“Um-m, what are you doing to call them forth?”
“An all-phones announcement.”
Evagail laughed-anew. “I can imagine that scene, love-ling! A poor, terrified family, whose idea of a wilderness trip is a picnic in Gallows Wood. Suddenly their town is occupied by hairy, skinclad savages—the same terrible people who burned the Moon Garnet camp and bushwhacked three punitive expeditions in succession and don’t pay taxes or send their children to school or support the Arulian war or do anything civilized—but were ‘supposed to be safe, cozy hundreds of kilometers to the west and never a match for regular troops on open ground—suddenly, here they are! They have taken Dom-kirk! They whoop and wave their tomahawks in the very streets! What can our families do but hide in their… apartment, is that the word?… the apartment, with furniture piled across the door? They can’t even phone anywhere, the phone is dead, they can’t call for help, can’t learn what’s become of Uncle Enry. Until the thing chimes. Hope leaps in Father’s breast. Surely the Imperials, or the Nordyke militia, or somebody has come to the rescue! With shaking hand, he turns the instruments on In the screen he sees—who’d you assign? Wolf, I’ll wager. He sees a long-haired stone-jawed wild man, who barks in an alien dialect: ‘Come out of hiding. We mean to demolish your city.’ ”
Evagail clicked her tongue. “Did you learn nothing about civilization while you were there; Karlsarm?” she finished.
“I was too busy learning something about its machines,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to be done and depart. What would you do here?”
“Let a more soothing image make reassuring noises for a while. Best a woman; may as well be me.” Karlsarm’s eyes widened before his head nodded agreement. “Meanwhile,” Evagail continued, you find the mayor. Have him issue the actual order to evacuate.” She looked down at her dress, grimaced, pulled it off and threw it in a corner with a violent motion. “Can’t stand that rag another heartbeat. Synthetic… dead. Which way is the telephone central?”
Karlsarm told her. Obviously she had already discovered how to use grayshifts and slideways. She departed, striding like a leontine, and he dispatched men on a search for city officialdom.
That didn’t take long. Apparently the mayor had been trying to find the enemy leader. Toms led him and another in at the point of a captured blaster. The weapon was held so carelessly that Karlsarm took it and pitched it out the window. But then, Toms was from the Trollspike region—as could be told from his breech-clout and painted skin—and had probably never seen a gun before he enlisted.
Karlsarm dismissed him and stood behind the desk, arms folded, against the dark broken pane, letting the prisoners assess him while he studied them. One looked almost comical, short, pot-bellied, red-faced and popeyed, as if the doom of his city were a personal insult. The fellow with him was more interesting, tall, yellow-haired, sharp-featured, neither his hastily donned clothes nor his bearing nor even his looks typical of any place on Freehold that Karlsarm had heard of.
“Who are you?” the little man sputtered. “What’s the meaning of this? Do you realize what you have done?”
“I expect he does,” said his companion dryly. “Permit introductions. The mayor, Honorable Rikard Uriason; myself, John Ridenour, from Terra.”
An Imperialist! Karlsarm must fight to keep face impassive and muscles relaxed. He tried to match Ridenour’s bow. “Welcome, sirs. May I ask why you, distinguished outworlder, are here?”
“I was in Domkirk to interview, ah, your people,” Ridenour said. “In the hope of getting an understanding, with the aim of eventual reconciliation. As a house guest of Mayor Uriason, I felt perhaps I could assist him—and you—to make terms.”
“Well, maybe.” Karlsarm didn’t bother to sound skeptical. The Empire wasn’t going to like what the out-backers intended. He turned to Uriason. “I need your help quite urgently, Mayor. This city will be destroyed. Please tell everyone to move out immediately.”
Uriason staggered. Ridenour saved him from falling. His cheeks went gray beneath a puce webwork. “What?” he strangled. “No. You are insane. Insane, I tell you. You cannot. Impossible.”
“Can and will, Mayor. We hold your arsenal, your missile emplacement—nuclear weapons, which some of us know how to touch off. At most, we have only a few hours till a large force arrives from another town or an Imperial garrison. Maybe less time than that, if word got out. We want to be gone before then; and so must your folk; and so must the city.”
Uriason collapsed in a lounger and gasped for air. Ridenour seemed equally appalled, but controlled it better. “For your own sakes, don’t,” the Terran said in a voice that wavered. “I know a good bit of human history. I know what sort of revenge is provoked by wanton destruction.”
“Not wanton,” Karlsarm answered. “I’m quite sorry to lose the cathedral. A work of, art. And museums, libraries, laboratories—But we haven’t time for selective demolition.” He drove sympathy out of his body and said like one of the machines he hated: “Nor do we have the foolishness to let this place continue as a base for military operations against us and civilian operations against our land. Whatever happens, it goes up before daybreak. Do you or do you not want the people spared? If you do, get busy and talk to them!”
Evacuation took longer than he had expected. Obedience was swift enough after Uriason’s announcement. Citizens moved like cattle, streamed down the streets and out onto the airport expanse, where they milled and muttered, wept and whimpered under the bleak light of waning setting Selene. (With less luminescence to oppose, more stars had appeared, the stars of Empire, but one looked and understood how the gulf gaped between here and them, and shuddered in the pre-dawn wind.) Nevertheless people got in each other’s way, didn’t grasp the commands of their herders, shuffled, fainted, stalled the procession while they tried to find their kin. Besides, Karlsarm had forgotten there would be a hospital, with some patients who must be carried out and provided for in an outlying latifundium.
But, one by one, the aircraft filled with humans, and ran fifty kilometers upwind, and deposited their cargoes, and returned for more: until at last, when the first eastern paleness began to strengthen, Domkirk stood empty of everything save the wind.
Now the Upwoods army boarded and was flown west. Most of their pilots were city men, knives near to throats. Karisarm and his few technicians saw the last shuttling vehicle off. It would return for them after they were through. (He was not unaware of the incongruity; skin-clad woodsrunners with dirks at their belts, proposing to sunder the atom!) Meanwhile it held Evagail, Wolf and Noach—his cadre—together with Uriason and Ridenour, who were helping control the crowds.
The mayor seemed to have crumpled after the pressure was off him. “You can’t do this,” he kept mumbling. “You can’t do this.” He was led up the gangway into the belly of the flyer.
Ridenour paused, a shadow in the door., and looked down. Was his glance quizzical? “I must admit to puzzle ment about your method,” he said. “How will you explode the town without exploding yourselves? I gather your followers have only the sketchiest notion of gadgetry. It isn’t simple to jury-rig a timing device.”
“No,” Karlsarm said, “but it’s simple to launch a missile at any angle you choose.” He waved to unseen Evagail. “We’ll join you shortly.”
The bus took off and dwindled among the last stars. Karlsarm directed his crew in making preparations, then returned outside to watch the first part of the spectacle. Beyond the squat turret at his back, the airfield stretched barren gray to the ruined barracks. How hideous were the works of the Machine People!