The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 28

Making the nighttime descent of the mountain from the ledge to the boulder beneath which they would exit had been almost like descending in daytime, from Hal's point of view. He had spent most of his life as Hal with Earth's single moon. Here, however, both of Kultis's moons could be in the sky at once - as they were at the moment - and both near the full. The combination of the two made not only for adequate light, but a near elimination of shadows.

The indescribable spicy odor of the alien semi-tropical forest had risen to meet them as they descended, and the clean mountain breezes were left behind, above them. At the boulder barring the entrance to the up trail, they had left the backup team of eight men and women, seven of whom stayed behind the boulder, which had been rolled back in place, and AnnaMist - the eighth - followed them through, but only as far as the other side of the boulder. It was to be her job to keep watch and, if necessary, pass the alarm back to those on the other side not to open up, if she got warning of anything gone wrong with the expedition.

Down in the forest, the moonlight was dimmer but still good, by the standards of Hal's Earth-accustomed eyes. However, the small and bright moons were fast-moving, and the smaller soon set. So the light dimmed, as they made their way toward Liu's camp. Eventually, it shut off completely, leaving them with only the starlight to help them see where to put their feet.

There had been some stumbles, and some who held to the person in front of them to make sure of the way. But Hal had sent Onete and the experienced night foragers ahead to lead. With these up front they made steady progress, until the line halted - so suddenly that Hal almost ran into the last member of the foragers, just before him.

A whisper came back down the line, passed from person to person for him, and he made his way to the head of the line. There he identified Onete by her general outline and body odor, as he had become acquainted with the body odors of most of the Guild members in the last few months. "We've found some new - dug soil that looks like two graves," she said in a whisper so low that no one else could hear it. "You don't suppose... " "No," he whispered back. "It'd make no sense for Liu to get up a couple of hours before dawn to kill the two of them and bury them without the answers he was after - even if he'd had time to do all that since we left the ledge. Wasn't someone carrying one of the scopes? Let's take a look at the camp. " "The light from the screen" began Onete doubtfully. "How close to the camp are we?" "A hundred and fifty meters. But you warned us against any light or sound once we left the boulder-" "I think with a hundred and fifty meters of forest in between we can risk it, in this instance," said Hal. "Can you get it for me? The rest of you make a wall with your bodies between us and the camp."

There were a few minutes delay and then the closed scope was placed in his hands. He opened it and touched the controls. A tiny view of the camp they were headed for appeared in the center of the screen. The figures on it were almost too small to be recognizable, but one was clearly still Cee, seated on the ground, and one was clearly Artur, still wrapped with rope and unmoving.

Hal turned the scope off, closed it and handed it back. "Someone take this," he said. It was removed from his grasp. To Onete he added, "It'll be messy, since we've only got our hands to dig with, but we're going to have to see what's buried here, if anything is. Use the scope light, if you need to.

That camp's got two men on watch, but they're only watching as far as the nearest darkness, and with those bright lights it must be like looking into an endless cave all around them."

Onete stopped him as he bent down to start digging, himself. "Not you," she said, "you may need clean hands later on for some reason. Also, most of us know how to use the plants we pass to find materials to clean ourselves up with."

It was a realistic argument. Even his effectiveness in shooting the bow he carried might be hampered by badly grimed fingers. "All right," he said and stood aside. He watched as shadowy figures labored in the soft earth of both dug-over areas. After some minutes, Onete's outline detached itself from the working group and came back to him. "We've found a body," she said. "We're just finding out if the other grave holds a body, too."

There was a subdued murmur from the working party, a few more motions, and then work ceased. "I'll come take a look," said Hal. "Have you got that scope handy?" "I'll get it." Onete moved away from him. He went to the group, which made way for him, and bent over the two half-excavated openings in the reworked earth. A hand pushed the scope into his grasp. He opened it, turned it on to show a minimum-sized picture, and directed the reflected light of the screen down into the opened holes.

A boot toe, the upper part of a body and the head of a soldier had been roughly cleaned of covering soil in one of them, the upper body and head of a second in the hole alongside.

