“Well, yes sir,” said Cal. “I did. There was no one out front,so I took a chance and knocked on your door. I didn’t realize you were busy with the General.”
“That’s quite all right,” said Harmon. Cal turned his head toward the seated man. “Tell me, aren’t you the officer I sent over to see Genera! Scoby, back in Denver?”
“That’s right, General.”
“I thought so,” said Harmon. “I’ve got quite a good memory for certain things.” He sat up straight and businesslike. “Well, Colonel, I think the Lieutenant here should do what he suggests, don’t you? We want to make an early start on good Contacts with the Paumons. Wait outside, will you, Lieutenant? The Colonel will have some more specific orders for you as soon as we’re done here. ”
Cal went out into the outer office and took a chair well away from the partition. He heard the conversation begin again between Harmon and Alt, but the voices were not so loud now and it was not possible to make out the words. After some minutes, the officers and men belonging to the outer office began to come in.
“Did you want to see me, Lieutenant?” asked the Captain at the Liaison Desk—a tall young man with blond hair already veering back at the temples—as he sat down.
“I wanted to locate Contacts HQ,” said Cal. “But Colonel Alt asked me to wait on another matter.”
“Oh,” said the Captain. “Well, Contacts is about three miles west by the Medics, at Grid four-five-seven-zero. I imagine Colonel Alt will be calling you shortly.”
The lights were all turned up in the outer office, now, and the four enlisted men and three officers were all busily at work. Over.the noise of their occupation, Cal heard a door close beyond the^partition wall. A minute or so later, Alt put his head out of the partition door.
“Truant,” he said.
Cal got up and went into the inner office. Alt faced him inside,his legs a little spread apart, his shoulders hunched.
“Lieutenant,” Alt said. “We’re going to get some orders cut for you. You won’t have to go back to your assigned outfit. Those Paumons prisoners you saw are going to be walked to a Prisoner of War center we’re setting up about forty miles from here at a town called Manaha. General Harmon suggested, and I agree, that since POWs generally are handled as a part of Contacts Service business, you might be the very man to manage moving them there. The General wants them there by tomorrow night.We’ll give you four armed enlisted men. You can move out at dawn.”
Chapter Eleven
Nothing happened in a hurry, of course. Cal’s outfit had to be notified, and the Contacts Service HQ, and then his orders had to be printed up. It took several hours and as they were just getting into it, the Liaison Desk Captain, who did not seem to share the popular prejudice against Contacts people, suggested Cal see about food and billeting for the night, sending him over to Officers Quarters. Cal got himself allotted a bunk and served some field rations and coffee. The Duty Officer, a young Lieu-tenant, came in and sat down and had a cup of coffee with him in the empty mess room.
“We’ll roll these Progs up in three months,” said the Duty Officer. “They’ve never been hit like this before. It stuns them;and they just give up. I saw them bringing them in all day today.”
The Lieutenant was wearing the patch of the Administrative Service.
“Yeah,” said Cal. “Can I get some more coffee?”
“Urn’s over there. Help yourself,” said the Lieutenant.
“Of course, they’re aliens. They can’t help it. But it may well be practically a bloodless conquest."
As soon as he had his printed orders, Cal went back down to the compound where the prisoners were. He showed the orders to the Section Leader in charge of guarding them.
“I want to talk to their leader,” said Cal. The Section unlocked the gate and let him in. There was no illumination inside the fence, but they had set up searchlights outside, and the harsh glare of these cast back a sort of bare stage-lighting over the Paumons standing around in little groups inside, Now that it was illuminated, Cal could see the extent of the compound, which was about five hundred feet on the square. The only structures inside it were a sanitation dome, and a small office dome.
“I want to talk to your ranking officer,” said Cal in Paumons, to the figures nearest to him. Without waiting for an answer, he went on into the office dome, which had a table and a few chairs, and sat down behind the table.
