"I worked in one of the Government departments," I said. "That enabled
me to pass information on to Sergeant's men in the vicinity. It also
gave me a good spot for mixing up orders and shipments."
He nodded again. "That's one of the advantages of a guerrilla outfit,"
he said. "The administration end really doesn't exist; we can live off
the country. I should think that, over an area as large as we can
range on Wohlen, we can't be wiped out."
Of course, that was only his opinion; but I wasn't easy about it. The
sight of him had shaken me quite a bit and I began to think I'd have
to get rid of him. That would be unpleasant and dangerous, I told
myself. But there didn't seem to be any help for it, at the moment.
"About information," he said. "You were closely watched--anyone
working for the Government would have had to have been. How did you
get your information out?"
I nodded toward the radio. "It's not a normal call-radio," I said,
with perfect truth. "Its operation is indetectable by the normal
methods. I'm not an expert, so I won't go into technical details; it's
enough that the radio works."
"Then why come to us?" Hollerith said. "Aren't there guerrillas in the
Ancarta vicinity for you to work with?"
I shook my head. "Only a few more or less ... ah ... disaffected
minorities," I said. That was true, too. "They raised hell for a day
or so, then walked in and surrendered. The guerrilla network on the
entire planet, sir, is under your command."
He shook his head. "It's not my command," he said. "This is a
democracy. You've met Huey ... my orderly, in the old days. But now he
has as much voice as I have. Except for expert matters."
Crackpots. But I listened. Democracy was the basis of their group;
every move was voted on by the entire band, wherever possible. "We're
not a dictatorship," Hollerith said. "We don't intend to become one."
It was nice to hear that; it meant that, maybe, I wouldn't have to get
rid of him after all. "Anyway," I said, "your men appear to be the
only ones active on Sergeant's behalf."
[Illustration]
He took it without flinching. "Then we need help," he said. "Can you
provide it?"
"I can get you guns," I said. "Volunteers. Supplies."
There was a little pause.
"Who do you think you are?" Hollerith said. "God?"
I didn't tell him that, from his point of view, I was inhabiting the
other half of the theological universe. Somehow, it didn't seem
necessary.
* * * * *
The men started to arrive in a week, some of them carrying supplies
and armaments for all the rest. Hollerith was beside himself with joy,
and even Huey stopped looking at me with suspicion. In the meantime,
I'd been living with the guerrillas, eating and sleeping with them,
but I hadn't been exactly trusted. There'd been a picked group of men
set to watch over me at all times, and I managed to get a little
friendly with them, but not very. In case I turned out to be a louse,
nobody wanted to have to shed tears over my unmarked grave.
Until the men arrived, there weren't any raids; Hollerith, very
sensibly, wanted to wait for my reinforcements, and he carried most of
the group with him. Huey was all for killing me and getting on with
normal operations; I don't think he had any real faith in me even
after the reinforcements began to arrive.
I'd made the call on my radio, in Hollerith's hearing. I'd asked for
one hundred and fifty men--a force just a bit larger than the entire
band Hollerith had commanded until then--three hundred heaters with
ammunition and supplies to match, a couple of large guns throwing
explosive shells, and some dynamite. I added the dynamite because it
sounded like the sort of thing guerrillas ought to have, and Hollerith
didn't seem to mind. On his instructions, I gave them a safe route to
come by, assuming they started near New Didymus; actually, of course,
some of my corps brothers were recruiting on other parts of the planet
and the Government had been fully instructed not to hold any of them
up. I won't say that President Santa Claus understood what I was
doing, but he trusted me. He had faith--which was handy.
Hollerith was overjoyed when the reinforcements did arrive. "Now we
can really begin to work," he told me. "Now we can begin to fight
back in a big way. No more of this sneaking around, doing fiddling
little jobs--"
He wanted to start at once. I nearly laughed in his face; it was now
established that I didn't have to get rid of the man. If he'd decided
to delay on the big attack ... but he hadn't.
So, of course, I helped him draw up some plans. Good ones, too; the
best I could come up with.
The very best.
* * * * *
"The trouble," Hollerith told me sadly, a day or so later, "is going to
be convincing the others. They want to do something dramatic--blowing up
the planet, most likely."
