“I see,” said Towers. You told him the matter was urgent?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I believe I heard him say we should sit and wait?”
The sergeant glanced at the straight-back chair behind the door and smiled briefly, “Certainly, sir. You may sit down if you wish.”
“It’s not a question of ‘wishing’ it,” said Towers, the rasp returning to his voice. “The colonel invited us to. Is that correct?”
The sergeant frowned. “As a matter of fact, sir, I believe so.”
“Did he, or didn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. He did.”
“Since there’s only one chair here, I assume he meant us to use the armchair also?” Towers looked pointedly at the armchair against the wall behind the fence.
“No one but permanent party is allowed back of the gate, sir,” said the sergeant positively.
Logan glanced at his watch and said uneasily, “Sir, it’s about time for the men to start coming down.”
“Yes,” said Towers, “but since the colonel may be ready to see us at any moment, and since he invited us to sit down and wait, I think we should do it. Sergeant—”
“Sir?”
“Bring that chair out here.” He glanced at the armchair.
The sergeant blinked, and looked at the desk, the little gate in the picket fence, and the narrow space between the desk and the wall.
“But it won’t fit,” said the sergeant, his voice climbing.
“That,” said Towers, “is a matter of perfect indifference to me. I’ve been invited to sit, and I will sit.”
Just then, the sound of a descending landing-boat passed overhead and dwindled away in the direction of the far corner of the camp.
“Sir,” said Logan, in a low voice, “that will be about half-a-dozen armored close-trained gorillas and their controller. Right behind them come a pack of close-trained wolves and their controller.”
A second landing-boat whined overhead.
“The next one,” said Logan, “has about a forty-foot superconda in it, with operator. Sir, when they go in that barracks, all hell will—”
“Exactly why I wish to speak to the colonel urgently. But he tells us to sit and wait.” Towers looked at the sergeant, and his voice when he spoke had the crack of a high-voltage discharge. “I said, move that chair!”
A third landing-boat passed overhead, and its sound dwindled off in the direction of Towers’ barracks.
The sergeant wrestled the chair over to the narrow gate.
Logan mopped his brow with a sweaty handkerchief.
“It won’t go through,” said the sergeant.
Despite this obvious fact, he tried ineffectually to fit the bulky chair through the narrow opening in the picket fence.
“Lift it,” said Towers irritably, “or move the fence, or do whatever else you have to, but hurry up.”
The sergeant tried to lift the chair over the fence. The chair slipped, fell, and with a loud cracking sound split the fence at the base and knocked it outward.
The sergeant dragged the chair back, propped the fence upright, and then tried pulling the desk back out of the way. The desk was screwed to the fence, the lower screw broke loose, the top screw held, and all the pickets in that end of the fence leaned over at a forty-degree angle, with the baseboard pulled free of the floor and a row of nails sticking out.
The sergeant moaned, went around to the other end of the desk, and tried to swing it around instead. To do this, he had first to drag the filing cabinet out of the way. When he had the filing cabinet out in the middle of the floor, he swung the desk around, and found that it and the filing cabinet together now blocked the chair into the far half of the room. When he made this discovery, something seemed to pop within him. Working like a madman, he now succeeded in blocking himself and all the furniture in front of the colonel’s door. Then, desperate, he wrestled the bulky armchair onto the desk, where it tipped off and hit the floor with a crash that shook the room, and was followed shortly by the sound of the filing cabinet tilting back against the wall as the sergeant hastily squeezed past it. The feet of the filing cabinet then slid, and the whole works slammed down on the floor like a dropped boulder.
The outer door opened up, and a neatly-dressed Centran brigadier-general stepped in. At the same moment, the door to the colonel’s office came open. The general looked around at the overturned furniture. His face perfectly blank, he went out again. From somewhere outside there came the sound of shouting.
Towers shook his head. “Well, it’s too late, now. They seem sort of disorganized in here, anyway. Come on.”
