Patriots

4. The Funny Farm

The landscape of Dittersdorf Minor rolled by a thousand feet below the aircar. Compared to Major, the terrain was hillier and some of the vegetation could be called low trees.

The biggest difference was that Mark could see more than a fog-shrouded blur.

"I don't see why the port and all the settlement's on the big island," Yerby said. "Down there looks like pretty decent land, and you can see a hand in front of your face."

He had to shout to be heard over the persistent screech of the car's power plant. The turbine ran without stuttering on any liquid-hydrocarbon fuel, but it sounded like it was about to fly apart any moment.

"The Alliance won't allow settlement because of the fort," Mark said. "All Minor's a military reservation."

Bannock snorted.

Major, Dittersdorf's larger island (or small continent), was shaped like a broad crescent whose wings flowed backward in the press of a warm ocean current. Minor was a ball in the crescent's hollow, relatively clear of the rain and fog that constantly shrouded the bigger island.

The Easterns occupied Dittersdorf for strictly military purposes. After Alliance forces captured the planet, the Paris bureaucracy permitted construction of a civil spaceport to serve traffic to the Three Digits, but only three hundred miles away on the larger island.

Minor would have been a more comfortable site for the caravansary and the civilian settlement that had sprung up to service the port, but a bureaucrat always finds it easier to forbid than allow. From what Mark had seen in the Rainbow Tavern, the silly restrictions hadn't kept the settlers from enjoying themselves.

The car lifted slightly in an updraft. Mark saw their destination sprawled ahead of them.

The military base was a vast six-pointed star with turreted energy weapons at the angles and a spaceport in the paved central courtyard. The complex covered several acres on the surface, and Mark knew that several levels of tunnels extended through the bedrock beneath.

"Say, I didn't guess it was that big!" Bannock said as they swept down toward their destination. "I wonder how many soldiers they've got here?"

"It held six thousand when Alliance forces captured it from the Easterns in 2223," Mark said, quoting the figure he'd checked in a data chip before he went to sleep the night before. "I don't have any recent information on the garrison, though."

"Yerby Bannock calling Alliance fort," Yerby said, speaking into the microphone pickup in the cab roof. "We're just coming to visit you folks, so don't get your bowels in an uproar."

Mark wasn't sure the laser communicator actually worked. There was a two-hundred-foot communications tower at one point of the star, but he had no idea what format or frequency the fort used.

"Don't you think they might shoot us down?" he asked. He tried not to sound nervous.

"Piffle," Yerby said. "We don't look like an army of Easterns, do we? Besides, there's no war nowadays."

He throttled back the fans. The car dropped in a series of awkward slaloms as Yerby steered for the edge of the area marked to land three starships simultaneously. He handled the controls in a rough-and-ready fashion, giving the impression of adequacy but not skill.

But Mark knew the big frontiersman had never touched the car's controls before he climbed aboard this morning, and the chances were he'd never flown anything very similar. The fact that Yerby was adequate at things outside his previous experience was probably the key to his survival on the frontier.

Yerby's assumption that he could handle most anything he tried was likely to get him killed one day, though Mark really hoped that Yerby's refusal to believe the soldiers would shoot at unannounced intruders didn't turn out to be that fatal mistake.

As they zigzagged low to land, Mark noticed that native foliage covered most of the fort's outworks. For a moment he thought that was for camouflage, but some of the broad-leafed shrubs were growing out of the courtyard pavement. Their roots must be breaking up the structure below.

"Wonder where everybody is?" Yerby said. Mark only understood the words because he'd been wondering the same thing. Nearer to the ground, the fort's low interior walls reflected the vehicle's noise into a squadron of screaming aircars.

"There-" said Mark, pointing at what he thought was a display of flags in a line on the other side of the landing zone.

Yerby had seen the flutter also. He hopped the car off the pavement where it first touched and skidded down again near the line.

The clothesline. Twenty or thirty garments, many too small for an adult to wear, were drying in the wan sun. Some of the clothes were dresses.

Bannock shut down the aircar. "Hey, you!" shrieked a woman scarcely less shrill than the turbine. "What do you think you're doing, blowing dirt on my wash? Couldn't you find anyplace else in this bleeding place to land?"

