John Rackham (13 page)

"Where would you
learn?" he retorted, and she shrugged and passed the question by. But it
came up again in the cool of the evening, and other evenings. Clumsily naive
questions that took the form
"J£
you
were set to it, how would you organize things to defeat a force like
Zorgan?" Most times he was too bone-weary to bother answering. But once or
twice he let himself be drawn into fantasizing such a situation, always
reminding them that it was nothing more than high-powered imagination on his
part. His constant refusal to entertain the notion seriously that Scarta could
offer anything but futile resistance provoked Hork, one evening, to offer
a
scheme of his own.

"We get news," he said,
"regularly, from Stopa and other places.
A
lot is being done. There is talk of trying to repair your ships and
build more like them. We can build. We have skills, and your technical people
to help. Why can't we build a fleet as big as Zorgan, and stop them that
way?"

Bragan snorted at it. "That would be
just about the silliest and most futile thing you could do, believe mel"
As Hork demonstrated that he didn't believe, Bragan elaborated. "Let's do
it from simple beginnings. Look; you are faced with an armed force on the
ground, right? So you put up a similar force to stop them. You meet headlong.
You wheel, try flanking movements, exert strength face to face, and you either
win or lose. Call it a batde. It's practical and bloody, and men have been
fighting that way for years and years. Two dimensions, on the flat. But now
introduce a third dimension, the air. You know about aircraft. Can you hang
a
curtain of aircraft up there to stop an enemy? He can go over or around
you, and you can stop some—your aircraft can shoot each other down—but some
will get through. Think, and leam as all warrior nations have had to learn,
that you can't fight
a
battle in three dimensions. It can't be done.
And so, even less can it be done in space, where you really
have
three dimensions, fantastic speeds and unlimited room to move around in.
Building spaceships calls for highly sophisticated skills and knowledge. Just
getting them off the ground is an achievement. Flying them is something else
again, calls for training and experience. Manning them with trained
space-troopers is yet another big step onward. And even if you could do
all
that, fast enough and massive enough—which you can't—it would still be a
waste of time. Can you do calculations?"

Hoik said that he could,
within reason and certain limits.

"All
right. See your glow-lights up there? They are roughly a quarter of a million
miles up. Now, you try working out the surface area of a globe that sizes in
square miles, and then imagine one ship per hundred of those square miles—
which you'd need for adequate guard and watch—and let me know what the figure
comes to." Bragan didn't have to wait long. By the time you cube a quarter
of a million and look at the result, you begin to breathe hard.

Hork grunted. "Then it is not possible
to fight the enemy in space?"

"Absolutely not. It just is not worth
thinking about. The only way in which you can deliver a blow at another
space-fleet and hope to make it effective is to catch that fleet in the
vicinity of a planet, say if it was actually carrying out
a
ground attack, and was therefore pinned down a little. If you had a big
fleet, and you had just put down invasion forces, and were standing by with
support—
then
you would be vulnerable
from the rear. There you have it. All you need is to radio some nearby friendly
planet to come up on Zor-gan from the rear while you are engaging them down
here—"

And Hork climbed to his feet with a growl.
"You have
a
strange sense of humor, Denzil Bragan."

"Not me, Hork. You are the comedians, if
you only knew it, you and your hopeless attempts to defeat the inevitable.
Build ships? You don't know how funny that is."

"I don't think it's funny, either,"
Ryth told him, and he stared at her in the gloom, calculating his response.

"I
have no reason to help you," he said. "Nor have I any reason to do
you a bad turn. In a sense I owe you something, a little, this extra life. If I
wanted to betray you entirely I would tell you to talk to your valiant friends
on your radio, and advise them to concentrate on building a great fleet of
ships. That way I could utterly ruin all your efforts, because it would be a
waste of time. But it doesn't matter either way. It's just that I do not like
futility, in any sense. I think I've made that plain. I have to admire your
Scartans for your drive, your courage. It would be a shame to waste it by trying
to build ships. And that's it. Take it or leave it."

It was a gamble, but he
felt he knew these two at least well enough by this time to estimate what they
would do. He would not have been surprised to know, that night after he and
Hork were safely asleep, that Ryth sat by her radio and talked to Stopa,
relaying the whole of that conversation, word for word, to attentive ears in
the city. Two people in particular were most interested. One was Hallex Mordin
himself, the other was Otto Karsh.

When she had finished her account, Karsh
looked across at Mordin and nodded grimly. "There you are, old man. Isn't
that exactly what I've been trying to tell you for two days now? We cannot
possibly match Zorgan ship for ship, not in a hundred years, and even if we
could, it would be useless."

"That, or you both are from the same brood of liars!"

"It's my life," Karsh retorted.
"I'm as fond of living as you are. And when it comes to tactical matters
I'll trust Bragan all the way. That's
a
smart
girl you have there. She seems to have gained his confidence, and we need that.
We need his brains."

"One man?" Mordin growled. "Is he so precious?"

