“Well, you got it,” said Cal to Ola Tain, as they headed back toward the column with the truck going ahead.
“With your people attacking, they did not want to spare it,”said Ola Tain, looking ahead to the truck. “It is not easy.” After a moment, he said, “I had to threaten them with you.”
They got back to the column, which had built fires. After the prisoners had eaten, they appeared stronger. But at the next halt,Allen came up to Cal.
“There’s five of them dead,” he said. “They’ve been carrying them all this time in the litters so we’d think they were wounded.”
“If they can keep up, let them,” said Cal.
But during the long night, the column began to straggle. Cal ordered the dead left behind, and in the process found that there were now twelve corpses in the column. They left them behind and went on, the exhausted, four to a litter now, carrying the near-dead, the staggering wounded helping each other. Cal increased his halts to one every half-hour.
Dawn found them straggling through another small town. Word of their movement had gone ahead of them over the civilian Paumons communications system, which was still operating. With Manaha, their destination, only a little over two miles off,the civilians had grown bolder and more in sympathy with the prisoners. They said nothing, but they peered from windows and rooftops, and dodged up side streets out of the way, as the column reeled forward.
As they emerged from the last village before Manaha, they found the road ahead lined with the old, the female and the young. They moved back from the road as Allen, leading the column, came toward them, but they waved in again toward the plodding prisoners as he passed. Looking ahead now, along the semi-open country ahead, Cal could see the distant glint of sun on windows that would be Manaha. He looked back at the reeling column; at the civilian Paumons, leaning in toward it as if over some invisible barrier rope. Wantaki and Ola Tain still moved ahead of the rest.
There was a slight bend in the road, and, as Allen reached it, the crowd of Paumons children there shrank back. But as he passed on, they bulged forward. There was a sudden flurry in their ranks, and a small, male youngster darted toward Ola Tain, who was closest.
The thin young soldier with the wide mouth snapped up his machine pistol.
“Hold it!” shouted Cal, as the youngster darted back again into the safety of the crowd, leaving Ola Tain holding a green and leafy branch from one of the cottonwood-type trees. For along moment Ola Tain looked at it in his hands; and then, holding it upright before him, took up the march again.
A moment later, another child, a little older this time, darted out with a branch for Wantaki.
Soon, branches were being delivered to prisoners, all along the column. Allen came back to Cal.
“Sir?” he said, looking at Cal.
“Leave them alone,” said Cal harshly.
Allen went back to the head of the column. Soon all the prisoners had branches. Each carried his own upright before him,their shoulders straightened, and stepping out. As they came into Manaha at last, they looked like a forest on the move. And they were marching like soldiers.
Chapter Twelve
Cal rejoined his outfit after that, and for the next six months he worked with Battalion as Interpreter, questioning prisoners.
The Expedition made large advances, conquering most of theplanet. It went as Harmon had predicted. The Paumons had to come to the Expedition on the plateau, and the Expedition made large-scale drops of fighting forces elsewhere around the world.
But it was not a bloodless conquest. It took the Paumons sometime to learn not to fight head-on battles against the vastly superior equipment of the Expedition, that whenever they did they suffered heartbreaking losses. The Expedition also suffered losses. At the end of six months they had received three sets of replacements for the Combat Services; their casualties were over seventy-five thousand. Estimates of the Paumons casualties put those at over two million dead and wounded. Cal was promoted twice, to First Lieutenant and then to Captain, and was brought back to take charge of the big new Prisoner-of-War center next to Expedition Headquarters and Expedition Main Hospital at Manaha. This gave him a chance to be with Annie, who was stationed at Main Hospital. He heard occasionally of Walk, who was making a name for himself as commander of a newly formed guerilla-hunting group. Promotions had been faster in the Com-bat Services, and Walk had made major.
One day Annie called Cal from over at Hospital Receiving to say they had just brought Walk in with multiple wounds of the arm and leg from a Paumons mortar. Cal juggled his schedule for the day and went over to the hospital. He found Walk had already been put into a room by himself. In the anteroom outside were Annie, who was charting up the readings of the preliminary checkover the Medical Officer had given Walk, and a Public Relations Officer from Administrative, who was there to write him up for a news release back on Earth.
