by Rex Gordon
XXVII
From the army report on the uprising:
The records show that General Koln did not take official leave in the autumn of 503 A. L. Instead, he used his leave period to visit various army units at a distance from the capital, making wide-ranging flights to distant units, including a journey to see the desert survey group then operating in the far north of Arcon in the desert. This was the group which had chosen the site and which was working on the primary installations of the rocket project.
It is now known that this is the time that the General began to gather a few of the higher ranking army men around him. The process was necessarily delicate, since at that time the General could show his hand to no one, but how it was done has been described in the testimony of the then commander of the desert survey group, who was later retained in charge of the project site throughout, a Colonel Glasson.
They were standing by the project camp watching a party of Information Office technicians setting out across the nearby hillside. It was because they were Information Office men that the colonel looked at them indignantly and took the opportunity to speak to the General.
“Sir, I thought this was to be our show." -
“Our show?” the General said.
“Our survey,” the colonel said. “Our space school, our rocket project, our rocket, our space-shot.”
The General stood looking at the Information Office technicians who were laying out the site for the radio telescope by driving red and white poles into the uneven ground of the hill above them. It was true that the army did seem to have been reduced to a supporting role of bringing in supplies, arranging transport and doing the earth-moving, while all the more technical and interesting work was being done by the men with Information Office flashes.
It was true that in the scene around them the rock-shifting, road-making, ground-leveling and foundation-digging was very heavy work in the desert heat, and the army seemed to be doing it. “Colonel,” the General said. “Are you sure you haven’t got a chip on your shoulder?”
“Me?” said Colonel Glasson. "I am completely unprejudiced.” He looked in a slightly strangled way at a group of his best soldiers who were digging a trial trench under the eye of an Information Office technician who had had a small awning erected so that he could sit in the shade to watch them. “It’s just that as far as the Information Office is concerned, I hate everything to do with them, including their guts,” he said.
The General looked more thoughtful. “Come with me, Colonel,” he said.
He took the colonel with him across the camp and to the helicopter-landing where the General’s pilot climbed promptly out of the General’s helicopter and stood to attention.
“All ready and correct to take off for your inspection of the higher valley, sir!” the pilot said, saluting.
“Thank you, sergeant,” the General said. “But I won’t need you today. I have decided to pilot the machine myself, and the colonel will come with me.”
“Sir,” said the pilot. “The helicopter will carry three.”
The General looked at the dreadful, dust-filled landscape. “That’s all right, sergeant,” he said. “You take a day off today. Amuse yourself.”
He and the colonel got into the helicopter and flew away from the hell of the digging operations toward the peace of the higher valley.
They did not in fact do much inspection of the higher valley, about which the colonel could tell the General in expressive and malevolent detail as they flew. As soon as they were out of sight of the camp, the General set the machine to climbing, and when they came to rest it was on the summit of one of the peaks around the valley sides, where the air was cooler.
There was also no one to overhear them within a score of miles on that peak, and they could sit peacefully in the helicopter with the window open and look out with a bird’s eye view over the rolling wastes of Arcon.
“Now you can talk to me, Colonel,” the General said.
“I don’t see why our rocket project, which was invented and designed for us, should be infiltrated by the bloody Information Office and taken over at all its important points,” the colonel said.
“It is said to be reasonable,” the General said. “Since the project is to be kept secret, and since the construction of the propulsion systems and the prefabrication of the rocket sections has to be handled by civilian firms before everything is flown out here, the Information Office naturally sees it as an internal security matter.”
“To hell with that,” the colonel said. “From what you told me last night, about which I’ve been thinking, it seems to me that you started this thing to be able to give a solid reason to the government for army expansion, but, with all due respect, sir, the Information Office has out-maneuvered you at all important points when it comes down to detail.”
“What detail?”
“The I. O. is to design the rocket, place the contracts, do technical assembly, select the space crew, train them and run the radio telescopes. The army is reduced to the role of hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
The General considered the colonel’s mastery of detail and essential competence despite an outlook on life that was as pessimistic as it was prejudiced.
“What would you think, Colonel, if I told you I have let the Information Office seem to out-maneuver me in order that they should think me a brash general -who is also a little stupid?”
The colonel stiffened.
“Sir, I would ask you what we hope to get out of it.” “Control?” the General suggested. “Suppose, just suppose, I was to indicate that what we might get out of it ultimately was complete army control of Arcon?”
The colonel gazed away at the endless, blue-tinged hillsides of his planet’s wastes, but he looked at them as though they were a green landscape of grass and streams and valleys all filled with roses.
“I’d say I was your man, sir.”
“It could be dangerous, Colonel. This is working up to an event that ought to be spectacular.”
“That’s what I came into the army for, sir, in my mistaken youth. For glory not unmixed with a hint of danger.”
