Part 2

"Me? Foolish?" Piacentelli demanded from the elevator. He walked up, clammed shut in his blue safety-suit, ready to hit bug-dirt. Under one arm he carried a package sheathed in opaque plastic. Behind him, in the gray safety-suit of an enlisted trooper, was a man Hartford recognized as Corporal Bond, machine-gunner from Pia's platoon. "Lieutenant Gabriel Piacentelli reporting with one man, Sir and Ma'am," he said, saluting his wife and Hartford.

"At ease, Weenie-head," Hartford said. "With you and Bond on picket amidst the sunflowers, I won't sleep a wink all night." He turned to the corporal. "Did you sure-enough volunteer for this duty?" he asked.

"Yes, sir!" Bond said. "I voluntarily assumed the duty of absorbing a fifth of Lt. Piacentelli's Class-VI Scotch. The Lieutenant was kind enough to reciprocate by offering me this tour."

"He gave you Scotch?" Hartford turned to Piacentelli. "Gabe, for a jug of Scotch I'd have gone on picket with you myself. What's that you're taking outside with you? Lunch?"

"A microscope," Piacentelli said. "I'm doing a little research for Paula." His wife nodded. A gnotobiotics technician, responsible for maintaining the bacteriological security of the Barracks, she had business with microscopes.

"Want to give me the word on this romp of yours?" Hartford asked.

"Standard picket, Lee," Piacentelli said. "I'll learn a little Kansan, take care of Paula's project and tell you all about it when we get back."

* * * * *

"Let's see your weapons." Hartford inspected Bond's Dardick-rifle and Piacentelli's Dardick-pistol. Both weapons were loaded, clean and wrapped up for their trip through the Wet Gut in plastic sleeves. The trucks and heavy weapons stayed outside on bug-dirt. The lighter weapons and all ammunition came back inside the Barracks with the troopers who carried them. The weapons were detail-stripped on each re-entry, irradiated with u-v and fit with fresh sleeves. As had been discovered with the first axenic animals, in the 1930's, keeping a mammal germ-free is a formidable task. When that mammal is a human being and a soldier the job is double-tough.

"Check out a jeep," Hartford said. "Report each half-hour. Don't shoot any Stinkers ... sorry, I mean Indigenous Hominids. Try not to hit a camelopard with the jeep; we're low on replacement parts. In fact, be careful. Okay, Pia?"

"Done and done, Exalted One."

Hartford dropped his voice. "I'd feel easier in my mind if I knew what's so important as to require your desertion of our mutual womb tonight, Pia."

"Language study, you might say," Piacentelli replied.

"_Ha! So desa ka?_" Hartford replied. "That's so much bug-dirt, and you know it."

"_Ha!_" Piacentelli said. "See you at dawn. Take care of my wife, buddy."

"Aren't you going to kiss her good night?" Hartford asked.

Pia grinned through his clammed-shut helmet and clomped to the elevator with Bond. They were en route to the Hot Gut and the Wet Gut, the twisting hallway from the sterile First Regiment Barracks to the living night of Kansas.

Hartford turned.

Paula Piacentelli wore the short skirt, knee-hose and short-sleeved blouse of Pioneer green that was the Class B uniform for females inside the Barracks. She looked, Hartford thought, remarkably delectable; and he again congratulated his friend on his luck in getting her. He returned his attention to the Status Board, which Paula was conning. Two red lights flickered on above the ground-floor diagram of the Barracks, indicating that the two men of the picket had entered the Hot Gut. A moment later these lights blinked off, and two lighted over the diagram of the Wet Gut. Piacentelli and Bond were swimming now, towing their weapons in ballooning plastic sleeves. Sterile, on their way out into a filthy world, these two men were the outpost that would protect through the night their hundreds of brothers and sisters sleeping safe _in utero_. Freud, thou shouldst have lived this hour! Hartford mused.

* * * * *

Piacentelli turned the ignition key of the jeep he'd chosen. With the starting cough of the engine, one of the rank of TV screens over the Status Board lighted. The camera eye was looking out the rear-view mirror of the jeep, and picked up Pia's helmeted head and the shoulder of his companion. "We're off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz!" Piacentelli sang.

His wife spoke into the microphone before her. "Don't do anything foolish, Lieutenant," she said. "And remember, all transmissions are recorded and are audited, at random, by the Base Commander."

