middle-aged executive bucking for a heart attack. His home life, to call it that, was something I couldn’t fathom. Rusudan’s appearance was generally the signal for a fight, which ended inevitably with slamming doors, but I would hear them laughing together in Arslan’s room, boisterous and innocent.
He wasn’t anything you could call a husband, but he was a real father. He took the child with him almost everywhere, and showed him almost everything. Nobody else was allowed to cross Sanjar in either the smallest or the most vital things; as a matter of fact, we were all under orders to obey (that was the word, obey) the child in everything. Naturally I paid no attention to that. Here was a bright, healthy, normal three-year-old boy, and of course he had no more idea of what was good for him than a hound pup. Luella was willing enough to spoil him, because she was starved for children, but she was always grabbing him away from the stove or out of her china cabinet or off the porch railing where he loved to climb; and every time Arslan caught her at it or heard about it, she was in trouble. I had to tell her finally, “Just look the other way when he gets into something.” Nobody had laid a finger on Luella so far, and I intended to keep it that way.
“I can’t look the other way,” she said. “I don’t care whose child he is. He’s always trying to take the stove lids off.”
“He’s got a father and a mother and a cavalry regiment to take care of him. If he wants to crawl in the oven, just hold the door open for him.”
Taking care wasn’t exactly it. Rusudan would play with him and fight with him by the hour, acting like a six-year-old herself, but if he needed to be fed or washed or bandaged, she called her women—or Luella. Hunt Morgan led him around by the hand (or rather he led Hunt), took him fishing when summer came, and corrected his budding English. The troops doted on him, and spoiled him every way they could think of.
It was different with Arslan. Sanjar might be climbing all over his father on the couch, getting his muddy little boots into the charts on the coffee table. “Sit still,” Arslan would say quietly, and the boy would slip to the floor without a murmur and sit there looking up with solemn eyes. And when, being a boy, he forgot again and started climbing onto the table, one sharp word from Arslan would set him back with a very chastened look on his face. He always spoke English to the boy now—at least, whenever I was within earshot—and Sanjar was developing a remarkable vocabulary. Most of it came from listening to Hunt read. Because, after all this time, Hunt was still reading to Arslan. I thought I understood that now. It was Arslan’s own continuing education, the liberal arts that the parvenu dictator’s son had never dreamed of; and now it was to be Sanjar’s, too.
It was Arslan, appropriately, who taught him about guns. He showed him why he shouldn’t pull a trigger by the simple, messy method of shooting a tame rabbit at close range with his pistol. After that Sanjar treated firearms pretty respectfully.
Still, by and large, Arslan with Sanjar was Arslan at his best. He fairly glowed with pride in all the child’s little accomplishments. It was really pretty to see how carefully he pointed things out to the boy. “Do you see it, Sanjar? Do you hear, Sanjar?” Dozens of times a day he would break off whatever he was doing to show Sanjar something. “Can you tell what color that bird is, Sanjar? Then go that way—you see? You need the light a little behind you … Do you see how the mare turns her ears, Sanjar? She is wondering if we will be her friends … Look, Sanjar; these are two different maps of the same place. Do you see, here is an island, and here is the same island on the other.” And the boy knew that nothing pleased his father more than for him to notice something and point it out. “Look, Arslan! Look, Arslan! You see the squirrel?” And Arslan would gravely follow the little waving finger and refuse to see the squirrel till it had been pointed out with bullseye accuracy.
Nobody ever disciplined Sanjar, but he had his hard lessons, and his punishments. The rabbit was only one of them. Arslan’s rule against gainsaying the boy meant that he had more than his share of accidents. In fact, it was a wonder he survived the year he lived in my house without serious injury. That spring and summer, especially, it was a quiet day indeed that passed without Sanjar’s shrieks of pain or fear, as he learned the hard way that mother sows will bite, that bulls will charge, that flatirons are hot and heavy, and a hundred other uncomfortable facts of life. None of these things disturbed Arslan; his only concern seemed to be that the boy should learn not to cry. “You sound like a woman,” he would say scornfully. “You sound like a baby.”
“It hurts me! It hurts me!”
And Arslan, hard-faced, hard-eyed, would shake his head. “Sanjar, listen; remember. If you are strong enough, and smart enough, and brave enough, nothing will hurt you. Nothing.”
It was this kind of thing that made Luella the most indignant. “He’s ruining that child,” she said to me. “He’s trying to make him into a soldier before he’s had time to be a baby.”
And she needed a baby to love. She should have been a grandmother by now.
You couldn’t see much of Sanjar—I couldn’t, anyway—without feeling a sort of fascination. I’d always hated to see a child completely alone in a world of adults. From what Hunt told me, Sanjar had never had a companion, or a rival, his own age. Naturally all good Kraftsville parents were careful to keep their children away from him. And it didn’t seem to occur to Arslan or Rusudan that their child might enjoy (still less need) the company of any little plebeians. But Sanjar would stop whatever he was doing to stare at every bunch of kids who happened along—stare awestruck and intent, his black eyes as full of concentration as his father’s and a lot more human.
Aside from acting as Sanjar’s tutor and escort, Hunt apparently had nothing to do. He drifted from my house to Nizam’s headquarters to school and back again. Information flowed through him like a wide-mesh seine.
“You can’t tell me he hasn’t run into a lot of active resistance movements, Hunt.” I knew for a fact he’d run into some. Roley Munsey’s receiver had picked them up and listened to them die. It was why I knew I’d been right never to let Roley transmit anything.
Hunt’s reaction to that kind of statement was likely to be literal: he wouldn’t tell me. But a little later on, he would give his own kind of answer. “It’s essentially a judo technique—use your opponent’s force and weight against himself. He’s a very eclectic wrestler. Have you ever seen him wrestle?”
“No.”
“No, of course.” He mused on his secrets. “He likes to use his own strength, too. That’s like a religion with him. It would be terribly interesting to see Arslan disabled.”
“Terribly.”
“But brute force is only the ideal. In practice, he follows the principles of judo. It’s not always easy, but it’s very economical. He invites the resistance to organize, you see, so he can crush it conveniently. He doesn’t object to resistance—only to organization.”
“What do you mean, ‘invites’?”
“Teases. Baits. It’s a kind of sport—resistance-baiting.”
I nodded. “So that’s what he’s been doing for four years—that and founding a dynasty.” Thank God, we had had the luck and the discipline to resist Evergreen. Still, it didn’t necessarily follow that the KCR was undetected. And Hunt wasn’t in a position to be trusted very far.
“It’s not a dynasty. A dynasty is an organization.”
“I never noticed him objecting to his own organization.”
“His organization is designed to be temporary. He’s going to phase it out as fast as possible.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it. And I’ll still call it a dynasty, Hunt. He’s not above setting up a monument to himself.”
“Why should he?” Hunt’s eyes went hot. “Do you think he wants to be remembered by posterity? Do you think he’d go down in history as Arslan the Good? Arslan the Well-Beloved? He’d be Red Arslan—Bloody Arslan—Arslan the Terrible.”
“Isn’t that the way he likes it?” From the sound of it, Hunt had savored that list of titles before.
He shrugged, mild again. “Perhaps the question’s a little academic.”
What the troop movements added up to was that about half the Russians and a smaller proportion of Turkistanis had been replaced by the new troops Arslan had brought in, which left us, numerically speaking, about where we were before. But in fact, things were a lot different.
It was probably a toss-up which of us was gladder to see Arslan—Nizam or me. I sympathized with Nizam, in a way; my hands had been as tied as his. The only thing that made District 3281 the possible site of an uprising was Arslan’s presence in it. If we’d ever tried to fight Nizam, it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference whether we failed or succeeded; the whole district could have been crushed from outside, like a flea between Arslan’s fingernails. Now we had the heart and brain of the whole juggernaut within our grasp, and we’d had four years to develop our organization.
The problem the KCR had to face now—or I had to face for the KCR—was simple enough, but the answer still wasn’t. As long as Plan One was in operation, we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. I know enough now to be sure Nizam wasn’t the only commander who would take it personally if anything happened to Arslan. And the new Turkistani battalion had the unmistakable look of an elite unit—hard and polished and too damned proud of themselves. There was no way the KCR could move, even now, without unleashing more hell than I wanted to be responsible for—no way but one. The only defense Arslan had been able to come up with against the threat of kidnapping was to tell me he wouldn’t let me do it. That had been valid enough in the front seat of a Land Rover, with one gun between us, but it didn’t apply any longer. Only we had to be very careful.
There was no lack of information and misinformation in the air, and Hunt wasn’t the only source of it. Things had solidified under Nizam—petrified into a humdrum daily desperation. Now we were free enough to breathe and think. Things seemed fluid again, and stale old bits of information from the Russian camp suddenly began to branch and bloom.