The white, pale light of the scope, washing over the halfexposed bodies and their still dirt-streaked faces-eyes closed but features staring up at the star-filled sky-was unpleasant enough so that a murmur arose from the group around the two graves. "Quiet!" snapped Onete, with a tone of command Hal had not expected from her. "But look at their faces-," said one protesting voice.

Hal reached down and brushed a little more of the loose dirt off the face and throat of the nearest body. "They strangled to death," he said. His fingers moved down to clear a little more dirt from the throat of the body before him: then pressed lightly on where the man's Adam's apple had been.

The dead flesh yielded before the pressure like a loose sack of small fragments and there was the faint crackling of trapped air forced into the surrounding tissues. "His larynx's been crushed. "

There was silence from those around him. "Does anyone here know," he asked, "was Artur acquainted with any of the martial arts? I'm talking about those for bare-handed fighting."

The silence continued another moment. "No," said Onete, "I don't believe he did." "No blow from the edge of a hand did that," said Old Man's voice behind Hal. "It could have been done by a kick, a very skillful kick, but it's unlikely. The blow of a fist, perhaps, though even Artur would have to be lucky as well as powerful to strike that spot with enough force."

Hal squatted back on his heels, staring down at the nearest body. "There's no good reason they'd kill two of their own that way," he said, half to himself. He raised his voice slightly. "We'll need to cover them up again so that the graves look undisturbed. "

He got to his feet and watched as the shadowy figures around him became busy, pushing the loose dirt back into its original place. When it was done, they started out once more through the forest with its root-cluttered, rock-strewn ground all but invisible under their feet.

It was not long, though, before those in the lead halted, and the line of people bumped each into the person ahead of him or her, and stopped. Onete came back to Hal. "This is about a hundred meters from the soldiers' camp," she said. "Thank you," he answered. "All right, here's the place where we'll leave all of you except the six of us who are bow-and-dart people and the other six night foragers Onete picked out as being able to move most quietly. I want one forager attached to each of us who've got bows, to get us to the edge of the illuminated area of the camp as quietly as possible. According to Missy and Hadnah's count, there're sixteen of the soldiers, counting Liu and the Urk. Calas, I'm sorry you've got to be one of those to stay behind, but you can't shoot and you can't move as well as the people we're taking."

"It's all right," said Calas, his voice low and hoarse from the black wall of bodies that now stood clumped around him. "More than anything I want to see Cee and Artur free. Just one thing - if we hear noises from the camp that sound like they've woken up and may be taking you, can the rest of us rush the camp, and try to help?"

Hal hesitated. "You'd be smarter, all of you, to head back for the boulder and the ledge." he said. "If they get their hands on six of you, anyway, they're going to be able to make at least one show them the way up to the ledge," said Calas. "Yes," said Hal. "All right, if you're sure they're all awake and trying to take us prisoner or whatever, come along. You can rush the camp. But you'll probably just be giving them that many more prisoners, or dead bodies." "That's all I want to hear," said Calas.

The small forward group moved off. They were close enough to see some glimmers of light through the trees ahead when Onete stopped them for the second time. "About another twenty-five meters,- she told Hal, "and you'll be just outside the clearing. They were foolish to put their lights up high that way. It means that direct illumination stops, for all practical purposes, at the edge of the area cleared. Reflection off ground and tree trunks will throw light farther back, but the eyes of those on guard aren't likely to pick up what it illuminates. Their sight is going to be adjusted to the brightness of the area under the camp lights. It's so stupid to do things that way! Maybe there's a trap to it, somewhere?" "I doubt it," said Hal. "I don't think they're really expecting us, or anything on the order of a try to rescue the prisoners. Those two men awake there, from what Calas tells me about the officers, are probably just part of Liu's spit-and-polish attitude. The rule book says post guards in situations like this, so he posts guards." "Do you want your bow-people spread around the camp now?" Onete asked. "I can have the foragers position them." "Not spread around," said Hal. "Old Man stays with me and I'd like you yourself to take the two of us down close to the hutments. Luke and the three other bow-people, take them over to where the soldiers are sleeping on the ground. Old Man and I will take out the two men on watch duty, and - Luke?" "Right here," said Luke's voice from the darkness. "The minute," Hal said, "you and the other bow-armed people see the two on guard drop, start shooting into the soldiers in the sleeping, sacks. Old Man and I will be going after Liu and the Urk. Meanwhile, Onete, I want you to do what I asked you to do up on the ledge. Use that knife you're carrying to cut loose Cee and Artur. Then whistle in the other foragers with the stretcher to put Artur on it and start carrying him out of here.

