“All right,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
Cal went back to his hammock and climbed in. Beside him, Wajeck, the Lieutenant officering B Section, was lying on his back on his hammock, gazing at the ceiling ten inches away.
His hairy-backed hands were gripping the edges of his hammock.
“Think of six beautiful women,” Cal said to him.
“I’m all right,” said Wajeck, not taking his eyes off the ceiling. “I’m just not sleepy.”
They made their first wave landing thirteen hours later, the assault glider that carried Cal along with A and B Sections screaming in at five hundred feet of altitude to eject them right and left like tossed popcorn. Cal cut wide in his shoulder jets with a short burst and slid in to earth under a tree so like a terran cottonwood it was hard to tell the difference. The trees on windy hillsides on Lehaunan had been warped and strangely-twisted like high-mountain conifers. On the world of the Griella, there had been no true trees. Only a sort of large bush. But here the trees were like trees and the cut-up rocky country all around and between them greened with a heavy moss that almost resembled grass.
Cal jettisoned his jets and checked his wrist scope. All the men of the two sections were down without trouble and already moving in on the red dot which marked the location of the senior Section Commander. That would be Walk. Cal took a bearing and moved, too.
He was two-thirds of the way to the twenty-foot-high cluster of rock where the red dot showed, when the first Paumons seeker torp came over the small hill at his left. It flashed black for a moment in his vision like a gnat flying right into his eye. And then the rocks he was headed for went up in a graceful, vase-shaped gout of brown earth and debris.
“Spread out! Spread out!” yelled Cal automatically. “Torps.”
He had gone down without thinking at the black flicker in his vision. Now he rose and ran, changing direction, for the rocks. When he got there, he found a crater, five dead men, a boy with one leg blown off, and Lieutenant Wajeck. Wajeck was sitting up against a rock, apparently unhurt, but hugging himself as if he were cold.
“You all right?” said Cal to Wajeck. He got no answer. Cal turned to the boy with his leg off and got a shot into him and a tourniquet around the pressure point just inside the midthigh. He set the tourniquet to loosen at fifteen minute intervals—the boy was out cold—and turned to Wajeck.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said, and pulled at the folded arms.
“Oh, God,” said Wajeck, “I knew it. Right in the middle. I knew it, I knew it.”
Cal got the arms apart and there was blood soaking through all over the stomach area of Wajeck’s coveralls. There was a slit in the cloth like a torp fragment might make. Cal put his fingers in it, tore it wide, and looked inside. It was a bad hole. He got a patch on it and gave the other man a shot, but Wajeck’s face was already beginning to go pinched and strange. Another torp came suddenly over the hills and Cal jerked Wajeck down with him to the ground, as the explosion went off not fifty yards from them.
“Oh, God,” said Wajeck, quite plainly and clearly in Cal’s ear as they lay on the ground together. “I knew it. I was sure. I knew it.”
“Where’s Walk?” said Cal. Another torp went off to their right.
“They switched him to Kaluba’s glider. Last minute. He didn’t come down with us. Oh, God...”
“Where’re your Section Leaders?”
“There. There. Squad men, too—” Wajeck twitched a hand and wrist toward the hole the torp had left and the dead bodies in and about it. “I told them to close when we ejected. So we’d come down ready to organize.”
Cal stared along six inches of dirt at Wajeck’s profile, staring up at the cloudless sky.
“Didn’t you learn—” Cal broke off. “Somebody’s got to get these men out of here. You must have a non-com somewhere still out there.”
“No one. No one,” said Wajeck’s lips to the sky. They stopped suddenly. Jerkily his head turned sideways. He looked along the ground into Cal’s eyes.
“You,” he said. “You know what to do. Take over, for God’s sake. You got to take over, Cal. Right now.”
There was a shriek and a roar. A torp exploded so close to them it brought dirt raining down about them. The boy with the leg off had just come to, and he was hit again. He began screaming.
