by M J Engh
“Morning, Franklin. I suspect that they’ll be out of your school before long.”
“Why?”
“A detachment of these fellows is taking over the Court House. I should imagine that that will be their new headquarters.”
“I hope so.” As a matter of fact, I hoped not. If we had to have them at all, I was just as glad to have their pulse right under my fingers.
“Incidentally,” he added after a minute, “I assume you know who these are.”
One time a news item in the Kraft County Register-Blade had referred to Fred Gonderling as a “rising young attorney,” and he had been almighty pleased. Personally, I wasn’t exactly sure how far he would rise, or would have risen. He was a spruce little fellow, intelligent and well-spoken; but it had always seemed to me that he was more interested in making a good show than in doing a good job. He was just at the point in his career of deciding whether he’d rather grow up to be a big frog in Kraftsville’s puddle or go seek his fortune someplace else. I’d had my try at that when I was his age and found out I could make a lot more money in the city, and aim for a lot bigger position, but I’d also found out I didn’t want it—not at the price of being cut off from the people I understood and the things I believed in. And till Arslan turned up, I never doubted I’d made the right bet. “Invaders,” I said sourly.
“They’re Russians.”
“Russians!”
“You bet they are. I remember that uniform from TV. And I’ve heard Russian. I took it in college.”
“Can you tell what they say?”
He shook his head shamefacedly. “They talk too fast for me. To tell the truth, I don’t remember it that well. But it’s Russian, all right.”
They camped on the fairground. They took over the existing structures, and next day they went right to work building more, with lumber from the local lumber yards. Fred Gonderling’s prediction was dead wrong. The Russian detachment stayed in the Court House just long enough to seal it up pretty thoroughly—every window barred, and every door locked. Colonel Nizam and his boys had already nosed through the county records and carried off heaven knew what to his den in Frieda Althrop’s house. Every citizen in the county must have been recorded in some form or another in the Court House. And it did occur to me that one way to find out what Nizam considered interesting enough to take would be to have a look at what he’d left.
The high school stood empty, but not for long. On the heels of the Russians, a regular little truck convoy delivered the new occupants to the door. They were girls—not women, girls; girls in their teens. As well as you could judge from a distance, they were American, and scared stiff. “But what—” Luella began, when I told her about it, and stopped.
“I’m afraid that tells us what happens to about half the high-school student body when Arslan moves in.”
Maybe it was his version of a sense of decency that prompted him to stock his brothel with out-of-county girls. More likely it was his idea of how to avoid trouble. And if you started from the premise that there had to be a brothel and that it had to be staffed with conscripted American high-school girls, that was about as unprovocative a way as you could find to do it.
There was a Russian captain in charge at the high school and another one in charge of the new stable they were building on the little stretch of dirt road that connected the Morrisville road with the highway. There were plenty of horses in the county. Nobody with a field to plow lacked a tractor, but Kraft County didn’t let go of anything in a hurry; there were still work horses to pull an occasional mudboat or work in the woods or brush where anything on wheels or tracks would look silly. There were mules—in fact, there were still a few people proud of their wagon mules; and there were enough saddle horses to stock a couple of dude ranches. Arslan was rounding them all up.
He might have international affairs on his mind, but his hands would have made him a pretty good farmer. He not only knew how to pick a good horse, he knew how to handle one. Every decent saddle horse in the district was brought around for his personal inspection. The really good stock went to the Russian camp. The others were returned to their owners. He saved out a few—ultimately four—for himself and had the storage shed behind my house cleared out, built a little longer, and fitted up to stable them. He didn’t give the same individual attention to the work horses and mules, which meant that people with enough sense were able to save some of their good stock. Even so, the Turkistanis and Russians didn’t seem to be any more fools than other people, and they ended up with a pretty good stable.
“I won’t say this is the only way to look at it,” Fred Gonderling said, hedging his bets as if he had something to lose, “but it’s one way: we only have Arslan’s word for anything outside the district.” At any rate, it was a pretty good seal. There was a half-mile-wide sanitary cordon all around the perimeter. The people who lived there had been moved out—“chased out” would be more accurate—and a mixed guard of Russians and Turkistanis had moved in. Any citizen sighted within that border area was liable to be shot on sight. And since the half-mile limit wasn’t very clearly defined by any landmarks for most of its length, people generally chose to be on the safe side and gave it a wide berth.
