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Picking his words with great care, he said, “From what I have seen in the SSSR, the fighting males here have trouble changing their plans to match changing circumstances. They do not respond as quickly as the Deutsche or the British.” In that way, they were much like the Race, which was probably why the Race had had such good success against them. “Communications also leave a good deal to be desired, and your landcruisers, while stoutly made, are not always deployed to best advantage.”
Colonel Lidov grunted. Ussmak didn’t know much about the noises the Big Uglies made, but that one sounded like what would have been a thoughtful hiss from a male of the Race. Then Lidov said, “Tell me of the ideological motivations behind your rebellion against the oppressive aristocracy which had controlled you up to the point of your resistance.”
After Gazzim translated that into the language of the Race, Ussmak let his mouth fall open in a wry laugh. “Ideology? What ideology? I had a head full of ginger, my crewmales had just been killed, and Hisslef wouldn’t stop screaming at me, so I shot him. After that, one thing led to another. If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn’t. It’s been more trouble than it’s worth.”
The Big Ugly grunted again. He said, “Everything has ideological underpinnings, whether one consciously realizes it or not. I congratulate you for the blow you struck against those who exploited your labor for their own selfish benefit.”
All that did was convince Ussmak that Lidov didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was talking about. All survivors of the conquest fleet-assuming there were survivors from the conquest fleet, which looked imperfectly obvious-would be prominent, well-established males on the conquered world by the time the colonization fleet arrived. They’d have years of exploiting its resources; the first starship full of trade goods might well have headed Homeward before the colonists got here.
Ussmak wondered how much clandestine ginger would have been aboard that first starship. Even if the Big Uglies had been the animal-riding barbarians everyone thought they were, Tosev 3 would have been trouble for the Race. Thinking of ginger made Ussmak wish he had a taste, too.
Colonel Lidov said, “You will now itemize for me the ideologies of the progressive and reactionary factions in your leadership hierarchy.”
“I will?” Ussmak said in some surprise. To Gazzim, he went on, “Remind this Tosevite”-he remembered not to call the Big Ugly a Big Ugly-“that I was only a landcruiser driver. If you please. I did not get my orders straight from the fleetlord, you know.”
Gazzim spoke in the Russki tongue. Lidov listened, replied. Gazzim translated back the other way: “Tell me whatever you know of these things. Nothing is of greater importance than ideology.”
Offhand, Ussmak could have come up with a whole long list of things more important than ideology. Topping the list, at that moment, would have been the ginger he’d thought of a moment before. He wondered why the Big Ugly was so obsessed with an abstraction when there were so many genuinely important things to worry about.
“Tell him I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to answer,” Ussmak said to Gazzim. “I was never a commander of any sort. All I did was what I was told.”
“This is not good enough,” Gazzim answered after Lidov had spoken. The male sounded worried. “He believes you are lying. I must explain, so you will understand why, that a specflic ideological framework lies under the political structure of this not-empire, and serves as its center in the same way as the Emperor does for us.”
Lidov did not hit Gazzim, as he had before; evidently he wanted Ussmak to have that explanation. As he had been conditioned to do, Ussmak cast down his eyes-this in spite of having betrayed the Emperor first by mutiny and then by surrender to the Tosevites.
But he answered in the only way he could: “I cannot invent bogus ideological splits when I know of none.”
Gazzim let out a long, hissing sigh, then translated his reply for the male from the NKVD. Lidov flicked a switch beside his chair. From behind him, a brilliant incandescent lamp with a reflector in back of it glared into Ussmak’s face. He swung his eye turrets away from it. Lidov flicked on other switches. More lights to either side burned at Ussmak.
The interrogation went on from there.
“Good God almighty damn,” Mutt Daniels said with reverent irreverence. “It’s the country, bread me and fry me if it ain’t.”
“Bout time they took us out o’ line for a while, don’t you think, sir?” Sergeant Herman Muldoon answered. “They never kept us in the trenches so long at a stretch in the Great War-nothin’ like what they put us through in Chicago, not even close.”
