He saluted and hurried away. Vorish strolled along the beach toward the landing field. As he passed the prefab dormitories and offices, a messenger hurried out to intercept him. “Excuse me, sir, but Mr. Wembling would like to use your ship’s power plant to extend his lighting system. If you’ll wait just a moment, his engineer—”
“Tell him to send his engineer to the Hiln,” Vorish said. “He can arrange it with my engineer.”
At the ship he okayed Smith’s guard rosters, and then he went to have a look at the security arrangements. He inspected sentry posts, watched the engineers set up new lights, and listened in on some of the arguments between his men and the construction workers.
Smith was complaining to a foreman that the lights in Sector R were useless because the field of observation was cluttered up with large bushes. He wanted them cut; the foreman protested that he had neither the men nor the machines for bush cutting. Smith was perfectly free to do the job himself, though. Since devices for cutting bushes were not standard equipment on Space Navy battle cruisers, Vorish knew how this was going to end. He walked on. At the north end of the perimeter, a nav technician was insisting that the line of sentry posts be moved back from the forest. “You can’t light up a forest,” he kept saying. “There’ll be a zillion shadows. Move the posts back, and the natives will have to come out of the trees to get at us.” Vorish gave him high marks but left him to win his own argument, which he did. The line was moved back.
While Vorish made his rounds, a stream of messengers from Wembling plodded in his wake.
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, sir, Mr. Wembling would like your Post Number Seven Two moved ten meters to the north. The light will fall on his bedroom window.”
“Mr. Wembling’s compliments, sir. It’s a frozen tart for your mess. And if it wouldn’t inconvenience you too much, would you mind spotting half a dozen more sentry posts at the head of the inlet?”
“Excuse me, sir, but Mr. Wembling would like to meet with your duty officer at seventeen hundred.”
“At your earliest convenience, sir, Mr. Wembling requests that-”
“Damn Wembling!” Vorish exploded.
At dusk Smith reported the sentry arrangements completed and the first echelon posted. “I think we’re in good shape,” he said. “There isn’t much to worry about anyway—outside Wembling’s imagination. The natives have no weapons.”
“Who says they don’t?” Vorish demanded. “Just because they haven’t used any doesn’t mean they don’t have any. These natives aren’t fools. I have a dozen reports of them watching from cover while you were posting the sentries. If they have foolish ambitions, tonight is the night they’ll try them out. They’ll know that fifty per cent of the sentries are new here, and they may know that Space Navy men aren’t accustomed to ground duty. Some of our men are going to be scared stiff standing out there with nothing between them and a dark forest, and the natives may know that, too. I want the off-duty echelons organized into platoons and bedded down where they’ll be available the moment reinforcements are needed anywhere. Have you talked with Macklie?”
Smith nodded. “Did he tell you the natives actually took Wembling to court over this?”
“No!”
“It’s a fact. They hit him with one suit after another and held up his work for months. Wembling won every case, but he was enjoined from working while the cases were being decided.”
“No wonder Wembling is in a foul mood!”
“That’s just the half of it. Once the courts let him go back to work, the natives started harassing him with those silly pranks to slow down his work. It gets on the nerves of his work force, and he’s had a tremendous turnover in personnel.”
“Did you know that Wembling claims he’s doing all this for the natives?”
Smith stared at him. “Then what are we doing here? Ours not to reason why, I suppose.”
“Nonsense,” Vorish said. “If a military man doesn’t know why, his work will suffer while he tries to figure it out for himself. Anyway, there’s no special secret why we’re here. Wembling may toss the natives a few crumbs, but he’s operating mainly for himself, and when he loses time he loses money. Whenever you encounter dirty politics, wherever you encounter it, it was caused by someone losing money, or someone trying to make money. Remember that.”
Along with the night, silence descended on the construction site. At the landing field the Hiln stood in an oval of light, and there was an unbroken band of light in front of the sentry posts around the entire perimeter. The dormitories and offices were surrounded by another band of light, and revolving lights swept the site, briefly illuminating the beginning of a skeletal framework where the resort building would stand. In spite of the lavish lighting, Wembling did not dare to continue work at night. In the confused play of shadows, the natives that broke in might be injured; or they might contrive really serious damage.
As soon as darkness had settled in, Vorish made another inspection tour. His men were less tense than he’d expected. The bored aplomb of Wembling’s veterans seemed to have a tranquilizing effect on them. Vorish returned to the Hiln and worked on a report, and when the second echelon had been posted he made another inspection. He had resigned himself to a sleepless night, but his men seemed in good spirits, and the night seemed so peaceful that he thought to catch a couple of hours’ sleep before inspecting the third echelon. He went to bed, and he was sound asleep when the explosion went off.
The enormous blast was still echoing in the distant hills when Vorish reached the ship’s ramp. High-pitched buzzes sounded from several directions as jittery men discharged their weapons. A patrol working inside the perimeter had taken cover, and the men in sentry reserve had sprung to their feet and were jabbering nervously. Down on the construction site, workers were pouring from the dormitories, and Wembling’s ground conveyance spun its rollers and lurched away toward the landing field. Vorish waited resignedly.
Another explosion sounded, and then another. Smith was delivering a preliminary report when the conveyance arrived. Wembling, in his slippers and a flapping robe, scrambled out and ran toward the Hiln, his ever present guards close on his heels. Vorish went to the bottom of the ramp to meet him. The echoing boom of the explosions continued.
“The natives are using explosives!” Wembling gasped.
“It certainly sounds that way,” Vorish agreed.
“We’re being attacked!”
“Nonsense. None of the sentries has seen a thing.”
“Remember those poison thorns I told you about? What if they have some kind of weapon that shoots them into the construction site?”
“If they were shooting anything at all into the construction site, it would have landed by now,” Vorish said dryly. “Nothing has.”
Wembling stood silently for a moment, and the two of them listened to the booming explosions. They ranged the full arc of the surrounding forest, but obviously they came from widely varied distances. If there was a pattern, Vorish couldn’t detect it.
“I want the sentries reinforced,” Wembling said.
“That’d be silly. I’d be left without a reserve.”
“I’m relying on you to take charge of the situation,” Wembling proclaimed oracularly.
“I’ve already done so.”
Trailing his guards, Wembling shuffled back to his conveyance and was driven away. Smith had loped off into the night while they were talking, so Vorish returned to the Hiln’s control room to wait for his report. The explosions continued.