The girl in the orange sweater had a handful of
scribbled notes, and was telling them where to push the pills. There
were other objects on the map, too--pistol-cartridges, and
cigarettes, and foil-wrapped food-concentrate wafers. Paula, seeing
him, straightened.
"The pink are ours, general," she said. "The white are the geeks." Von
Schlichten suppressed a grin; that was the second time he'd heard her
use that word, this evening. "The cigarettes are airjeeps, the
cartridges are combat-cars, and the wafers are lorries or
troop-carriers."
"Not exactly regulation map-markers, but I've seen stranger things
used.... Captain Malavez!"
"Yes, sir?" The girl captain, rushing past, her hands full of
teleprint-sheets, stopped in mid-stride.
"What we need," he told her, "is a big TV-screen, and a pickup mounted
on some sort of a contragravity vehicle at about two to five thousand
feet directly overhead, to give us an image of the whole area. Can
do?"
"Can try, sir. We have an eight-foot circular screen that ought to do
all right for two thousand feet. I'll implement that at once."
Going into a temporarily idle telecast booth, he called Konkrook, and
finally got Themistocles M'zangwe on the screen.
"How is it, now?" he asked.
"Getting a little better," the Graeco-African replied. "Half an hour
ago, we were shooting geeks out the windows, here; now we have them
contained between the spaceport and the native-troops and labor
barracks, and down the east side of the island to the farms.
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