“Nope,” Mutt said. “They could afford to fool around in France. They had the men an’ they had the initiative. Here in Shytown, we was like the Germans Over There-we was the ones who had to stand there and take it with whatever we could scrape together.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call Elgin the country.” To illustrate what he meant, Captain Stan Szymanski waved his arm to take in the factories that checked the town’s grid of streets. The wave took in what had been factories, anyhow. They were ruins now, jagged and broken against the gray sky. Every one of them had been savagely bombed. Some were just medium-sized hills of broken bricks and rubble. Walls and stacks still stood on others. Whatever they had made, though, they weren’t making it any more. The seven-story clock tower of the Elgin Watch factory, which had made a prime observation post, was now scarcely taller than any other wreckage.
Mutt pointed westward, across the Fox River. “But that’s farm country out there yonder, sir,” he said. “Ain’t seen nothin’ but houses and skyscrapers and whatnot when I look out for a long time. It’s right nice, you ask me.”
“What it is, Lieutenant, is damn fine tank country,” Szymanski said in a voice that brooked no argument. “Since the Lizards have damn fine tanks and we don’t, I can’t get what you’d call enthusiastic about it.”
“Yes, sir,” Daniels said. It wasn’t that Szymanski wasn’t right-he was. It was just the way these young men, born in this century, looked at the world. Born in this century, hell-odds were Szymanski’d still been pissing his drawers when Mutt climbed on a troopship to head Over There.
But no matter how young the captain was on the outside, he had a cold-blooded way of evaluating things. The farmland over across the river was good tank country and the Lizards had good tanks, so to hell with the whole landscape. One of these days, there might not be a war going on. When Mutt looked at farmland, he thought about that, and about what kind of crops you’d get with this soil and climate, and how big your yield was liable to be. Szymanski didn’t care.
“Where they gonna billet us, sir?” Muldoon asked.
“Just off of Fountain Square, not far from the watch factory,” Szymanski answered. “We’re taking over a hotel that hasn’t been bombed to smithereens: the three-story red brick building over there.” He pointed.
“Fountain Square? Yeah, I been there.” Sergeant Muldoon chuckled. “It’s a triangle, and it ain’t got no fountain. Great little place.”
“Give me a choice between a hotel an’ the places we been stayin’ at in Chicago, an’ I ain’t gonna carry on a whole lot,” Mutt said. “Nice to lie down without worryin’ about whether a sniper can pick up where you’re sleepin’ and blow your head off without you even knowin’ the bastard was there.”
“Amen,” Muldoon said enthusiastically. “ ‘Sides which-” He glanced over at Captain Szymanski, then decided not to go on. Mutt wondered what that was all about. He’d have to wander over to Fountain Square himself and see what he could see.
Szymanski didn’t notice Muldoon’ s awkward pause. He was still looking westward. “No matter what they do and what kind of armor they might bring up, the Lizards would have a tough time forcing a crossing here,” he observed. “We’re nicely up on the bluffs and well dug in. No matter how hard they pasted us from the air, we’d still hurt their tanks. They’d have to try flanking us out if they wanted to take this pla
ce.”
“Yes, sir,” Muldoon said again. The brass didn’t think the Lizards would be trying to take Elgin any time soon, or they wouldn’t have sent the company here to rest and recuperate. Of course, the brass wasn’t always right about such things, but for the moment no bullets were flying, no cannon bellowing. It was almost peaceful enough to make a man nervous.
“Come on, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “I’ll show that there hotel and__” Again, he didn’t go on; he made a production of not going on. What the devil had he found over by Fountain Square? A warehouse full of Lucky Strikes? A cache of booze that wasn’t rotgut or moonshine? Whatever it was, he sure was acting coy about it.
For a Midwest factory town, Elgin looked to be a pretty nice place. The blasted plants didn’t make up a single district, as they did so many places. Instead, they were scattered among what had been pleasant homes till war visited them with fire and sword. Some of the houses, the ones that hadn’t been bombed or burned, still looked comfortable.
Fountain Square hadn’t been hit too badly, maybe because none of the town buildings was tall enough to draw Lizard bombers. God only knew why it had the name it did, because, as Muldoon had said, it was neither square nor overburdened with fountains. What looked to be a real live working saloon greeted GIs with open doors-and with a couple of real live working MPs inside those open doors to make sure rest and recuperation didn’t get too rowdy.