“Of course he got the Russian government first, Hunt. But what the devil could he threaten them with—or bribe them with, either?”
There was a faint, abstracted frown he used for hypothetical problems. “If the lever is long enough, it doesn’t take much force to move the world.”
“It’s got to have been some kind of a trick. They must have thought they were using him. But from there on, it’s all downhill work. Somebody just picked up the hot-line phone and told Washington they could either fight a nuclear war or turn over the armed forces to Arslan. And all I can say is, everything we ever heard about Washington must have been true, the way they caved in. I suppose it doesn’t matter much now whether they were traitors or just chicken. After that, he just started shifting troops around.”
Hunt nodded absently. “That’s approximately right.”
“What do you mean?”
“At least, that’s approximately what he told me.”
It was no use getting mad at Hunt. “Told you how long ago?” I asked him as mildly as I could.
He considered. “About six years.”
“In other words, right after he got here.” And the whole town—the whole world—dying to know, buzzing with bewilderment and pain, while Hunt Morgan sat mum with his nice-little-boy face of ravished innocence. For six years. “All right, how did he get the Russians to cooperate?”
“Magic?” he suggested. He met my eyes for a second, and hunched forwards in a movement of contrition. “He didn’t really tell me much,” he said seriously. “I’m sorry. Would it have helped?”
“I suppose not. Forget it, Hunt.” His shadowy smile flickered, and it annoyed me. He was so damned determined to be an exile, cultivating every little irony like an orchid.
But it was in midsummer that the real revelation came, and everything crystallized into a new solidity. Luella tapped on the bedroom door and peeped in. “It’s Dr. Allard,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.” Her manner added, privately.
Jack Allard was already making his ponderous way upstairs, like a tired bear. Luella ushered him in and left us alone. “What can I do for you, Doctor?” I motioned him to the armchair and turned my desk chair to face him.
He settled himself thoroughly down into the cushions. He didn’t look cheerful. “Torey McArthur and two of his kids are sick.”
“What about it?”
“Well, it looks to me like typhus. Not that we have typhus in Kraft County, but these new troops could have brought it in.” There had been troop movements—little, piddling ones, like fine-tuning adjustments—in and out of the district for the past two months.
“Didn’t the McArthurs get their shots?”
“Oh, they got them, all right. Typhus—that’s the one thing Nizam’s boys were the keenest about. They let me do the flu and the cholera, but they insisted on giving the typhus inoculations themselves. You know they’ve been through this district door to door.”
I nodded. “So what are you saying, Doctor?”
He took out his pipe and looked at it. “Well, nothing gives one hundred percent immunity. I’m not saying anything.”
“If the vaccine doesn’t work, how do we keep it from spreading? Quarantine?”
“Quarantine, sanitation. It’s louse-borne, you know. Shouldn’t be much of a problem if I can have the authority to stop people from living like pigs.”
“You just take all the measures you need to, Jack, and if anybody objects, send them to me.” I looked at him. “All right, what else is on your mind?”
“I tried to get some more vaccine or some serum from Nizam’s boys, so I could at least revaccinate the rest of the family. Nothing doing. They not only claim they don’t have any—they obviously don’t give a damn that there’s typhus in the district. Which strikes me as odd from the same bunch who were so steamed up a couple of years ago about everybody getting protected against typhus—especially women and children.”
“Jack,” I said, “tell me one thing. How long since there’s been a baby born in the county?”
“That’s the right question. It’s very close to a year. The last was Pearl Miller’s baby girl.” He leaned forward, playing with his pipe. “Oh, I could tell you some interesting things.”
“Such as that the birth rate started dropping fast about nine months after Arslan first got here?”
“Well, not quite that soon. But you remember how Nizam inoculated about half the population right away and then ran out of vaccine? And didn’t get enough to finish the job till last year? Well, I’ve been going over my records since this McArthur thing turned up, and I can show you that every maternity case I’ve had in the last three years has been a woman who missed the first round of inoculations.”
I was pacing the floor by this time. Relax, relax, my little automatic warning system was telling me stupidly. “Jack, is that possible? Is there a shot to induce sterility?”
“Well, I’m not the world’s leading authority on the subject.” He tried to light his pipe, and failed. “The Pill’s a very temporary thing, of course. There’s quite a spectrum of drugs that’ll prevent conception in various ways, but the effect is ephemeral, or the dosage required is massive, or the side effects are pretty bad. But a lot of people have been working on it. Somebody was bound to come up with something like that sooner or later. And it looks like it was sooner.”
He sat silent, looking down at his hands and his cold pipe, while I paced down the room, and back, and down and back again. I stopped. “Anything else, Jack?”
He glanced up and shook his head.
“Okay. Thanks. Be sure you keep me up to date.”
I found Arslan alone in one of Nizam’s side offices, drinking coffee and dictating into a machine like any normal businessman. Lieutenant Z had brought me to the door with some trepidation, but I was admitted promptly, and Arslan greeted me with his blandest silence.
“General, are you aware that there’s typhus in the district?”
He looked interested. “Who?”
“Torey McArthur’s family. They’re poor and they’re dirty, but they’ve had your typhus shots. The whole district’s had your typhus shots, General; and now we’ve got typhus. What we don’t have are any babies.” His smooth face didn’t change. He only looked at me and waited. “Is this Plan Two, General?” He began to smile, just a little.
“Was there ever a Plan One?”
He stood up, putting out his cigarette in his cup. “Plan One was obsolete before it could be applied,” he said easily. The smile broadened all at once. “Your country, sir, has been one of the easiest to deal with.”
Relax, relax. But I had held the gun on him, and thrown it away for the children’s sake. And now the only children would be Arslan’s. “What is it?” I asked him. “How did you get hold of it?” How far has it gone? was what I wanted to know.
“It is a virus.”
“Virus? You mean it’s contagious?”
“Minimally, if at all. You will understand, sir, that there has been little time for research. But no cases of natural transmission have been observed. It was developed in a Chinese government laboratory.”
“Chinese?”
He nodded. “Yes, it is true that the Chinese were very loud in praise of fertility. They developed the virus as a weapon, and I have used it as a weapon. The report of the virus came to me in Kraftsville, sir, in the first month of my stay here.”
So the night he had crossed his dirty boots on my bed, the night he had expounded Plan One with such blazing eyes and vibrant conviction, it was already a discarded shell. “What makes a country easy to deal with, General?”
“Organization and centralization. The more centralized, the simpler to capture. The more organized, the easier to control.”
“So a lot of other places are giving you more trouble.”
He shrugged. He crossed his arms and leaned comfortably against the wall. “There are problems of logistics and security. Colonel Nizam has been invaluable to me.” He smiled. “District 3281 is totally sterile, sir. There is no harm in your knowing, now.” He tilted his head with that juvenile cockiness. “North America is totally sterile.”
“Including your family?” I asked viciously.
The look that came into his face was the look of a snake drawing back upon its coils. “I have a son, sir,” he said. “I do not plan to have more; but I reserve the power of choice to myself.”
“And what about your son? How much power of choice are you reserving for him?”
The black eyes stared expressionlessly. “None.” He straightened up and fished a cigarette out of his pocket. “No, sir, I have not sterilized my son. If I fail, he will have his choice. But if I succeed, there will be no woman able to bear his children.” He lit his cigarette, and repeated, as if it was a mild joke, “His children.”
“I imagine one of your logistical problems is just producing enough of your—your—What do you call it?”
“Vaccine,” Arslan said savoringly.
A warm wave of relief went over me. I knew, as surely as if I’d seen the documents in Arslan’s own handwriting, that it wasn’t only his son he hadn’t sterilized. One entire sex, he had said that night in my bedroom. Vaccine, yes; he was trying to vaccinate the human female against pregnancy. “How do you know it’s permanent?” I asked him.
“What is knowing, sir? I have never seen an absolute proof of anything, but I have seen conclusive evidences. I conclude that my vaccine is permanent in effect. You, of course, are at liberty to hope otherwise.” And he grinned at me confidentially.
“It’s none of your Evergreens and Resistances that’ll solve the problem,” Jack Allard said to me, later. “It’s medical research, if it’s anything.”
“You think so?”
“I’m convinced of it. After all, it’s a medical problem. And you know as well as I do that there are physiologists and geneticists and virologists and biochemists and plain old general practitioners all over the civilized world working on a hundred different approaches to it right now. Somebody’s bound to find an answer—most likely, several answers.”
“You know the trouble with that, though, don’t you, Doctor?”