He paused and looked around at them, so that his voice would carry to each. "Remember," he said, "what I told you when I briefed you before we left the ledge. Once things start happening, each of you ignore everything going on around you and just do what you came here to do. This is to free Cee and Artur, get Artur on the stretcher and carried out. Onete, it'll be up to you to try to get Cee to understand we're not going to hurt him the way the soldiers did. She probably won't trust us at first sight, any more than she trusted them.

Onete nodded. "I'lI do exactly that, " she said. " Don't worry about my part of it, just concentrate on your own."

Hal smiled at her, though he knew the smile would be hidden in the darkness, but perhaps it would color the tone of his voice enough for her to pick it up. "I know you will. And we will." he said. "Let's go now.

Onete, go around to everyone, pass the word to anyone who didn't hear or understand me completely, just now. Then come back and guide Old Man and me to our proper positions."

She did, and a few moments later saw the three of them ghosting like morning fog around the outskirts of the camp to the far end where the hutments stood and the table at which all the enlisted men had eaten. It was now occupied only by the two on duty. These two, deprived of their bottle, were seated at one end of the table and had found themselves entertainment in the form of some kind of gambling that involved dice. All their attention was on the movement of the small, dotted cubes.

Beyond them and close by, Artur lay silent and motionless under the blanket they had thrown over him. Farther off, Cee still sat cross-legged at the foot of her tree. She was wide awake, but her gaze was finally off the hutment that held Liu. Instead it was focused as plainly on Onete, Hal and Old Man, as if it was broad daylight and she could see them clearly, in their movement around the camp. "Can she see us, do you think?" Hal whispered as softly as he could and still be heard by Onete. "Hears us, more likely," whispered Onete in answer. "It's all right as long as one of those two soldiers doesn't take a look at her and get interested in what there could be out in the dark here to make her watch it," said Hal.

They stopped. Onete faced Cee squarely and shook her head deliberately, waving one hand past her face and deliberately turning her own gaze away from the little girl.

Whether Cee could not actually see them, or chose to ignore Onete's signal to stop watching them, was impossible to tell, but in any case, her gaze remained brightly following the three of them. Hal shrugged. They moved on. "This will do," he whispered, finally, when they reached a point which put them at about the same distance from hutments and the two soldiers on watch. "Old Man?"

Hal had already taken his bow from his back and was stringing it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Old Man doing the same. They each took a shaft from the quivers at their belts and a dart from a loop of one of the bandoleer-belts that Luke and his helpers had made for them.

In silence, together, they screwed the darts on to the ends of the arrow shafts. Old Man smiled, and - holding bow and arrow with one hand - held up the fingers of his other with the thumb and middle finger only a couple of inches apart to indicate the very short distance they had to shoot.

Hal smiled back and nodded. It was true. They were less than six meters from the soldiers. Even Calas, probably, could not have missed, at this close distance. Hal pointed at the farther soldier, the one across the table from them and whose face was toward them.

Old Man smiled and nodded, aiming at the other man. They shot almost together. The soft twang of the bowstrings was loud enough to be heard by the two targets. Both men looked up from their gambling, startled, as the dart points went home, Hal's in the shoulder muscle of the man he had aimed at, Old Man's in the back of the neck of the soldier on his side.

