John Rackham (6 page)

"All right," he nodded. "Now
I
know more about you than I did before. You claim not to fear death. It
is a big claim and death can come in many ways. We shall see how true the claim
is. Perhaps we can find some way to make you bend, to change your mind. I ask
you to think of this. You are a conquered people, whether you realize it yet or
not In the end you will come to know it, and admit it. It lays within your
power to choose whether the lesson is hard or easy. Last night some forty of
your aircraft, with crews, were destroyed before you learned you could not hurt
us. You were warned. That loss was unnecessary. It is no desire on the part of Zorgan
to inflict unnecessary suffering or destruction, to kill without reason. That
is not the Zorgan way. But what we take we hold, even if it means reducing
every city on the surface and killing every last Scartanni. Is that
understood?"

"Why
tell me?" Mordin retorted evenly. Tell the people. You talk large words,
Bragan of Zorgan. Tell the people!"

"I
will. By this time tomorrow I will have something else to tell them. This talk
is finished." He turned abrupdy away, hooking the lieutenant with a
gesture.

In a voice amply loud
enough for the prisoners to hear he said, "No more food and drink for
them. Nothing. Let them go hungry and thirsty for a while and see what comes of
their stubborn manner."

"You mean that?" the lieutenant
murmured. "No grub, nothing?"

"They look well-fed to me. A bit of
starvation won't hurt. Now, on the matter of this sub-headquarters. This
building is useless. They all are, for our purposes. Move out, out there into
the square."

"I'd already begun to think something of
the kind myself, sir. Stone walls do not
a
prison
make, not this kind anyway."

"Yes. Makes you wonder what the devil
the Scartanni do with their jailbirds. Maybe they don't have any. Anyway,
you'll have to build, out in the square. You can make
a
start right away, laying out the site-plan. You'll need ample space for
accommodations, and a big stockade, a
big
one.
It must be escape-proof and requiring the minimum guard. You know the kind. I'm
going back to the ship and arrange for personnel to be sent out to help. And
the equipment. Mark me, nowl I want that stockade big enough to hold
a
lot of prisoners. A lot!"

Bragan got back to the ship to find Karsh and
Swann keenly interested in how he had managed. They had been studying data from
the other ships and had begun to realize just how twisted the situation was.
They listened as he gave them the gist of his interview with Mordin.

Karsh commented, "It's
a
tough one. These laddies don't bend!"

"It's a bluff!" Swann offered.
"It's got to be. Nobody holds his life as cheap as all that. Still less
his wife's. And that guff about him not being a boss won't work either. They
are organized, we've seen that, and you can't have organization without
somebody in charge. So it's a bluff!"

"If it is," Bragan pointed out
coldly, "we are going to have a hell of a time calling it. I want you two
to understand exactly what the position is, because the next and most logical
step won't be pleasant, and you need to know why it's necessary. So think of
this. What good are reprisals, unless they are known? I can threaten Mordin, or
others. I can even line him and a lot more up against a wall and have them all
shot. But what does that achieve, if nobody sees it done?"

Out of a thoughtful silence Karsh muttered,
"If only they hadn't all lit out that way I"

"It raises two points," Bragan
said. "First, that they really did go, and thus very efficientiy got
themselves out from under our thumb and out of our reach, not caring one damn
about any hostages. That makes Mordin's claim sound valid, doesn't it?" He
eyed his companions keenly, then went on.

"Second, let's look at that fact again.
Half a million people picked up and went, in a few hours, in the dark, and
left never so much as a trace, nor made a sound. Very nice teamwork. Nobody is
going to convince me that such a trick was done on the spur of the moment. That
took organizationl'*

"Checks with all the other ships,"
Karsh whispered, scratching his jaw. "What do we do?"

Bragan scowled as he reviewed his own mind.
"We adjust. We are up against a wily and ingenious opposition. They are
fighting us not with weapons, or force, because they haven't much of either,
but with brains, intelligence, and imagination. So we have to hit them on that
level. And here's how. We will first remove all sub-headquarters establishments
out of their buildings and into our own. And each sub-station will have a
stockade that needs no guarding, or at most just one man on patrol. A big
stockade."

"For the hostages," Karsh nodded.
"That makes sense. We can't tie up our troopers just keeping watch on
balky prisoners. But—"

Bragan halted with a palm. "Then we rum
the prisoners loose into the stockade. Solid stone, fused smooth, with no
doors. We gas them first, strip them right down to the skin. And leave them. We
also wire each stockade with micro-pickups and feed the noise into the
Scartanni.network. Then slammer-patrols go out and quarter the countryside and
pick up more and more prisoners. Anybody they can grab. And we strip them, too,
and dump them in the stockades. And leave them. No food, no water, no shelter,
no clothes—and no out, either. And we will see just how long the Scartanni can
hold out."

Swann's face was a study in unbelief.
"You can't
do
that!" he protested. "Women and
kids, starving?"

"You
seem to forget"—Bragan stared him down—"that I am in charge here. I
can do it. My job is to take, break and remake this planet, and that is exactly
what I am going to do. The first thing is to show the Scartanni so there can be
no doubt, that they haven't got a chance, that we are master here."

"But condemning women
and kids to starve!"

