Soul Music

" It's not an original idea, mind you," said the ser­geant. "Been done dozens of times."

" Yeah," said the corporal awkwardly. "That's what they must've thought. And then... and then... when they was galloping down the sand‑dunes... when they was almost on us, laughing and everything, say­ing stuff like "that old trick again"... someone shouted "Fire!" and they did."

" The dead men‑?"

" I joined the Legion to... er... you know, with your mind..." the corporal began.

" Forget?" said Albert.

" That's right. Forget. And I've been getting good at it. But I'm not going to forget my old mate Nudger Malik stuck full of arrows and still giving the enemy what for," said the corporal. "Not for a long time. I'm going to give it a try, mind you."

Albert looked up at the battlements. They were empty.

" Someone formed 'em up in formation and they all marched out, afterwards," said the corporal. "And I went out to look just now and there was just graves. They must have dug them for one another..."

" Tell me," said Albert, "who is this "someone" to whom you keep referring?"

The soldiers looked at one another.

" We've just been talking about that," said the ser­geant. "We've been trying to remember. He was in... the Pit... when it started..."

" Tall, was he?" said Albert.

" Could have been tall, could have been tall," nodded the corporal. "He had a tall voice, certainly." He looked puzzled at the words coming out of his own mouth.

" What did he look like?"

" Well, he had a... with... and he was about... more or less a..."

" Did he look... loud and deep?" said Albert.

The corporal grinned with relief. "That's him," he said. "Private... Private... Beau... Beau... can't quite remember his name..."

" I know that when he walked out of the..." the sergeant began, and began to snap his fingers irritably, "... thing you open and shut. Made of wood. Hinges and bolts on it. Thank you. Gate. That's right... gate. When he went out of the gate he said... what was it he said, corporal?"

" He said, "EVERY LAST DETAIL", Sir."

Albert looked around the fort.

"So he's gone."

" Who?"

" The man you were just telling me about."

" Oh. Yes. Er. Have you any idea who he was, offendi? I mean, it was amazing... talk about morale..."

" Esprit de corpse?" said Albert, who could be nasty at times. "I suppose he didn't say where he was going next?"

" Where who was going next?" said the sergeant, wrinkling his forehead in honest enquiry.

" Forget I asked," said Albert.

He took a last look round the little fort. It prob­ably didn't matter much in the history of the world whether it survived or not, whether the dotted line on the map went one way or the other. Just like the Master to tinker with things...

Sometimes he tries to be human, too, he thought. And he makes a pig's ear out of it.

" Carry on, sergeant," he said, and wandered back into the desert.

The legionnaires watched him disappear over the dunes, and then got on with the job of tidying up the fort.

" Who d'you think he was?"

" Who?"

" The person you just mentioned."

" Did I?"

" Did you what?"

Albert crested a dune. From here the dotted line was just visible, winding treacherously across the sand.

SQUEAK.

" You and me both," said Albert.

He removed an extremely grubby handkerchief from a pocket, knotted it in all four corners, and put it on his head.

" Right," he said, but there was a trace of uncertainty in his voice. "Seems to me we're not being logical about this."

SQUEAK.

" I mean, we could be chasing him all over the place."

SQUEAK.

" So maybe we ought to think about this."

SQUEAK.

" Now... if you were on the Disc, definitely feeling a bit strange, and could go absolutely anywhere, any­where at all... where would you go?"

SQUEAK?

" Anywhere at all. But somewhere where no‑one re­members your name."

The Death of Rats looked around at the endless, featureless and above all dry desert.

SQUEAK.

" You know, I think you're right."

It was in an apple tree.

He built me a swing, Susan remembered.

She sat and stared at the thing.

It was quite complicated. In so far as the thinking behind it could be inferred from the resulting con­struction, it had run like this:

Clearly a swing should be hung from the stoutest branch.

In fact ‑ safety being paramount ‑ it would be better to hang it from the two stoutest branches, one to each rope.

They had turned out to be on opposite sides of the tree.

Never go back. That was part of the logic. Always press on, step by logical step.

So... he'd removed about six feet from the middle of the tree's trunk, thus allowing the swing to, well, swing.

The tree hadn't died. It was still quite healthy.