I said I didn't think they planned to go that far, and, anyhow, I had
an idea that might help. "You want to take the Army armaments depot
near New Didymus," I said. "That would serve as a good show of
strength, and weaken any reprisals while we get ready to move again."
"Of course," he said.
"Then think of all the fireworks you'll get," I said. "Bombs going
off, heaters exploding, stacks of arms all going off at once--the
Fourth of July, the Fourteenth, and Guy Fawkes Day, all at once, with
a small touch of Armageddon for flavor. Not to mention the Chinese New
Year."
"But--"
"Sell it that way," I said. "The drama. The great picture. The
excitement. That, believe me, they'll buy."
He frowned while he thought it over. Then the frown turned into a
grin. "By God," he said, "they might."
And they did. The conference and the election were both pretty stormy.
All the new patriots were off to blow up the Government buildings one
after another, even more enthusiastic than the original members. It
was only natural; my instructions to the recruiters had been to pick
the most violent, frothing anti-Government men they could find to send
out, and that was what we got. But Hollerith gave them a talk, and the
vote, when it came, was overwhelmingly in favor of his plan.
Even Huey was enthusiastic. He came up to me after the meeting and
pounded me on the back; I suppose it was meant for friendship, though
it felt more like sabotage. "Hey, I thought you were no good," he
said. "I thought you were ... oh, you know, some kid of a spy."
"I know," I said.
"Well, Mister," he said, "believe me, I was wrong." He pounded some
more. I tried to look as if I liked it or, anyway, as if I could put
up with it. "You're O.K., Mister," he said. "You're O.K."
Some day, I told myself, I was going to get Huey all to myself, away
in a dark alley somewhere. There didn't seem to be much chance of
keeping the promise, but I made it to myself anyway, and moved away.
The meeting had set the attack for three days ahead, which was a moral
victory for Hollerith; the men were all for making it in the next five
minutes. But he said he needed time--it's a good thing, I told
myself, that he didn't say what he needed it for. Because in a few
hours, right after sunrise the next morning, training started and
Hollerith had his hands full of trouble.
The new men didn't see the sense in it. "Hell," one of them
complained, "all we got to do is go up and toss a bomb into the place.
We don't like all this fooling around first."
The "fooling around" involved jungle training--how to walk quietly,
how to avoid getting slashed by a vine, and so forth. It also involved
forming two separate attack groups for Hollerith's plans. That meant
drilling the groups to move separately, and drilling each group to
stay together.
And there were other details: how to fire a heater from the third rank
without incinerating a comrade in the front rank; signal-spotting, in
case of emergency and sudden changes of plan; the use of dynamite, its
care and feeding; picking targets--and so forth and so forth.
Hollerith's three days seemed pretty short when you thought about what
they had to cover.
But the new men didn't like it. They wanted action. "That's what we
signed on for," they said. "Not all this drill. Hell, we ain't an
army--we're guerrillas."
The older hands, and the more sensible members of the band, tried
their best to talk the new men into line. Some of the officers tried
ordering them into line.
But the talk was ignored. And as for the officers--well, the old
United States Civil War tried a democratic army for a while, on both
sides. Unfortunately, electing your officers is not an efficient way
to run things. The most popular man makes the best officer about as
often as the most popular man makes the best criminal-law judge. Or
engineer, for that matter. War's not a democratic business.
This one, however, seemed to be. Mass election of officers was one of
the rules, along with the voting on staff decisions. The new men
out-numbered the older hands. New officers were elected--and that
stopped the orders.
Hollerith was about two-thirds of the way out of his mind when the
three days were up and the attack time came around. When night fell,
the atmosphere around the cave was as tense as it could get without
turning into actual lightning. It was a warm, still night; the single
moon was quarter-full but it shed a lot more light than Earth's moon;
we blacked ourselves and Hollerith went over the plans. We were still
divided into two groups--ragged groups, but groups. The first wave was
to come around on the depot from the left, attacking in full force
with all armaments and some of that dynamite. When things were getting
toward a peak in that direction, the second force was to come in from
the right and set off its own fireworks. Result (Hollerith hoped):
demolition, confusion, catastrophe.
