XI
He flinched inwardly, and tightened his eye-muscles on the edge of themonocle to keep them from flinching physically as well, trying tofreeze out of his face the consternation he felt.
"That's bad, Kent," he said. "Very bad. I'd been counting heavily onDr. Gomes to design a bomb of our own."
"Well, general, if you please." That was Air-Commodore LeslieHargreaves. "You say you suspect that King Orgzild has developed anuclear bomb. If that's true, it's a horrible danger to all of us. ButI find it hard to believe that the Keegarkans could have done so, withtheir resources and at their technological level. Now, if it had beenthe Kragans, that would have been different, but...."
"Paula, you'd better carry on and explain what you told me, and addanything else you can think of that might be relevant.... Is thatsound-recorder turned on? Then turn it on, somebody; we want thistaped."
* * * * *
Paula rose and began talking: "I suppose you all understand whatconditions are on Niflheim, and how these Ullran native workers areemployed; however, I'd better begin by explaining the purpose forwhich these nuclear bombs were designed and used...."
He smiled; she realized that he needed time to think, and she wasstalling to provide it. He drew a pencil and pad toward him and begandoodling in a bored manner, deliberately closing his mind to what shewas saying. There were two assumptions, he considered: first, thatKing Orgzild already possessed a nuclear bomb which he could use whenhe chose, and, second, that in the absence of Dr. Gomes, such a bombcould only be produced on Gongonk Island after lengthy experimentalwork. If both of these assumptions were true, he had just heard thedeath-sentence of every Terran on Ullr. The first he did not for amoment doubt. The reasons for making it were too good. He dismissed itfrom further consideration and concentrated on the second.
"... what's known as a Nagasaki-type bomb, the first type ofplutonium-bomb developed," Paula was saying. "Really, it's atechnological antique, but it was good enough for the purpose, and Dr.Gomes could build it with locally available materials...."
That was the crux of it. The plutonium bomb, from a militarystandpoint, was as obsolete as the flintlock musket had been at thetime of the Second World War. He reviewed, quickly, the history ofweapons-development since the beginning of the Atomic Era. Theemphasis, since the end of the Second World War, had all been onnuclear weapons and rocket-missiles. There had been the H-bomb, itselfobsolescent, and the Bethe-cycle bomb, and the subneutron bomb, andthe omega-ray bomb, and the negamatter bomb, and then the end ofcivilization in the Northern Hemisphere and the rise of the newcivilization in South America and South Africa and Australia. Today,the small-arms and artillery his troops were using were merely slightrefinements on the weapons of the First Century, and all the modernnuclear weapons used by the Terran Federation were produced at theSpace Navy base on Mars, by a small force of experts whose skills werealmost as closed to the general scientific and technical world as thesecrets of a medieval guild. The old A-bomb was an historicalcuriosity, and there was nobody on Ullr who had more than a layman'sknowledge of the intricate technology of modern nuclear weapons. Therewere plenty of good nuclear-power engineers on Gongonk Island, but howlong would it take them to design and build a plutonium bomb?
"... Gorkrink also has a good understanding of Lingua Terra," Paulawas saying. "He and Dr. Murillo conversed bi-lingually, just as I'veheard General von Schlichten and King Kankad talking to one another. Ihaven't any idea whether or not Gorkrink could read Lingua Terra, or,if so, what papers or plans he might have seen."
"Just a minute, Paula," he said. "Colonel Grinell, what does yourbranch have on this Gorkrink?"
"He's the son of King Orgzild, and the daughter of Prince Jurnkonk,"Grinell said. "We knew he'd signed on for Nif, two years ago, but thestory we got was that he'd fallen out of favor at court and had beenexiled. I can see, now, that that was planted to mislead us. As towhether or not he can read Lingua Terra, my belief is that he can. Weknow that he can understand it when spoken. He could have learned toread at one of those schools Mohammed Ferriera set up, ten or fifteenyears ago."
"And Dr. Gomes and Dr. Murillo and Dr. Livesey left papers and planslying around all over the place," Paula added. "If he went to Niflheimas a spy, he could have copied almost anything."
"Well, there you have it," von Schlichten said. "When Gorkrink foundout that plutonium can be used for bombs, he began gathering all theinformation he could. And as soon as he got home, he turned it allover to Pappy Orgzild."
"That still doesn't mean that the Kee-geeks were able to do anythingwith it," Air-Commodore Hargreaves argued.
"I think it does," von Schlichten differed. "As soon as Orgzild wouldhear about the possibility of making a plutonium bomb, he'd set up anA-bomb project, and don't think of it in terms of the old FirstCentury Manhattan Project. There would be no problem of producingfissionables--we've been scattering refined plutonium over this planetlike confetti."