On the other hand, saying we had to take Arslan’s word for everything was a little bit like saying we’d had to take the Weather Bureau’s word for the weather. Maybe we didn’t get explicit information from outside the district, but we got evidence, even if it was mostly negative—just as no cordon of armed foreigners could keep the clouds from sailing across the border. And any time you were tempted to think that it was somehow a fake, that the normal United States existed right over there on the other side of the boundary, you came smack up against the fact of what didn’t come across.
We still had radios, and nobody was broadcasting any jamming signals. After dark in the old days—meaning two weeks ago—you could pick up stations as far away as Canada and Mexico, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City. Now there was nothing, not even the EBS—nothing except on shortwave, where we listened in on Arslan’s business, and might have learned God only knew what, if any of us had understood Russian or Turkistani. I made a special effort to locate the Cuban propaganda station we used to hear sometimes. There wasn’t a sign of it. TV screens showed nothing at all, except some variegated static.
Then there were the maps. Arslan was forever on the move, shuttling up and downstairs, in and out of the house, to school, to Nizam’s, to the stable, out of the district, and back to my house every time. And the maps followed him. There always seemed to be a messenger trotting up with another bunch of them. Arslan labored over those maps morning and night, brooding, scribbling, comparing, like a boy who’d just discovered the new world of geography. And since he did a good deal of it on my coffee table, it didn’t take the CIA to figure out that Kraftsville was being turned into a nerve center for some intercontinental operation. Which was all very interesting, of course; but for right now the question of what Arslan and his army were doing in America and the rest of the world had to take a back seat—pretty far back—to the question of what they were going to do in Kraftsville.
Arslan was as good, or as bad, as his word. The interpreter he provided was a pleasant-faced, serious-faced young lieutenant with a mustache, whose name I never did exactly catch—something that started with a sharp “Z” sound. He escorted me silently to Frieda’s—Nizam’s—wearing a peculiar strained look all the way. I didn’t know enough yet to recognize it as the expression of a frustrated longing to practice English small talk.
The big front room was being transformed into Colonel Nizam’s office, though a burrow would have been more appropriate. He looked hunched and blinking, at his desk in the middle of that spacious parlor. The big windows let in too much light, even in December, and opened too many walls. He was doing what he could to make himself a homey atmosphere, though. Filing cabinets stood among Frieda’s overstuffed divans and shelves of bric-a-brac. There were three subsidiary d
esks, all busy. Two soldiers in a corner were putting a just-uncrated tape recorder through its paces. A crew of half a dozen or so seemed to be operating on the house wiring, yelling at each other up and down the big staircase that climbed from the back of the room. A piece of the wall was knocked open there, and thick black electrical cords trailed around the floor and up the stairs like endless leeches, barely alive enough to wriggle and suck.
We stood in front of Nizam’s desk, observed but not acknowledged, till he deigned to look up. My polite little lieutenant saluted—not very snappily, I thought—and presented me. Colonel Nizam’s eyes scraped over my face like claws. If I’d known where we were going, I’d have had one of my stomach pills before we started, or maybe two. Then he lowered his eyes to his deskful of papers and uttered a quantity of Turkistani in an unencouraging voice. The lieutenant translated, with about as much feeling for the original as a sixth-grader reading Shakespeare: “Mr. Bond, will you please supply all the information about the conditions of District Three-Two-Eight-One?”
“What?” I said blankly. The words registered, but they didn’t mean anything. He repeated them. “I don’t know what District 3281 is. I certainly can’t supply all the information about it.” Not that I’d undertaken to supply anybody with anything.
Lieutenant Z looked apologetic and surprised and a little uncertain—running over his English lessons in his mind to see if he’d forgotten anything vital. He made a little circular gesture with his hand, forefinger pointing down. “District 3281 is this district,” he said.
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 included mo
st 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.”