“Can I go in and see him?” Cal asked Annie.
“In a minute,” she said, coding up results of the checkover, with her fingers hopping over the machine keys. “I’ll take you in. I asked to be his nurse.”
“Are you a buddy of his?” asked the PR Officer, a neat First Lieutenant with a mustache. “The officers and men of his outfit idolize him, I hear. And to the Paumons he’s almost a legend they tell to frighten their children into being good. Maybe we can get some pictures of the two of you together. His story is one Tong string of heroic exploits after another. They say even the aliens respect him.”
“You can come in now,” said Annie to Cal. They went in together. Walk was lying in a hospital bed, under a light top sheet only. He was so tanned and thin he looked like a sun-blackened corpse against the white sheets. His eyes focused crazily on Cal as he came up to the side of the bed.
“Cal . . .” he muttered. “What’re you doing here? Get out . . . Get back to base...”
“He’s out of his head,” said Annie. She folded Walk’s arm up and put a hypodermic syringe gun against the side of it. After a moment his eyes began to clear. He recognized Cal sensibly, and his lips twisted in a hard line.
“Captain Truant,” he said.
“How’re you feeling?” asked Cal.
“Like a million,” said Walk. “Just like a million.” He made an effort to pull himself up on his pillow. “Nurse—” He recognized Annie. “Annie, they got any liquor around here for the casualties?”
“I’m sorry,” said Annie, “but they’ve got to do some operating on you.”
“. . . them,” said Walk. His tongue was beginning to thicken. Annie had evidently given him some fast-acting sedation. “. . .you, too. All of you . . . The universe. That’s all it’s good for. . .”
His eyes closed and he passed out. Annie put a gentle hand on Cal’s arm.
“That’s all right,” said Cal. “It doesn’t matter. I was figuring he’d be like this.”
He went back to his office at the POW compound. There was a message that General Scoby wanted to see him, but Ola Tain had been waiting in his outer office for half an hour. In the large Manaha POW Center that now held over eighty thousand Paumons, Ola Tain was Cal’s most valuable connection. It was as Scoby had implied in his talk with Cal after Cal had graduated from Contacts School, back in Denver. There were no rules for building a basis for co-existence with those you had conquered. You could only feel your way.
Cal felt it mainly through Ola Tain. Wantaki had escaped early. He and five of his officers had broken out and got clean away the second week of their internment at Manaha. Cal was convinced that Ola Tain could have gone at that time, also, if he had wanted to. But he had chosen to stay and speak for the other prisoners. The other prisoners seemed to respect him, but not absorb him. It was as if he was alien to them, too. Cal had asked once if he was never lonely.
“No,” said Ola Tain. “One can only be lonely within walls. And I have never built any.”
Now Cal stopped in the outer office to explain that he would have to get over and see Scoby.<
br />
“There’s no hurry about my business,” said Ola Tain. “I have only promised to ask again that the recreation area be enlarged.”
“I’ll ask General Scoby about it,” said Cal.
He went on over to Contacts Service HQ. Scoby, busy at his desk as Cal came in, looked as if he, his office, and Limpari the cheetah had been transported all in a package from Denver, without even disturbing the papers piled on the desk. Cal repeated Ola Tain’s request.
“No,” replied Scoby. He leaned back in his chair and stared at Cal, seated opposite him. “They don’t really want more space. They just want to find out if the rumor’s true.”
“What rumor?”
“That if peace is signed next month, they’ll all be released.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“It’s circulating,” said Scoby. “What do you think we ought to do about it?”
“Do?” said Cal.
“That’s what I said.”
“Nothing. The whole thing’s crazy. In the first place we’re a lot more than a month from signing peace, anyway. Wantaki’s still back in those mountains of Zone Eleven with better than thirty thousand men.”
