The Men in the Jungle Read online

  She took his hand and led him back to bed.

  And it-was only long minutes later, when the sight had finally faded from his mind’s eye and he was about to fall asleep, that he remembered that now he had the answer, the answer that would galvanize the torpid Sangran peasantry into a revolutionary tide, a tide that would sweep the Brotherhood to oblivion and himself to victory.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Willem Vanderling cocked his head, stared at Fraden quizzically. “Killer uniforms?” he said. “Sure, we can pick up all the Killer uniforms we want. We’re killing fifty, sixty, eighty Killers a week. It’d be no trouble to collect uniforms. But why? What in hell do you want with Killer uniforms?”

  Fraden grinned, leaned back against a tree as he stood in front of Vanderling’s hut, looked out across the little guerrilla camp, and saw it as it would be a few months from now, thousands of men where now there were scores, an army where now there were essentially only brigands. And it couldn’t miss; it was a natural.

  “Not what do I want,” he said, “what you want, Willem. You and about twenty or so of your most trusted—if you’ll parden the expression—herogyn-heads are going to play Killer for a while…”

  Vanderling grinned. “Hey, that’s a pretty good one!” he said. “We dress up in Killer uniforms and infiltrate that Killer concentration I told you about, hit ’em from the inside and the outside all at once, and—”

  “Nothing like that,” Fraden said. “You’re going to kill Bugs.”

  “Huh?”

  “You heard right You’re going to kill Bugs—the Brains that the villagers use to control the Bugs, to be precise.”

  “I don’t get it, Bart,” Vanderling said. “We’re going to kill Brains… What good is that going to do us? Seems like a king-sized waste of time to me.”

  Fraden sighed. “It would, Willem, it would. Look, let me explain it to you in words of one syllable. The Bughills are hive organisms, right? It’s as if all the Bugs in a hill were arms of a single body, and the Brain was the head. So what happens when you chop off an animal’s head?”

  “Uh… it dies. But the Bugs won’t die, will they? I suppose they’d just run around like a buncha dumb beetles…”

  “Very good, Willem, very good. Without a Brain a Bughill is just a collection of brainless, useless insects. Now hold your nose and consider the Sangran peasants. All the able-bodied men in the villages work a full day tending the Meatanimals, producing food for someone else. They work all day and don’t produce so much as a morsel of food for themselves. The only reason the villagers don’t starve is because the Brotherhood has it all neatly worked out: the ‘Animals’ slave for them, and the Bugs slave for the Animals. One old man directing one Brain which controls the village Bughill grows food for the entire village, freeing the men to tend the local Brother’s Meatanimals. So what happens to the villagers if their Bugs suddenly become useless?”

  “Whoo-whee! They’re up crap creek without a canoe! They keep working for the local Brother and they starve to death. They try to cut out and work their own fields—if they remember how—and the local poobah sends in his Killers to round ’em up and make ’em work. Either way, they’re screwed. But I don’t get it, Bart. You’re always telling me how we need the yokums on our side. This is just going to make ’em hate our guts!”

  “Who, little old us?” Fraden said with great mock innocence. “Remember, it’s the Killers they’ll see killing their Brains. And the rumor-mill’ll spread the story that it’s part of the madness pogrom. Moro’s out to starve ’em all so they’ll flip easier. Dig?”

  Vanderling shook his head in dazed admiration. “I dig,” he said. “You got a mind like a rattlesnake! But won’t the Brotherhood just truck in more conditioned Brains? Even the Sangrans will smell a rat if they see the Brotherhood replacing the Brains they’re supposed to have killed in the first place…”

  “Which is why we concentrate on the six nearest estates to begin with,” Fraden said. “Round-the-clock patrols on all roads from Sade. We intercept and kill any Brains they try to truck in. Six estates, couple hundred villages, maybe ten thousand potential guerrillas. Once all the Brains in the area are dead, we’ll have so many men it’d take an army of Killers just to get in here. And then we move on to the next district, and the next… And by that time, the Brotherhood will be so busy fighting a war, they’ll forget all about trucking in Brains.”

  “Yeah…” Vanderling muttered. “Man, it really should work!”

