10.

The General held a final pre-operation briefing at the Castle of the Twin-headed Horse. It was the ruins of an old museum outside the city, destroyed during the war. Overgrown with ivy and grass, it was a wild, lonely place. City dwellers never visited it because of its proximity to a malarial swamp, and it had a reputation among the local population as a hideout for bandits and thieves, Maxim arrived on foot with Ordi; Green came on his motorcycle with Forester. The General and Memo-Hoofer were waiting for them in a drainage pipe that led directly into the swamp. The General was smoking, and Memo was frantically waving away the mosquitoes with a scented stick.

"Did you bring it?" he asked Forester.

"Of course." Forester removed a tube of insect repellent from his pocket.

Each person smeared himself, and the General opened the briefing.

Memo spread out a map and went over the entire operation again, even though everyone had already memorized it. Between 12:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M. the group would creep up to the barbed-wire barrier from four directions and set linear charges. Forester and Memo would work alone, coming from the north and west, respectively. The General and Ordi would come together from the east. Maxim and Green would come from the south. The charges would detonate simultaneously at precisely 1:00 A.M., and the General, Green, Memo, and Forester would rush through the breach in the barbed wire and hurl grenades at the guardhouse. As soon as firing from the guardhouse ceased or slowed down. Maxim and Ordi would run over to the tower with magnetic mines and lay them, after tossing two more grenades at the guardhouse to be sure it was knocked out. Then they would light the fuses, collect the wounded -- only the wounded! -- and head east through the woods toward a village. Shorty would be waiting for them there with a motorcycle. The seriously wounded would be loaded onto the motorcycle; those with minor wounds would escape on foot. Forester's cabin would be the reassembly point. They were to wait there not more than two hours. After that they must leave the usual way. Any questions? No? That was that.

The General threw away a butt, slipped his hand under his shirt, and drew out a vial of yellow tablets. "Attention!" he said. "The staff has decided on a minor change in our plan. The starting time has been advanced to twenty-two hundred."

"Massaraksh!" said Memo. "What the hell now?"

"Don't interrupt!" said the General. "At precisely twenty-two hundred the evening radiation strike begins. A few seconds before, each of us will take two tablets. The rest of the operation is the same, with one exception: Ordi and I will throw the grenades. Mac will have all the mines and will blow up the tower alone."

"How come?" said Forester as he studied the map. "It doesn't make sense: twenty-two hundred is radiation time. I'll be flat on my back and not even a jab with a bayonet could get me to my feet."

"Just a minute," said the General. "I'll repeat it again: at ten seconds beforebefore twenty-two hundred, everyone will take this painkiller. Do you understand. Forester? You will take it! So, by twenty-two hundred -- "

"I know those pills," said Forester. "Two minutes of relief and that's it. Then you're completely tied up in knots. We know, we've tried them."

"These are different," explained the General patiently. "They are effective up to five minutes. We'll have time to make a dash for the guardhouse and throw our grenades. Mac will take care of the rest."

Silence fell. They were thinking. Forester, who was a little slow on the uptake, scratched his head. The idea was sinking in slowly. He stopped scratching, looked around with an expression, of sudden insight, brightened, and slapped his knees. Forester had taken a lot of hard knocks in life but still didn't understand what it was all about. He wanted nothing more than to be left in peace and to return to his family. He had spent the entire war in a the trenches, where he feared his corporal more than the atomic weapons. He had grown very fond of Maxim and was deeply grateful to him for curing an old leg injury. Since then he firmly believed that nothing could happen to him as long as Maxim was present. Maxim had slept in his cellar all month, and every evening before retiring Forester would tell him the same story, but each time with a different ending. Maxim could not imagine Forester taking part in any bloodshed, although he had heard that he was a skillful and ruthless fighter.

"The new plan has the following advantages," said the General. "First of all, they aren't expecting us: the element of surprise. Second, the first plan was made a long time ago and there's the danger that the enemy is aware of it. This time we're going to strike first. It increases our chances of success."

