Arslan

talked, talked, talked. Once in a while we would be fighting hand to hand; but every time it switched back to the thick gun butt against my palm and the little distance between us. Sometimes I pulled the trigger, with various results. The gun would refuse to fire; or the bullet would have no effect; or, on the other hand, it would blow him into bloody pieces that kept on struggling stubbornly. Most often I woke up before I did anything. But sometimes I threw the gun away, or hid it under something, and sometimes I even handed it to him. Now and then I turned it on myself and pulled the trigger; and nothing happened.

That same evening, before the first of my dreams, the schoolbus drivers were brought in, glum and scared, and the children were loaded up and driven home. Three soldiers rode with every busload. I didn’t begin to breathe easier till the first bus got back and the driver told me they really had taken the kids home—even delivered every child to his own door. That made it a long evening.

The teachers went with the last loads. When the buses were all back and the drivers were escorted away (the confiscation of motor vehicles had started, and they weren’t allowed to drive home), the young officer who seemed to be in charge gave me a pleasant smile and waved me toward the south door.

The street lights weren’t on, though it was past nine o’clock. None of the soldiers wandering in the darkness paid much attention to me. As an experiment, I turned west past my house—almost anything was worth a try—but I wasn’t surprised when a rifle turned me back.

A sentry on my front porch eyed me insolently as I opened the door, though he didn’t make a move. There was a hot, hard fireball burning in the pit of my stomach. But the first thing I saw was Luella sitting stiffly in the green armchair. She jumped up and touched my arm. “You haven’t had any supper, have you? I’ll get you something right this minute.”

The couch was back, too, and the coffee table, both of them strewn with papers. The rug was littered with cigarette butts. Two soldiers lounged on the windowseat, and two more leaned against the built-in bookcase, their elbows on the shelves among Luella’s bric-a-brac, all smoking, all looking very much off duty. They broke off their chatting to eye me for a minute.

I followed Luella into the kitchen. Another soldier was sitting at the table, also smoking, also much at his ease, dropping ashes on his dirty plate. “Just give me a glass of milk,” I said. She looked pained, but she managed to pour it without a word. “Where’s Arslan?”

“The General? He’s upstairs,” she said gloomily. “And the Morgan boy,” she added. “And Betty Hanson.”

“I know.” I took a drink of my milk and looked at the soldier. “All right; you can bring me a plate in the dining room. And you sit down and tell me everything that’s happened and everything you’ve heard.”

There wasn’t much I didn’t already know or at least expect. Betty had been brought over straight from the banquet and locked into the sewing room, and that was when the guards were posted around the house and on the stairs. Luella had been in the bedroom when Hunt was brought in; she had just got a quick sight of him in the hall, but that was enough to stop her from asking any questions. She hadn’t seen Arslan come in at all, but she had heard him, sounding like a whole new invasion. “And then this morning,” she said, “Betty started screaming.”

And that morning at ten-fifteen he had been in my office, saying, “Your people are entirely free,” with a face like a cat just wiping the feathers off of its mouth.

Neither Hunt nor Betty had been out of the rooms since they went in, except for one guarded trip each to the bathroom. That was after the one meal Luella had been allowed to fix for them, carried up on trays a while after noon by Arslan’s men. She hadn’t seen them; hadn’t heard any sounds out of the rooms since the screaming stopped, a little while before Arslan left that morning. He had come back around suppertime, eaten a big meal, and disappeared into the guestroom. Since then everything had been very quiet.

She hadn’t been out of the house the whole time since the Turkistanis arrived, hadn’t seen anybody else or heard anything else. And she was almost at the end of her rope. By the time she had finished her story she was shaking all over, just the faint animal quivering of weariness and strained nerves. “I’m sorry, Franklin,” she said. “I’ve had all I can take for one day. I’ll be all right tomorrow.”

And she would, I knew that. I could rely on Luella. But unfortunately the world wasn’t made of Luellas.

If you couldn’t use your anger constructively, it poisoned you; I’d found that out a long time ago. Raging and raving against Arslan would just get in the way of working against him. And I was beginning to see that I could work against him. Not that I hadn’t done a beautiful job of asking all the wrong questions; but I’d learned a few things, in spite of myself, and I was going to make the most of them.

By next morning, Arslan’s version of normality was already in force. Entirely free. I made myself eat a good breakfast, ignoring all spectators, and walked out of my front door as if I still owned it; and the first civilian I met was Wallace Ford, coming to look for me. His pale face colored up with relief.

“There you are. They wouldn’t let me get into school, and I was afraid—”

I steered him out of the crowded parking lot, and we strolled quietly toward the square. It was silly not to have any place to go, but that was the truth of it. “All right, let’s hear your story,” I said.

He looked hopefully back toward the house. “Any chance you could invite me to sit down? I walked in to town this morning, and I didn’t get any sleep much last night.”

Wallace Ford was principal of Kraft County Consolidated High School. Their new school building was located a mile out of town, which had raised considerable opposition from the people who thought the only place to build a new building was where the old one was torn down.

“I could invite you to sit down, and I could offer you some breakfast, too. But any talking we do had better be outside.”

He shrugged hopelessly. “Forget it, then. That’s all right, I’ve had breakfast; I stopped at home a minute. I just thought—” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “What are they going to do with the kids, Franklin?”

“Nothing—not with my kids. They’ll be safe at home unless some grown-up does something stupid.”

He gave me a wild look, the very picture of a man longing to go crazy and get away from it all. “My kids are still locked up at school.”

“Then why in heaven’s name aren’t you with them?”

“They sent the faculty home this morning.”

And he had let himself be sent. “All right, Wally, tell me about it.”

“Oh, my God, Franklin.” But that was something of an exaggeration. What he had to tell wasn’t much. I’d known from the first day that the high school had been shut up the same as we were; some of the parents I phoned had already heard from Wally about their older children. “But the kids are still there,” he mourned. “Franklin, you’ve had a night’s sleep, at least. I just can’t think any more. What in God’s name am I supposed to do? ”

“That’s your problem, Wally. I’ve got all the responsibility I need right now.” It was a shame to disappoint Wally when he wanted to impress me, but I just didn’t feel inclined to hold his hand for him. I had both hands full. “What you really ought to do is go back home and get some sleep yourself. Come on, I’ll walk you over.”

By dawn the next morning the high school was empty. During the day and night every single student had been trucked away toward the west.

He hadn’t abducted my students, but in the next two weeks he did a pretty thorough job of taking over my school. He informed me that my office was now his office—meaning, in a nutshell, that it wasn’t my office any more; he never did any work there, to my knowledge. He was all over the rest of the school, though, directing operations I didn’t like the look of. Electronic equipment, canned goods, and God only knew what else, was being brought in by the truckload and installed on every floor. Floodlights were mounted all around the schoolground. There were more and more rooms I wasn’t allowed to enter. The whole building rattled with carpentry. Walls were torn down, partitions set up. All of the children’s desks were knocked apart and the pieces neatly stacked on racks in the basement. “Firewood,” Arslan explained with lifted eyebrows, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. He was stockpiling a real conglomeration of things, from pumpkins to transistors. It looked as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to expect a Vicksburg siege or a computerized space battle.

Meanwhile, Colonel Nizam had quietly moved into Frieda Althrop’s house. Frieda’s place was one of the biggest in town, built by her grandfather back when people knew how to build big houses, and modernized a time or two since then. It also commanded the intersection of Pearl Street and Illinois 460, looking north from its high- shouldered yard to the square, east to the school, and south along the hardroad out of town as far as the curve.