"Transmission received, receiver contrite," Piacentelli reported back. "Okay, Paula-Darling. From now on till Bond and I swim home, we'll be as military as GI soap." He flicked the TV monitor around to look out the windshield and started the jeep down the road toward Stinkerville. The duty of the picket was to chug around outside at random, hitting all the cross-roads, settlements and high spots of the countryside near the Barracks; to interview late-riding Indigenous Hominids and inquire their business being out; to conduct such searches of Stinker homes and hideaways as might seem useful to the occupying Axenites; and to remain at all times in contact with the officers on duty at the Status Board.

As the picket got underway, Hartford went down to the Terrible Third's area to check quickly through the two-man apartments. Knock on the door; "As you were, Troopers." A brisk inspection of two safety-suits, gaping beside their owners' bunks like firemen's boot-sheathed pants. The men were quiet. Guard-duty meant that any socializing with Service Company troopers was impossible for a night, and militated against any intake of alcoholic beverage. It was a bore, especially after three dry and womanless weeks in the field. Hartford visited his Platoon Sergeant last: "Sergeant Felix, could you have our bunch standing on bug-dirt ten minutes after I blew the whistle? Very well, then. Good night, Felix."

Having demonstrated to his troopers that he was suffering the same strictures as they, Hartford went back to the O.G. cubicle in the Board Room. He checked his own safety-suit, his plastic-packaged Dardick-pistol, said good night to Paula Piacentelli and lay down to begin his first night's sleep outside a safety-suit in three weeks.

But sleep didn't come easily.

There was the murmur from the Board Room; Piacentelli's half-hourly reports. "Nothing to report, Paula. I'm at Road Junction (41-17). No I.H. activity. No excitement at all."

"Continue random patrol, Lieutenant."

"Yes, Dear. I'm going to run down to Kansannamura (42-19) for my next call-in."

"Carry on, Lieutenant."

Pia was in the best possible hands with Paula on duty, Hartford mused. The Status Board was really a woman's job. The girls of the Service Companies were the house-keepers of the Barracks, the guardians of the Regimental lares and penates. Paula, for example, had as her primary duty gnotobiotic control: the maintenance of the whole germ-free system of the Barracks, from the Hot-&-Wet Guts to safety-suit inspection and the upkeep of the Decontamination Vehicles. Behind the women on Board-duty, however, was always at least one male, combat-trained Officer of the Guard, ready (once awakened and briefed by the female help) to take armed men into the field.

But meanwhile, Hartford wanted to sleep.

* * * * *

Half an hour passed, and at its end Pia made his report: "Picket reporting, Paula. I'm going into the village. Corporal Bond will remain with the jeep, and will keep the transmitter open till I get back. Okay?"

"Be careful, Lieutenant," Paula Piacentelli said, combining affection with military formality.

Hartford, deciding that sleep was impossible, got up and cold-showered. Dressing in fresh Class B's, he walked out to join Paula at the Status Board. The TV screen showed Bond, the sheathed Dardick-rifle slung over his shoulder, pacing back and forth in front of the jeep, glancing from time to time toward the walls of Kansannamura, white in the light of the skyful of stars. He was nervous, evidently aware of the fact that Kansas was largely unexplored, her potential for midnight mayhem untested. Bond spoke across his shoulder. "The lieutenant has been gone for a quarter hour, Ma'am," he said. "Do you want me to go in and ask him to come out?"

"Wait another quarter-hour, Corporal," Paula said. She explained to Hartford, "What he's got to do may take a little time." They watched the screen. Bond climbed back into the jeep, where he sat with his rifle between his knees, sweeping his attention around him, at the village, at the road behind, at the sunflower-fields, where the blossoms were bleached white and the leaves enameled black by starlight.

With Paula's agreement, Hartford pressed the microphone-switch to talk with Bond. "Have you tried to tap Piacentelli on his suit-receiver, Corporal?"

"Yes, sir," Bond said. "First thing. No answer."

"Turn your bitcher full up, then," Hartford said. "Tell Lieutenant Piacentelli that the O.G. wants him out on the road within five minutes."

"Done and done, sir." Bond tongued the bitcher's controls to Full Volume and repeated the message. Echoes bounced back from the walls of Stinkerville and lost themselves in the tangle of sunflowers.

No one answered.

The village seemed as much asleep as it had been before Bond's bellow. The Kansans were never hasty to volunteer response to Axenites; they knew that troopers meant trouble.

