Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (21 page)

“Absolutely,” Bill said hollowly.

Somehow, Bill kept up his end of the conversation through the rest of the meal, but his heart wasn't in it. His mind wasn't in it, either, but fortunately he'd made enough of an impression on Eunice that she didn't expect brilliance. But Bill was trying to solve a problem.

On the one hand, he'd promised Eunice that he would work for her, and a promise was a promise. But on the other hand, if he could finish cleaning the barn tomorrow morning; he could sneak next door in the afternoon. But on the other hand, it would take weeks to finish the piggery. And on the last hand, he didn't have that many hands.

The problem still bothered him that night when he went to sleep, and in the morning when he got up. He shaved and put on clean overalls in case the solution to his problem suddenly manifested itself. But even puzzling over it all morning — aided by the friendly presence of the porcuswine — didn't help. Nothing happened right up until the moment he heard the sonic boom.

It was a sound that surely didn't fit in this quiet, old-fashioned valley, where the most difficult concern should have been how to get on line with the amiable redhead. Bill came out of the piggery to see what the boom might token, and he reached the yard just in time to hear the foom that followed it.

Snow? Couldn't be; it was the wrong time of year for it on this part of Eyerack. But something was definitely falling out of the sky, something that was coming down much too slowly to be rain or hail or shrapnel or any of the normal weather. And although it was coming down all over the valley, it was coming from five or six specific spots.

Propaganda bombs, Bill realized as he picked one of the leaflets out of the air and read it. YOUR EMPEROR LOVES YOU!, it began. They almost all began that way.

YOUR EMPEROR LOVES YOU!

“Yes, I do, I really do!” — The Emperor

From the very beginning of our glorious Empire, farmers have represented the very best that the Empire has to offer — strong, devoted, productive citizens who love their Emperor as much as he loves them. Every Emperor has always stayed in close touch with the soil and with those who work it; every Emperor has always owned farmers, and has taken good care of them.

Without farmers, a large part of our food supply would be disrupted, and several of the Official Imperial Food Groups would be very hard to find. Farmers are very important to the health of the people of the Empire, and that is another reason for your Emperor's special love for all farmers.

Farmers are especially important for armies, because armies eat a lot of food, and produce hardly any. Your Emperor loves armies, so that is another reason for him to love farmers even more.

Sadly, your Emperor's love is not without limit. As much as he loves you, he needs to bring you back into his loving embrace. And in order to do that, he must defeat the foolishly misled armies that, in their obstinate ignorance, resist his love. And the food that you, in dutiful obedience to your traditional role, are providing to the armed forces of Eyerack, is a dagger in the heart of your Emperor. The longer the armed forces of Eyerack resist, the greater destruction your Emperor must reluctantly rain on you and your cities.

Therefore, despite your Emperor's never-ending love for you, there really are limits. So reluctantly and unhappily his Imperial Troopers are about to destroy your homes and farms, in order to preserve you from the even more awful doom into which your leaders would plunge you.

You have twenty minutes to get out.

And remember,

YOUR EMPEROR LOVES YOU!

“Run! Run away!” Bill ran toward the house, screaming. “Get out of here!”

Eunice had already read a leaflet, grabbed up a few mementos, and was hurrying out to warn Bill. Together they ran to the road and joined the growing crowd.

Back up the road, out of the valley, they ran. “Run away! Run away!”

They reached Melissa Nafka's house. “Run away!” She was inside, and she hadn't seen the leaflets, but she heard the yelling. Bill saw her flame-colored hair at an upstairs window; it vanished again almost immediately, and moments later the entire woman burst out the front door.

Bill paused in his running to take in the spectacle. Her body fulfilled every promise the house dress had made; that he could see in the seconds before she got her robe wrapped up tightly, covering the leather straps and patent leather hip boots that were all she wore. Behind her came three men, one too old to go into the army, the other two just too young, perhaps a father and his two almost-grown sons, all of them pulling up their pants and swinging shirts gingerly over the welts on their backs.