“Oh, sure. Insufficient time and inadequate communications. Oh, sure.” He sucked his pipe. “But somebody will find it somewhere, and apply it somewhere, and that’s all it takes. The human race has had setbacks before—take the Black Death, there’s an example for you. The human race is going to outlive Arslan by at least a few centuries, don’t worry. He may even have done us good in the long run.”
Well, that was the faith Jack Allard solved his part of the problem with—and it was about as unrealistic as any I’d ever heard. Conditions all over what had been the civilized world didn’t figure to be exactly ideal for scientific research. And if one of those suppositious somebodies did find one of those hypothetical answers, how in God’s name could it be put into practice? Logistics was on Arslan’s side now. He was over the hump.
Now that I knew about his virus, it was a lot easier to make sense out of his maps and messages. What he had in mind, and in progress, was pacification with a vengeance. He certainly hadn’t divided the whole globe into countysized districts to start with. Instead, he had sealed off key areas, divided them, and sterilized them. After that, it was a matter of annexing new districts, so that his sterile areas spread like patches of leprosy. The chilling thing was that he had started with America, Russia, and Western Europe.
But he was forging a chain that had to reach around the world, and every new link increased the chances of its breaking. How many of his officers would really push Plan Two to the end? How many of his men would go along with it at all if they realized what they were doing? If they could be offered an alternative at the right time, everything might change in a hurry. That was why he feared organization. It would be no civilian resistance that would ever break him; it would have to be an organized movement that could detach whole units of his patchwork horde. No, what we needed now wasn’t faith, but works. And that was my business.
In spite of everything, Hunt was my best source of information, or anyway my most valuable one—and Arslan himself was a pretty close second. It was worthwhile talking to the Russians, too, and up to a point they were very informative. And not even all of Nizam’s talents had kept a few facts from seeping across the border.
Arslan had told a piece of the truth when he called himself the leash that held back his wolves. Only what most of them were probably raring to do was hurry back where they came from. Of course there would be officers with private ambitions, ready to carve out their own little principalities or just to fill their own pockets. That was one danger—bad enough, but not too serious in the long run. The other was the officers who would stay loyal to Arslan. But Arslan’s conquest itself was living proof that most armed forces would obey whoever spoke through the chain of command. And, this time, that would be us.
In fact, what we were preparing wasn’t exactly a revolt; it was a coup d’etat. One thing about Arslan—one thing that would work for us, finally—was that he was a very personal commander. That meant the ones who were loyal would be under our control by the simple law of blackmail, once we had Arslan, and the ones who were merely obedient would go on obeying. Furthermore, we would have the communications to bypass any uncooperative links in the chain.
It meant incidentally that he couldn’t keep his hands off the adjacent districts. He was forever dashing across the border in one direction or another to handle some new problem. That was fine with me. It didn’t make my work any easier—Nizam was less of a problem when Arslan was in town—but it was a weakness in a man who was trying to run the world, and any weakness in Arslan was something to hang onto.
He had been gone since early morning, presumably into the next district west, the day Rusudan disappeared. About five o’clock that afternoon, she had started out for a stroll with two of her women. It was just turning dusk when they got back. She had sent the women upstairs, walked through the kitchen, picked up an apple, and stepped out the back door, and that was the last anybody had seen of her.
When Arslan came in about an hour later, looking very pleased with himself and yelling for Rusudan, we were just realizing she was gone. The women were in a flutter. Arslan’s face hardened; it was against his orders for Rusudan to go anywhere alone. But she had lived in Kraftsville almost a year now, and that particular order had been disobeyed a hundred times. He didn’t say much to the two women who had been with her, but whatever he said was effective; their faces were sick with dread as they scampered out the back door and went separate ways into the dark.
After them went the soldiers—half a dozen who had come back with him, and three of his own bodyguards. Hoofs pounded and tires squealed. Arslan himself was across the street to school and back again four times in ten minutes. Obviously he was losing no time in mounting a full-scale search.
“What do you think?” Luella asked me quietly.
“I think you’d better go upstairs.” I wanted her out of Arslan’s way. He had driven Hunt upstairs already with one savage gesture. Only little Sanjar stood by gravely, gazing up from the level of his father’s knee.
“They’ll be wanting their supper,” Luella said.
“Well, let them call for it.”
She put her hand on my arm. “All right, but you come up with me.”
It must have been about nine o’clock when I heard the front door open after a period of quiet, and came downstairs to see a Turkistani sergeant frozen in a salute that Arslan did not return. The man’s face was blank and hard as a glazed brick. Arslan stood in front of the couch, his shoulders a little hunched and his eyes dogged. There was dead silence in the room.
“What is it?” I asked the sergeant. Most of them knew a little English by now.
He dropped his salute, and spoke a few stiff words to Arslan. Arslan gestured silently towards the door, and was through it himself before any of his bodyguards had time to open it for him.
They brought her in within the hour. Sanjar had run downstairs in his pajamas when he heard the jeep, with the women fluttering after him. Arslan in the doorway shouted; one of them scooped up the boy, and they rushed back up the stairs.
His arms were full of her. She looked grotesquely big; she should have been doll-size, she seemed so broken. Clothes and hair, tangled and soiled, stuck out every which way; here a limp arm, there a dangling foot. He laid her on the couch and straightened her.
She was mired with her own blood. Whatever she had been beaten with had smashed full across her bright, queenly face. She was unquestionably dead.
“Vodka,” Arslan said flatly. He backed away from the couch and sank into the armchair. He was staring steadily at Rusudan. The bodyguard flashed into clockwork action. One produced a bottle, another a glass. Arslan took the drink in his left hand and looked at it; and slowly, deliberately, he clenched his hand upon it, till the glass broke with a snap and he crunched the pieces in his tightening fist. Blood spurted, squirting between his fingers. He opened his hand slowly, shedding glass fragments and liquor and blood, and still looking blankly at it.
Two of the guards had sprung forwards, one of them jerking out a handkerchief and the other one grabbing Arslan’s forearm, but he shook them off with a wordless grunt, and they backed away. His right hand fastened and tightened on his left wrist, the nails and joints of the fingers standing out pale, and he bowed intently over his locked hands. His blood dribbled slower and slower.
There was a flurry of action at the door. The jeep charged away. Arslan raised his head at last, and his face was absent as a death mask. Now he began to talk, asking questions, giving orders, but his voice was soft and distant, and the eyes in that blank face stayed fixed on Rusudan.
In a few minutes, Dr. Allard was escorted in by the jeep driver. He looked perfunctorily at Rusudan, nodded to me, and turned to Arslan. One of the hovering bodyguards pointed unnecessarily to the wounded hand.
“Now, why do a stupid thing like that?”
I stood up quickly; I thought the doctor had really put his foot in it this time. But Arslan only looked at him, a bleak, defensive look I’d never seen. The doctor spread out Arslan’s hand on the arm of the chair, getting blood on Luella’s doily. “Sure, broken glass is all right; but it can’t compare with tire chains, can it?” He pulled up a chair, settled himself domestically, and went to work. “Stings, doesn’t it?” He was pouring something into the cuts. “Here, I’ll give you a good dose. Now see if you can hold that still while I sew you up.”
The bodyguard crowded close, suspicious and helpless. In a little while the doctor stood up and waved his hand casually towards Rusudan. “You want me to do an examination on her?”
“No.” Strength and timbre had come back into his voice.
“Okay,” the doctor agreed with a shrug. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
He sprang up, bumping the doctor backwards. His eyes blazed and his face was flushing. “Get out! Out!”
Jack Allard wasn’t the man to be hurried by a tornado. He closed his bag calmly, nodded to me again, and moseyed out. Arslan had stood silent and vibrating. Now he spun on me. He took a handful of my shirt front, and I was on my feet instantly. I didn’t know I could move that fast, but I wasn’t going to be jerked up.
His voice was low and staccato. “Tell me anything that you know about this, tell me anything that can help me. Do not quibble about words now. You understand. Tell me.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I know nothing about it, thank God, and I don’t want to know anything.”
He let go of me slowly. “If you learn anything, at any time, by any means, you will tell me at once.” Something blazed suddenly in his face. “If you betray me, sir, you will beg me to let you die,” he cried, and whirled away from me. A moment later he was snapping out orders. One of the soldiers waved me brusquely towards the stairs. The last I saw of Arslan, he was sinking back into the armchair, and he was still talking.
No, I didn’t want to know anything about it. That night I lay awake, trying not to think. I couldn’t afford it. And lying there with open eyes in the dark, I felt an ugly joy in my soul. If only it had been done outside of Kraft County!