Both the uniformed men reached with puzzled looks toward the points of irritation where the dart needles had entered, but the shafts had already dropped off the darts, clattering down and through the slats that made up the seats of the benches with which the tables were equipped. Old Man's target actually managed to close a couple of fingers weakly on the end of the dart which protruded from his neck, but Hal's never managed to touch his, before both men were failing backwards off the bench on to the ground.

Both Hal and Old Man broke off the ends of two more arrow shafts and shot another dart into each slumped body, a dart that would inject the atropinelike substance Tannaheh had equipped them with.

Now, for the first time, Hal took a second to look around the clearing. The soldiers in the sleeping sacks were still receiving dart-loaded arrows fired from the darkness beyond them. In the dazzling light from the overhead illumination, he saw Onete, knife in hand, on her way to cut Cee loose from the tree to which she had been tied.

The twang of a bowstring close to his right ear brought his attention abruptly back to Old Man. He was in time to see a dart-laden arrow penetrate the wall of the hutment in which the sleeping Liu was housed. "I believe that lodged in a safe body area," Old Man said, lowering the bow and looking mildly at Hal. "I thought you were going to wait until I could go and open one of the door flaps, so you could see what you were shooting at," said Hal. "I know you made that offer, back up on the ledge," said Old Man, still softly, "but as it turned out it wasn't necessary. The still pictures on the scope were good enough to show us where his cot stood and how he lay on it-you remember there was one that showed him taking a nap with one of the flaps open, so that we could see him there in the shadow on the cot?" "You're right," said Hal. He looked at the middle hutment. "We saw the inside of the Urk's hutment too, but without him on the cot. That's why you didn't put a dart through the wall of it into him?"

"According to my memory, his cot was almost completely surrounded by equipment of one kind or another." "I'll take care of it, then." Hal kicked off his boots. "I'll open a flap to let you see what you're shooting at, and if there's still no way you can get a clean shot at him, wave me on. I'll go in and place a dart in him by hand."

He glanced about, saw Onete busy now with the medical kit and Artur, stepped to the door of the middle hutment and pulled back the right-hand one of the two flaps that closed its entrance. Within, by the outside light of the clearing that was reflected inside through the open flap, it was possible to see a body in a sleeping sack on a cot between what looked like a temperaturecontrolled food storage box and a cooker. Hal was turning to check with Old Man when the soft twang of a bowstring was accompanied almost simultaneously by the passage of an arrow by him. It lodged its needle in what looked like the upper body of the form in the sack.

The body lifted its head and shoulders as if to begin to get up, then fell back and was still. "Here," said Old Man.

Hal turned to see the other beside him, the bow in one hand and the other holding Hal's boots, the top rims clutched together. Hal took the boots and put them on, as Old Man went forward, picked up the fallen shaft of the arrow, broke off its end and made the second injection into the drugged sleeper on the cot. "Indeed, it's the one Calas called the Urk," he said. The hand that was not carrying his bow now held the power pistol the Urk had worn earlier. "This was in its holster, on a belt with the rest of his clothes, on a chair beside the cot." "Thanks," said Hal, "you don't want to keep it yourself?" "It's a machine for killing - nothing more," said Old Man. "I've never killed, human or animal, and never will. These drugged darts are permissible."

Hal nodded and tucked the pistol into the waistband of his trousers.

He led the way back outside to the clearing. There, the other bow-people were injecting the follow-up, atropinelike drug, mostly by hand, as they bent over the still forms in the sleeping sacks. Hal shook his head and smiled a little. For once, to confound practice as opposed to theory, a tactical plan had worked out as it had been planned.

Hal turned to the darkness of the forest and whistled. The sound went out into obscurity, and another whistle distantly responded.

A few moments later, Calas and the other Guild members they had left a hundred meters back ran into the clearing, carrying the various parts of the stretcher that had been part of their responsibility. As Hal watched they began to fit it together and prepare Artur, now unconscious from a drug in the medical kit but otherwise still alive, to be lifted on to it and secured there for carrying.

