The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (66 page)

The first scattered houses at the edge of the deserted town loomed up in the blackness on either hand. Igor tramped on, grinding his teeth as he remembered.

“Last week,” the President had said heavily, “our eastern neighbor presented us with an ultimatum. Our refusal to negotiate made, our neighbor declared, a peaceful settlement of the dispute impossible. We were therefore informed that unless we yielded the claimed territory without further delay, that a state of war would exist. We were given twelve hours in which to reply.”

The President had seemed to swallow a lump in his throat.

“We are a small nation. Our neighbor is a great one. We have atomic bombs, but so has our neighbor. In a total war, of population against population, we could not hope to survive. So the Council of Ministers has ordered the evacuation of the territory claimed by our neighbor. We will not resist its occupation. But we cannot consent to be absorbed, province by province, until our nation shall cease to exist. We have yielded in this instance, but only to this extent: We will not offer armed resistance to the entry of their troops. We will not expose our cities to bombardment and our population to massacre by a total war. We will not take any action against the cities or the civilian population of our neighbor unless forced to do so in retaliation. We say simply and solely this: that any alien soldier who crosses our borders does so at his peril.”

The President’s address had ended, then, and Igor saw with cynical clarity that the mysterious note on which it closed was masterful. It suggested menace. It suggested a source of confidence which should preclude despair. It gave Igor and his fellow-patriots something to talk about, something to guess about, something to hope about—and it held off revolt until revolt was too late. Now Igor knew that the President’s threat had been as empty of meaning as the nursery rhyme about the west wind that would save one from harm.

The earth about him was empty, now, abandoned to an enemy who would march in and find waving grain-fields and snug cottages and factories and mines and the entire equipment of civilization ready for his enjoyment. There had not even been a removal of machines from the abandoned industrial plant. Only the population had been taken away with what they could carry in their arms. And their live-stock, even to the dogs.

Igor was in the city, now. His footsteps echoed hollowly from the house-fronts on either side. And it was heart-breaking. The city had been emptied so recently that it still had even the smells of occupancy. There was the smell of bread about a bakery, left with unlocked doors. There was an earthy odor of vegetables about a green-grocer’s shop. Its stock was intact, not yet rotten. There were no street-lights, to be sure, nor even the faintest glimmer of a night-light burning in some one comfortable dwelling, but the city seemed more ghostly because of the smells of occupancy than if it had been empty for a hundred years.

Igor fumbled his way to the square in the city’s very heart. There was a statue there, a monument to Paslič, the greatest of the country’s national heroes. It would be a splendidly ironic site from which to broadcast the desolation and the shame of this surrender.

He went to the steps about the statue. He unslung his transmitter from his shoulder. He aligned the unfolded directional antenna with the aid of a tiny, luminous-dial compass. He turned on the transmitter-tubes once more.

Then he heard a sound. Footsteps, furtive and soft. He reached for his pistol. Then he remembered, and bitterness overcame him. A robber? There could be no robbery where all property was abandoned. There could be no murder where there was no law. This was no man’s land. This was the Province of Shame. He said ironically into the darkness:

“Good-evening, friend!”

The footsteps stopped. Silence. Ear-cracking stillness.

“Good-evening, friend!” repeated Igor sarcastically. “You dodged the soldiers, too? We are the only inhabitants of this city, tonight!” The silence continued. Igor said bitterly, “Oh, no need to hide from me! I’m no soldier or policeman! If you’re doing a little looting, more power to you! You might as well steal as the soldiers who’ll come from the east tomorrow. They’ll steal! It’s even patriotic to rob your fellow-countrymen rather than let them do it!”

Stillness. Then an irresolute sound as if someone uneasily shifted his position.

“I’m a broadcaster,” said Igor, in a fine, angry bitterness. “I slipped past the patrols to watch the occupation and broadcast it for the people who’d rather give in than fight. Hm… How’d you like to broadcast? Your voice in every home of what’s left of our country! If you’re a thief, so much the better. You can boast of it, because even a thief has the right to be scornful of the Council of Ministers! Come and talk into my microphone!”