Chapter Ten
The men were dying, and someone was weeping. Looking around under the thunder and ground shake of the nearby exploding torps, Cal saw the one who wept was the boy with his leg off. He was lying on his back looking at the sky and tears were running out of the comers of his eyes, back into the blond sideburns in front of his ears. Cal looked back at Wajeck, who was trying to get the command scope off his wrist. But his fingers were already too weak to stretch the expansion band over his hand and the scope kept slipping back to his wrist.
“You got to!”
“I can’t,” said Cal. “Kaluba wasn’t going to let me come on this drop because he figured I’d do something like that. It’s my orders.”
“You gut,” said Wajeck, Still fumbling like a baby with the expansion band. “You don’t care about these men; you only care about keeping your uniform. Nobody lives by orders all the way,you know that.” He was still fumbling with the scope band.“I’m going to make you do it, you lousy gut.”
“Quit wearing yourself out,” said Cal. He pulled the arm with the scope out of Wajeck’s weak grasp of the other hand,and lifted arm, scope and all to his lips. He pressed the talk button. “All right, men,” he said into it, “this is Lieutenant Truant. Lieutenant Wajeck is out of action, and so are all the non-coms. I’m a Contacts Officer and you know I can’t takeover. You need somebody in here to take over the command scope. I’ll help all I can once one of you gets here. But that’s my limit. Those torps’ll have us all in another ten minutes, unless one of you forgets all he ever learned about not volunteering. Somebody better make up his mind and get in here fast.”
For a moment there were no explosions. In the unusual silence that suddenly seemed all wrong, Cal looked about him. There were two or three large holes in the open space around him, but it looked like very little damage, just by itself. He had to re-member that the seeker mechanism on the torps would almost certainly have found at least one man where every hole was now.
An assault soldier dodged out from behind a tree about eighty yards away and began running towards the rocks where Cal lay. Another broke cover off to the left about the same time, but, seeing the first ahead of him, dodged back again.
Cal counted the seconds, watching the man come on. But nothing happened. Only, the second after the man threw himself down beside Cal and Wajeck, a torp flitted over the hilltop and exploded to their left.
The man was in his thirties, small, with a sort of hazelnut-shaped face. Cal searched his memory.
“Mahauni?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said Mahauni. “What do I do?”
“What you think you ought to do,” said Cal. “It’s your show.”
“Yes, sir. What would you do?”
“Get the men on the move. Keep them at least fifty feet apart.” Cal pointed at the command scope on Wajeck’s wrist. In a larger circle around the unit dots were the battalion signals,clustered now to their west. The two Sections under Wajeck had come down in this little area with a low, open hill to their east, scattered trees and, to the west, rising clusters of trees to a wooden horizon. Beyond that, about eight miles off, was battalion command.
“Perimeter’s about five miles,” said Cal. “When I was a soldier they had anti-torp defenses along battalion perimeters. I’ll take the Lieutenant. You take the kid, there.”
“Right.” said Mahauni. He moved like an old hand, stripping the command scope off Wajeck’s wrist and talking into it. He gave commands as if he might have been a Section Leader once. Or better.
“Ready to move,” he said to Cal finally, the command scope now on his own thin, brown wrist.
; They moved. The rest of it was simply horribly hard work,running and climbing with a wounded man apiece on their backs,shouting commands at the rest of the two Sections of men, and being lucky when the torps came over. They made it over the hill and safely at last within battalion defenses, with fifty-three men left out of a hundred and eighty-one that had been dropped.
By the evening of the day of the first drops, waves one, two and three of the Initial Assault Team were down on the Paumons ground, and regrouped. They formed a curving, staggered line of battalion fronts, arching around three Paumons cities and several hundred small settlements. The settlements were essentially housing centers, the cities essentially factory complexes for Paumons’ heavy industry, which here was supplied by power from volcanic taps.
