John Rackham by The Double Invaders Read Free Book Online Page B

shelter or clothing of any kind. If they cry out, or complain, or appeal
to you in any way, you will be able to hear them. I cannot make you listen, but
I can tell you now that they will remain thus until they die of hunger and
exposure, or until you return to your places, until you come to feed them and
save them. Their fate is in your hands. The decision is up to you. Make it soon!"
    He could keep his voice calm on the radio, or
when talking to his two colleagues, and no one would have guessed from his
exterior that he was anything but calm. Yet it was part of his training to be
sensitive to moods, and he felt the change in mood, not only of his immediate
colleagues, but of all the men under his charge. Karsh had plenty of technical
detail to busy him and was not so obviously bothered, but Swann made a poor
secret of his feeling that this was not the
way of a fighting man. Risk and danger, the cut and thrust of action, yes. But
the slow wait-out of starvation was not to his way of thinking at all.
    Bragan knew exactly what was wrong. This was
typical of the fighting man-in-the-field at any time. Muscle-heads,
substituting action for thinking. Countless painful and disastrous experiments
in the past had demonstrated beyond all doubt that the mentality that is
prepared to gamble life and limb in physical combat with an enemy is not the mentality to handle dispassionate decisions affecting abstractions
like the fate of nations. Bragan knew that his men were uneasy, and he knew
why, but he could do nothing about it.
    He
couldn't even corner his own companions and explain to them, to say to them,
"Look here—you feel rotten about what is being done simply because it is
immediate, and deliberate. That's natural. But I have to think ahead. A few
thousand people now, feeling the pangs, and you can see and hear them. But
think what will inevitably happen if we fail, here and now. That will be a disaster a hundred times more horrible, and you'll be the prime
actors in itl" He couldn't explain, and even if he had, it would have
made little difference. No abstract future has half the impact of the here and
now.
    That
was a long day, and he spent a very poor night, his second with little sleep.
At breakfast the next morning the atmosphere was bleak. The first
skimmer-parties of raiders were due out in an hour. All night, at intervals of
an hour, the Scartanni radio had carried a tape of his grim message, with the
time between given over to noises from the stockades. The other ships, all
over Scarta, had duplicated this pattern. Back from the radio-network, from
Scarta, came nothing at all, not a sound. It was to be a war of nerves, and
Bragan felt confident his own were tougher than the opposition. His problem was his own men. If they failed him he was done. That was one
eventuality not covered by the fabulous Zorgan technique.
    He
kept a sharp eye on his breakfast companions. Swann was openly restive and
truculent in manner, but not to the point yet of open defiance. Karsh, solid
and stolid, was harder to read but he looked unhappy. Bragan began to feel a
sense of impending doom. That, or something was due to break soon. By the time
he had chewed his way through an untasted breakfast he was in the mood to try anything
rather than just wait.
    He radioed a warning to the stockade, asked
them to have Mordin hauled out and brought to the original meeting place. Then
he went and got himself into body-armor again, took a skimmer, driving it
himself this time, and went once more to the City Hall. Arriving there, he
dismissed the trooper who stood guard over the prisoner.
    "The
man is securely bound," he snapped, "and helpless. I am in no need of
protection from him."
    Mordin
stood as sturdy and unbowed as ever, still as watchfully blank, making no
effort to strain against the cables that held him. Naked he looked somehow more
powerful than before. Bragan glared at him grimly.
    "You
are a strange people, Mordin. Would you all rather die than