The small gray man sighed. “I am very much afraid, Half-Captain, that anything I have to give you has not yet resolved itself to critical analysis. It would not be complete, and while we are always happy to be of service, I fear we might erroneously advise you.”
“Ah. Well, it won’t take very long to organize things here,” said the Tolnep. “It’s been a very long voyage and my crew is still in deep sleep, but we can launch a party in the next few hours and obtain preliminary data.”
The small gray man was afraid he would say that. “I, of course, would not presume to thwart your intentions, Half-Captain, but I should think it would be very inadvisable.”
“Oh? But a quick smash-bash, a few beings seized from here and there, and a rapid interrogation should give us all we need.”
“Half-Captain, I feel I should advise you that I do not think it would yield fruit. I have been collecting information for some time now and have here anything you would get. I can transmit it over to you, whatever I happen to have.”
“That would be very thoughtful of you, Your Excellency. But why not a quick smash-bash minor raid? I detect some thoughts on this.”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said the small gray man, “you do detect some reservations and it is very acute of you. It might be important to stand off and wait.”
“Do you think they’re the ones?” asked Snowl.
“My dear fellow,” said the small gray man, “I believe there are three hundred different planetary suspects.”
“Three hundred two, I think,” said Snowl. “At least that is the rumored figure.”
“We cannot tell you that this is the one,” said the small gray man, “and I can’t give you comparative evidence about other planets and systems for I am, of course, concerned with simply this sector, as you are. But it is my belief, based on very thin evidence, that this just could be the one.”
“Oh, I say!” said the Tolnep. “That’s promising!”
“We are not in a position to adjudicate at this time. But it could be that a raid by you might disturb what appears to be a very critical political situation down there and possibly disturb it to our disfavor.”
“You’re advising us to wait, then,” said the Tolnep.
“Well, yes,” said the small gray man. “I will send you across any file data I have been collecting and I think you will reach the same conclusion.”
“It’s difficult,” said the Tolnep. “No raids, no prize money is our position. But we do have this other strategic thing.”
“Yes, and we should not make any tactical move that might upset it.”
“Ah,” said the Tolnep. Then, “How long would you think we should delay? Days, months, years?”
“Months, I should think.”
The Tolnep sighed. Then brightened and smiled—a Tolnep smile was a bit frightening since their fangs were poison—“All right, Your Excellency. It is very courteous of you to offer the information and I shall be very happy to review it. By the way, can we offer you escort and protection? I should think a Hockner ship might show up and they are quite nasty, you know.”
“I do thank you, Half-Captain,” said the small gray man wearily, “but as you know, we have no quarrel, ourselves, with the Hockners.”
“No, of course not,” said the Tolnep. “Any supplies, anything like that we can provide?”
“Thank you, not just now. Possibly later. Your courtesy is always appreciated.”
“We’re already in your debt,” said the Tolnep and laughed. “Come across for some tea sometime.” He clicked off.
The very thought of more tea made the small gray man’s stomach hurt. He reached for another indigestion pill. All things considered, this really was the worst hard-core problem that had ever come to his desk.
The indigestion pill was about to take effect when he suddenly realized that the Bolbods, the Hawvins, and who knows who else, might show up. He hoped they wouldn’t quarrel with one another. In the situation he was in, it took months now to get proper reports home and months to hear anything. He felt very much on his own.
He looked out the port again at the gun-bristling monster of a war vessel, flashing along beside them in the glaring sunlight. Tough beings, the Tolneps. But really not much worse than Bolbods or Hockners.
He glanced down at the planet face below them. Was it really the one? If it were, in one way it would be a relief. But if it were, what violence could go shooting down at it!
His sigh was very deep.
2
Terl was purring. He was moving into his office today!
There had been a few bad moments. This morning he had sent Lars into it to make sure it was not booby-trapped—better Lars blew up than he.
The compound in general had been in a bit of a turmoil. General Snith had come down and commandeered all the dead bodies of the slaughtered commando and had had a fight with a couple of his officers, apparently concerning mess table allocations. But Snith had resolved all that. There were twenty-eight bodies, eighteen active commandos. So he had hit on the masterful solution of one body to be issued to each commando, two to the officer’s mess, six to the women and children, and two to his own table. So that had died down.
The thirteenth commando had cleaned the place up and the fifth commando had taken over the duty, all very smooth and military. They were all very polite to Terl and so it was obvious they knew who their boss was.
But right after things had smoothed out, Lars came screaming back to the cage to tell Terl that the place was booby-trapped. Worse, he didn’t have a clue how to disarm a booby trap. Knowing he had better not let any of these Brigantes loose in the place— they’d stink it up and maybe blow it up—Terl himself had had to go in to handle the trap.
It was right inside the kneehole of the desk. Knowing that one booby trap could have another under it to explode when the top one was removed, he had taken a lot of care to remove it.
When he had disarmed it, he was about to throw it out when he saw that it had hairs stuck in it. They were gray Psychlo wrist hairs! Ker’s fur was orange. And somebody had broken a claw tip while pushing the plastic explosive down around the edges: it was too big a tip for it to be Ker’s.
