“WE’LL TAKE CARE of that.” Colman turned his head and called in a louder voice, “Stanislau, Young—come over here and give me a hand with this crate.” Rifles slung across their backs, Stanislau and Young stepped away from the squad standing on the sidewalk and helped Colman to heave the crate into the truck waiting to leave for the border checkpoint, while the Chironian who had been struggling to lift it with his teenage son watched. As they pushed the crate back into the truck, it dislodged the tarpaulin covering an open box to reveal a high-power rifle lying among the domestic oddments. The Chironian saw it and lifted his head to look at Colman curiously. Colman threw the tarp back over the box and turned away.
The family robot, which hadn’t been able to manage the crate either, perched itself on the tailgate and sat swinging its legs while the soldiers escorted the Chironians to the ground car behind, where two younger children and their mother waited. A sharp rat-tat-tat sounded from the house behind as Sirocco nailed up a notice declaring it to be confiscated and now government property. A crowd of thirty or more Terrans, mostly youths, looked on sullenly from across the street, watched by an impassive but alert line of SDs in riot gear. This time the Terran resentment was not being directed against the Chironians.
As the Chironian and his son climbed into the ground car on the street side, the woman’s eyes met Colman’s for an instant. There was no malice in them. “I know,” she said through the window. “You’ve got a job that you have to do for a little while longer. Don’t worry about it. We can use the vacation. We’ll be back.” Colman managed the shadow of a grin. Seconds later the truck moved away, the robot sitting in the rear, and the groundcar followed, two wistful young faces pressed against the rear window.
Angry murmurs were heard from the Terran civilians.
Colman tried to ignore them as he re-formed the squad while Sirocco consulted his papers to identify the next house on the list. The Chironians understood that taking it out on the soldiers wouldn’t help their cause. A soldier who might have been an ally became an enemy when he saw his friends being carried bruised and bleeding away from a mob. Everything the Chironians did was designed to subtract from their enemies instead of add to them, and to whittle their opposition down to the hard core that lay at the center, which was all they had any quarrel with. He could see it; Sirocco could see it, and the men could see it. Why couldn’t more of the Terrans see it too?
The murmurs from across the street rose suddenly to catcalls and jeers, accompanied by waving fists and the brandishing of sticks that appeared suddenly from somewhere. Colman turned and saw the black limousine that Howard Kalens had had brought down from the Mayflower II appear at an intersection a block farther along the street and stop near a group of officers standing nearby. Major Thorpe detached himself from the group and walked across. Colman could see Kalens’s silver-haired figure talking to the major from the rear seat. Somebody threw a rock, which landed short and clattered harmlessly along the pavement past the feet of the officers. More followed, and several Terrans moved forward threateningly.
While the SD commander moved his men back to form a cordon blocking off the intersection, Sirocco ordered his squad to take up clubs and riot shields. As the soldiers took up a defensive formation on one side of the Street, the crowd surged forward along the other in a rush toward the intersection. Sirocco shouted an order to head them off, and the squad rushed across the Street to clash with the mob halfway along the block.
Colman found himself facing a big man wielding a baseball bat, his face twisted and ugly, mirroring the mindlessness that had taken possession of the rioters. The man swung the bat viciously but clumsily. Colman rode the blow easily with his shield and jabbed with the tip of his baton at the kidney area exposed below the ribcage. His assailant staggered back with a scream of pain. Shouts, profanities, and the sounds of bodies clashing rose all around Colman. Something hard bounced off his helmet. Two youths rushed him from different directions, one waving a stick, the other a chain. Colman jumped to the side to bring the two in line for a split second’s cover, feinted with his baton, then sent the first cannoning into the second with a shove from his shield with the full weight of his shoulder behind it, and both rioters went down into a heap. Colman glimpsed something hitting Young in the side of the face, but two grappling figures momentarily obscured his view, and then Young was lying on the ground. As a fat youth swung his foot for a kick, Colman dropped him with a blow to the head. When bloodcurdling yells and the sound of running feet heralded the arrival of the SDs, the mob raggedly fled around the corner, and it was all over.
Young had a gash on his cheek that was more messy than deep and a huge bruise along his jaw to go with it, and four rioters were left behind with sore heads or other minor injuries. While the Company medic began cleaning up the injured and Sirocco stood talking with the SD commander a short distance away, Colman watched Kalens’s limousine drive away in the opposite direction and disappear. That was how it had always been, he could see now. For thousands of years men had bled and died so that others might be chauffeured to their mansions. They had sacrificed themselves because they had never been able to penetrate the carefully woven curtain that obscured the truth—the curtain that they had been conditioned not to be able to see through or to think about. But the Chironians had never had the conditioning.
