Arslan

M. J. Engh ARSLAN Science Fiction Masterworks Volume 84

For Fritz Leiber: friend, heartener

PART ONE Franklin L. Bond

Chapter 1

When his name first cropped up in the news reports, it was just one more foreign name to worry about, like so many others. And like so many others, it graduated in due time to the level of potential crisis. But before it had gone any further than that, suddenly all the rules had been changed when we weren’t looking, and if you said “he” without an obvious antecedent you were talking about Arslan.

On TV and in the news weeklies he’d looked no different from a lot of them: young, jaunty, halfway Oriental like the second-row extras in Turandot, and every one of them a major general at the very least. “Turkistan—is that independent now?” Luella had asked me, one of the first times he showed up.

“I think it always has been.” I meant to look it up in the big atlas at school; but I was busy planning for quarterly exams, and that intention went the way of a lot of other things I meant to do. I never did get around to it till after the Emergency Broadcast Network began its terse announcements that martial law had been proclaimed throughout the United States and that all U.S. armed forces were under the command of General Arslan. Among other things that hectic day, I looked at the map of Central Asia. Turkistan. Cap: Bukhara. Pop: 1,369,000. Even South Vietnam would have been able to handle a place that size. Still, with China on one border and Russia on another, and an oil field begging for development, it was small wonder Arslan had made a splash at the U.N.

“Stay off the highways,” the EBS kept saying. Whether that was a friendly voice or a hostile one was anybody’s guess. “Only military transport is permitted on state, interstate, and national highways.” Military transport—that included, apparently, the great commercial trucks that rolled past the square and on through town. We stood and watched them in the early dusk, and I wondered if it was good luck or bad that Kraftsville happened to lie on a main highway.

“I’ve got to get home,” Paul Sears protested. “I can’t help it if I live on the hardroad.”

“If I were you, Paul, I’d go around by the back road.” That was Arnold Morgan, knowing all the answers. “Once the President invokes his emergency powers, we’re required to follow his instructions. That’s Federal law.”

Paul snorted. “It didn’t sound like the President to me.”

“I’d feel better if I knew who that General Arslan was,” somebody else put in. Which was about par for Kraftsville. Plenty of people in town had never heard of Premier Arslan, or didn’t remember it if they had.

“He’s the one that’s been talking to Red China,” I said. The last news I remembered hearing about him, Arslan and the Chinese premier had been in Moscow by invitation, presumably discussing their border dispute. The Russians had been offering for months to mediate it. Turkistan had been cagey, China had emphatically refused; but at last they had agreed to a Moscow summit meeting, agenda unspecified. Now, a few days after the meeting started, Arslan was Deputy Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. And the trucks were rolling. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Everybody was on the telephone. Long distance calls were getting through to some places, but none farther away than Louisiana, where Rachel Munsey talked to some of her relations and found out there was fighting going on down there. Maybe riot or maybe war—Rachel had managed not to find out that little detail; but there were people with uniforms and people without, and black and white in both categories. We couldn’t make connections with the East Coast or the West Coast, and even Chicago was cut off cold. There were open lines to St. Louis, our nearest city, for just two days. Then they went dead, sometime in the night.

And the next morning we got word from Monckton that a real, genuine army was driving west on Illinois 460, which meant straight towards us. But Kraftsville, Illinois, wasn’t likely to be anybody’s military objective, and the highway didn’t pass the school; I saw no reason to declare a holiday.

It was just after lunch when Luella came hurrying across Pearl Street to my office. “I thought I’d run over and tell you instead of tying up the phone. Helen Sears just called, and she says they’re passing her place right now; they ought to be in town in a few minutes.”

“You shouldn’t be alone,” I said. “Why don’t you go over to Rachel Munsey’s?”

“No, I’d rather be in my own house. And somebody might call.”

“All right. Call me or come over if you hear anything that sounds important. Otherwise just stay put. I want to know where you are.”

From Nita Runciman’s eighth-grade room, which was the southwest corner of the top floor, you could see a little bit of the highway four blocks away. I told Nita to post one or two of her students there as lookouts and let me know as soon as they saw anything. In less than ten minutes she was on the intercom. “They’re coming through,” she said. “Mr. Bond—” Her voice crackled. “Some of them are turning down Pearl Street. Trucks and jeeps.”

They didn’t pass the school; they stopped beside it. I watched them from the south window of my office while I talked on the intercom. They pulled up in a line right in front of me, their engines still running, stretching nearly the full block. The last jeep of the string drove past the others and turned into the parking lot. There was a driver, and a man with a submachine gun, and one passenger. I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but when I saw him, my heart went down a notch. He was too young, too young and too happy.

I had no doubt of who he was, much as I could have used a little doubt right then. The news pictures that had seemed so anonymous suddenly flashed into vivid focus. He gave orders exuberantly, waving his hands. Soldiers swarmed out from Pearl Street in both directions, into the schoolground and into the yard of my house. I searched the upstairs windows for a sight of Luella. But I didn’t have much time to look. Soldiers were at the south door, a few steps from my office, some of them with rifles reversed—ready to smash the glass if the double doors were locked, or maybe just for fun. I got there first, and they waited grinning while I opened up. We might be wanting those doors intact.

They pushed in. Whatever they were, they weren’t Americans. I got in front of a sergeant (I didn’t bother to count his stripes, but he looked like a sergeant) and braced my legs. “Wait a minute!” I said. He looked at me without much interest and gave an order, and three men backed me into my office. I guessed this was what was called token resistance; anyway, it seemed like the best idea available at the moment. Now it was my teachers’ turn. They had instructions to sit as tight as possible, cooperate without objection, volunteer nothing, and keep the children still. There wasn’t much else we could do on such short notice.

Boots thudded along the hall, up the stairs, down into the basement. Doors opened, doors slammed. A long barrage of thumps told me they were opening the desks. Then most of them came trooping back and out of the door. It had only taken a few minutes.

The sergeant held the south door open, saluting smartly, and General Arslan strode in, with quite a retinue behind him. He was stocky, but he moved with lightness and bounce, like a good welterweight boxer. He turned into the office as if he knew his way around. The soldiers let go of my arms and fell back, and I was face to face with him.

“You are in charge of this school?” His English was very clear, his voice a quick baritone.