" Yes. "
Hal paused. "That's why, not like the rest, you've been sleeping lightly, and so you woke up the first moment you heard anything out of the ordinary. Now, you're just about to hear it. I'll leave you for a moment, and then I'll be back beside you when you hear it, to tell you what to do, and I'll stay beside you until everything's under control. Understood?" "Understood," said Harvey.
Hal got to his feet and moved swiftly and silently to Liu's hutment. He stepped inside to meet the inquiring gazes of Calas, Kady and the one Guild member who had stayed with Calas as a messenger. "All set," he said to Calas. "Now, when Kady passes you the signal you've got two things to do. One is shout what Kady told you to shout. The other is to take the power pistol from the Urk's holster, and use it to blow the throat out of Liu. Can you do that, or have you got some hesitations about shooting a corpse?" " I wouldn't shoot Iive people today - I hope, " said Calas. " I felt like killing Liu after what he'd ordered them to do to Artur. But I don't think maybe I'd kill, anymore, except someone like him, now I'm a Chantry member. It's not going to bother me, though, to blow the dead bastard's throat out. I suppose you want to hide the fact of how he was killed?" "That's right," said Hal. "If you hadn't wanted to be the one who used the power pistol, I'd have to, and I'd do the shout and the shot from here, before I go back to the soldiers. After you're done put the pistol into the Urk's hand."
"Right,"- said Calas. "Good," said Hal. He turned to Kady. "Come with me and stand just outside the door, so you can see me. I'll be waving soon after I get back to one particular soldier. When I do, you tell Calas, and run away from the hutments - fast. Orban, you come away now and get out of sight with the rest of the Guild members. "
"Orban was a slight man in his forties with very light-colored blond hair flat on his skull. He nodded.
Hal left the hutment, went back to the soldiers, and squatted down once more in front of Harvey. He looked about. All Guild members, as instructed earlier, were out of the line of sight of the hypnotized soldiers. "Whatever happens, " he said, looking back at Harvey, "it'll be up to you to lead all the rest of the men out of here and back to headquarters. You've got rank on everybody else, and the others'll follow you. All you have to do is take charge. I'll be right beside you all the time until you leave here, even though you won't remember that afterward, and the rest won't see or hear me when I talk to you."
He paused. Harvey watched him, listening with an attention that was so profound it was almost innocent. "Now, in a moment, what woke you all up is going to go on with more noise and trouble," Hal said. "You'll need to take charge of things at once, Order all the rest of them to stay put here while you go and investigate. Remind them you're the one in command, Corporal."
He watched Harvey's eyes closely on the last word, but they did not change. The ranks of groupman, force-leader, and team-leader, which Cletus Grahame had proposed in his massive work on tactics and strategy, had come into being as the jealously guarded property of the actual fighting troops. The older ranks of corporal, sergeant, warrant officer and lieutenant had been kept only for those in support positions. Some who bore the older ranks were ashamed of them, some secretly pleased by the special access to privileges that went along with them. Harvey, it seemed, was one of the latter.
Nonetheless, most noncommissioned officers in his position secretly yearned for the authority to directly order and command combat troops. What Hal was suggesting hypnotically to Harvey now would give him not only that, but the approval of his superiors back at headquarters, when he took control of a situation in which his officers were dead.
Some men in his position might have found the prospect either forbidding or unpleasant. Harvey, however, gave no sign that this was the case with him.
Hal stood up.
"Now," he said to all the soldiers, "lie down. Sleep." They all, including Harvey, obeyed. Hal turned to face the hutment that had been Liu's and the slim figure of Kady standing just outside the entrance flaps. He lifted his arm over his head and waved it back and forth, slowly, twice. He saw her arm go up to wave back and she turned to speak in through the flaps.
Turning back, she went off at a run toward one side of the hutments, where at the edge of the darkness, Onete stood with Cee. The girl had wrapped around herself another vine having a split-open pod, and the pod sagged down, heavy once more with what were probably more rocks of a size to fit the girl's closed fist. Her eyes were steady on the hutment in which were not only the dead Liu and Urk, but the still living Artur.
A shout, almost high-pitched enough to be called a scream, came from the structure, with the words Hal had directed Kady to pass on to Calas. They were followed almost immediately by the coughing roar of the power pistol, and almost as quickly after that, the figure of Calas slipped out through the flaps and headed off in the direction Kady and Orban had taken.
Hal clapped his hands together loudly. "Sit up!" he shouted. "All of You men! Listen! What's happening? What's going on in there?"
They were sitting up, most of them looking around, bewildered.
Hal leaned down swiftly and spoke in the ear of Harvey, who was also now sitting up, but looking toward Liu's hutment. "Now!" Hal said softly. "Now, you take control of them, or it'll he too late. Tell them to stay where they are. You'll look into it!" "Hold it! Stay put!" shouted Harvey, scrambling to his feet. "That's an order - from me! I'll find out what's happening."
A few of the soldiers who had already fumblingly started to rise, sat back down. Still groggy from the remainder of the drugs still in their bloodstream, but released from the deeper stages of hypnosis by the clapping of Hal's hands, they swore and muttered to each other, staring at the hutment-but they stayed put.
Harvey stumbled toward the hutment. His cross-legged position had evidently cut off the circulation of blood to his legs, and they were just now reawakening to normal flow. He was walking more normally by the time he reached the flaps of the hutment. "Corporal Magson, sir. May I come in?" he called, and waited. When after a moment, there was no answer, he pushed his way inside, closely followed by Hal.
Under the silent interior lights of the hutment, the bodies of the obviously dead Urk and Liu Hu Shen and the unconscious figure of Artur lay still. "They're all dead," said Hal quickly, standing behind the corporal. He spoke in a low voice, directly into Harvey's ear, as the fat man stopped, checked by the sight before him. "You can see what's happened. The prisoner must have been strong enough to break loose and start for the force-leader. Liu must have reached for his pistol, but since he'd been watching from his bed and the sidearm was in its holster on the chair beside the bed, he must have seen he couldn't get to it in time. So he shouted - we all heard him, just now - for the Urk to shoot. And the Urk must have - but not fast enough to save his own life. Look at that, his head's all crushed in. That big man must have been as strong as a giant! But the Urk did manage to kill him with that one shot." "Yes... " said Harvey, still staring, still under the influence of the hypnosis to the point where he heard Hal's words as if they were his own thoughts. "And when the Urk shot the big man," Hal went on in a soft, persuasive voice, "the charge went right through him and killed the force-leader, too. They're all dead." "Yes, that's it," said Harvey. "You'll really have to take charge now," said Hal. "They'll think a lot of you at headquarters for handling this properly. You'll want to bring the officers' bodies back for burial, of course, but you can have some of the men scrape a hole and roll the body of the big man in it, next to where they buried the child, after she died from the questioning. As Liu himself said just an hour ago - remember? Liu said that there was pretty surely no one else up here to find, or either the child or the man would have talked by this time. But he said, remember, they might as well make sure by working on the man until he died?" "Yes," said Harvey, "yes, I remember just how it was."