"Piacentelli is busy at something," Hartford said, as much to reassure himself as Pia's wife. "I think I'll go out and have a look." He spoke to Bond: "Get out of the jeep, but stay close to it. Report any haps immediately. Watch for lights, listen for small-arms fire."

"Done and done, sir."

Hartford phoned Felix, his platoon sergeant. "Report to the Board Room to sub for me," he said. "Wake the Platoon Guide and tell him to stand ready to fall the Guard out, but not to wake anyone else yet. This is probably a nothing, Felix; Lt. Piacentelli just went for a walk in Stinkerville."

* * * * *

The Command Light, top in the tier of all the hierarchy of red-yellow-green-white Status-Board indicators, flashed alive.

"A nothing?" Nasty Nef's voice demanded. "What sort of talk is that, Lieutenant? If I've been properly interpreting the past five minutes' transmissions, we've got an Axenite officer stranded in the middle of a Stinker village. This, Mister, is not a nothing. Call out the Guard. Prepare to join me in a Stinkerville shakedown. Those Gooks got to learn they can't play fast-and-easy with Axenite troopers."

"Done and done, sir!" Hartford snapped. He toggled the phone to get Felix back. "Felix, fall the boys out beside the Syphon. We've got the Old Man hitting bug-dirt with us, so look sharp."

"The colonel's going out with us?" Felix asked.

"Yes. There must be more to this situation than meets the company-grade eye," Hartford said. "Diaper-up our darlings and stand by in the Hot Gut, Felix."

"Done and done!"

Twenty seconds later a figure in Santa Claus red came clashing into the room. Hartford, half into his blue safety-suit, came to a clumsy attention. The newcomer, his helmet clammed shut all ready for contamination, bellowed, "Get with it, Mister!"

"Yes, sir." Hartford fit himself into the suit, a sort of cockpit, a congeries of valves, gauges, counters and vetters. In a moment he'd sealed himself in the sterile suit, checked his air-filters and air reserve. "The Guard is assembled in the Hot Gut, sir, ready to take the field."

"Dam' well better be," Nef said. "Lead off, Mister." He turned to Paula Piacentelli. "Send a Decontamination Vehicle after us, Lieutenant. No telling what those Stinker devils have cooked up with Piacentelli." Back to Hartford: "You're in command of the Guard, I'll observe and offer suggestions."

"Tain-HUT!" Platoon Sergeant Felix saluted the scarlet-clad colonel and the blue-clad lieutenant as they stepped from the elevator into the electric atmosphere of the Hot Gut. The Guard snapped to, their plastic-packaged Dardick-rifles at order arms.

"Take 'em out, Felix," Hartford said. "Two personnel carriers, a .50-caliber m.g.-mounted jeep fore and aft. You and the colonel take the rear jeep; I'll lead. Have the men unbag their weapons the instant we're outside. Any questions?"

"No, sir."

"Move out," Hartford said.

IV

The squads peeled off and double-timed down the Hot Gut. Man by man they dipped into the Wet Gut for their swim outside. They'd been drilled for speed in exiting. If the Regiment were needed outside, the Syphon could become a literal bottle-neck. As the last squad splashed into the antiseptic solution, Hartford turned to Colonel Nef. "Sir, I have a question," he said.

"Hurry it up, Mister."

"Isn't this a bit extreme, sir? We're going out to take one man out of a primitive village where we're not even sure he's in trouble. And we're carrying enough firepower to blast into an armed city."

"I don't trust the Gooks," the colonel said. "Their bucolic way of life may be a fraud, designed to lull us into complacency. Tonight we may discover that they're plotting the overthrow of the Garrison, using weapons and tactics they've kept secret. I hope such is the case, Lieutenant. It would give us adequate cause to wipe the Stinkers off Kansas and make this as clean a world as Titan."

"Sir...."

"Move, Mister," Nef said. "Piacentelli has been in Stinkerville for fifty minutes. Let's get him out."

The four trucks roared down the plateau toward the Indigenous Hominid hamlet at its foot. When the first Axenite Pioneers landed on the planet, bacteria-free as all men in space had to be, they'd set up camp near the spot where First Regiment Barracks now stood. They saw the fields of sunflowers, grown for food and cloth, and heard the natives call the nearest village Kansannamura. From that time on, this world was Kansas.