  “As long as we play it cool. We don’t want it to backfire. So we use only twenty-five men, five teams of five. Into a village, kill the Brain, and out, bang-bang, and all at night, when they, won’t notice that the men in the Killer uniforms don’t look like Killers. Each team should be able to hit four or five villages a night. And of course, use only ’heads—the volunteers might not… er, comprehend the strategic necessities. Pick five squad leaders, take ’em out the first few nights yourself, let ’em get the idea, then they lead their own squads.”

  “Right,” Vanderling said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  “And for chrissakes, don’t take a snipgun with you! Remember, you’re supposed to be a Killer. Act like one.”

  “Yeah!” Vanderling said, with what Fraden thought was a good deal too much enthusiasm.

  Willem Vanderling studied the five black-uniformed figures crouched in the clump of trees and heavy underbrush beside him. The village was a dark cluster of featureless shapes before them in the moonless Sangran night. Towering high above the huts was the huge black mound of the local Bughill. Vanderling read the faces of his five squad leaders in, the starlight. Gomez, Jonson, McPhee, Ryder, Lander. They were starting to get wild; their eyes were bloodshot and sunken, their arm-muscles tight bands as they clutched their guns tightly, occasionally stroked the morningstars clipped to their belts ominously. This is it for the night, he thought. They had nearly gone ape in the last village, killing the Brain and then wanting to take on all comers. When they were this far into withdrawal, it was hard to control ’em without the snipgun, which they feared and respected. This fifth village and then back to camp and good stiff doses of herogyn to cool ’em down.

  “Okay men,” he whispered. “In we go. Last one for the night, and then those little blue pills for all, eh?”

  They grinned at him, ran tongues over dry lips.

  “Remember, in, make plenty of noise, kill the Brain, and then out, with no side trips. That’s the pattern, and for chrissakes, let’s stick to it this time! Let’s go.”

  Noisily, arrogantly, they tromped into the sleeping village. Vanderling led them past huts, where the sounds of awakening villagers could be dimly heard as they hurried by, booted feet pounding bard on bare earth. He led them straight to the isolated hut on the far side of the Bughill.

  And there it was—you could smell that lousy Bug-stink all over the place, that and the smell of the crude booze they kept the Brains lushed on.

  “Okay,” Vanderling said as they paused momentarily outside the reeking little hut. “Remember, guns, not morningstars. We want to make it fast, and we want to make it noisy!”

  They burst into the hut. In the far corner, a withered old man slept on a straw pallet. Piled next to the pallet were a dozen clay jugs, open-mouthed and filled with raw alcohol. But the reek of the alcohol was utterly overpowered by the rancid odor of the thing in the center of the hut.

  The Brain lay there on its belly, pulsating, its body so bloated that its eight legs, little atrophied nubbins, did not reach the ground. Its head was dwarfed by the grotesque, sacklike body, and the face was almost invisible, a hideous doll-face, tiny black eyes, small cilia-rimmed mouth, almost buried in convoluted green flesh.

  “Thirs? Thirs? Orders, thirs?” the Brain began to chitter chitinously.

  Disgusting smelly mess! Vanderling thought. He raised his rifle, pointed it at the Brain, emptied five shots into its face in rapid succession. His men began firing wildly, hitting the Brain in the f
ace, legs, body. Where dozens of bullets punctured the chitin, neat holes spouted heavy green ichor, and the room filled with the choking reek of gunpowder.

  Vanderling kept firing. “Thirs…? Thirs…? Orders, thirs…?” the dying Brain croaked weakly. Then it tottered and fell over on its side, the eight little legs waving feebly…

  “What—?” Thunk! A liquid, burbling scream, a quick series of horrid little moans, more heavy thunking sounds.

  Vanderling whirled, saw that the old man had risen off the pallet, had been clubbed in the face by a morningstar, his features a hideous mask of chopped and bleeding meat where the blade-studded steel ball had struck. The old man fell backward where he stood. Gomez, Jonson, and the others clustered around his supine body, smashing it senselessly with their morningstars, kicking it savagely with their boots, uttering throaty animal noises.

