Before they had left Africa, Dr. MacKendrick had been very pessimistic about being able to remove such brain devices from all that bone and still have a live, functioning Psychlo on his hands. That chance was not entirely gone. But it was nothing to be counted on.
Angus had lately begun to understand why Jonnie had kept Terl alive, why they didn’t just get out some battle planes and wipe this new political mess out. It was a very delicate situation. It was a thin chance. It had to work. But with what risks! Angus had no doubt whatever that Jonnie was holding his own life at stake. A huge and dangerous risk. But what a prize! The Psychlo technology of teleportation. Earth depended upon it.
Jonnie was a cool one, Angus thought. He himself would never have that much patience or be able to retain that detached an overview of the entire scene without permitting personal considerations from entering in.
Angus looked up from the locks. He was in awe of Jonnie as he thought about what they were doing. These people or Terl would kill Jonnie in a flash if they found him or knew what he was up to. Robert the Fox had denounced it as folly and a hopeless, unwarranted risk. Angus didn’t think so. It was a brand of courage he had never seen before.
He got the cabinets opened. They contained all the paraphernalia a security chief ever thought he would need. They contained papers and records Terl would consider vital.
Jonnie was looking for superconfidential notes on teleportation or its odd mathematics. On his inspection he did not find anything on those subjects beyond normal tests. But he did find an item of interest.
It was a record of all the mineral deposits left on Earth. The company had not made a mineral survey for itself for centuries, content with their originals. But Terl had.
Jonnie smiled. There were sixteen lodes of gold on the planet almost as good as the one they had mined! In the Andes and the Himalayas—they just weren’t that close to home and it would have been more public to have mined them. Ah, yes. All these other lodes were also associated with uranium.
There were thick records of Earth’s existing mineral resources. Hundreds of years of security chiefs had continued to log the findings of the drones, which were used for security but were essentially mineral spotters.
The company, with its “semicore” methods of mining, could go down almost to the molten core, to the very bottom of the crust without breaking through. And they were content to mine what they had and conserve their assets of unmined wealth.
Terl had simply removed the records from company view for his own purposes.
Ores, metals! The planet was still wealthy in resources.
Jonnie recorded every page rapidly. This was not what he was here for, but it was nice to know their planet had not been bankrupted of minerals. They would need them.
Angus had found what they were really looking for just now—Terl’s bug probe. It was an oblong box with an aerial sticking out of it and a disk cup on the tip of the aerial. It had on/off switches for various frequencies and light domes and buzzers.
Jonnie had done his apprenticeship well in the electronics shop. He knew that no wave this could detect would pass through lead or a lead alloy. Ordinarily this would not be a factor since any bug of any kind whatsoever would also not pass through lead. Therefore, why detect it since it wouldn’t work as a bug or button camera if it had lead over it?
The first job was to rig these switches.
Jonnie made a trip to electronics stores and got what he wanted. He came back to find that Ker had swept the area for bugs and found none.
They chose where Terl would do his shopwork: in Chirk’s former reception office. It was big enough to work in and the size console it would be would go in and out of the door.
While Jonnie, at his desk, worked on the bug probe, the other two rigged a workbench out of a metal slab and welded it to the floor and then armor annealed the welds so it would be an awful lot of trouble to move. They even got a stool and put it in front of it. When they had finished, they had a very nice layout. Jonnie moved his work over to it.
He had made excellent progress. Using microbutton transmitters employed normally in remote controls, he had rigged every switch in the probe so that when it was turned on it would send out an impulse from the remote relay. These relays took a microscope to see properly. They were fastened in with a small molecular spray. The worst part was getting them to stay where one wanted them while spraying them down. But the eye that could detect them unaided had never been made.
Using a scope set at a distance from the probe, he clicked each switch on in turn and the scope bounced in response.
The next part was hard because it involved the adaption of iris leaves taken from tubes of plane viewers. These were small devices that automatically adjusted the volume of a light path. They would close their concentric leaves from wide open to shut.
They had to take these delicate things apart and spray them, molecules thick, with lead, and reassemble them, so they would not only work but would go on working, opening and closing. Angus was the best at this sort of work.
They then got some contraction rings and put them around these leaded irises and installed microbuttons in them to activate them.
When they had built about fifteen of these, they made a thorough and extensive test. When the probe was clicked on, the iris instantly closed. When the probe was turned off, the irises sprang open.
In other words, the leaded irises would be shut whenever the probe was on, thus putting a lead screen over any bug and making it undetectable and for the moment unable to “see” and “hear.” But when the probe was off, the screen would be off and any bug or device could “see” and “hear.”
So far so good. They now went on an extensive tour of storerooms—telling Lars, who showed up, that they were looking for “spindle-buffers”—and located not only every other bug probe in the compound, but also every other key component it took to make a bug probe. They put these in a box and put the box in their car to be transported out of the country.
They now had a probe that wouldn’t probe while obviously working and fifteen irises they could put in front of bug devices.
Lars popped up again, saying they sure were quiet, and they told him to get lost. But presently Ker took a disk recording of hammering and pounding and drilling and let it play.
