Part 23
1
Damn Terl!
At first, Jonnie had thought he had data on the point positions of the poles. He had no adequate viewing equipment in his house in Scotland; he had only taken a quick scan and a glance at a box Ker had sent that seemed to have just a piece of cable in it. It was months to Day 92 and so he was happy to stay for lunch and see Aunt Ellen and the parson again. And to try to cheer up Pattie.
He had flown back to the African minesite in good spirits. He had gotten up this morning all ready to really plow into it. And now this!
Glencannon had said the delay was occasioned by Terl’s spending most of his time outside measuring. Terl apparently didn’t like to stay outside very long: Glencannon hinted that a bit of air had been injected into breathe-gas vials when the office was set up in order to discourage Terl from developing too much of a fondness for wandering around. Also, Glencannon had told him, they had omitted something in their original planning—they didn’t have a picto-recorder to record what went on around the platform itself. But they had rigged one in a tree now and the Brigantes hadn’t noticed, and they didn’t have to depend on drone overflys anymore.
Looking at them now, Jonnie saw how meticulous Terl had been in measuring distances to poles. He had almost used a micrometer. But he had not been measuring point positions for teleportation firing!
Here it was, the full layout and plan, complete with the exact dimensions: the firing platform, the new position for the console, and a squiggly line.
Jonnie knew now why Terl had spent so many days on force equations. He had been calculating exactly how close you could put the squiggly line to the firing platform without messing up the teleportation! There it was on his final plan: seven and eight-elevenths feet. All around the firing platform and the new console.
The box Ker had sent contained a little note, written with his wrong paw, if Jonnie knew Ker.
Jonnie inspected it. The cross-section was obviously the same as that around the dam and site in Kariba. But now he had a look at what it was composed of. It had to be put in right side up and be pointed in the direction you wanted the screen to go. It itself was armored, and how Ker had cut it, he did not have any idea.
The way it worked seemed fairly obvious: the bottom insulation interior was really a reflector. Just above that went the main current source. Then above that there was another wire and above that a third and so on up. A stack of fifteen wires. Each apparently amplified the charge of the one just below it. Out at the end it must be fastened together with a box, not included here, which assisted amplification. The resulting fabulously boosted charge must be tuned to the fields of the core and ring particles of air atoms. Hit, the molecules of air realigned themselves into molecular cohesion. The final product was an invisible curtain wall entitled “atmosphere-armor ionization cable.” They had proved it at Kariba. Not even a bullet would go through it.
It wasn’t a “force screen.” Those were used in space and the Hawvins employed them on major war vessels. It was air armor.
And Terl was going to put this seven and eight-elevenths feet all around the console and platform?
Jonnie’s tentative plan had been to let Terl build the console and set up the firing platform and then somehow seize it.
But this changed things.
How could one get through a solid curtain like that?
Damn Terl!
Dully, Jonnie made quite a few copies of the firing platform plan. He got out the Intergalactic Mining Company map of their onetime defenses and noted where Ker must be digging up cable for reinstallation at the platform.
The map was so old and creased that he hadn’t really noticed before that all minesites had these cables around their dams and along their lines. He saw now that this African minesite had a second underground power transmission line and that what had been known as the Owens Falls Dam back in man-days was protected. He called for Angus and told him to go down there and check, and if the cable was still there, to get the trees removed from above it, using a blade scraper, and then if the switchboard at the dam still worked, to shift over to underground transmission and drill the sentries on turning it on and off so one could get in and out of the dam, and in and out of the minesite.
Jonnie, trying to work his way through this new one, wandered around the compound. He saw Sir Robert had just arrived and showed him on the old map that all minesites had these and that he should probably use them.
Jonnie wandered on, troubled.
Teleportation! The secret of the Psychlos. With it they had controlled universes. Without it, he didn’t see how he could defend this one planet.
He saw MacKendrick. Yes, the wounded Psychlos were all well now. Except Chirk who just lay there. No, he hadn’t figured any way to get those things out of a Psychlo’s head—disturbance at that bone structure would kill the monster. Yes, he realized that if they tried to consult Psychlos on technical matters, they would attack, and kill themselves, or, if female, probably go into a coma like Chirk.
What MacKendrick was really worried about was the diet of the prisoners. The Psychlos in their manuals didn’t consider it valuable information, being Psychlos; the prisoners themselves knew what they ate, but didn’t know the names for it that applied to this planet, and if he didn’t solve it, they’d shortly have no prisoners.
Did Jonnie know they now had three Jambitchows? It was last night. Evidently a scouting party had been sent down to investigate all the new activity that was going on at Kariba, and the Scot officer there, the moment he got word a small craft had detached itself from the Jambitchow cruiser up in orbit, had put into action something dreamed up by the Chinese. They called it a “tiger-net.” They put a dummy dressed like a Chinese down near a pool away from the camp and the Jambitchows went right in to grab the dummy and a big net had been tripped up in the trees and they’d been caught. Evil-looking brutes.
MacKendrick wanted to know whether he’d heard what they ate. No? Well, the old woman from the Mountains of the Moon was helping and maybe they could work it out.
Jonnie wandered on. Damn Terl! It was getting too chancy! Somewhere, somehow he should be able to get the information on some other channel.
Once before he had thought of exploring a teleportation motor to see whether he could get some sort of answer out of it. A motor wasn’t a transshipment rig, but it did work on space-position change.
He had a motor and console to fool with: the ones from the wrecked tank in the battle of the pass. It had been carted in to the garage repair shop. Maybe if he just tore it apart—a thin hope, for he’d already looked at such rigs. But he got into some work clothes and went down to the repair level.
The Basher was sitting there, badly scarred and with a couple of plates sprung. He got into it, checked the fuel, and started the motor with a “right here” space coordination punched in on the console. It ran! One thing you could say about the Psychlos, their stuff lasted forever.
He shut the motor off and took a screwdriver to the top screws of the console. He loosened them a half-turn, each one.
Jonnie was distracted by a sentry appearing at the tank port and handing him some ear pads, asking him to put them on. Jonnie stood up and looked out the turret port to find out what was going on.
It was Stormalong and the Tolnep, Double-Ensign Slitheter Pliss, surrounded by guards.
“What’s up?” called Jonnie.
They didn’t hear him. They all had ear pads on. Then Jonnie saw that the Tolnep patrolcraft had been dollied in here and he could guess the rest of it. Stormalong probably wanted to know how it flew so he could teach pilots how to handle Tolnep craft. Probably Angus wanted to know the cycles of vibration of that paralysis beam.
Slitheter Pliss seemed quite amiable. He had obviously written himself off as a Tolnep. He saw Jonnie and hissed a greeting.
But if they were going to let the Tolnep near that lethal sound vibrator, they were taking no chances that he would turn it on, paralyze the lot of them, and escape. Jonnie didn’t think so, for the Tolnep had nowhere to go. But he put the ear pads on anyway.
The Tolnep seemed to find it a bit provoking that the accumulator terminals had been bent. They responded to his dumb-show signs and gave him some tools and he straightened them and rehooked the power cable. The craft promptly began to run and he shut it off. With more dumb-show he pointed the switches out to Stormalong, indicating what they connected to, and Stormalong seemed to find it quite elementary; he nodded to the Tolnep and signaled the guards to take him away.
Once Pliss was away from the craft, Jonnie cautiously removed the ear pads and started to duck down out of the turret to resume his work.
The Tolnep alarmed the guards by pausing and swinging open the side door of the tank. He almost got himself shot. But Jonnie gestured for them to back up. He could shove the screwdriver into the Tolnep’s teeth if he tried to bite.
“You people aren’t Psychlo-commanded, are you?” said the Tolnep, hanging in the door. Getting no answer—since Jonnie was not going to volunteer information to a potential escapee no matter how remote escape might be—the Tolnep said, “What are you trying to do with that tank motor?”
Jonnie just looked at him for a moment and then it occurred to him that as a Tolnep officer, Pliss might have been trained on these things. “You know how this works?”
“Blast no! And neither does anyone else in any universe that I ever heard of,” said Pliss. “We’ve never raided this planet but we have raided other Psychlo bases. According to the textbooks, we’ve brought in thousands of these things just for the experts to look at.” He smiled a rather frightening smile. “I’ll bet my next month’s pay, which I’ll never get, that you people are up against the same thing that everybody else is up against.”
Allowing for possible malice, Jonnie looked encouraging.
“We’ve gotten their textbooks, their mathematics texts even. We’ve actually captured a transshipment console intact. It said in the text that it worked once and then as soon as they tried to find how it was built, pop, no console.
“The very best Tolnep commanders have interrogated Psychlo engineers,” continued Pliss, “and nothing happened. Of use, that is. They chew you up and kill themselves. Been going on, I read once, for 302,000 years!”
The Tolnep changed the subject. “You got a metals sample room around here? I’m hungry and maybe I can find something.”
