The Merchant's War (18 page)

“Who wants a hospital?” I demanded belligerently. “I don’t need any damn hospital! All I need is a Moke—” I didn’t get it, though. I didn’t get anything. If I had I wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it, because just then the sky darkened and wrapped itself around me in a black-wool cocoon, and I was out of it for the next ten hours.

They were not idle hours. The prescription for heatstroke was: rehydrate; keep cool; bed rest. Fortunately, it was the same prescription for acute hangover. I got what the doctor ordered. True, I didn’t know it at the time, because I was unconscious at first, drugged asleep after that. I had hazy memories of the needles with saline and glucose going into my arm now and then, and of being coaxed awake to swallow immense doses of liquid. And of dreams. Oh, yes, dreams. Bad dreams. Dreams of Mitzi and Des Haseldyne pigging it in their deluxe penthouses and laughing themselves silly when they thought of poor, dumb old Tennison Tarb.

And when I did wake up at last I thought it was still a dream, because the first sergeant was bending over me, a finger to his lips. “Lieutenant Tarb? Can you hear me? Don’t make any noise—just nod your head if you can—”

The mistake I made was in doing what he said. I nodded. The top of my head shook loose and rattled on the floor, exploding with pain at every bounce.

“I guess you’ve got a pretty bad hangover, right? Too bad … but listen, there’s a problem.”

The fact that there was a problem was not news to me. The only question was, which problem did he mean? Surprise; it wasn’t any of the ones I was aware of. It was something brand new, and not so much my problem as Gert Martels’s. One eye cocked for the floor nurse, whispering with his lips so close to my ear that his breath tickled my ear-hairs, he explained, “Gert’s got this one bad habit, I guess you know—”

“What habit’s that?” I asked.

“You don’t know?” He looked surprised, then actually embarrassed. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “I know it sounds real lousy, but a lot of the guys, you know, out in the field, exposed to all sorts of influences—”

Against all wisdom and desire, I pushed myself up. “Sergeant,” I said, “I don’t have clue one to what you’re talking about. Spell it out for me.”

He said, “She’s off with the Weegs, Lieutenant. And she hasn’t got her protective equipment. And it’s T minus two hours and counting.”

That got me. “You mean the operation’s on tonight?” I yelled.

He winced. “Please, keep your voice down. But yes. It goes at midnight, and it’s ten o’clock right now.”

I stared at him. “Tonight?” I repeated. Where had I been? How had I missed the warning? Of course, it was technically secret information, but surely every trooper in the camp must have known hours before.

The first sergeant nodded. “They moved it up because the weather’s perfect.” Now that I knew what to look for I could see the polarized fabric hood slung over his shoulders and the huge sound-deadening earmuffs hanging down below his chin. “The thing is—”

Sound at the end of the ward. A door opening. A light.

“Oh, hell,” he snapped. “Listen, I’ve got things to do. Go get her, will you, Lieutenant? There’s a Weeg waiting for you downstairs, with protective gear for both of you—he’ll take you to her—he—” Footsteps coming nearer. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he panted. “I’ve got to go.”

And went.

So, as soon as the nurse had made her rounds and gone, I slipped out of bed, slid into my clothes, sneaked out of the ward. My head was hammering and I knew that the last thing I needed was to get an AWOL-from-hospital mark on my record to add to all the other black marks. The funny thing was, I didn’t hesitate for a minute.

I didn’t even hesitate long enough to realize that it was strange. Only later did it occur to me that there had been plenty of times in the past when someone or other had put his tail in a crack to save me from something. Never before had I had any trouble forgetting that when a chance came to pay the favor back. All that was in my mind was that I owed Gert, and she needed me to bail her out. So I went … pausing only once, at the hospital door, to score a couple of Mokes from the vending machine. And I actually think that if the machine hadn’t been right there and available, I might well have gone even without them.

The Weeg was waiting as advertised, not only with complete gear for two but even with a donkey and a two-wheel cart. The only thing missing was his knowledge of English. But, as he seemed to know where to go without any instructions from me, that didn’t appear to be a problem.

