Free Arslan by M. J. Engh

legally I could tear it down any time I wanted to, but it was just as well not to confront Arslan head-on—not with anything less than a fait accompli .
    That meant getting busy before the Turkistanis moved in and made it impossible. Even now, it was tricky. We had to get the fire well started before they noticed it; and there was some remote chance of it blowing across the side yards and catching on my house. But we were lucky enough to have a dry, windless night. The Turkistanis got there with the city firetruck in time to save the shell of the house, nothing else.
    That brought me on the carpet before Arslan himself. I didn't deny I'd had the place burned.
    “Why do you destroy your own property, sir?”
    “Why take over the world and then start tearing it down?”
    He laughed outright, but his face hardened again in a hurry. “Who are your subordinates? Who have helped you?”
    “You wanted me to spread the word, General. I can't do that unless people know they can trust me.”
    He eyed me steadily for a while—and those eyes could be pretty damned steady. Then the hardness relaxed, and he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “Let them trust.”
    There were other kinds of planning besides economic, and other kinds of survival. Above all, there was one thing I was anxious to keep from getting started. I didn't need a preacher to tell me that the best of us at the best of times were no more than poor ornery sinners. And Arslan had put a terrible weapon within our reach—a weapon to use not against him but against ourselves: the billet rule.
    I didn't think there had ever been a murder in Kraft County in my lifetime, or, in the normal course of things, ever would be. But who was to say there might not have been, if there had been a really sure and safe and well-established method handy? Now we were living in a time of violence and stress and permanent emergency, and we had that kind of a method. To get rid of your enemy and his whole household, you only had to throw a rock at his billeted soldier. There were risks, of course, but they didn't amount to much, compared with the certainty of the return. There was the little matter of incidentally murdering maybe three or four innocent children; but these were desperate times, and anyway, you wouldn't have to pull the trigger on them yourself.
    I worked as hard at it as I'd ever worked at anything. What with this, and laying the groundwork for the economic plan, and a few other things, I had become a first-class rumor mill. I started a lot of talk under the pretense of just passing it on, and I learned to convey a lot of information and opinion by asking questions. Some people I could talk to straight, which was more comfortable, but most of it was sideways and round-about.
    We had to keep up the faith that there was a viable United States and a viable Christian Church somewhere over the boundary of District 3281; that the old rules were still essentially valid, however much we might have to twist them to fit new cases, and that the old penalties would descend all the harder after the time out.
    We needed that assurance. Arslan's brothel was more than a convenience for his soldiers; it was a deliberate focus of corruption for the county. In other words, it was free and public. There would even have been a useful side to that, except that the American girls were reserved for the troops. A truckload of foreign girls (it was one of them that Arslan had led up the stairs, and not the last one) had been installed in the north wing of the high school, and that wing was open to all comers. It emerged—emerged pretty fast for a supposedly Christian town—that these girls were Russians. And, not to make it worse than it was, most of the north wing's business was Russian soldiers. You might put it down to homesickness.
    There were bound to be a few failures; you couldn't expect any better. I came home one day and found Luella waiting for me in the bedroom.
    “I just couldn't