Jonnie told the guards to take him there.
“So good luck,” said the Tolnep with a sarcastic-sounding hiss. They took him away.
Possibly it was just malice, Jonnie thought. But he didn’t believe it.
He’d lost track of the sequence of actions he had been involved in when interrupted. So he started all over again. He put the console buttons in “right here” and tapped the power switch to start the tank motor.
Nothing happened. He checked the connections. All usual.
He tried to recall whether the Tolnep had touched anything, and the Tolnep hadn’t.
He once more tried to start the motor. Nothing.
What had Ker told him once about consoles? They’d had a blade machine back up. The canopy had been open because Jonnie didn’t need breathe-gas and a torrent of dirt had come spraying down on the console and the blade machine wouldn’t start afterward. Oh, yes. Ker had said to leave it, that he’d get an engineer on it. Not a mechanic, but an engineer! And an engineer had come down and disconnected the console and taken it off to an underground workshop with a small traveling crane.
Jonnie had been more interested in the crane at the time. The cranes had magnetic plates in a circle with springs between them. They didn’t have any motors. The arms of the crane moved by applying power to the magnets. Jonnie wished he had watched when they pulled the console out.
What had he done before the Tolnep arrived? Let’s see. He had loosened the top-plate screws. Psychlos once in a while used screws. Most of the time they just annealed metal with a molecular adhesion/cohesion blade. But they were a bit unusual.
He now took all the screws out and lifted off the plate. The screws went into a black material that held, on its underside, all the complex components of the console.
The screws. They must connect something to something in addition to holding the cover on. But he couldn’t find any switch. They just seemed to be screws. But turning one or another of them had certainly disabled this console.
He put it back together. He looked at another console and found the angle the screws were supposed to be set at. He set the Basher’s console screws at the same angle.
It would not start again, no matter what he did.
It must be the screws. When that blade scraper quit, maybe a dirt clod had hit a screw and turned it.
He went through all the motions for the fifth time, trying to align screws.
But that was it. He had a dead-motor Basher tank.
Jonnie finally gave it up.
He went down to the lake and threw rocks at the crocodiles. Then he became ashamed of himself for teasing the beasts.
They were very amiable creatures compared to Terl.
A tri-wheeler came down from Sir Robert who wanted to tell Jonnie it was unwise to be in the open without air cover. The visitors might send somebody down.
“Would you like to shoot a Psychlo?” Jonnie asked a startled messenger.
Damn Terl! Damn all Psychlos!
And it wasn’t any comfort to know that thousands of races had been saying the same thing for 302,000 years.
He’d have to think of something, some plan, no matter how desperate or dangerous, or this planet was finished!
2
Winter had come to Denver.
But the cold wind and snow flurries could not dampen the elation of Brown Limper Staffor.
The new bank note had arrived.
A packet of them lay on his desk and four of them were spread out before him. How beautiful! They were bright yellow, printed on one side, and there, right in the middle, was an oval picture of Brown Limper!
What an awful lot of trouble they had had getting that picture. Brown Limper had tried innumerable poses, facing this way and that; he had tried countless expressions, frowning or scowling; but none of these would do.
Lars Thorenson had finally had to give him a hand. Lars had explained that it was the beard that was wrong: Brown Limper had a black mustache and beard, and whereas the mustache was all right, the beard was thin and scraggly. So the thing to do was shave off the beard and trim the mustache until it was a bushy tuft just under the nose; that was the sort of mustache the great military hero Hitler had had and so it must be correct.
Then there had been the problem of a proper costume. Nobody seemed to find anything proper. General Snith came to the rescue. He had heard one of his men report that there was an old graveyard that had air-sealed coffins in it. Several had been dug up, looking for a corpse that had been properly dressed: but after more than a thousand years, the fabric wouldn’t hold together. The only outcome of all that was a sickness that had hit the Brigantes: two had died and a doctor, passing through, had said it was “formaldehyde poisoning,” whatever that was.
Somebody had finally found a bolt of gray cloth in a basement that didn’t tear very much and somebody else had found a pattern that said “chauffeur’s uniform” on it and some Brigante women had sewn it up. They had also found a black-visored cap that lasted long enough for the picture.
Snith had a handful of jewelry he’d found—which Brown Limper knew couldn’t possibly be rubies or diamonds and was probably colored glass—and they’d put that on the left breast of the coat so he would have “medals.”
The final posing was solved by using a picture Lars had of somebody called “Napoleon,” also a great military hero of ancient man. The pose had the fingers of one hand tucked into the coat edge on the breast.
MacAdam had been a bit difficult. He had asked Brown Limper whether this was what he really wanted by way of a portrait and Brown Limper had been cross about it. After all that trouble. Of course that was what he wanted!
So here was the new bank note at last. It was a hundred-credit note; MacAdam had said he could only print one denomination and it had to be a hundred credits. Brown Limper realized that that made this a far more important bill. It had the bank name on it. It was only printed in English and no other tribal language. And right there, loud and clear, it said: One Hundred American Credits! And it said Valid for the payment of public and private debts in America.
One of the conditions MacAdam had made was that all earlier money in the country be collected up and exchanged for these new bills. It was hard to do because the earlier issue was a one-credit bank note and this American issue was a one-hundred-credit bank note. But the dream of having all Tyler notes gone was so alluring, Brown Limper had made up the differences in exchange out of his own pocket.
This victory was doing much to improve Brown Limper’s spirits: they had been very low as of late.
When that Tyler had not only not gone to his booby-trapped home in the meadow, but had walked right out of the country, Brown Limper had been so dispirited he had wanted to call off the whole Terl project.
But Lars had talked to him. Lars seemed to have developed a hatred for Tyler. (He did not say it was from the degradation of hiding under scrap metal in the garage and envy over the way Tyler could fly, but the emotion was very well understood by Brown Limper who considered it natural.)
Lars had said that if they went ahead and actually transshipped, Tyler was certain to reappear.
Terl had talked to him. Terl said that when they fired a shipment to Psychlo, Tyler would be right there, and he had traps for him that even Tyler could not get around.
So Brown Limper had continued with the project.
Other things were going wrong, though. He did not hear much anymore from the tribal chiefs. Lars explained it was natural—they trusted him to run things. No pilgrims came anymore to the minesite. But that was natural—it was winter.
People had been disappearing. First the hotel cook. Then some Swiss shopkeepers. Then another and another, until now the hotel was no longer operating and no shops were open at all.
The shoemakers had vanished. The Germans who repaired things were no longer to be found. The llaneros had driven the large herds south—where they would have better winter feed, they said—and then they had vanished.
Brown Limper had taken it up with Snith. Did this have anything to do with Brigantes? Even Terl put the question to him. But Snith swore up and down he and his men had behaved.
The Academy was still there and operating. There seemed to be a vast number of pilot trainees and a vaster number of machine operators. But they stayed down at the Academy and all one saw was an occasional plane doing practice flights.
All his office radios and teleprinters were gone. They broke down and had to be taken away to be repaired and then they never came back. But never mind, Brown Limper couldn’t operate them anyway and couldn’t really trust anyone else to.
This new bank note was making a world of difference to his morale. He decided he would not pay the pilots in it. He’d get even with them.
People would be hanging him, Brown Limper, on their walls now!
On sudden impulse, he decided he had better mend his political fences with his own tribe—and show them this bill, of course. He called Lars and General Snith and they got into a mine passenger plane Lars kept in the parking lot and took off for the new village he had put his people in.
Brown Limper was still admiring one of the bank notes he held in his hand. The thought of showing it off to the village people warmed him. He did not even mind the harrowing way that Lars Thorenson flew.
Narrowly missing snow-covered peaks that were not even on their route, Lars set them down near the old mining town.
But it all seemed deserted.
Not a single plume of smoke rose from a fire. Not even the smell of it remained.
Carrying a Thompson, Snith scouted the place. Empty! Not even a trace of belongings. Nothing.
Brown Limper searched, looking for a clue, dragging his clubfoot through the smooth snow from building to building. Finally he found where they must have had a meeting. There were some torn scraps of paper lying about. And then, under a table where it might have fallen off a pile of papers unnoticed, he found a letter.
It was from Tom Smiley Townsen.
Brown Limper looked at it and went into an immediate rage. Not at what it said, but at Tom Smiley’s having the effrontery to know how to write. What arrogance! But then he saw it was not really written, it was printed, and rather crudely at that. Even the signature was printed. So he decided to be tolerant and read it.
The letter went on and on about how nice some area known as “Tashkent” was. Big mountains, endless plains of wild wheat, lots of sheep. And a mild winter climate. And how he had gotten married to some . . . ? Some Latin! Disgraceful. No blood purity there.
Brown Limper threw the letter down. Well, maybe the village people had gone back to their old home. They had not wanted to move. But he was surprised that the Indians and the people from the Sierra Nevadas and the other British Columbian fellow had not remained here, for they hadn’t cared for the old village—too cold and too heavy a prospect of starving every winter.