“Don’t change your spots suddenly, Colonel. Don’t suddenly become a friend of the Information Office. Just continue in your old way.”
“Sir,” said the colonel. He sat by the General as though scenting a flowered air and hearing a faraway sound of bells across the rocky hill slopes. “Can you give me any hint, even a hint, of what the outcome of this is going to be?”
The General glanced at him and wondered how much he had to tell such an emphatic man, to gain his undying support and loyalty and keep him happy.
“It’s true I started this project, Colonel, but the position we want to get ourselves in is one where we can eventually disown it.”
“Disown it, sir?”
“Space ventures are unpopular on Arcon,” the General said cryptically. “You want to think about that, Colonel.” He put his hand to the helicopter starter button. “Especially if the public should eventually get to know of it.”
The noise of the helicopter motor cut into whatever the colonel had been about to say, which was something about “the common people,” and he looked instead with wonder at the Arcon landscape as they flew back to the project camp.
He was wondering, he reported later, just how the General proposed, despite the Information Office control of security, to convey the news of the project to a sufficient number of the Arcon people, and how he could so do it as to insure the overthrow of Arcon democracy. That would surely depend on how it was presented, he thought, and that, without question, would have to be in a dramatic form.
XXVIII
After the colonel’s introductory lecture, Len was conducted to his room to contemplate the job for which he was in the space school, and for which Berkeley had sent him.
It was a clean room, with a bed, bright walls, a chair, a window, and a student’s desk.
Len stood by the window. He could
see two men, instructors in white coats, walking in the grounds. Outside the grounds, over the wall, he could see the barren peaks of Arcon’s northland. He hardly saw the scene. Len was human. He saw the firm delicacy of Lucinda’s features in his mind’s eye, and the curve of her breasts as revealed by the dress that had been tom on landing. The pictures merged.
He found he was standing with clenched fists. Too much was happening to him at one time. He looked down at the desk. There were books on the desk, and one of them was called The Principles of Three-dimensional Navigation, and the other was Electronics Applied to Space Flight.
Len went and flung himself down on the bed. He looked fixedly at a blank wall. He thought of himself and Lucinda in the rocket, then rejected the thoughts that came to him. He did not know why he did so. The whole situation in the space school, it seemed to him, lacked some inner logic. He thought of the tall spire of the rocket that stood in the valley beyond the space school walls. His mind fought and searched for something. He looked at the other walls of his room, as though looking for something that was not there.
It was not so much fury he felt, while he was in his room, as a hopeless longing. It was true that his thoughts were full of unanswered questions. There was too much doubt. Berkeley, and the way he had come to the space school. What could he do about it? What had he ever succeeded in doing, and was he not just a helpless pawn in a game someone else had chosen?
His mind filled again with the picture of Lucinda as he had first seen her in the desert, with the tom dress revealing too much as she put up her arm to comb the dark hair that fell about her shoulders. Suddenly, inexplicably, he smiled a little.
The door of his room opened. A soldier stood in the doorway looking at him. “You can come out to eat now.”
Len got up and faced the soldier. And they call us space volunteers, he thought. The man turned away and went to another door along the corridor. In the corridor, Duncan and Sorensen and Ropotsky were already out. Beyond the stair head, where there was a sentry, they could see the girls leaving their rooms. Sorensen looked at Len with a lazy glance. Duncan’s gaze drifted over him. Ropotsky moved around them. Len’s feelings contracted.
“We are going into space under radio control,” Ropotsky said to Len. “They will direct us on course by radio until we are well on our way to Vista?” He watched Len. Len looked back and shook his head. Sometimes Ropotsky talked too much.
“Let’s go,” Duncan said.
Ed Creet and Salford were being let out of their rooms. The girls came toward them. Looking at the party, Len had the same feeling he had had in the desert and in the aircraft. They moved on down the corridor.
Even looking at the back of the men’s heads, Len still felt it. It was these men and these six girls who were coming past the sentry.
Lucinda halted, waiting for him at the stair head. The sentry looked as though she should go on. She wore a new dress, green and plain. It had been in her room, where they all had clothes. Someone had anticipated their requirements and knew their sizes. That had been prepared too, in advance, along with all the other items of the project. She turned around to show it to Len while Susan was going to Ropotsky and Imantha was walking with Salford down the stairway. She said, “Maybe you prefer the tom one?”
“Yes,” said Len. In a way it was pointless to talk. A kind of invisible barrier had sprung into being around the whole party. Too much was understood.
At the bend of the stair, a window looked out in the direction where, over the wall, they could see the thin spire of the rocket in the valley. Little Penny and Eliza Teen, with Duncan and Ed Creet in attendance, were looking at it. Eliza said, “What are we supposed to do in that?” and Penny said, “I know what we are supposed to do.”