There was no moonlight--Kansas has no moon--but the headlamps of the four vehicles were wasted against the bright ribbon of road, lighted as it was by the sheet of stars that melted together in a metallic ceiling over the night. The men sat with their rifles between their knees, the plastic sleeves stripped off. Each of these Dardick-rifles could fire a solid stream of death. Each round of ammunition was fitted with a matrix that served as chamber, cartridge and the first fraction-of-an-inch of barrel. A magazine of forty such rounds could be hosed through the rifle in half a second. The troopers sped downhill, through sunflower fields black and silver in the light of the stars.

* * * * *

The personnel carriers and the jeeps scuffed to a halt by the village gate, the men scattering like shrapnel, according to the book. Colonel Nef spoke to Hartford on the command-band. "Move in, Lieutenant. Bring out Piacentelli. Any Stinker resistance is to be treated as open rebellion."

"Yes, sir." Hartford spoke to his men: "First squad, lead scout, forward to the gate."

The scout, his plastic safety-suit and the glass of his helmet glinting highlights, scuttled to the gate. He kicked the gate open--Piacentelli had evidently left it ajar--and entered, rifle-first. "First squad, follow me in column. Open to Line-of-Skirmishers in the square. Second squad, follow in the same manner. Third squad; maintain your interval and stand ready."

Hartford ran, pistol in hand, through the open gate. It was like charging some Roman ruin unpeopled for three centuries, like a field exercise with boulders marking obstacles to be won. There was no sign of natives. Their shop-boards hung bearing the picture-script the Kansans used, quiet as the marbles in a cemetery. Hartford directed first squad in a sweep through the alleys, searching for Piacentelli. Second squad clattered through the gate behind them, took up a skirmish line, and moved in to cover the square as first squad disappeared into the doorways and alleys of Stinkerville.

The village, except for its beasts, might have been deserted. These animals, camelopards used for riding and to carry burdens, woke and gazed serenely down at the interrupters of their vegetable dreams, blinking their liquid half-shuttered eyes. Boots clattered on cobblestones. The houses were unlighted. "Throw on your i-r," Hartford ordered. As they moved into the dark, narrow ways, the men beamed infra-red light from the projectors on their safety-suits, the bounced-back, invisible light being transduced to black-and-green chiaroscuro by passage through the stereatronic goggles dropped inside their helmets.

"Turn the Stinkers out, Mister," Nef command-banded.

"Into the houses," Hartford signaled. Ahead, a boot slammed wood, and hinges burst. To the restless night sounds of the camelopards in their stalls, the click of military boots on brick, and the rustle of rifles against safety-suits was added the whispering of families rousing from their beds. Hand in hand from father to mother to elder brother, down the scale to the youngest, the Kansans stumbled out into their little courtyards. "_Ano hito wa dare desu ka?" "Abunai yo!" "Shikata ga nai...._"

* * * * *

"Any sign of Piacentelli yet?" Nef demanded.

"Not yet, sir," Hartford signalled.

"Feed a candle into every building, Lieutenant. We'll get these Gooks in the open and interrogate till we find our man."

"Done and done, sir," Hartford said, stepping out of the way of a little girl fleeing toward the village square with an even littler girl strapped to a pack-board on her back. He passed on the order. "Fire in ten seconds, nine, eight ... now!" Each man of first squad tossed a Lake Erie Lightning Universal Gas Candle through the window nearest him. A little over a second later a dozen grenades spit out a cloud of smoke with a hiss like a bursting fire-hose, and the outer air was filled with an eye-stinging gas. The Indigenous Hominids spilled out of their homes in all directions now; coughing, choking, children rubbing the smoke particles into their half-wakened eyes. Two camelopards, blinded like their masters, blundered into the square, tears streaming from their reproachful eyes, twelve feet above the pavement. Second squad's men danced clear of the beasts and hallooed them out the gate.

Somewhere back in an alley a first-squad trooper tapped his trigger, jetting steel against overhanging roof-tiles. "Nail that shot, Mister!" Nef demanded.

Hartford heard the squad leader: "It's Lieutenant Piacentelli, sir. He's here."

"Bring him out, man; bring him out!" Nef's excited voice triggered a new string of rifle bursts.

Hartford tongued his bitcher full-volume: "Cease fire, you idiots! Piacentelli, head for the square."