They cleaned up traces of their work so far and hid their products.
Suddenly they realized it had been a long day. They hadn’t eaten. They had a long way to go, but that, they agreed, was enough for now.
Jonnie and Angus, not wanting to tempt the fates by running into too many cadets at the Academy, elected to bed down in Char’s old quarters. Ker was going to drive back to the Academy and get them something to eat and bring them some work clothes. Dunneldeen should be there now and Jonnie had a message for him about the Psychlos. Jonnie typed it out on Chirk’s writing machine:
All’s well. In three days, engineer the transportation of the thirty-three Ps now in compound jailhouse to stated destination Cornwall. Report them crashed at sea. Deliver to the doctor. Not before three days. You will have no trouble with them. They’ll be screaming to leave. Eat this note.
Ker said he’d deliver it and rushed away.
Jonnie and Angus stretched out to unwind. So far it was okay. They had a ways to go.
2
A bit lost in Char’s twelve-foot bed, a bit tense in this echoing, empty compound, Jonnie was waiting for Ker’s return. It was getting very late and he was wondering what the delay might be. But to pass the time, he was reading.
Char, in packing, had tossed out odds and ends that he hadn’t cared to take back to Psychlo with him, and one of them was a Psychlo infant’s History of Psychlo, maybe from Char’s own early schooling, for it said under the coverleaf, in an immature scrawl, “Char’s Book. You stole it so give it back!” and then below that, “Or I’ll claw you!” Well, Char wouldn’t claw anybody now: he was dead, by Terl’s thrust, quite a time now.
Because
Ker had mentioned underground mines, Jonnie was mildly interested to learn that the whole of the Imperial City on Psychlo and all the surrounding area was a maze of deep and abandoned shafts and drifts. As long as three hundred thousand years ago, Psychlo had exhausted surface minerals and had developed semicore techniques. Some of the shafts went down as far as eighty-three miles and in some cases that was within half a mile of the liquid core. How awfully hot those mines must have been! They could only be worked by machines, not living beings. The labyrinth was so extensive that it caused some buildings on the surface to sag from time to time.
He was just reading about the “First Interplanetary War to End Mineral Starvation” when Ker came back.
Ker looked a bit grave, even through his face mask. “Dunneldeen’s been arrested,” he said.
Dunneldeen, related Ker, had arrived in a battle plane just at sunset and had gone to find quarters and supper. As he came out of the mess hall, two men in monkey skins with crossbelts stepped out of the shadows and told him he was under arrest. A squad of several more were at a distance.
They had taken Dunneldeen in a ground car driven by Lars up to the big capitol building, the one with the painted dome up in the ruined city. They pushed him into the “courtroom” and the Senior Mayor Planet started to charge him with a whole lot of crimes like interrupting council projects and committing war and had then looked at him more closely and said, “You’re not Tyler!” And had called for the guard captain and there’d been a row. Then this Senior Mayor made Dunneldeen promise not to incite a war with Scotland over this and had let him go.
Dunneldeen was back at the Academy after taking Lars’s car away from him and he was all right. Ker had had to wait to give him the message and Dunneldeen said to warn Jonnie.
“It means,” concluded Ker, “that they expected you to come in and they’ve got their eyes out all over the place. We got to work fast, be careful, and get you out of here as soon as we can.”
Jonnie and Angus ate a bit of the food Ker had brought and then went to sleep for four hours. Ker had turned in in his old room, sleeping in a breathe-mask, for there was no breathe-gas circulation in the general compound.
They were at it again before dawn, working fast. Ker had another disk recording of hammering and pounding and he put it on. The kind of work they were doing didn’t sound at all like duct work.
What they had to do now was plant “eyes” and picture transmitters so they could not be seen or detected.
They attacked the lead glass dome and bored “bullet holes” in it in the exact right places, getting around the problem of their being covered by the blinds, if drawn. The very top of one of these upper-level domes was much more thickly tinted than the sides, so the detectors (“readers,” Ker called them) had to be up pretty high.
The “bullet holes” also had to be starred out, which is to say, given hairline cracks to make it look like they had come in from the outside. For good measure they put some in other domes and didn’t repair them so that the condition appeared more general than in just Terl’s quarters.
They sank readers and transmitters into the holes. Then they repaired the holes with one-way, see-through “bubble patch.” They put more glass repair sealing roughly on the “cracks.”
Each reader had a leaded iris in front of it and was in a little lead box. The result looked like a crudely repaired hole fixed up in slovenly fashion by careless workmen. Each of these was focused on a different part of the work areas in the two rooms.
“He won’t fool with that,” grinned Ker. “He’ll be afraid he’ll let his breathe-gas out and air in!”
It was afternoon by the time they completed the dome readers. They tested them with the probe and receivers. They went blind and undetectable with the probe on and read everything in their path with the scope off.
They took a short lunch break and turned off the disk that had been blasting their ears in. There was suddenly more din outside.
Ker went to the door and unbarred it. Lars got a whiff of breathe-gas and backed up. He demanded Ker to come out and talk to him right now.
