“True enough,” Donal said. “What’s your suggestion, then?”
“Withdraw to one of the untouched worlds—the Exotics, Coby, Dunnin’s World. Or even the Dorsai, if they’ll take us. We’ll be safe there, in a position of strength, and we can take our time then about looking for a chance to strike back.”
Ian shook his head.
“Every day—every hour,” he said, “William grows stronger on those worlds he’s taken over. The longer we wait, the greater the odds against us. And finally, he’ll have the strength to come after us—and take us.”
“Well, what do you want us to do, then?” demanded Lludrow. “A fleet without a home base is no striking weapon. And how many of our men will want to stick their necks out with us? These are professional soldiers, man—not patriots fighting on their home ground!”
“You use your field troops now or never!” said Ian shaking his head. “We’ve got forty thousand battle-ready men aboard these ships. They’re my responsibility and I know them. Set them down on some backwater planet and they’ll fall apart in two months.”
“I still say—”
“All right. All right!” Donal was rapping with his knuckles on the table to call them back to order. Lludrow and Ian sat back on their floats again; and they all turned to look at Donal.
“I wanted you all to have a chance to speak up,” he said, “because I wanted you to feel that we had explored every possibility. The truth of the matter is that both you gentlemen are right in your objections—just as there is some merit in each of your plans. However, both your plans are gambles; long gambles—desperate gambles.”
He paused to look around the table.
“I would like to remind you right now that when you fight a man hand-to-hand, the last place you hit him is where he expects to be hit. The essence of successful combat is to catch your enemy unawares in an unprotected spot—one where he is not expecting to be caught.”
Donal stood up at the head of the table.
“William,” he said, “has for the last few years put his emphasis on the training of ground troops—field troops. I have been doing the same thing, but for an entirely different purpose.”
He placed his finger over a stud on the table before him and half-turned to the large wall behind him.
“No doubt all you gentlemen have heard the military truism that goes—you can’t conquer a civilized planet. This happens to be one of the ancient saws I personally have found very irritating; since it ought to be obvious to any thinking person that in theory you can conquer anything—given the necessary wherewithal. The case for conquering a civilized world becomes then a thing of perfect possibility. The only problem is to provide that which is necessary to the action.”
They were all listening to him—some a little puzzled, others doubtfully, as if they expected all of what he was saying to turn suddenly into some joke to relieve the tension. Only Ian was phlegmatic and absorbing.
“Over the past few years, this force, which we officer, has developed the wherewithal—some of it carried over from previous forces, some of recent development. Your men know the techniques, although they have never been told in what way they were going to apply them. Ian, here, has produced through rigorous training the highly specialized small unit of the field forces—the Group, which under ordinary battle conditions numbers fifty men, but which we have streamlined to a number of thirty men. These Groups have been trained to take entirely independent action and survive by themselves for considerable periods of time. This same streamlining has gone up through the ranks—extending even to your fleet exercises, which have also been ordered, with a particular sort of action in mind.”
He paused.
“What all this boils down to, gentlemen,” he said, “is that we are all about to prove that old truism wrong—and take a civilized world, lock, stock, and barrel. We will do it with the men and ships we have at hand right here, and who have been picked and trained for this specific job—as the planet we are about to take has been picked and thoroughly intelligenced.” He smiled at them. They were all sitting on the edges of their floats now.
“That world,”—he pressed the stud that had been under his finger all this time; the wall behind him vanished to reveal the three-dimensional representation of a large, green planet—“is the heart of our enemy’s power and strength. His home base—Ceta!”
It was too much—even for senior officers. A babble of voice burst out around the table all at once. Donal paid no attention. He had opened a drawer at his end of the table and produced a thick sheaf of documents, which he tossed on the table before him.
“We will take over Ceta, gentlemen,” he said. “By, in a twenty-four hour period, replacing all her local troops, all her police, all her garrisons and militia and law enforcement bodies and arms, with our own men.”
He pointed to the sheaf of documents.
“We will take them over piecemeal, independently, and simultaneously. So that when the populace wakes up the following morning they will find themselves guarded, policed and held, not by their own authorities, but by us. The details as to targets and assignments are in this stack, gentlemen. Shall we go to work?”
They went to work. Ceta, large, low-gravity planet that it was, had huge virgin areas. Its civilized part could be broken down into thirty-eight major cities, and intervening agricultural and residential areas. There were so many military installations, so many police stations, so many armories, so many garrisons of troops—the details fell apart like the parts of a well-engineered mechanism, and were fitted together again with corresponding units of the military force under Donal’s command. It was a masterpiece of combat preplanning.
“Now,” said Donal, when they were done. “Go out and brief your troops.”
He watched them all leave the conference room—all, with the exception of Ian, whom he had detained; and Lee, for whom he had just rung. When the others were gone, he turned to the two still with him.
