Oomphel in the Sky | Page 5

some unpleasantly ingenious death by
his clientry, and this was going to turn out to be the biggest
magico-prophetic blooper in all the long unrecorded history of
Kwannon.
A few minutes after the car turned south from the ruined village, he
could see contragravity-vehicles in the air ahead, and then the fields
and buildings of the Sanders plantation. A lot more contragravity was
grounded in the fallow fields, and there were rows of pneumatic
balloon-tents, and field-kitchens, and a whole park of engineering
equipment. Work was going on in the klooba-fields, too; about three
hundred natives were cutting open the six-foot leafy balls and getting
out the biocrystals. Three of the plantation airjeeps, each with a pair of
machine guns, were guarding them, but they didn't seem to be having
any trouble. He saw Sanders in another jeep, and had Heshto put the car
alongside.
"How's it going, Paul?" he asked over his radio. "I see you have some
help, now."
"Everybody's from Qualpha's, and from Darshat's," Sanders replied.
"The Army had no place to put them, after they burned themselves
out." He laughed happily. "Miles, I'm going to save my whole crop! I
thought I was wiped out, this morning."
He would have been, if Gonzales hadn't brought those Kwanns in. The
klooba was beginning to wither; if left unharvested, the biocrystals
would die along with their hosts and crack into worthlessness. Like all
the other planters, Sanders had started no new crystals since the hot
weather, and would start none until the worst of the heat was over. He'd
need every crystal he could sell to tide him over.
[Illustration]
"The Welfarers'll make a big forced-labor scandal out of this," he
predicted.
"Why, such an idea." Sanders was scandalized. "I'm not forcing them to

eat."
"The Welfarers don't think anybody ought to have to work to eat. They
think everybody ought to be fed whether they do anything to earn it or
not, and if you try to make people earn their food, you're guilty of
economic coercion. And if you're in business for yourself and want
them to work for you, you're an exploiter and you ought to be
eliminated as a class. Haven't you been trying to run a plantation on this
planet, under this Colonial Government, long enough to have found
that out, Paul?"
Brigadier General Ramón Gonzales had taken over the first--counting
down from the landing-stage--floor of the plantation house for his
headquarters. His headquarters company had pulled out removable
partitions and turned four rooms into one, and moved in enough screens
and teleprinters and photoprint machines and computers to have
outfitted the main newsroom of Planetwide News. The place had the
feel of a newsroom--a newsroom after a big story has broken and the
'cast has gone on the air and everybody--in this case about twenty
Terran officers and non-coms, half women--standing about watching
screens and smoking and thinking about getting a follow-up ready.
Gonzales himself was relaxing in Sanders' business-room, with his belt
off and his tunic open. He had black eyes and black hair and mustache,
and a slightly equine face that went well with his Old Terran Spanish
name. There was another officer with him, considerably
younger--Captain Foxx Travis, Major General Maith's aide.
"Well, is there anything we can do for you, Miles?" Gonzales asked,
after they had exchanged greetings and sat down.
"Why, could I have your final situation-progress map? And would you
be willing to make a statement on audio-visual." He looked at his watch.
"We have about twenty minutes before the 'cast."
"You have a map," Gonzales said, as though he were walking tiptoe
from one word to another. "It accurately represents the situation as of
the moment, but I'm afraid some minor unavoidable inaccuracies may

have crept in while marking the positions and times for the earlier
phases of the operation. I teleprinted a copy to Planetwide along with
the one I sent to Division Headquarters."
He understood about that and nodded. Gonzales was zipping up his
tunic and putting on his belt and sidearm. That told him, before the
brigadier general spoke again, that he was agreeable to the audio-visual
appearance and statement. He called the recording studio at Planetwide
while Gonzales was inspecting himself in the mirror and told them to
get set for a recording. It only ran a few minutes; Gonzales, speaking
without notes, gave a brief description of the operation.
"At present," he concluded, "we have every native village and every
plantation and trading-post within two hundred miles of the Sanders
plantation occupied. We feel that this swarming has been definitely
stopped, but we will continue the occupation for at least the next
hundred to two hundred hours. In the meantime, the natives in the
occupied villages are being put to work building