The Best Made Plans | Page 3

and lay stretched out. He had sought cover behind the hummock near the speaker stand and now he raised his head cautiously, to watch the silent windows of the house. Other men lay in similar positions, their attention on the windows, their weapons ready. The windows stared blankly back.
The camera shifted back to the weapons carrier. A low voice spoke.
"Let's have a look at that scope, Walton."
A man's back moved aside and the light and dark pattern of the range detector showed on the screen. The low voice spoke again.
"Four of them," it said. "Looks as though they've got a small arsenal in there with 'em. See those bright pips?"
"Khroal?" queried another voice.
"A couple of those, yeah," the first voice said. "But that isn't too bad. Those are just antipersonnel. They've got a pair of rippers, too. Good thing we've got screens up. And there's a firebug. They could give those guys on the ground a real hard time." A finger appeared in front of the detector.
"See that haze with the lines in it?"
"Them the charges?"
"That's right. They show up like that on both scopes, see? You can always spot heat-ray charges. They look like nothing else. Only trouble is, they louse up the range scale. You can't tell----"
* * * * *
Don looked critically at the carrier.
There was, he thought, evidence of carelessness. No deflector screens were set up. A Moreku tribesman could put a stone from a sling in there, and really mess them up--if he could sneak in close enough. He grinned inwardly.
"Of course, if he hit the right spot, he'd go up with 'em," he told himself. "Be quite a blast."
He continued to study the weapons carrier arrangements, noting that the chargers were hot, ready for instant activation. Even the gun current was on. He could see the faint iridescence around the beam-forming elements. He shook his head.
"Hit that lens system against something right now," he muttered inaudibly, "or get something in the field, and that would be the end."
The loud-speaker clicked again and the camera swung to center the house in its field of view.
"Your time is running out, Waern." The amplified roar of the voice reverberated from the hills. "You have twenty seconds left."
Abruptly, the speaker became a blaze of almost intolerable light. The man near it rolled away hurriedly, dropping his microphone. Another man quickly picked up a handset and spoke briefly into it.
Again, the camera picked up the weapons carrier. The crew chief had his hand on his microphone switch. He nodded curtly and adjusted a dial. The lens barrel of the projector swung toward the house, stopped, swung back a trifle, and held steady.
The pointer, sitting in front of the crew chief, moved a hand and flicked a switch.
"Locked on."
The crew chief glanced over the man's shoulder, reached out to put his hand on a polished lever, and pressed. Mechanism at the rear of the long projector clicked. The faint glow over the beam formers became a blaze. A charge case dropped out and rolled into a chute. Another charge slid in to replace it and for a brief instant, a coruscating stream of almost solid light formed a bridge between house and carrier.
Then the busy click of mechanism was drowned by the crash of an explosion. A ragged mass of flame shot from the house, boiled skyward, then darkened, to be replaced by a confused blur of smoke and flying debris. The crew chief took his hand from the lever and waited.
At last, the drumroll of echoes faded to silence--the debris fell back to ground--the smoke drifted down the valley with the light breeze. And the rising sun again flooded its light over the estate.
The rambling white house, shaded by its miniature grove of trees, had gone. Charred timbers reached toward the sky from a blackened scar in the grass. On the carefully kept lawn, little red flowers bloomed, their black beds expanding as the flaming blossoms grew.
Near the charred skeleton of the house, one tree remained stubbornly upright, its bare branches hanging brokenly. About it, bright flames danced on the shattered bits of its companions.
In the fields about the house, men were getting to their feet, to stretch cramped muscles and exercise chilled limbs. A few of them started toward the ruins and the man by the speaker got to his feet to wave them back.
"Too hot to approach yet," he shouted. "We'll let a clean-up crew go over it later."
The scene faded. For an instant, the royal colors of Oredan filled the screen, then the banner folded back and Daniel Stern faced his audience, his gaze seeming to search the thoughts of those before him.
"And so," he said, "Harle Waern came to bay and elected to shoot it out with the Enforcement Corps." He moved his head from