Arslan

He glanced up and shook his head.

“Okay. Thanks. Be sure you keep me up to date.”

I found Arslan alone in one of Nizam’s side offices, drinking coffee and dictating into a machine like any normal businessman. Lieutenant Z had brought me to the door with some trepidation, but I was admitted promptly, and Arslan greeted me with his blandest silence.

“General, are you aware that there’s typhus in the district?”

He looked interested. “Who?”

“Torey McArthur’s family. They’re poor and they’re dirty, but they’ve had your typhus shots. The whole district’s had your typhus shots, General; and now we’ve got typhus. What we don’t have are any babies.” His smooth face didn’t change. He only looked at me and waited. “Is this Plan Two, General?” He began to smile, just a little.

“Was there ever a Plan One?”

He stood up, putting out his cigarette in his cup. “Plan One was obsolete before it could be applied,” he said easily. The smile broadened all at once. “Your country, sir, has been one of the easiest to deal with.”

Relax, relax. But I had held the gun on him, and thrown it away for the children’s sake. And now the only children would be Arslan’s. “What is it?” I asked him. “How did you get hold of it?” How far has it gone? was what I wanted to know.

“It is a virus.”

“Virus? You mean it’s contagious?”

“Minimally, if at all. You will understand, sir, that there has been little time for research. But no cases of natural transmission have been observed. It was developed in a Chinese government laboratory.”

“Chinese?”

He nodded. “Yes, it is true that the Chinese were very loud in praise of fertility. They developed the virus as a weapon, and I have used it as a weapon. The report of the virus came to me in Kraftsville, sir, in the first month of my stay here.”

So the night he had crossed his dirty boots on my bed, the night he had expounded Plan One with such blazing eyes and vibrant conviction, it was already a discarded shell. “What makes a country easy to deal with, General?”

“Organization and centralization. The more centralized, the simpler to capture. The more organized, the easier to control.”

“So a lot of other places are giving you more trouble.”

He shrugged. He crossed his arms and leaned comfortably against the wall. “There are problems of logistics and security. Colonel Nizam has been invaluable to me.” He smiled. “District 3281 is totally sterile, sir. There is no harm in your knowing, now.” He tilted his head with that juvenile cockiness. “North America is totally sterile.”

“Including your family?” I asked viciously.

The look that came into his face was the look of a snake drawing back upon its coils. “I have a son, sir,” he said. “I do not plan to have more; but I reserve the power of choice to myself.”

“And what about your son? How much power of choice are you reserving for him?”

The black eyes stared expressionlessly. “None.” He straightened up and fished a cigarette out of his pocket. “No, sir, I have not sterilized my son. If I fail, he will have his choice. But if I succeed, there will be no woman able to bear his children.” He lit his cigarette, and repeated, as if it was a mild joke, “His children.”

“I imagine one of your logistical problems is just producing enough of your—your—What do you call it?”

“Vaccine,” Arslan said savoringly.

A warm wave of relief went over me. I knew, as surely as if I’d seen the documents in Arslan’s own handwriting, that it wasn’t only his son he hadn’t sterilized. One entire sex, he had said that night in my bedroom. Vaccine, yes; he was trying to vaccinate the human female against pregnancy. “How do you know it’s permanent?” I asked him.

“What is knowing, sir? I have never seen an absolute proof of anything, but I have seen conclusive evidences. I conclude that my vaccine is permanent in effect. You, of course, are at liberty to hope otherwise.” And he grinned at me confidentially.

“It’s none of your Evergreens and Resistances that’ll solve the problem,” Jack Allard said to me, later. “It’s medical research, if it’s anything.”

“You think so?”

“I’m convinced of it. After all, it’s a medical problem. And you know as well as I do that there are physiologists and geneticists and virologists and biochemists and plain old general practitioners all over the civilized world working on a hundred different approaches to it right now. Somebody’s bound to find an answer—most likely, several answers.”

“You know the trouble with that, though, don’t you, Doctor?”

“Oh, sure. Insufficient time and inadequate communications. Oh, sure.” He sucked his pipe. “But somebody will find it somewhere, and apply it somewhere, and that’s all it takes. The human race has had setbacks before— take the Black Death, there’s an example for you. The human race is going to outlive Arslan by at least a few centuries, don’t worry. He may even have done us good in the long run.”

Well, that was the faith Jack Allard solved his part of the problem with—and it was about as unrealistic as any I’d ever heard. Conditions all over what had been the civilized world didn’t figure to be exactly ideal for scientific research. And if one of those suppositious somebodies did find one of those hypothetical answers, how in God’s name could it be put into practice? Logistics was on Arslan’s side now. He was over the hump.

Now that I knew about his virus, it was a lot easier to make sense out of his maps and messages. What he had in mind, and in progress, was pacification with a vengeance. He certainly hadn’t divided the whole globe into countysized districts to start with. Instead, he had sealed off key areas, divided them, and sterilized them. After that, it was a matter of annexing new districts, so that his sterile areas spread like patches of leprosy. The chilling thing was that he had started with America, Russia, and Western Europe.

But he was forging a chain that had to reach around the world, and every new link increased the chances of its breaking. How many of his officers would really push Plan Two to the end? How many of his men would go along with it at all if they realized what they were doing? If they could be offered an alternative at the right time, everything might change in a hurry. That was why he feared organization. It would be no civilian resistance that would ever break him; it would have to be an organized movement that could detach whole units of his patchwork horde. No, what we needed now wasn’t faith, but works. And that was my business.

Chapter 10

In spite of everything, Hunt was my best source of information, or anyway my most valuable one—and Arslan himself was a pretty close second. It was worthwhile talking to the Russians, too, and up to a point they were very informative. And not even all of Nizam’s talents had kept a few facts from seeping across the border.

Arslan had told a piece of the truth when he called himself the leash that held back his wolves. Only what most of them were probably raring to do was hurry back where they came from. Of course there would be officers with private ambitions, ready to carve out their own little principalities or just to fill their own pockets. That was one danger—bad enough, but not too serious in the long run. The other was the officers who would stay loyal to Arslan. But Arslan’s conquest itself was living proof that most armed forces would obey whoever spoke through the chain of command. And, this time, that would be us.

In fact, what we were preparing wasn’t exactly a revolt; it was a coup d’etat. One thing about Arslan—one thing that would work for us, finally—was that he was a very personal commander. That meant the ones who were loyal would be under our control by the simple law of blackmail, once we had Arslan, and the ones who were merely obedient would go on obeying. Furthermore, we would have the communications to bypass any uncooperative links in the chain.

It meant incidentally that he couldn’t keep his hands off the adjacent districts. He was forever dashing across the border in one direction or another to handle some new problem. That was fine with me. It didn’t make