Arslan (7 page)

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 circumstances. 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 constitutional impediment to answering questions. But after a certain amount of dickering 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 assured 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 passed me with a knowing smile. “You are busy, sir?”

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 shirtsleeves 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-fashioned 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, fishing just passable 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-fashioned smoked ham and hot cornbread with sweet cream butter and sorghum molasses 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 analyze Nizam's motives, any more than I'd analyze 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 hassle 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 dickering. Colonel Nizam's ideas of what constituted 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 documents.

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. Nobody 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 assigned 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 assume 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 assume 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. God 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 scrape 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.”