The sight reminded Hal of Cee. He looked back toward the tree to which she had been tied and did not see her, only Onete, hastening toward him. He went to meet her. "Where's Cee?" he asked. "I don't know. I don't have any idea," answered Onete. She sounded distressed. "She can move so fast... I cut her loose and had her with me, coming to join all the rest of us, here, and something must have made me look away for a moment, because all at once she was gone. Maybe she ran off into the forest." "Is that likely?" Hal said. "With Artur still with us'?" "But I don't know where else she would go-"

Hal did not hear the rest of what Onete said, because his ear was suddenly caught by a faint, but undeniable noise, a wheep, wheep! sound. He started at a dead run in the direction from which the sound had come, which was either right beside or in Liu's hutment. The image of the two dead soldiers they had unearthed was starkly in his mind, suddenly connecting itself with a memory of the two he had seen fall on the screen as the Soldiers rushed Cee to capture her. He reached the hut and burst through the flaps, but he was too late.

Cee, holding one of Liu's socks in either hand, each sock with a heavy-looking lump in its toe, ducked under his arm and was out the flaps before he could turn around.

He did not wait to examine what he knew would be the corpse of Liu Hu Shen, but ran after Cee, almost catching her as she went in between the open flaps of the Urk's tent and actually catching her, a moment later, as she stood just inside the entrance swinging in her right hand a weighted sock that gave forth the same sort of noise that had attracted his attention a moment before.

He grabbed her from behind, wrapping his arms around both of her arms, pinning them to her body and lifting her clear of the ground.

She fought back fiercely, in utter silence and with incredible strength for one so young. She kicked back and up with her heels, but he had anticipated this, spreading his legs and holding her closely against him, so that those same heels, rock-hard after years of running unshod on all kinds of surfaces, could not reach his rom.

She tried to swing the weighted end of the sock up to smash his face or hit his head, but his grip was around her elbows and she did not have the freedom of movement and strength to rotate the heavy end through the air and upward to its point of aim. Meanwhile, continuously, she struggled to twist and turn in his arms, to win enough freedom from his grasp so that she could twist loose and escape.

But, fighting as best she could, she was a youngster pitting the strength of her small body against the large and powerful adult one. Hal held her fast and backed with her out of the hutment. "Onete! Old Man!" he shouted.

He heard the sound of two pairs of running feet, but it was Old Man who first stepped around from behind him to face them. He twitched the weighted sock so suddenly from Cee's grasp that her fingers failed to hold their grip on it, and tossed it aside. Her gaze noted where it fell and returned instantly to glare at him. "Child, child," he said sorrowfully to her, "don't you know that nothing is ever settled, nothing is ever gained, by killing?"

She stared back at him with savage, unrepentant eyes. "Take her," Hal told him. "Hold her." Onete had now joined them and was talking rapidly and soothingly to Cee, who ignored the woman completely. "Old Man can hold her," Hal said to Onete. "You try and make her understand that we're here to rescue her uncle and take him to someplace where he'll be safe, but her killing Liu just now..." "She killed the officer!" Onete said. "I'm afraid so. I should have realized she might."

Onete stooped and picked up the officer's sock Cee had dropped, held it upside down and shook it. A short, heavy energy pack for a power pistol dropped out of the end of it. "She must have got them from Liu's uniform belt, " Hal said, "and thrown sock and pack together, the way she'd send a rock from her sling. Those two dead in the forest will have been her doing. The two we saw on the screen, who fell when they rushed in to catch her. But never mind that now." "What are we to do with her?" Onete said, distressed. "As I say, Old Man can hold her. It'll be up to you to make her understand that we're here to rescue her uncle, but she's already made a problem for us by killing Liu. If she kills anyone else, we may not be able to cover it up and send the soldiers away believing things that'll keep them from coming back. If they don't believe and do come back, they'll find and kill us all, including her uncle, after all."