They flew to the old village. Lars had trouble setting down and almost landed in the middle of one of those uranium circles. When he could let go his grip on the seat, Brown Limper looked around.
No smoke here, either.
Brown Limper poked into some of the houses. When they had moved at such short notice, people had had to leave most of their personal possessions behind and Brown Limper thought they must still be there. But no. Every house was empty. Not ransacked the way Brigantes left places. Just neatly empty.
With a bit of fear—because it had been booby-trapped—he approached the old Tyler house. It was still standing. Maybe the booby traps hadn’t gone off.
Then he saw that some of the roof was bulged and he went around to the other side to where the front door had been. The door had been blown off. Lars and Snith were poking at something in the snow.
It was the remains of two Brigantes. What hadn’t been burned had been torn apart by wolves. It was obvious they had tripped the booby traps and quite a while ago.
General Snith poked at the scraps of money, skin and bones with the muzzle of the submachine gun. “Mus hab come oop here browling fer loot!” said Snith. “Waste of good meat!”
Brown Limper wanted to be alone. He dragged his foot up the slope to the place they once had buried people. He turned at the top and gazed down at the empty village, falling apart and now abandoned forever.
Something had been nagging at him and now it hit him.
He was a tribal leader without a tribe.
From five tribes he had descended to one—the Brigantes! And they were not native to America.
Numbly he realized he had better keep this awfully quiet. It undermined his whole position.
Something caught his eye. A monument? A small stone shaft sticking up out of the ground. He moved around it. It had an inscription:
TIMOTHY BRAVE TYLER
A Good Father
Erected in Respectful
Memory
By His Loving Son
J.G.T.
Brown Limper screamed! He tried to kick the monument down. It was too firmly planted and he only bruised his foot. He stood and screamed and screamed, tearing the echoes of the valley apart.
Then he stopped. It was all Jonnie Goodboy Tyler’s fault.
Everything that had befallen Brown Limper all his life was totally and wholly Tyler’s fault!
So Tyler would come again, would he? Terl might have his plans and they might be all right. But Brown Limper was going to make very, very sure.
If Tyler ever hit that firing platform again he was a dead man.
Brown Limper went down to the waiting plane. He said to Lars and Snith—they mustn’t know what he really intended—“For our mutual protection, I think you should teach me how to use a Thompson submachine gun.”
They agreed it would be wise.
Terl had said time and again you didn’t dare shoot off a gun during a transshipment. But who cared about that? Two guns. He would use two guns. . . . Brown Limper planned how he would do it all the way back to Denver.
3
The small gray man sat watching the strange antics of a terrestrial craft several miles above his orbit.
The combined force had learned over a month ago to leave such a craft alone. Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl, already in disgrace over trying to sneak a kidnap and cut them out of the potential loot, had charged his Vulcor-class cruiser, guns blazing, at a ship doing exactly what this one was doing. The strange craft had sidestepped neatly; there reportedly had been a series of clangs against the cruiser’s hull.
Snowl had pulled up, mystified as to what the “clangs” betokened. He had sent crewmen out on lines to inspect his hull and they had been horrified to discover they had about twenty limpet mines on it, held solidly by magnetism to the hull.
The terrestrial craft had apparently mined the orbit they used.
Snowl had been further embarrassed to discover that the mines did not explode. They had atmosphere pressure fuses, which meant that if he brought the Vulcor-class cruiser within a hundred thousand feet of the planet’s surface, the air pressure would explode them there.
Every commander had hastily examined his whole ship to see if he had picked any up. They hadn’t, but it meant to them that if you chased that terrestrial ship it threw a cloud of mines in your path. Very unnerving! So they left it alone.
The ship had a huge door in the side and a lot of cranes. The small gray man was no miner or military expert, but the ship was obviously collecting space debris. It wasn’t using its cranes so it must have a big magnet inside that door.
Apparently it would spot something on its screen—there were a lot of odd bits in orbit just now as a large, strange comet had entered the system lately, evidently from some other system, and bits of it were floating around and occasionally hitting the meteor shielding of most of these ships. Then the terrestrial would go out and pace the object—many of them were moving as fast as nineteen miles a second—and suddenly dart sideways. The apparent magnets inside that door would collect it.
Rather interesting, the small gray man thought. Somewhat like a hummingbird he had once seen, darting about after insects, stopping around a flower, and then zooming off. He needed something to occupy his mind.
There was no word yet. Probably wouldn’t be for another couple of months. No new courier had come to him, which seemed to mean that the one had not been found elsewhere. These were very troubled times.
His indigestion had begun to act up again. About three weeks ago he had gone down to see the old woman—he had run out of peppermint leaves. She had been glad to see him and so had the dog. She had used the vocoder to start up some trade with the Swedes and she had sold them some oats and some butter, and she was rolling in money—look, six credits! Enough to buy an acre of ground or another cow! And she had been busy evenings. Cold weather had been coming on and it must be an awful lot colder up there in the sky, and she had knitted him a nice gray sweater.
The small gray man had the sweater on now. It was quite soft and warm. He touched it and felt a little sad.
He had told those military men that it was politically inadvisable to try to operate in the Highlands of Scotland and he thought they had listened. But just a week ago he had gone down to get some more peppermint and the old woman was gone. The house was closed up. The dog was gone. The cow was gone. There seemed to be no sign of violence, but then you never knew with these military men: they could be very sneaky and thorough at times. He had dug up a few sprigs of mint from under the snow but was quite troubled. Anything like sentiment was a foreign thing to him. But he had felt troubled nonetheless.
These military men! They were so obsessed with finally smashing up this planet that they were quite restless when asked to wait for his courier.
They got such silly ideas. They had noted that every plane and every installation down there now seemed to have a little creature in an orange yellow robe. They couldn’t understand the messages now being sent on the planet’s radios. They had tried language machines and none worked. Then they tried all their coding and scrambling machines and none worked. All the messages seemed to begin and end with “Om mani padme om,” like a sort of chant.
That place in southern Africa near the big dam—the one the terrestrials had used to lure in and trap two raiding parties—was being all cleared out and it gave them their first clue. A pagodalike structure—several in fact—were being erected. They found in some old reference texts that the design was a “religious temple.” So the military men had agreed that the planet had now experienced a new political upheaval. Some religious zealots had taken over. Religions were very dangerous—they inflamed people. Any sensible government and its military should stamp them out. But they were not concerned with politics and religion just now. They would wait.
The small gray man turned his attention from the terrestrial craft to the combined force. It had increased in number now to thirteen. New arrivals. Other races. They had brought the news that there was a hundred-million-credit prize offered now to the ship or ships that discovered the one. Thus they were more eager to raid and collect evidence than they were to gut the planet.
Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl had become quite incensed with this place, obsessed with it in fact. But his military sense was telling him that he was outnumbered by the rest of the combined force, and he had left a couple of weeks ago to return to his planet and bring up additional war vessels. It would get quite crowded in the orbits. His own captain had asked the small gray man whether he could draw off a bit from the rest. This was going to be an awful mess when these military men “found out” and could split the prize and then gut the planet. The small gray man had agreed.
He returned to idly watching the terrestrial ship. It seemed to be finished now, possibly had a full hold. It was slowly going down into the atmosphere, making its way to the African base.
4
Jonnie watched Stormalong’s old orbit miner come in. A sentry turned off the atmosphere-armor shield and let the plane through, and they turned it back on. There was always a faint sizzle from it when the power went on, but after that it was silent. Aside from some luckless birds and insects that hit it and sometimes left a feather or feelers, one wouldn’t know it was there. All pilots had had to be warned, and a complex set of guard signals had had to be developed lest some pilot crash his ship.
Stormalong put the old ship alongside a metal pulverizer. The Psychlos used a device which first “softened” metal by breaking down its molecular cohesion and then let it go through armored rollers that really tore it apart and smashed it. The result was a metal powder so fine that if one threw a handful into the air, a lot of it stayed there like fine dust. The Psychlos needed it that way for part of their fuel and ammunition processes.
Using the ship’s own cranes, the copilot began unloading the “catch” into the metal pulverizer. Stormalong got out and came over. “Fifty-five tons this trip,” he said smugly. “There’s plenty up there, trapped in orbit. Think we’ll need any more?”
Jonnie wasn’t sure. He had been onto other things. They walked down into the compound to verify.
One of the Buddhist communicators came up. They had a way of moving which always intrigued Jonnie. They would put their right hand into their left sleeve and their left hand into their right sleeve and then they would move their feet in a sort of fast trot-shuffle. Their shoulders didn’t bob. The result made them look like they were floating or scooting. Until yesterday many had continued to wear their reddish yellow robes; these and their shaven heads made them too easy to single out from above. A huge batch of packages and uniforms had come in from Ivan: people there had been reworking cloth sent to them from some looms now operating in Luxembourg. They were green uniforms with an armored, aluminum helmet, also green. Jonnie supposed that all their forces would be in these soon. The Buddhist was wearing his now. He bowed—always a bow—and handed Jonnie a package. He was so very sorry. There was so much in, distribution was delayed. Jonnie bowed back. It was contagious.