“Thirty thousand isn’t much,” said Scoby with one of his sudden spasms of mildness. “They can be ignored. The main civilian Paumons representatives are ready to ignore him and sign.”
“You mean they’d leave him in the position of an outlaw—the Commander that fought harder for them than anyone else? Him and thirty thousand men, to say nothing of all the other guerrilla groups around the world?”
“They’re a lot like us,” said Scoby. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“I noticed,” said Cal bitterly.
Scoby gazed at him for a moment.
“Trouble with you, Cal,” he said, “is you’re still expecting miracles from people—and I mean people of all sorts, Lehaunan, Griella, Paumons, as well as human. That’s the trouble with most of us. We quit expecting the worst from people, so fight away we’ve got to swing over and start expecting nothing but the best.”
“If the General will forgive me,” said Cal. “I’ll try to do better next time.”
“And don’t get sarcastic. You’ve learned a lot this last year but I still know a few things more than you do. One of them is how particularly important this particular race is to us. Or can you tell me that too?”
Cal thought a moment.
“No,” he said, finally, “I guess not.”
“They’re important just because they are so damn much like us,” said Scoby. “Long as the races we were knocking over were covered with fur, or had prehensile noses, we could go on calling them Pelties or Anteaters. We could shut our eyes to the fact that they had about as much brains, or probably about as much soul as we had. But an alien we got to call ‘Prog,’ now—that’s getting a little like ‘God’ or ‘Nigger.’ You’re sort of straining to point up the difference. “And yet it stood to reason if we were going to bump into other thinking races out among the stars, sooner or later one of them was bound to be pretty human.”
He stopped. He looked at Cal for a reaction.
“I guess you’re right,” said Cal.
“Of course,” said Scoby, “I’m using the word human in only its finest sense.”
“I guessed you were,” said Cal. “So being like us is what makes the Paumons so important?”
“That's right," said Scoby. "what would you do if you were a Paumons and this was Earth, and you had eighty thousand ‘Humies’ out behind that wire when peace was signed? Would you want to turn them loose?”
Cal straightened up in his chair.
“Hell, no!” he said. “I see what you mean.”
“Not unless you wanted to start the conquest all over again, that right?” said Scoby. “How far would you say these people are from being re-educated into living side by side with us?”
“Twenty years,” said Cal. “Do something with the next generation maybe.”
“Don’t kid yourself. Five generations’ll have a hard time wiping out the fact we started things out by coming in and trompling them.”
“Can you talk General Harmon out of releasing them?”
“No.”
“Then we’re helpless,” said Cal. “We’re just giving them back an army. This and the other POW camps—they’ll have three-quarters of a million men under arms again in half a year. And we can’t do a thing.”
“Not quite,” said Scoby. “Once peace is signed, Contacts Service Head can interdict any step taken by Combat Services Commander, if Contacts Head thinks it’ll lead to a breach of the peace.”
“Ouch,” said Cal. “But you wouldn’t want to do that to Harmon.”
“No. But then I won’t have to,” said Scoby. “You will.”
Cal sat up straighter suddenly. He stared at Scoby, but Scoby was not smiling.
“Me?” Cal said.
“I told you I’d been grooming you,” said Scoby. “I’ve got men here who’ve been with me sixteen years. But you’ve got the Combat experience, and you’ve got the guts. You’ve got something else, too.”
“But me—” said Cal, and stopped.
“Every Expedition the mulebrains in the field talk about how they should all hang together and go back as a unit to straighten out the ex-mulies in Government. The man on the spot always thinks he knows best. Rubs Government the wrong way. It’s happening now—politics, boy. Now’s the time for me to get things from Government. I’ve got to go back to Earth and fight for our team.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” said Cal slowly.
“I’m sure for you,” said Scoby. “I’m having orders cut now,giving you a double jump to Lieutenant Colonel. You’ll have as much authority here as I would—just not the reputation to back it up. That you’ve got to make yourself.” Scoby grinned. “Be happy, boy. You’re going up in the world.”
