Oomphel in the Sky Page 3
A few minutes after the car turned south from the ruined village, hecould see contragravity-vehicles in the air ahead, and then the fieldsand buildings of the Sanders plantation. A lot more contragravity wasgrounded in the fallow fields, and there were rows of pneumaticballoon-tents, and field-kitchens, and a whole park of engineeringequipment. Work was going on in the klooba-fields, too; about threehundred natives were cutting open the six-foot leafy balls and gettingout the biocrystals. Three of the plantation airjeeps, each with a pairof machine guns, were guarding them, but they didn't seem to be havingany trouble. He saw Sanders in another jeep, and had Heshto put the caralongside.
"How's it going, Paul?" he asked over his radio. "I see you have somehelp, now."
"Everybody's from Qualpha's, and from Darshat's," Sanders replied. "TheArmy had no place to put them, after they burned themselves out." Helaughed happily. "Miles, I'm going to save my whole crop! I thought Iwas wiped out, this morning."
He would have been, if Gonzales hadn't brought those Kwanns in. Theklooba was beginning to wither; if left unharvested, the biocrystalswould die along with their hosts and crack into worthlessness. Like allthe other planters, Sanders had started no new crystals since the hotweather, and would start none until the worst of the heat was over. He'dneed every crystal he could sell to tide him over.
"The Welfarers'll make a big forced-labor scandal out of this," hepredicted.
"Why, such an idea." Sanders was scandalized. "I'm not forcing them toeat."
"The Welfarers don't think anybody ought to have to work to eat. Theythink everybody ought to be fed whether they do anything to earn it ornot, and if you try to make people earn their food, you're guilty ofeconomic coercion. And if you're in business for yourself and want themto work for you, you're an exploiter and you ought to be eliminated as aclass. Haven't you been trying to run a plantation on this planet, underthis Colonial Government, long enough to have found that out, Paul?"
Brigadier General Ramon Gonzales had taken over the first--countingdown from the landing-stage--floor of the plantation house for hisheadquarters. His headquarters company had pulled out removablepartitions and turned four rooms into one, and moved in enough screensand teleprinters and photoprint machines and computers to have outfittedthe main newsroom of _Planetwide News_. The place had the feel of anewsroom--a newsroom after a big story has broken and the 'cast has goneon the air and everybody--in this case about twenty Terran officers andnon-coms, half women--standing about watching screens and smoking andthinking about getting a follow-up ready.
Gonzales himself was relaxing in Sanders' business-room, with his beltoff and his tunic open. He had black eyes and black hair and mustache,and a slightly equine face that went well with his Old Terran Spanishname. There was another officer with him, considerably younger--CaptainFoxx Travis, Major General Maith's aide.
"Well, is there anything we can do for you, Miles?" Gonzales asked,after they had exchanged greetings and sat down.
"Why, could I have your final situation-progress map? And would you bewilling to make a statement on audio-visual." He looked at his watch."We have about twenty minutes before the 'cast."
"You have a map," Gonzales said, as though he were walking tiptoe fromone word to another. "It accurately represents the situation as of themoment, but I'm afraid some minor unavoidable inaccuracies may havecrept in while marking the positions and times for the earlier phases ofthe operation. I teleprinted a copy to _Planetwide_ along with the one Isent to Division Headquarters."
He understood about that and nodded. Gonzales was zipping up his tunicand putting on his belt and sidearm. That told him, before the brigadiergeneral spoke again, that he was agreeable to the audio-visualappearance and statement. He called the recording studio at _Planetwide_while Gonzales was inspecting himself in the mirror and told them to getset for a recording. It only ran a few minutes; Gonzales, speakingwithout notes, gave a brief description of the operation.
"At present," he concluded, "we have every native village and everyplantation and trading-post within two hundred miles of the Sandersplantation occupied. We feel that this swarming has been definitelystopped, but we will continue the occupation for at least the nexthundred to two hundred hours. In the meantime, the natives in theoccupied villages are being put to work building shelters for themselvesagainst the anticipated storms."
"I hadn't heard about that," Miles said, as the general returned to hischair and picked up his drink again.
"Yes. They'll need something better than these thatched huts when thestorms start, and working on them will keep them out of mischief.Standard megaton-kilometer field shelters, earth and log construction. Ithink they'll be adequate for anything that happens at periastron."
Anything designed to resist the heat, blast and radiation effects of amegaton thermonuclear bomb at a kilometer ought to stand up under whatwas coming. At least, the periastron effects; there was another angle toit.
"The Native Welfare Commission isn't going to take kindly to that.That's supposed to be their job."
"Then why the devil haven't they done it?" Gonzales demanded angrily."I've viewed every native village in this area by screen, and I haven'tseen one that's equipped with anything better than those logstorage-bins against the stockades."
"There was a project to provide shelters for the periastron storms setup ten years ago. They spent one year arguing about how the nativessurvived storms prior to the Terrans' arrival here. According to theolder natives, they got into those log storage-houses you werementioning; only about one out of three in any village survived. I couldhave told them that. Did tell them, repeatedly, on the air. Then, afterthey decided that shelters were needed, they spent another year hasslingover who would be responsible for designing them. Your predecessor here,General Nokami, offered the services of his engineer officers. He wasfrostily informed that this was a humanitarian and not a militaryproject."
Ramon Gonzales began swearing, then apologized for the interruption."Then what?" he asked.
"Apology unnecessary. Then they did get a shelter designed, and startedteaching some of the students at the native schools how to build them,and then the meteorologists told them it was no good. It was a dugoutshelter; the weathermen said there'd be rainfall measured in metersinstead of inches and anybody who got caught in one of those dugoutswould be drowned like a rat."
"Ha, I thought of that one." Gonzales said. "My shelters are going to bemounded up eight feet above the ground."
"What did they do then?" Foxx Travis wanted to know.
"There the matter rested. As far as I know, nothing has been done on itsince."
"And you think, with a disgraceful record of non-accomplishment likethat, that they'll protest General Gonzales' action on purelyjurisdictional grounds?" Travis demanded.
"Not jurisdictional grounds, Foxx. The general's going at this the wrongway. He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he'sgoing right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences andround-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance tofoul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that'sundemocratic. And what's worse, he's making the natives build themthemselves, whether they want to or not, and that's forced labor. Thatreminds me; has anybody started raising the devil about those Kwannsfrom Qualpha's and Darshat's you brought here and Paul put to work?"
Gonzales looked at Travis and then said: "Not with me. Not yet, anyhow."
"They've been at General Maith," Travis said shortly. After a moment,he added: "General Maith supports General Gonzales completely; that'sfor publication. I'm authorized to say so. What else was there to do?They'd burned their villages and all their food stores. They had to beplaced somewhere. And why in the name of reason should they sit aroundin the shade eating Government native-type rations while
Paul Sandershas fifty to a hundred thousand sols' worth of crystals dying on him?"
"Yes; that's another thing they'll scream about. Paul's making a profitout of it."
"Of course he's making a profit," Gonzales said. "Why else is he runninga plantation? If planters didn't make profits, who'd grow biocrystals?"
"The Colonial Government. The same way they built those storm-shelters.But that would be in the public interest, and if the Kwanns weren'tpublic-spirited enough to do the work,