On hearing about this booby trap the first time, Terl had supposed it would be the animal’s doings. According to what he had learned, the animal had remained behind after the other two left and probably had planted this trap.
The fact that the animal had not come up and killed him too when the animal had wiped out this commando had troubled Terl. This was the second or third time the animal had had a chance to kill him but had not done so. Eerie. Unnatural. So he had figured out that the animal, having planted this booby trap, thought it was all cared for.
These bits of fur and the claw tip changed that. Once more, the animal had not killed him or tried to. Very abnormal behavior. Terl finally came to a conclusion, however. The animal had been so beaten about by Terl that the animal was afraid of him. That was the right answer!
Terl was comfortable with this until he realized that it was the Psychlos down in the lower dormitory who had sneaked up here and planted the trap.
Instantly he demanded their slaughter. He didn’t want them around anyway. But Lars had come back and said that that very morning all thirty-three of them had been removed under cadet guard and had been shipped overseas—and here was the requisition for goo-food, kerbango, breathe-gas, etc., to prove it. So Terl got over his fright and began to collect the odd bits such as the dictionary and extra breathe-gas vials from the cage, walked out of it forever, and went back to his office.
What a relief to be out of the sun and air of this accursed planet!
He locked the door and turned on the breathe-gas circulator and soon he could take off his mask. What a relief to have a mask off.
Terl looked around. Some things had been moved out. No drone recorders. Who wanted them? No radio links. So what? Compound intercoms all dead. Who cared?
But the place w
as all set up to work. He thought one table was out of position and sought to move it and found it was welded down. Even welded down with an armor weld! Ho, ho! Somebody wanted that table in exactly that place! Ah, ha! That was why the animal remained behind. The place was bugged!
They hadn’t moved his clothes out. Later, he would dress and become civilized again. But just now he wanted his green dress boots. There they were. They even had dust on the floor around them and hadn’t been moved an inch. He turned the right boot upside down, twisted the heel, and the cabinet keys fell out.
He went back into the main office room. Ah, hah! They had tried to jimmy the cabinets. There were the jimmy marks and one door slightly bent. But Terl knew you couldn’t jimmy security cabinets open. He unlocked them all. Everything all in its same old place! Better and better.
He picked up the bug detector, inspected it. He turned it on. And right away a buzz! Lights flashing! Devils but this place was really bugged!
For a solid hour, Terl did nothing but remove bugs. Micro-microphones, button cameras, scanners. All in very hidden places, all focused to zero in on the key work areas.
Thirty-one of them. He had been tossing them, when found, onto his desk. He counted again. Thirty-one. Oh, that animal had been busy! And stupid! Terl bet every other detector had been removed from the compound.
Finally he put on a tunic. Somebody had stacked a whole crate of kerbango pans against the wall and he was eyeing it. He was about to indulge when he thought, “Just one more sweep,” and passed the bug detector around again. It whined!
For fifteen minutes he searched and searched. And then he found it. It was a micro set into the design of the top tunic button. He was wearing it.
Thirty-two. He checked out all his other clothes. No more. He thought he had better look into the ducts visually. They didn’t register on the detector but who knew? But when he tried to steady himself on a chair by touching the duct frame it was wobbly. No more of that! He could let air into this place. Shoddy work. But what could one expect?
He surveyed the place again. He stood and laughed when he saw the components rack. Every assorted type of component, each with a big label above the box. And one of the button cameras he’d found hidden in a light fixture had been trained straight on it. Stupid animal!
Then he suddenly realized there must be a planted feeder unit to power these bugs and relay their coverage.
He put a mask on and got Lars. They went up and down the passageways. And there it was! A whole feeder unit, all wired up, right inside a recess closet for fire apparatus. He pulled it out and turned it off. Such a thing could run for half a year.
And recorders? It must have been relaying to recorders. Within a few hundred feet. He went back and got a mine radio, turned the feeder on, and very shortly ran down the recorder. Just inside the garage door where anyone could pass in and out to change its disks without much observation. Stupid animal!
He turned the thing off and took it away. Who cared about any others? They were blind now that they had no bugs to feed or record.
Happily, he went back into his office, barred it, rechecked with his detector. Beautiful silence. No lights. Wonderful. Privacy at last.
He put on some pants and boots. He opened up a pan of kerbango and sank back in his chair, luxuriating.
Home to wealth and power. That’s where he was going now. And this time he would set such a trap that the animal would be gobbled up if he even came near it.
After nearly an hour, he thought he had better get to work.
But first things first. He had better calculate how much time he had to get this job done. And then start on the construction of a weapon so lethal and deadly that the company never used it except in the extreme emergency of planet destruction. After he fired, this place would be just a smudge in the sky.
He went to the cabinets and opened a false bottom.
3
Since his return to the African minesite, Jonnie had had trouble getting to sleep at night. He would roll and toss on the oversized Psychlo bed in the underground room he now used, uncomfortable in the overly hot and humid dark, going over and over again the steps and planning of recent past events, spotting where he had gone wrong in this and where he should have done something else in that. The life of a boy seemed far too much to pay for the information they had to have.