Chapter Thirteen
Cal saw Scoby off from the Headquarters field just outside Manaha. The field had been leveled and poured only six months before. But the green moss could grow anywhere, and where it was not burnt away daily by the ascending ships, it had flung long arms across the concrete. It was destroyed by a puff of heat,the touch of a human foot. But it grew again overnight. Standing with Scoby, waiting for boarding orders to be announced on the slim, small courier ship that would take the older man home, Cal could see, less than forty yards away, the great tower of the Expedition’s flagship black against the morning sky. It had not moved since landing on this spot eleven days, local time, after the first drops in which Cal had come down with Wajeck and the others. It carried the sheathed sword of nuclear explosives under its armor, that could potentially devastate the world it stood on for half a thousand miles in every direction from where it stood. It could wound a planet; and from four hundred and twenty-six feet above Cal and Scoby, in the observation room,the single caretaker soldier aboard it could be looking down on them all. From the main screen he could be seeing the lesser ships below him, and the field, and Manaha, with all the mains trength of the Expedition laid out like a toy scale model below.And even on this lord of space and war, the moss at its base was already beginning to lay its tender, green relentless fingers.
The hooter sounded, announcing boarding orders.
“Hold hard, Cal,” said Scoby, one fist clutching the handle of Limpari’s harness. He put his hand out blindly, and Cal took it. In title last moment one of his blackouts had taken him and he could not see. They shook. “Now, girl,” he muttered to Linipari. And smoothly and powerfully, she led him away from Cal and onto the ship.
Cal went back to Contacts HQ and a work day that in the several months following stretched to better than ten hours as a routine matter. He had little time even to see Annie. He had come to depend on her heavily, but when she suggested that they might get married—he had never mentioned it—the violence of his reaction startled even him.
“No!” he had shouted at her. “Not now! Can’t you see t
hat? Not now!”
He had turned and flung himself three angry strides away from her, from the hospital desk where she was sitting on duty, at the moment she had mentioned it. Down the hall, an ambulatory patient had turned, surprised, to stare. Ashamed suddenly, he came back to the desk, but muttering under his breath, still, “Not now. Now’s not the time, Annie. Can’t you see that?”
She did not press him.
The peace was signed. Wantaki was now an outlaw in Zone Eleven, with now nearly twenty thousand Paumons. Walk, recovered, was also back in Zone Eleven, harrying the Paumons leader from a series of strong posts encircling the base of the mountains. Harmon signed the order releasing all Paumons prisoners of war, and Cal stood at his office window and watched as the waves of prisoners celebrating their release literally tore the gates from their hinges and ripped half the compound to shreds along with it. For a day and a night, riot threatened in and around Manaha. Three mechanized battalions were ordered in to patrol the area. Subdued, the Paumons ex-prisoners melted away to their own home area. Five days later, Cal looked out at the tom and empty shells of the buildings in the compound as rain began to fall.
The initial drops of the Expedition had been timed to come at the earliest possible date after the winter season on this plateau.Now a new winter season—a time of rain—was upon the high,arid country about. Day in and day out, the gray curtains of the rain obscured the landscape as Cal went back and forth between Contacts HQ, Expeditions HQ, the Medical Center, and his own quarters.
For two months the rainy season continued. Meanwhile, elsewhere about the planet, the yeast of the returned Paumons fighting men was beginning to ferment. The Paumons civilian authorities made apparently honest attempts to comply with the plan for reorganization and re-education of their people. But the whole planet now was beginning to quake and gasp from unexpected fumaroles, like cooking oatmeal before it comes to an active boil. The Paumons people were tom, divided and violent. On the one hand there were outlaw resistance groups even in the large cities, haunted by human soldiery and their own police as well. On the other hand, in Zone Eleven, Walk commanded one whole fighting unit made up of Paumons enlistees and ex-soldiers. Ugly stories began to emerge from Zone Eleven, and from the activities of resistance groups elsewhere. Prisoners were not taken so often; and those who were taken by both sides were liable to turn up later as corpses in not-so-pretty condition.
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