He and Logan stepped out in the hall, and hurried outside.
As they neared the barracks, Towers saw a large crowd of Centran troops staring at a deserted part of the camp. In the middle of this deserted section was the barracks to which Towers’ men had been assigned. There was nothing exceptional about the appearance of this barracks, except for about twenty feet of oversize python gradually disappearing through the nearest doorway, a gorilla in plate armor walking out a doorway at the opposite end of the barracks, and a yawning lion looking out a window.
In the front of the barracks was a stack of crates about twelve feet high and twenty feet long. A couple of Towers’ men were outside the barracks, scratching their heads in apparent perplexity, and glancing back and forth from the heap of crates to the barracks. As Towers approached, they saluted, and one of them said in a carrying voice, “Sir, there are exactly six double bunks in that barracks that aren’t taken. How do we fit all this stuff in?”
Towers said, “Wait a little.”
There was the sound of another landing-boat coming down, and a few minutes later an electric truck delivered another load of crates in front of the barracks. Half-a-dozen armored gorillas marched past under the command of a heavily-armed human. Stepping carefully around the python, they disappeared into the barracks.
Towers glanced around.
The Centran brigadier-general, who had looked in at the chaos in the office a little earlier, was thrusting his way through the crowd. As he approached, twelve huge gray dogs or wolves came out the far door of the barracks and trotted past in single-file, to disappear in the direction of the place where the landing-boats were coming down. From that direction, another half dozen armored gorillas marched past, and into the barracks.
Logan said uneasily, “You don’t think we’re laying it on too thick do you?”
Towers glanced in the direction of the landing-place. “Something will snap shortly, and then we’ll know. Look there.”
The Centran brigadier general was staring at the electric truck, as it trundled up carrying a big transparent case full of water, inside of which a large bulbous creature floated amidst a tangle of flexible arms.
“Great,” said the general, “hairy master of sin! Who’s in charge here?”
Towers saluted. “I am, sir.”
“What is this?”
“Advance Unit I of Independent Division III of the Special Effects Team, landing at the request of Major-General Horp Klossig.”
The general walked over, frowning. “You’re Towers?”
“That’s right, sir.”
The general looked around. “Let me see your barracks assignment sheet.”
Logan handed the papers to Towers, who handed them to the general. The general leafed through them. “How are you going to get all this stuff into one corner of one barrack?”
“I’ve been trying without success to get an answer to that question, sir,” said Towers angrily. “These sheets of paper show our requirements for space. Six double bunks is what we were allotted.”
“But this sheet of paper says ‘Advance party. Twelve (12) men, and equipment.’ ”
“That means, sir, twelve human beings. Amongst the equipment, which there is no place on that form to specify, is everything else you see here.”
The general pointed to the last ten feet of what looked like an oversized python, now disappearing through the doorway. “You call that ‘equipment’?”
“Certainly, sir. Equipment shaped as an animal form is often far less conspicuous than the usual equipment. That is a Mark III Superconda with hydronic drive, twin fusion guns at the nostrils, scraper jaws, and adequate specimen storage compartments just aft the muzzle. It can be controlled remotely, or from a sealed compartment in the forward third. Among other things, it’s extremely useful for scouting dense brush, swamp, and rain forest. It looks like an oversize constrictor. It’s actually a highly-specialized vehicle.”
“What about that?” The general pointed to a lion trotting past. “That’s no vehicle.”
“No, sir. But we find that in ordinary close combat, certain animals, when properly trained and disciplined, are hard to beat. By the use of surgical implants at selected nerve-centers, we can cause the animal in training to feel an instantaneous sharp pain. We can also initiate slight impulses for the motion we desire the animal to make. To a degree, the trainer can create a pleasurable sense of well-being. With such immediate prompting and guidance, with swift reward for the right responses, and instantaneous punishment for the wrong responses, the animal learns very rapidly. We call this ‘close training.’