Arslan (5 page)

“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.

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 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?
”