The war in Indo-China was crowded back among the stock-market reports. Even the official announcements that the first Mars rocket was nearing completion in its sublunar orbit—front-page news at any normal time—got an inconspicuous paragraph in some papers and was dropped entirely by others.
But I found an item in a St. Louis paper about the policeman who had collapsed after shooting a criminal. He was dead.
I woke up a little before dawn that morning, having had a solid fifteen hours’ sleep. I found the cafeteria and hung around until it opened. That was where Captain Ritchy-loo tracked me down.
He came in as I was finishing my second order of ham and eggs, a big, blond, swimming-star type, full of confidence and good cheer. “You must be Mr. Dahl. My name is Ritchy-loo.”
I let him pump my hand and watched him sit down. “How do you spell it?” I asked him.
He grinned happily. “It is a tough one, isn’t it? French. R, i, c, h, e, l, i, e, u.”
Richelieu. Ritchy loo.
I said, “What can I do for you, Captain?”
“Ah, it’s what I can do for you, Mr. Dahl. You’re a VIP around here, you know. You’re getting the triple-A guided tour, and I’m your guide.”
I hate people who are cheerful in the morning.
We went out into the pale glitter of early-morning sunshine on the flat; the floodlight poles and the pillboxes trailed long, mournful shadows. There was a jeep waiting, and Ritchy-loo took the wheel himself.
We made a right turn around the comer of the building and then headed down one of the diagonal avenues between the poles. I glanced into the firing slit of one of the pillboxes as we passed it, and saw the gleam of somebody’s spectacles.
“That was B building that we just came out of,” said the captain. “Most of the interesting stuff is there, but you want to see everything, naturally, so we’ll go over to C first and then back to A.”
The huge barracks, far off to the right, looked deserted; I saw a few men in fatigues here and there, spearing stray bits of paper. Beyond the building we were heading for, almost against the wall, tiny figures were leaping rhythmically, opening and closing like so many animated scissors.
It was a well-policed area, at any rate; I watched for a while, out of curiosity, and didn’t see a single cigarette paper or gum wrapper.
To the left of the barracks and behind it was a miniature town—neat one-story cottages, all alike, all the same distance apart. The thing that struck me about it was that there were none of the signs of a permanent camp—no borders of whitewashed stones, no trees, no shrubs, no flowers. No wives, I thought.
“How’s morale here, Captain?” I asked.
“Now, it’s funny you should ask me that. That happens to be my job, I’m the Company B morale officer. Well, I should say that all things considered, we aren’t doing too badly. Of course, we have a few difficulties. These men are here on eighteen-month assignments, and that’s a kind of a long time without passes or furloughs. We’d like to make the hitches shorter, naturally, but of course you understand that there aren’t too many fresh but seasoned troops available just now.”
“No.”
"But, we do our best. Now here’s C building.”
Most of C building turned out to be occupied by chemical laboratories: long rows of benches covered by rank growths of glassware, only about a fifth of it working, and nobody watching more than a quarter of that
“What are they doing here?”
I “Over my head,” said Ritchy-loo cheerfully. “Here’s Dr. Vitale, let’s ask him.”
Vitale was a little sharp-featured man with a nervous blink. “This is the atmosphere section,” he said. “We’re trying to analyze the atmosphere which the alien breathes. Eventually we hope to manufacture it.”
That was a point that hadn’t occurred to me. “He can’t breathe our air?”
“No, no. Altogether different.”
“Well, where does he get the stuff he does breathe, then?”
The little man’s lips worked. “From that cone-shaped mechanism on the top of his head. An atmosphere plant that you could put in your pocket. Completely incredible. We can’t get an adequate sample without taking it off him, and we can’t take it off him without killing him. We have to deduce what he breathes in from what he breathes out. Very difficult.” He went away.
All the same. I couldn’t see much point in it. Presumably if Aza-Kra couldn’t breathe our air, we couldn’t breathe his—so anybody who wanted to examine him would have to wear an oxygen tank and a breathing mask.
But it was obvious enough, and I got it in another minute. If the prisoner didn’t have his own air-supply, it would be that much harder for him to break out past the gun rooms and the guards in the corridors and the. pillboxes and the floodlights and the wall....
We went on, stopping at every door. There were storerooms, sleeping quarters, a few offices. The rest of the rooms were empty.
Ritchy-loo wanted to go on to A building, but I was being perversely thorough, and I said we would go through the barracks and the company towns first. We did; it took us three hours, and thinned down Ritchy-loo’s stream of cheerful conversation to a trickle. We looked everywhere, and of course we did not find anything that shouldn’t have been there.
A building was the recreation hall. Canteen, library, gymnasium, movie theater, PX, swimming pool. It was also the project hospital and dispensary. Both sections were well filled.
So we went back to B. And it was almost noon, so we had lunch in the big air-conditioned cafeteria. I didn’t look forward to it; I expected that rest and food would turn on Ritchy-loo’s conversational spigot again, and if he didn’t get any response to the first three or four general topics he tried, I was perfectly sure he would begin telling me jokes. Nothing of the kind happened. After a few minutes I saw why, or thought I did. Looking around the room, I saw face after face with the same blank look on it; there wasn’t a smile or an animated expression in the place. And now that I was paying attention I noticed that the sounds were odd, too. There were more than a hundred people in the room, enough to set up a beehive roar; but there was so little talking going on that you could pick out individual sentences with ease, and they were all trochaic—Want some sugar? No, thanks. Like that.
It was infectious; I was beginning to feel it now myself— an execution-chamber kind of mood, a feeling that we were all shut up in a place that we couldn’t get out of, and where something horrible was going to happen. Unless you’ve ever been in a group made up of people who had that feeling and were reinforcing it in each other, it’s indescribable; but it was very real and very hard to take.
Ritchy-loo left half a chop on his plate; I finished mine, but it choked me.
In the corridor outside I asked him, “Is it always as bad as that?”
“You noticed it too? That place gives me the creeps. I don’t know why. It’s the same way in the movies, too, lately—wherever you get a lot of these people together. I just don’t understand it.” For a second longer he looked worried and thoughtful, and then he grinned suddenly. “I don’t want to say anything against civilians, Mr. Dahl, but I think that bunch is pretty far gone.”
I could have hugged him. Civilians! If Ritchy-loo was more than six months away, from a summer-camp counsellor’s job, I was a five-star general.
We started at that end of the corridor and worked our way down. We looked into a room with an X-ray machine and a fluoroscope in it, and a darkroom, and a room full of racks and filing cabinets, and a long row of offices.