She'd come out of an armored door nearby. Weeds rooted in pavement cracks grew around the panel. The door hadn't been closed in a long time, and maybe couldn't be closed at all. Close up, the walls' fourteen-foot height looked more impressive than it had from the air when compared to the surface the fort covered.

The woman was short, dirty, and probably even younger than Mark himself. She wore a faded Alliance military shirt and carried a sleeping infant in a cloth sling on her left side. Her feet and her legs below the shirttails were bare.

"Sorry, sister," Bannock said easily as he got out of the car. "I'll be careful when I leave. My friend and I are just trying to find the colonel."

"Colonel, that's a laugh!" the woman said. "If you're looking for Captain Easton, you won't find him in married quarters. He'd be in the next bay over, but the chances are he's out with his vegetables anyhow."

She indicated the adjacent segment of the star with her thumb. The woman's voice had dropped a couple octaves since she got a good look at the strangers. Yerby Bannock wasn't a conventionally handsome man, but power has its own attraction and nobody could doubt the big man's power.

"His vegetables?" Mark said in surprise.

"That's it," the woman said with a nod… and perhaps a degree of speculation about Mark as well. "Flowers too. Anything you want to know about growing stuff, the captain's the one to tell you. Anything else, you may as well ask the boy here-"

Her hand brushed just above the forehead of the sleeping infant. She didn't look down as she gestured.

"-for all the good you'll get of it. Go to the open door, then down one level, then left at the main corridor till you hit the first blue corridor. Along it and up the ladder to hatch Blue Forty-two if it's standing open, which it likely will be."

"Thank you kindly, sister," Yerby said, lifting his broad-brimmed hat as he bowed to the woman. He strode across the bay in the direction she'd indicated.

"But won't somebody mind?" Mark asked, speaking to either of the others.

"Mind what?" the woman asked. "But don't expect much of a welcome unless you've got tomato seeds. He was complaining his tomato seeds didn't arrive."

An elevator and a staircase of slotted steel plates stood on opposite sides of the anteroom within. There was no passage directly through the fortress on this level. One of the elevator doors was missing; the shaft was empty.

The frontiersman led the way down the stairs surefootedly. The only light came from the open hatch and that, by the time they'd turned at the second landing, wasn't enough for Mark to feel comfortable. The treads were slick with condensate and the air was increasingly musty. The fort's ventilation system didn't seem to work any better than the lights did.

"Has the place been abandoned, do you think?" Mark asked. He could see some light below them, coming through another open doorway. "Is the woman just a squatter?"

"There was a ship landed in the past week or so," Yerby said. He sounded a little puzzled too. "You saw the way the plants coming up through the cracks had been squished down? Of course I don't know exactly how fast things grow here, but a week's close enough for a guess."

Mark hadn't noticed the crushed vegetation. Well, Yerby Bannock probably couldn't give a connected account of interstellar expansion over the past one hundred fifty years. People had differing skills and abilities.

But right now, Mark felt lost and completely useless in comparison with a man who was perfectly comfortable in circumstances that were new to both of them.

Nearer the doorway they could hear voices. A dozen children aged ten or younger played a ballgame in the corridor. Two of the lights in the ceiling here worked; the nearest other patches of illumination were hundreds of yards down the corridor.

A girl kicked the ball toward Yerby and Mark by accident as they stepped into the corridor. Yerby caught it. The girl screamed in surprise. A boy darting toward the kick collided with Mark instead.

"Do any of you young heroes know where Captain Easton would be?" Yerby asked, bouncing the ball back to the child who'd kicked it. "Hatch Blue Forty-two, the lady upstairs said."

"That's my mommy!" cried a child of indeterminate sex. "I'll take you!"

The child ran off down the corridor, baggy trousers flapping. He/she must have been at least six years old. Mark frowned. Either his estimate of the woman's age was wrong, or-

Or perhaps the kid was wrong about who'd given directions to the strangers. That was a comforting thought, so Mark clung to it.

A boy behind them called, "What do you want to see old Cabbage for? Are you from Earth? Is he going to be court-martialed?"

"Come on!" squealed their guide. The child's silhouette vanished down a cross-corridor, otherwise invisible in the gloom. Yerby lengthened his stride, covering an enormous amount of ground without seeming to run, but Mark had to jog to keep up.