I took a deep breath and willed that joy away. I was ready to stake my life that it hadn’t been done by anybody in the KCR. Nobody in my organization would make such an all-out mistake. Not now, above all, when we were so near to starting the upheaval that was to put the world back on its track. Revenge was sweet, sure; there’d be plenty of people who felt the same vicious little joy I did when they got the news, plenty of nice ladies who’d nod their heads and say, “It served her right.” But Kraftsville had taken on an expert. If you betray me… It was the first personal threat he’d ever given me, and unfortunately I had no doubt he could make it good.
All through that night they were coming and going. There were hoofbeats—usually one or two horses, sometimes more. A jeep drove up, later another; after a while they left. Rusudan’s women had been brought down early, and Hunt shortly after. I had fallen into a sickly doze when I heard a cry from below, and then a whole chorus of shrieks and moaning wails. Luella sat up and clutched at me. “What is it?”
“Put the pillow over your head.” And pretty soon she did. There was something funny about those shrieks; they didn’t have exactly the wholehearted spontaneousness of cries of pain. After a while, they stopped as suddenly as if they’d been cut off by a switch.
I had slept and waked again to hear the first roosters crowing, when Arslan’s quick step drummed up the stairs. He paused at our door and said something (the sentry must have been posted there while I was asleep) and went on to his own room. From then on, there was an irregular stream of footsteps up and down. I went to sleep again to that ragged beat.
Luella woke me with breakfast on a tray. “This is just to get you started,” she said. “There’s plenty more downstairs. I would have let you sleep, but I thought you’d better have something in your stomach.” She was right; I could feel the warning sensations already. “You’ll have to go down for your coffee. I knew if I brought it up you’d drink it the first thing.”
It was already nine o’clock. Arslan was still in his room, where he’d had breakfast. Hunt was locked in. Luella had tried to take him some breakfast, too, but the soldiers wouldn’t let her get near the door. She thought Arslan had forgotten about him. The women had fared better. A couple of them had been allowed to bring Sanjar down to eat, and Luella said they’d gone back with enough food for a week. Arslan had come out just long enough to claim Sanjar. The boy had been in his father’s room nearly two hours now.
The sentry let me pass with hardly a look. Downstairs the house was deserted. Rusudan was gone. There was a clean afghan on the couch.
My coffee tasted very good, rich and warm and heartening. There was no use fretting over the hours I’d wasted. The thing now was to get out and try to find out. I’d enjoyed the comfort of ignorance as long as I wanted to.
I had more to tell the KCR that morning than they had to tell me. But there were a few items of information. She had been found in the edge of the woods on the old Karcher place, not far from the road. That whole area had been sealed off, and Nizam’s men had been in and out all night. Dr. Allard’s off-the-cuff diagnosis wasn’t the only evidence that she’d been beaten with tire chains; a set of them had disappeared yesterday from the camp. Just about anybody could have picked them up. The Russians tended to get sloppy whenever they were allowed to, and the chains had just been piled in a heap of gear outside their fence.
The Turkistanis had been very busy. They were going over the district with a fine-tooth comb, questioning everybody. Whether they’d found the tire chains, or anything else, nobody knew. Nobody was allowed to budge out of his home without special permission—apparently I’d been granted the special permission. Nevertheless, news was getting around. The KCR was functioning, like the lungs of a sleeping man.
The Russians were confined to camp. Maybe they were getting the same comprehensive once-over as the civilians, or maybe Arslan just wanted them out of the way. If a Russian soldier had done it (and nobody would have had a better chance), we would have to write him off; the Russians were, for the moment, totally out of our hands, and at best they were too numerous and too anonymous. We had to work on the assumption that this murder was a native product.
One thing you could just about bet on: when there was anything really nasty going on, Ollie Schuster was going to be involved in it.
Kraftsville had always had pretty nearly its share of shiftless no-accounts. Ollie had been no good even when he was young, and age had made him meaner without making him any smarter or more industrious. A lot of people, including me; thought he had been mixed up in what we still referred to as Kraftsville’s crime wave, a few years before Arslan appeared, when quite a series of local businesses had been hit by vandalism and even arson. He had certainly been arrested, at one time or another, for everything from drunkenness to indecent exposure. He lived now with his widowed niece in one of the shacky little houses on the north edge of town, not far from Torey McArthur, not far from Leland Kitchener.
I visited Jack Allard, and he made a house call to the McArthurs—as a doctor he was able to get the necessary permission—and somehow word seeped across the back yards from there. By midafternoon Susie Mitchell’s house had burned to the ground, and Susie, with a wet rag on her forehead, was resting on her neighbor Leland Kitchener’s couch, while her Uncle Ollie sat in the kitchen with Leland. It was a pretty drastic method of winning half an hour’s direct conversation, but we were pressed for time.
That was Tuesday. After the fire, we sat tight. But Arslan’s machine rolled on, through that day, through that night. “I don’t think he’s eaten anything since breakfast yesterday,” Luella said to me Wednesday morning. “And he surely hasn’t slept at all.”
“Don’t tell me you’re worrying about Arslan,” I said.
“Well, I suppose he’s human.”
He hadn’t left the house. He hadn’t spoken to me or to Luella since Monday night. We had never been questioned, and nobody had offered to restrict my movements in any way. In all likelihood, Arslan was eager to have me play detective; I might serve as a telltale to lead them to the quarry, or as a sponge to soak up information and then be squeezed.
But that morning the sentry at the front door sent me back to my room. And when all the breakfasts were over with, Luella was sent up to join me. She came and stood beside me at the window, and together we watched.
The town was filling up, the way it used to do on Saturdays when I was young, when all the farmers would come in for the week’s trading and gossip. But today people weren’t coming by choice. They were being herded. There was a cordon of soldiers around the schoolground, standing along the far sides of all four streets with their guns at the ready. They made a very deadly-looking cage. And from all four directions people were pouring into that cage.
“We can go out any time now,” Luella said after a little while. “We’re supposed to go over there.”
“Where’s Hunt?”
“In his room, I suppose. I don’t know, Franklin.”
She sounded very subdued. I asked her if she’d heard anything new downstairs, and she shook her head.
“I just feel like it’s the end. What’s he going to do now?”
“Let’s find out.”
Everybody I talked to had the same story. Arslan’s men had routed them out of their houses and fields and ordered them to go to the school. They were coming in waves—the folks from Baptist Creek, the folks from Reeves Mill, the whole town of Carey in a solid line of wagons. It looked like a clean sweep. Even the bedridden had been loaded into the wagons, and now they had to be unloaded and carried onto the schoolground. All the horses and wagons had to be hitched along the side streets. It was going to be another hot day; the whole neighborhood was already starting to smell like a barnyard. I wondered if it was physically possible to get the entire population of the district into the two square blocks of the schoolground and the adjacent streets.
The sun was high. The early-comers were getting restless—thirsty and sweaty and wanting to go to the toilet. There was still no word of what was going to happen, except for the rumors that churned the crowd. Maybe Arslan was going to produce the murderers. Maybe we were just going to be exhorted, or more likely threatened. Or maybe he was preparing to do a really thorough job of local extermination.
Lieutenant Z appeared at my shoulder, gently urging Luella and me along onto the east walk. Rusudan’s women stood in a dejected knot, with a little space left clear around them, and then a circle of curious and hostile faces. Hunt stood at the edge of the space, not quite a part of the crowd. He looked pale and haggard, but cheerful enough. We nodded to each other.
Then a little procession came down my front walk and speared its way into the crowd. First two soldiers with dogs on leash, then Arslan with Sanjar in his arms, then Nizam, then Arslan’s bodyguards. The crowd split frantically, almost silently, to let them through. They reached the east steps, and the men with the dogs cleared them of people in a matter of seconds. Arslan mounted the steps without pausing and turned to face us. A stillness rolled out over the crowd, and we stood waiting. Now the guards were spreading out, pushing people back, clearing an open space in front of the steps. I put an arm around Luella and held my ground in the jostling, so that when the movement stopped we were near the front rank of people. Nizam mounted the steps to stand a little behind his master, and, as he passed, Arslan put Sanjar into his arms.
He looked at us a few moments longer. He lifted his arms a little way and flexed them in a curious gesture and let them fall. His face, from where I stood, looked like a mask of sorrow, drawn and bleak. Then he lifted his head a little, and his voice rang out: “Ollie Schuster!”
The crowd quivered, as a flash of horrible relief ran through it: Thank God it’s just Ollie.
“Bill T. Carmichael!” Uncertain eddies of sound and movement were beginning here and there. “Fred Gonderling!” Beside me Luella gasped. “Morris Schott!”
That was all. He stood easy and quiet, his arms barely swaying at his sides, and minute by minute his face cleared, as the crowd milled and twisted and muttered, and here and there his men worked their way through it, and at last, across from where Luella and I stood, Ollie Schuster was disgorged into the open space.
