Moffis glared. “I’m supposed to get this stuff unstrapped and pitched out between the time we bounce over the repaired place and the time the outpost shoots past to one side?”
Horsip hesitated.
“Come on,” roared Moffis. “Am I?”
“Well, now, look,” said Horsip. “You’re not going at it the right way.”
“Oh, I’m not, am I?”
Horsip flared: “If you had the sense an officer’s supposed to have, you’d know better than to have the stuff strapped in helter-skelter. You’d have a supply schedule strapped to a wagon post, and the supplies all loaded on in reverse order, so it would be no trouble at all—”
“But,” said Moffis, “I’m not playing the part of an officer here! I’m one of our soldiers! I’m irked and griped because here I am, a soldier of the Integral Union, and I don’t even dare speak to any of the native girls running around. There’s no fighting going on—nothing definite—just an endless folderol that isn’t getting anywhere. I’m about fed up with the thing. Every time I turn around there’s some new makeshift.”
“Yes, yes,” said Horsip. “I see that—”
“All right,” said Moffis, “the point is, the soldier is no mathematician in the first place. If you explain every point of the routine to him—O.K., maybe. But if he isn’t used to it, things are going to get snarled up. Well, he hasn’t had any training for this routine and it’s a mess.”
“In time—” said Horsip, groping his way.
“In time, nothing,” said Moffis. “It won’t work, and that’s that. I haven’t even had time to tell you everything wrong with it. What do you suppose these barrels and cans do when they hit the ground, anyway?”
“Well—”
“They burst, that’s what they do! And I’m here to tell you a soldier that sees his barrel of flour come out the side of a wagon, hit the ground, fly to pieces, and then get swirled all over the road by half-a-dozen sets of wheels is in no frame of mind worth talking about.”
“For—”
“He has to sweep it up with a broom!” roared Moffis. “And by the Great Hungry Mikeril, I tell you, I don’t want to be around trying to give that soldier orders until we’ve unloaded his gun and got his knife away from him. There’s got to be some other way of supplying these outposts or I pull in every one of them and to hell with sharp-shooters along the road. At least the men will be able to eat.”
“Yes,” said Horsip, feeling exhausted, “I see you’ve got a point there.”
“All right,” said Moffis. He stopped to swallow and massage his throat. “There’s another thing. This car-park idea.”
“Surely there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“No, the idea is all right. The plan on paper looks good. But how many million gross of spike-bars do your people think an army is equipped with, anyway? You’re an officer. You know that. We have just so many for ordinary requirements, plus a reserve for desperate situations. And that’s it. Well, this planet has been nothing but one big desperate situation since we landed on it. We just don’t have the material to make any such big things as these car parks.”
“Couldn’t you,” said Horsip, desperately, “collect a few here and there from your fortifica—”
“No!” roared Moffis, his voice cracking. “Not on your life! Once we start gnawing holes in our own defenses—”
“All right, then,” said Horsip, straightening up, “what about the natives? They had armies. They must have used spike-bars. Or, if they didn’t, we can teach them how they’re made, buy them from them—”
* * *
Moffis looked down at the floor gloomily.
“What’s the matter?” said Horsip.
Moffis shook his head. “They didn’t use spike-bars.”
“Well, then, we can teach—”
“They had their own stuff.”
Horsip looked apprehensive. “What?’
“Fang-wire.”
Horsip felt himself sinking into a fog of confusion. With an effort he struggled clear. “What did you say?”
“I said, they had their own stuff. Fang-wire.”
“What in the world is that?”
“Thick twisted wire with teeth on it.”
Horsip goggled. “Is it as good as our spike-bars?”
“As far as coming up against it, one is about as bad as the other.”
“Then—why don’t we use it?”
Moffis shook his head. “If you ever saw our soldiers laying the stuff out—it comes wound up on little wire barrels. You have to take one end of the stuff, without getting the teeth in you, and pull if free. It comes off twisted, it jumps and vibrates, and the teeth are likely to get you if you try to straighten it out. I saw half a company of soldiers fighting three rolls of fang-wire the only time we ever tried to use it. The wire was winning. The natives were dug in on a hill opposite from us, and they were having hysterics. No, thanks. Never again.”
“Listen,” said Horsip doggedly, “if they use the stuff, there must be some way to do it.”
“That’s so,” said Moffis, “but if we take the time to train the army all over again in new ways of fighting, we aren’t going to get anything else done.”
Horsip paced the floor. “I hate to say this, Moffis, but it appears to me to be a plain fact that this victory is tearing the army to pieces.”
“I know it,” said Moffis.
“Everywhere we come in contact with the natives, something goes wrong.”
Moffis nodded.
“All right,” said Horsip, his voice rising. “What we need here is drastic action, striking at the root of the trouble.”
Moffis watched Horsip uneasily. “What, though?”
“Reconcentration,” said Horsip. “The iron rusts fast when it’s cut in bits where the air can get at it. Melt it back into a bar and only the surface will rust. Then the bar will keep its strength.” Horsip looked hard into Moffis’ eyes. “We’ve got to mass the troops—not just the road outposts, but the occupation districts. Everything. Take over a dominating section of this planet and command it.”
“But regulations—in Phase II we have to do it this way!”
“All right,” said Horsip, “then we’ll go back to Phase I.”
“But . . . but that’s never been done! That’s—” Moffis paused, frowning. “It might work, at that. The devil with regulations.”
They gripped each other’s arms. Moffis started for the door and walked into a hurrying messenger. They exchanged salutes, Moffis took the paper, looked at it, and handed it to Horsip. Horsip looked at it and read aloud:
“Hold on. Arriving in thirty days. Twenty million troops in motion. Your plan good. Argit, Supreme Integrator.”
“I guess we’d better stay put,” said Moffis.
Horsip frowned. “Maybe so.”
* * *
It was a trying thirty days.
The outposts took to buying food direct from the natives. The road-repair crews fell into an ugly habit of getting out of work by exposing arms or legs and daring the lop-tails to shoot at them. There were so many flesh-wounds that the aid stations began running out of supplies. Troops in the remoter sections began drinking a kind of liquid propellant the lop-tails sold in bottles and cans. It was supposed to cure boredom, but the troops went wild on it, and the reserves were kept bouncing and grinding from one place to another, thinking the war had broken out again.
Planetary Integration did have a few victories to its credit. The trouble on the hilly curve, for instance, proved to be caused by a gang of native boys who came out every few days and stretched a cable across the road at an angle. The speeding ground-cars spun around the curve, slid along the cable and went over the edge. The boys then came out, rolled up the cable, and went home for breakfast. By the time this was discovered, the situation was so uneasy no one thought of asking any more than that the boys be spanked and the cable confiscated.
At intervals, by now, large concentrations of humanoid soldiers were observed in open maneuvers; their troops were fully equipped with stitching-guns, cannons run from place to place by their own engines, and traveling forts in numbers sufficient to turn a man pale at the mere mention.
Horsip watched one of the maneuvers through a double telescope in an observation post on his fortified mountain.
“Is that what you had to fight, Moffis?” he asked, his voice awed.
“That’s it,” said Moffis. “Only more of them.”
Horsip watched the procession of forts, guns and troops roll past in the distance.
“Their airplanes,” said Moffis, “were worse yet.”
“Then how did you ever win?”
“For one thing,” said Moffis, “they weren’t expecting it. For another, they wasted energy fighting each other. And our troops were in good order then. They were used to victory, and they were convinced they were superior. Then, too, we used the Fleet to cut the natives’ communications lines.”