"Every man to his own skill," Karsh
said patiently. "I've told you this before. If this radio breaks down, can
you fix it? No. But I can, and so can any man who is trained for that. Look, in
a battle fleet every man has his job. Troopers, squad-leaders and such, they
operate on the ground, or with weapons. A ship's captain knows his ship and how
to handle it. My own special training is in technology, of weapons, forces,
energies, metals and so on. But a battle fleet is
a
whole thing,
a
striking force, and one man has to be in
charge. It takes
a
special land of mind and brain, and special
training. We call men like that cadwalladers. It means battle-arrangers. And
that's Bragan. He's trained for it. If there is any man who can figure, out a
way of crippling a big fleet with a smaller force, he's that man!"

"I think this is
true," Ryth came in thoughtfully. "I saw this man throw Hork to the
ground three times. He was still weak, and weary from hard work, and Hork is
much bigger than he is, yet he threw him down with only a twist of his hand. He
called it strategy."

"There you are!" Karsh declared.
"I told you, we need him. He won't break by force, but he might with
kindness."

"Very
well." Mordin shrugged. "But it is for Ryth to decide."

"I
think I can get him to talk," she said.
"He is sour in some ways, and suspicious, but he is a good worker and
doesn't complain. Hork is the trouble. He is too forthright with
questions."

"How soon before you
can manage without him?"

"I
think about seven or eight days. The Zorgan will be strong enough by then, and
most of the heavy work will be done for a while." She signed off to leave
Karsh and Mordin to their planning.

Bragan
knew nothing about it. All his thoughts were given over to one nagging problem,
even while he slept. It was a simple problem to put into words, but
tremendously difficult to find an answer for. In all the history he had
studied, and it was considerable, there was one unbroken axiom. Ability,
talent, genius, call it what you will, emerges only under pressure of some kind.
Survival pressure. On the surface the Scartanni should have been simple, almost
retarded farmers. Instead they were near-genius intelligent, fantastically resourceful
and ingenious. Why? What was driving them? Why did they all so positively and
instantly reject any idea of defeat?

In
the week that followed the problem never moved away very far from his mind,
^ven though, by the end of that second week, he had succeeded in putting
himself back together again. It was a process that happened almost insensibly.
He couldn't have pinpointed the moment when hopping out of bed in the morning
became a pleasure, when expanding his chest was no longer an effort but a joy,
when he could lay hold of a machete and swing it to clear undergrowth with
zest. Hork noticed it the day they slaughtered a mereen for fresh meat, and
Bragan hoisted the carcass over his shoulder and carried it back to the
cold-store shed without so much as a grunt.

"You couldn't have done that the day you
came here, Dcnzil. I think this life is good for you."

"Fresh air, good food and hard work.
It's an old recipe,

Hork.
You would rather live and work in the city than stay here?"

"It
is necessary if we are to beat Zorgan. All men are needed. A woman can run a
farm." Hork laughed, not unkindly, and added, "Why don't you come
with me, and help?"

Bragan shook his head as they strode along to
where Ryth had their noon meal ready outside on the grass. "I'm no good at
that. Even if I thought you had a chance—and I don't—I can't
help
with it. My part in military affairs is to take charge, and your people
wouldn't allow that."

Ryth,
squatting down by the steaming plates, wanted to know what they were talking
about, and Bragan told her. "He's trying to persuade me to run off with
him back to Stopa and help with the war-effort."

*Tou
fool!" she snapped at her brother, then pinked and tried to ease the
moment by adding, "Why do you think I wanted Denzil here in the first
place, if not to help me so that you could leave?"

"That's
what you say. But all the holdings around here are managing without men now;
you know that. I'm the only male working land in the whole Tarat region. If the
others can manage, so can you!" Hork took his plate and began to eat.
Ryth grew pinker still and managed an uneasy smile for her prisoner. Bragan
came to her rescue easily.

"I'm
not going to leave. Not unless you want me to. Apart from anything else, I'm
pretty sure I wouldn't get cooking like this in the city."

Now her pink became a rosy glow that spread
down over her lovely curves in a warm tide, and Bragan felt a twinge of
contrition. She really was a marvelous cook, a marvelous woman, and if things
had been different—he felt ashamed of what he was doing. Then he recalled
Swann, and other good men who had died, and thought of the millions more who
would share the same fate if he made a mistake, and managed to harden his
heart.

"We
will gather gleebs this afternoon," she declared, "and I will make a
pie from some of them. Then you will see what good cooking really is. And no
more talk of leaving me here alone to do all the hard work."

Hork grunted. "Gleebs!
Boy's workl"

"Not for you. You can cut and clean
those carcasses ready to hang. We will have baskets for you to carry by
then."

The
gleebs filled a field over by the slope of a hill opposite the mereen pasture.
The bushes stood about eight feel tall, a yard apart in orderly rows. They had
taken with them a pile of flat straw baskets. Ryth, tossing her tunic aside as
always, set a basket close by her feet, grasped a machete, and commanded him
to observe.

"Cut
the top here," she indicated a point level with her chin—"and let it
fall. Then chop one side-shoot at a time; like this," and the blade spun
to slice off a stout branch laden with large green fruit something like a
tomato in shape. She dropped the machete so that it stuck upright in the ground
and proceeded to strip the fruit with quick hands, tossing them into the
basket. In five minutes the bush stood stark and slim with just stumps of
branches left. "It will grow again, more fruit, in about eight or nine
weeks. Now let's see you." And she watched while he tackled the first in the
next row. Then they began to work, bush by bush, in harmony.