He and Stormalong walked on through the compound looking for Angus. Jonnie was opening his package. It was from Ivan. A helmet. Plain green like everyone else’s. Ear pads put on that would lift. There was a letter (some coordinator had written it for Ivan) on top of the helmet:
It was a nice helmet and it fit. There were a couple of small creases on it they hadn’t quite rubbed out. Ivan must have fired some shots at it to make sure it would stop bullets.
There was also a package of ammunition for the AK 47s. Jonnie had advised them to bore a hole in the ends and put some thermit explosive powder in them so they would be useful against Tolneps. They said it worked and they were converting.
Stormalong and Jonnie had arrived at the “meteorite powder washing area.” Four Psychlo females were working hard, sloshing pans of metal powder around in huge tubs of mercury. They were gloved and clothed to protect them from mercury poisoning.
When Stormalong had begun this orbit mining it had been with an eye to training pilots and, Jonnie suspected, to gratify a craving for wild flying. The stuff collected was odd enough. Meteorites and such got caught in orbit or perihelion, and before they sizzled down through the atmosphere they were often crystalline and quite amazing. Jonnie was about to put a stop to it—it had served its purpose scaring the visitors half to death with limpet mines. But Angus, always prowling into something, had noted some pieces in a recent batch that were of different chemical structure.
An outer space comet, not native to the system, had been blasting across the skies for some time. Angus pointed out to Jonnie that it contained the tiniest traces of the unknown element Terl had used for the center of his device. Angus had shown him on the analyzer: there they were! Microscopic traces of it. If the material had burned down through the atmosphere like meteorites usually do, the element might have vanished from the heat. But these “virgin” bits did contain it.
Jonnie had gone in circles for a day on how to extract it, and then remembered you could “pan” gold because it was heavier than dirt and rock.
The Psychlos used literally tons of mercury in some mining process. So they got pans of it and tested it. Iron, copper, nickel, most elements now in powder form, were lighter than mercury and floated off or combined. But this strange element went to the bottom with a thud. It was terribly cohesive and clung to itself. It took an awful lot of powdered metal to get any.
They could have rigged some machines to do the panning, but these Psychlo females couldn’t care less about a big pan of mercury and they happily sloshed it about, panning the powder. They smiled at Jonnie. They were all right unless somebody foolishly mentioned mathematics—you would lose one Psychlo female, right then. It had happened with Chirk and again with another one.
They said Angus would be back and they waited for him. He reappeared presently and they asked him: did he need any more? Angus shook his head and beckoned.
In the shop where he was working, Angus had duplicated Terl’s box with one exception: it didn’t push all the elements together when you raised the lid. A timed piston did that. You set the time and then the piston closed the rods.
Angus had six of them. The center bit was probably not as pure a metal as Terl’s, but they were sure that was of no importance. The weights were varied a bit but all around seventy-five pounds for the center bit. Angus had not put the centers in place: he had those sitting well apart and every one was making a dent in what it sat on.
“Unless you’ve got in mind to blow up the universe,” said Angus, “don’t you think about eight will do? The load you just brought in should give us two more.”
“But what does it do?” begged Stormalong.
Jonnie shook his head. “We don’t know. But if Terl made one with that expression on his face you can be very sure it is the deadliest weapon the Psychlos have. One thing you be sure of, Angus: pack the core separately and don’t let anybody combine them on this planet! When you’re all done, send them down to the underground armory in Kariba.”
Jonnie went out. He was feeling fairly cheerful. Lots of good things were happening. The Chinese in Kariba said they had engineers, and they did, but they were engineers expert in wood and stone and bridges and things. They also had some painters and that small bowl and its surrounds looked pretty strange—but artistic. They lined internal bunkers with tile they made. It was all very neat. They even had a little village of their own between the atmosphere-armor cable and the shore of the lake made by the dam. Their antiaircraft pits had little pagoda rain domes over them.
Good progress was being made in America.
He was almost cheerful. They might have a chance. Thin but possible.
Of course there was the mathematics thing. Lately all Terl seemed to do was scan pages and pages and pages of incomprehensible mathematical equations. He had not started building a console but he was obviously figuring it out from scratch. The old one was burned out. He had demanded it anyway for its case and they had brought him all kinds of scrap but none was it—it couldn’t be, for Jonnie had the original console, a burned-to-a-crisp wreck, down in the garage here. So Terl would even have to do the metal case.
Jonnie saw a couple of Hockners being taken to another room. These prisoners fought each other, race to race, like wildcats. The tallest Hockner, not too bad-looking in spite of having no nose, was a lower-grade officer but educated. He was showing vast interest in the vehicles parked around. Jonnie stopped the group, intending to ask some questions.
The tall Hockner was grinning superciliously at the vehicles. Ordinary Hockner crewmen didn’t speak Psychlo but their officers did. He recognized Jonnie. “You know,” said the tall one, “that none of these vehicle frames are built on Psychlo, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know,” said Jonnie.
Although it made the sentries wary, the Hockner went over to a ground car and looked around under the edge of one of the bumpers. “There,” he said, pointing.
Jonnie looked at it. It was one of the alphabets on the Galactic Bank notes.
“That’s Duraleb,” said the Hockner. “It says ‘Made in Duraleb.’ The Psychlos import all their plane bodies and tank bodies and machinery from other systems and peoples. The Psychlos only furnish metals and then motors and consoles. Nobody can use this stuff except Psychlos, since nobody has the drives. These other planets build other things for other peoples. But this Psychlo stuff is useless if you don’t have the consoles. They make those on Psychlo and only on Psychlo.”
Jonnie thanked him. He said, “Don’t thank me, old fellow. If you ever start running out of consoles and motors, while you can buy all the bodies you want, you won’t have a thing. It’s the way the confounded Psychlos run things! They’ve got a throat-choke monopoly on every universe. You can’t go up against them. Hockners have tried. You’ll just lose.”
Jonnie knew these prisoners, while cooperative, tended to be malicious, but he had heard this too often for it to be just a guess. He changed the subject: “Did you fellows ever capture any Psychlo mathematics texts?”
The Hockner gave a laugh. It sounded like a horse neighing. “My dear fellow, every wizard brain in the universe for 302,000 years has tried to figure out Psychlo mathematics. It can’t be done. Oh, it isn’t their arithmetic. An eleven-numeral system is not too strange. There’s a race that had twenty-three different numerals. It’s their silly equations. Nothing ever balances. Texts? Anybody can pick up their texts. They’re meaningless! Pure rubbish! Balderdash! Rot! Now will you order them to give me and my crew something to eat like you did the Tolnep?”
Jonnie told them to see MacKendrick.
He went to his viewing room and looked at Terl’s vast numbers of worksheets again. He wasn’t feeling so good now.
Jonnie had a bomb to land on Psychlo if necessary. Great! He didn’t have a thing to land it there with.
He had a rapidly growing force of visitors overhead. Terl was dawdling.
Jonnie had a very desperate plan to seize the console before it could be destroyed, but even if he got it, it might work just once and quit, if the Tolnep was right.
He looked over Terl’s equations again. They didn’t balance. They didn’t proceed one to the next logically. Yet the whole fate of this planet depended, in the final analysis, on solving them.
Maybe other people of other races had met this impasse, this same problem before. And lost. Maybe another being had sat here, like this, staring at texts and worksheets of Psychlo math, uneasy, and with a feeling of hopelessness, and then gone out to be destroyed by the Psychlos, his personal courage meaningless.
5
Terl was getting suspicious.
It was a whole series of little things.
First, there was the trouble with the money, and trouble with money was one thing Terl would not tolerate.
They had his contracts and Terl had supposed they would simply hand it over in due course. But no. It seemed the two billion Galactic credits had been safeguarded in the Denver branch of the Earth Planetary Bank. Worse, it also seemed that this Brown Limper Staffor was running up huge bills and loans with the Earth Planetary Bank. The most recent had been one to build a castle up on a hill. He wanted to call it “Bergsdorfen” or some such thing.
Brown Limper Staffor, to get the money, had offered as collateral the Terl contracts.
Directors of the Earth Planetary Bank, a man named MacAdam and a German, had turned up here at the compound with new documents for Terl to sign. And unless they were signed, then the Galactic credits could not be turned over.
The last thing Terl wanted was valid evidence lying about. But there was no help for it. MacAdam said the original contracts were not properly notarized and no one had attested to the signature. Terl had signed them with his left paw since he hated the idea of all this evidence. He could have claimed the first contracts were forgeries he knew nothing about.