"Well, an A-bomb's a pretty complicated piece of mechanism, even ifyou have the plans for it," Kent Pickering said. "As I recall, therehave to be several subcritical masses of plutonium, or U-235, orwhatever, blown together by shaped charges of explosive, all of whichhave to be fired simultaneously. That would mean a lot of electricalfittings that I can't see these geeks making by hand."
"I can," Paula said. "Have you ever seen the work these nativejewelers do? And didn't you tell me about a clockwork thing they haveat the university, here, to show the apparent movements of thesun...."
"That's right," von Schlichten said. "And what they couldn't make,they could have bought from us; we've sold them a lot of electricalequipment."
"All right, they could have built an A-bomb," Buhrmann said. "But didthey?"
"We assume they tried to. Gorkrink got back from Nif on the_Canberra_, three months ago," von Schlichten said. "If Orgzilddecided to build an A-bomb, he wouldn't give the signal for thisuprising until he either had one or knew he couldn't make one, and hewouldn't give up trying in only three months. Therefore, I think wecan assume that he succeeded, and had succeeded at the time he sentGorkrink here to get that four tons of plutonium we let him have, and,incidentally, to tell his ambassador to pass the word to have SidHarrington poisoned according to plan."
"Then why didn't he just use it on us at the start of the uprising?"Meyerstein wanted to know.
"Why should he? Getting rid of us is only the first step in Orgzild'splan," Grinell said. "Back as far as geek history goes, the Kings ofKeegark have been trying to conquer Konkrook and the Free Cities andmake themselves masters of the whole Takkad Sea area. Let Konkrookwipe us out, and then he can move in his troops and take Konkrook. Or,if we beat off the geeks here, as we seem to be doing, he can bomb usout and then move in on Konkrook. I think that as long as we'refighting, here, he'll wait. The more damage we do to Konkrook, theeasier it'll be for him."
"Then we'd better start dragging our feet on the Konkrook front,"Laviola said. "And get busy trying to build a bomb of our own."
* * * * *
Von Schlichten looked up at the big screen, on which the battle ofKonkrook was being projected from an overhead pickup.
"I'll agree on the second half of it," von Schlichten said. "And we'llalso have to set up some kind of security-patrol system againstbombers from Keegark. And as soon as _Procyon_ gets here, we'll haveto send her out to hunt down and destroy those two Boer-classfreighters, the _Jan Smuts_ and the _Kruger_. And we'll have toarrange for protection of Kankad's Town; that's sure to be another ofOrgzild's high-priority targets. As to the action against Konkrook,I'll rely on your advice, Them. Can we delay the fall of the city forany length of time?"
M'zangwe shook his head. "When we divert contragravity tosecurity-patrol work, the ground action'll slow up a little, ofcourse. But the geeks are about knocked out, now."
"The hell with it, then. I doubt if we'd be able to buy much time fromOrgzild by delaying victory in the c
ity, and we'll probably need thetroops as workers over here." He turned to Pickering. "Dr. Pickering,what sort of a crew can you scrape together to design a bomb for us?"he asked.
"Well, there's Martirano, and Sternberg, and Howard Fu-Chung, and Pietvan Reenen, and...." He nodded to himself. "I can get six or eight ofthem in here in about twenty minutes; I'll have a project set up andworking in a couple of hours. There has to be somebody qualified onduty at the plant, all the time, of course, but...."
"All right; call them in. I want the bomb finished by yesterdayafternoon. And everybody with you, and you, yourself, had betterrevert to civilian status. This isn't something you can do by thenumbers, and I don't want anybody who doesn't know what it's all aboutpulling rank on your outfit. Go ahead, call in your gang, and let meknow what you'll be able to do, as soon as--sooner than--it'spossible."
He turned to Hargreaves. "Les, you'll have charge of flying thesecurity patrols, and doing anything else you can to keep Orgzild frombombing us before we can bomb him. You'll have priority on everythingsecond only to Pickering."
Hargreaves nodded. "As you say, general, we'll have to protectKankad's, as well as this place. It's about five hundred miles fromhere to Kankad's, and eight-fifty miles from Kankad's to Keegark...."
* * * * *
He stopped talking to von Schlichten, and began muttering to himself,running over the names of ships, and the speeds and pay-loadcapacities of airboats, and distances. In about five minutes, he wouldhave a program worked out; in the meantime, von Schlichten could onlybe patient and contain himself. He looked along the table, and caughtsight of a thin-faced, saturnine-looking man in a green shirt with acolonel's three concentric circles marked on the shoulders insilver-paint. Emmett Pearson, the communications chief.