“You’re interrupting our work,” said Ker. But he went out in the hall.
“You’ve got your nerve!” said Lars, quivering with rage. “You gave me a handful of junk that had radioactive dust on it! You got me in trouble! When I showed it to Terl this morning, it started to explode when it got near his breathe-mask. You knew it would! He almost bit me!”
“All right, all right, all right!” said Ker. “We will clean up everything in here before we turn on any big amount of breathe-gas.”
“Those were radioactive bullets!” shouted Lars.
“All right!” said Ker. “They came in through the dome. We’ll find them all. Don’t get so excited!”
“Trying to get me in trouble,” said Lars.
“You stay out of here,” said Ker. “It rots human bones, you know.”
Lars didn’t know. He backed up. He left.
Angus said, when Ker had come back in and barred the door, “Were they really radioactive bullets?”
Ker laughed and began to shove goo-food in his mask. Jonnie marveled. Ker was the only Psychlo he had ever seen that could chew kerbango with a mask on, and now he was eating goo-food and talking with a mask on.
“It was flitter,” said Ker, laughing. “It’s a compound that throws off blue sparks when sunlight hits it. I dusted some of it on the bullets. Harmless. A kid’s toy.” He was laughing even harder. Then he sighed. “We had to explain the bullet holes, so we had to ‘find’ some bullets. But that Terl—he is so clever that he sometimes can be awful dumb!”
Jonnie and Angus laughed with him. They could imagine Terl seeing the sparks when Lars held out the “finds” Ker had given him and the sunlight setting off the blue sparks. Terl’s conviction that the world was after him must have driven him halfway through the back wall of the cage! He would have thought his own breathe-mask exhaust was setting off uranium!
They were into the duct work now and they really did start hammering and pounding. The trick was to inset leadirised readers into the duct vent intakes and exhausts around the room so that they could not be seen and yet, peering out of the dark depths of the vents, could read an exact portion of the workrooms. The ducts actually required some very fancy work of their own. Although Ker was a midget, he could bend sheet iron with his paws like it was paper.
Ker fixed it so the ducts, as they entered and left the room, were rickety. If you touched them they appeared to be in danger of coming apart and falling out. But in actual fact the final fittings were armor-welded.
They set the readers into these, made sure the irises worked, put the ducts in place, and began on the circulator pumps. It was late evening by this time, but they worked straight on through. By about one in the morning they had completed a usable circulator system that would go on working.
They felt they were running behind in time so they didn’t stop. They had the problem now of centralizing the transmissions of all the readers and getting them clear over to the Academy, miles away.
None of these readers could be powered and picked up from more than a few hundred feet away. They all had different frequencies to keep them apart and this meant a bulky feeder system.
Jonnie worked on the probe some more and put an on/off remote in it that would turn off and on the multichanneled feeder box. That was the easiest part. One mustn’t have radio waves flying about with a probe on.
The tough part of it was getting the transmission through to the Academy. They solved it by using ground waves. Ground waves differ from air waves in that they can travel only through the ground. The “aerial” to send is a rod driven in the earth and the “aerial” to receive is simply another. It takes a different wavelength band so there was no danger of anything detecting it. Since ground waves were not in general use by the Earth Psychlos it required a feverish fabrication of components, converting normal radio to ground wave.
It was the fall
of the year and it was still dark when Angus and Ker went screeching off to the Academy to install the receivers and recorders, one unit in a toilet, one in an unused telephone box and the third under a loose tile in front of the altar in the chapel.
Jonnie meanwhile buried the feeder outside the dome in the ground. He had the pretext ready of “looking for power cables” but he didn’t need it. The world slept. He shoved in fuel cartridges to run it for half a year or more, wrapped it in waterproofing, buried it in the hole, pounded in the ground aerial, and restored the turf. Nobody could detect the grass had even been touched—a hunter’s skill in making deadfalls came in handy.
Inside again, he checked. Every lead iris was working flawlessly. The readers were powered. They went on and off at the feeder. He let them run to give Angus and Ker a signal to set their recorders to, over at the Academy.
Jonnie busied himself with placing and armor-welding the desks and drawing board in place. No molecular cutter would ever dent those welds!
At eight o’clock Angus and Ker sauntered in as though just arriving for the day. They bolted the door and both turned huge grins on Jonnie.
“It works!” said Angus. “We watched you laboring away and even read the serial number of your welding torch. We got all fifteen readers on the screen!” He thrust out his hand. “And here’s the disks!”
They replayed them. They could even see the grain in material, much less read numbers!
They heaved a sigh of relief.
Then Angus took Jonnie by the shoulder and pointed to the door. “We needed your skill and ideas up to now. But from here on, it’s just putting cream on the oatmeal to convince Terl. Every minute you stay here is a minute too long.”
Ker was already putting the rigged probe back in exactly the same place, arranging the cabinet just as it had been. “When I took on this job and suspected you’d be coming,” he said as he worked, “I fueled a plane. It’s the one exactly opposite the hangar door—ninety-three is the last of its serial numbers. All waiting for you. They don’t want us, they want you!”