John Rackham (3 page)

"Passive resistance," Captain Slatt
assumed, but the reply came back fast and firm.

"Not
them! Every damn one of them is boiling inside. You daren't turn your eye off
them for a second if they're loose. We lost a few that way, in the first few
minutes. Now we bind them and keep them bound. They're holding in. Clamped
down. You can see it. Like bombs waiting to go off. Looks like they don't even
know
how
to be scared!"

Karsh
hunched his shoulders and offered a stare to Bragan, who reached for a switch
to talk to Captain Slatt.

"Cany
on with routine, Captain. If they won't talk, all right; let's not waste time
trying to force them. Perhaps they won't be quite so stubborn by dawn."

"Very
good. This senior landholder seems to be their most prestigious personality in
the area, and as this is visibly their largest city, it could be that he is
equivalent to their pres-dent, or leader of some kind. If they have such a
thing."

"It's worth noting,
Captain. Keep him isolated."

"Name is Mordin.
Hallex Mordin."

"Right.
I'll talk to him myself, in the morning. If I can break him it might induce the
rest of them to be a bit more rational. We do not wish to execute them
unnecessarily. That would be wasteful."

Bragan pushed the microphone away and relaxed
back in his seat. That was part of the Zorgan way of doing things too. If there
was no other way, you collared the top people and brought pressure to bear. You
executed them, eventually, if they would not bend. But you tried to bend them
first, and then use them. It had nothing to do with tenderness or compunction,
just plain efficiency. There was very little worth in a dead man.

The
Scartan sun crept halfway down the sky and still those stupid small pockets of resistance
held out. Bragan noted them on the display and shook his head. To Swann he
said, "Intervene. Stop that. If they get the notion they can hold us up
we'll have nothing but trouble from here on. Get them!"

Swann
bared his teeth in a ferocious grin and buttoned for a report on the current
state. Slatt put him through to Eleven-A squad leader. The trooper came through
sounding disgusted.

"We
made a few small gains at first with max stun-power, but in the last two
hours—nothing! This is the damndest kind of place to get your back covered
without risk. No usable cover at all. Their building materials are all of some
land of compacted powder-brick, fragile as hell. No guts in it. A man can punch
his way through easily. The Scarts have whipped up some land of screen,
body-screen of wire-mesh with a trailing earth, so that it shorts out most of
the stun-bolt kick. They still feel it. We can hear them holler and see them
run, but we can't knock them down!"

"How do they hit
back?" Swann wanted to know..

"A
new gadget, a lulu! It's a thing something like a weld-, ing-torch with a
ten-foot flame hot enough to melt sheet alloy. And they have it out on the end
of a telescopic rod, up to thirty feetl So far as we can tell, there's thirty
or thirty-five of them still going, and they all have one!"

A
report was ready from the Four-B squad leader, and his tale was of a similar
hazard. Again there were the flanged-up body screens to cancel out the
stun-bolts, and a lively resistance of all kinds of irritations, ranging from
corrosive and odoriferous sprays to odd and obviously spur-of-the-moment
incendiary and explosive projectiles.

"No
more laser-burners, though," the leader declared, "because they
don't have power anymore. We cut their gas supply." He sounded aggrieved.
Swann turned his fierce grin on Bragan.

"You called the turn, all right. These
people are quick on the draw. Stiffnecked too. They must know they haven't a
prayer, but they keep right on. They must be thinking we are slow. So we will
change that right now."

Bragan nodded. This was the book according to
Zorgan. A valiant and resourceful slave is worth much, but a conceited one is
dangerous. He saw Swann link-in his microphone with Slatt and the two
squad-leaders, and order:

"Up
one stage. Cancel stunners, switch to ultra-sonics, dazzlers and peace-gas
where indicated. Liquidate those two areas fast. Crab as many good-condition
prisoners as possible!" He snapped the switches over and murmured,
"Anybody want to bet they don't cook up a fast defense against these in a
hurry?" He got no takers, and that was his loss, because his estimate was
accurate. Within the hour those two red spots had been eliminated from the
battle-board, and the rest of the action was strictly routine.

Bragan
listened detachedly to the constant stream of reports and information coming
in, watched it being broken down and fed into the system, to reappear as
computational symbols on the big board. Data was coming in too from the other
five ships. With minor variations, the pattern was the same in all cases. The
invaders had barreled through with only fractional losses, no more than a score
of men injured and out of action all told. And about three times that number
of casualties on the opposing side.
Great
strength
can
be gentle,
he
thought, listening to sunset watches being set up and the routine thousand and
one items of settling in. But, for all the many hundreds of captives and
hostages, again the routine was the same. No comment. He scowled at that. It
was all wrong.

A
peaceful planet, with no history of war at all and no experience of punitive
weapons or techniques, such a planet should be helpless. Defenseless. By all
accounts they
had
been. But now? Their reactions were lighting
fast, their ingenuity enormous, and they were seemingly immune to panic or
fear. And he just did not believe it. There had to be some bitter reason why
all
the Scartanni hostages, without exception, stubbornly refused to talk,
or bend. They were highly intelligent, therefore they must know what the score
was.

"They are waiting for something,"
he mused, "anything, waiting for—what? Any man who refuses to give up in
the face of certain destruction must have something to prop his hopes on. But
what?"