"Emmett," he said, "those orbiters you have strung around this planet,two thousand miles out, for telecast rebroadcast stations. How much ofa crew could be put on one of them?"
Pearson laughed. "Crew of what, general? White mice, or trainedcockroaches? There isn't room inside one of those things for anythingbigger to move around."
"Well, I know they're automatic, but how do you service them?"
"From the outside. They're only ten feet through, by about twenty inlength, with a fifteen-foot ball at either end, and everything's insections, which can be taken out. Our maintenance-gang goes up in athing like a small spaceship, and either works on the outside inspacesuits, or puts in a new section and brings the unserviceable onedown here to the shops."
"Ah, and what sort of a thing is this small spaceship, now?"
"A thing like a pair of fifty-ton lorries, with airlocks between, andconnected at the middle; airtight, of course, and pressurized andinsulated, like a spaceship. One side's living' quarters for a six-mancrew--sometimes the gang's out for as long as a week at a time--andthe other side's a workshop."
That sounded interesting. With contragravity, of course, terms like"escape-velocity" and "mass-ratio" were of purely antiquarianinterest.
"How long," he asked Pearson, "would it take to fit that vehicle witha full set of detection instruments--radar, infrared and ultravioletvision, electron-telescope, heat and radiation detectors, the wholeworks--and spot it about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles aboveKeegark?"
"That I couldn't say, general," Emmett Pearson replied. "It'd have tobe a shipyard job, and a lot of that stuff's clear outside mydepartment. Ask Air-Commodore Hargreaves."
"Les!" he called out. "Wake up, Les!"
"Just a second, general." Hargreaves scribbled frantically on his pad."Now," he said, raising his head. "What is it, sir?"
"Emmett, here, has a junior-grade spaceship that he used to servicethose orbital telecast-relay stations of his. He'll tell you what it'slike. I want it fitted with every sort of detection device that can becrammed into or onto it, and spotted above Keegark. It should, ofcourse, be high enough to cover not only the Keegark area, butKonkrook, Kankad's, and the lower Hoork and Konk river-valleys."
"Yes, I get it." Hargreaves snatched up a phone, punched out acombination, and began talking rapidly into it in a low voice. Afterawhile, he hung up. "All right, Mr. Pearson--Colonel Pearson, I mean.Have your space-buggy sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix itup." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live throughthis, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in serviceon this planet.... Now, general; I have a tentative set-up. We'regoing to need the _Elmoran_ for patrol work south and east ofKonkrook, and the _Gaucho_ and _Bushranger_ to the north andnorth-east, based on Kankad's. We'll keep the _Aldebaran_ at Kankad's,and use her for emergencies. And we'll have patrols of lightcontragravity like this." He handed a map, with red-pencil andblue-pencil markings, along to von Schlichten. "Red are Kankad-based;blue are Konkrook-based."
"That looks all right," von Schlichten said. "There's another thing,though. We want scout-vehicles to cover the Keegark area withradiation-detectors. These geeks are quite well aware ofradiation-danger from fissionables, but they're accustomed to theordinary industrial-power reactors, which are either very lightlyshielded or unshielded on top. We want to find out where Orgzild'sbomb-plant is."
"Yes, general; as soon as we can get radiation detectors sent out toKankad's, we'll have a couple of fast aircars fitted with them forthat job."
"We have detectors, at our laboratory and reaction-plant," Kankadsaid. "And my people can make more, as soon as you want them." Hethought for a moment. "Perhaps I should go to the town, now. I couldbe of more use there than here."
Kent Pickering, who had been talking with his experts at a tableapart, returned.
"We've set up a program, general," he said. "It's going to be a lotharder than I'd anticipated. None of us seem to know exactly what wehave to do in building one of those things. You see, the uranium orplutonium fission-bomb's been obsolete for over four hundred years. Itwas a classified-secret matter long after its obsolescence, because ithadn't been rendered any the less deadly by being superseded--therewas that A-bomb that the Christian Anarchist Party put together atBuenos Aires in 378 A.E., for instance. And then, after it wasdeclassified, it had been so far superseded that it was of onlyantiquarian interest; the textbooks dealt with it only in generalterms. The principles, of course, are part of basic nuclear science;the secret of the A-bomb was just a bag of engineering tricks that wedon't have, and which we will have to rediscover. Design of tampers,design of the chemical-explosive charges to bring subcritical massestogether, case-design, detonating mechanism, things like that.
"The complete data on even the old Hiroshima and Nagasaki types isstill in existence, of course. You can get it at places like theUniversity of Montevideo Library, or Jan Smuts Memorial Library atCape Town. But we don't have it here. We're detailing a couple ofjunior technicians to make a search of the library here on GongonkIsland, but we're not optimistic. We just can't afford to pass up anychance, even when it approaches zero-probability."