“Lee,” he said, “in six hours every man in the fleet will know what we intend to do. I want you to go out and find a man—not one of the officers—who doesn’t think it’ll work. Ian”—he looked over at his uncle—“when Lee finds such a man and reports to you, I want you to see that the man is sent up to see me, right away. Is that clear?”
The other two nodded; and went out, to do each his own job in his own fashion. So it was that a disgruntled Groupman from a particular landing force had a surprising meeting and surprisingly cordial chat with his commander in chief, and that they went out together, half an hour later, arm-in-arm, to the control room of the flagship, where Donal requested, and got, a voice-and-picture hookup to all ships.
“All of you,” Donal said, smiling at them out of their screens after he had been connected, “have by this time been informed about the impending action. It’s the result of a number of years of top-level planning and the best intelligence service we have been lucky enough to have. However, one of you has come to me with the natural fear that we may be biting off more than we can chew. Therefore, since this is an entirely new type of operation and because I believe firmly in the rights of the individual professional soldier not to be mishandled, I’m taking the unprecedented step of putting the coming assault on Ceta to a vote. You will vote as ships, and the results will be forwarded by your captain, as for or against, to the Flagship here. Gentlemen”—Donal reached out an arm and brought the man Lee had discovered into the screen area with him—”I want you to meet Groupman Theiss, who had the courage to stand up like a free man and ask questions.”
Caught unawares, and dazzled by the sudden limelight into which he had been thrust, the Groupman licked his lips and grinned a little foolishly.
“I leave the decision to all of you,” added Donal, and signaled for the viewing eyes to be cut off.
Three hours later, Groupman Theiss was back on his own ship, astounding his fellow soldiers with an account of what had happened to him; and the votes were in.
“Almost unanimous,” reported Lludrow, “in favor of the attack. Only three ships—none of the first line, and none troop carriers—voting against.”
“I want those three ships held out of the attack,” said Donal. “And a note made of their names and captains. Remind me about that after this is over. All right.” He got up from the float where he had been sitting in the Flagship Lounge. “Give the necessary orders, commander. We’re going in.”
They went in. Ceta had never taken the thought of enemy attack too seriously. Isolated in her position as the single inhabitable planet, as yet largely unexplored and unexploited, that circled her G8 type sun of Tau Ceti; and secure in the midst of an interstellar maze of commitments that made every other planetary government to some extent dependent upon her good will, she had only a few ships in permanent defensive orbit about her.
These ships, their position and movement fully scouted by Donal’s intelligence service, were boxed and destroyed by Donal’s emerging fleet almost before they could give warning. And what warning they did give fell on flabbergasted and hardly-believing ears.
But by that time the assault troops were falling planetward, dropping down on city and military installation and police station behind the curtain of night as it swung around the big, but swiftly-turning world.
They came down in most cases almost on top of their targets, for the ships that had sowed them in the sky above had not been hampered in that action by enemy harassment. And the reaction of those on the ground was largely what might have been expected, when veteran troops, fully armed and armored, move in on local police, untried soldiers in training, and men relaxed in garrison. Here and there, there was sharp and bitter fighting where an assault unit found itself opposed to leased troops as trained in war as they. But in that case, reinforcements were speedily brought in to end the action.
Donal himself went down with the fourth wave; and when the sun rose the following morning large and yellow on the horizon, the planet was secured. Two hours later, an orderly brought him word that William himself had been located—in his own residence outside the city of Whitetown, some fifteen hundred kilometers distant.
“I’ll go there,” said Donal. He glanced around him. His officers were busy, and Ian was off somewhere with an arm of his field troops. He turned to Lee. “Come on, Lee,” he said.
They took a four-man platform and made the trip, with the orderly as guide. Coming down in the garden of the residence, Donal left the orderly with the platform, motioned Lee to accompany him, and entered the house.
He walked through silent rooms, inhabited only by furniture. All the residents of the house seemed to have vanished. After some little time, he began to think that perhaps the report had been in error; and that William was gone, too. And then he passed through an archway into a little anteroom and found himself facing Anea.
She met his gaze with a pale but composed face.
“Where is he?” asked Donal.
She turned and indicated a door on the far side of the room.
“It’s locked,” she said. “He was in there when your men started to land; and he’s never come out. Nobody else would stay here with him. I ... I couldn’t leave.”
“Yes,” said Donal, somberly. He examined the locked door from across the room. “It wouldn’t have been easy—for him.”
“You care about him?” Her voice brought his head up sharply. He looked at her, seeking some note of mockery in her expression. But there was none. She was honestly questioning.
“I care somewhat for every man,” he said. He walked across the room to the door and laid his hand upon it on a sudden impulse, he put his thumb into the finger-lock—and the door swung open.
A sudden coldness blossomed inside him.
“Stay with her,” he threw over his shoulder to Lee. He pushed open the door, found himself faced by another, heavier door—but one which also opened to his touch—and went in.
At the end of a long room William sat behind a desk occupied by a mass of papers. He stood up as Donal entered.
“So you’re finally here,” he said, calmly. “Well, well.”
