Murray Leinster by The Best of Murray Leinster (1976) Page A

engineer of the pumping station came out, the surgeon general could tell by his expression that he knew of the tragedy that had struck the country.
    Surgeon General Mors got out of the car.
    ‘They have not come here yet,’ he said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice.
    ‘Not yet,’ said the engineer. He ground his teeth. ‘I have carried out my orders,’ he said harshly. 8 Just as I was told.’
    Surgeon General Mors nodded.
    ‘That is good.’ Then he hesitated. ‘1 would like to look over the plant,’ he said almost apologetically. ‘It is very modem and clean. The - enemy spent their money on guns. They might try to remove it for one of their cities.’
    The engineer stood aside. Surgeon General Mors went through the little pumping plant. There were only twenty thousand people in Stadheim, so a large installation was not required, but it was sound and practical. There were the filters, and the chlorination apparatus, and the well-equipped small laboratory for tests of the water’s purity. The people of Stadheim would always have good water to drink, if the invaders didn’t wreck or remove this machinery.
    ‘It is good,’ said the stocky little man unhappily, ‘to see things like this. It makes for people to be healthy, and therefore happy. Do you know,’ he added irrelevantly, ‘that our inoculation program was almost one hundred per cent complete? Ah, well—’ He paused. ‘I must go on to Stadheim. The invaders are there. I shall try to reason with them about our sanitary arrangements. Their soldiers will not understand how careful we are about sanitation. I shall try to get them not to make changes while they are here.’
    The engineer’s eyes burned suddenly.
    ‘While they are here!’
    ‘Yes,’ Surgeon General Mors went on disconsolately. ‘They will not stay more than ten days. War is very terrible! It is everything that we doctors fight against all our lives. But so long as men do not understand, there must be wars.’ He drew a deep, unhappy breath. ‘It will indeed be terrible! May it be the last.’
    There was a sudden change in the engineer’s eyes.
    ‘Then we fight? My orders—’
    ‘Yes/ said Surgeon General Mors, reluctantly. ‘In our own way, we fight. In the only way a small nation can defend itself against a great one. We may need as long as ten days before we drive them out, and when it comes it will be a very terrible victory!’
    He hesitated, and then spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He walked out to the car and drove sturdily toward Stadheim.
    Sentries stopped him at the outskirts of the city, to confiscate the car. But when he got out wearing the uniform of his country’s military force, he was immediately arrested. He was marched toward the center of the city by a soldier who held a bayonet pressing Iighdy against the small of the little man’s back. Mors, of course, was of the medical branch of his army and looked hopelessly unmilitary, and he carried no weapon more dangerous than a fountain pen. But the enemy soldier felt like a conqueror, and this was his first chance to act the part.
    When the surgeon general of his country’s army was taken to the general commanding the invading troops, the latter was already much annoyed. There had not been a single shot fired in the invasion, and this time the history books would place the credit where it belonged - with the dull, anonymous men who had prepared timetables and traffic control orders, rather than with the combat leadership. General Vladek would go down in history, if at all, only as the nominal leader of an intricate crosscountry troop movement. This he did not like.
    An hour since, too, he had performed an impressive ceremony on a balcony of the provincial capitol building. With officers flanking him and troops drawn up in the square below, he had read a proclamation to the people of Kantolia. They had been redeemed, said the proclamation, from the grinding oppression of their native country;