Arslan

the KCR was undetected. And Hunt wasn’t in a position to be trusted very far.

“It’s not a dynasty. A dynasty is an organization.”

“I never noticed him objecting to his own organization.”

“His organization is designed to be temporary. He’s going to phase it out as fast as possible.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it. And I’ll still call it a dynasty, Hunt. He’s not above setting up a monument to himself.”

“Why should he?” Hunt’s eyes went hot. “Do you think he wants to be remembered by posterity? Do you think he’d go down in history as Arslan the Good? Arslan the Well-Beloved? He’d be Red Arslan—Bloody Arslan—Arslan the Terrible.”

“Isn’t that the way he likes it?” From the sound of it, Hunt had savored that list of titles before.

He shrugged, mild again. “Perhaps the question’s a little academic.”

What the troop movements added up to was that about half the Russians and a smaller proportion of Turkistanis had been replaced by the new troops Arslan had brought in, which left us, numerically speaking, about where we were before. But in fact, things were a lot different.

It was probably a toss-up which of us was gladder to see Arslan—Nizam or me. I sympathized with Nizam, in a way; my hands had been as tied as his. The only thing that made District 3281 the possible site of an uprising was Arslan’s presence in it. If we’d ever tried to fight Nizam, it wouldn’t have made one bit of difference whether we failed or succeeded; the whole district could have been crushed from outside, like a flea between Arslan’s fingernails. Now we had the heart and brain of the whole juggernaut within our grasp, and we’d had four years to develop our organization.

The problem the KCR had to face now—or I had to face for the KCR—was simple enough, but the answer still wasn’t. As long as Plan One was in operation, we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. I know enough now to be sure Nizam wasn’t the only commander who would take it personally if anything happened to Arslan. And the new Turkistani battalion had the unmistakable look of an elite unit—hard and polished and too damned proud of themselves. There was no way the KCR could move, even now, without unleashing more hell than I wanted to be responsible for—no way but one. The only defense Arslan had been able to come up with against the threat of kidnapping was to tell me he wouldn’t let me do it. That had been valid enough in the front seat of a Land Rover, with one gun between us, but it didn’t apply any longer. Only we had to be very careful.

There was no lack of information and misinformation in the air, and Hunt wasn’t the only source of it. Things had solidified under Nizam—petrified into a humdrum daily desperation. Now we were free enough to breathe and think. Things seemed fluid again, and stale old bits of information from the Russian camp suddenly began to branch and bloom.

“Of course he got the Russian government first, Hunt. But what the devil could he threaten them with—or bribe them with, either?”

There was a faint, abstracted frown he used for hypothetical problems. “If the lever is long enough, it doesn’t take much force to move the world.”

“It’s got to have been some kind of a trick. They must have thought they were using him. But from there on, it’s all downhill work. Somebody just picked up the hot-line phone and told Washington they could either fight a nuclear war or turn over the armed forces to Arslan. And all I can say is, everything we ever heard about Washington must have been true, the way they caved in. I suppose it doesn’t matter much now whether they were traitors or just chicken. After that, he just started shifting troops around.”

Hunt nodded absently. “That’s approximately right.”

“What do you mean?”

“At least, that’s approximately what he told me.”

It was no use getting mad at Hunt. “Told you how long ago?” I asked him as mildly as I could.

He considered. “About six years.”

“In other words, right after he got here.” And the whole town—the whole world—dying to know, buzzing with bewilderment and pain, while Hunt Morgan sat mum with his nice-little-boy face of ravished innocence. For six years. “All right, how did he get the Russians to cooperate?”

“Magic?” he suggested. He met my eyes for a second, and hunched forwards in a movement of contrition. “He didn’t really tell me much,” he said seriously. “I’m sorry. Would it have helped?”

“I suppose not. Forget it, Hunt.” His shadowy smile flickered, and it annoyed me. He was so damned determined to be an exile, cultivating every little irony like an orchid.

But it was in midsummer that the real revelation came, and everything crystallized into a new solidity. Luella tapped on the bedroom door and peeped in. “It’s Dr. Allard,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.” Her manner added, privately.

Jack Allard was already making his ponderous way upstairs, like a tired bear. Luella ushered him in and left us alone. “What can I do for you, Doctor?” I motioned him to the armchair and turned my desk chair to face him.

He settled himself thoroughly down into the cushions. He didn’t look cheerful. “Torey McArthur and two of his kids are sick.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it looks to me like typhus. Not that we have typhus in Kraft County, but these new troops could have brought it in.” There had been troop movements—little, piddling ones, like fine-tuning adjustments—in and out of the district for the past two months.

“Didn’t the McArthurs get their shots?”

“Oh, they got them, all right. Typhus—that’s the one thing Nizam’s boys were the keenest about. They let me do the flu and the cholera, but they insisted on giving the typhus inoculations themselves. You know they’ve been through this district door to door.”

I nodded. “So what are you saying, Doctor?”

He took out his pipe and looked at it. “Well, nothing gives one hundred percent immunity. I’m not saying anything.”

“If the vaccine doesn’t work, how do we keep it from spreading? Quarantine?”

“Quarantine, sanitation. It’s louse-borne, you know. Shouldn’t be much of a problem if I can have the authority to stop people from living like pigs.”

“You just take all the measures you need to, Jack, and if anybody objects, send them to me.” I looked at him. “All right, what else is on your mind?”

“I tried to get some more vaccine or some serum from Nizam’s boys, so I could at least revaccinate the rest of the family. Nothing doing. They not only claim they don’t have any—they obviously don’t give a damn that there’s typhus in the district. Which strikes me as odd from the same bunch who were so steamed up a couple of years ago about everybody getting protected against typhus—especially women and children.”

“Jack,” I said, “tell me one thing. How long since there’s been a baby born in the county?”

“That’s the right question. It’s very close to a year. The last was Pearl Miller’s baby girl.” He leaned forward, playing with his pipe. “Oh, I could tell you some interesting things.”

“Such as that the birth rate started dropping fast about nine months after Arslan first got here?”

“Well, not quite that soon. But you remember how Nizam inoculated about half the population right away and then ran out of vaccine? And didn’t get enough to finish the job till last year? Well, I’ve been going over my records since this McArthur thing turned up, and I can show you that every maternity case I’ve had in the last three years has been a woman who missed the first round of inoculations.”

I was pacing the floor by this time. Relax, relax, my little automatic warning system was telling me stupidly. “Jack, is that possible? Is there a shot to induce sterility?”

“Well, I’m not the world’s leading authority on the subject.” He tried to light his pipe, and failed. “The Pill’s a very temporary thing, of course. There’s quite a spectrum of drugs that’ll prevent conception in various ways, but the effect is ephemeral, or the dosage required is massive, or the side effects are pretty bad. But a lot of people have been working on it. Somebody was bound to come up with something like that sooner or later. And it looks like it was sooner.”

He sat silent, looking down at his hands and his cold pipe, while I paced down the room, and back, and down and back again. I stopped. “Anything else, Jack?”