Going closer, Donal examined the man’s face and eyes. There was nothing there to evoke such a notion; but Donal had the sudden suspicion that William was not as he should be.
“It was a very good landing. Very good,” said William tiredly. “It was a clever trick. I acknowledge the fact, you see. I underestimated you from the first day I met you. I freely admit it. I’m quite conquered—am I not?”
Donal approached to the other side of the desk. He looked into William’s calm exhausted face.
“Ceta is in my control,” said Donal. “Your expeditionary forces on the other worlds are cut off—and their contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Without you to give the orders, it’s all over with.”
“Yes ... yes, I thought as much,” said William, with the hint of a sigh. “You’re my doom, you know—my weird. I should have recognized it earlier. A force like mine among men must be balanced. I thought it would be balanced with numbers; but it wasn’t.” He looked at Donal with such a strange, searching expression that Donal’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re not well,” said Donal.
“No, I’m not well.” William rubbed his eyes, wearily. “I’ve been working too hard lately—and to no purpose. Montor’s calculations were foolproof; but the more perfect my plan, the more perfectly it always went awry. I hate you, you know,” said William, emotionlessly, dropping his hand and looking up at Donal again. “No one in all the history of man has ever hated the way I hate you,”
“Come along,” said Donal, going around the desk toward him. “I’ll take you to someone who can help you—”
“No. Wait—” William held up his hand and backed away from Donal. Donal stopped. “I’ve got something to show you first. I saw the end the minute I got reports your men were landing. I’ve been waiting nearly ten hours now.” He shivered, suddenly. “A long wait. I had to have something to keep myself occupied.” He turned about and walked briskly back to a set of double doors set in a far wall. “Have a look,” he invited; and pressed a button.
The doors slid back.
Donal looked. Hanging in the little close area revealed there was something only barely recognizable by what was left of its face. It was, or had been, his brother Mor.
Secretary For Defense
Flashes of clarity began to return.
For some time, now and again, they had been calling him from the dark corridors down which he walked. But he had been busy, too busy to respond until now. But now—slowly—he let himself listen to the voices, which were sometimes those of Anea, and Sayona, and Ian, and sometimes the voices of those he did not know.
He rose to them reluctantly, slow to abandon the halls of darkness where he traveled. Here was the great ocean he had always hesitated to enter; but now that he was in it, it held him warm, and would have possessed him except for their little voices calling him back to petty things. Yet, duty lay to them, and not to it—that duty that had been impressed on him from his earliest years. The things undone, the things ill-done—and what he had done to William.
“Donal?” said the voice of Sayona.
“I’m here,” he said. He opened his eyes; and they took in a white hospital room and the bed in which he lay, with Sayona and Anea and Galt standing beside it—along with a short man with a mustache in the long pink jacket of one of the Exotic psychiatric physicians.
Donal swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. His body was weak from long idleness, but he put the weakness aside the way a man puts aside any irritating, but small and unimportant thing.
“You should rest,” said the physician. Donal looked at him casually. The physician looked away; and Donal smiled, to ease the man.
“Thanks for curing me, doctor,” he said.
“I didn’t cure you,” said the physician, a little bitterly, his head still averted.
Donal turne
d his glance on the other three; and a sadness touched him. In themselves, they had not changed, and the hospital room was like similar rooms had always been. But yet, in some way, all had dwindled—the people and the place. Now there was something small and drab about them, something tawdry and limited. And yet, it was not their fault.
“Donal” began Sayona, on a strangely eager, questioning note. Donal looked at the older man; and he, like the physician, looked automatically away. Donal shifted his glance to Galt, who also dropped his eyes. Only Anea, when he gazed at her, returned his glance with a child’s pure stare.
“Not now, Sayona,” said Donal. “We’ll talk about it later. Where’s William?”
“One floor down ... Donal—” the words broke suddenly from Sayona’s lips in a rush. “What did you do to him?”
“I told him to suffer,” said Donal, simply, “I was wrong. Take me to him.”
They went slowly—and, on Donal’s part, a little unsteadily—out the door and down to a room on the floor below. A man there lay rigid on a bed like the one Donal had occupied—and it was hard to recognize that man as William. For all the asepsis of the hospital, a faint animal smell pervaded the room; and the face of the man was stretched into a shape of inhumanity by all known pain. The skin of the face was tautened over the flesh and bones like cloth of thinnest transparency over a mask of clay, and the eyes recognized no one.
“William—” said Donal, approaching the bed. The glazed eyes moved toward the sound of his voice. “Mor’s trouble is over.”
A little understanding flickered behind the Pavlovian focusing of the eyes. The rigid jaws parted and a hoarse sound came from the straining throat. Donal put his hand on the drum-tight brow.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll be all right, now.” Slowly, like invisible bonds melting away, the rigidity began to melt out of the man before them. Gradually he softened back into the shape of humanity again. His eyes, now comprehending, went to Donal as if Donal’s tall form was one light in a cavern of lightlessness.