Fred Gonderling came forth under his own power and stepped out on the walk, being careful to keep his distance from Ollie. But it took about ten minutes more, and a lot of poking through the crowd with bayonets, before Morris Schott and finally Bill Carmichael were brought out. Fred had tried to say something two or three times, but a gun in front of his face had stopped him.
Now the crowd was quiet again, quieter than ever. People were straining themselves into a desperate silence. In the depth of it, Arslan looked down on the four men and spoke.
“Ollie Schuster and Bill T. Carmichael"—their names sounded quaint and exotic in his foreign mouth—"you have committed murder.” There were bayonets at their throats before they could begin their protests. “Fred Gonderling, you have helped these two. Morris Schott, you have known this and tried to hide it.” He looked up, and out over the crowd, and his chest swelled like a singer’s, and he cried in a voice that rang with exultation, “Now I will kill you!” and only then did his eyes come back to the four men.
The guards fell away to the edge of the open space and took their places in what was now a double circle like concentric gears, the outer ring of rifles facing the crowd, the inner the four scared men. Arslan came down the steps with a movement that made my neck prickle and my arm tighten on Luella’s shoulders—the hard, flowing motion of a dancer, muscle without bone. The holster on his hip was empty; the sheath knife was gone from his belt.
They backed and bunched before him, and Fred Gonderling was making one more try at formal protest. But before their indecisive movements had brought them into any defensive position, Arslan was already on them. With the unhesitating assurance of a trained herd dog cutting out a sheep, he pulled Ollie Schuster away from the others, a long one-handed yank on Ollie’s right arm. The first cry went up from the little arena, a hopeless yelp of pain, or fear, or both; and before it died, Arslan’s other hand rose and fell, and again, in two streaking hammer blows to the back of Ollie’s head as the first pull jerked him past. He crumpled, half on his slack knees, half dangling by the arm in the iron grip. He’s dead, I thought. But instantly Arslan ran his free hand into Ollie’s left armpit, lifting him bodily, and smashed him sidelong down onto the walk. The noise of it was a solid crunch, mechanical and lifeless as breaking machinery or the chunk of a butcher’s cleaver. Luella turned against me.
Arslan spun back to the others, his face drawn taut with a passionate smile. Morris Schott, unexpectedly resolute, dived forward; Arslan met his tackle with a stooping embrace. They skidded and rocked in the dust. Carmichael started forward, hesitated. It was already too late to help Morris. Arslan had flung him loose and was systematically demolishing his head with kicks and stamps. A very eclectic wrestler, I remembered Hunt saying.
Strange noises came from the crowd—cries of protest and exhortation and horror and rage that united and emerged as an inarticulate muttering groan. Carmichael and Gonderling had fled to opposite segments of the circle, as if neither one of them had any hope beyond seeing the other killed first. Gonderling was almost directly in front of us. I leaned forward and bellowed at him, “Stay together, you damned fools! Fight him!”
Fred looked at me with startled eyes. He jerked a glance at Arslan, still occupied with Morris, and took off at a scared run around the circumference of the circle. Pausing in his work, Arslan stood still and watched him. Morris lay twitching; his wrecked head in a puddle of blood. Gonderling and Carmichael braced themselves, shoulder to shoulder. Arslan set one foot deliberately on what had been Morris’s face, and swung across him with a vaulting stride.
He walked into them as if he expected no resistance at all. But Carmichael almost managed to sidestep his belly-punch; it took him grazingly under the ribs, and even at that, it staggered him away from Fred. Now they were separated again, but by the same token Arslan had to turn his back on Fred to follow up Carmichael. From our position, I couldn’t make out the action exactly. I only saw that Arslan waded into Carmichael with fists and knees, and that Fred Gonderling threw himself wildly onto Arslan’s back, flinging his arms around his neck to jerk his head backwards. Arslan hunched under the onslaught, turning spasmodically back towards us. His left hand was knotted under Fred’s gripping arms—saving him, maybe, from strangulation or a broken neck, but otherwise useless for the moment. With his other hand he was reaching behind him to get at Fred. Bill Carmichael righted himself and plunged at Arslan’s unguarded front. A howl went up from the nearer ranks of the crowd as Carmichael’s knee found Arslan’s groin. Bull-like, Arslan swung right and left, right and left again, moving forward staggeringly with every swing. Fred—I thought it was Fred—screamed suddenly, and at the same moment Arslan fell forward bulkily, bearing Carmichael down beneath him. For a few seconds the battle heaved on the ground, three men deep; then Arslan was up and out of it, stepping lightly backwards. He stooped and grabbed Fred’s ankles, just as Fred was rolling onto his side and pushing himself up. One jerk put him flat on his face again. Arslan backed, dragging him partway across the sidewalk; then, with a lifting twist, he half turned him over, dropped his ankles, and leaped forward onto him. He banged Fred’s head on the edge of the walk, and then his hands were on Fred’s throat.
The crowd was screaming. It was as if all the feelings of all these past years had found voice at last. But the only words I could make out in the uproar were the ones in my own throat: “Get up! Get up!” And they were aimed not at Fred Gonderling—no use to yell at him—but at Bill T. Carmichael. He had dragged himself up to hands and knees, or nearly so. Blood dripped from somewhere on his face, but he looked fairly intact. Suddenly the yelling seemed to reach him. He got his feet under him with surprising speed and lunged at Arslan.
Arslan knelt like an incubus on Gonderling’s chest, one knee and foot on the ground for stability. Carmichael hit him like a tidal wave hitting Gibraltar. Arslan’s head was bowed, his lips drawn back in an animal grin. His hands were rooted in Gonderling’s neck. He crouched there immovable, while Carmichael clubbed and tore at his unshielded head with fists, knees, fingers. The crowd throbbed with hope, and in the froth of sound I heard myself howling, “His eyes! Get his eyes!” The faces of the double ring of soldiers were set grimly; every rifle seemed trained on some appropriate target, one of which was my chest. Nizam on the steps with Sanjar in his arms stood like a statue of poised vengeance. The child stared, motionless. I caught another glimpse of Arslan’s face through the welter of blows, and I could have sworn he was laughing.
Then in an instant the battle was reversed once more. Carmichael was down again. It took me a moment to realize Arslan’s hands had come up like lightning and yanked him down by an arm and knee. Now he had his own knee in Carmichael’s back, one arm binding his arms and chest, the other wrapping his head and dragging it back in a series of brutal jerks. The noise of the crowd swelled painfully, off-key, and died. Arslan clambered upright, shedding Carmichael’s body across Gonderling’s.
Luella stirred in my arms, and I realized I was gripping her painfully tight. I relaxed my hold. The crowd was still.
Arslan stood breathing in hard gasps, mouth open, arms hanging slack. He said something hoarsely, pointing at the ground. Then he turned toward the steps, and Nizam came quickly down them and put Sanjar into his arms. The boy’s little arms went around his neck and held fast. Without another look at the bodies at his feet, he started back the way he had come. This time he went first, and only the men with the dogs followed. The crowd split away from his path as if some electric field had hurled them back. As he walked he swayed, and once I saw him stumble.
Even before he was through the crowd, some of the soldiers had brought out shovels from the school and started to dig. And long after Arslan and his child and his dogs had disappeared into my house, we stood like a herd of cattle in the sun and watched them dig the four neat graves and tumble in the bodies with their feet, and fill the graves again and tramp and stamp them down.
He must have slept the rest of the day and through the night. The house was very still, with a closed feeling. All the bedroom doors stayed shut. Next morning I was up early, before Luella. I was just starting downstairs when he came out of his room. “Good morning, sir,” he said—his commonplace greeting—and went on towards the bathroom. He was still wearing the dirty fatigues in which he’d killed the four men yesterday, very rumpled now. His hair was awry, his face was bruised and his right eye swollen, and the ragged scratches where Bill T.’s fingernails had dug his face were blood-caked and inflamed. But he looked rested.