  Vanderling cursed, jabbed at his men with his rifle butt and boots. “Cut it out! Cut it out! Enough! Let’s get the hell out of here! Out! Out! Out!”

  With shouts, curses, and kicks, he managed to herd them out the door and into the night. As they ran through the village toward the cover of the woods, dark, shouting, gesticulating shapes erupted from the huts, bumped them, pummeled them blindly in the night.

  The guerrillas began to shout, began swinging their morningstars, using them to clear a path through the villagers as casually as a man hacks his way through a jungle with a machete. Howls of pain filled the darkness, screams, curses, the sickening sound of metal on flesh.

  Vanderling felt hands pummel him, claw at him. Cursing, he unshipped his morningstar, swung it in wide random arcs. He felt a shudder run up his arm as it struck flesh and bone, then another and another.

  Something within him seemed to give way as he fought his way to the woods in the darkness, the anonymous darkness, where no eye watched, no man saw. As the Animals clawed blindly at him, as he felt their flesh tear and pulp beneath his morningstar, a curtain seemed to part in his mind, revealing a hot red haze, a blazing animal heat that overwhelmed him, set his blood afire, surrendered his being totally to the moment.

  He screamed like an animal, swung his weapon with wild, unthinking abandon, laughed gutturally as he felt it slam home again and again and again. He swung his free arm like a club, felt flesh beneath his fist, kicked out at soft parts, and the sea of screams filling the darkness urged him on to smash and punch and kick and kill.

  “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” he chanted shrilly over and over again as he hacked his way through the human underbrush toward the woods.

  Finally, the village, the screams and moans of the maimed and the dying, was behind him, and he stood panting in the quiet, dark woods. He took a head count as vague shapes clustered about him. One… three… five… They had all made it!

  The herogyn-heads were laughing, breathing languorously in the night. Vanderling found himself laughing, breathing with them, one of them. “Okay, boys, okay!” he told them. “A good night’s work, and now back to camp for the happy stuff!”

  In the knot of men, back-slapping, grinning, happy men, Willem Vanderling walked through the jungle toward the guerrilla camp, the warm aftermath of battle bathing him in contentment.

  Piece of cake! he thought. A real piece of cake! And the fun, he knew, was only just beginning…

  “Looks good. Looks pretty damned good,” Bart Fraden said. Okay nodded, turned to glance over his shoulder at the guerrilla camp, now quieting in the twilight. Fraden watched Olnay looking the camp over, leaned back in his chair, and smiled a knowing smile.

  With the campaign to destroy the Brains well under way enough by now for Willem to he out of it, with scores of Brains already dead, with the recruitment rate having nearly tripled in the past week, it was now time to test out the rumor mill that Olnay had set up.

  “Okay, Colonel, you’ve got the agents now,” he said. “Let’s see what they can do.”

  Olnay turned away from the center of the camp, where nearly two hundred volunteers hunkered around dozens of campfires, eating the last bites of the dry, flat Sangran bread, and looked at Fraden expectantly.

  “We’ll see how good your boys are at spreading propaganda,” Fraden said. “The. Killers are wiping out the Brains because they figure that starving Animals can be driven crazy all the quicker. I want every villager in this district to know that by next week. And I want the story to end with ‘only Bard Fraden can save us.’ Can do?”

  “Y’Killers are killing y’Brains?” Olnay said incredulously.

  Fraden hesitated. There was something to be said for having Olnay know the truth… It would be bad news if he found out he was being lied to. On the other hand, the first rule of security was tell no one more than he had to know to do his job.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “I want the people to think that whether it’s true or not. What they think’s going on is what counts, not what really is.”

  Olnay nodded. “Y’propaganda’s not truth, not a lie either? Or it’s both…” He seemed to struggle with the concept.

  “Never mind,” Fraden said. “Too much thinking is bad for digestion. Let’s just say that anything’s true if you make it true. Men control truth, it doesn’t control them. Now hop to it, eh?”

  Olnay seemed pleased with that pragmatic definition, or at least confused enough to stop thinking about it, Fraden mused, as the Sangran went about his business.