It was a hot, dark night, so dark that it was almost scary. You could see the sky! I don’t just mean a daytime sky, or even the night sky when the lights from below give it that dull reddish kind of glow, I mean
stars.
Everybody’s heard of stars, but how many people have actually seen one? And here were
millions
of them, spanning the sky, bright enough to see by—

Bright enough, anyway, for the donkey to see by, because it didn’t seem to have any trouble finding its way. We were off the main roads, heading for the nearby hills. Between us and the hills was a valley. I’d heard of it; it was kind of a curiosity in those parts, because it was fertile. What makes the Gobi a gobi— that is, a gravelly desert—is dryness and wind. Dryness turns the soil into dust. Wind blows the dust away, until all that’s left is endless square miles of stony desert. Except that now and then in a few isolated places—a valley, the sheltered side of a hill—there’s a little water, and those places trap the soil. Other officers had told me that this one was almost like an Italian vineyard, with trellised grapes and even murmuring streams. I hadn’t thought it worth the trouble of visiting. I hadn’t planned to visit it now, especially at night, especially when all hell was supposed to break loose in—I sneaked a look at my watch, brilliant in the dark night—about an hour and five minutes. And actually we didn’t visit it this time. The Weeg took a path around the vineyard, stopped the cart, motioned me to get out and pointed up a hill.

In the starlight I could vaguely see a structure of some sort, shedlike, all by itself. “You mean I should go up there?” I asked. The Weeg shrugged and pointed again. “Is Sergeant Martels in that shack?” Another shrug. “Hell,” I said, turned around and, sighing, started up the hill.

The starlight was not quite enough to see by after all. I stumbled and fell a dozen times trying to climb that feeble excuse for a path— that damn, dirty, dusty path, so dry that when I slipped I was likely as not to slide a yard or two backward. I gashed myself at least twice. The second time as I clambered back to my feet something beyond the hills coughed
whump,
and a moment later
whump
…
whump
…
whump
came from all around the horizon, and in a score of places the stars were stained by slow, spreading clouds of darkness. I didn’t have to be told what they were: sky screens. The operation was about to begin.

I smelled the shed yards before I reached it. It was used for drying grapes into raisins, and it was heavy with a winy stink. But over and above that sickening fruit stench there was something stronger—not just stronger. Almost frightening. It was a little like food—Reel-Meet, maybe, or TurrKee—but there was something wrong with the smell. Not spoilage. Worse than spoilage. My stomach had been reminding me for some time that I’d given it a hard life recently; the smell almost pushed it into revolt. I swallowed and groped my way into the shed.

Inside there was a sort of light. They had built a fire—to see by while they ate stolen rations, I assumed. Wrong assumption. As wrong as the other assumption, which was that Sergeant Martels’s “one bad habit” was something like shacking up with the natives, or maybe getting drunk on home-brewed pop-skull. How naive I had been! There were half a dozen troopers gathered around the fire in the shed, and what they were doing with the fire was desiccating an
animal
over it. Worse than that, they were
eating
the dead animal. Gert Martels stared up at me openmouthed, and in her hand was a part of its limb. She was holding it by its skeleton—

That finished my stomach. I had to blunder outside.

I barely made it. When I had finished heaving everything I’d swallowed for twenty-four hours I took a deep breath and went back inside. They were scared now, looking at me with pale, fearful faces in the firelight.

“You’re worse than gooks,” I told them, my voice shaking. “You’re worse than
Veenies.
Sergeant Martels! Put this on. The rest of you, get your heads down, put your fingers in your ears, don’t open your eyes for the next hour. The operation’s in ten minutes!”

I didn’t wait to hear their anguished complaints, or even to see if Gert Martels was doing as I had ordered. I got out of that hellhole as fast as I could, slipping and skidding a dozen yards down the path before I paused long enough to put the earmuffs in place and the hood over all. Of course, then I could hear nothing at all, least of all Gert Martels coming up beside me. Conversation was impossible. That was just as well. There was nothing I wanted to say to her just then. Or hear. We picked our way down the hill to where the Weeg was waiting with his donkey, squeezed into the cart pointed back toward the encampment. The Weeg picked up the reins—

Then it began.

