Colonel Zornig coddled the Pani less than General Raddle had done. He brought them quickly to heel. Pani was a rich planet. The men could not allow their exploration to be hampered by the resentful people-animals. The Pani were treacherous, they were schemers. They had no weapons but glass knives, but these were scalpel sharp. They could kill a man with them if they got close enough, and they had the habit of drifting through the guards as though they were fog and coming uncomfortably close.
The military problem was simple: to set up a pale and maintain it; to infiltrate and not be infiltrated; to prevent trouble at its beginning.
But the Pani seemed not to understand. For that reason it was suspected that they understood too well. They were into everything. And so simple-minded and pathetic did they seem when they were reprimanded.
Colonel Zornig instituted flogging to show the Pani that he was serious about them keeping their places. He didn't know if it did any good. The Pani grinned when they were whipped, and they grinned about it.
“Have you people no sense of pain?” he questioned.
“Man colonel, we sure don't like the stuff,” Ieska said.
“But you grin when you're whipped.”
“The happy grin is a convention of your own sort, I believe. With us the grin doesn't mean the same thing.”
“What does it mean then?” Zornig demanded.
“It mean, ‘there will come a day, men things, there will come a day.’ ”
So the colonel knew he could still expect trouble from the Pani.
He didn't wait. He went to meet the trouble. He found out the Pani secret societies and broke them up. He seized the leaders. He transported two hundred of them to an island that they had never inhabited. They hadn't the technique to cross back from it. He seized the knives of all but certain farmers who must have them to cut their cane. He marked these with numbers; they must be turned in every evening or the registered owner's life was forfeit; and it was death for any Pani to have an unmarked knife. He drew a circuit of three hundred yards around the garrison, and it was death for any Pani to be found within that circuit without being sent for and accompanied by a guard. He leveled one out of every four of the Pani's dwellings and destroyed one quarter of their gathered food.
“It is not punishment for what you have done,” he told them through Ieska. “It is punishment for what you had better not do. At your first false move we will destroy one quarter of you creatures as we have destroyed one quarter of your dwellings and food. At the second false move we will destroy all of you.”
The Pani lived very quietly then, but they seemed to smolder. They were funny folks. You only thought you knew them.
“What are these pictures of?” Zornig asked the expedition photographer one day.
“Ah—they are pictures of the Pani,” the man said.
“But they don't look like that,” he retorted.
“No, they don't really. But what do they look like, Colonel? They looked like that at the moment this picture was taken.”
What did they really look like? What were they really like?
“I believe my every move has been correct so far,” Zornig told Doctor Mobley. “Do I not have them cold?” he asked.
“They won't accept it,” Doctor Mobley said. “I believe they will now make a move so curious that you will hardly be able to pin it on them or be sure they have done it when it is done.”
“We're surely a match for a bunch of stone-age bugs,” said Zornig. “What can they do?”
They made a move so curious that Colonel Zornig could not pin it on them and was not sure that they had done it when it was done.
They stole the body of General Raddle.
Or perhaps they didn't. The grave was guarded all the time and no Pani approached it. But the grave seemed disturbed and Colonel Zornig had a moment of unaccountable panic. He ordered it opened. The box was there in the loosened dirt. But the General's body was not in the box.
II
One of the sergeants came to Colonel Zornig several days later. This man had learned a little Pani and was often sent to bring one or another of them in. He understood them best of all the men. The man told Colonel Zornig of the rumor that the Pani did have the body of General Raddle, and that they were trying to fix it, to bring it back to life. “Say nothing about this,” Zornig told the man. “I play a waiting game now,” Zornig told himself. “It may keep them occupied. General Raddle had a sly humor, and I doubt if he'll really mind the desecration of himself. While they try to animate the body they'll have no time for conspiracies. Meanwhile I'll devise a suitable punishment. The little beasts will play into my hand on this one.”
And again several days later, the man who had learned a little Pani reported that he had heard that the Pani had had some success at the reanimation—that the body could now sit up and talk a little and would soon be able to take nourishment. Zornig chortled.
“The bugs are having you, son,” he chuckled. “What sort of superstitious lout are you to be gulled by bugs?”
“No. I believe there is something to it,” insisted the soldier.
And after another couple of days the man reported that Pani friends had told him that the body of General Raddle could now walk and was eating well, and would soon be fixed completely.
So the man was clapped into the guardhouse for being made a fool of by things that were less than human.
One morning Major Crocker came to Colonel Zornig. The man was death-white and his jaws worked soundlessly. It came to Zornig that the man was like one in a nightmare who tries to cry out and cannot.
Doctor Mobley staggered in. He was out of his wits. He never gained them completely. He was badly frightened.
Major Wister and Crowell stumbled up in a like condition of terror, and Colonel Zornig could get nothing out of the fellows at all.
“I got to find what ails the fools,” Zornig growled. “Terror is catching. I can't have my command spooked by some nonsense.”