Bill sighed. Yet another lost glorious opportunity. Perhaps he could return after the Imperial warships had finished obliterating the small community, return and find this woman of his dreams. But for the moment, he had more pressing business.

“Let's get the bowb out of here!”

Bill could still hear the bombs exploding when he saw the old stone barn. It had been hit early on, so he figured that maybe it might be safe, if just for a little while. It didn't look like it was really worth bombing twice. He sprinted across the fields to its dilapidated shelter.

Surprisingly, the door was locked. It was so unlikely that Bill tried it again, then rammed it with his shoulder. Neither the lock nor the door was opening and his shoulder hurt.

There was no other choice. Bill, after intense thought, solved the problem. He went around the corner and into the barn through the huge hole in the wall.

In fact, most of the building was gone.

Some of the roof had held together enough to collapse into a kind of lean-to in the far corner, where there were still more or less intact walls, but the only wall that looked whole was the one with the door. Except for the corner where part of it had fallen, the roof was entirely missing. Whatever had been inside, Bill judged from the smell and texture, had either been blown to smithereens or made a hasty departure. If anything was still alive in here, it was in that corner lean-to. And it was probably scared and dangerous.

That was the only shelter available.

And Bill wanted it.

It is said that most animals are only truly dangerous when they are cornered, or protecting their young. In an absolute sense, this is largely true. In a relative sense, however, very few animals can be considered dangerous at all under any circumstances if they stand between an irritated Imperial Trooper and his improving his chance of survival. And Bill was decidedly irritated by now.

One of the first bombs had hit Melissa Nafka's house. She probably wouldn't be coming back at all. One of the first cars through the crowd had picked her up, so Bill couldn't follow her in the mass escape.

He had seen where another bomb had hit the local liquor store. Now there was really no reason for Bill to stick around.

On the up side, the precision attack had been a first-rate operation. There had been only a few casualties (one of them the older man who had run out of the Nafka place, who tripped on his pants and sprained his knee) while the entire area was rendered incapable of supporting human life. Bill had to admire a job well done.

But he would rather admire it in retrospect, and in order to do that he needed some cover.

He strode across the courtyard that had once been a barn, and pounded on what had once been a roof while shouting loudly to announce his presence.

Nothing came out.

That was a good sign.

Unless whatever was inside was too scared to come out.

Bill braced himself for whatever might be waiting and stepped inside the chunk of fallen roof.

It was dark under there, but not so dark that he couldn't see the many pairs of eyes reflecting the dim light that came in from the sides. They were all together in the darkest corner, and there were enough of them that, whatever they were, they would give Bill more than a little trouble if they decided to attack. He edged away from the opening, to give the glowing eyes a clear shot at the exit, and to give his own eyes a chance to get used to the dark.

The eyes in the corner shifted around; staying as far from him as possible.

Then he heard the sound. It was almost like human whispering; Bill could nearly make out words in it, things that might have been “uniform” and “hiding” and “quiet.”

And at last Bill adapted to the dark, before he needed to attack or to defend himself. He could see what faced him.

“Hi, guys,” he said.

“Who are you?” one of the men asked.

“Bill.” He stepped forward and put out his hand.

“Who are you working for?”

“Eunice Augeas.” Bill's hand started to droop.

“Is Eunice on the draft board?”

Before Bill could answer — which was just as well, since he had no idea what they were talking about — another voice said, “No. At least, she didn't used to be.”

“I don't think there's a draft board any more,” Bill said. “Maybe there's some draft kindling. The whole valley's been blown up pretty good. But what are you talking about?”

“Don't you read the papers?” the first man asked.

Bill considered this, then shook his head. “No.”

“Did you hear about the coup?”

“Yup. Actually, I'm on the run from the junta.”

“That's okay. So are they. I guess you didn't hear about the other coup?”

Bill blinked. “The other coup?”