Von Schlichten nodded. "That's about what I'd expected," he said. "Isuppose Gomes got his data out of one of the dustier storage-stacks atJan Smuts or Montevideo, in the first place.... Well, I still wantthat bomb finished by yesterday afternoon, but since that'simpractical, you'll have to take a little--but as little aspossible--longer."
"What are we going to do about publicity on this?" Howlett, thepersonnel man. asked. "We don't want this getting out in garbledform--though how it could be made worse by garbling I couldn'tguess--and having the troops watching the sky over their shoulders andgoing into a panic as soon as they saw something they didn'tunderstand."
"No, we don't. I've seen a couple of troop-panics," von Schlichtensaid. "There can't be anything much worse than a panic."
"I think the Terrans ought to be told the worst," Hargreaves said."And told that our only hope is to get a bomb of our own built anddropped first. As to the Kragans.... What do you think, King Kankad?"
"Tell them that we are building a bomb to destroy Keegark; that we arerunning short
of ammunition, and that it is our only hope of finishingthe war before the ammunition is gone," Kankad said. "Tell themsomething of what sort of a bomb it is. But do not tell them that KingOrgzild already has such a bomb. Old Kankad, who made me out ofhimself, told me about how our people fled in panic from the weaponsof the Terrans, when your people and mine were still enemies. Thisthing is to the weapons they faced then as those weapons were to theold Kragans' spears and bows.... And when the geeks from Grank comehere, tell them that we are winning and that if they fight well, theycan share the loot of Konkrook and Keegark."
Von Schlichten looked up at the big screen. Already, ThemistoclesM'zangwe had ordered the Channel Battery to reduce fire; the big gunswere firing singly, in thirty-second-interval salvos. There was lessbombing, too; contragravity was being drawn out of the battle.
"Well, we all have things to do," he said, "and I think we'vediscussed everything there is to discuss. Anybody think of anythingwe've forgotten?... Then we're adjourned."
He and Paula Quinton took the elevator to the roof, and sat side byside, silently watching the conflagration that was raging across thechannel and the nearer flashes of the big guns along the island's cityside.
"Wednesday night, I thought we were all cooked," Paula told him."Cleaning up the North in two days seemed like an impossibility, too.Maybe you'll do it again."
"If I pull this one out of the fire, I won't be a general; I'll be amagician," he said. "Pickering'll be a magician, I mean; he's the boywho'll save our bacon, if it's saveable." He looked somberly acrossthe flame-reflecting water. "Let's not kid ourselves; we're justkicking and biting at the guards on the way up the gallows-steps."
"Well, why stop till the trap's sprung?" she asked. "What'll happen tothese people on this planet, after we're atomized?"
"That I don't want to think about. Kankad's Town will get the secondbomb; Orgzild won't dare leave the Kragans after he's wiped us out.Yoorkerk and Jonkvank, in the North, will turn on Keaveney and Shapiroand Karamessinis and Hid O'Leary and wipe them out. And when the nextship gets in here and they find out what happened, they'll send theFederation Space Navy, and this planet'll get it worse than Fenrisdid. They'll blast anything that has four arms and a face like alizard...."
Half a dozen aircars lifted suddenly from the airport and streakedaway to the north-east. As they went past, in the light of theburning-city, he could see that at least three of them had multiplerocket-launchers on top. In a matter of seconds, a gun-cutter racedafter them, and a second, which had been over Konkrook, jettisoned abomb and turned away to follow.
"Maybe that's it," Paula said.
"Well, if it is, we won't be any better off anywhere else than here,"he told her. "Let's stay where we are and watch."
After what seemed like a long time, however, a twinkle of lightsshowed over the East Konk Mountains. They weren't the flashes ofexplosions; some were magnesium flares, and some were the lights of aship.
"That's _Procyon_, from Grank," he said. "Everybody gets a good markfor this--detection stations, interceptors, gun-cutters. If that hadbeen it, there'd have been a good chance of stopping it." He feltbetter than he had since Pickering had told him that Lourenco Gomeswas dead. "It's a good thing Gorkrink didn't pick up any dope onguided missiles, while he was at it. As long as they have to deliverit with contragravity, we have a chance."
They rose from the balustrade where they had been sitting, and, forthe first time, he discovered that he had had his left arm over hershoulder and that she had had her right hand resting on the point ofhis right hip, just above his pistol. He picked up the folder ofpapers she had been carrying, and put her into the elevator ahead ofhim, and it was only when they parted on the living-quarters levelthat he recalled having followed the older protocol of gallantryrather than the precedence of military rank.