Arslan

CHAPTER 1
When his name first cropped up in the news reports, it was just one more foreign name to worry about, like so many others. And like so many others, it graduated in due time to the level of potential crisis. But before it had gone any further than that, suddenly all the rules had been changed when we weren't looking, and if you said "he" without an obvious antecedent you were talking about Arslan.

On TV and in the news weeklies he'd looked no different from a lot of them: young, jaunty, halfway Oriental like the second-row extras in Turandot, and every one of them a major general at the very least. "Turkistan--is that independent now?" Luella had asked me, one of the first times he showed up.

"I think it always has been." I meant to look it up in the big atlas at school; but I was busy planning for quarterly exams, and that intention went the way of a lot of other things I meant to do. I never did get around to it till after the Emergency Broadcast Network began its terse announcements that martial law had been proclaimed throughout the United States and that all U.S. armed forces were under the command of General Arslan. Among other things that hectic day, I looked at the map of Central Asia. Turkistan. Cap: Bukhara. Pop: 1,369,000. Even South Vietnam would have been able to handle a place that size. Still, with China on one border and Russia on another, and an oil field begging for development, it was small wonder Arslan had made a splash at the U.N.

"Stay off the highways," the EBS kept saying. Whether that was a friendly voice or a hostile one was anybody's guess. "Only military transport is permitted on state, interstate, and national highways." Military transport--that included, apparently, the great commercial trucks that rolled past the square and on through town. We stood and watched them in the early dusk, and I wondered if it was good luck or bad that Kraftsville happened to lie on a main highway.

"I've got to get home," Paul Sears protested. "I can't help it if I live on the hardroad."

"If I were you, Paul, I'd go around by the back road." That was Arnold Morgan, knowing all the answers. "Once the President invokes his emergency powers, we're required to follow his instructions. That's Federal law."

Paul snorted. "It didn't sound like the President to me."

"I'd feel better if I knew who that General Arslan was," somebody else put in. Which was about par for Kraftsville. Plenty of people in town had never heard of Premier Arslan, or didn't remember it if they had.

"He's the one that's been talking to Red China," I said. The last news I remembered hearing about him, Arslan and the Chinese premier had been in Moscow by invitation, presumably discussing their border dispute. The Russians had been offering for months to mediate it. Turkistan had been cagey, China had emphatically refused; but at last they had agreed to a Moscow summit meeting, agenda unspecified. Now, a few days after the meeting started, Arslan was Deputy Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. And the trucks were rolling. It didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Everybody was on the telephone. Long distance calls were getting through to some places, but none farther away than Louisiana, where Rachel Munsey talked to some of her relations and found out there was fighting going on down there. Maybe riot or maybe war--Rachel had managed not to find out that little detail; but there were people with uniforms and people without, and black and white in both categories. We couldn't make connections with the East Coast or the West Coast, and even Chicago was cut off cold. There were open lines to St. Louis, our nearest city, for just two days. Then they went dead, sometime in the night.