The inverted logic that had puzzled him had not been something peculiar to the military mind; it was just that the military mind was the only one he had ever really known. The inversions came from the whole insane system that the Military was just a part of—the system that fought wars to protect peace and enslaved nations by liberating them; that turned hatred and revenge into the will of an all benevolent God and programmed its litanies into the minds of children; that burned and tortured its heretics while preaching forgiveness, and made a sin of love and a virtue of murder; and which brought lunatics to power by demanding requirements of office that no balanced mind could meet. A lot of things were becoming clearer now as the Chironians relentlessly pulled the curtain away.
For the curtain that was falling away was the backcloth of the stage upon which the dolls had danced. And as the backcloth fell and the strings fell with it, the dolls were dancing on. The dolls were dancing without the strings because there were no strings. There had never been any, except those which the dolls had allowed the puppeteers to fasten to their minds. But those strings had held up the puppeteers, not the dolls, for the puppeteers were falling while the dolls danced on.
Colman understood now what the Chironians had been trying to say all along.
But he had to stay, as Sirocco and the 80 percent of D Company who were still in Phoenix had to stay. After Swyley went, Driscoll went, and many of the others went, Sirocco had called the rest together and reminded them about the weapons in the Mayflower II. “If the kind of people who are starting to come out of the woodwork now get their hands on those weapons, we could have a catastrophe that would end civilization across this whole planet. You’ve all seen what’s happening back on Earth. Well, the same mentalities are here too, and they’re panicking. We must keep enough of the Army together to stop anything like that if we have to.” And so they had stayed.
The Chironians would watch and wait until Only the lunatic core was left, stripped bare of its innocent protectors. Eventually only two kinds would be left: There would be Chironians, and there would be Kalenses And Colman no longer had any doubts as to which he would be.
In the D Company Orderly Room in the Omar Bradley barracks block, Hanlon secured his ammunition belt, put on his helmet, and took his M32 from the rack. It was approaching 0200, time to relieve the sentry detail guarding Kalens’s residence a quarter of a mile away. “Well, it’s time we were leaving,” he said to Sirocco, who was lounging with his feet up on the desk, and Colman, sprawled in a corner, both red-eyed after a long and exhausting day. “I’ll try to shout quietly. I’d hate to be disturbing His Honor in his sleep.”
Sirocco smiled tiredly. “You’re excused from taking off your boots,” he murmured.
“Are we still invited to the Fallowses tonight, Steve?” Hanlon asked, stopping at the door to look back at Colman.
Colman nodded. “I guess so. I’ll probably be asleep when you come off duty. Better give me a call.”
“I will indeed. See you later.” Hanlon left, and they heard him forming up the relief guard outside.
“Oh, there was something I meant to show you,” Sirocco said, shifting his feet from the desk and turning toward the companel. “It come in earlier this evening. Want a laugh?”
“What?” Colman asked him.
Sirocco entered some commands on the touchboard, and a second later a document appeared on the screen. Colman got up and came across to study it while Sirocco sat back out of the way. It was a communication from Leighton Merrick, the Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering in the Mayflower II, routed for comment via Headquarters and Brigade. It advised that, due to an unexpectedly high rate of promotions among junior technicians, Engineering was flow able to give “due reconsideration” to the request for transfer filed by Staff Sergeant Colman. Would the Military please notify his current disposition? “Looks like they’re running out of Indians,” Sirocco remarked. “What do you want me to say?”
“What do you think?” Colman answered, and went back to his chair. Sirocco casually entered NEGATIVE, and cut the display.
“So what will you do? Sirocco inquired, propping his feet back on the desk. “Figured it out yet?”
“Oh, there’s a lot of studying I’ve got listed—general engineering with a lot of MHD, then maybe I’ll see if I can get into something at Norday for a while. Later on I might move out to the new place they’re talking about.”
“Will Kath fix it up for you?”
Colman nodded. “To start with, anyhow. Then, I guess, it’s a case of how well you make out. You know how things operate here.” After a pause he asked, “How about you?”
Sirocco tweaked his moustache pensively. “It’s a problem knowing where to start. You know the kind of thing I’d like to get out and see the whole planet. The Barrier Range is as big as the Himalayas, there’s Glace...a Grander Canyon out in Oriena...there’s so much of it. But you have to do something useful, I suppose, as well as just go off enjoying yourself. But I think there’s a lot of survey work waiting to be done yet. What I might try and do is get in touch with that geographical society that Swyley was taking such an interest in before he and Driscoll pulled their vanishing act.” Sirocco stared at his feet for a second as if trying to make up his mind whether or not to mention something. “And then of course there’s Shirley,” he added nonchalantly.
“Shirley? You mean Ci’s mother?”
“What About her?”