"Fool!
I'm
not starving them. I am not going to do a thing to them except confine
them behind walls. If the rest of the Scartanni want to feed their friends, I
won't stop them. Let them come, and bring food. They will be welcomed. That is
what I intend to tell them, on their own radio. They have the intelligence, and
the imagination, to take it from there."

IV

B
ragan
went
on the Scartanni air
at noon, Stopa-time. Activities in the wake of his talk with Mordin had been
fast and efficient and he was able to talk over the radio in the sense, mostly,
of "this has been done." A people with fast reactions ought to
appreciate just how fast he had reacted in his turn. He wasted no time in
elaboration.

After
introducing himself as before, as the Supreme Executive on the planet, he told
them, "I leam that as a people you do not have any great respect for those
in authority over you and that you do not feel obliged to obey their orders.
That attitude will change. How quickly it changes will depend on you. At this
moment Zorgan holds some seven thousand of you prisoner.
From
this moment all prisoners will be held in open stockades, without food,
water, shelter or clothing of any kind. If they cry out, or complain, or appeal
to you in any way, you will be able to hear them. I cannot make you listen, but
I can tell you now that they will remain thus until they die of hunger and
exposure, or until you return to your places, until you come to feed them and
save them. Their fate is in your hands. The decision is up to you. Make it soon!"

He could keep his voice calm on the radio, or
when talking to his two colleagues, and no one would have guessed from his
exterior that he was anything but calm. Yet it was part of his training to be
sensitive to moods, and he felt the change in mood, not only of his immediate
colleagues, but of all the men under his charge. Karsh had plenty of technical
detail to busy him and was not so obviously bothered, but Swann made a poor
secret of his feeling that this was
not
the
way of a fighting man. Risk and danger, the cut and thrust of action, yes. But
the slow wait-out of starvation was not to his way of thinking at all.

Bragan knew exactly what was wrong. This was
typical of the fighting man-in-the-field at any time. Muscle-heads,
substituting action for thinking. Countless painful and disastrous experiments
in the past had demonstrated beyond all doubt that the mentality that is
prepared to gamble life and limb in physical combat with an enemy is
not
the mentality to handle dispassionate decisions affecting abstractions
like the fate of nations. Bragan knew that his men were uneasy, and he knew
why, but he could do nothing about it.

He
couldn't even corner his own companions and explain to them, to say to them,
"Look here—you feel rotten about what is being done simply because it is
immediate, and deliberate. That's natural. But I have to think ahead. A few
thousand people now, feeling the pangs, and you can see and hear them. But
think what will inevitably happen if we fail, here and now.
That
will be a disaster a hundred times more horrible, and you'll be the prime
actors in itl" He couldn't explain, and even if he had, it would have
made little difference. No abstract future has half the impact of the here and
now.

That
was a long day, and he spent a very poor night, his second with little sleep.
At breakfast the next morning the atmosphere was bleak. The first
skimmer-parties of raiders were due out in an hour. All night, at intervals of
an hour, the Scartanni radio had carried a tape of his grim message, with the
time between given over to noises from the stockades. The other ships, all
over Scarta, had duplicated this pattern. Back from the radio-network, from
Scarta, came nothing at all, not a sound. It was to be a war of nerves, and
Bragan felt confident his own were tougher than the opposition.
His
problem was his own men. If they failed him he was done. That was one
eventuality not covered by the fabulous Zorgan technique.

He
kept a sharp eye on his breakfast companions. Swann was openly restive and
truculent in manner, but not to the point yet of open defiance. Karsh, solid
and stolid, was harder to read but he looked unhappy. Bragan began to feel a
sense of impending doom. That, or something was due to break soon. By the time
he had chewed his way through an untasted breakfast he was in the mood to try anything
rather than just wait.

He radioed a warning to the stockade, asked
them to have Mordin hauled out and brought to the original meeting place. Then
he went and got himself into body-armor again, took a skimmer, driving it
himself this time, and went once more to the City Hall. Arriving there, he
dismissed the trooper who stood guard over the prisoner.

"The
man is securely bound," he snapped, "and helpless. I am in no need of
protection from him."

Mordin
stood as sturdy and unbowed as ever, still as watchfully blank, making no
effort to strain against the cables that held him. Naked he looked somehow more
powerful than before. Bragan glared at him grimly.

"You
are a strange people, Mordin. Would you all rather die than submit? All of
you?"

"The
question is without meaning." Mordin showed his teeth in what could have
been a grin. "Submit to what?"

"To
me. To my troops, my superior strength, my orders, my wishes. To Zorgan
I"
This time Mordin showed
some sign of deep thought, and bewilderment.

"You
know very little of us, Bragan of Zorgan. I have thought much on what you said
before, trying to understand. It seems we Scartanni do not think the way you
do. I accept orders and commands from no man, ever. Nor does any man look to me
for orders, nor would he take them. We do not tell each other what to do. It is
not the way we do things."

"Rubbishl"
Brayan barked at him impatiently. "You speak nonsense. You have here a
city, and a culture. There are many of you and you work together. You are
organized into one people. And where that happens there must be a set of rules,
a plan of some kind. There must be those who give orders and those who carry
them out. What other way is there of doing it?"

Mordin looked even more bewildered now.
"We do not work like that," he declared, as thoughtfully as if this
were some abstract debate. "I can see it would be possible to do things in
that fashion, but it is not our way. If I wish to do something, I think about
it first, then, if I so decide, I do it." He sounded like someone giving
lessons to a child.