We were eating breakfast an hour later when he came in, clean, shaved, with Hunt at his heels. Luella jumped up to pour coffee and slice ham and fry eggs, and while Arslan plunged wordlessly into his meal, Hunt opened a book and began to read: “In regard to tunicated bulbs, those consisting of broadened and fleshy leaf-like coats, as in the onion, no one not absolutely certain of his diagnosis should ever attempt to eat any which lack the familiar odor of onions…”
So it was business as usual—but business with a difference. There was a kind of fury in Arslan’s actions, in his voice, his laugh, his stride. Every movement he made looked like a blow held back. He’d never wasted time before, but he’d never seemed pressed for it, either; he’d had the leisure to enjoy everything. Now, suddenly, he was in a hurry. Business as usual—but he plunged into that business with a very unusual fervor, burrowing his way into mountains of work that seemed to disintegrate under his attack and leave him unsatisfied, unprotected again. And after dark, pleasure as before; even beginning that first night, with Rusudan hardly cold in her grave under his window, he dove into the black sea of his old pastimes. He had his two bottles of vodka every night, and every night now he had to have a new girl. He wasn’t interested in the esthetic niceties of rape any longer; he took whatever the daily dragnet brought him. One of his lieutenants was in charge of picking up a new girl every day and getting rid of the used one. So day by day I saw a procession of the pretty kids who had been in second and third grades the last year of school, delivered and discarded like daily newspapers. A girl would be picked up sometime during the day, whenever the roving lieutenant spotted a likely prospect, and held at Nizam’s till evening. Then the lieutenant would escort her over to Arslan’s room, as forcibly as necessary. In the morning he was on duty from five o’clock, ready to whisk her away as soon as Arslan emerged and deposit her where he had found her.
But there were also nights when Arslan turned away from his door and crossed the hall with two quick steps. In the morning, the girl would be turned loose as if she had served her purpose—and, judging from what I heard in town, as often as not she was a little disappointed. Those mornings, Hunt would be aquiver with the same fury, as if Arslan’s pain was contagious. His voice, as he read about Hittite cuneiform or coefficients of expansion, was throbbing and throaty with bitterness. It was the voice I heard one night, through my closed door and his, cry wildly, “—never will!” I wondered who it was that never would. I never will. You never will. There were other possibilities, but they seemed less likely.
The nights with Hunt came more often, and so did the mixed nights, when Arslan went into his own room after supper and came out of Hunt’s room for breakfast. There were days when the circles under Hunt’s eyes looked like bruises, and more than once there were real bruises showing on his arms and neck. He had started drinking during the day.
Two days after the killings on the schoolground, Rusudan’s women were gone. They loaded their multicolored booty mournfully into a truck and were driven off eastward. The crowded room where they had hovered around little Sanjar was now Sanjar’s room exclusively.
He spent a lot of time there, just sitting, tracing rust lines on the windowscreen with his fingers. The bottom had been broken out of the world for him. His mother was underground in the front yard. His nurses were gone. The men he had watched his father slaughter were buried across the street. That father had turned away from him. He was alone, and the world was shifting and violent.
Luella gave him all the time she could, and all the loving he would take. But he never went to her now; she had to go to him. Only when he woke out of his nightmares he called for her, and that was every night for weeks.
He still went to Arslan, but he went cautiously, expecting the worst, and Arslan’s reactions were brusque and harsh. They seemed to make their only contacts physically now. Sanjar would worm his way inch by inch into some firm position where he could press against his father, and stay there, silent and watchful, till Arslan’s business dislodged him. Arslan hardly seemed to notice him, but again and again his hand would brush swiftly over the boy’s hair or close hard for an instant on his shoulder. And maybe a minute later he would stand up, talking to one of his men, shaking off his son like a clod of dirt.
He had tortured nobody, unless it was Rusudan’s women—and they hadn’t looked any the worse for wear, physically. He had done it by simple, thorough detective work. In about thirty-six hours he and his men had questioned something like three thousand people, and (at least as important and a lot harder) found and compared the relevant answers. The questions had been very standardized and very few: Where were you between five-thirty and eight? What were you wearing? Whom did you see? What were they wearing? Meanwhile they had confiscated the shoes and clothes allegedly worn by every able-bodied man in the district that night. It was a massive job, but very effective if you had the manpower to do it fast and thoroughly. One of its virtues was that it touched everybody. It didn’t much matter whether Arslan’s conclusions were accurate or not, either. Kraft County had been impressed.
It was plausible enough. Everybody knew that Rusudan had talked to Fred Gonderling pretty often, in spite of the fact they didn’t speak the same language. And in a way it was easy to imagine what Arslan’s mistress could see in Fred Gonderling. He might have seemed, in comparison, downright courtly. Some people thought Fred had masterminded the whole thing. He would have thought he was smart enough to get away clean. Others figured it was Ollie Schuster’s idea. Some said it must have happened on the spur of the moment—that Fred didn’t have the meanness or the guts to plan such a thing, and Ollie didn’t have the brains. Nobody imagined that Carmichael had been more than a willing henchman, and nearly everybody felt that Morris Schott—a respectable man who had never made any kind of trouble in his life—had gotten a very raw deal.
Of course there was plenty of outrage over the killings, but nothing that Arslan couldn’t have turned to his own advantage. It had needed something exactly like this, I couldn’t help thinking, to make him the veritable king of Kraft County. But he had thrown that possibility away by his behavior since then. He wasn’t just asking for trouble; he was building it with his own hands.
But Rusudan’s murder had stopped our timetable cold. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I honestly couldn’t make up my mind. Maybe this was the perfect time to strike, while Arslan had other things on his mind and the flood-tide of feeling was running against him. But maybe it was the worst possible time, with Nizam’s crew wound up to the highest pitch of alertness and suspicion, and all the troops ready for blood—ready, too, I noticed, to stand by and let Arslan risk his own neck against four men.
The whole district was like one raw wound. Not all the shootings of the past six years had had the effect of that one morning’s work on the schoolground; and now every family with a teenage girl had a very personal stake in getting rid of Arslan. But by the same token, people had never been so demoralized, so distrustful of each other and so in awe of Arslan. I felt it myself, and cursed myself for it; normally I wouldn’t be hesitating like this. What we needed—what we all needed—was something to pull us together. Something simple and immediate, a rallying point, a straight road, a slogan.
Day and night, for the first two weeks, two of Arslan’s own bodyguards stood watch at Rusudan’s grave, incidentally commanding a good view of the schoolground. Then one day they were gone. The next morning there were flowers on Fred Gonderling’s and Morris Schott’s graves.
Quite a few people found reasons to pass by the school that morning. None of the soldiers paid any attention. It was Arslan himself, on his way across the graves to the school, who nudged the two Mason jars over with his toe, shattered them with his heel, and carefully ground flowers and glass into the bare, packed earth under his boots. I watched from the living-room window, and I felt a beat of hope. We had our slogan!
Decorating the graves… It was ticklish. The graves were in full view of my house and yard. I let the word get around that the KCR would take care of the decoration, if interested parties would supply the bouquets. That way we could keep it a popular movement without jeopardizing too many people too much. I put Leland Kitchener in charge of collecting the flowers. After a little experimenting, we settled on the three Munsey boys to do the decorating. From the corner of their yard they could see my bedroom window, which made it easy to let them know the best time to move. I would stand at that window for hours sometimes, watching the shrubbery and the shadows and the open places in the moonlight, the wind stirring the close-packed branches of a juniper beside the school steps. It always made me think of muscles moving under an animal’s skin.
Every morning the flowers were there. Not in jars any more—there weren’t that many jars to spare—but just laid in bunches, big or small, neat or sloppy, beautiful or scraggly. Usually every grave was decorated, and always at least one.
It was a little war that went on in silence. Every morning Arslan walked across the schoolyard, and every morning he paused at the graves and methodically trampled the flowers. He was careful to crush every blossom. After a few weeks the graves were covered with a mulch of broken, withered flowers. I never saw or heard of his exchanging a word with anybody about the decoration—or, for that matter, about anything connected with Rusudan. Sometimes I saw a couple of soldiers nudge each other and nod towards the latest decorations, but that was all. It could be they were under orders to pay no attention to the flowers, or to the thin parade of Kraft County people who passed along the streets by the school every morning. It could be they were under orders not to bother Leland in his rounds or the Munsey brothers on their nightly strolls. Arslan was capable of that.
Day by day the mulch deepened. Marigolds and zinnias gave way to chrysanthemums. The last roses bled under Arslan’s heels. Night after night I listened for the shot that would mean the end of the Munseys. Morning after morning the graves were decorated. And every morning Kraftsville was a little stronger.
The first light frost came the first week in October. Then we had a warm spell—Luella always said we had our nicest weather in October—and then it began to get steadily more chilly. We had our hands full, citizens and troops alike, getting in crops and laying in meat for the winter. Along towards the last of the month, we had frost four nights running, hard enough to finish off the tomatoes and all the tender flowers. Sprays of bittersweet started to turn up in the bouquets. A lot of the ladies had been drying cornflowers and everlastings and pampas grass and all the other things Kraftsville ladies did dry. If Arslan was counting on the weather to win his battle for him, he was going to be disappointed.