Green kept nodding approvingly, and his face glowed with malicious delight. He was a man who enjoyed taking risks; he loved the unexpected. His past was very shady: he had been a thief and a swindler; he had spent time in prison, made a daring escape, tried to return to his underworld pals, but times had changed. They wouldn't tolerate a degen and wanted to turn him in, but he beat them off and escaped again. He hid in the countryside until the late Gel Ketshef had found him. Green was clever, a romantic, believed the earth to be flat and the sky solid. It was precisely because of his ignorance and wild imagination that he was the only person on the inhabited island to suspect that Maxim was not from the mountains, not a strange quirk of nature, but a visitor from an impossible place, maybe from beyond the heavenly firmament. He had seen mountaineers -- in all shapes and sizes. Green never mentioned his thoughts directly to Maxim, but dropped hints and treated him with a deference that bordered on bootlicking. "You're going to be the top man here," he would say. "And under you, I'll really show my stuff." How and where he planned to show his stuff was not at all clear, but one thing was certain: Green loved risky jobs and hated routine tasks. Maxim disliked his wild, primitive cruelty. He was an ape in barely domesticated form.

"I don't like this operation," said Memo morosely. "It's too risky. No preparation. No checking into anything. No, I don't like it."

Memo Gramenu, the Hoof of Death, was perpetually discontented and always appeared to be afraid of something. His past was kept secret because he had once held a very high position in the underground. He had fallen into the hands of the police and somehow survived. Crippled by torture, he was dragged out by his cellmates who had arranged an escape. Thereafter, in keeping with the rules of the underground, he was removed from his position, although he was unquestionably above suspicion. He was appointed Gel Ketshef's assistant. He had fought in attacks on towers, blown up patrol cars, pursued and shot the commander of a Legion brigade, and was known for his fanatic daring and excellent marksmanship.

On the eve of his appointment as leader of a group in some small town in the southwest. Gel's group was caught. Hoofer remained above suspicion and was appointed leader of the group, but he was haunted by the belief that his comrades were uneasy about him. Actually his fears weren't justified, although they very well could have been. People who were too lucky were not especially liked in the underground. He was a silent but carping type, well versed in the art of conspiracy and a stickler for the rules, even the most trivial ones. Nothing, he felt, was worthwhile discussing except matters related to the underground; all his energies were devoted to the group. He saw to it that it was fully supplied with weapons, food, money, and safe meeting places. Even a motorcycle. Although Maxim sensed his dislike for him, he didn't understand the reason for Memo's attitude and preferred not to question him about it. Memo wasn't the kind of person one could have a frank conversation with. Perhaps Memo disliked him because Maxim was the only one to sense his constant fear. The others would never have believed that morose Hoofer, one of the founders of the underground movement and a dedicated terrorist who treated staff representatives as his equals, could be afraid of anything.

"I can't understand the staff's reasoning," continued Memo, smearing another dose of repellent on his neck. "This isn't tie first time I've heard about the plan. The staff has wanted to try it a hundred times but always rejected it because it means almost certain death. While there's no radiation, we still have a chance to get away in case we fail, and can live to strike somewhere else. But with this plan, the very first failure means we'll all be killed. It seems very strange to me that the staff can't see such an obvious fact."

"You're not quite right about one thing, Hoofer," replied Ordi. "Now we have Mac. If anything goes wrong, he can pull us out and maybe even blow up the tower."

She smoked languidly, gazing into the distance at the swamp. Cool and calm, she was ready for anything. People were intimidated by her because she perceived them as more or less useful mechanisms of destruction. There was nothing shady or questionable about her past or present. She came from an educated family. Her father had died in the war; her mother was still employed as a teacher in Duck Village. Ordi, too, had worked as a teacher until she had been fired as a degen. She hid, tried to escape to Khonti, and finally met Gel, who was smuggling weapons. He turned her into a terrorist. Purely idealistic considerations had dictated her initial devotion to the cause: she fought for a just society where each individual would be free to think and do as he or she wished and was capable of doing.