But these bankers had typed up brand-new, much more valid-looking contracts. The new ones attested that Terl was political officer, war officer, security officer, and acting head of Intergalactic Mining Company. True enough, locally.
It was pointed out that there was no Earth branch of the company, that there was just the company as a whole. So Terl had to sign as acting for the whole board of Intergalactic Mining Company, and the contract sold “the company and any interests the company might have that could be sold, transmitted, conveyed . . .” You could read this contract in a way that sold all of Intergalactic everywhere! And all its planets. Or you could read it that it was just this planet and this branch. Very general.
It made Terl’s claws curl in fear. If the imperial government of Psychlo learned of this they would take days to torture him to death. Not in over three hundred thousand years had Intergalactic ever sold any part of itself or its interests.
They had brought a Swiss notary and witnesses. The contract was in English, German and Psychlo. It had fifteen originals that had to be signed.
But no sign, no money. Terl, rage and fear suppressed, had signed every copy and then Brown Limper had signed as the “Custodian of Interests for Any Legally Constituted Government of the Planet, said contract binding on all Successors” and then had also signed an addition to it conveying the contract to the Earth Planetary Bank “to have and to hold and to execute or convey in return for sums advanced.”
With horror Terl saw this document witnessed, stamped, covered with red seals, covered with gold seals, and packaged in wax seals. Fifteen separate copies of it!
But they gave him his money. They said the Denver branch of the bank was closing and they could not keep it there and Terl had to take it right now. Terl raised no objection to that.
They brought the boxes on a flatbed truck and put them in his bedroom.
They gave Terl his copies of the contract and he signed a receipt for those and the money. They all left, and the moment they were out the door, his first act was to shred, burn, and destroy the ashes of his copies. If Psychlo ever got word of it—!
He felt soothed then and he sat and petted the money for a while. Then he realized he couldn’t go to bed amid all these boxes.
He got the guards to let him go out to the morgue and get three coffins. It seemed to him that there were fewer coffins there than there used to be. However, he brought the coffins in and put them in the bedroom and got to work putting the money into them, counting it by bundles.
It was late and he still hadn’t finished the job, so he spread some blankets on one of the coffins and went to sleep.
The next day, still working on packing the money—he had never realized before what an enormous lot of money two billion credits was—he found he was short one coffin. It was going to take four.
Accordingly, he got the guards to let him out and he went to the morgue to get another coffin. On his last visit, there had been one quite close to the door. Now it was no longer there. Somebody was doing something with these coffins.
Only a security chief of Terl’s talents and training ever could have gotten to the bottom of it. That he was sure of.
First he questioned guards. Then he questioned a Captunk Arf Moiphy. And he found these Brigantes, these allegedly reliable, trained mercenaries, had been trafficking in coffins with the cadets.
The night duty commando had been selling coffins to the cadets for whiskey. Whiskey was some drink made in Scotland. Intoxicating.
Oh, Terl got the whole story. Late of an evening, some cadet, different ones, would come to the compound with an open pail of whiskey and trade it for a coffin. The guard would simply open the morgue and hand one over and take the whiskey.
It did no good for Captunk Arf Moiphy to show him that the cadets used the lead to make little cast-model spaceships and soldiers. Moiphy even had a couple. Terl knew those. They were for a game called klepp. Those cadets were selling game pieces and game boards made out of melted-down lead coffins. Company coffins!
Terl had demanded to see Snith. He ordered him to put a stop to it.
Three days later, Terl had gotten himself escorted down to the metal supply storeroom to get some needed sheets of material when he noticed that the hangar was nearly empty. There were a few ore carriers and a half-dozen battle planes and that was all that was left in those vast hangars. He had promptly gone to the garage, and that, too, was nearly empty. There were just a dozen flatbeds and a couple of Basher tanks left in there.
The place was being stolen blind!
He got hold of Lars and raged at him.
Lars said there had been a lot of crashes and the cadets were simply replacing the lost machines from the hangar.
Just as he was about to rip Lars to bits, it suddenly occurred to Terl that company property was no longer his responsibility. So he let it go.
Three days later there was a tearing argument with Ker.
Sometime since, they had begun to clear away the wreckage and fused wires of the old transshipment rig and now that it was gone, Terl wanted to be sure that the points would be at the correct distances on the poles. He went out and he found . . .
Ker using the most sloppy, inexperienced machine operator trainees he had to dig the trench for the atmosphere-armor ionization cable! There was the trench half-dug. But these trainees had been digging all over the place!
And more! There was equipment scattered everywhere. Cranes, blade scrapers, you name it. Whenever one of these stupid animal trainees had dug something, he had simply left the machine there. Whenever he lifted something, he left the magnetic crane right there.
What a mess!
Standing on the platform, hating the bright winter sun, half-sick from the rotten-quality breathe-gas that was available, Terl had felt like clawing the midget to bits.
“You know better than this!” raged Terl.
“Can I help it if these animals break machines?” shouted Ker.
“Can’t you follow a straight, plain plan?” shouted Terl.
“Can I help it if these animals can’t follow a straight, plain line?” shouted Ker.
Terl realized Ker had a point. They weren’t going to get anywhere standing here shouting. “Look,” said Terl, “it is in your own best interest that I get safely to Psychlo.”
“Is it?” said Ker.
Leverage, leverage, Terl told himself. “I’ll tell you what I will do,” said Terl. “I will put ten thousand credits to your account in the Galactic Bank. You have a numbered account there with quite a bit in it already. But I will add—”
“Brown Limper Staffor paid me a hundred thousand Earth credits just to dig up that cable for you, that cable right over there. It was no easy job and I considered the pay cut-rate!”
Terl thought fast. “All right, I’ll pay you a hundred thousand Galactic credits to help install this firing rig and cooperate.”
“I can get double that from this Brown Limper not to do it,” said Ker.
“You can?” said Terl, suddenly alert. He thought hard. Yes, that Brown Limper had been acting furtively lately, like he was hiding something.
“He wants a certain party!” said Ker. “He doesn’t care if you get to Psychlo or not!”
“But doesn’t he know I have to record the deeds?”
“He’s only interested in getting one man!” said Ker.
“Look,” said Terl, “I will put half a million credits in your account if you cooperate in getting me to Psychlo.”
Ker thought about it. Then he said, “If you will get me new papers and destroy my old company records and deposit seven hundred fifty thousand credits to my account, I’ll see all goes smoothly.”
Terl was about to say he agreed when Ker spoke again: “You will have to make it all right with this Brown Limper Staffor also. Tell me how you intend to trap this man so I can reassure this Staffor. He controls these workers. So add that, and it’s a deal.”
Terl looked at Ker. He knew how money-hungry he was. “All right. I’m going to string five hundred Brigantes around outside that atmosphere armor, armed with poisoned arrows. Arrows won’t make a concussion if fired and they can shoot that animal to bits if he comes! You whisper that to Staffor and he’ll also cooperate with you. It’s a deal then?”
Ker smiled.
Terl went back inside, glad to get his breathe-mask off. He got some kerbango to soothe his nerves.
He reviewed this strange scene. It was Staffor. That was the one who was going to mess this plan up. Terl would take care of the animal: he hadn’t told Ker he also intended to have Snith and a squad on the platform armed with poisoned arrows or that he had a beautiful beryllium box to hand Staffor. The box would destroy all the evidence, the contract copies, everything.
And Ker, too!
He would have a hostage to handle the animal.
He felt quite satisfied about everything until three nights later when he noticed there were no guards in view. He went out and there they were, sprawled around the morgue, dead drunk.
It was obvious that Snith had used the information just to get a commission in whiskey.
Well, he could handle Snith when the time came.
The one to keep an eye on was this Staffor. His suspicions were right. It was Staffor that was plotting, plotting, plotting. Sneaky rat! It was plain he would try to steal this money back.
Warned, Terl was confident he could outsmart them all.
He went in and checked the money coffins, sealed them, marked them “radiation killed” so nobody on Psychlo would want to open them, and put his private X on the bottom of each one.
He would be a wealthy tycoon on Psychlo!
He spread his bedding out on top of the coffins and slept a beautiful sleep with beautiful dreams where royalty bowed when they met The Great Terl on the street. And all evidence and this planet would have been totally destroyed behind him.
6
Deep in the African minesite, bent over the viewscreens in the half-lit dark, Jonnie was taking a loss.
Day 92 was coming up on them like a whirlwind.
At first he had hoped that he could get a separate console built using Terl’s plans and install it down at Kariba. Such would bypass any real necessity for a hopeless attack in America to seize that one. It looked as if it remained their best chance, but it was hardly any chance at all. He would have had to stop Terl from using that strange bomb, but he could not do that without the almost foolhardy risks of letting it go right on up to firing time on Day 92 and trying to attack the platform and grab that console at the last moment.