Onete nodded. "I'll try," she said. "Don't just try. She's got to understand and go along with us. You've got to get through to her, somehow. She's got to understand that we have to take Artur back up to the Chantry Guild to fix what the soldiers did to him, and she's got to help us do that, not hinder!" "All right," said Onete. "Take her, Old Man," said Hal, "but be careful. Loosen up for a second and she'lI get away, and we'lI never catch her. "

With her weapon taken from her, Cee had stopped struggling in Hal's arms, but he was very sure she would explode into action the moment she felt any loosening of the grip upon her. He waited for Old Man to take the child into his own arms, but instead the other merely reached up and began to stroke the back of Cee's neck, meanwhile crooning to her, a wordless melody that consisted of the same series of musical phrases repeated over and over again. "Artur told me about that," Onete murmured to Hal. "It was one of the things Cee's mother used to hum when Cee was a baby and even after, to put her to sleep. Artur thought he could use it to make Cee trust him, but maybe he just didn't hum it right. Old Man must have learned it from him."

Hal nodded. The neck-stroking, he knew, was one of the Physical aids to hypnosis. In any case, he felt the tension gradually going from the small, tight body he held, growing less and less until eventually Cee hung almost limply in his arms.

Old Man stopped his crooning. "I think you can let her go now," he said to Hal. He took one of Cee's small, hard and dirty hands in his own. "Come with me," he said to the girl.

He led her off. Onete followed. Hal turned back with a feeling of relief, mixed with urgency, to the matter of taking care of the soldiers, on whom the drug would act for only a limited amount of time.

The first thing to be done was to get the Urk up, and bring him out under hypnosis to ostensibly explain things to equally drugged and to-be-hypnotized soldiers. Hal's original story that he had planned they would carry back to their headquarters was to have been given them by Liu, and would have simply told them that both Artur and Cee had died under torture - the last stage of which would have been supposed to have taken place privately at the hands of Liu himself in one of the hutments, that the two had thereafter been buried and, since Liu had learned enough from them before they died to be certain there were no other people around in this area of the forest, they would all be returning to headquarters.

Now, his story must not only be given by the Urk, which weakened it, the Urk being no more than a noncommissioned officer, also it must explain Liu's death, which would raise a great many more questions than if Liu, himself, had returned with only two soldiers lost. Particularly when the loss could be blamed on the great strength of the adult they had captured. And it would be Liu's word that there was nothing more to be found up here.

In time, of course, that hypnotic memory would wear thin, and some memory of what had actually happened to each of them here tonight would have surfaced on the minds of all of them, officers and men. But by that time, the subject would have been closed and filed away some time since, and none of them, even Liu, would have any good reason to make extra work and trouble for himself by digging back into the records and looking for the truth of what had actually happened.

Hal stepped into the Urk's hut, still wrapped in thought. It was not until he actually opened the top flap of the Urk's sleeping sack and put his hand on the man's throat to both rouse him and begin the process of hypnosis, that the coolness of the flesh he was touching brought his attention back to what was before him.

The coolness was very slight, because of the shortness of time that had passed since they had reached the camp. But it was noticeable enough now to alert Hal, and now that he looked closely at the man under his hand, he saw that the Urk was also dead. Almost as immediately as he registered the fact of death and his eyes found what had killed the man, his memory clicked back with something he should have remembered, but had not until this moment.

When Cee had dodged under his arm and out of Liu's hutment before he could catch her, she had been swinging two of the officer's weighted socks. There had been one in each hand. This, in spite of the fact that Liu had died of a crushed throat like the two dead soldiers they had disinterred on the way here. Since Liu presumably had been wearing only one sock on each foot, and had taken those off for the night, she had been able to turn them into weapons after she had stolen silently into his hutment. She would have loaded them with energy packs from the carrying loops in the man's belt. Then she must have thrown, and picked up again, the one she had used to kill the force-leader.

But when Hal had burst into the Urk's hut and wrapped his arms around her as she was just about to throw, she had been carrying only one of the socks with which she had left Liu's sleeping place. Somehow she must have gotten off one throw before Hal had caught her, and since it had been a hurried shot at the target, she must have been about to follow it up with a second cast when Hal had seized her.