The girls laughed. The guards and sentry who were watching them looked uneasy. There was something sharp about the girls’ laughter.
Len felt a fierce exultation bum through him. It was there. Something had happened, and someone, somewhere, had not got a clue. Yet it was still, at that stage, something completely vague and undefinable, like people meeting.
“Don’t look like that, Len,” Lucinda said, and they went down, to the dining room.
They could talk there, at the table. It was not intended. The soldiers were to wait on them at table, which was no doubt intended to prevent them from wandering off and losing themselves in kitchens. Someone had decided it was best to keep an eye on them, even there. But when the soldier brought the soup course no one ate, and Salford sat staring at him as long as he stood by them. The soldier backed away, and then they ate. Slowly, it was as though they built an invisible ring around them.
Ed Creet talked into his soup. It was a low voice that would not carry to a soldier, and everyone was watching. “Supposing we aim to do it, how would we get out of here?”
Even Ed Creet knew it, and was talking about possibilities. It was something of a surprise to Len. He had thought of a lot of things, but not actually of getting out. He examined the idea. It was fairly worthless.
Eliza bent her head to the contents of her plate. “They have a sentry in the corridor. There are the building guards, and the walls, and a thousand miles of desert.” She sounded reluctant, as though saying play it on the home ground.
Salford looked down the line of girls. “The sentry looks sex-starved,” he said softly. “All the guards are lost in the desert.”
Len wondered what he wanted.
“The sentry has a spray-gun,” Ropotsky said. .
“Anyone who had a spray-gun here could get two,” Salford said. He looked at a soldier’s belt. The soldier was coming to take the plates.
They did not talk when a soldier was near them. They watched the soldiers waiting on table, steadily.
Ropotsky must have been thinking what Salford meant. When the soldier had gone, he said, “So you take the building.”
Duncan shifted his shoulders indifferently. “We don’t want the building. We would want the gates.”
They viean it, Len thought.
Sorensen tried to stop it “The air strip is three miles away.”
“Len’s room,” Salford said.
“Len s?”
“He has a view of the gate. He can see what time the guard is changed.”
“So?”
“It is midnight. We are waiting there, armed. Then we have a vehicle.”
Salford was a difficult man to stop. They had seen it
“Face it, Des. If we got away in a plane, we would be shot down before we got to Davis City.”
“You think so? There are twelve of us. We have the armament first of the interior guard, then of the new guard coming to relieve them. It is night, and we move fast in the vehicle. We cut communications first. We drive into the airfield firing.”
An image of the rim of the Arcon desert came into Len’s mind, and the thousands of miles of desert to lose a plane in. While the soldiers passed along the table, they thought about it. It could work. They would end with the plane lost in some swamp-creek jungle somewhere.
“Twelve people working hard could bury a plane,” Ropotsky said.
Lucinda had been watching them. Like Len, she had been seeing if they were serious or not. The answer was that it did not matter if they were serious. For some reason, when Len looked at Lucinda’s face, he seemed to see things through her eyes. It was like watching some newborn, clumsy, twenty-four-legged animal taking its first steps. That was the way Lucinda was looking at the group, as though she had learned some kind of a lesson in the desert aircraft crash.
“And then?” she said. “We live like naked outlaws, on some swamp-sea, in the jungle somewhere?” She spoke as quietly as the rest, just keeping her head down, making her contribution.
Len’s eyes narrowed. He was the only one who had been watching her before she spoke. She was not a girl asking. She was not even a woman pouring cold water on a young man’s scheme.
More like an experienced operator, it looked to him, doing so
mething she had to do.
One of the civilian instructors suddenly came to sit with them. They could not talk any more. The instructor looked uneasy. He said, “You may not understand this. We instructors want to cooperate with you when you work for your survival.”
After a while, on behalf of all of them, Duncan said,
“Yes?”
“You have to work,” the instructor said.
Duncan was silent. Len looked around, waited, and replied of his own accord: “We want more information.”
There was the uneasy look again. “You do. We know you do. This evening you’ll get an Information Office briefing.”
Neither Len nor any of the others replied to that. They had all had experiences of one kind or another with the Information Office. After a while, the instructor seemed to recognize their coolness. He went away.
“Is an Information Office briefing different from an army briefing?” Ropotsky said. Len noticed the way Duncan’s eyes went to him, as though it was something for speculation.
From the dining room, they went to the lounge, which had comfortable chairs and a wide window looking out on the swimming pool. It looked as though it would be a better place to talk than the dining room, for it was not as formal and they could be at ease in it; in fact, because of the placing of the chairs, they were more distributed around the room, and a soldier-servant was constantly present. He would bring drinks or coffee, but when they sent him for them another appeared while he was gone, going around to empty the ash trays, which did not need emptying.