Читать книгу The Spectre General - Theodore Cogswell - Страница 8

CHAPTER FOUR

At War Base Three, nobody was happy. Ships supposed to be light-months away carrying on the carefully planned search for General Carr’s hideout were fluttering down out of the sky like falling leaves, disabled by blown jets, jammed computers, and all the other natural ills that worn-out and poorly serviced equipment is heir to. Technical maintenance was quietly going mad. Director Krogson was being noisy about it.

“Schankle!” he screamed. “Isn’t anything happening anywhere?”

“Nothing yet, sir,” said the little man.

“Well, make something happen!” He hoisted his immaculately polished black boots onto the desk and called up the holographic map of his sector. Tiny stars winked into existence. “How are the others doing?”

“No better than we are,” said Schankle. “Director Storch of Sector Six tried to set himself up as a hero, but didn’t get away with it. He sent his troops to a plantation planet at the edge of the Belt and had them hypno the whole population. By the time they were through, they had fifteen million greenies running around yelling, ‘Up with General Carr!’ ‘Down with the Lord Protector!’ ‘Long Live the People’s Revolution!’ and things like that. Storch even game them a few interplanetary missile launchers to make the threat look more realistic. Then he sent in his whole fleet, tipped off the press at Prime Base, and waited. Guess what the Bureau of Essential Information finally sent him?”

“What?” said Director Krogson.

“One lousy cub reporter. Storch couldn’t back out by then, so he had to go ahead and blast the planet down to bedrock. This morning he got a three-line notice in Space and a citation as Third Rate Protector of the People’s Space Ways, Eighth Grade.”

“That’s better than the nothing we’ve got so far!”

“Not when the press notice is buried on the next to last page, right below the column on ‘Our Feathered Comrades,’” said Schankle, “and not when the citation is posthumous. They even misspelled his name; it came out Stooch!”