Rothwell looked down at his desk and closed his eyes briefly. I knew it,
he thought, I knew this would happen, sure as hell. He raised his head.
"Impossible?"
"We will first land twenty ships. These twenty must be fully loaded and
back in orbit before the next will land. We will use the first twenty
air fields on your list."
Rothwell took a deep breath. "But I thought you wanted to get away as
soon as possible! It will take at least an extra day to load according
to your scheme."
"Will it?" Aku moved to go, his lieutenant reached to open the door.
On an impulse, Rothwell stepped forward. "Commander, if you had a son
would you send him away like this?"
Aku stopped, and looked directly at him with even, black eyes; then the
gaze moved through and past him, to the window and the ship beyond. For
a minute his expression altered, changing almost to one of pain. When
he spoke, it was almost to himself. "My father loved his children more
than ..." He started as his lieutenant suddenly clapped a hand on his
shoulder. The expression vanished. They left together, without looking
at Rothwell or saying another word.
For several minutes Rothwell stared frowning at the closed door. He
walked thoughtfully back to his desk, and lowered himself slowly into
the chair.
He sat for a long time, trying to puzzle through the picture. Finally
he stood and paced the room. "Suppose," he said to himself, "just
suppose that not all of those hundred ships up there are really cargo
ships. Suppose that, say, only twenty are. Then, after those twenty were
loaded ..." He swung around to look again at the long, slim silhouette
poised high against the main runway. "With ocean vessels, it's the
fighting ships that are lean and slender."
Bending over his desk, he nudged an intercom button with his finger.
"Doc, how would one go about trying to understand an alien's
reactions?"
Philips' voice shot right back. "Well, Jim, the very first thing, you'd
have to be sure they weren't exactly the same as a human's reactions."
Rothwell paused, startled. "It can't be, Doc. Why, if Aku was a human
I'd say ..." He stiffened, feeling the hair rise at the back of his
neck. The short, curt answers, the refusal to meet his eyes, the frozen
expression clicked into pattern. "Doc ... I'd say he was being forced to
do something he hated like hell to do."
Tensely, he straightened and contemplated the lean, gray spaceship. Then
he whirled around and slapped every button on the intercom.
* * * * *
Thursday. The sun pecked fitfully at the low overcast while a sullen
crowd watched a squat alien ship descend vertically, to finally settle
with a flaming belch not far from the first. Similar crowds watched
similar landings at nineteen other airports around the world, but the
loading was to start first in New York.
An elevator-like box swung out from the fat belly of the ship and was
lowered rapidly to the ground. Two golden-hued aliens, in uniforms
resembling Aku's, stepped out and walked about a thousand feet towards
the crowd. Only children actually being loaded were to go beyond this
point; parents had to stay at the airport gates.
"When do I go, Dad?"
"Shortly, son." Rothwell laid his hand on the lean shoulder. "You're in
the second hundred." There was a brief, awkward silence. "Martha, you'd
better take him over to the line." He held out his hand. "So long, son."
Jim, Jr., shook his hand gravely, then, without a word, suddenly threw
his hands tight around his younger sister. He took his mother's hand,
and they walked slowly over to the sad line that was forming beyond the
gate.
Rothwell turned to his daughter. "You going over there too, kitten?" The
words were gruff in his tight throat.
She wiped a hand quickly across her cheek. "No, Dad, I guess I'll stay
here with you." She stood close beside him.
Aku, forgotten until now, cleared his throat. "I think the loading
should start, General."
Raising his hand in a half-salute, Rothwell signaled to a captain
standing near the gate who turned and motioned to a small cordon of
military police. Shortly, a group of fifty of the first youngsters in
the line separated from the others and moved slowly out onto the
concrete ribbon towards the waiting ship. The rest of the line
hesitated, then edged reluctantly up to the gate, to take the place of
the fifty who had left. They waited there, the children of a thousand
families, suddenly dead quiet, staring after the fifty that slowly moved
away.
They walked quietly, in a tight group, without any antics or horseplay
which, in itself, gave the event an air of unreality. Approaching the
ship, they seemed to huddle even closer together, forming a pathetically
tiny cluster in the shadow of the towering space cruiser. The title of a
book that he had read once, many years before, flashed unexpectedly in
Rothwell's memory, _The Story of Mankind_. He looked sadly after the
fifty, then back at the silent line. Were these frightened kids now
writing the final period in the last chapter? He shook himself, work to
be done, no time now for daydreams.
As the fifty reached the ship and started to enter the elevator,
Rothwell turned and beckoned to some technicians standing out of sight
just inside the entrance to the control tower. Three of them ran out and
set up what looked like a television set, only with three screens. One
ran back, unreeling a power cable, while a fourth flicked on a bank of
switches, making feverish, minute adjustments. Rothwell felt the sweat
in his hands. "Is it okay, Sergeant?"
The back of the sergeant's shirt was wet though the air was cool. "It's
got to be, sir!" His fingers played across the knobs. "All that metal,
the whole thing is critical as ... Ah!" He jumped back. The screens
flashed into life.
* * * * *
Aku stiffened. His lieutenant gasped audibly, made a jerky movement
towards the screens, then suddenly became aware of three MPs standing
beside him, hands nonchalantly cradling blunt-nosed weapons.
All three receivers showed similar scenes, the milling youngsters and
the ship, but from up close, the pictures jerking and swaying
erratically as if the cameras were somehow fastened to moving human
beings. Then the scenes condensed into a cramped, jostling blackness as
the fifty crowded into the elevator and were lifted up the side of the
ship.
Next, were three views of a large room, bare except for what appeared to
be overhead cranes and other mechanical paraphernalia of a military shop
or warehouse. For a while the fifty moved about restlessly, then the
cameras swung about simultaneously to face a wall that slowly slid
apart.