Other news was not good. There had been two more raids by the visitors in different places and casualties had been suffered. An ore plane, returning empty from a ferrying trip, had been swooped down upon by the Hawvins and blasted out of the sky with the loss of both pilot and copilot. A hunting party from the Russian base had been gunned from above and three Siberians and a Sherpa had been killed before their air cover had shot down the intruder.
Also the Edinburgh defense planning had gone wrong. Sir Robert had wanted to bring in a couple of miles of atmosphere cable and surround Castle Rock with it. The power dams in Scotland of long ago were not in shape or converted to Psychlo power. The Cornwall minesite power supply was a tidal dam at Bristol in the Bristol Channel, and while it worked well on the ebb and flow of those gigantic tides, it was not possible to run a line clear up to Edinburgh—and that line would have been open to attack in any case. The hauling of that much cable, itself, was a formidable block, for it would have had to be flown in sections to Scotland. No other means than antiaircraft fire was available to protect Edinburgh. And the Scots, having regained it, were not going to abandon it. It was the center of the most ancient Scottish nationalism. Moving the whole remaining population down to Cornwall, as proposed by Jonnie, had not been approved, and it was true it would be pretty crowded. Jonnie knew Edinburgh was going to catch it.
Terl was going about his job in a way that seemed backward. He spent a lot of time measuring up poles and stringing outside wire and putting in firing points. Everything he did was being duplicated exactly down at Kariba. They now had the wires up and all the points in, down at that base. Angus, each time they got a new item, would go tearing down to Kariba and install an equivalent in the secondary defense platform there.
It had looked very hopeful for some days. Terl had gotten a lot of metal and had built the console case, a heavy, massive thing about a yard square. They had built the same case here and it was sitting down in a locked room, an empty shell, waiting.
But after all this spurt of energy, Terl for the last several days had just been fooling with fuses. He wasn’t getting on with construction.
Reams of mathematics had been worked out by Terl. But a lot of good they were. Who understood them?
Now it was just fuses. Jonnie had gotten duplicates out of supply here of all the fuses Terl was working with and tried to figure out what he was doing.
Jonnie had learned one thing: that some of the items in a console that would appear to be different components were fakes. They were not resistors or capacitors. They were actually fuses made up to look like other things.
Terl was doing something Jonnie had not heard of before. With meters and such, he was working with an “underload” type of fuse. The circuit would be connected only so long as current was going through it. When the current ceased to flow, the fuse burned out. It was an odd kind of circuit breaker, made of a filament so tiny and thin it had to be worked under a magnifying scope.
Well, that seemed to be all Terl was doing.
Jonnie’s attention was drifting when he suddenly realized that the filament Terl was using looked awfully like the ones in the silver capsule in Psychlo heads.
Forgotten was his stiff neck. He went tearing out and got one they had removed from a corpse. Yes, the same thing!
Abruptly he added it all up and rushed out to find MacKendrick. The doctor was working with a Psychlo skull he had cleaned and whitened. He was trying to find some means of entering it with instruments. He put it down on the table before him where the sockets stared sightlessly at him and composed himself to listen to Jonnie.
“That isn’t anything very mysterious!” said Jonnie, pointing excitedly into the silver capsule he held. “It’s just a fuse! It doesn’t vibrate or put out radio signals or anything. It’s just a fuse!”
Jonnie grabbed some pictures of one inside a Psychlo brain. “Look! You said the nerves this was fastened between were the primary impulse channels of their thought.
“All right. Mathematics is logical thought! It is the approximation of being sensible! Now even if a Psychlo has a soul and does his thinking with a soul, or even if he doesn’t have, mental action works between those two channels.
“So long as a Psychlo is thinking logically, there is a constant current between those two nerves. Even asleep there would be a current, a very slight one.
“Now up comes an alien. The Psychlo knows his whole race and empire depends upon keeping his mathematics a secret. And the alien wants to know about Psychlo mathematics. The Psychlo instantly shuts off thinking about them. Or a surge occurs and then a shutoff. Pop. Blown fuse!”
MacKendrick was quite interested. But he said, “That doesn’t explain suicide.”
“All right! Look at this picture and look at this fuse. The silver capsule is very close to that bronze item that short-circuits pleasure and pain and action. Look at this fuse filament! When it parts, the ends drop down inside the capsule and you get a short circuit into the bronze item.
“The Psychlo has an instant impulse to kill! If he can’t right then, the short circuit between the silver and bronze items acts as an obsession to kill that doesn’t let up. He has to kill something and he winds up killing himself!”
MacKendrick thought it over and nodded. “But,” he said, “that doesn’t explain the females.”
Jonnie got that type of capsule and looked at it. “It’s another kind of fuse. Since mathematics is logical thought, it would cause a concentration of current to begin. They probably are taught not to teach females mathematics—it’s part of their moral code. And the females are noted for being illogical. When they start to think in mathematical terms or even try to, a current gets too heavy and they blow the fuse. They don’t have a bronze object and they just go into a coma. Their wits won’t connect anymore and they go out of communication with the nervous system.”
Jonnie paused. “My explanation may not be complete. But I know these are just fuses and short circuits. And that’s how they protected their empire!”
“And why they’re so crazy,” said MacKendrick. “I am sure you have the explanation and that those things are what you say they are.”
MacKendrick turned the Psychlo skull around on the table. It was a huge, massive, heavy thing. A complex mass of bone and joints. “There’s only one thing wrong.”
Jonnie was all revved up with having gotten that far. He listened.
“We’re no closer to getting those things out of their heads than we were,” said MacKendrick.
Jonnie laid the pictures and the capsules down on the table beside the skull and walked quietly out of the room.
It was definitely not a hopeful day.
7
Jonnie lanced northwest in the Mark 32 battle plane.
The alert had come just over half an hour ago. Glencannon was in trouble.
It was Day 78, only fourteen days before Terl had scheduled himself to fire. He had not begun his panel on the last disks Jonnie had had. There had been a delay.
And now this! Glencannon was under attack en route.
The visitors, four hundred miles above Earth, had increased. There were eighteen of them now. Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl had come back and with him he had brought four heavy war vessels. One of them at least, if not more, was a plane carrier. It was probably from this that the attack on Glencannon had been launched.
Jonnie had no communicator with him. He had simply been outside when the alert came. Stormalong and two other pilots had scrambled and Jonnie had simply grabbed an air mask and a plane. All the communication in the air right now was in Pali—both Glencannon and Stormalong had communicators with them and were using them. Thus Jonnie could not tell what was happening. The singsong of the Buddhists never showed excitement even in combat, so their voice tones told him nothing.
He was gaining altitude and widening his viewscreens. He had Stormalong and the other two ships just ahead of him. He had not yet picked up Glencannon.
Jonnie threw a scanner upward. Three of their visitors were way up there, not as clear in this bright daylight as they would be on scanners at night due to daytime ultraviolet in the air.
Was that the Vulcor-class vessel? The other two with it were larger, more bulky. Yes, that was the Vulcor-class: diamond-shaped bridge. Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl himself.
The three weren’t coming down—apparently it took a lot of solar accumulation to do that and they tended to reserve themselves. The other two must be plane carriers.
Yes! From one of them came a new launch.
Six needle-like craft were coming down like arrows.
Clearly, using Psychlo, Jonnie said, “Six new hornets from above!” That would warn Stormalong.
There was Glencannon. Streaking along at about one hundred thousand feet, flat-out, heading for the minesite. Where was his escort? He should have an escort. No sign of them!
Four needles were shooting along behind Glencannon. Occasionally a long-range flash of fire laced out from them.
There went Stormalong!
In tight formation, the three planes cut straight through the pursuing Tolneps.
An explosion! A second gout of hot blue flame. And a third.
There was only one Tolnep racing out of the smoke.
Jonnie turned up to intercept the six coming down. They grew larger and larger in his sights.
He centered on the nose of the leader. His thumb hit the firing trip as he wildly swung sideways, sweeping his awesome firepower into the Tolnep’s tight formation.
His viewscreen flared out with the explosions ahead.
A slight thump as a broken piece of a Tolnep plane touched his wing.
Jonnie flipped around as they went by him. He sighted in on the tail of the last ship. He hit the trip of the blast cannon. He was skidding so wildly from his turn that he missed.
Four Tolneps left to go.
He flashed ahead of them and spun about. He was almost head-on with the Tolnep now leading. An instant before they would have collided, Jonnie’s shots stuffed the Tolnep’s own fire up his cannon barrels. The ship exploded.
Three Tolneps left. They looped and came on, firing in formation. The air about Jonnie was slashed. The Mark 32 took a hit in the windscreen. Half of it went black.
Jonnie’s guns were going. One Tolnep! Two Tolneps!
The last one tried to make a run for it, shooting back into the heights.
Jonnie steadied his battle plane. He threw the firing sets onto “Flame” and “Maximum Range.” He sent searching needles straight up.
The Tolnep shattered into a ragged ball of fire.