  He stood, stretched, laughed. Years ago, he had given up worrying about the essential naivete and selfishness of the human race. The worst human traits—greed, hate, stupidity—could be useful if you simply determined to use them and not try to reform clods. Later, when the war was won, maybe it would be time to clean up some of the more distasteful messes. But now, he told himself, relax, dig it! For the first time since he had landed on Sangre, he felt completely on top of things. He could feel the Revolution beginning to build up momentum, could sense events, people, whole patterns of action, the shape and feel of the Revolution itself, as part of a great web, with himself at the center, controlling, stimulating, digging, as if the planet, the people, the Revolution were parts of his own body.

  He stepped inside the hut Sophia was lying on the bed, languid, perhaps bored. He walked over to the bed, looked down at her, A thrill went through him. How great it was to be the center of a whole revolution, to sense men and events, a whole planetful of ’em, quickening to your own will, falling one by one into patterns that were extensions of your own self, a whole universe orienting itself around your being! To be k charge, to be Number One, the Leader, the Man Who, and to just be able to look down at your woman and to know you’ll soon be able to lay a whole planet like a bauble at her feet if the spirit moves you!

  She looked up at him. Her eyes widened, she smiled, a wild, wild smile.

  “Bart…” she murmured. “I’ve never seen you… You look like a bull, a big virile bull, Zeus about to rape Europa…”

  Fraden laughed. Yeah, I feel like a god, all right! Zeus had his planet and I have mine! he thought, listened to the blood pounding in his temples. Pride, yeah, pride! What was wrong with pride? Anybody didn’t dig pride, didn’t dig himself. Anybody didn’t dig pride deserved to have a man who did rule him. Screw humility! You are who you say you are as long as you can bade it up!

  He stood over the bed, looked down, anticipated her touch, yet made no move. “I feel like a bull,” he said. “Why not? I’m Bart Fraden and this is my planet, mine! Every man should feel this before he calls himself a man. If I were Tarzan and you Jane, I’d kick Cheeta out on his ass, beat my chest, and—”

  “I’ve never seen you like this before, you goddamned arrogant bastard,” she said, but laughing with, shining eyes as she said it.

  “You never saw me on the bottom pushing my way up before. Scares you?”

  “Does Tarzan scare Jane?” she answered touching his arm lightly. He felt the moment building between them, felt himself swelling, enlarging, felt the feeling of pow
er feeding his manhood, felt his manhood feeding his power. He saw in her eyes that she felt it too, saw that the raw, animal, maleness in him was stoking the fire of womanness in her. The heat she was giving off fed his own and the room seemed like the center of a volcano about to explode.

  “Only their chimpanzee knows for sure…” he said.

  The inane words, like a catalyst, ignited the explosion. She reached up, pulled him down on her with surprising savage strength, uttering little piercing cries, pleading, begging, demanding. He was all over her, and clothes went somewhere, anywhere, and the intoxication, with her, with himself, with the universe, swept his mind away, and his whole being was in his body, his skin, going out to her, penetrating her, enveloping her. He felt her giving of herself as an offering, yet aggressively, proudly, and as a monarch takes homage, with pride and with grace, he took of her, and the thrust of his taking and the enfolding of her giving produced a crescendo that for a timeless instant united them, giver and taker, woman and man, as a worldfilling whole.

  Long minutes of silence later, she looked up at him with smoky, sparkling eyes. “Long live… long live…” she tried to say and broke up into girlish giggles.

  “Long live what?”

  “Long live the Free Republic!” she roared and broke Into peals of uncontrollable laughter.

  Long live the Free Republic! Bart Fraden thought, half-sardonically, as he glanced behind him at the new flag of the Free Republic of Sangre—a red circle on a square of green cloth—fluttering from a pole so crude that the bark was still peeling off it.

  But that flag was less presumptuous every day. Now it was being carried openly down the road in the daylight. In front of the flag, Fraden marched, alone. Behind marched a hundred armed guerrillas in neat formation—volunteers all—and behind them came another hundred men or so from the last two villages who had joined up on the spot. Bart Fraden marched at the head of two hundred men under the hot, red Sangran sun, and to him it seemed as if he outshone it, that the heat he was giving’ off made that ball of hot plasma seem like a hunk of red ice. He marched, and he felt the power march with him.