After a few minutes the door opened and two unwounded Paumons came in and stood before the desk. At first glance they looked alike as all the others did. But Cal, searching hard for differences, saw that the one facing him on the right was a little taller and stood straighter. The one on the left, without any particular identifiable sign of it, gave an impression of greater age. They both wore the piping on their trousers and jacket battle dress that identified them as officers.
“Sit down,” said Cal in Paumons, indicating two chairs he had arranged on the other side of the desk.
“No,” said the one on the right. “I am General Commander Wantaki. This is my aide, Leader Ola Tain.”
“All right,” said Cal. “I’m the officer who is going to be responsible for moving everybody in this compound to more permanent quarters tomorrow. We will move out at dawn.”
“Everyone?” said Wantaki. “A good quarter of the men here are walking wounded, and there are close to seven sixes of men who cannot walk.”
“That’s why I am talking to you tonight,” said Cal. “It is a very long day’s march to where we are going, even for your well people. But I have my orders and I must carry them out. I will do what I can, but you must all travel. So I tell you now.”
“What good does that do?” said Wantaki harshly.
“Listen,” cautioned his companion, Ola Tain, who had not spoken up until now.
“I suggest you make preparations,” said Cal. “Rig litters and assign those who are well to help the walking wounded. I have already arranged to have litter poles and fabric for the litters and for bandages to be given you.”
“You show an unusual amount of courage to come in here without at least a sidearm,” said Wantaki. “Some of my people, and I do not exclude myself, might not be able to resist the temptation.”
“I belong to a branch of the human army known as the Contacts Service,” said Cal. “The Contacts Service never bears arms or joins in the fighting.”
“They would be well advised to change their ways in the seasons to come,” said Wantaki. “If you supply us with poles and fabric, we will use them. Is that all?”
“That is all,” said Cal. They went out. He himself went out and returned to the gate. The Section Leader of the Guard let him out.
“I’ve made arrangements with Quatermaster to have some litter materials and stuff delivered to the prisoners,” Cal told him. “Let it through to them when it comes.”
He went back to Officers Quarters and turned in to his assigned bunk. He went off to sleep immediately, but several hours later he was awakened by the Duty Officer.
“What’s up?” said Cal thickly. Ugly dark half-remembered shapes were still thronging the back of his brain.
“You were yelling,” said the Duty Officer. “Some kind of a nightmare or something, about rabbits.”
In the pale light of predawn, near the fence, Cal could see the four armed men he had been given to control the five-hundred-odd prisoners on the march. He imagined Alt had personally selected them. Two were youngsters. One had his hair cropped to a stubble and a thin, wide, sharp-looking mouth in a thin face. The other was small and large-eyed. One was of the same type and age as Mahauni, the mulebrain who had taken over command of the outfit under the torps. These were all buck soldiers. There was a non-com, too, a Squadman. He was lanky, black-haired, and tall. He did not call the men to attention as Cal came up, but stayed lounging against the fence above the other three seated on the grass. They were all wearing full harness and weapons.
“You the prisoner guard?” said Cal as
he came up.
“That’s us,” drawled the non-com, not moving, glancing at Cal’s Contacts Service patch.
“What’s your name?” Cal asked him.
“My friends call me Buck,” said the Squadman. Cal waited. “Allen,” said the Squadman.
“All right, Allen,” said Cal, in the same tone of voice. “You report back to your outfit and tell them to send me somebody else. Tell them you impressed me as being sloppy, unreliable and insubordinate, and that I said I couldn’t use you.”
Allen straightened up with a jerk.
“Hey, wait a minute—” he began. But Cal was turning to the other three.
“On your feet,” he said. They scrambled up. Behind him, Cal heard the Squadman talking.
“. . . senior man of the Combat Services gives the orders in the field. You don’t tell me—”
Cal looked around. “I thought I gave you an order,” he said.
“Listen, Lieutenant, I—”
“Get in there,” said Cal, turning back to the three others. “Start counting the prisoners, and see that all the wounded who can’t walk have litters.” They went off.
