Then Fikes suggested that detention was not inevitable. He offered Reggie an incentive for cooperation, an unspecified place in the new administration. The sort of position, Colonel Fikes said, that Reggie deserved.
Flattering. But Reggie was not naïve. The world was piss or be pissed on, and right now Reggie Forrester, sad to say, was not in a position to piss on anyone. His status had been on a dizzying downward slide since the start of the war, and now he would have to wiggle hard to avoid the hot yellow stream that gravity was pulling his way. To escape it, he’d have to make himself not just useful but indispensable to the new regime.
Which was fraught with its own dangers. He wondered if the colonel had interviewed Ben yet, and what incentives he might have offered Ben.
That evening, Reggie slipped through backyards to Paula’s house. He was shocked to see how few people had evaded the Army’s tightening net. Those who’d made it to the meeting perched on Paula’s sofas and chairs and shared their news. The Army had rounded up the network of spotters guarding Lewisville, including Ben’s own brother, and replaced them with their own people. The colonel had posted new rules at the county courthouse. Electricity would be down until the town was reconnected to the national grid. Drinking water would be distributed between 8 and 11 a.m. at the corner of Main and Third, no other uses of water except as authorized for agricultural production. A blanket curfew would be enforced between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m.; no civilian was allowed on the streets during those hours for any reason at all. No assembly of more than eight civilians except under Army auspices. Reggie counted: including himself, this meeting numbered nine.
“The right to assembly,” Jim Hanover fumed, “is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution!” Jim had been a lawyer.
Flora Bucholter was distraught. “Just how long will it take to hook us up to the grid? How do they think they’ll be able to protect the lines? What’s the point of taking away our electricity?”
“That salvage doesn’t belong to the Army,” said Dave Sutton, whom Ben often used to float ideas. “It belongs to the people who risked their lives bringing it back—who’ve fought to keep the town safe!”
That predictably set off the ever-volatile Otis Redinger. “Dave’s right! We’ve worked hard just to survive! We’ve been listening to other folks on the shortwave, we know what it’s like in the rest of the country. It’s totally lawless. Now these people show up and say, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help you—’” (that drew a chuckle) “—but they’ve brought their lawlessness with them. All they’ve done is destroy or steal everything we’ve fought to preserve. This is an illegal military occupation by an illegal government. We’ve managed to protect our community from aliens. Now we have to protect it from dangerous human beings as well!”
Several people applauded this impassioned speech, and Otis’s face grew red from embarrassment. But then Todd Myklebust, always a wiseass, said, “Ah, sedition. Is that right enshrined in the Constitution, too?”
For a moment the meeting lapsed into nervous silence. Otis and Todd had spoken out loud what the others had only come up to the edge of saying. Then everyone started talking at once.
Up to this point in the discussion Ben had stayed silent. That was his style: remain above the fray, the calm militia commander. Now he put down the footrest of Paula’s plush blue recliner and rocked into an upright position. The uproar stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Everyone turned to look at him.
“George,” Ben said, “you’ve been doing some reconnaissance. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve learned?”
Although no one would guess it to look at him, unshaven, shambling George Brainerd had once been an Army Ranger. His skills had immeasurably aided both Lewisville and Ben’s wartime ascent to the top of the town’s chicken-coop ladder. He was not, however, one of Ben’s acolytes. (Although George had not gotten up to offer that easy chair to the mayor, either! Reggie was squeezed between Dave and Flora on the sectional sofa.)
Now Ben’s question made George look unhappy. “Their communications equipment isn’t much better than ours. I didn’t see anything fancier than off-the-shelf shortwave. No cell phones and they haven’t set up any dishes, so my guess is that the military hasn’t launched new satellites yet. No indication of aircraft, not even a recon balloon. They may patch the lines out of Lewisville for landline service, but that’ll take time.”
“Until then,” Ben said, “we take away their radios and they’re completely isolated.”
“Sure,” said George, looking unhappier. “If we take away all of them.”
“Then we eliminate them,” Otis said.
“You mean kill them?” Flora said. “Otis, you are a bloodthirsty son-of-a-bitch.”
Otis shifted uncomfortably. “Well, probably they’d surrender long before that.”
“What do we do with them when they do surrender?” George asked. “Or if they don’t? What will the Army do when an entire battalion disappears after going to look for a downed eetee ship?”
“We could get the enemy to do the job for us,” said Otis. “We could send them into a trap. Then no one would know we were involved.”
“So,” George said, “you want to set up your fellow human beings so aliens can kill them for you?”
Silence fell on the room. Apparently even Otis felt that sounded nasty.
Then George said, “What do you think, Mr. Mayor?”
That was, Reggie knew, an appeal for his help. Reggie was flattered. And usually persuading people to a course of action was something he liked to do, something he was good at. But tonight the power of his words was far less important than their real-world consequences. When one boat was going to sink, and you didn’t know whether it would be Ben’s or the Army’s, you needed to make very certain you had a place on both boats.
He sighed audibly and rubbed his forehead. “I agree with George that you have to think about the long term. Unless we have weapons that provide a decisive advantage over the Army—that would allow us to keep the Army and everyone else out of Lewisville for the foreseeable future—all an attempt at secession will accomplish is make our situation worse.”
So far, so good. No one could accuse him either of pushing for Otis’s little revolt, or of siding with the evil invading Army. People were turning from Ben to Reggie. Ben looked sour but not yet angry.
“You want to hand them a petition?” Jim said. “We, the undersigned, protest your wholesale abuses of civil rights, the U.S. Constitution, and common decency?”
“Oh, sure,” Reggie said. “As a first step. But we need something that will make it worthwhile for them to negotiate—in earnest—instead of rounding us all up. I’ve been wondering, why is the Army spending all its resources to gather up not just every last piece of eetee salvage, but nearly every person who’s worked with it? Does anyone here believe this disease nonsense? I think instead they’re looking for something, but they don’t yet know what it is.”
George had leaned forward and was listening intently. Flora said, “And you think that if we could figure out what that thing was, if we could find it first, it would give us an advantage in negotiations?”