Shuffling, shambling footsteps approaching cautiously. A hoarse, rumbling voice.

“Broadcast, eh?” The figure coughed, and suddenly a brilliant flashlight beam smote upon Igor. “Eh, yes! Y’are a broadcaster. That’s a set a man carries on his back to talk for the broadcasting stations, eh?”

The words were mumbled. The accent was barbarous.

“To be sure,” said Igor, blinking in the light. “And that’s a very fine flashlight. You’ve been looting already. Good for you! What you steal, the enemy won’t get!”

The flashlight went off. Igor felt rather than saw that the figure in the darkness was clothed in the shapeless, bulky garments of a peasant. It rumbled suspiciously:

“You talk—eh—maybe y’are a broadcaster, at that! Who else is with you?”

“I’m alone,” said Igor. “It’s my job to make our fellow citizens ashamed. Want to help? Hm… Any more of you? If there’s a half-dozen or so the lot of you could make a fine record.” Then he said fiercely: “Hah! You’re a patriot in your way, aren’t you?”

The figured mumbled.

“Got all the loot you can carry?” demanded Igor. “Got more hidden? You’ve had hours! Look! If you’ve a few companions, we’ll set fire to this damned town—it’d take half a dozen of us to set it properly alight in enough places—and we’ll broadcast to the Council of Ministers, that we—thieves and peasants—have more courage than our betters and we’ve burnt at least one town so our enemy can’t take it over unharmed and laugh at us for our cowardice! We’ll make the broadcast with the roar of the flames behind our voices!”

The figure rumbled again and came closer. It chuckled. Then the flashlight beam came on again. In the beam and bearing on Igor, a hamlike hand held a pistol.

“Stand up!” snapped a voice which was neither hoarse nor illiterate. “Raise your hands or I shoot!”

Igor caught his breath. The hand’s grip tightened on the pistol. He stood up. He ground his teeth as he felt himself handled by fingers searching him expertly. His pistol was taken away.

“Ah!” said the voice which had changed so remarkably. It sounded satisfied. “One thing more and we’ll talk!”

The flashlight beam shifted to Igor’s transmitter. There was a crashing, crackling sound. The figure of the night stamped on the instrument. It was smashed to utter uselessness. And such fury filled Igor as he had never felt before.

“I see!” he said in a thick voice. “You’re a last patrol hunting for patriots like me, for fear some of us would burn down our towns before letting the enemy take them!”

The voice was amused.

“No, not that.”

More stampings on the already-smashed transmitter. Igor’s hands clenched. Then his breath stopped. He said eagerly:

“Listen! Are you—did the President have something in reserve? Are you—setting an atomic-bomb trap for the enemy? Arranging for the town to blow itself to bits when it’s full of enemy troops?”

The voice chuckled a second time.

“Not that either, Mr. Broadcaster. I’m a spy, if you please. I’m a captain of engineers in the army that’s to march in here in the morning. Your enemy! I parachuted down three hours ago with a platoon of my men, all equipped with Geiger counters and ionization chambers, to look for just such atomic traps. It’s been entertaining to listen to you. As far as I know, you’ll be the only prisoner taken in the occupation movement of our army. Now, face about and march!”

The pistol-muzzle prodded Igor in the back. It urged him on through the darkness.

CHAPTER 2

The dawn came up with a sound that was greater than thunder. There were still lowering, thick, dark clouds overhead. There was a sullen gray lightening of the darkness which was night. There was a dim and angry, red glow low down upon the horizon. Then there was a droning, rumbling, growling sound that seemed to fill all the world. It was plane-engines in greater numbers than Igor had ever dreamed could be heard at once.

