Arslan (17 page)

“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.

Chapter 10

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.”