Terror is catching. Colonel Zornig caught it. What he saw now froze his scalp and he felt all the blood drain out of him. He worked his jaws soundlessly. He himself was the man in the nightmare who tries to cry out and can make no sound. He was unable to break out of the nightmare.
What he saw was General Raddle.
General Raddle did not look well. He had never looked well; but he looked himself.
“Colonel Zornig,” growled General Raddle dryly, “I would like to see my own death certificate. I believe that it is in error.”
“Colonel Zornig,” said General Raddle after he was seated in his office and after he had examined his own death certificate for a long minute, “arrest Doctor Mobley.” “Arrest Doctor Mobley? Wh—why?”
“I am not in the habit of explaining to subordinates,” said Raddle. Then he smiled sourly. “But this time I will. Doctor Mobley knew that I was subject to cataleptic trances. None of the rest of you knew it; I would not have been given my command if it were known. I am not in good health, but I do not suffer from the failing that is here given as the cause of my death. Doctor Mobley knew that I was not dead. He ordered me buried alive.”
“But, General, you could not have lived through it.”
“I am here, am I not?”
“But you were in the grave for ten equivalent days. No catalepsy could survive that.”
“I was not in the grave at all. I was not in the coffin when you buried it. The Pani are sly, but not that sly. They couldn't have had me from a guarded grave. There was a settling of the ground at the grave; and there were the rumors: so you opened the grave and found me not in the box.
“But the Pani made the switch earlier—after you had closed the box and sent the others away. Ieska distracted you. They stole me from behind your back and put in an equivalent weight of dirt, and closed it again. They move as noiselessly as smoke.”
“Good God! Were you conscious?”
“I was comatose. I could hear fitfully and I could feel movement. The Pani u
nderstood death. They sensed that I was not dead, that I was only sick—broke. They could not understand your not trying to cure—fix—me. They wished to try to fix me, and they believed that they could do it. They have elements of genuine medicine mixed with their hoodoo. And they did fix me—aided by time and my own constitution.”
“Are—are you sure?”
“I am sure that I am here, Colonel Zornig. Stop gaping like a fish!”
In short hours, General Raddle reversed most of the policies of Colonel Zornig. In particular he gave orders that Ieska was not to be molested. He held Doctor Mobley under close confinement under the charge of attempted murder.
“The Pani are a gentle people,” the general told Colonel Zornig, “and they have saved my life. I was too harsh with them before, and you have been a dozen times too harsh. We will make it up to them. Colonel, disband the regular guard entirely.”
“That is against the standing orders for the Expedition.”
“No. There will be a special guard. There is provision for that.”
“Who shall I put on the special guard, General, and how will it differ from the regular guard?”
“You will put no one on it. I will attend to it completely. Certain of the men will be put on guard by myself. Who they are will be known to no one but me. They will not seem to be on guard, but they will be alert. I am playing a hunch and I've had good luck with my hunches.”
“Your hunch may get us all killed, General. Remember that we found all the members of the previous Expedition dead.”
“Yes. Of an unfortunate epidemic.”
“Doctor Mobley says that it was a subtle poison.”
“So subtle he could find no trace of it? Doctor Mobley has a pathological hatred of the Pani. It was because I was too easy on them that he tried to kill me. These people will be completely friendly if we treat them right. There's no guile in them at all.”
“General,” said Colonel Zornig futilely, “there's one opinion—and I lean to it—that the Pani are the most tricky, devious, triple-dealing, intransigent, ambushing, merciless creatures that have ever been encountered. There is the story that they murdered not only the members of our previous Expedition but those sent out by half-a-dozen different sorts of other civilizations also. They are sworn to kill every visitor to their world. Why else has so promising a planet not been developed?”
“I believe that no other party—if there were any besides the previous human one—realized the promise of the place.”
“The exploratory parties always realize the promises of a place. We're not exceptional. The Pani have killed by trickery every one who has come here!”
“Colonel Zornig, who was it who gave you the idea that the Pani are the most tricky, devious, merciless creatures ever encountered?” asked General Raddle.
“Ah—well, I suppose it was Doctor Mobley.”
“The demented doctor again! Let us consider the subject closed.”
III
General Raddle had always been right, and very often he had seemed to be wrong till his final move. A man must trust the ability of someone. Colonel Zornig had to trust the judgment of the general, since he could no longer trust his own. The whole thing bothered him, but he had to go along with it.
And he had to like Ieska who now had the run of the place more than ever before. One had to like all the Pani. They had apparently forgotten all previous harsh treatment and were now most cooperative.
General Raddle had seemingly been right about Doctor Mobley. That man, brooding in his detention, soon became little more than a vegetable. He said that he was dying by the subtle poison of the Pani! He pointed to rocks and bushes in the area and said that they were Pani ready to spring. He insisted that the Pani people who were able to raise the dead might be capable of anything. And Doctor Mobley did not accept the account of General Raddle.
“Of course he was dead,” the doctor whined. “I certified him dead, didn't I? I wish he had stayed dead. Did I kill him, you ask me, Zornig? Did I bury him alive? Well, maybe I did. One forgets things… I'd like to do it again.”