"Stop it, for God's sake, stop it!" Piacentelli shouted, his unamplified voice coming from a smoke-filled alley. Hartford plunged into the dark smoke--a tear-gas grenade had set afire some of the sun-flower-paper room dividers, and kindled with them a row of wooden houses--and shouted for Piacentelli. A blabrigar, as blind in the smoke as the men, blundered against Hartford's helmet. "_Yuke! Yuke!_" the bird screamed, grabbing hold of the transceiver-antenna that horned up from the helmet. Hartford grabbed the blabrigar and tossed it up above the melee. He heard it flying in circles, searching for its Stinker owners, chanting the last words they'd said to it: "_Yuke! Yuke! Yuke!_"--"Go!"

* * * * *

Everything was burning. Even through the safety-suit Hartford suffered from the heat. He retracted his i-r goggles, useless in all this smoke. Nef called. "I'm coming in, Mister." Hartford acknowledged. Great. One more blind man wandering in the smoke was what he needed.

He tongued his bitcher loud and shouted; "Gabe! Come this way. Gabe! Gabe!" The heat was intolerable. He positive-pressured his suit, ballooning the fabric away from his skin. How hot, he wondered, would the rounds packed into the butt of his Dardick-pistol have to get before they exploded?

As though in answer, a snap of gunfire sounded from the fog ahead. Some meat-head had spooked. There were more shots as other troopers fired at their fantasies. "Cease fire, damn it!" Nef shouted over the command-circuit. "If anyone was hurt by you idiots, I'll court-martial every man with smoke in his gun barrel." Hartford hurried on. Ahead of him in the alley he heard Colonel Nef's voice, uncharacteristically soft. "Hartford, join me. I've found Piacentelli." Ahead in the smoke was a pinkness: the scarlet-suited commander kneeling above a body on the bricks.

Here in the open of planetary air, available to all the microscopic beasts of Kansas, Piacentelli was wearing only Class B's; his sneakers, shorts and tee-shirt. The center of the shirt sopped blood from the bullet-hole that funneled into Axenite Lieutenant Piacentelli's chest.

Nef stood. "The Decontamination Vehicle should be standing by," he said. "Get Piacentelli outside. We may be able to save him." He sounded unhopeful.

Hartford draped his friend's body across his shoulder. The smoke was bad, but he'd memorized his course through it. The air sucked in through his filter was clean, but hot. His helmet steamed opaque. As he stumbled out, blind, but guided by the colonel's voice, two men came forward to take Piacentelli over to the Decontamination Vehicle parked by the village gate. In the cooler air Hartford's helmet cleared. A girl gnotobiotician from the Decontamination Squad pressed the pickup of her helmet's "ears" against Piacentelli's bloody chest.

She looked up. "He's dead, sir," she said.

Nef's voice boomed from his bitcher. "Burn the Stinker village!" he shouted. "These Gooks will pay for Piacentelli's death with their homes."

Hartford felt imminent danger of vomiting, bad business in a safety-suit. He fought it as he looked around. The column of smoke rising from the buildings already fired was sweeping around, carried by the morning wind that poured off the plateau. Everything within the walls of the rammed-earth houses would be incinerated. Kansannamura was destroyed. "Regroup by the vehicles," Hartford spoke to his troopers. He walked back to his jeep, the village flaming behind him.

The Decontamination Squad checked Hartford's safety-suit, and found it sound despite its roasting. Piacentelli they cocooned in plastic: he was contaminated and dangerous. As the five trucks rolled back toward the Barracks, they met families of Indigenous Hominids, smoke-stained, who retreated back into the sunflower-fields as the troopers drew near them. The Stinkers seemed to have salvaged little from the flames beyond an occasional blabrigar, perched on an old man's shoulder, or now and then a camelopard, fitted with a saddle and carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle of clothing and cooking-pots.

V

Hartford had to see Piacentelli's body placed in the Barracks morgue, where a necropsy would be performed by a safety-suited gnotobiotician. It was seldom that an Axenite was contaminated. Rarer yet was the death of a trooper who'd been exposed to bacteria. Information held in Pia's body might someday save lives.

Hartford, directing the sealing-off of the morgue from the rest of the Barracks, was not comforted by these reflections. He unsuited, shaved and showered, and put on fresh Class B's to finish what remained of this O.G. tour. On his way back up to the Board Room he had to pass the morgue again. Colonel Nef, in the midst of a cluster of lesser ranks, was there. On a wheeled cart, covered by a sheet, was a second body.

Hartford stopped. "What happened, sir?" he demanded. "Who is it?"

Nef raised the corner of the sheet with a hand that seemed infinitely weary. The body was Paula Piacentelli. "Another accident," the Colonel grunted.