He beckoned to me. I followed him and the riflemen aboard. A warning siren screeched. Looking down from the control turret, I saw people scattering. Laurel stood closer, shaking here fist, dwindling to a defiant doll as we lifted.
The admiral landed us at half a dozen towns up and down the Avalon, at the ski lodge below the volcano, the oasis down on the desert, at a lumber camp on the headwaters of the Styx. At each stop he went off with his rifle squad to read his proclamations. A few people hooted. Nobody cheered.
We climbed back to the geosynchronous point. He broadcast an ultimatum demanding unconditional submission. The colonists must accept the rule of the democratic Terran Republic, swear allegiance to President Cleon III, welcome Terran landing forces, pay Terran taxes, obey orders from him as their newly appointed governor. Unless he received a signal of surrender within three days, he would be forced, however unwillingly, to take whatever measures the situation might require.
“There will be no signal,” I warned him. “There is no government, nobody with authority to surrender.”
“I expected opposition from the like of that Greenlaw woman.” He shook his head, his jaw set hard. “These people were condemned and sent here as outlaw enemies of the state. They are enemies and outlaws still. If they want a lesson in Terran power, I’ll give them a lesson.”
Waiting three days in orbit, he received no signal of surrender. His lesson was a volley of guided missiles.
“I’m remaining on the flagship,” he told me. “It will be my official residence. Captain Crendock is going down as my executive secretary with orders to secure the planet and establish administrative control.”
He was startled when I wanted to go back to Benspost.
“Why?” He gave me a hard look. “You won’t find friends there.”
Uncomfortably, I tried to explain my own torn feelings.
“I’m still loyal,” I told him, “bound by my duty to the Republic. But I did make friends there. People were generous to me. I was fascinated with their history. I want to write it for the whole Republic.”
“Forget your pet traitors,” he advised me. “That Greenlaw woman is no friend now.”
“Yet she is making history. History worth recording.”
“Better get back to Terra while you can.” He gave me a stiff half-smile. “You were warned to expect no public recognition, but we will surely find something for you.”
He called me a fool when I shook my head.
I had to go back to find Laurel, to try to explain what I had done, to beg her to understand. I didn’t tell him that, but in the end, he replaced my lost radio and holo camera and let me go back down to Benspost with Crendock. A missile had struck there, and little remained of old Ben Greenlaw’s trading post.
Yet life went on. I saw camels loaded with lumber and tile to repair shattered buildings. Bart was back again from some Terran planet with another illicit cargo. We found his skipcraft undamaged, standing on the pad near the ashes and fallen walls.
“Leave him alone,” Gilliyar had ordered. “I hope to legalize the trade and impose excise taxes.
Camels were tethered around his ship, the drivers loading them with goods he had brought. His crew was loading it again with exports: nuts and dried fruit from the desert lowlands, rare hardwoods and balls of raw rubber from the rain forest.
His parents had set up a new barter center in a tent on a vacant lot. His mother burst into tears when she saw me, and ran back into the tent. His father sat in his wheelchair behind a rough table, surrounded with whatever his clerks had been able to salvage. I thought he seemed sick, the splotches of his old jungle fever infection livid and swollen.
He looked up at me with an enigmatic expression.
“Well, sir?” He shook his head. “I never expected to see you again.”
“I’m a historian,” I said. “I came back to write the history of the colony. And I want to see your daughter.”
“You’ve turned our history to tragedy.” He spoke with a harsh finality. “You’ll never see Laurel.”
He turned to deal with a farmer who had come with a basket of eggs to trade. I saw Bart himself, stooping in the ashes of the store, filling a bag with scraps of fused and blackened metal. He met me with a quizzical grin and handed me what was left of my gun, the magazine shattered when the ammunition exploded.
“I think this was yours.”
I asked about Laurel.
“Gone.” The grin vanished. “I don’t know where.” His gaze grew sharper. “If your Terran friends are looking for her…”
He shrugged and stooped again into the ashes.
A few days later he came up to me while I was out with the camera to shoot a group of workers with spades and wheelbarrows, refilling a crater that one of Gilliyar’s missiles had left in the road.
“Let’s talk.” He offered his hand. “I’ve heard about your history. I want our Terran friends to know our story. Will you let me take you back to tell it?”
I thanked him.
“But the history isn’t finished. And I want to stay till I can see your sister.”
His face grew bleak. “You’ll be here forever.”
Before he took off, I gave him a draft of my unfinished narrative, copies of my holos of the ruins, and a shot of Crendock strutting off a lander to repeat Gilliyar’s ultimatum. I kept digging into the records I could find, asking people for their recollections, shooting the damage from the bombardment and the efforts at reconstruction.
And longing all the time for a glimpse of Laurel.
Crendock set up his headquarters on a hilltop above the ruins. His landers were busy for a time, bringing down temporary buildings and equipment. He tried to employ civilian labor, but nobody wanted his money or wanted him there. The few people left in the town were clearing the streets, rebuilding their homes, replanting gardens. Some of them let me join the labor teams, gave me food and shelter in return. I asked and asked again for news of Laurel, receiving blank or hostile stares.
Crendock’s officers were just as determined to find her, but no more successful.
“It’s frustrating,” he told me one night when he had asked me to his quarters for a Terran dinner. “There’s nobody with authority, no way to get control. Gilliyar says this Laurel Greenlaw has to be our first target. She openly defied him. He wants her caught and tried for treason.”
He asked for anything I knew. That was nothing at all.
“My investigators have been looking everywhere. Broiling themselves down in the desert. Freezing on the slopes of that volcano. Not a clue. I hear that she was once employed down in the jungle. She may have returned. Nowhere we can follow, but we’re posting a price on her head.”
With no better lead, I found Marco Finn, the top driver of a camel train returning to the lumber mills, and begged him for a ride down to the jungle.
“Don’t go.” He turned to spit green fluid from the angel cud that bulged his bearded cheek. “You ain’t fit for it.”
He was a raw-boned, short-spoken man, scarred from hell fever, his wild beard stained bright green from the angel wood bark he chewed. He frowned and squinted at me. I tried to explain that I wanted to see the jungle, get the history of the lumbermen, the silvernut and rubber plantations, the barges on the Styx.
“Who will give a damn?” He shrugged and spat again. “Nothing but poison vines and devil bugs and rain that never stops. We call it hell country. No place for a Terran.”
“But you’re going back.”
“We hell rats ain’t quite human.” He gave me a ferocious scowl. “We toughen up and take it like it is. Sometimes it kills us, but people need the timber and the rubber and the silvernuts. And we get double barter points. If I’m alive ten years from now I can use my last timber load to build a cabin up in sky country. Grow a garden. Keep chickens and a cow. What you ought to do.”
Yet he let me climb to the hard seat beside him.