It was a good plan. Hollerith obviously wasn't sure of his own men
any more--and neither would I have been, in his spot. But he had the
advantage of surprise and superior arms; he was clearly hoping that
would overbalance the lack of discipline, training and order in his
force. Besides, there was nothing else he could do; he was outvoted,
all the way down the line.
* * * * *
I set out, with hardly a qualm, along with the second attack group. We
were under the command of a shy, tall man with spectacles who didn't
look like much, he'd been a trapper before the war, though, and was
one of the original guerrillas, for a wonder, and that meant he was
probably a hell of a lot tougher and more knowledgeable than he
seemed. Setting traps for Wohlen's animals, for instance, was
emphatically not a job for the puny or the frightened. The first group
was under Huey's command.
Hollerith stayed with a small group of his own as a "reserve";
actually, he wanted to oversee the battle, and the men were perfectly
willing to let him, having gotten one idea into their democratic
heads: Hollerith was too valuable a man for the guerrillas to lose.
But I wasn't, of course. I'd done my bit; I'd gotten the volunteers.
Now I could go and die for glory like the rest of them.
* * * * *
The trouble was, I couldn't see any way out. I marched in the dimness
with the rest, and we managed to make surprisingly little noise.
Wohlen's animals were active and stirring, anyhow, and that helped.
At last the depot showed up in the moonlight with the city some
distance behind it. There was a wire fence, and a sentry, immediately
in view behind him were square blocky buildings in a clearing. Beyond
that there was another fence, then some more jungle, and then the
city. Fifty yards from the fence, in the last screen of trees, we
stopped and waited.
The first group was off to the other side of the fence, and I couldn't
see or hear them. The wait seemed to go on for hours; perhaps a minute
and a half passed. Then the first heater went off.
The sentry whirled and fired without really thinking. There wasn't any
way for him to tell what he was shooting at. More heaters went off
from the jungle, and then they started to come in. There was a lot of
noise.
The boys were yelling, swarming over the wire fence and through it,
firing heaters wildly. There were lights in the buildings, now, and a
picked group of men came out of one of them, swinging in single file;
the heaters chopped them to pieces before they had much of a chance. A
tower light went on and then the really big guns got going.
The guerrillas started to get it, then. The big boys from the
armaments tower charred holes in their line, and the noise got worse;
men were screaming and cursing and dying and the heaters were still
going off. I tore my eyes away and looked at the leader of our group.
He was poised on the balls of his feet, leaning forward; he stayed
that way, his head nodding very slowly up and down, for a full second.
Then he shouted and lifted an arm and we followed him, a screaming mob
heading down into hell.
The big guns were swiveled the other way and for a couple of seconds
we had no trouble. Our boys weren't playing with heaters too much;
instead, the dynamite started to fly. Light the fuse, pick it up,
heave--and then stand back and watch. Fireworks. Excitement. Well, it
was what they wanted, wasn't it?
There was an explosion as a small bundle landed inside the fence, in a
courtyard. Then another one, the flashes lighting up faces and bodies
in motion. I found myself screaming with the rest of them.
Then the big one went off.
One of the dynamite bundles had hit the right spot. Ammunition went
off with a dull boom that shook the ground, and the light was too
bright to look into. I went flat and so did the others; I wondered
about solid shells exploding and going wild, but there weren't any.
The light faded, and then it began to grow again.
I put my head up and saw flames. Then I got up and saw the others
rising, too. I turned tail for the jungle. Some of them followed me,
along with some of the first group; order was lost entirely and we
were no more than pieces of a shrieking, delirious, victorious mob. I
headed back for the base.
Behind me the ammunition depot burned brightly. The raid was over.
It had been an unqualified success, of course. The guerrillas had done
the best job of their careers.
So far.
* * * * *
Hollerith was back to the cave before me. Put it down to a short-cut,
or just more practice in the jungle. When I came in he looked
terrible, about a hundred and twelve years old and shrunken. But my
appearance seemed to rouse him a little. He gestured and the others in
the cave--three or four of them--went out. One stood at the entrance.
There was a silence. Hollerith grimaced at me. "You're working for the
Government," he said. It wasn't a question.