The Man Who Played to Lose by Laurence M. Janifer (distant reading .TXT) 📗

New Didymus; actually, of course, some of my corps brothers were recruiting on other parts of the planet and the Government had been fully instructed not to hold any of them up. I won't say that President Santa Claus understood what I was doing, but he trusted me. He had faith—which was handy.

Hollerith was overjoyed when the reinforcements did arrive. "Now we can really begin to work," he told me. "Now we can begin to fight back in a big way. No more of this sneaking around, doing fiddling little jobs—"

He wanted to start at once. I nearly laughed in his face; it was now established that I didn't have to get rid of the man. If he'd decided to delay on the big attack ... but he hadn't.

So, of course, I helped him draw up some plans. Good ones, too; the best I could come up with.

The very best.

"The trouble," Hollerith told me sadly, a day or so later, "is going to be convincing the others. They want to do something dramatic—blowing up the planet, most likely."

I said I didn't think they planned to go that far, and, anyhow, I had an idea that might help. "You want to take the Army armaments depot near New Didymus," I said. "That would serve as a good show of strength, and weaken any reprisals while we get ready to move again."

"Of course," he said.

"Then think of all the fireworks you'll get," I said. "Bombs going off, heaters exploding, stacks of arms all going off at once—the Fourth of July, the Fourteenth, and Guy Fawkes Day, all at once, with a small touch of Armageddon for flavor. Not to mention the Chinese New Year."

"But—"

"Sell it that way," I said. "The drama. The great picture. The excitement. That, believe me, they'll buy."

He frowned while he thought it over. Then the frown turned into a grin. "By God," he said, "they might."

And they did. The conference and the election were both pretty stormy. All the new patriots were off to blow up the Government buildings one after another, even more enthusiastic than the original members. It was only natural; my instructions to the recruiters had been to pick the most violent, frothing anti-Government men they could find to send out, and that was what we got. But Hollerith gave them a talk, and the vote, when it came, was overwhelmingly in favor of his plan.

Even Huey was enthusiastic. He came up to me after the meeting and pounded me on the back; I suppose it was meant for friendship, though it felt more like sabotage. "Hey, I thought you were no good," he said. "I thought you were ... oh, you know, some kid of a spy."

"I know," I said.

"Well, Mister," he said, "believe me, I was wrong." He pounded some more. I tried to look as if I liked it or, anyway, as if I could put up with it. "You're O.K., Mister," he said. "You're O.K."

Some day, I told myself, I was going to get Huey all to myself, away in a dark alley somewhere. There didn't seem to be much chance of keeping the promise, but I made it to myself anyway, and moved away.

The meeting had set the attack for three days ahead, which was a moral victory for Hollerith; the men were all for making it in the next five minutes. But he said he needed time—it's a good thing, I told myself, that he didn't say what he needed it for. Because in a few hours, right after sunrise the next morning, training started and Hollerith had his hands full of trouble.

The new men didn't see the sense in it. "Hell," one of them complained, "all we got to do is go up and toss a bomb into the place. We don't like all this fooling around first."

The "fooling around" involved jungle training—how to walk quietly, how to avoid getting slashed by a vine, and so forth. It also involved forming two separate attack groups for Hollerith's plans. That meant drilling the groups to move separately, and drilling each group to stay together.

And there were other details: how to fire a heater from the third rank without incinerating a comrade in the front rank; signal-spotting, in case of emergency and sudden changes of plan; the use of dynamite, its care and feeding; picking targets—and so forth and so forth. Hollerith's three days seemed pretty short when you thought about what they had to cover.

But the new men didn't like it. They wanted action. "That's what we signed on for," they said. "Not all this drill. Hell, we ain't an army—we're guerrillas."

The older hands, and the more sensible members of the band, tried their best to talk the new men into line. Some of the officers tried ordering them into line.

But the talk was ignored. And as for the officers—well, the old United States Civil War tried a democratic army for a while, on both sides. Unfortunately, electing your officers is not an efficient way to run things. The most popular man makes the best officer about as often as the most popular man makes the best criminal-law judge. Or engineer, for that matter. War's not a democratic business.

This one, however, seemed to be. Mass election of officers was one of the rules, along with the voting on staff decisions. The new men out-numbered the older hands. New officers were elected—and that stopped the orders.

Hollerith was about two-thirds of the way out of his mind when the three days were up and the attack time came around. When night fell, the atmosphere around the cave was as tense as it could get without turning into actual lightning. It was a warm, still night; the single moon was quarter-full but it shed a lot more light than Earth's moon; we blacked ourselves and Hollerith went over the plans. We were still divided into two groups—ragged groups, but groups. The first wave was to come around on the depot from the left, attacking in full force with all armaments and some of that dynamite. When things were getting toward a peak in that direction, the second force was to come in from the right and set off its own fireworks. Result (Hollerith hoped): demolition, confusion, catastrophe.