Where was Glencannon?
There he was, racing down to the minesite, almost there.
He had a Tolnep right on his tail.
Stormalong and his other two ships were slashing down on the Tolnep.
The guard opened the atmosphere-armor curtain and Glencannon flashed through. He was safe!
A scythe of fire hit the Tolnep as Stormalong and the other two pilots let drive from extreme range.
The guard got the atmosphere curtain on. The Tolnep hit it and slammed through.
The air had not had time to reionize enough.
The Tolnep ship exploded in a ball of flame in the scramble area, narrowly missing Glencannon’s ship as it landed.
Jonnie and Stormalong scanned the skies for more enemy. There was none. Some smoke palls rose in the distance where enemy ships had dis-integrated.
The guard opened the atmosphere curtain. A fire-fighting crew was there now, spraying the burning wreckage of the Tolnep ship. Jonnie, Stormalong and the other two landed.
Glencannon was sitting in his seat still. His Buddhist communicator was trying to calm him. Glencannon was crying. His hands were shaking. It was a reaction of total frustration.
“I had orders to come through,” Glencannon was repeating over and over. The communicator waved the others away and then came to them.
“There are many things for the Academy of pilots to do in America,” the Buddhist told Jonnie and Stormalong. “They also have to maintain their air cover. There were no escort pilots and we delayed coming for days. Then Glencannon felt he could not delay anymore.
“A Swiss pilot, a close friend of his, but a very new pilot, volunteered. The Tolneps hit us just after we crossed the coast in northern Africa. It was too far away for Cornwall or Luxembourg to help us.
“The Swiss fought them off. He shot down three. But he needed help and Glencannon had orders to keep going in such an event and he kept going.
“He feels that if he had turned back to help the Swiss, they wouldn’t have got him. The Swiss pilot was alone, he had no communicator, but he also told Glencannon to keep going.
“The Tolneps shot the Swiss to pieces. When he ejected and tried to get down by backpack they closed in and killed him in the air.
“Glencannon wants to go up and shoot down those ships in orbit. They would murder him. Please help.”
They got Glencannon calmed down. Stormalong said that he would call Sir Robert and get the vital communication line made more secure. Sir Robert was going over to move the Academy out of America and to the Cornwall minesite in a few days but meanwhile better arrangements should be made. The ferrying of innumerable planes and equipment to safe places was now all complete. The tribes were centralized. Stormalong also said he would take over the run.
Glencannon handed over the pouch of disks.
Jonnie looked at the packet.
He hoped it was worth it.
8
It was!
Minutes after Jonnie opened the courier pouch and got a disk on a viewscreen, he realized that for the first time in all of Psychlo’s long and sadistic history, non-Psychlo eyes were looking upon the actual construction of a teleportation transshipment console.
Terl, having no models or patterns, was working from scratch. And crazy though he might be, his workmanship was exact. Of course, his own life depended upon its being so.
He had already made the console case. He had fitted the rows of buttons, spares from the storerooms, all properly marked, into the panel top. He had made the screw holes which held the top on to the bottom case.
Watching the view disks, fascinated, Jonnie saw him take a yard-square piece of common black insulating board, the kind that was used to back all electronic assemblies, and fit it into the area between the top panel and the case sides. It was this board, evidently, which would hold the various components of the circuit he would build. He carefully and precisely drilled the holes in this insulating board so it would fit between the top panel and the case and be held in place by the same joining screws.
He temporarily fastened down the board in the case and put a smear of powder over it and then pressed each button so the location where it touched the board was exactly marked. Then he took it all apart again and made more exact marks with a red pencil wherever the powder had been dented. He drilled small holes in each one of these points and put in a metal plug. Now the buttons of the top panel, when pressed, would come down and touch a metal plug.
Terl now turned the insulating board over. The little metal plugs showed on the underside. He marked which was the top and which was the bottom of the board and really went to work.
Scarcely consulting his notes and formulas at all, he began to cover the underside of the board with various electronic components: resistors, capacitors, tiny amplifiers, relays and switches. It was actually a rather crude and old-fashioned sort of layout. It seemed to match up to the metal plugs the buttons would hit from above and often connected to it.
But there was an oddity. He was putting fuses in places where, if you used the board at all, they would certainly blow. In fact, for every metal plug through the board, there was a fuse that would disconnect it from the circuitry now being built. It looked to Jonnie that all you had to do was hit one button on the upper console and a fuse would blow. Dozens of such fuses.
In a dumb kind of way, this mysterious circuit he was building made sense. All except these fuses. Why would one put fuses all through a piece of electronic circuitry?
Terl neatened up this whole complicated circuit. He color-coded it and polished it. And at last it was complete. It really looked marvelous, if one admired all the complexities of an electronic circuit board. It almost made sense—you pushed a top console button and current went here, you pushed another and current would go there.
The board was complete. Terl admired it, even took a break and bit off some kerbango.
Then he did the strangest thing imaginable. With a flourish of his paws, he hooked up some leads to a power source, snapped the clips to the terminals of the very artistic board circuit he had just built, and blew all the fuses in it!
They went with little glowing pops and smoke puffs.
He had just made the whole circuit inoperational.
Now he really got down to work. He pulled over his vast pile of equations and worked-out formulas, got out micrometer measuring tools, cleaned up a set of drafting triangles and rulers, sharpened up white marking pens to a hairline point.
He turned the board he had just made over to the blank side, made some reference points on it, and for the next two days, meticulously consulting his notes, he drew in a circuit. Aside from matching up with the metal plugs for the console buttons, this new circuit had nothing whatever to do with the one he had so laboriously built on the bottom side of the board.
He drew in the resistors and amplifiers and capacitors and every other electronic component. All in tiny lines and squiggles and curls.
Terl consulted his equations and worksheets and duplicated the measurements with enormous exactitude in white on the board. It was a long and complicated procedure and it was a very complex circuit that emerged. The console buttons, when pressed, would activate it if it were composed of wire.
He got that finished. Then he dusted the whole drawing with a thin coating of reddish paste. You could see the circuit through it but when you put something on the paste like a pencil it would show that that bit of the circuit had been traced.
Terl now got a thin-bladed annealing knife. One end of these knives, by the process of separating molecules through destruction of their cohesion, cut metal. The other end was used to restore the molecular cohesion and “sew” the metal up.
He took the sewing end of the knife and began to trace his circuit with it. Wherever he followed a line, the thin red paste showed he had followed it. Thus, he could keep track of where he had traced and work without any skips.
Jonnie stared at this activity. Then he rushed out of his viewing room, raced up to one of the compound storerooms, and got a piece of insulating board and an annealing knife.
He made a diagonal mark across the board with the sewing end of the knife. He put clips at both ends of his mark and put current through it.
The current flowed!
By aligning usually insulative molecules in a straight line, one had a path, a “wire.”
He had seen that Psychlos, in cutting these boards to size to install circuit breakers, always sawed them. He had just thought knives didn’t work on them. True enough, knives were not efficient in cutting them. But by aligning molecules, the insulating board conducted electricity at the points of touch.
Jonnie, starry-eyed, went back to further view this activity Terl had been engaged upon.
It had taken Terl two days just to trace that circuit. Finally he finished.
And then Terl took some solvent and a rag and wiped the whole board clean.
There was not one visible trace left. But that “insulating” board now contained all the alignments of a complex circuit.
The underside’s visible components were a total fake. They weren’t ever intended to work. And anybody examining one of these boards would think he had blown its fuses. Scientists of many races had probably spent hundreds of years of time trying to make that false circuit make sense and agree with Psychlo math.
Terl was doing something in the upper left corner of the board. Unfortunately he had carelessly dropped a text open in such a position that its cover obscured much of what he was doing. It had something to do with the installation of a switch. It was a switch which would appear in the top panel. All Jonnie could see on the disks was that the switch probably had to be changed with every use of the board. Up one firing, down the next, up the next, and so on. The switch was misleadingly labeled, “Dimmer.” The component it was attached to was visible enough.
If activated by a wrong turn of the switch, that component would send a surge through the board and erase the invisible circuit.
Jonnie couldn’t see what position the switch was rigged to be in at the first firing.
Terl now was putting the board together.
And Jonnie found why loosening the screws which held it all together made the board inoperational.
Terl took a large electromagnet and put it around the case. Then just inside one screw, where it went through the insulating board, he inserted a fuse.
Jonnie went down and got one. It was a “magnet fuse.” As long as a current went through it, it stayed whole. The moment a magnetic current was absent, it blew. To remove a console top, one had to put a magnetic field around the console.
When the screw was touching the top edge of the console, the magnetic top edge kept a tiny current running forever. The moment that screw was loosened, the magnetic current ceased and the fuse blew.
More: when it blew it activated one of the components just under it and wiped the invisible circuit out of the board.
But to take a panel top off all you had to do was put a magnetic field generator near that screw and the fuse wouldn’t blow.