Sanjar had started to venture out a little more. The horsemen were giving him riding lessons—something Arslan had insisted on doing himself, in the old days. Hunt had taken to horseback, too. On the bad mornings he would wash down his breakfast with a swig of vodka, saddle up the chestnut colt that Arslan had reserved for him, and flash down the road at a frantic gallop. Arslan himself rode everywhere now—rode, to give him his due, as well as he’d ever driven. Once I saw him, cantering past the school, suddenly dig his heels into the horse’s sides and circle the long block at full gallop, dragging the horse’s head sharp around the corners, and then canter quietly on down Market Street, straight-shouldered and blank-faced.
The flowers were getting to him. For once—maybe—he had started a fight he couldn’t win.
He chose the fight. He could have stopped the decorations any time by guarding the graves, if not by more dramatic means. Instead, he chose this long, quiet struggle. He had taken me down the Morrisville road once to show me he could do things for himself. The evidence of something he had done for himself lay under the trampled flowers. Apparently he meant to win this fight the same way, by raw force of his own will and muscle. He was telling us he could trample all the flowers Kraftsville could grow. I thought not.
“You going trick-or-treat, Franklin?” It seemed like nobody’s idea; it seemed like everybody’s. By the middle of October, enough people had said it to me, with the right kind of grin, to make me decide this was it. Instead of a midsummer D-Day, we were going to have a bang-up Hallowe’en.
Only the older kids remembered going trick-or-treat, but they were all enthusiastic when the KCR spread the word it would be safe to go out again this year. I wanted Arslan and Nizam to be expecting a little innocent activity. Hallowe’en fell on a Sunday, and quite a dispute developed over whether it was right to allow trick-or-treating on the Sabbath. It was the nicest little smokescreen we could have asked for.
We had set the Saturday night for the Trick; but for insurance we would be ready to go the night before. There would be a few kids out on Friday night—closely followed by nervous parents—and a few more little ones on Saturday afternoon. At sundown the KCR would pass the word at top speed, and an immediate curfew would go into effect. At seven o’clock most of the troops would be eating supper; those on duty would be expecting to see people on the streets; Nizam would be in his lair; Arslan, if he followed his recent pattern, would already be in his room with a girl. At seven o’clock we would hit.
All our hope was to strike fast enough to secure the two necessary prizes: Nizam’s headquarters, and Arslan. With Arslan and Nizam neutralized (dead, or preferably alive under lock and key) there would be nobody competent to command the whole body of troops. More important, we would have control of communications in the district, and contact with Arslan’s headquarters all over the world. And we would have a little language problem.
We had—maybe—our traitor, if that was the right word, among the Russian officers, ready to declare himself commander of the troops and broadcast our message. But all our contacts had been very circumspect, and I wasn’t counting on him too much. We would tell him what was going on when it was under way. I counted more on Hunt Morgan. Hunt could make himself understood by the Turkistanis, and one way or another—either to save the world or to save Arslan’s life—I was sure he would act as interpreter for us.
If we got that far, we were just coming to the hard part. What we were betting was that nobody, not even the Turkistanis, really gave a damn about Arslan’s Plans. Either they were serving Arslan personally, or they were serving under duress. In the first case, they’d be our men as long as we held Arslan hostage (and if he had to be killed, they wouldn’t have to know it); in the second, we could tell them about Plan Two and offer them the freedom to go home. But we had to face the possibility of hostile units. That meant raising the local population against them, or turning other units against them, or both. Whether Kraftsville turned out to be the Concord of the new American Revolution or just the first skirmish of Armageddon would depend very much on what kind of contact we made with Arslan’s armies and with the American people during the first few days.
And if we failed at any point, I would have let loose the hell on earth that I had sold my soul to prevent, seven years ago on the Morrisville road. But it was Arslan who had broken the contract.
Friday night, as it happened, we all ate together. Arslan swung into the house early, shouting for Hunt and his supper. Hunt was in the living room, pouring himself a drink. Luella was just sitting down with me to eat before the rush. She had been deep in making applesauce and apple butter all day. The stove was covered with steaming pots, and the whole house was full of the rich, spicy smell. “I’m using up the last of the cinnamon,” she said. “It loses its flavor, anyway; you can’t keep it forever.” Supper was about as simple as it could be—baked ham, baked beans, and fresh hot applesauce. “That’s one nice thing about a wood stove,” Luella said; “if you’re cooking anything on top, you might as well put something in the oven, too.” She smiled at me tiredly.
“It’s delicious.” I smiled back at her. This was probably the last supper I’d be eating with her here for a while. It might very well be the last of all. And the smell of the apple butter was very good.
But Arslan and Hunt came in, Hunt carrying glass and bottle. “Coffee,” Arslan ordered. He was on the make tonight; the fury was avid, and everything in sight was fair game. He took Hunt’s bottle and poured vodka into his coffee till it brimmed the cup; his teeth showed as he lifted it and drank. “You are very trusting, sir,” he said to me. His eyes flashed. He dug into the beans with vengeance.
“That depends on who you ask me to trust.”
“I ask you to trust no one, least of all my soldiers. But you have approved that your people’s children should go out alone in the night. Would it not have been wiser to consult with me before you approved this?”
“We’ll be watching them.”
He smiled cruelly. “As you watched, the day I came to Kraftsville?”
I shoved back my plate. “If anything happens to any of those kids, General, you’ve got a revolution on your hands.” It was the literal truth. My pistol shot—or any other—would be the signal to start things rolling.
Light leaped in his eyes. He turned his square hands above his plate, half-smiling. “No, sir,” he said softly. “But perhaps a revolt. There will be more important revolts.”
I got up. “You’d better see that they’re left alone. Be careful if you don’t want to lose me, General.”
He gazed up at me, balancing, daring. “Do you imagine that this is important to me?”
“If it isn’t, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing.”
He smiled slowly. “Ah,” he whispered, and went back to his beans.
Luella bent her head over her plate, but not before I saw her drawn mouth and look of misery. I hadn’t eaten very much. I was sorry. Hunt sat stiffly upright, eyes down, swirling the liquor in his glass. Arslan smiled around the table; he was pleased with his work.
It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes before Arslan was at my bedroom door, bottle in hand. He stood eyeing me a moment before he came all the way in, kicking the door shut behind him, and stretched himself on my bed, propped on his left elbow. “Have you considered the significance of flowers, sir?” he asked softly.
“I’ve never given it much thought.” Thirty-six hours from now, one of us would be a corpse or a captive. It was easy enough to picture Arslan bound hand and foot, blood and sweat on his face (there’d be no other way), with his black hair lank on his forehead and his black eyes watchful and undefeated; but I couldn’t picture him dead, any more than I could myself.
He was a young man—a very young man to have destroyed so much. But his skin was weathered, and his eyes haggard. “What is a flower in itself, sir? It is an organ of reproduction, and like other organs of reproduction, it gives pleasure. No doubt the pleasure of the bee is greater than the pleasure of the gardener. Pleasure, sir"—his face grew fierce, intent and serious—"pleasure is the supreme immediate end; but in the economy of the world it is only instrumental. The flower of the pea is as exquisite as the flower of the rose. The scent of the lilac is a tool with which the lilac constructs its seeds.” He looked down into his bottle with an expression of intense wonderment, and slowly, feelingly, drank.
“And yet there are sterile flowers, sir. The flower of the potato, the Japanese cherry blossom; to what end do they bloom? This is the monstrosity that man has bred: the sterile flower. And yet there were already sterile flowers when man ran on his knuckles with the apes. Who bred the wild yam? Who bred the saxifrage?” He glared at me as if he could compel an answer. Then he drank again, and his face smoothed. “Is this not beautiful, sir?” he asked purringly. “The flower that gives pleasure fruitlessly? Is it not beautiful that nature is so—unnatural?” He showed his teeth in a slow grimace. “Why do your people put flowers upon graves, sir? What is the meaning of this custom?”
“I suppose, like most customs, it means about whatever people put into it.”
He hunched his shoulders forward a little, searching my face. “I tell you a curious thing, sir,” he said confidentially. “I am in pain. You understand that I am accustomed to facts; facts do not trouble me. But there is a pain that does not cease.” He grinned savagely. “Ah, this gives you satisfaction, sir. Good. Good.” A hot look glowed in his taut face. He lifted three cigarettes from the pack in his shirt pocket and plugged the mouth of the bottle with them, and in one powerful, deliberate movement he swung his legs down and his arm in a sideward arc. The bottle smashed against the opposite wall, spewing liquor, and he was sitting upright on the edge of the bed. “Hunt!” he roared.
Vodka dripped down the wall. A piece of flying glass had landed on my knee. I flipped it off with my finger, and it hit his leg and dropped onto his shoe. He picked it up and looked at it searchingly.