Sir Robert was not here. He remained in Scotland organizing a perimeter antiaircraft defense for Edinburgh. MacKendrick was not here. He had taken a trip home to see to the movement of his underground hospital to more suitable quarters now available and to check up on how his assistant there was getting along. Colonel Ivan was in Russia.
Stormalong had been detained here, for they were afraid some revenge might be taken upon him for lending his clothes and identity to the recent enterprise. Finding himself at loose ends, the Norwegian had kept himself busy inventorying the “flying hardware”—a name he had gotten from somewhere or invented for planes.
Through Stormalong’s efforts Jonnie had begun to divine the true character of his African base. Because it shipped very little bulk ore—they had roasted the tungsten down on the site—it had had none of the bulk ore carriers, a fact which made it necessary to truck out fuel and breathe-gas from the branch minesite in the Ituri Forest. But this African central did have a great many other types of planes which had led Stormalong to conclude that the base had also had a defense function. From some old Psychlo manuals they had found, it seemed that in event of attack upon the minesite near Denver, this African base had the function of launching a counterattack to take an enemy by surprise. And this is exactly what these Psychlos had been engaged upon when annihilated.
It greatly intrigued Stormalong to find several types of flying hardware he had never seen before and which weren’t listed in current Psychlo manuals. They were not battlecraft as such, however. They were dual-purpose machines brought in to perform a specific task, and then, that task done—rather typical of company policy—they had simply been dollied to the back of the hangar and forgotten. Too costly or too much trouble to return them to Psychlo.
According to flight logs still with them, they had been used to “mine out” an enormous amount of material which was found in orbit around this planet, a circumstance unusual in Psychlo experience. Some of the metals in these objects were priceless, being very scarce elsewhere, and the company had taken the unusual step of sending in some machines.
If properly gasketed in its doors, due to its teleportation motors, which had no dependence upon air for lift, any common battle plane could fly to the moon and back without too much trouble. But they were not equipped to mine in space. You couldn’t take objects in and out of a battle plane while flying in a vacuum. So some factory on Psychlo or on a planet controlled by the Psychlos had converted some very heavy duty, armored marine- attack planes. With atmosphere locks and remote control grapplers, they could fly alongside some object in space, seize on to it, and put it in the hold. Some scraps of such recovered objects were still in the holds of these things, bits which had broken off, like nameplates. One said NASA and Stormalong tried to look it up in planetary lists and couldn’t find it. Therefore he had to conclude it had once been a local something.
Jonnie had looked at the old relics with some indifference. The gaskets on the doors were deteriorated—you can’t expect a gasket to last for eleven hundred years and still be airtight, he pointed out. Every hinge and ball joint in their cranes and doors was too stiff to operate properly. There were even some spider nests in them and the spiders had dined, for countless generations, on another breed of insect that had dined upon the upholstery. The things were a mess. Jonnie had been more interested in another craft which mounted a blast cannon.
But Stormalong, having some idle and recently trained mechanics and three spare pilots on his hands and full shops available, had put these relics in operating condition. He had even painted a burning torch on either side of its nose, which he said was a symbol of fre
edom. Stormalong had a lot of artistic style in him, Jonnie had to admit. But he privately hoped the symbol didn’t forecast the thing going down in flames.
Not detecting the expected amount of enthusiasm, Stormalong had smugly pointed out, “Do you have anything else that could go up and visit those things orbiting four hundred miles up there?”
For some days now there had been four bright objects in orbit. First there had been one, then two, and now four.
“Visit them!” Jonnie had said, aghast. “This thing doesn’t even have guns anymore!”
“We put them back,” said Stormalong. “And every screen and instrument in it works now. There were spares.”
“You better test fly it,” said Jonnie, “with a jet backpack close to hand!”
“I did,” said Stormalong. “Yesterday. The console buttons are a bit old-fashioned, but it flies great.”
“Well, don’t go flying up to those objects!” said Jonnie.
“Oh, I didn’t,” said Stormalong. “I just took pictures of them.”
He had them. One was a big craft with a diamond-shaped bridge and a lot of blast-gun snouts. One was a cylinder with a control deck in the front, flat end. One was a thing which looked like a five-pointed star with a sort of gun on each star point. And the fourth was a sphere with a ring around it.
“Hey,” said Jonnie, “that answers the description, the last one, of the small gray man’s ship, the one you did, but didn’t, crash into.”
“Precisely,” said Stormalong. “We’re under surveillance.”
Jonnie had known they were under surveillance. No enemy had a monopoly on that. They had shifted their own drone pattern and control to Cornwall and there were repeaters here. Twelve drones, flying slow around the globe, were passing the American minesite every few hours. They were also recording the objects in orbit, though not so well, for drones were basically down-looking. No, a potential enemy had no monopoly. And ground defenses were also alert. But it was minimal defense and Jonnie knew it.
Tonight he couldn’t sleep at all. Dunneldeen was overdue with the first recordings of Terl’s activities, and Jonnie didn’t even know yet whether they would get recordings. Radio chatter about their project was forbidden. He was in the dark.