Trojan Horse Laugh

VII

“Drop it!” Joe Morgan snapped. He held the rifle leveled. The two men in ragged field uniform, swaying with weariness dropped their weapons, a carbine and a submachine gun. They were dirty and unshaven and one of them had a bandage, dark-stained with blued across his left hand.

“Move over to the side!” he ordered. The men obeyed meekly. Alice went down the steps and picked up the weapons, staying well out of the line of fire.

“Who are you?” Joe demanded.

The older of the two said, deep weariness in his voice: “Baker Company, Five oh eight battalion, Eighty-third.” Then he added, with a note of ironic humor, “I think maybe Harry and me are the whole company.”

“You’ve given up, eh? You’re looking for a hole to hide in.”

The younger one took two heavy steps toward the porch. He said: “Put down that pop-gun, junior, and we’ll talk this over. I don’t like what you said.”

“Shut up, Harry,” the older one said. “Mister, yesterday we picked us a nice spot and kept our heads down until they come along with a high-speed motor convoy. They were too close together. We killed the driver in the lead truck and piled up the convoy. We sprayed ’em real nice and got away up the hill. As long as we got a few rounds we’re not through?”

Joe grinned. “Then welcome to the Morgan Irregulars. Come on in. We’ve got food and hot water and some bandages for that hand. How close do you guess they are?”

“Fifteen miles, maybe. But they’re not headed this way. They’re using the main road as a supply line, I think.”

The men came up on the porch. Joe stood his rifle beside the door. The older man said: “What makes you think we won’t bust you one and take your food and take over your nest, mister?”

“Because,” Joe said, “you have a hunch that maybe I can help you be a little more effective. You don’t know what I got up my sleeve. And besides, you’re not the first guys to get here, you know. If you’d made a move toward that rifle, you would have caught a surprise from the brush out there.” He turned and said, “O.K., guys. These two will do.”

By twos and threes about fifteen well-armed men sauntered out of the brush.

America in turmoil. Not a man but who, at some time in his life, had speculated on how the country would behave under the iron heel of an invader. Had the softness of life in this big lush country destroyed the hidden focus of resistance? Where was the heart of the country?

Gaunt and bearded men, with nothing left but fury, rushed the armored columns with home-made bombs of rags and gasoline. The jacketed bullets smashed them down hut always a few got dose enough to throw the bomb and die. And black greasy smoke wound up into the fall sky and the blackened hull of a vehicle was towed off onto the shoulder, sentinel of death, monument to valor.

In the night an absurdly young man wormed on his belly behind the hangars, killed the guard with a knife, crawled into the cockpit of the jet fighter, ripped off into the pink dawn. They climbed after him. He went around in a screaming arc, leveled out twenty feet above the ground, and smashed himself and the alien ship into whining fragments — but he took with him six of the enormous bombers.

A destroyer, the last of the fuel almost gone, cut all lights, drifted like a wraith through the night, drifted with the tide into a vast harbor where the enormous supplies of invasion were being unloaded under the floodlights.

Erupting with all weapons, with the boiling wake of torpedoes, the can fought and smashed its way down the line of freighters, drifting at last, a flaming ruin into one last supply ship, blanketing it in the suicide flame.

In the Sangre de Cristo Mountaintains three full divisions hide, and at night the patrols in strength smash invader communications, blow up ammunition dumps. When the bombers sail out at dawn to punish such insolence, nothing can be seen but the raw real rock of the mountains.

The Invader, taunted and stung from every side, lashes in fury, destroying without cause, forsaking all plans of gentle administration to rule by flame and by the firing squad and with machine guns aimed down the descried streets of the silent towns.

The common denominator is fury, and the pain of loss. But thirty-five millions, the city dwellers, are yet hostage to the new weapon of emotional resonance, and as the long days go by, the empty and hopeless days, once again within them builds up the cretin joy, the mechanical gaiety, the vacuous death-dance, threatening to explode once more into crazy violence.

Thirty-five millions, tied, one to another, by a life-rhythm so carefully adjusted as to be the final indignity meted out to the human spirit.

They have not left their cities and neither the attacks of the Invader nor the destructive joy of the adjusted has served to destroy those cities.

The Invader, wise in the ways of his own weapon, evacuates his troops from the afflicted cities during the week before the emotional peak is reached.

Joe Morgan, grown to new stature during this time of trial, has carefully husbanded his strength, has made no move so flagrant as to cause a punitive column to be sent to the small take. He has sent his men on recruiting missions and his force has grown to over two hundred.