There was an ordinary battlelamp on the chair holding the Urk's clothes. Hal turned it up and in the wash of reddish light that spread over the form on the cot the face stood out clearly. The right temple was plainly indented. The Urk must have died instantly from the first energy-pack loaded sock, but Cee, who had most probably been aiming at his throat as she had in all the previous cases, must in the dimness of light reflected from the outside of the hutment, have realized only that she had missed her target. So she had tried, but failed, to get her second weighted sock thrown before Hal had stopped her.

He stood, head slightly bent under the low roof of the hutment, which had been tall enough for people like the Urk and Liu but was not for him. Now, the situation was even more complicated.

Briefly, what he would now need to hypnotize the soldiers into believing, must be an ever greater distortion of what had actually taken place here in the forest.

He turned, went out of the hutment, and across to the group that was now strapping Artur securely onto his stretcher. A little off to one side, the drugged soldiers sat or lay still, watched by the other four bowmen, and a little beyond these were Cee, Onete and Old Man. Old Man's hand still rested on the back of Cee's neck. But it lay there with an appearance more like that of a comforting gesture, than a calming one. Onete's lips were moving steadily as she spoke to Cee, who in her turn was utterly unmoving and unanswering, but listened to the grown woman as if fascinated.

Hal reached the group by the stretcher. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I'm going to have to make use of Artur before you carry him away. If he's ready to be moved, follow me. I want to bring him into the hutment on the far right where the officer in command was sleeping. Calas?" "Right here," answered Calas, emerging from the crowd. "Come along," said Hal. "I want to talk to you as we go. After Liu and the Urk, who'd be in charge of these soldiers?" "Who? Probably him," said Calas as they walked toward the hutment. He pointed to a square-bodied, middle-aged man with thin, tousled hair on a round head, sitting beside his sleeping sack and staring at nothing. "He's a supply corporal, and theoretically he wouldn't command force-soldiery. But he's the senior in rank, and besides, he's one of the headquarters clique, one of the bunch that runs things and you keep in good with, if you know what's good for you. His name's Harvey. He'd take command here if Liu or the Urk couldn't. He'd like doing that - but it's not likely-"

He stared at Hal abruptly. "Or is it?" "Yes," said Hal bluntly. "They're both dead." "Dead?" Calas stopped in his tracks, then had to run to catch up with Hal, who had not paused. "Cee got to them," Hal said.

"She did?" Calas broke into a smile. "How?" The stretcher bearers, also close enough to hear this, turned their heads at Hal's blunt statement. But he did not answer. They continued to stare, to the point where they almost missed the entrance to the hutment at which they were aiming, before finally carrying the stretcher through it. "So, as a result, we've got a problem on our hands," Hal went on. They were now inside the hutment that had been Liu's. Hal stood aside to let the bearers set down on the floor the still unconscious Artur. "Take him off the stretcher," Hal directed them. "I want him laid, face down, sprawled out on the floor as if he'd fallen trying to reach Liu on his cot. When you're done with that, go to the hutment next door, dress the body of the Urk in his uniform, sidearm and all - find the power pistol - and carry him in here on the stretcher. " "Calas," said Hal, as soon as they had gone out, "how well could you imitate Liu's voice? I don't mean you'd have to be good enough to fool anyone under ordinary conditions, close up, but I need a shout or two, supposedly from him, to back up what I'm going to hypnotize the rest of the soldiers into believing. Did Liu have some particular way of speaking that was his alone? Everyone does, and most soldiers can imitate their officers' mannerisms." "He had a high voice and a snappy, snotty way of talking," said Calas. "I think I could come up with something like it, if I'm to be yelling from inside the hutment here, where they can't see me and the hutment'll probably mess up the way his voice'd sound, some. " "Good," said Hal, "what I want you to yelI is an order from Liu to the Urk to shoot. The idea will be that Artur's somehow gotten loose in here." "Good," said Calas. "I can do that standing on my head. Anyway, I like the idea of Artur getting loose in here with the two of them. Or, I would if Artur would have actually done anything to them, even if he did get free."