The planes were close before he could pick them out against the low-hanging sky. First there were small fighter-planes, driving on at the lowest, impatient speed at which jet-driven planes could stay aloft. There were scouts and light bombers, combat craft, capable of infinite destructiveness against personnel. Then came the big bombers. Huge flying wings that looked like bats against the dark-gray clouds, flaring flame and vapor from their after parts. They came in lines, in massed formations, by dozens and hundreds and it seemed by thousands. Had the sky been light, it would have seemed that they darkened it. They roared and bellowed over the empty city, rigidly spaced and monstrous in size and number and velocity. They swept over and beyond, and others followed them.

Waves of sound filled all the universe. Igor felt the air throb to the deep-toned, hollow roaring. Standing on the upper balcony of the city hall of the deserted city, it seemed to him that he was battered, was pounded at by sheer waves of sound. He was deafened. He was in agony. And still the fighters and the bombers roared on and on and on. There were thousands of them. There was a squadron of the hugest craft for every small single-seater his own nation could send aloft. The smaller craft were literally innumerable. The sky was speckled with them. The air was burdened with the larger ones. There seemed no end to the stream of air-borne might and destructiveness. A nation with such an air-fleet needed no atomic bombs to overwhelm a smaller neighbor. It could smother by sheer weight of numbers…

The noise diminished. The bigger bombers had passed. Only more fighters darted by, higher than the bombers had been, almost in the clouds.

Igor’s captor grinned at him.

“If your army plans any tricks,” he shouted above the deafness the roar of jet-motors had left with both of them, “if your army has any idea of a surprise-attack, our air-fleet alone could take care of it!”

Igor swallowed. There were the two of them upon the high balcony of the abandoned city. The light grew momently stronger, and down in the central square before them his captor’s fellows were comfortably busy. One group had set up a microwave radio, aimed to eastward like a machine-gun. Men with headsets sat beside it, some reading into microphones, some typing busily. Other clumsily-clad figures cooked over an open fire made from the smashed furniture of the city council-room. There were stoves and there was fuel in any number of deserted dwellings, but soldiers have a tradition of destruction. They cooked over a fire of shattered mahogany, and tossed on gilt-framed portraits to make it burn the brighter.

“Our ground-forces aren’t far behind,” Igor’s captor shouted again, bending closer. “You’d better get ready to do some talking! I’ve gotten the devil for smashing your transmitter, but you’ll tell what you know regardless!”

Igor felt whipped by the tumult which had thrashed at him from aloft. But he said fiercely:

“I’ve told you! I’m a civilian! I thought we should fight! I came to make broadcasts for recordings that would be played—”

His captor laughed.

“Nonsense! You’d some trick frequency on that transmitter that would set off a bomb or two after we’d occupied this town! But you won’t do it now! And you’re going to tell all you know! We caught that broadcast by the President of your Council of Ministers! We know of the warning that any soldier who crosses your border does so at his peril! You’re going to tell us what that peril is!”

“It was a bluff!” raged Igor. “The President said that to keep us patriots from revolting and throwing him out of office for surrendering to you!”

The thunder that had come from the east was now a mere faint murmur to westward. The enemy’s air-armada swept on to the frontier. It might or might not stop there. Igor’s flesh crawled at the thought of the devastation that the monstrous fleet could wreak on his country. Without resort to atomic weapons, such a pall of crackling destruction could be laid down in a single raid that his nation would be rendered desolate and helpless. It was helpless now! If that fleet drove insolently on beyond the frontier, there was nothing to stop it. There could be nothing to stop it! If it laid the capital in ruins, if the refugees from this abandoned province had merely left their homes to be massacred in the remnant of their country—Igor’s captor suddenly pointed toward the eastern horizon.

“There we come!” he said zestfully. “You’re a prize, my friend! I don’t believe a word you’ve said, of course,—your President had some trick in mind—but if you don’t know what the trick is you’d better guess it pretty quickly, and you’d better guess right! Our general isn’t soft with men who don’t tell him what he wants to know!”

The dawn had advanced by a little. Clouds still hung all over the earth, but the reddish coloring at the world’s edge had faded, and this was such a gray and dreary morning as was fitting for the shame and perhaps the doom of a small and once-gallant nation.