Arslan. Part 3

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 s.h.i.+rtsleeves 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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, fis.h.i.+ng just pa.s.sable 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-fas.h.i.+oned smoked ham and hot cornbread with sweet cream b.u.t.ter and sorghum mola.s.ses 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 a.n.a.lyze Nizam's motives, any more than I'd a.n.a.lyze 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 ha.s.sle 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 d.i.c.kering. Colonel Nizam's ideas of what const.i.tuted 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 doc.u.ments.

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. n.o.body 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sume 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. G.o.d 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 sc.r.a.pe 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. n.o.body 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 n.o.body'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 sh.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.ned 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-cla.s.s rumor mill. I started a lot of talk under the pretense of just pa.s.sing 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 a.s.surance. 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, n.o.body 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 hea.r.s.es 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 att.i.tude.

Chapter 5.

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 a.s.sign jobs to other people. He worked, though G.o.d 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 appet.i.te 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ha.s.sle. 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 p.r.i.c.kle 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 n.o.body but my family and myself had ever lived in it, and n.o.body 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 a.s.sorted 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.