Arslan

community should be self-sufficient. It should produce everything it consumes, and contain no more people than it can support in comfort.” He was speaking dully, absently. His eyes were on the gun.

I had started to take off my suit coat. And just now, when I needed every speck of coolness I could manage, sweat ran into my eyes and I kept seeing faces in the corner of my mind’s eye: the children’s faces, Hunt and his mother, Betty white with fear, and Colonel Nizam’s face, and faces of soldiers; and over and behind what Arslan was saying now, I heard him saying to Perry, “No games,” and the noise Perry made.

“I thought there were too many people to go around.” I had my left arm out of the sleeve. I reached across my chest and pulled the coat loose from behind me, pulled it down from my right shoulder, leaving my right arm in its sleeve, and began to wrap the loose folds around the gun.

“Of course. It is too late to solve the problem by distribution alone. But it is better to die quickly than by starvation or malnutrition. And those who remain alive will have enough. Also, there is more land than you may think, sir. Very much is now wasted.” He watched the gun. It was the first time I had seen that face dead serious, without a trace of mockery or humor. No games, I heard his voice saying, and I saw the soldier’s rueful look, and Paula’s face.

“Destruction of civilization sounds like a good name for it, all right. What about industry?”

“Only local industry. No trade. Total self-sufficiency based on the land.” He glanced from the gun to my face and smiled faintly. “Yes, these are cliches. You yourself live by cliches, sir. But mine are enforceable.”

“Not for long.”

“No. But for long enough to change the pattern of society, the pattern of human life. If I succeed, I think it will be several hundred years before the world becomes again as bad as it was last summer.”

“In other words, you want to set the world back several hundred years. What about medicines? What about training doctors and dentists?”

“They can be trained like other craftsmen, by apprenticeship. There will be less disease, because conditions will be more healthful; less contagion, because less travel. Medicines enough can be produced locally.”

“What are you doing here? Why Kraftsville?”

“There was a cause for celebration. It was convenient to halt here. And then—”

It was the first time I’d seen him hesitate over anything. “And then?”

His grin came back, just for a second. “Kraftsville pleases me.”

I had the gun as well muffled as I was likely to get it. “You said there’s no United States government. What happened to it?”

“It abdicated to me.”

“That’s unbelievable,” I said. “And I don’t believe it. Any of it.”

No, he wasn’t really very much interested in agrarian socialism at the moment. Blood showed rusty at the corner of his mouth. “Believe this, then, that I will not die easily. I have put my death into your hands, sir; but at the end I must fight it. The range is very short, yes, the caliber is large; but I am very quick, and I am strong. And do not hope to disable me and hold me as hostage. This pistol is not a precision instrument. You will not stop me with less than a fatal wound.” He paused, his eyes preoccupied with the gun, and went on again. “If you kill me, sir, I think your best chance will be to fire the town yourself, immediately.” I stared at him. “Do not imagine that you can surprise the school. But with a few good men and a sufficient diversion, you might save very many of the children.” Slowly he fingered another cigarette out of his pocket, but he didn’t put it in his mouth. “Your wife,” he said, “sleeps in your own bedroom. The boy Hunt is in the southwest room. There is a guard on the stairs, and one on each side of the house outside.”

“Where are those two girls?”

“At the high school.”

“Where’s Betty Hanson?”

“In the northwest room.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged. He put the cigarette in his mouth. He looked at me. And I felt an anger that burned and ached to my fingertips. He had started this. He had come here, occupied my town, taken over my school. And now he was passing the buck to me, to decide, on the shabbiest sort of data, which of two intolerable directions the world should take. Well, I didn’t want it. I wasn’t God. The most I could do was choose for myself, for Luella and the children.

“All right,” I said finally. “You can light your cigarette.”

He lit it in a hurry, and dragged deep. Apparently he was part human, at least.

“What happens,” I asked, “if I just get out of the car and go away?”

He shook his head. “I will stop you.”

I shifted the gun to my left hand while I got the coat off of myself and it. I opened the breech and took out the cartridges. I half turned, and flung them broadcast into Sam Tuller’s oat field, and the gun after them.

Arslan didn’t seem to have moved an eyelash. He offered his cigarette pack, and I shook my head. I felt sick and cold. His whole face was shiny with triumph.

“You threatened me with a weapon, sir,” he said quietly. “I threatened you with a more powerful one. I still hold that weapon. I could use it now to make you search this field on hands and knees until you found every cartridge. But I do not.” He straightened in his seat and switched on the ignition, and that little flick of the fingers was a swagger in itself. “I wish to know about the farms we pass: who lives in each house, how much land, what crops, what livestock. You should not lie to me about anything today, sir. It is important for your people.”

We covered practically the whole of Kraft County, and a little of three neighboring counties. We went down roads I hadn’t been on in years, and some I’d never been on. In fact we covered, by actual driving or by sight, every passable backroad in the whole area. He wasn’t interested in the main roads; or maybe he thought he knew them already. And all the way he kept me busy with his questions. “Who lives there? How old? How many sheep? Is that wheat? Is that soybeans?” (He was always right.) “What is their water supply? Is there a basement in that church? Does this stream flood?” And every now and then, “What bird was that?”

I usually hadn’t seen the bird. I was busy thinking a few miles ahead, searching for something that I could profitably lie to him about. The thing was to save any weapons we could, and a reserve of people willing and able to use them. He didn’t ask me about guns, but he asked me a lot about people and about farm equipment. And it was on those points that I did slip in a few outright lies and several exaggerations.

When we pulled up at the south door of the school and got out and he faced me across the car and said pleasantly, “You will find ways, sir, to spread the word,” I couldn’t speak—couldn’t have spoken if my life depended on it, which for all I knew it did. It was the most I could do to hold myself upright against the pain in my stomach. I just looked at him. He smiled and turned away toward the street—toward my house—and a soldier behind me opened the school door.

But it wasn’t for me; it was for Colonel Nizam coming out. He passed me with a carnivorous look and saluted his general. Everybody in the parking lot was looking very attentively at Arslan’s face. His mouth and cheek were swollen, with a little discoloration around the lips; and even while my stomach was rolling into itself, it made me proud to see the mark of my fist on him. Nizam asked him something, sharp and low, and Arslan answered briefly, with a smile and a sidelong glance at me. But the look that Nizam turned my way was pure murder. I gave him one straight stare for answer, and went in. So now Colonel Nizam had it in for me, and General Arslan thought it was very amusing.

Well, there were two things I could hold on to. For one, there were a high-caliber pistol and eight cartridges somewhere in Sam Tuller’s oat field. For another, this earthshaking Arslan had a suicidal streak a mile wide. And both those facts might be useful; but they might also be very dangerous.

Chapter 3

I dreamed about it. It seemed to me I dreamed about nothing else for weeks. I had the pistol in my hand (sometimes it was so real I could feel it) and I was facing him—in spitting distance, as my father used to say. Sometimes I did spit in his face. We were in the Land Rover, or my office, or different rooms of my house. We