The commander saluted smartly, and made a slight bow from the waist. "Please Madame. I am so happy that you speak our language our language. It will make everything so much simpler. I regret to inform you that you are my prisoner."
"Obviously."
He smiled as if she had been exceptionally witty. "Yes, of course. You and your assistants I am forced to require a certain service of you."
"I shall not help you!" " Please, Madame." It will not be anything you do not wish to do. You will simply continue with your present duties of caring for children back to my country. You will be needed to care for them.."
"I will not! I shall tell them to resist. You cannot possibly control three thousand children."
He shrugged his shoulders, " as you like, Madame. Did I not promise that you would not be required to do anything that do not wish to do?"
While they were talking, a great door opened from the fat body of the aircraft , swung down like a draw-bridge, and a dozen men trotted out at double time. They broke into two single file columns and deployed rapidly around the buildings until they completely surrounded the school at fifty-yard intervals. Each carried a large tripod and had a pack slung on his back.
Once at their posts, they set up the tripods, unslung the packs, clamped them hastily on the tripods, and stripped and stripped the covers from the packs. Then each one grasped the end of a reel of wire which was slung on his tripod, trotted away a counter-clockwise direction toward next adjacent tripod, paying out the wire as he ran. Each man clamped the end his wire to the tripod of his left-hang neighbor, and ran quickly back to his post.
A non-commissioned officer standing at the helicopter door bellowed, "Report!"
"One!" "Two!" "Three!" "Four !' "Five!" "Six!" "Seven!" "Eight!" "Nine!" "Ten!" "Eleven!" "Twelve!'
The non-commissioned officer brought his right hand down smartly.
Nothing much happened. The trees and buildings beyond the line of tripods shimmered slightly as if seen through a soap bubble film. But a motorcycle squad of civic guards. came charging up the boulevard from the city a moment later, and crashed into this iridescent phantom. They piled up in a tangled, sickening heap.
Inside the helicopter a young techni-cian sat before a complex control board, his bony, nervous hands busy with knurled levers, a triple bank of numbered keys, and numerous switches. His eyes fol-lowed the responses on the instrument panel back of the control board, noting the readings shown by quivering needles, watched the wandering of the little light-ed "bugs" in the zero readers, saw the ready lights flash on.
A green light flashed near the top of the panel. He pulled a screen down in front of his face and threw a switch. A picture rapidly built up on the screen of another pale-faced nervous man. The pic-ture spoke
"Hi, Jan. Ready on your side?"
"Yeah. I'll give you a stand-by warn-ing."
"I don't like this, Jan."
"Neither do I. I'll run any machine that they put in front of me, but I prefer to take 'em apart first and see what makes 'em tick."
"Right. How the hell do I know what
Goes on back of that board? I'm just punching keys in the dark. Besides, how do we know those kids won't be hurt? Nobody has ever seen this gadget in op-eration."
A shadow fell across the board. The technician looked up and saw the non-commissioned officer gesturing to him. He spoke again to the panel.
"Stand by! We're starting the music." He pressed three buttons in rapid succes-sion.
The music reached the four standing on the grounds; Madame Curan, nervous and defiant; her assistant, frightened and looking for guidance; the commander and his aide, urbane and alert. It tinkled in their ears like a child's song. It sang to them of a child's cosmos, a child's heaven, wonderful, free from care.
Dansic smiled at Madame Curan. "Is it not silly to be at war when there is music like that in the world?"
In spite of herself she smiled back.
The music swelled and developed a throbbing almost below the audible range. Then a thin reedy piping was distinguish-able. It wove in and out of the melody, embroidered it, and took it over. Cone away, it said. Come away with me. It was piercing, but not painful-it seemed to vibrate in the very brain itself. ;
The children boiled up out of the un-derground ramps like so many puppies. They laughed and shouted and ran in cir-cles. They rushed out of the ground and danced towards the helicopter. Up the incline they jostled, pushing and giggling.
The technician took a quick look over his shoulder, and barked, "Here they come!"
He threw a switch, and an empty frame beside the control board, six feet high, suddenly filled with opaque, velvet black-ness.
The first of the children skipped up to the frame, jumped into it and disappeared.
Commander Dansic led Madame Curan into the helicopter as the last of the chil-dren were entering. She suppressed a scream when she saw what was happen-ing to her charges, and turned furiously at the commander. But he silenced her with a wave of his hand.
"Regard, please."
Following the direction of his pointing finger, she saw, framed in the television panel, a screen similar to the one in which she stood, except that in the picture the children were popping out of a frame of blackness.
"Where are they? What have you done with them?"
"They are in my country-safe."
The last of the staff of the school was persuaded or coerced into passing through the blackness; the helicopter crew fol-lowed, two at a time. Finally the com-mander was left alone, save for the techni-cian, with Madame Curan. He turned to her and bowed.
"And now, Madame, will you come with me and resume your duties to your wards?" He offered her the crook of his right elbow.
She bit her lip, then grasped the proffered arm. They marched steadily into the black.
The technician pulled off his earphones, made some last adjustments, and faced' the framed darkness. He entered it with the air of a man about to take a cold shower.
Fifteen seconds later the packs on the:, circle of tripods blew up in a series o_ overlapping little pops. Ten seconds after, that the helicopter blossomed into a giant mushroom, with a dull whooo-hooom that shook the ground.
The two technicians need not have worried about the safety of the children. Back deep in the territory of the their home country, Doctor Groot sprawled in a chair and watched the arrival of one consignment of children,
A small, warm smile lightened his ugly Face, induced by the sound of the unearthly music perhaps, or possibly by the sight of so many happy children. The Prime Minister stood near him, too nervous to sit down.
Groot crooked a finger at an ,.elderly gray-haired female in the white uniform of a chief nurse. "Come here, Elda."
"Yes, Doctor."
"You must see to the music yourself. Reduce the volume now to the least that will keep them quiet, free from tears. Put them to sleep with it tonight. But no music-this sort of music-tomorrow, unless absolutely necessary. It is not good for them, to be happy as angels too long. They have still to be men and women."
"I understand, Doctor."
"See that they all understand." He turned to the Prime Minister, who pulled at his lip and looked distrait. "What is worrying you, my friend?" "Well- Are you sure no harm can come to these children?"
"Do you not see?" Groot waved a hand at the frolicsome children, being herded in little groups to the quarters prepared for them.
"Yes-but suppose two of your receiv-ing stations were tuned in the same fash-ion. What would happen to the children?"