Swann,
as always, had a simple answer. "It's shockl" he explained in the
tone of a man who firmly believes all psycho-sociology is no more than applied
common sense. "Stands to reason, doesn't it? What else would you expect?
We fall on them out of a clear blue sky, like nothing they have ever seen before,
and we smother them. They try to kick back-naturally—and we smack them down
good and hard. So they fold up in shock. Obvious. We give them a night to sleep
on it and think it over, and you'll see, in the morning they will start falling
apart at the seams!"

Bragan didn't argue. It wouldn't have
achieved anything except bad feeling from Swann. In any case, it was no part of
his task to delegate the thinking on decisions. Those problems were his own
and he kept them to himself. It was
a
lonely
task, but the man at the top is always lonely.

"We will post watches," he said,
all at once. "Karsh, put me down for the middle trick, from midnight to
four. I have some work to do with the computer."

"Watches?
Us?" Karsh opened his eyes wide for a moment then shrugged. "All
right. I have some data I'd like to break down myself. That will keep me till
midnight. Mike, you're elected from four in the morning."

Bragan
pushed back his seat before the bickering could begin and announced: "I'm
going topside to have a look at some fresh air. I'll be back in time to take
over." He stretched wearily then made his way up through the many ramps of
deck levels to the topside blister. Here, from under a glass-ite bowl-roof he
saw the evening sky just darkening into sunset. The one-man lookout stiffened
into attention at sight of him, made a salute, then relaxed again, visibly
bored. That, Bragan thought, symbolized the whole operation. Straightforward
routine, and easy. Too easy. But what else would anyone expect, here? One planet,
unified in culture and speech, with no internal factions or nationalism. And no
space-travel. With that sky, why would they bother? He stared up at it now as
dusk marched across it. There was a great glow-mass of silver just setting, and
another just rising over his shoulder. Between them, like a scarf of light
flung across the purple dusk, was the trail of dust, glowing softly. A pathway
of silver across the sky. He wondered why there was no mention of it in the
Scartan speech? One would have expected a complex and involved mythology
employing these great sky-wonders.

And
they were wonders. Now with the great red lamp of Betelguese on one edge of the
ribbon of fire, it shimmered with ghost-rainbows in pastel tints, and was
silvered bright under the bow by the harsh white glare of the beacon of Rigel.
Bragan's stare settled on Rigel and he forgot about beauty. There, in that
direction and beyond, lay the territory of Zorgan. The dread hosts, humanoid
outwardly, but totally and utterly dedicated to one end, one drive. To grow and
spread and take. To find, and strike, and overthrow, and take. Zorgan the
mighty, the inflexible, the irresistible, the eventual rulers of the whole
Galaxy. It was in their history.

Once, long ago, by some freak of evolution, a
small race of people on a small planet had grown great in wisdom and
understanding, just for one glorious moment in time. They had been wise and
peaceful. They had passed away, leaving their heritage of wisdom to a different
kind of people altogether. Knowledge is impersonal, is good or bad depending
on who uses it. Zeeral left knowledge. Zorgan applied it. And now Zorgan was a
wide-flung fringe of might that enclosed and fed on a hundred or more
planetary systems like a virus on a body. But a cunning virus, that took care
to keep the body alive to provide sustenance.

Bragan shivered and withdrew his attention
from such somber thoughts, narrowing down to the immediate objective. The gray
masses of Scopa lay all around him, dark bulks in the twilight. Scartanni
architecture, he thought, peering at it. There was a school of thought that
maintained you could deduce a lot about a people by studying the way they
built. Bragan knew that down under his feet, in the systems computer, was a
great mass of data bits about these people. And out there were their artifacts.

But understanding—that was something else
again, something utterly beyond a computer. A machine, no matter how
sophisticated, cannot achieve understanding. No man living could hope to learn
more than ten million statements in a lifetime. A good computer could start
with that many in its store and go on to accumulate ten times as many, but it
could never achieve understanding. Only a man could do that, and he could be
wrong.

Bragan
shivered again. From his memory came a line of wisdom from an ancient writer,
"They well deserve to have, that know the strongest and the surest way to
get." It might well be true, but his memory also served up the line, from
the same source. "The Hon thrusteth forth his paw and wounds the earth, if
nothing else, with rage to be o'er-powered." That was the reaction to be
expected, and for which he was prepared. But the Scartanni were not reacting to
plan. They had hit back, true, at first. But now? Were they going to stay
buttoned up and stubborn? He peered again at the shadowy skyline of the city.
Nothing big here. Plenty of clean lines and even some grace, but the emphasis
seemed to be on open spaces and room to move. Hardly a city at all, by his
terms. It was too scattered. For a moment the wisp of an idea tickled the back
of his mind, the soft-fingered hint of understanding, and he made himself
not
concentrate on it, hoping to let it come through by itself from some
unconscious level. Then he became aware of sound.

It
was a far-away muttering, just audible, but it grew louder swiftly. He lifted
his head. So did the lookout. Both men stared for the space of a breath, then
the lookout cursed feelingly.

"Ask you to get below, sir, fast. That's
aircraft—a whole flock of them!" Bragan dived for the down-ladder. Before
he had gone down one deck the klaxons were blaring. By the time he had regained
his seat in the master control the entire ship was humming softly to the
sixty-cycle alternation of the multi-megagauss screens that were encircling it.
Those screens of energy, dense enough to lean on, were in many layers, yet they
built up and broke down sixty times a second, thus giving synchronized passage
to the power-beams from the collector-dishes and the energy supplies going out
to the troopers in the field. Those men would hardly notice the switch from
D.C. to A.C. unless they had occasion to revert to stunners, where the
difference in sound was easily recognizable. Karsh grinned wryly as Bragan fell
into his seat