Hunt opened the door. “Bring me another bottle,” Arslan said suavely. Hunt nodded, taking it all in with a little scornful smile, and lifted his hand into sight. It held an unopened bottle of vodka. Arslan’s laugh exploded. He dropped the glass fragment onto the bed beside him and accepted the new bottle. “Shut the door.” He opened the bottle swiftly, took a long swig, and nestled it between his knees. “Therefore, or in part therefore, I am going.”
Hunt took a step forward from the door. “Where?”
“To Russia. Probably then to India.”
I didn’t care where. “When?” I asked harshly.
He gave me a smile of luminous sweetness. “Tonight,” he said. He lifted the bottle by the neck and swung it gently back and forth. “The main transmitter and receiver have been dismantled. The rest of the communications equipment"—he glanced at his watch—"has just left headquarters. Sanjar,” he added smoothly, “is already out of the district.” He set the bottle on the floor and leaned forward confidingly. “You see, sir, that I wish to save Kraftsville.”
He had spread his hand a little too soon. But I had to be on my feet and out of reach, and I’d better be between Hunt and the door, and my first shot should be by the window, to put the KCR into action.
Hunt brushed past me and confronted Arslan. “This time are you asking me?” he cried huskily.
Arslan’s face went cold. “No. You stay, Hunt.”
Hunt swayed on his feet. “I’m going with you.” His voice was hard and shrill with desperation. Three strides got me to the window; as I turned I had the gun in my hand.
That instant the world stopped turning for me. The whole room seemed illuminated with a terrific clarity. I felt every muscle in my body. I was contented. There would be no more lying now.
Hunt had turned his desolate face towards me. On the far edge of the bed, Arslan had to look almost over his shoulder. He made no move, but his face was afire with excitement. “Ah, there it is,” he said quietly.
I turned the gun a little away from them, to fire the signal shot. But as I turned it, the long moment ended, exploded in a splintering burst, and flying specks of my blood and bone sprinkled my face. Flickeringly I saw Arslan fling himself across the bed, rolling over and up onto his feet in front of me, and stoop and rise and dance back. He stood before me with a pistol in each hand.
I knew two things in the smeared dimness that throbbed through the room: he had fired the signal shot; and with all the guns on his side, I had nothing more to lose. I plunged towards the door. Keep him cut off from his men till the KCR got here—that was the last-ditch idea that moved my legs.
Hunt met me in a rush, and we grappled together. I heard myself remarking, up in some attic of my brain, He’s stronger than I thought. Now the shock of the bullet was wearing off, and one wave after another of hot pain washed up my right arm. I threw Hunt down and slammed against the dresser, driving it in front of the door. Through the drumming in my head I heard feet on the stairs. I gave the dresser a last thrust and caught Hunt as he came up again.
He hadn’t tried to use his knife—the famous knife that had been Arslan’s own. My vision cleared as if a curtain had risen. I hugged him to me with my left arm, catching his right hand between our chests. Arslan’s men were at the door.
Hunt had stopped struggling. He stood trying to control his breath. Arslan was standing a little back from the window. He holstered one of the pistols casually and called out something; the sounds at the door stopped.
“You can let me go now,” Hunt said composedly. “Consider me hors de combat.”
I wasn’t about to let him go. Other things being equal, Arslan would maybe rather not kill me, but he would almost certainly go at least a little out of his way to keep from killing Hunt. And the only thing Hunt had showed me so far was that neither of us could afford to trust him.
Then the first shots sounded from the schoolground. Arslan smiled at me expectantly. A machinegun answered under the window.
“Sir,” he said, “I am leaving Kraftsville to you.” He lifted the lamp from the table. The machinegun spoke again. I heard running footsteps outside; the Land Rover started up; something else—one of the trucks—was coming down the street. My whole right arm to the shoulder felt swollen and half-solid, like a balloon full of blood. I was getting dizzy. He shouted one more order, and then he hurled the lamp in a looping overhead pitch that lifted the shadows and shook them over us. He swept the curtain aside, and struck the screen a sidearm blow. Fire swarmed up the cotton spread, from the shattered lamp at the bed’s foot. The screen clattered on the porch roof. I let go of Hunt and lunged forward, carrying him along with my rush till he pulled away from me. Arslan was already out of the window.
The fire was to keep us busy, maybe, but neither of us was having any. Hunt dived through the window. How I got through I didn’t know.
Arslan was running lightly along the edge of the porch roof, fuzzy in the darkness. At the corner he half turned to us, and his hand came up in a quick gesture of salute or warning. The light of the flames from the bedroom glinted on his face. Hunt had almost reached him when he dropped over the edge. Instantly, it seemed to me, the truck motor roared. There was one more burst of machinegun fire, somebody yelled something, and beyond the roofs edge I saw the truck and the Land Rover scream into Pearl Street, their lights coming on like explosions.
We teetered on the gentle slope of the shingles. I waved my good arm. “Joel!” I bellowed. “Pete Larner! All of you get up here! We’ve got to put out a fire!”
Hunt came back to me with a step, facing me close. He shook with racking laughter. “That’s right, Mr. Bond,” he said. “Your house is burning. You’d better take care of your Goddamn house.”
“A few weeks, a few eons—in other words, presumptively never. That’s when Arslan will come back.”
That was what Hunt said. He had made his movement of self-preservation very promptly. He had attached himself to me the instant Arslan deserted him, but he had also asserted his independence, or at least his aloofness, by doing it with a very scornful air.
And for half an hour on the porch roof, it was Hunt who had taken care of me. He had caught me when I swayed and eased me down away from the roofs edge. He had held me back when I half sat up and raved at the KCR men to leave me alone and get to work on the fire. He had put the tourniquet on my arm, and he had jumped off the roof and gone for Dr. Allard.
Later I found myself lying on a strange bed in a strange room. But it was Arslan’s bed, Arslan’s room. “Is it out?” I demanded.
“Yes, yes, it’s out,” Luella answered.
“Where’s Joel Munsey?”
“He’s dead,” Hunt said from somewhere in the shadows.
“He’s the only one,” Luella added quickly.
“Then get me Leland Kitchener—or anybody that knows what’s going on.”
Hunt put himself forward. “Okay, I can tell you. The town’s all yours. The troops are apparently all in camp—those that are still here. Nobody’s fighting anybody. The school is cleaned out. Nizam got his unit out with practically no action. Joel Munsey’s dead, Leland Kitchener has a few bullets in him, and you’re the rest of the casualty list.” His voice was brassy. “You had a nice little revolution going, Mr. Bond, but it never had a chance to get off the ground. Oh, yes, and your bed’s ruined—that’s all. But you have a couple of extra rooms now, anyway.”
I looked at my arm lying beside me and was a little surprised to see fingers at the end of the bandages. Luella was holding my left hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t let you know beforehand,” I told her.
“Thank goodness you didn’t.”
“Where’s Leland?”
“Downstairs. The doctor’s down there with him.”
I took a good breath and started to get up. There were a lot of things to find out.
We couldn’t tell how many Russians were still in the camp. The only men we saw were manning the machineguns along the fence. We had no way of attacking that kind of fortress, and I had no intention of trying it. There was no sign of our friendly officer. Either Nizam had got him, or he’d chickened out, or he’d been Arslan’s man all along.
Except for the impacted Russians, the district was empty of troops; but, as the KCR soon found out, the border was as solidly guarded as ever, only now it was guarded from the other side. We had gained nothing but the half-mile-wide border strip. It wasn’t that our coup had failed; it had just ceased to be applicable.
The bemusing thing was that Arslan had escaped from Kraftsville. He had known the plot, or at least known of it. He could hardly have doubted he could smash it. Instead, he had secretly packed up his valuables and fled. He had come into Kraftsville like a young lion, rampant and triumphant, but in the end he had climbed out a window and run down a roof, and his getaway car had been waiting.
There was a weird feeling everywhere, like the shock when an unpleasant noise you’ve gotten used to suddenly stops. No more soldiers! The Russians stayed inside their fence. On Tuesday Kraftsville boiled over. Boys romped through the school and Nizam’s headquarters, breaking windows and tumbling desks down the stairs. By midafternoon an orgy of visiting was in progress. The wagons were coming to town again. Impromptu picnics and covered-dish suppers were being put together. Reunions were being planned. The churches were announcing prayer services. Quite a few people were looking for Arslan’s liquor supply, and several of them came to me about it. As far as I was concerned, he’d either used it up or taken it with him—and in case anybody looked through my furnace-room window, I sent Hunt down to cover the cases with some boxes of Luella’s fruit jars.
He had left the district to me and the KCR. But it was still a sealed box, with an explosive charge in the middle of it. We might have twenty-four hours of respite or forever; there was no way to know except by living it.
As it turned out, we had five years.