The colonel looked at Loft. “How many do you think were dropped?”
“I don’t know, sir,” said Loft. “We picked up about fifty of them, and about ninety parachutes they came in. For some reason the people leave the parachutes when they take the tubes, and then there are probably a lot we haven’t found yet.”
Lanser waved his hand. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said. “They can drop as many as they want. We can’t stop it, and we can’t use it against them, either. They haven’t conquered anybody.”
Loft said fiercely, “We can beat them off the face of the earth!”
Hunter was prying the copper cap out of the top of one of the sticks, and Lanser said, “Yes—we can do that. Have you looked at this wrapper, Hunter?”
“Not yet, I haven’t had time.”
“It’s kind of devilish, this thing,” said Colonel Lanser. “The wrapper is blue, so that it’s easy to see. Unwrap the outer paper and here”—he picked up the small package—“here is a piece of chocolate. Everybody will be looking for it. I’ll bet our own soldiers steal the chocolate. Why, the kids will be looking for them, like Easter eggs.”
A soldier came in and laid a square of yellow paper in front of the colonel and retired, and Lanser glanced at it and laughed harshly. “Here’s something for you, Hunter. Two more breaks in your line.”
Hunter looked up from the copper cap he was examining, and he asked, “How general is this? Did they drop them everywhere?”
Lanser was puzzled. “Now, that’s the funny thing. I’ve talked to the capital. This is the only place they’ve dropped them.”
“What do you make of that?” Hunter asked
“Well, it’s hard to say. I think this is a test place. I suppose if it works here they’ll use it all over, and if it doesn’t work here they won’t bother.”
“What are you going to do?” Hunter asked.
“The capital orders me to stamp this out so ruthlessly that they won’t drop it any place else.”
Hunter said plaintively, “How am I going to mend five breaks in the railroad? I haven’t rails right now for five breaks.”
“You’ll have to rip out some of the old sidings, I guess,” said Lanser.
Hunter said, “That’ll make a hell of a roadbed.”
“Well, anyway, it will make a roadbed.”
Major Hunter tossed the tube he had torn apart onto the pile, and Loft broke in, “We must stop this thing at once, sir. We must arrest and punish people who picked these things up, before they use them. We have to get busy so these people won’t think we are weak.”
Lanser was smiling at him, and he said, “Take it easy, Captain. Let’s see what we have first, and then we’ll think of remedies.”
He took a new package from the pile and unwrapped it. He took the little piece of chocolate, tasted it, and he said, “This is a devilish thing. It’s good chocolate, too. I can’t even resist it myself. The prize in the grab-bag.” Then he picked up the dynamite. “What do you think of this really, Hunter?”
“What I told you. It’s very cheap and very effective for small jobs, dynamite with a cap and a one-minute fuse. It’s good if you know how to use it. It’s no good if you don’t.”
Lanser studied the print on the inside of the wrapper. “Have you read this?”
“Glanced at it,” said Hunter.
“Well, I have read it, and I want you to listen to it carefully,” said Lanser. He read from the paper, “ ‘To the unconquered people: Hide this. Do not expose yourself. You will need this later. It is a present from your friends to you and from you to the invader of your country. Do not try to do large things with it.’ ” He began to skip through the bill. “Now here, ‘rails in the country.’ And, ‘work at night.’ And, ‘tie up transportation.’ Now here, ‘Instructions: rails. Place stick under rail close to the joint, and tight against a tie. Pack mud or hard-beaten snow around it so that it is firm. When the fuse is lighted you have a slow count of sixty before it explodes.”
He looked up at Hunter and Hunter said simply, “It works.” Lanser looked back at his paper and he skipped through. “ ‘Bridges: Weaken, do not destroy.’ here, ‘transmission poles,’ and here, ‘culverts, trucks.’ ” He laid the blue handbill down. “Well, there it is.”
Loft said angrily, “We must do something! There must be a way to control this. What does headquarters say?”
Lanser pursed his lips and his fingers played with one of the tubes. “I could have told you what they’d say before they said it. I have the orders. ‘Set booby traps and poison the chocolate.’ ” He paused for a moment and then he said, “Hunter, I’m a good, loyal man, but sometimes when I hear the brilliant ideas of headquarters, I wish I were a civilian, an old, crippled civilian. They always think they are dealing with stupid people. I don’t say that this is a measure of their intelligence, do I?”
Hunter looked amused. “Do you?”
Lanser said sharply, “No, I don’t. But what will happen? One man will pick up one of these and get blown to bits by our booby trap. One kid will eat chocolate and die of strychnine poisoning. And then?” He looked down at his hands. “They will poke them with poles, or lasso them, before they touch them. They will try the chocolate on the cat. Goddamn it, Major, these are intelligent people. Stupid traps won’t catch them twice.”
Loft cleared his throat. “Sir, this is defeatist talk,” he said. “We must do something. Why do you suppose it was only dropped here, sir?”
And Lanser said, “For one of two reasons: either this town was picked at random or else there is communication between this town and the outside. We know that some of the young men have got away.”
Loft repeated dully, “We must do something, sir.”
Now Lanser turned on him. “Loft, I think I’ll recommend you for the General Staff. You want to get to work before you even know what the problem is. This is a new kind of conquest. Always before, it was possible to disarm a people and keep them in ignorance. Now they listen to their radios and we can’t stop them. We can’t even find their radios.”
A soldier looked in through the doorway. “Mr. Corell to see you, sir.”
Lanser replied, “Tell him to wait.” He continued to talk to Loft “They read the handbills; weapons drop from the sky for them. Now it’s dynamite, Captain. Pretty soon it may be grenades, and then poison.”
Loft said anxiously, “They haven’t dropped poison yet.”
“No, but they will. Can you think what will happen to the morale of our men or even to you if the people had some of those little game darts, you know, those silly little things you throw at a target, the points coated perhaps with cyanide, silent, deadly little things that you couldn’t hear coming, that would pierce the uniform and make no noise? And what if our men knew that arsenic was about? Would you or they drink or eat comfortably?”
Hunter said dryly, “Are you writing the enemy’s campaign, Colonel?”
“No, I’m trying to anticipate it.”
Loft said, “Sir, we sit here talking when we should be searching for this dynamite. If there is organization among these people, we have to find it, we have to stamp it out.”
“Yes,” said Lanser, “we have to stamp it out, ferociously, I suppose. You take a detail, Loft. Get Prackle to take one. I wish we had more junior officers. Tonder’s getting killed didn’t help us a bit Why couldn’t he let women alone?”
Loft said, “I don’t like the way Lieutenant Prackle is acting, sir.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He isn’t doing anything, but he’s jumpy and he’s gloomy.”
“Yes,” Lanser said, “I know. It’s a thing I’ve talked about so much. You know,” he said, “I might be a major-general if I hadn’t talked about it so much. We trained our young men for victory and you’ve got to admit they’re glorious in victory, but they don’t quite know how to act in defeat. We told them they were brighter and braver than other young men. It was a kind of shock to them to find out that they aren’t a bit braver or brighter than other young men.”
Loft said harshly, “What do you mean by defeat? We are not defeated.”
And Lanser looked coldly up at him for a long moment and did not speak, and finally Loft’s eyes wavered, and he said, “Sir.”
“Thank you,” said Lanser.
“You don’t demand it of the others, sir.”
“They don’t think about it, so it isn’t an insult. When you leave it out, it’s insulting.”