Cal watched them go down the fence, in through the gate and out of earshot. The Squadman was still talking. He stopped when he saw Cal’s face.
“Listen,” said Cal, holding his voice down. He could feel his arms beginning to shake from the tensed muscles in them. “Listen, soldier. Get one thing clear in that head of yours. You’re here to do what I tell you, and exactly what I tell you in getting these prisoners to Manaha. You can just forget anything else.Never mind rule books or the kind of Contacts Officers you, maybe ran into in the past. Just remember that on the official papers it’s just you and me, all alone on this trip. And if you think your two stripes can play games with these—Cal jabbed a rod-stiff finger at his Lieutenant’s tabs—“just you try it. And I’ll hang your hind end, boy. Remember that. No matter what happens to me, when the dust settles you’re going to find yourself in front of a long table with five officers of the rank of major or above behind it.”
Cal quit talking. He was shaking all over now. He knew Allen could see it, but he didn’t give a damn.
“Well?” he said. Allen was not moving. He stood stiff and stared straight ahead. His face was pale. “All right,” said Cal, almost in a whisper. “I’m going to take you along and you’re going to see that you and those other three do the job they’re supposed to do. Now, get in there and get them organized.” Allen turned and went. Cal watched him go, and gradually the case of shakes he had picked up began to leak out of him.
They actually got the Paumons prisoners moving by half an hour after sunrise, which was even better than Cal had hoped. He had figured it would take a full hour to get the march actually on the road. What helped was the authority of Wantaki and Ola Tain. They had taken over internal command of the march; and Cal wisely let them be.
He and his four soldiers wore jump belts; and he had a man pogo-sticking along on each side of die column, one at the rear and Allen up front. He jumped back and forth from tail to rear of the marching column, himself.
It was a good-weather day; there was that much in its favor. They were in the southern latitudes of the northern hemisphere and high up. The air was dry. To begin with, the column made nearly three miles an hour, but that could not last, Cal thought. He moved back and forth along one side of the column, then in the opposite direction along the other. The Paumons prisoners marched steadily, in a rough column of fours, two whole individuals on each side of a wounded, two frequently changed on each litter. Their eyebrowless, dish-shaped faces seemed to show no expression. They talked little among themselves. He found himself getting curious about them.
There was an atmosphere of numbness about them, a leaden quality. They marched like people in a dream, or about some dreary, routine task. Only up at the head of the column were exceptions to this to be found. There, Wantaki strode with heavy, jarring footfalls, staring straight ahead like a thwarted wrestler. Beside him, Ola Tain paced soberly, but apparently calmly.
Now that Cal had time to study the two leaders, he found himself puzzled by Ola Tain. Wantaki he could understand to a certain extent. The Paumons Commander had the ring of the military about him. But Ola Tain did not seem to belong at all. He was almost like a priest.
They had been stopping at Cal’s order ten minutes out of every hour. They also stopped at noon. Nobody had known anything about rations for the prisoners, or even what the Paumons ate, when Cal had asked about it back at HQ before leaving. So the column was without food. They did not complain about it, but sat quietly in the brilliant, high-altitude sunlight from small,bright Bellatrix, like a white coin in the sky. Glanced at for just a fraction of a second, it left a black after-image burning against the closed eyelid, floating about with the hidden movements of the eyeballs.
When the order came to move on, they took up their march again. But they were definitely slowing. It was the wounded who were holding the rest back. They went through several small towns, but the white, low buildings on either side of the narrow,winding streets were locked up tight and no Paumons civilians showed themselves. By mid-afternoon, Cal was forced to call another halt and the prisoners, particularly the litter-bearers,went down where they stood as if they had been so much grain cut by a scythe.
Cal sat on a little rise of ground at the side of the road and let them lie. After about twenty minutes, Allen came up to him.