“Yeah,” said another voice from the back of the barn. “Two guys named Sam and Sid, a couple of days ago. They rescued President Grotsky, rallied the crowds, got the army on their side, and took back control of the government. Heck of a speech they made, standing on that tank.”

Bill blinked again. It was the only possible response.

“Anyway, once Grotsky got back in, he announced that the worsening situation gave him no choice — he had to declare martial law. And suspend the constitution. But at least democracy has been restored.”

“That's nice,” Bill managed to say. “But what about Sam and Sid? What happened to them?”

“Oh, they got shunted off into some dead-end jobs with the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Some gratitude, huh?”

“Gee,” was all Bill could think of to say. He sat down with a thud among the men in the lean-to.

“So, Bill, what are you doing here? Are you hiding from the draft, too?”

Bill grunted a monosyllabic answer and squinted up at the sky. “Maybe. But I guess you could say I'm more concerned with the rain.”

“Rain? It isn't raining.”

“Well, things are falling out of the sky, and I'd rather they didn't fall on me.”

Now, suddenly, the men gathered around Bill and shook his hand and gripped his shoulder and made other gestures of manly camaraderie. “You're one of us, then, aren't you?”

Bill had been in other situations, once or twice, where a lot of other men were touching him and asking if he was one of them, usually in bars, and the men were usually wrong, but he didn't want to jump to any incorrect conclusions here, since he didn't really feel like having to fight off unwanted advances or leave this ramshackle shelter. So he asked, “One of what?”

“Why, draft dodgers, of course!”

Bill was pretty sure that someone — Betty, for a likely candidate — would have mentioned it before now if there had been conscription in Eyerack. “Is that something new?”

“It's another of President Grotsky's reforms,” the apparent leader of the group explained. “Since democracy has been saved, it's important that we all participate fully in our basic freedoms, so everyone between eighteen and thirty-five is being rounded up and trained in unquestioning obedience. It's the only way to preserve our liberties.”

“Sure,” Bill agreed. “It makes perfect sense.”

“And although we support our leaders in every way, we have certain subtle philosophical differences with them on the matter of our being blown into very large numbers of very small pieces.”

“I can understand that completely.”

Now everyone was able to relax, knowing that no one there would turn them in to the authorities, and that the authorities could not possibly come to get them through the intense bombardment that was turning the surrounding fields of corn and strawberries and kohlrabi into undifferentiated brown muck.

The relatively steady, and relatively distant, thunder of high explosives was oddly reassuring, and they let it become background music to their idle conversation.

Then a man appeared in the entry to the lean-to. Lit only from behind, he seemed huge. Even Bill found himself intimidated into silence by this apparition.

“Hello!” the stranger said.

After a pause, waiting for someone else to speak, Bill asked, “How did you get here through the bombing?”

“Professional courtesy.”

Bill leaped to his feet and ran, bowling the stranger over and making for the ruined walls.

He got only as far as the middle of the barn before the circle of armed men blocked his way. They raised their blasters and clicked off the safeties.

Bill stopped.

The draft dodgers, who had followed him, also stopped, although not before knocking Bill into the mud and manure.

The stranger picked himself up and brushed off the worst of the filth. He pulled a small plastic card out of his shirt pocket and read: “Greetings!” The dodgers moaned. “Your democratically elected president, and loyal elements of the general staff, welcome you to the great adventure of freedom and democracy. In order to preserve human liberties to the fullest, you are hereby inducted into the armed forces of the planet of Eyerack.” He put the card away. “Any questions?”

From the back of the crowd, someone put up a hand. One of the guards shot a neat hole through it.

“Bandage that wound. Any other questions?”

There weren't any.

Basic training at Camp Hynline was practically a vacation for Bill. Even though this time it was in an underground shopping mall turned into a boot camp, he'd been through it all before, as a trainee and as an instructor. He could do it in his sleep.

In fact, he did do most of it in his sleep. The officers were especially impressed with his ability to march and follow orders without ever waking up. It was clear he knew what he was doing.