The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (67 page)

Far, far in the distance there was movement. It was a swarming of crawling motes. There was first a brisk, whizzing movement of very small shapes indeed. They were motorcyclists, darting here and there and everywhere, not only on the highways but all over the fields, investigating every square yard of the soil and every patch of woodland and underbrush. They slipped inquisitively into every homestead and barnyard with the insatiable curiosity of the forerunners of a marching army of ants.

But this army was not ants, despite its multitude. These were men. The scouts searched hastily with instruments far more sensitive than any human sense-organ. They quested for areas in which neutrons or gamma rays or other impalpable particles might be present in even slightly excessive number. The presence of excess sub-atomic particles anywhere might indicate radioactive material in concealment, which might mean atomic bombs. But they found nothing.

The invading army rolled forward like a swiftly-Bowing tide. Behind the motorcyclists came armored cars, tracking ruthlessly through the growing grain. More delicate instruments still made sure that the peaceful countryside was no deathtrap for the legions yet to follow. After the armored cars came tanks. Light tanks by hundreds. Medium tanks by thousands. Heavy, clanking monsters, lurching and rolling in a horrible panoply across the emptiness which had been abandoned to them to be crushed beneath their treads.

Igor’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the balcony-rail of the empty city hall. This was no mere inflow of an occupation-force. This was the army—the main army—of the eastern nation on the march. It moved in terrible, overwhelming strength. It did not merely take possession. It invaded, though quite unopposed. And invasion in force of a province emptied for its occupation had a flavor of the absurd which was not in the least amusing. The mobilization of such might, in spite of the lack of even a dog to bark defiance at it, was more menacing than anything else in the world could have been. It could not be checked by armed resistance, much less by capitulation to its demands. Seeing the force which entered the empty province, Igor knew more bitterly than ever that the sacrifice of territory had been in vain. His country was doomed in its entirety. These troops could overwhelm it almost without a pause. The army and air-force of Igor’s country, against such a force, was no more able to stop it than the west-wind of the nursery rhyme.

Inexorably, the invading army swept across the visible land to the east and reached a point level with the city from which Igor watched. The scouting motorcycles divided before it and went racing and dashing hysterically here and there across the open fields. They closed together again beyond the city and went on to westward. Behind them came the armored cars, almost as many in number. After them came the tanks; light tanks and growling medium tanks and the swaying monsters with turrets from which long and deadly guns lolled out.

The streets of the deserted city filled. An orderly came rushing to the platform from which Igor and his captor watched. Igor’s captor ran down the stairs, and the orderly prodded the stricken and raging Igor to follow. He reached the open air of the square about General Paslič’s statue just as a cavalcade of sleek staff cars drove briskly into it, dispersed themselves according to patently pre-arranged plans, and disgorged shoulder-tabbed officers who saluted each other and chattered brightly in the slightly annoyed satisfaction of officers who have conducted a completely uneventful advance.

Igor’s captor, his peasant’s costume now stripped off to reveal the melodramatic uniform of a paratrooper, stood at attention before an officer with a general’s stars. He spoke, plainly preening himself. He beckoned, and one of his men brought Igor’s smashed transmitter forward. The general officer glanced at it indifferently and gestured with his hand. An officer rushed it to a lumbering technical-service truck just entering the square.

Igor was led forward. He was suddenly very calm. It was the numbed composure of despair. His country had surrendered a second province to the threat of force, and the province had been occupied by an army capable of sweeping away any conceivable resistance in the rest of the nation. And therefore, the surrender of this province had merely saved the invaders a few lives. That was all. The army had not fought with its new weapons. It craved to be tested against a suitably inferior antagonist, so that it could taste the pride of victory. So—Igor knew that his country’s yielding had been quite useless. It meant only that fighting would begin nearer the heart of the smaller nation, against an enemy already flushed with triumph, and with the smaller and weaker nation already stunned by disaster, crowded with refugees, and convinced of its coming doom.

