Patriots

At least half the lights worked in the blue corridor. The floor was painted, though the center was worn to bare concrete and the margins were too dingy for anyone to be absolutely certain of the color. The child stopped fifty yards from the intersection, pointing at what really was a ladder-Mark had thought the word might mean a stairway, like "companion ladder" on a starship. The three of them stared up at the oval of daylight thirty feet above.

A man stepped through the hatch and began to climb down without looking behind him. He wore a gray military uniform with patched knees and an apron over it. Tools clinked together as he moved.

"That's Cabbage," the child whispered.

When it was obvious that Easton wasn't going to notice them, Yerby said cheerfully, "Good morning, Captain!"

"Oh my goodness!" Easton said. He flung himself backward off the ladder while he was still ten feet in the air.

Mark grabbed the gaping child and dived clear of what he guessed was going to be the impact zone. Yerby caught Easton in a two-hand grip around the pudgy waist. He swung the captain first upright, then to the ground as lightly as a circus act.

A trowel dropped from an apron pocket clanged to the floor just as Mark was starting to relax. The child giggled and ran back down the corridor the way they'd come.

"What on earth are you doing here?" Easton demanded. He peered at Yerby, then Mark. His eyes were still adapted to the daylight above. "Do I know you?"

"We're from Greenwood, Captain," Ba

"Oh, I couldn't do that," Easton said. He minced down the corridor at a surprisingly quick pace.

Mark and Yerby fell into step on either side. Easton looked over one shoulder, then the other. His round, bushy-bearded face took on a hunted expression. "Lieutenant Hounslow handles all that sort of thing. Yes, you'll have to talk to him. Not me."

"And you're taking us to Lieutenant Hounslow, sir?" Mark said.

They'd reached the intersection. The ballgame was still going on down the main corridor to the right. Easton turned sharply left, as if by pretending Yerby didn't exist he could make the big man vanish. Ba

"Oh, all right," Easton said. "He'll be in the Command Center, I suppose. He's always in the Command Center."

Several men wearing portions of uniforms lounged in the corridor ahead. The ceiling fixtures didn't work, but a series of light-strips co

"Hey, it's the Old Man," one of the troops said without concern.

The four doors open to the left all served a single dormitory big enough to sleep at least a hundred. Mark looked in at each doorway. There were only twenty or thirty bunks scattered across the room. Men lay on a few of them. Rows of large boxes staggered against the back walls. Some had fallen over, spilling what looked like trash.

"G'morning, sir," a couple of the men in the corridor said to Easton. One of them even touched his forehead in an attempt at a salute.

Easton grimaced and bobbed his head. He was trying to pretend the troops didn't exist either. "I don't suppose you know anything about collards, do you?" he murmured to Yerby. "Mine are getting little black spots near the edge of the leaves, and I don't know if that's a-"

"Not a thing about collards," the frontiersman said. "What're you growing collards for anyhow? Something wrong with your rations?"

"All they provide us with is processed food, processed!" Easton said with the first animation he'd shown since his shout as he fell off the ladder. "Why, if they'd give me proper support in Paris, I could turn this whole base into a garden of healthy natural delights."

The next door past the barracks was open also. The smell staggered Mark. "Wow!" he said.

"Well, the sewer system seems to be blocked," Easton explained with some embarrassment. "And we're below ground, of course. So since the pump space was two-level and the pumps didn't work anyway, we've converted it to a, ah, well, a latrine."

The holes in the floor of the room had held a pair of centrifugal pumps eight feet in diameter. The equipment had been removed-Mark wondered how-and replaced with two-by-sixes raised a foot and a half above the holes so that users could sit with their families an adequate distance out in the air beyond.

"The right hole is for officers only," Easton said. He pulled the door shut. "Now, you know, this could be a valuable source of carbon and nitrates if properly composted, but I've had difficulties explaining this to the troops."

Who are the ones who'll be cleaning and transporting the valuable fertilizer, of course… "I can imagine you would have difficulties convincing your men, yes," Mark said.

He guessed that the garrison's answer to any problem was "Throw it downstairs." Mark didn't want to think about what the corridors on the fort's lower levels were like.

"Look, how many men do you have all told?" Yerby asked. The furrows of his frown had been getting deeper with every additional sign of neglect.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Easton said peevishly. He waved a hand to brush the question away. "That's all Hounslow's province."

The next two doors, both closed, were labeled COMMANDANT and DEPUTY COMMANDANT with letters cast into the dense plastic of the panel. Mark noticed that the bottom of the doors had been shaved off and the top of either panel gapped a finger's breadth at the side opposite the hinges. The fort had been settling in the generations since it was built. Cracks ran across flat surfaces and doorjambs twisted out of true.

Mark remembered the latrine. Also, sewer lines broke.

The next room was labeled COMMAND CENTER, by odd purple paint stenciled onto a sheet of plastic tacked to a replacement door of wood. Below that, in straggling script hand-lettered in green, Keep out!

Easton tried the handle. It was locked. "Oh, dear," he said. "Maybe we shouldn't. He really doesn't like to be-"

Ba

The man who leaped up from behind the desk was tall, black-haired and cadaverously thin. His initial expression was outraged, but it turned to horror as soon as he heard Yerby's words.

"Oh, that won't be possible," Hounslow said. His gray uniform was threadbare but immaculately ordered, down to the neat HOUNSLOW on the tape over his left jacket pocket. "Why, I've just completed the duty rosters for the next-"

He gestured at the walls. They were covered with graph paper on which lines and names were drawn in at least six different colors of ink.

"-nineteen months. Can't possibly be done. I-you aren't from Paris, are you? Are you from the Inspector General's office?"

"No, we're from Greenwood," Mark said sharply. He'd heard Captain Easton scurry off the moment Yerby burst the door open. They were here with a simple question, and there didn't seem any reason they shouldn't have a simple answer.

"No" was simple enough and acceptable so far as Mark was concerned; but it couldn't be "no" from a lunatic.

"Certainly not for Greenwood," Hounslow said, nodding vigorously. "I don't even know where Greenwood is."

From the way he talked, Mark doubted Hounslow knew where his left foot was. The data terminal built into one end of the desk was cold and very possibly as dead as the fort's sewer system. The charts on the wall were hand-drawn. The same names occurred on them over and over again, but they were written in different colors.