An officer heaved himself out of the seat beside the driver, cursed irritably, flung open the door and swung out onto the running board—a malevolently superhuman figure in his panoply of snouted mask and rubberized armor. His gloved hand lifted, sliding a long-barreled automatic from its worn holster, aiming. At the shot's crash the man from the thicket stiffened and toppled into the mud, where he writhed painfully. Two more bullets, carefully placed, put a stop to that.
The officer slid back into the seat and sighed with a sucking sound inside his mask. Without being told, the driver turned the truck cautiously off the road; tilting far over, left wheels deep in the slippery ditch, it ground in lowest gear past the motionless body, keeping several feet away.
In the back of the truck, five oddly-assorted civilian men and one woman huddled together and exchanged vaguely curious glances over the stop, the shooting, and the detour. Then, as the machine climbed back onto the roadbed and they could see the corpse sprawled in the way behind, the interest left their faces; they reflected only the emptiness of the gray sky, the hopelessness of the sodden fields and woods they passed. The prisoners might have found the weather appropriate for death. They did not speak of that, because they knew they were on their way to die.
But the masked and armored soldiers who sat nervously watching them, rifles clutched between their knees, did speak of death, and made sour jokes about it. They did not know they themselves were going to death—that when the execution was done and reported by radio, a plane would be overhead inside two minutes to bomb them.
That would take place by order of the Diktatura, that is: by the sovereign will of the People, expressed by its Executive Council, which was responsible directly to the Dictator.
Naturally it was the People's will that no one come out of a plague spot, for the People feared death.
Joseph Euge said as much to the pale, underfed-looking young man who crouched beside him in the bed of the truck. "The gasproof clothing," he added, "protects nothing but morale, and these men's morale needs to last only until—their job is done."
The young man looked at him fixedly, seeing gray hair, a firm-lined face, and a suit that had been expensively respectable. They did not know each other's names. All the trials had been separate; each prisoner had been told that the others—whom, for the most part, he had never heard of—had confessed the whole plot.
"What makes you think so?"
"I know a good deal of the Dictator's ways," said Euge quietly; "I used to be well acquainted with him."