The general regarded Igor with lack-lustre eyes. He was a high-ranking general, Igor knew. He recognized him from photographs seen long before. But in his strange, despairing calmness Igor saw more than an enemy. He saw that the general was a wholly commonplace man, pompous and strutting because that was the tradition of his army, but without conviction. He was a puppet of his government, without will or conscience of his own, and therefore he would be more merciless, more ruthlessly brutal, more hideously inhuman in his commands than a man who dared to think for himself.

“You were sent,” said the general, “to detonate atomic bombs when our troops should have taken their positions. Tell me your orders and the position of the mines.”

“I had no orders,” he said stiffly. “I know of no mines.”

Igor hated himself that he had to moisten his lips to reply. “I stayed behind with a radio transmitter to broadcast an account of the entry of your troops, for recording and rebroadcast to make my fellow countrymen ashamed that they had surrendered.”

The general waved his hand impatiently.

“You are not in uniform. There is no reason why you should not be shot out of hand. What are your orders and where are the mines?”

“I have no orders!” repeated Igor fiercely. “There are no mines! I am ashamed that there are no mines!”

The general frowned. An officer behind him murmured softly.

“No,” said the general without emotion. “He would say anything at all, merely to escape the pain. Drug him and question him under the drugs. Make sure he tells all he knows. Then hang him.”

He dismissed Igor from his mind. Igor was dragged away. And he had thought that he hated his country’s enemies before, but it was as nothing to the rending passion that filled him now. He said thickly to his guards:

“You’ll get nothing out of me! I’m not needed to take care of you! You’ll destroy yourselves!”

And then he ragingly filled his mind with pictures of destruction such as he longed to have fall upon the invaders. He imagined death raining from the skies upon them. Death rising from the bowels of the earth to engulf them. He trembled with his hatred. He had no hope, of course, that he himself would live to see the sunset. But he lashed himself into a veritable frenzy of hate, and he thrust away most fiercely of all the secret thought that gave him sound reason for just this passion.

He blanked his mind to all but hatred as, held fast in the counter-intelligence-service truck that was especially equipped for the questioning of prisoners, he felt the needles inject the drugs which should rob him of all resistance to questioning. He did not expect to wake. He expected to be dangling at the end of a rope before the hypnotic drugs wore off. And therefore he hated the enemy, and envisioned all that could destroy them and every disaster that could befall.

It worked. The adrenalin of fury fought the soporific drugs. The world became a dim land in which he raged futilely but triumphantly against the invaders. Soothing voices asked questions, and he panted joyously of cataclysms which would destroy them all.

He was very, very cold and sick when consciousness came back to him. There had been no compassion whatever in the treatment given him. It did not matter whether he died while being questioned or afterward. He remembered groggily that he’d shouted at them until they drugged him almost to unconsciousness, and then he’d whispered gleeful prophecies of what would happen as they found out the peril which awaited every invading soldier. It seemed to him—but he was sick and dizzy and confused—that he’d told them that their own actions would set off the devices that were to annihilate them. And from a misty memory of questions about radio, he believed that he’d given them the impression that their own inter-vehicle radios were to be the means by which their destruction would be released.

That, of course, could very well have been arranged, but he was bitterly sure that there was no death-trap set to harm the invading soldiers at all.

He realized that the surface on which he lay was moving. It bumped and lurched and swayed. He was in a vehicle of some sort, a truck perhaps, moving down a metal road. Then he heard voices. Guards, no doubt.