Then, seven years ago, the police had tracked down Ordi and taken her child as hostage in an effort to force her to surrender her husband and herself. The underground staff would not permit her to do this because she knew too much. She had heard nothing more about her child and considered him dead, although deep down she didn't believe it. These last seven years she was driven primarily by hatred for the enemy. Her dream of a just society remained only a remote and faded ideal. Although she had loved him deeply, she accepted the loss of her husband with surprising serenity. Long before his arrest she had probably reconciled herself to the idea that she must not get attached to anything at all. Now, like Gel at his trial, she was a living corpse, but a very dangerous one.

"Mac is a greenhorn," said Memo. "How do we know he won't lose his head when he's alone? It's ridiculous to rely on this plan and reject an old reliable one just because we have this greenhorn. I said it once and I'll say it again: it's too risky."

"Drop it, Hoofer," said Green. "It's our work. Old plan, new plan -- what's the difference? They're all risky. What else can you expect? We can't do our job without taking some risk, and these pills reduce it. When we hit them at ten o'clock, those guys under the tower won't know what happened. At ten they're probably drinking whiskey and singing their lungs out. That's when we strike. Maybe they haven't even loaded their guns; they're too drunk. Yes, I like the plan. Right, Mac?"

"I feel the same way," said Forester. "If this plan is a surprise to me, imagine what it'll be for the legionnaires. Green is right: they won't know what hit them. Besides, those pills will give us an extra five minutes. And before you know it, Mac will have that tower knocked out and everything will be great. Oh, it damn well will be great!" he said suddenly, as if struck by a new idea. "And we'll be the first guys in the underground to topple a tower. Just think how long it will take them to repair it! We'll live like human beings for at least a month without attacks from that son-of-a-bitch tower."

"Hoofer, I'm afraid you misunderstood me," said the General. "Nothing has really changed in this plan. We're just launching a surprise attack, with additional help from Ordi. And our withdrawal will vary only slightly from the usual procedure."

"If you're worried that Mac won't be able to drag us all out of there," said Ordi, "don't forget, he'll have to get only one of us, at most two. He's strong enough to do it."

"Yes," agreed the General. "That's true."

The General was in love with Ordi. Only Maxim was aware of his feelings, but he realized that it was an old and hopeless love. It had begun when Gel was still alive, but now it seemed even more hopeless. He was not a real general. Before the war he had j been a worker on an assembly line, then was admitted to a school for junior officers, fought in the infantry, and finished the war as a captain. He knew Captain Chachu well and had old scores to settle with him -- there had been some sort of trouble right after the war. Anyway, he had been pursuing Chachu for a long time without success. Although he was attached to underground headquarters, he frequently fought in operations and was a good soldier and a competent commander. He enjoyed working in the underground but could scarcely imagine what the future would be like after victory. Actually, he really didn't believe in victory. A born soldier, he adjusted easily to any and all conditions and never looked beyond the next ten to twenty days. His ideas had been picked up haphazardly, a little here and a little there; from one-armed Vepr, from Ketshef, from headquarters. But the ideas hammered into him at the school for junior officers remained foremost in his consciousness. Expounding his theories, he would display a strange mixture of opinions: the power of the wealthy must be overthrown (this from Vepr, who Maxim assumed was some sort of socialist or communist); engineers and technicians should be our country's leaders (this from Ketshef); cities should be leveled and we should live in communion with nature (from some bucolist at headquarters). All this could be accomplished by absolute obedience to one's superiors and with considerably less discussion of abstract subjects.

