He turned a corner, strode to a door marked “Prison,” said, “At ease,” as the guard snapped to attention, and started in.
“Sir,” said the guard desperately, “I wouldn’t go in there just now. Things are a little confused right now, sir.”
Horsip’s brows came together and he strode through the doorway as if propelled by rockets. He halted with equal suddenness on the other side.
Several dazed-looking soldiers were working under the direction of a red-faced officer who was barking oaths and orders in rapid succession. The general direction of the effort seemed to be to get three soldiers who were tied up untied. The trouble was that the three were off the floor, strung by their middles to the upper tier of bars in a cell. When one soldier was successfully pulled to the floor, overenthusiastic soldiers working on the other side of the bars would make a leap upward, seize one of the other soldiers, and haul him down, whereupon the first soldier would fly up out of the hands of the men trying to untie him.
“Captain,” said Horsip dryly, “concentrate your effort on one man at a time.”
The officer was apparently shouting too loudly to hear.
Wham! Down came one soldier and up went another.
The officer paid not the slightest attention to Horsip’s order.
Horsip noticed one of the three tied soldiers slowly bending and unbending from his middle.
The first soldier came down. The second jerked up.
The officer screamed in frustration, threats, oaths, and orders mingled together in a rage that drove the soldiers to jerking frenzy.
Down came the second soldier. Up went the first.
Now the first was down again. Now he was up. Now down again.
Up . . . Down . . . Up . . .
* * *
Every small detail of the scene was suddenly crystal clear to Horsip, as if he were seeing it under thick glass. He felt detached from it all, much like a third person looking on. When he spoke, he did not feel that he gave excessive force to the word. He was hardly conscious of speaking at all. He merely said:
“CAPTAIN!”
The officer halted in mid-curse. He turned around with the glassy-eyed expression of a fish yanked out of the water on a hook.
The soldiers froze in various postures, then jerked to attention.
The outer door opened up and the guard presented arms.
Horsip said, “Captain, take the two nearest soldiers. Have them pull down that man on the outside of the cell. Now have them hold tight to the rope that’s looped up over the bar. Now, take the next two nearest soldiers and have them untie that man. All right. Now, have those next two soldiers stand on the opposite side of those bars, inside the cell, ready to catch that other soldier when the rope is lowered.”
The captain, using his hands to move the soldiers around, was following out Horsip’s orders in a sort of dumb stupor. The first soldier was untied. The second soldier was cut down. The second soldier was untied. The third soldier was untied, and sat chafing his wrists and hands, and massaging his abdomen.
Horsip motioned the captain into a little cubicle containing a desk and a filing cabinet.
“What’s happened here?” said Horsip.
The captain merely blinked.
Horsip tried again. The captain stood there with an unfocused look.
“Report your presence,” said Horsip.
The captain’s hand came up in a salute, which Horsip returned.
“Sir, Captain Moklis Mogron, 14-0-17682355, 3rd Headquarters Guards, reports his presence.”
The captain blinked, and his eyes came to a focus. He seemed to really see Horsip for the first time. He turned pale.
“What happened, Captain?” said Horsip.
“Sir, I—” the captain stopped.
“Just tell me what you saw and heard, as it happened,” said Horsip.
“Well, I . . . sir, it all boils down to . . . I just don’t remember.”
“What’s the first thing you do remember?”
“I opened that outside door, and I came in and—Wait. No. The guard came to me and told me the prisoners needed attention. I came in, and . . . and—” He scowled fiercely. “Let’s see, I came in, and, let’s see, one of the prisoners—yes! The prisoners were out of their cells! . . . But they said that’s what they called me in for. The lock design on the cell was no good, and they wanted to show me a better one. One of them was holding a shiny key on a string in the bright light from this desk light . . . now, what was that doing out there?. . . and he said to look at it, and watch it, and keep my eye on it, and he’d explain why I should . . . should—”
The captain looked dazed.
“Report your presence!” snapped Horsip.
The captain did so. Horsip tried several times, but could not get past the point where the natives showed the captain the shiny key in the bright light. Horsip became vaguely aware that he was wasting his time on scattered details, and, as usual on this planet, coming away empty-handed. He sent the captain out to learn from the three soldiers how they had come to be tied up in the air that way. The captain returned to say the natives had told the soldiers about a rope trick, had gotten them over to the bars with a coil of rope, and that was all the soldiers remembered.
Horsip sent out orders to comb the place for the prisoners, and for anyone who had seen them pass to report it.
The prisoners weren’t found, and everyone was sure he hadn’t seen them.
Horsip went back to his rooms feeling more than ever as if he were struggling uphill through layers of mud.
* * *
The next day passed in a welter of sticky details. The staff had finally figured out how to get supplies to the outposts without having the tires shot out in the process. An armored ground-car towing a string of supply wagons was to approach the outposts, traveling along the roadway at high speed. As the cars passed the outposts, soldiers on the wagons were to throw off the necessary supplies, which the men from the outposts could come out and pick up. In this way, the staff exulted, there would be no need for the cars to slow down; as the natives seemed reluctant to fire at moving vehicles—lest they kill someone and invoke the edict—there should be no more trouble from that source.
To protect vehicles from sabotage at night, the staff proposed the construction of several enormous car parks, to be surrounded by leaping-mine fields and thick spike-bar barriers.
Meanwhile, another convoy of eighteen cars had shot off the bottom of the hilly curve with no known explanation. The staff advised the building of a fortified observation post, with no fewer than two observers on watch at all times, so it could at least be found out what happened.
But the old troubles were not the only ones to deal with. Just as the Planetary Integration team triumphantly handed out answers to thorny problems that had confounded them in the past, word came of something new and worse. The soldiers were getting hard to manage.
Always in the past, on conquered planets, the troops had had some sort of female companionship. The natives had often been actually glad to make alliances with their conquerors. But here, such was not the case. The females of the local species ran shrieking at the approach of a love-starved soldier. This had a bad effect on morale. Worse yet, the lop-tail authorities had been offering to help matters by showing the soldiers instructive moving pictures on the topic, these pictures being the very same ones used to instruct the lop-tail soldiers on how to act toward females. Since seeing these pictures, it was a question who was more afraid of whom, the soldiers or the women. Now there was a sort of boiling resentment and frustration, and there was no telling where it might lead to.
While the staff, under Horsip’s direction, was thrashing this problem out, Moffis, red-faced and indignant, came charging into the room.
Horsip sprang from his seat and rushed Moffis out into another room.
“Hairy master of sin!” roared Moffis. “Are you trying to ruin me?”
“Keep your voice down,” said Horsip. “What’s wrong now?”
“Wrong? That stinking idea for feeding the outposts, that’s what’s wrong.”
“But—Why?”
“Why?” Moffis growled deep in his throat. He stepped back, his teeth bared and one hand out to his side. “All right. Here I am. I’m on one of these stinking supply-wagons your bright boys say ought to be hooked up to the ground-cars. We’re racing along the road at high speed, like we’re supposed to. We go over a repaired place in the road. All the wagons go up in the air. I have to hang on for dear life or I go up in the air. Now someone yells, ‘Three barrels of flour, a sack of mash, three large cans Concentrate B, and a case of .33 splat-gun darts.’ “