Arslan. Part 2

His grin came back, just for a second. "Kraftsville pleases me."

I had the gun as well m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d. 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 s.h.i.+ny 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 pa.s.s: 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 pa.s.sable 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed 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.

Chapter 3.

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 b.u.t.t 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.u.t.ts. 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 gla.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d'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 nutsh.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d 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, part.i.tions set up. All of the children's desks were knocked apart and the pieces neatly stacked on racks in the bas.e.m.e.nt. "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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sume 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. n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.cious 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 quant.i.ty 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.

Chapter 4.

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 circ.u.mstances. 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 const.i.tutional impediment to answering questions. But after a certain amount of d.i.c.kering 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed me with a knowing smile. "You are busy, sir?"