And the planet showed itself more promising every day, and the Pani became still more cooperative.
Sometimes it seemed that a bell was booming a thousand leagues away, yet Colonel Zornig knew that it was inside his own head. It would not be silenced.
The man who had learned Pani talk best came to Colonel Zornig and told him that the Pani secret societies had been revived.
“I know it,” said the colonel, “and General Raddle knows it. He says that they are harmless. I respect his judgment.”
“And I respect yours, Colonel,” said the man, “if you will ever make one. It had better be pretty soon.”
“The general has always been right before.”
“I know it. But now I believe that there is something wrong about the general.”
This soldier was named Fraker. He seemed a simple-minded fellow, but he had a way of understanding aliens.
The Pani people behaved perfectly, but the same could not be said about the humans. The men had all become very jumpy. They had the new habit of always looking over their shoulder as though they were being followed. Zornig found himself doing it. He became irritable and suffered headaches. It was that bedamned bell bonging in his head—the warning bell.
The thing that bothered him most was that he didn't know who was the guard. It seemed that nobody was on guard. “They will not seem to be on guard, but they will be alert,” General Raddle had said. But dammit, Zornig should be able to tell when a man was on guard—even on a special guard! He knew these men.
But he trusted the general.
Colonel Zornig was accustomed to doing little military position problems in his head. Such a thing must not be permitted to occur at the same time as another thing, for instance. One or another thing might be neglected, but there were collusions of things that must not be all neglected at once. There was now arriving a coincidence of events and dispositions that could be disastrous, like an old astrological coincidence of planets in a certain sign boding evil. And the Pani were astrologers—in their own way.
Zornig noted certain movements and activities of the Pani, certain negligences of the men, certain orders of General Raddle. They dovetailed too perfectly to be accidental. There would come an hour—very soon—when the men might be completely in the hands of the Pani, if the Pani realized it.
Was it all coincidence? Was it a clever plan of General Raddle, who had never been wrong in these things? Was the general giving the Pani a chance to hang themselves on their own liani? Were the special guards really alert, though not seeming to guard, as General Raddle had said? Was there somehow to be the final and correct play by the general?
Or would it be something else?
Zornig went once more to the prisoner, Doctor Mobley. “Are you in your wits, Mobley?” he asked softly.
“I am not, and I have not been since the general returned. I decided that there was only one sane explanation of the event: that I was crazy.”
“Tell me one thing only. Was General Raddle dead?”
“Colonel, he was dead. I was not yet crazy when I signed his death certificate.”
“Could a simple people like the Pani somehow have the knowledge to bring a dead man back to life?”
“That is what I lost my mind over. But even as a crazy man let me correct you in one error. Primitive peoples are never simple. They are frighteningly complex. It is we who are simple, because civilization is nothing but a simplification.”
“Doctor Mobley, it is easier for me to believe that you were mistaken than to believe that the general was raised from the dead.”
“Maybe I wished the general dead,” said the doctor.
As Zornig walked out with uncertain mind the man Fraker came to him.
“Colonel,” said Fraker, “I have to tell you that I know that something is very wrong, and that I have nothing to go on. But, whatever is going on, it will crest in a very short whi
le. The Pani are about to make their push, and I know the Pani.”
“I know you do. And I know that they will make their move in a certain hour very soon. I am sure that the general knows it also. It may be quite a coup, and I hate to be left out of it. I trust the judgment of the general on tactical movements, and I trust your premonitions on aliens.”
“Then trust my premonition on the general. There is something wrong about him.”
“I have nobody on whom I can depend absolutely—unless it is yourself, Fraker. Have you four or five men you can depend on?”
“Three.”
“Get them! And get Ieska.”
“Ieska is under the special protection of the general. No one is allowed to touch him.”
“We break rules now! Get your men, and get Ieska! Bring him to the old guardhouse, and do it quickly. We haven't too much time before the coincidence of events.”
They had Ieska the Pani Story-Teller. They stretched him flat on his back, or as flat as his peculiar body would permit, and they did it to the sound of rending bones and tearing cartilage. “I believe it is time that you tell us a little story, Ieska,” said Colonel Zornig. “Tell us the true story of what has happened to General Raddle and what is intended to happen to us.”
“Is reason why that story cannot be told, man Colonel,” said Ieska in pain.
“What reason?” asked Zornig, and he shoved a pike an inch into Ieska's belly.
“The story involve bamboozle. Stories of bamboozle may only be told when warm summer sun is shining. The story involves protection of Fatherland, and such story can only be told when winter night grips world. The story involve stranger people, you, and story of stranger people may only be told when South wind is blowing. The story involve real slick tactic, and real slick tactic is the son of the West Wind. And also the story involve trap inside a trap inside a trap, and three-trap story may only be told on windless day at high noon. Our stories are ritual and can only be told at set times. As you understand, this tale could only be told on cold winter night with hot summer sun shining, and winds blowing every direction and not at all. Therefore the story may not be told. Circumstances will not permit it.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 48