Cal, having checked in with Kaluba, had received permission to leave for a few hours and make contact with his own Contacts Service Command, for instructions. His supplementary and unannounced reason was to tell his story of the drop to someone like Scoby (who was in Contacts Service Command, along on the Expedition) before any other version of it should reach him.He had no idea where C.S. Command Headquarters was so he hunted up Expedition Command, where he would be able to get directions. He found it just a little before sunset—a camouflaged cluster of domes in a little clearing surrounded by tall trees of a cottonwood-like variety.
“Contacts Service HQ?” he asked a Wing Section who was passing between the domes.
“Check with the liaison desk, Command HQ, Dome Eight,” said the Wing Section, brusquely, looking only at the Command Service patch on Cal’s breast pocket and not at Cal’s face. He pulled away and hurried off.
Cal found Dome Eight. He stepped through the vibration screen at its entrance and found himself in an outer office with several empty desks and chairs. A door in a thin partition led to an inner office from which the sound of a conversation came. It occurred to Cal belatedly that this would be the time for evening chow. The people belonging to the outer office, including the Liaison Desk Officer, would be off eating. He moved toward the inner office, then checked as he recognized one of the conversing voices as General Harmon’s, the other as Colonel Alt’s. It would hardly do to use the Commanding General of the Expedition and his aide as an information service. Cal took a seat beside the partition to wait for the return of the Liaison Desk Officer.
“—bismuth,” Harmon’s voice sounded thinly through the partition. “Their communications system depends on those thermopiles. We seal off this manufacturing area and they’ve got to come to us. Then we can make other drops. Here, hit them here, Zone Five. Zone Three. Around the planet here, in this mountainous section—Zone Eleven. By the way, we’ll have to watch that spot for mop-up toward the end, Hag. It’s natural country for a regular hornet’s-nest of guerrillas. Put a strong-point outside the mountains under somebody fitted for the work. But don’t overload him with men...”
Cal dismissed the voices and let his thoughts drift off to the subject of Annie. She would be with the Medics main unit, and that, too, would be locatable through the Liaison Desk. But he would not have time after finding Contacts Service HQ and telling his story. . .
“. . . 4th Assault Wing, 91st Combat Engineers,” Alt was saying. Cal came alert with a jerk, hearing his own outfit mentioned. “A couple of sections, I understand.”
“Yes,” said Harmon’s voice. “But outside of a couple of incidents like that, it was a near-perfect drop. Almost too perfect. We’ve got a fifty-year advantage in weapons on these Paumons, and it’s making for too much complacency on our side.”
“The men’ll stiffen up as they get more action,” said Alt.
“No doubt. But will it be soon enough? Soldiers aren’t supposed to regard the enemy with good-humored contempt.They’re supposed to hate ’em, and have a healthy fear of them. Anything else results in a lot of throats being cut the first dark night.”
“I’ll write up a general order.”
“No good, Hag. Half the trouble’s with the Progs. They’re treating us as if we’re halfway civilized, and we’re treating them as if they were. Everybody forgets their fighting force outnumbers ours six hundred to one from a mathematical standpoint. One of these days we’ll wake up to find we’ve half-civilized ourselves into being completely surrounded and defeated.” Harmon broke off suddenly. “I’ve got it.”
“Yes?”
“We’ve got about five hundred prisoners down below Headquarters here, haven’t we?”
“That’s right, General.”
“Pick a town behind our front here—say, this place here. What’s its Prog name? Manaha? Get a good, stiff man and have him march those prisoners there, wounded and all. You understand, Hag?”
There was a slight pause. Cal suddenly sat bolt upright, listening.
“I think so, sir,” came Alt’s voice.
“I’m not going to give any orders. Don’t you, either. Just pick the right man.”
“Yes, sir. I think I know who I can get.”