“How long we going to leave them here, Lieutenant?” the Squadman asked. Cal looked up at the man without answering,and Allen wet his lips and went away.
It occurred to Cal that he had no idea how much endurance the Paumons might have. It might be less, or more, than humans in the same position. He got up and went up to the head of the column. Wantaki was there, sitting on a roadside boulder, looking back over the column of men. One muddy, rust-colored hand was on his knee, curled up into a fist. His face was as hard and washed clean as a stone seen under running water in a mountain stream fed by glaciers. He sat alone. Ola Tain was a little ways off, also alone, lying on a hillside. Cal turned and went toward Tain.
They had come to a wide open area of the plateau now, with only an occasional clump of the cottonwood trees. In between the heaved up rock, in the stony soil, the green moss was everywhere. There was a faint, sweet odor to it, like lavender.
The moss deadened the sound of Cal’s footsteps, and Ola Tain evidently did not hear him approaching. The Paumons aide was lying on one elbow, the forefinger of the hand belonging to that elbow tracing out the small, feathery stems of the moss-plant directly underneath it. His face was absorbed. Cal’s steps slowed as he watched the other. For the first time, now, he saw that there were tiny yellow blossoms hidden among the cone-shaped leaves of each miniature stem, and that Ola Tain’s finger was counting these.
Cal felt a constriction in his guts and his throat tightened.There came to him suddenly a strong and desperate longing to know what sort of feelings moved inside the breathing, living being just a few feet from him; a sort of terrible loneliness. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that happened was that he made a sound in his throat. Ola Tain looked up.
“I need some information,” said Cal, in Paumons. “I did not think now would be a good time to ask the General Commander.”
Ola Tain’s glance slid past Cal to Wantaki, and back to Cal again.
“No,” he said.
“I want to know,” said Cal, “how your people are standing up to the march. We have still over half the distance to go.”
“You see,” said Ola Tain, nodding toward the column. “Can you tell us what our destination is?”
“Manaha. I have no means to take care of stragglers.”
“I had noticed that.” Ola Tain looked at him for a moment. “You are doing the best you can for us within your orders?”
“Yes.”
“I had thought so, myself. I will help as I can.”
“If we take until tom
orrow dawn, will all make it?”
“We will pray so.”
Cal lingered, looking down at him.
“You pray?” he said.
“Sometimes,” said Ola Tain. “I am praying today.”
“What to?”
“Does it matter?” said Ola Tain.
“I guess not.” Cal looked back over the column, then down at Ola Tain again. “You’re a strange sort of soldier.”
“I am not really a soldier. I teach—” the term he gave did not translate well. Something between philosophy and anthropology, in the Paumons sense.
“He is a soldier,” Cal nodded toward Wantaki. “He hates us, doesn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Ola Tain.
“Do you hate us?”
“I try not to. Hate gets in the way of clear thinking. But...” Ola Tain hesitated. “Yes, I hate you, too.” He looked back down at the flowers of the moss.
“Well,” said Cal, after a second, “we’re only ensuring the safety of our bases and our people, you know.”
“Please.” Ola Tain did not look up. “Do not make it harder for me to try not to hate you.”
Cal went back to the column, and to Squadman Allen.
“Get ’em moving,” he said.
With the declining of the sun, the air cooled quickly. At first that seemed to have a good effect on the prisoners and revived the column. But as Bellatrix sought the horizon, what had been merely a pleasant coolness now began to approach a chilliness.With the long night ahead of him, Cal faced the fact that the only way to keep the most of his prisoners moving was to get some food and drink into them.
He took Ola Tain and went ahead up to the next town. Together and alone, they came on the small place by surprise.There were lights in the windows and female Paumons and children moving about the streets. They stared for a moment at the sight of Cal, then scattered to their buildings. Ola Tain left him and went on into the heart of the town, alone.
He was some little time getting back. When he returned, he was followed by a female driving a civilian balloon-tired transport carrying food and drink of the Paumons variety.
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