Seventy miles away is a small city where, before the invasion, there was a splendid medical center. A spy returns and reports to Joseph Morgan that the doctors from the medical center have been impressed into the medical service of the Invader, that they work in the original medical center, now filled with Invader troops.

Joe Morgan remembers a feature story he once wrote — on a certain Dr. Horace Montclair.

Five days before the adjusted were to reach their emotional peak, their five-day orgy, Joe Morgan, leading a picked group of ten men, crouched in the back of a big truck while another of his men, dressed in a captured uniform, drove the truck up to the gate of the medical center.

The gate guard sauntered over to the cab window, reached a hand up for the transportation pass. The entrenching tool smashed the guard’s throat and he dropped without a sound. The truck rolled up to the main building and Joe led the ten men inside.

In the stone corridor the weapons made a sound like a massive hammering on thick metal.

But four men backed with Joe out the door to the waiting truth. One of them was Dr. Montclair.

The dead guard had been found. Whistles shrilled near the gate. Joe, at the wheel, raced the truck motor, smashed the slowly closing gates, rode down the men who stood in his path.

He took the road west out of town, as planned, pursuit in swifter vehicles shrilling behind them.

At the appointed place he stopped the truck. The five of them ran awkwardly across the field, dropped into a shallow ditch. The pursuit screamed to a stop by the abandoned truck. A patrol spread out, advanced slowly across the field.

At the proper moment Joe shouted. The rest of his command, the full two hundred, opened up with a curtain of fire. Two men of the patrol turned, tried to race back, and they, too, were smashed down by the aimed fire.

In the black night they circled the town, headed back across country to the quiet lake. The return trip took three days.

The windows of the cabin were carefully sealed. Joe Morgan sat at the table facing Dr. Montclair. They were alone, except for Alice who sat back in the shadows. She, like Joe Morgan, had acquired a new strength, a new resolution, born both of anger and despair and the shared weight of command.

“It was daring, my friend,” the doctor said. He was a small man with too large a head, too frail a body, looking oddly like an aging, clever child.

“It was something we had to do,” Joe said, “or go nuts sitting here waiting for company.”

“I didn’t care for you, Mr. Morgan, when you interviewed me. I thought you lacked integrity of any sort.”

Joe grinned, “And now I’ve got some?”

“Maybe that wryness which is an essential part of you is what all men need in these times. But we are getting too philosophical, my friend. What can I do for you?”

“Doc, you’ve studied this Trojan Horse of theirs, where the people defeat themselves. What’s the answer?”

“Just like that? The answer?” Dr. Montclair snapped his fingers. “Out of the air? Answers have to be tested. I have suppositions only.”

“There isn’t much time to set up a lab to do the testing. Just pick your best supposition and we’ll work on it.”

Dr. Montclair rubbed his sharp chin, stared at the table top. “Obviously one of the basic qualities of the disease, and we will call it that, is the progressive infectiousness of it. The peaks are intensified by the proximity of the other victims. Thus one possible answer is isolation. But the infected must be thinned out to such an extent that they do not, in turn, infect their neighbors, eh?”

“Oh, sure. Thirty-something million people, so we isolate them.”

“Do not be sarcastic, Mr. Morgan. Another thought is whether, if a man were drugged heavily enough, it would delay his cycle so that his peak would come at a different time, thus destroying the synchronization which appears to be the cause of resonance.”

“Look, Doc, those suppositions are interesting, but we have a little war on our hands. I’ve been wondering how we can turn their Trojan Horse against them. A horse on them, you might say.”

“They have withdrawn from the focal points of infection, my boy. They are unwilling to risk infection of their troops.”

“How many men would you say they have inside our borders?”

“I can make a guess through having seen consolidated medical reports. Forty divisions, I believe. With service troops you could estimate the total strength at one and a quarter millions.”

Joe Morgan whistled softly.

He said: “In two days the peak of hysteria hits again. The cities will be like... like something never seen before on earth. How does the invader plan to handle it after all resistance has stopped?”

Montclair spread his hands, shrugged his shoulders. “Do they care? Left alone the thirty-something millions will at least tear themselves apart. The human mind cannot stand that constant pattern. Suicide, laughing murder. They will cease to be a problem and then the empty cities can be occupied safely.”

“There’s nothing we can do in time for the next big binge?”

“Nothing,” Montclair said sadly.

“Then we’ve got roughly thirty-two days to dream up a plan and put it in operation. What’ve we got? A few hundred men, ample supplies, a hidden base and some expert technical knowledge. We’re not too bad off, Doc. Not too bad off at all.”