sigh. "Oh, well, it"s nice to check the facts of history. The books could be wrong." His fan flashed into a circle of light and the machine surged forward. "Pardon me."
The front rubber ball barged forcefully between two men, knocking them sidewise without injury. With a high whine, the machine shot down the road, its fan-blast making the rider"s plaited hairdo point horizontally backward.
"You dumb galoots!" raged Gleed as his fallen pair got up and dusted themselves. "I ordered you to stand fast. What d"you mean, letting him run out on us like that?"
"Didn"t have much choice about it, sarge," answered one, giving him a surly look.
"I want none of your back-chat. You could have busted a balloon if you"d had your weapons ready. That would have stopped him."
"You didn"t tell us to have guns ready."
"Where was your own, anyway?" added a voice.
Gleed whirled round on the others and bawled, "Who said that?" His irate eyes raked a long row of
blank, impa.s.sive faces. It was impossible to detect the culprit. "I"ll shake you up with the next quota of fatigues," he promised. "I"ll see to it-"
"The Sergeant Major"s coming," one of them warned.
Bidworthy was four hundred yards away and making martial progress toward them. Arriving in due time, he cast a cold, contemptuous glance over the patrol.
"What happened?"
Giving a brief account of the incident, Gleed finished aggrievedly, "He looked like a Chickasaw with an oil well."
"What"s a Chickasaw?" Bidworthy demanded.
"I read about them somewhere once when I was a kid," explained Gleed, happy to bestow a modic.u.m of
learning. "They had long haircuts, wore blankets and rode around in gold-plated automobiles."
"Sounds crazy to me," said Bidworthy. "I gave up all that magic-carpet stuff when I was seven. I was
deep in ballistics before I was twelve and military logistics at fourteen." He sniffed loudly, gave the other a jaundiced eye. "Some guys suffer from arrested development."
"They actually existed," Gleed maintained. "They-"
"So did fairies," snapped Bidworthy. "My mother said so. My mother was a good woman. She didn"t tell
me a lot of tomfool lies-often." He spat on the road. "Be your age!" Then he scowled at the patrol. "All right, get out your guns, a.s.suming that you"ve got them and know where they are and which hand to hold them in. Take orders from me. I"ll deal personally with the next one along."
He sat on a large stone by the roadside and planted an expectant gaze on the town. Gleed posed near him, slightly pained. The patrol remained strung across the road, guns held ready. Half an hour crawled by without anything happening.
One of the men said, "Can we have a smoke, Sergeant Major?"
"No."
They fell into lugubrious silence, watching the town, licking their lips and thinking. They had plenty to
think about. A town-any town of human occupation-had desirable features not found elsewhere in the cosmos. Lights, company, freedom, laughter, all the makings of life. And one can go hungry too long.
Eventually a large coach came from the outskirts, hit the high road, came bowling toward them. A long,
shiny, streamlined job, it rolled on twenty b.a.l.l.s in two rows of ten, gave forth a whine similar to but
louder than that of its predecessor, but had no visible fans. It was loaded with people.
At a point two hundred yards from the road block a loud-speaker under the vehicle"s bonnet blared an urgent, "Make way! Make way!"
"This is it," commented Bidworthy, with much satisfaction. "We"ve got a dollop of them. One of them is going to chat or I leave the service." He got off his rock, stood in readiness.
"Make way! Make way!"
"Bust his bags if he tries to bull his way through," Bidworthy ordered the men.
It wasn"t necessary. The coach lost pace, stopped with its bonnet a yard from the waiting file. Its driver peered out the side of his cab. Other faces snooped farther back.
Composing himself and determined to try the effect of fraternal cordiality, Bidworthy went up to the
driver and said, "Good morning."
"Your time-sense is shot to pot," observed the other. He had a blue jowl, a broken nose, cauliflower ears, looked the sort who usually drives with others in hot and vengeful pursuit. "Can"t you afford a watch?"
"Huh?"
"It isn"t morning. It"s late afternoon."
"So it is," admitted Bidworthy, forcing a cracked smile. "Good afternoon."
"I"m not so sure about that," mused the driver, leaning on his wheel and moodily picking his teeth. "It"s
just another one nearer the grave."
"That may be," agreed Bidworthy, little taken with that ghoulish angle. "But I have other things to worry about, and-"
"Not much use worrying about anything, past or present," advised the driver. "Because there are lots
bigger worries to come."
"Perhaps so," Bidworthy said, inwardly feeling that this was no time or place to contemplate the darker side of existence. "But I prefer to deal with my own troubles in my own time and my own way."
"n.o.body"s troubles are entirely their own, nor their time, nor their methods," remarked the tough
hooking oracle. "Are they now?"
"I don"t know and I don"t care," said Bidworthy, his composure thinning down as his blood pressure built up. He was conscious of Gleed and the patrol watching, listening, and probably grinning inside
themselves. There was also the load of gaping pa.s.sengers. "I think you are chewing the fat just to stall me. You might as well know now that it won"t work. The Earth Amba.s.sador is waiting-"
"So are we," remarked the driver, pointedly.
"He wants to speak to you," Bidworthy went on, "and he"s going to speak to you!"
"I"d be the last to prevent him. We"ve got free speech here. Let him step up and say his piece so"s we can
get on our way."
"You," Bidworthy informed, "are going to him." He signed to the rest of the coach. "And your load as well."
"Not me," denied a fat man, sticking his head out of a side window. He wore thick-lensed gla.s.ses that gave him eyes like poached eggs. Moreover, he was adorned with a high hat candy-striped in white and pink. "Not me," repeated this vision, with considerable firmness.
"Me, neither," endorsed the driver.
"All right." Bidworthy registered menace. "Move this birdcage an inch, forward or backward, and we"ll shoot your pot-bellied tires to thin strips. Get out of that cab."
"Not me. I"m too comfortable. Try fetching me out."
Bidworthy beckoned to his nearest six men. "You heard him-take him up on that."
Tearing open the cab door, they grabbed. If they had expected the victim to put up a futile fight against heavy odds, they were disappointed. He made no attempt to resist. They got him, lugged together, and he yielded with good grace, his body leaning sidewise and coming halfway out of the door.
That was as far as they could get him.
"Come on," urged Bidworthy, displaying impatience. "Show him who"s who. He isn"t a fixture."
One of the men climbed over the body, poked around inside the cab, and said, "He is, you know."
"What d"you mean?"
"He"s chained to the steering column."