The first step was fireworks—plain, simple old pyrotechnics. Starbursts. Golden rain. Showers of diamond-bright waterfalls. They weren’t quite bright enough to actuate the quick-response dimmers in our hoods, but they were bright enough to be startling—our Weeg driver almost dropped the reins, gazing pop-eyed at the sky—and all of it punctuated with bombs bursting in air, muffled and dim through our cutouts, but the sound rolling off the hills. The landscape was bright with the aerial bursts; and that was only the come-on. That was to wake the Weegs up and get them out in the open.

Then the Campbellian brigades went into action.

There weren’t many blasts of sound now, but the ones there were sounded like a sonic boom happening between your shoulder and your ear. Incredibly loud. Even through the earmuffs,
painfully
loud—if we hadn’t had the big cutouts half the troops would have experienced hearing loss. For the Weegers, I suppose there was. I found out later that in those booms two glaciers on the distant mountains had calved, and an avalanche of loosened snow had caught the population of one Uygur village staring at the sky. But the noise was only half of it. The other half was
light.

It strobed in your eye—even through the quick-response hoods. Even through closed lids. There was never a show like it. Even protected, it shocked the senses numb.

And then, of course, the speaker balloons bellowed their commands and our projector battalion filled its vapor screens with the vivid, luscious, compelling images of steaming mugs of Coffiest and Cari-O candy bars and Nic-O-Chews and Starrzelius Verily pants suits and athletic supporters—and sizzling, juicy cubes of Reel-Meet with slices curling off them, so rich and rare that you could almost taste them—could in fact smell them because the Chemical Reinforcement Team from the 9th Battalion had not been idle, and their generators poured out whiffs of Coffiest and aromas of Reel-Meet Burgers and, worst of all for me, the occasional chocolaty tang of a Moke—and always and above all the deafening sounds, the blinding strobe lights … “Don’t look!” I shouted in Sergeant Martels’s ear. But how could she help it? Even protected from the limbic stimuli by earpieces and hoods, the images themselves were so appetizing, so heart’s-desire demanding, that my mouth watered and my hands reached as by themselves into my pockets for credit cards. Most of the basic compulsion of the campaign passed us by, of course. We were spared the Campbellian reinforcers. The verbal messages that boomed from hill to hill were in the Uygur dialect, which we did not understand. But our driver sat rapt, head thrown back, reins loose in his lap, eyes shining, and on his face a look of such unutterable longing that my heart melted. I reached in my pocket and found half a Cari-O bar; and when I gave it to him he responded with such a profusion of gratitude that, without understanding a word, I knew that I had earned his lifelong devotion. Poor Weegs! They didn’t have a chance.

Or, to put it more properly, I corrected myself primly, at last they had entered the rich and rewarding comity of mercantile society. Where the Mongols and the Manchus and Hans had failed, modern cultural imperatives had triumphed.

My heart was full. All the worries and tragedies of the last few days were forgotten. I reached out for Gert Martels as we sat in that unmoving cart, with the last of the sky display fading and the echoes of the acoustics fading away, and put my arm around her shoulders.

To my astonishment, she was crying.

By eleven the next morning the trading posts were stripped bare. There were Kazaks and Uygurs and Hui begging at their empty shelves for the chance to buy Popsies and Kelpy Krisps. The entire operation was a flawless triumph. It meant a unit citation for everyone involved, and an Account-Exec citation for some.

It meant—it might even mean—a chance at a fresh start for me.

But, it turned out, it wasn’t going to mean that right away. I got Gert, red-eyed and still mysteriously sniffling, back to her NCO quarters and sneaked back into the hospital with no trouble—half the patients, and nearly all the orderlies and medical staff, were still outside with their hoods thrown back over their shoulders, chattering excitedly about the attack. I mingled for a moment, worked my way through the crowd, found my bed and was asleep again; it had been a hard day.

The next morning replayed my first day, as the major came poking through the ward with the medics in tow to tell me that I was discharged from the ward and due at headquarters in twenty minutes. The only good thing was that the colonel wasn’t there; she’d ordered herself to the fleshpots of Shanghai as soon as the exercise was over to report to General HQ. “But that doesn’t let you off the hook, Tarb,” lectured the lieutenant colonel who was second in command. “Your conduct is
shocking.
You’d be a disgrace to the uniform even as a consumer, but you’re an adman. Watch your step, because I’ll be watching you!”