At least half the lights worked in the blue corridor. The floor was painted, though the center was worn to bare concrete and the margins were too dingy for anyone to be absolutely certain of the color. The child stopped fifty yards from the intersection, pointing at what really was a ladder-Mark had thought the word might mean a stairway, like "companion ladder" on a starship. The three of them stared up at the oval of daylight thirty feet above.

A man stepped through the hatch and began to climb down without looking behind him. He wore a gray military uniform with patched knees and an apron over it. Tools clinked together as he moved.

"That's Cabbage," the child whispered.

When it was obvious that Easton wasn't going to notice them, Yerby said cheerfully, "Good morning, Captain!"

"Oh my goodness!" Easton said. He flung himself backward off the ladder while he was still ten feet in the air.

Mark grabbed the gaping child and dived clear of what he guessed was going to be the impact zone. Yerby caught Easton in a two-hand grip around the pudgy waist. He swung the captain first upright, then to the ground as lightly as a circus act.

A trowel dropped from an apron pocket clanged to the floor just as Mark was starting to relax. The child giggled and ran back down the corridor the way they'd come.

"What on earth are you doing here?" Easton demanded. He peered at Yerby, then Mark. His eyes were still adapted to the daylight above. "Do I know you?"

"We're from Greenwood, Captain," Bannock said, shading the truth a little for the sake of simplicity. "We'd like you to station some troops with us to keep the peace. It needn't be many. Fifty or a hundred, that'd be a right plenty."

"Oh, I couldn't do that," Easton said. He minced down the corridor at a surprisingly quick pace.

Mark and Yerby fell into step on either side. Easton looked over one shoulder, then the other. His round, bushy-bearded face took on a hunted expression. "Lieutenant Hounslow handles all that sort of thing. Yes, you'll have to talk to him. Not me."

"And you're taking us to Lieutenant Hounslow, sir?" Mark said.

They'd reached the intersection. The ballgame was still going on down the main corridor to the right. Easton turned sharply left, as if by pretending Yerby didn't exist he could make the big man vanish. Bannock skipped out of the way, holding station. He was frowning.

"Oh, all right," Easton said. "He'll be in the Command Center, I suppose. He's always in the Command Center."

Several men wearing portions of uniforms lounged in the corridor ahead. The ceiling fixtures didn't work, but a series of light-strips connected by extension cords gave off a yellow-green glow sufficient for seeing clearly.

"Hey, it's the Old Man," one of the troops said without concern.

The four doors open to the left all served a single dormitory big enough to sleep at least a hundred. Mark looked in at each doorway. There were only twenty or thirty bunks scattered across the room. Men lay on a few of them. Rows of large boxes staggered against the back walls. Some had fallen over, spilling what looked like trash.

"G'morning, sir," a couple of the men in the corridor said to Easton. One of them even touched his forehead in an attempt at a salute.

Easton grimaced and bobbed his head. He was trying to pretend the troops didn't exist either. "I don't suppose you know anything about collards, do you?" he murmured to Yerby. "Mine are getting little black spots near the edge of the leaves, and I don't know if that's a-"

"Not a thing about collards," the frontiersman said. "What're you growing collards for anyhow? Something wrong with your rations?"

"All they provide us with is processed food, processed!" Easton said with the first animation he'd shown since his shout as he fell off the ladder. "Why, if they'd give me proper support in Paris, I could turn this whole base into a garden of healthy natural delights."

The next door past the barracks was open also. The smell staggered Mark. "Wow!" he said.

"Well, the sewer system seems to be blocked," Easton explained with some embarrassment. "And we're below ground, of course. So since the pump space was two-level and the pumps didn't work anyway, we've converted it to a, ah, well, a latrine."

The holes in the floor of the room had held a pair of centrifugal pumps eight feet in diameter. The equipment had been removed-Mark wondered how-and replaced with two-by-sixes raised a foot and a half above the holes so that users could sit with their families an adequate distance out in the air beyond.

"The right hole is for officers only," Easton said. He pulled the door shut. "Now, you know, this could be a valuable source of carbon and nitrates if properly composted, but I've had difficulties explaining this to the troops."

Who are the ones who'll be cleaning and transporting the valuable fertilizer, of course… "I can imagine you would have difficulties convincing your men, yes," Mark said.