Sirocco raised his eyebrows in what was obviously feigned surprise. “Oh, didn’t I tell you? She wants me to move in. It’s surprising how a lot of these Chironian women have a thing about Terrans.” He frowned and scratched his nose while he searched for the right words “...assist with their future contribution to procreation.” He looked up. “She wants my kids. How about that, Steve? Come on, I bet it’s the same with Kath.” Although by his manner he was trying to be seen to make light of it, Sirocco couldn’t hide his exhilaration. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before, and he had to tell somebody, Colman saw; but Colman played along.
“You sly bastard!” he exclaimed. “How long has this been going on?” Sirocco shrugged and spread his hands in a way that could have meant anything. Then Colman grinned. “Well, what do you know? Anyhow—good luck.”
Sirocco resumed twiddling his moustache. “Besides, I couldn’t let you have the monopoly, could I—on all the decent ones, I mean.” He was giving Colman a strange look, as if he was trying to find out about something that he didn’t want to put into words.
“What are you getting at?” Colman asked him.
Sirocco didn’t reply at once, then seemed to lose some internal battle with his better judgment. “Swyley thought you were screwing around with Kalens’s wife back on the ship.”
Colman kept a poker face. “What made him think that?”
Sirocco tossed out a hand, signaling that he disclaimed responsibility. “Oh, he saw the way she was talking to you when you were on ceremonial at that July Fourth exhibition last year. That was one thing. Do you remember that?”
“Colman went through the motions of having to think back. “Yes...I think so. But I don’t remember Swyley being around.”
“Well, he must have been there somewhere, mustn’t he?”
“I guess so. So what was the rest of it?”
Sirocco shrugged. “Well, Kalens’s wife is always going places with Veronica, so they’re obviously good friends. Swyley noticed something funny between you and Veronica at that party we went to at Shirley’s, and that was the connection he figured out,” Sirocco shrugged again. “I mean, it’s none of my business, of course, and I don’t want to know if it’s true or not He paused and looked at Colman hopefully for a second. “Is it?”
“Would you expect me to say so if it was?” Colman asked.
“I suppose not.” Sirocco conceded, deflating with a disappointed sigh. After a second he looked up sharply again. “I’ll do a deal with you though. Tell me after this is all over, okay?”
Colman grinned. “Okay, chief. I will.” A short silence fell while they both thought about the same thing. “How long do you think it’ll be?” Colman asked at last.
“Who can say?” Sirocco answered, picking up the more serious tone. “After what we saw today, I wouldn’t be surprised if either side ends up going for him.”
“A lot of people are starting to think he could have bad those bombs planted. What do you think?”
Sirocco frowned and rubbed his nose. “I’m not convinced. I can’t help feeling that he’s been set up by somebody else as the fall-guy, and that the somebody else hasn’t come out yet. I think the Chironians believe that too.”
Colman nodded thoughtfully to himself and conceded the point. “Any ideas?”
Sirocco shrugged. “I’m pretty sure it can’t be Wellesley. He’s tried to play it straight, it’s all sweeping him way out of his depth. Anyhow, what would he have to gain? All he wants to do is to be put out to pasture; he’s only got a few days left. Ramisson obviously wouldn’t be involved in something like that, and the same goes for Lechat. But as for the rest, if you ask me, they’re all crazy. It could be any of them or all of them. But that’s who the Chironians are really after.”
“So it could take a while,” Colman said.
“Maybe. Who knows? Let’s just hope there aren’t too many of them in the Army.”
At that moment the emergency tone sounded shrilly from the companel. Sirocco jerked his legs off the desk, cut the alarm, and flipped on the screen, It was Hanlon, looking tense.
“It’s happened,” Hanlon told him. “Kalens is dead. We found him inside the house, shot six times. Whoever did it knew what they were doing.”
“What about the sentries?” Sirocco asked curtly,
“Emmerson and Crealey were at the back. We found them unconscious in a ditch. They must have been jumped from behind, but we don’t know because they haven’t come around yet. They look as if they’ll be okay though. The others didn’t know a thing about it.”
Colman was listening grimly. “What about his wife?” he muttered to Sirocco.
“How is Kalens’s wife?” Sirocco asked Hanlon.
“She isn’t here, We’ve checked with transportation, and she was booked onto a shuttle up to the ship earlier this evening. She must have left before it happened.” Beside Sirocco, Colman breathed an audible sigh of relief.
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” Sirocco said. “Stay there, Bret, and don’t let anyone touch anything. I’ll get onto Brigade right away. We’ll have some more people over there in a few minutes.” He returned to Colman. “Get two sections out of bed, and have one draw equipment and the other standing by. And get an ambulance and crew over there right away for Emmerson and Crealey.” Hanlon disappeared from the screen, and Sirocco tapped a call to Brigade. “It looks as if the fall-guy has gone down, Steve,” he murmured while Colman called the ambulance dispatcher on another panel. “Let’s see who steps out from the wings now.”