Maxim had clashed with him twice. Why destroy towers, sacrificing courageous comrades, time, money, and weapons, contended Maxim, when the towers would be restored in ten days anyway? Everything would continue the same as before, except that the inhabitants of neighboring villages would be convinced that the degens were inhuman devils. The General could not explain clearly to Maxim why they engaged in these diversions against the towers. Either he was concealing something, or he himself did not understand why they were necessary. He would repeat the same phrases on each occasion: orders are not to be discussed; every attack on a tower was a strike against the enemy; people must not be prevented from fighting back or hatred would corrode them and they would have nothing to live for,

"We must find the Center!" Maxim would insist. "We must strike at the Center with all our forces at once! What kind of brains do they have at headquarters if they can't understand such a simple thing?"

"Headquarters knows what it's doing," the General would thunder. "In our situation, discipline comes first! We don't need any anarchists, thank you. Mac, everything has its time. You'll get your Center, too, if you live long enough." Still, the General respected Maxim and eagerly sought his help when radiation strikes caught him in Forester's cellar.

"I'm still against it," said Memo stubbornly. "Suppose they pin us down with their fire? Suppose we need six minutes rather than five to do the job? It's an insane plan."

"We'll be using linear charges for the first time," explained the General. "Using our old method of tearing through the barbed wire, the fate of the operation will be decided in three or four minutes. If we catch them by surprise, we'll have one or even two minutes to spare."

"Two minutes is a long time," said Forester. "In two minutes I could strangle them all with my bare hands. If I could get my hands on them."

"Yeah, if we could get our hands on them." Green grimaced. "Right, Mac?"

"Mac, don't you want to say anything?" asked the General.

"I already have. The new plan is better than the old one, but still poor. Let me do the job myself. Take the risk."

"We won't go into that." The General was irritated. "And that ends the matter. Do you have anything practical to add?"

"No," replied Maxim, regretting that he had reopened the discussion.

"Where did you get these new pills?" Memo asked suddenly.

"They are the same as the old ones," explained the General, "but Mac managed to make them a little more effective."

"Ah, yes, Mac..." Memo's disparaging tone made everyone feel uneasy. It conveyed the notion that here was a greenhorn, not really one of them, an alien who might even be setting them up.

"Yes, Mac," said the General sharply. "Enough talk. The order is from headquarters. Obey it, Hoofer!"

"I am." Memo shrugged his shoulders. "I'm opposed to it, but I'm obeying it. What else can I do?"

Maxim looked at them sadly. A completely heterogeneous group. Under normal circumstances it would probably never occur to them to associate with each other. Ex-farmer, ex-criminal, ex-teacher. What they were about to undertake seemed so senseless; in a few hours most of them would be dead and nothing in their world would have changed. Those who survived would have, at best, a brief respite from those excruciating pains. But they would be wounded or exhausted from the ordeal. They would be pursued like dogs and would have to hide out in stifling holes. And the cycle would begin again. To act in concert with them was folly, but to abandon them would be unconscionable. He had to choose the former. Maybe that was the way you had to work here if you wanted to accomplish anything. You would have to endure folly, senseless bloodshed, even treachery. What miserable, stupid, evil people. But what could one expect from such a miserable, stupid, evil world? Folly springs from weakness, and weakness from ignorance, from ignorance of the correct path. It's impossible that the correct one can't be found. "I've tried one already, and it was wrong. It's evident that the one I'm about to take is wrong, too. Who knows, I might choose the wrong one again and again and find myself at a dead end. To whom am I trying to justify my actions? And why should I? I like these people and I can help them. For the present, that's all I need to know."

"We'll split up now," said the General. "Hoofer, you go with Forester. Mac with Green. Ordi with me. At twenty-one hundred we meet at the boundary marker. Don't take the roads; go through the woods. Each of you is responsible for your partner, so stick together. Let's go now. Memo and Green first." He brushed the butts onto a sheet of paper, rolled it up, and put it in his pocket.

Forester rubbed his knees. "My bones ache. It's going to rain. That means a fine night for us -- good and dark."