“Handle that march right, and the word’ll get out fast enough. It’ll stiffen up the Paumons, and the Paumons’ll take care of stiffening up our own boys. That’s what—”
Quickly and quietly, Cal got up and out of the dome. He was in the new darkness of early night among the trees surrounding the Headquarters area, headed downhill, before he slowed. The little breeze among the trees felt abruptly cool on his forehead.
He kept going. The business of telling his story of the drop to Contacts HQ would have to wait, now. He stopped abruptly.He had headed off without thinking of direction. He would have to return at least to the edge of the HQ area to get his bearings.But he did not want to come back into the area by Dome Eight. He turned to his left and began to circle around the base of the hill on which the area was located.
A few moments later he came up against a steel fence. He turned and went down along it. A little ways further on he came out of the trees and saw Paumons standing behind the wire mesh of the fence. These must be the prisoners Harmon had been talking about. They stood silently in little clumps. The sun, Bellatrix, was down, but the western sky was still light. In the dusk what little light there was left glimmered here and there on light patches about the prisoners. The patches were bondages that they had put on the wounded by tearing up their own uniforms—dark green on the outside, and light green on the inside—and using them inside out. They stood silently, but he saw them watching him as he passed. In the dusk their figures were outlines, indistinct. They could have been Lehaunan—or human. He walked on.
“Bunnyrabbit!” said a voice.
The world rocked suddenly. One quick movement. Then it stopped and everything was just the same as it had been a moment before. Cal found he had stopped dead, and his hands were up at his chest, reaching to a harness that was not there. A great chill flowed over him. He turned sharply around.
The dim figures were still there. They did not seem to have moved. A single figure was standing closest to him, back a half a dozen steps, just on the other side of the wire. He went back and looked through the mesh at it. It was a Paumons with a large bandage all over one half of his face. It looked as if he had been badly wounded in the cheek and jaw. He saw the light-colored parts of the Paumons’ eyes glitter at him in the gloom.
The Paumons said something. Cal had been taught the language. If what the Paumans had said had been understandable,he would have understood it. But it was not understandable. The other’s jaw or tongue must have been damaged to the point of producing incomprehensibility. It was a mangled, bawling sound that made no sense. But it was directed at Cal, and there was a feeling behind it that matched the glitter of the eyes. Cal’s ears had metamorphosed it into the recognizable human word.
Cal turned and walked off. After a moment, he stopped, turned and went back, but the prisoner who had spoken to him was no longer at the wire. He looked for a moment at the other motionless shapes, then turned for a final time and went up the slope in the darkness.
The
outer office of Dome Eight was still empty, for which he was grateful. Harmon and Alt were still talking behind the partition. He walked up to the door in the partition, and knocked.
There was a pause inside.
“Who’s that? Come in!” said Alt. Cal opened the door and stepped a half-step into the inner room. There was a desk at which Harmon was sitting, and Alt was standing half-turned toward the door, in front of the desk. There was a further door and, on the walls, maps and schematics.
“Lieutenant Truant, sir,” said Cal. “Contacts Service. I thought I’d better speak to the Colonel. It’s about the Paumons prisoners.”
Alt turned his head a little bit and looked at Cal more directly.
“Prisoners?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the prisoners?”
“I happened to pass the compound where they’re being held,sir.” said Cal. “And some of them spoke to me. You know they gave Contacts trainees the language.”
“I know that,” said Alt. “What about the prisoners?”
“I thought I’d speak to you, Colonel,” said Cal. He looked directly into Alt’s face. “The prisoners seem to think something’s going to be done with them; they’re going to be done away with, or something like that. I thought, as part of elementary Contacts, I might have the Colonel’s permission to speak to them on his behalf and assure them they’ve got nothing to worry about; that they’re going to be well treated.”
Alt stared at him for a moment.
“You did, did you?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
From behind the desk, Cal could see Harmon also looking at him. The General was tilted a little backwards in his chair, and he had been gazing at Cal all this time with no expression on his face except a sort of steady interest.
“Tell me, Lieutenant,” said Alt. “Did you just come in to the outer office, there?”
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