Arslan (6 page)

“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.