He guessed that the garrison's answer to any problem was "Throw it downstairs." Mark didn't want to think about what the corridors on the fort's lower levels were like.

"Look, how many men do you have all told?" Yerby asked. The furrows of his frown had been getting deeper with every additional sign of neglect.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Easton said peevishly. He waved a hand to brush the question away. "That's all Hounslow's province."

The next two doors, both closed, were labeled COMMANDANT and DEPUTY COMMANDANT with letters cast into the dense plastic of the panel. Mark noticed that the bottom of the doors had been shaved off and the top of either panel gapped a finger's breadth at the side opposite the hinges. The fort had been settling in the generations since it was built. Cracks ran across flat surfaces and doorjambs twisted out of true.

Mark remembered the latrine. Also, sewer lines broke.

The next room was labeled COMMAND CENTER, by odd purple paint stenciled onto a sheet of plastic tacked to a replacement door of wood. Below that, in straggling script hand-lettered in green, Keep out!

Easton tried the handle. It was locked. "Oh, dear," he said. "Maybe we shouldn't. He really doesn't like to be-"

Bannock pushed the door open with his hip and shoulder. Pieces of flimsy latch flew into the room. The frontiersman boomed, "Hello there! Hounslow, is it? I'm Yerby Bannock, and we need some of your men on Greenwood."

The man who leaped up from behind the desk was tall, black-haired and cadaverously thin. His initial expression was outraged, but it turned to horror as soon as he heard Yerby's words.

"Oh, that won't be possible," Hounslow said. His gray uniform was threadbare but immaculately ordered, down to the neat HOUNSLOW on the tape over his left jacket pocket. "Why, I've just completed the duty rosters for the next-"

He gestured at the walls. They were covered with graph paper on which lines and names were drawn in at least six different colors of ink.

"-nineteen months. Can't possibly be done. I-you aren't from Paris, are you? Are you from the Inspector General's office?"

"No, we're from Greenwood," Mark said sharply. He'd heard Captain Easton scurry off the moment Yerby burst the door open. They were here with a simple question, and there didn't seem any reason they shouldn't have a simple answer.

"No" was simple enough and acceptable so far as Mark was concerned; but it couldn't be "no" from a lunatic.

"Certainly not for Greenwood," Hounslow said, nodding vigorously. "I don't even know where Greenwood is."

From the way he talked, Mark doubted Hounslow knew where his left foot was. The data terminal built into one end of the desk was cold and very possibly as dead as the fort's sewer system. The charts on the wall were hand-drawn. The same names occurred on them over and over again, but they were written in different colors.

"Look, we just need fifty or a hundred men," Yerby said in a cajoling tone. "It'll be a nice experience for them, getting-"

"Fifty or a hundred?" Hounslow repeated. "Why, I've only got forty-three troops total to carry out all the necessary duties here! Fifty or a hundred? Are you mad?"

Well, I'm certainly not very friendly, Mark thought. Aloud he said, "Just what duties are these, Lieutenant?"

"Why guards, charge of quarters, commandant and deputy commandant's drivers-"

"Where do you drive?" Yerby asked.

"It's beside the point whether we have vehicles or not!" Hounslow said. "Those positions have to be filled. This is a military base!"

Could've fooled me.

"Command post runners, guards for Heavy Weapons Stockpiles One, Two, and Three-we have over a thousand tanks and heavy artillery pieces here! KP-of course that's just distributing ration packs, but the position, the position, is sacrosanct. And only forty-three troops!"

"Why in heaven would you have so much weaponry here?" Mark asked. The idea of a basement full of tanks sounded as dotty as everything else to do with Dittersdorf Base.

Hounslow drew himself up stiffly. "Sir, we are a pre-positioning base of crucial importance to the security of the Alliance!" he said. Deflating somewhat, he added, "And of course it would have been awfully expensive to ship all that equipment back to Earth at the end of the Proxy Wars."

Yerby scratched his head. "This whole base and…" he muttered.

Mark bowed formally to the anguished lieutenant. "Thank you for your time, sir," he said. "Yerby, I think we should get back to the spaceport. We don't want Amy to worry about us." And we certainly aren't doing any good in this combination of a kindergarten and a nuthouse.