It was a good plan. Hollerith obviously wasn't sure of his own men any more—and neither would I have been, in his spot. But he had the advantage of surprise and superior arms; he was clearly hoping that would overbalance the lack of discipline, training and order in his force. Besides, there was nothing else he could do; he was outvoted, all the way down the line.

I set out, with hardly a qualm, along with the second attack group. We were under the command of a shy, tall man with spectacles who didn't look like much, he'd been a trapper before the war, though, and was one of the original guerrillas, for a wonder, and that meant he was probably a hell of a lot tougher and more knowledgeable than he seemed. Setting traps for Wohlen's animals, for instance, was emphatically not a job for the puny or the frightened. The first group was under Huey's command.

Hollerith stayed with a small group of his own as a "reserve"; actually, he wanted to oversee the battle, and the men were perfectly willing to let him, having gotten one idea into their democratic heads: Hollerith was too valuable a man for the guerrillas to lose.

But I wasn't, of course. I'd done my bit; I'd gotten the volunteers. Now I could go and die for glory like the rest of them.

The trouble was, I couldn't see any way out. I marched in the dimness with the rest, and we managed to make surprisingly little noise. Wohlen's animals were active and stirring, anyhow, and that helped.

At last the depot showed up in the moonlight with the city some distance behind it. There was a wire fence, and a sentry, immediately in view behind him were square blocky buildings in a clearing. Beyond that there was another fence, then some more jungle, and then the city. Fifty yards from the fence, in the last screen of trees, we stopped and waited.

The first group was off to the other side of the fence, and I couldn't see or hear them. The wait seemed to go on for hours; perhaps a minute and a half passed. Then the first heater went off.

The sentry whirled and fired without really thinking. There wasn't any way for him to tell what he was shooting at. More heaters went off from the jungle, and then they started to come in. There was a lot of noise.

The boys were yelling, swarming over the wire fence and through it, firing heaters wildly. There were lights in the buildings, now, and a picked group of men came out of one of them, swinging in single file; the heaters chopped them to pieces before they had much of a chance. A tower light went on and then the really big guns got going.

The guerrillas started to get it, then. The big boys from the armaments tower charred holes in their line, and the noise got worse; men were screaming and cursing and dying and the heaters were still going off. I tore my eyes away and looked at the leader of our group. He was poised on the balls of his feet, leaning forward; he stayed that way, his head nodding very slowly up and down, for a full second. Then he shouted and lifted an arm and we followed him, a screaming mob heading down into hell.

The big guns were swiveled the other way and for a couple of seconds we had no trouble. Our boys weren't playing with heaters too much; instead, the dynamite started to fly. Light the fuse, pick it up, heave—and then stand back and watch. Fireworks. Excitement. Well, it was what they wanted, wasn't it?

There was an explosion as a small bundle landed inside the fence, in a courtyard. Then another one, the flashes lighting up faces and bodies in motion. I found myself screaming with the rest of them.

Then the big one went off.

One of the dynamite bundles had hit the right spot. Ammunition went off with a dull boom that shook the ground, and the light was too bright to look into. I went flat and so did the others; I wondered about solid shells exploding and going wild, but there weren't any. The light faded, and then it began to grow again.

I put my head up and saw flames. Then I got up and saw the others rising, too. I turned tail for the jungle. Some of them followed me, along with some of the first group; order was lost entirely and we were no more than pieces of a shrieking, delirious, victorious mob. I headed back for the base.

Behind me the ammunition depot burned brightly. The raid was over.

It had been an unqualified success, of course. The guerrillas had done the best job of their careers.

So far.

Hollerith was back to the cave before me. Put it down to a short-cut, or just more practice in the jungle. When I came in he looked terrible, about a hundred and twelve years old and shrunken. But my appearance seemed to rouse him a little. He gestured and the others in the cave—three or four of them—went out. One stood at the entrance.

There was a silence. Hollerith grimaced at me. "You're working for the Government," he said. It wasn't a question.

I shook my head. "I—"

"Keep it," he said. "James Carson from Ancarta is a cover identity, that's all. I tell you, I know."

He didn't look ready to pull a heater. I waited a second. The silence got louder. Then I said: "All right. How do you know?"

The grimace again, twisted and half-humorous. "Why, because you got me recruits," he said. "Because you got me armaments. Because you helped me."

"Doesn't make sense," I said.

"Doesn't it?" He turned away from me for a second. When he turned back he looked more like General Rawlinson Hollerith, and less like a corpse. "You got me fanatics, men who hated the Government."

"Well?"

"They don't think straight," he said. "There isn't room in their minds for any more than that hatred. And they're democratic, just like the rest of us. They vote."

"You set that up," I said. "I had nothing to do with it."

He nodded. "I know," he said. "There are places where democracy just doesn't work. Like an armed force. As long as most of the members think alike, you're all right. But when a new factor comes into the picture—why, nobody knows what he's voting for. It becomes a matter of personal preference—which is no way to run a war."

"All right,"