An invisible circuit, two booby traps to wipe it out, a completely false circuit to distract.
And that was the secret of the Psychlos.
A sober Jonnie made plentiful copies of Terl’s circuit. One could simply put it on a piece of insulating board and trace it in. The metal plugs through it activated the invisible circuit. They could duplicate it.
All except for one switch. And that was why he was sober. Exactly how it was rigged he did not know. The position it would have to be in for each sequential firing he did not know.
He reviewed the disks again.
No, he could not make it out.
He speculated on the possibility of just making several boards and working it out. No, it might do something else too.
He made a full file and plenty of notes.
They couldn’t make teleportation motors from this, but possibly they could open them and trace the circuit. Maybe. But without that one switch . . .
Jonnie knew they would have to go over and seize that console just to see where Terl set it.
It was an appalling risk and might cost men’s lives.
He knew they would have to do it.
9
Jonnie quietly and efficiently neatened up his scene.
In case anything happened to him, which he felt was more than likely in this American raid, he carefully briefed Angus in all the intricacies of the console. He made copious notes especially for Angus, so that he could duplicate and operate such a console. He told him some of the things that could be done with it.
Angus objected violently to Jonnie’s going on the raid. Jonnie said he was not going to risk anyone else’s life, for the actions he had to take were too dicey. He would have the backup of thirty Scots, ten drivers and fifteen pilots. Angus was still trying to protest but it didn’t do any good. If Robert the Fox had been there the two of them might have prevailed, but Sir Robert was over in America moving the Academy and Angus gave in reluctantly.
A Scot aide of Sir Robert’s was there and Jonnie briefed him on the military aspects of their situation: the visitors were waiting for something—he was not sure what. Jonnie felt it had to do with whether or not they got a transshipment rig operating. An analysis of their chatter among themselves showed they were observing the American compound, waiting for something to happen: the visitors had seen Psychlos there (probably Terl and Ker) and seemed to think the American scene might still be in Psychlo hands, or in any event might be political. Jonnie expected the sky to fall in right after that transshipment rig was fired and an alert should be out, then, for Day 92, which was approaching very quickly.
Jonnie briefed another Scot officer and arranged a decoy platform to be hastily built in the Singapore area. There was a minesite there northwest of the ancient, deserted man-city where the Psychlos had mined tin, titanium and tungsten; it had full hydroelectric power, atmosphere armor and a certain amount of stores and planes left in it. A handful of Chinese, three pilots, a communicator, a coordinator and this officer were to lay out a platform and poles. Jonnie gave them the old burned-out console which they repainted. Under the protection of the cable they were to make like they were busy firing, complete with things appearing and disappearing on the platform. When the flights left the American area with the real console, the heaviest part of the escort would streak to the Singapore area and pull any pursuit of the real console away. The Kariba platform had been under camouflage nets from the beginning and chatter from the visitors showed they thought it was a temple. He warned the officer that the attack would be heavy there in the Singapore area. But the Scot just smiled and grabbed his allocated men and left.
Jonnie made a fast tour of Kariba. The Chinese had done wonderfully well. There was a roof under the screen but over the firing platform, all held together with wooden pegs, swooping gables and points made it very artistic. They had a lot of dragons around, carved from wood and cast in clay that pointed out from the beam ends with flaming mouths and scaly tails. They had bunkers inside the protected cone. They all had tiled interiors. They even had a little hospital. Their own village was inside the protective cable over by the lakeshore. It was all very colorful and attractive, more like a garden than a war area.
Dr. Allen had gotten some juice of plants from up in the old Nairobi area—he called it “pyrethrum”—that killed insects very efficiently, and despite the number of animals in the woods thereabouts that attracted flies, they had had no trouble with tsetse sleeping sickness.
Jonnie heard them singing and playing on strange string and wind instruments that evening, so he recorded a lot of it and had them rig loudspeakers ready to play it when they activated the area—it would foul up any listening beams from upstairs. That plus the interference the armor cable posed would keep them ignorant of what was going on here.
When he returned to the African compound, it was Day 87. He found Stormalong there with more disks that showed the color codes of the cables and the pole wires. They could simply hack off the console’s cables and reconnect them at Kariba. He gave the code to Angus.
Stormalong said this would be his last run so Jonnie briefed him carefully on the military situation. It was Jonnie’s belief that the visitors would attack in force after any American firing. Stormalong had better be prepared to take control of air defenses on the planet. Jonnie would not let him go on the raid. Dunneldeen was handling air cover for them on that. Thor would be with them in the raiding party. Jonnie missed Robert the Fox who usually handled these briefings and actions.
Stormalong, like Angus, did not want Jonnie to go. He said America was stripped now. The Academy was empty. Jonnie would have only his own raiding party, and though he knew it had been drilled within an inch of the participants’ lives, there were an awful lot of Brigantes over there. Just after they had pulled the recorders out of the three places at the Academy, Brigantes had begun to systematically loot the place. But with no Sir Robert to support his objections, Stormalong did not prevail.
Jonnie was going up to an upper level of the compound and he ran into Ker.
The Psychlo midget was all smiles. They swatted “paws.” He had been looking for Jonnie to show him the silly money they were now printing for America and in which he had been “paid.” Jonnie pulled him into a deserted office and shook his head over the hundred-credit note and the picture of Brown Limper Staffor.
“The stuff is worthless!” said Ker. “The Brigantes just throw it into the street!”
Ker was so happy to be out of that area. He told Jonnie all about it. “And he offered me seven hundred and fifty thousand Galactic credits that I’ll never see. He’s one crazy Psychlo. Not sane like us half-humans!” Ker laughed over that.
Ker gave him the final layouts of the firing platform area. There was nothing new. Ker had dug and done exactly according to plan. It was the same plan on which his raiding team had been drilled and Ker assured him everything was in place.
But Ker hadn’t realized Jonnie was going over there. When he heard that he got very serious. “This Terl is a very bad one. He’s liable to have surprises. I don’t like your going, Jonnie.”
Jonnie said he had to go.
“What if you get a Psychlo war party back on that platform in return?” said Ker.
“I don’t think we will,” said Jonnie. “And we have a present for Psychlo.”
“I hope so,” said Ker. “It’s my furry neck if they ever turn up here again. The I.B.I. would take days to kill me!”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” said Jonnie. “But you stay here among these defenses. There’s quite a few enemy prisoners in the place and all the Psychlos that are left. Maybe you can teach them to play cards!”
Ker laughed. And then he said, “Did the one you call Sir Robert come back here?”
“Why?”
“Well, right in the middle of the Academy move to England, we didn’t see him anymore. I wanted to check a couple of points with him and I couldn’t find him. And Dunneldeen put in calls. He isn’t in Edinburgh or Luxembourg or Russia. I thought he must be here. The reason I ask is he knows all your dispositions of forces and even some of your raid details.”
Jonnie was very concerned about Sir Robert. He threw off Ker’s question with, “They could never make him talk.”
“The I.B.I. could make anybody talk,” said Ker.
“We don’t know the enemy has him,” said Jonnie.
Shortly afterward he instituted his own queries. There was no sign of Sir Robert in any area. A couple of ferry planes had gone down lately from enemy attack. They had been en route from America to Scotland. Had Sir Robert been on one of them?
Sir Robert had not handled many of the details of this raid. There was no reason to change planning this late.
Jonnie spent his last day at the Lake Victoria minesite neatening up what there was of his personal life. He was under no illusion that this raid was not dangerous.
He wrote a letter to Chrissie that he knew the parson would read for her and put it in plain sight on his desk, the envelope marked “To Chrissie in Case of Something Happening to Me.”
He had heard one wrote wills to leave personal possessions. He started one. All he had was his horses and some odds and ends of clothes. He couldn’t think of anything else he owned. Then he thought maybe Chrissie had occupied the Edinburgh house in his name, so he put down any interest he had in that or its contents and left it to Chrissie. Then he remembered he had a few books so he left those to Pattie. For the life of him he couldn’t recall anything else he owned. But maybe people would think he owned gifts like the chrome AK 47. They weren’t very many. Still, they might be. So he added a clause, “And anything else I am found to own shall be equally divided among . . .” and he listed the names of those men who had been closest to him. He thought for a while and then added Ker.
He had also heard that you signed these things and got them witnessed so he did that. Then he put it in an envelope and put it alongside the letter to Chrissie.
Feeling he had made things very orderly, he spent that evening making sure all his weapons and gear worked, that his radiation suit had no holes in it, that his air mask tanks were full and that half a dozen kill-clubs were in throwing condition. He put copies of the latest sales contract Terl had signed into his pouch. He checked the beryllium bomb case for safe carrying. He tested the edge of a hatchet to cut console cables.
He felt he was ready and got a good sleep on his last night before the American raid. He had done everything he could. Now it was in the hands of the gods. Or a devil like Terl.