“…Lucky…own radio sets working some kind of timers… not too much detail…plays the devil, though…general ordered all short-wave communication stopped…”

Nausea overwhelmed Igor, lying on the floor of a bumping truck. But he felt a silly sick triumph nevertheless. They thought their own short-wave radios would ultimately set off atomic bombs hidden somewhere. So they’d stopped using short-waves. He’d accomplished that much. He’d made that much confusion among the invaders. Of course, it would make no difference in the end. His country would be overwhelmed and extinguished. It would have been better to have fought from the beginning; to go down in a welter of atomic flame. But, puny as was his revenge, at least he’d done that much! He’d made the conquerors a little bit ridiculous…

Then weakness swept over him like a flood. He blanked out, as the enemy vehicle carried him somewhere unguessable. Undoubtedly, though, he thought in a last flicker of indifferent consciousness, undoubtedly he was on the way to wherever it might be that they would hang him.

CHAPTER 3

“Look here,” said Igor carefully, to the white-coated, blank-eyed psychologists who regarded him in completely inhuman meditativeness. “After what I’ve been through, you can’t expect me to be afraid of being shot! And you know that you’ve gotten just about everything that my conscious or subconscious mind can give you! There simply isn’t anything more to be had from me. I don’t know any more! So there’s no use!”

There was silence. A figure said detachedly:

“We merely debate what to do next. Under the first hypnotics, you spoke of destruction awaiting our army. Now you deny all knowledge of anything of the sort.”

“Naturally,” said Igor, “at the time I was ashamed and raging. I was to be hung. Anybody would say anything to do all the damage he could under such circumstances. I worked on your counter-intelligence men to make them believe there was something drastic in store for them and all your army. Who wouldn’t have tried to do that? And,” he added in grim triumph, “I managed it. I’d had a short-wave radio, and you people thought I’d have touched off something with it, somehow, so I’ve gotten your army afraid to use its field-sets for fear they’ll set off booby-traps! You marched thirty divisions into my country, when one would have been enough to take over the province you demanded. I think they were going to go right on and annex the rest of the nation, too. But they’re stopped, now. They’re sitting tight right where they are. They’re even using wire-telegraph and couriers and ground-to-plane signalling for communications. Quite a bit of accomplishment for one man, don’t you think?”

One of the white-coated figures said reflectively:

“If you lie, now, it is to get your traps exploded by our actions in the field. If you tell the truth, it is because you know we will not believe you. We must plan something quite decisive, to make quite sure just what you have managed to hide from us.”

Igor licked his lips. He had been in the enemy capital for thirty-six hours. He had been examined in every fashion that science could devise. Physical torture had been limited only by the fear that—after the course of hypnotic drugs designed to shatter all normal controls—too much agony might make him simply go mad and be useless for further questioning. He was a jangling mass of quivering nerves. He was weak. He was exhausted. He had suffered all that they dared do to him. And if he had courage now, it was because he had no hope whatever. He was possessed by the terrible exhausted composure of a man who has already experienced the worst that they would dare to do.

“The President of our Council of Ministers,” he said as carefully as before, “said that our nation would not consent to be gobbled up province by province. He said that we would not attempt to fight a total war, with the certain death of many or most of our citizens an inevitable consequence, but that any alien soldier who entered our territory did so at his peril.” Igor paused. “I can’t add anything to that. I hope that it was not only a bluff. I think that your army had orders to go on and occupy our entire country, if it looked practical. I hope that if they had such orders, or if they carry them out, that they will be killed to the last man, and that you and all your fellow countrymen die as horribly as it is possible for human beings to die.”

He said it without anger. There was no longer any strength in him for fury, and these enemies would kill him presently in any case. If it suited their purpose to kill him by slow torture they would do so, and if it did not suit their purpose they would not do so. Nothing that he could say or do would make his death easier or harder. Certainly he could do nothing to avoid it.

They waited, looking at him with the same abstracted, unhuman speculation. They were the leading psychologists of the enemy nation, but they were frightened men. They were required to find out, from Igor, the nature of the threat the invading army faced. And so far they had not found out. They couldn’t. He didn’t know. But they did not dare kill him without finding out. Now he saw a faint, hidden hope beginning to appear among them. He had begun to talk of his own volition. They listened, in the hope that something would slip that violence and science had previously failed to extract.