He got up restlessly at last and paced about. Then he went outside the compound. Hot, muggy. A lion was roaring down by the lake. The sky was overcast. Suddenly, he was overcome with the desire for some cool air and a look at stars.
There were a couple of battle planes on standby, ready for a scramble if needed, but they were defense items. The ancient relic Stormalong had repaired was near at hand, a dull green in the glow of compound lights. On impulse, wanting only to do something besides brood, he went in to the duty officer and told him where he was going and got a mask and flight suit.
True enough the controls were a bit old-fashioned. The lift-balance buttons were bigger and in a different place. The gun trips had been moved to make way for the crane controls. But so what? He put on a jet backpack, strapped himself in, closed all the windows tight, and vaulted the old wreck skyward.
He burst through the overcast and there were the stars. Jonnie could always get a thrill from flying. Since that first enchanting day he had been aloft, he had never lost it. The black sky and bright stars, half a moon, some snow-capped peaks close by shoving their crowns up through the overcast and into the night sky. Jonnie felt some of his tension ease away.
He simply enjoyed it. It was certainly cooler now.
Out of habit he scanned his screens. Some blips! He looked through the screen for a visual check. Four objects in orbit was what should be there. No, there were five. One new object was approaching the four old ones, all brighter and steadier than stars. About four hundred miles up.
The last thing he was going to do was go up and “visit” them. Unknown ships there; he was flying a relatively untried ship here. He had no support. And even if this old relic could fly clear to the moon and back, he needed no additional incidents at this time, thank you.
But maybe he could get some better pictures. Stormy’s, taken in daylight, had been fuzzy with ultraviolet. He threw his plane up to a height of two hundred miles and closer to the objects, his attention mainly on putting the recorders on standby.
What was that? A flash from the new fifth ship? Yes. Another flash? Were they shooting at him?
Ready to take evasive action, he suddenly saw a wild flurry of flashes coming from one of the four objects and a splash of light on the fifth. Hey! The fifth ship was shooting at one of the original four and that one was firing back!
He quickly battered away at the old controls and closed the distance to about a hundred fifty miles. He was so intent on getting his recorders working he didn’t realize he was shooting in toward those ships at hypersonic maximum.
Astonishing! The fifth ship and one of the original four were really having at it. Blast streaks were sheets of blue green and red between them. Orange splashes of hits!
Abruptly he realized they were getting awfully big in his viewscreens. A Psychlo-numbered digital was rolling up the narrowing distance. Seventy-five miles.
An instant before he pressed the console for a reverse role and drive, the firing among the ships ceased abruptly.
Jonnie put his old wreck into a full power fall and got out of there. That was not his war. He didn’t even know whether he had working guns.
At about a hundred miles above the earth’s surface he eased off. He was about fifty miles up when he was flying level again.
He looked back. They were not firing now. Just sitting up there. The fifth ship seemed to have closed in on the others.
Jonnie shook his head at himself. This was not the time to be doing crazy, reckless things. He had almost done exactly what he had warned Stormy not to do—go visiting.
The old relic he was flying had become heated from air friction. It was built to take it, but he had come up for a cool breath of air and now the flight deck was hot. If he’d really wanted to go up there he would have taken just an ordinary battle plane, making sure its gaskets were tight around the doors. And making sure its guns were loaded and working. Sir Robert would not have been proud of him!
Another blip on his viewscreens. Down low at about a hundred thousand feet of altitude. Coming on a route from Scotland? America over the pole?
Warm cabin or no warm cabin, he streaked down to intercept and identify. He flipped on his local command channel, and just as he did so a voice from the nearby plane came through:
“Don’t shoot! I’ll marry your daughter!” It was Dunneldeen.
Jonnie laughed. It was the first time he had laughed since returning from America.
He spun the old relic around and flashed after Dunneldeen as the Scot roared down toward the minesite.
4
The small gray man in his small gray cabin was sighing patiently. Well, not too patiently. His indigestion had not improved at all, and now this.
Things were distressing enough without the military people getting into fights among themselves. But it was a military matter, not political, not economic, and not strategic, so he was perforce out of it, a mere observer.
He now had four faces on his separate viewscreens. And if it kept on going this way, he’d have to ask his communications officer to break more screens out of stores and put them in on a rack. It made one’s office so cluttered.
The face of the Tolnep half-captain was quite angry-looking and he kept adjusting his glasses in an agitated way. “But I don’t care if you were surprised to see me here. I have no advices at all that our nations are at war!”
The Hawvin’s face was the light violet Hawvins got when they were very provoked. The square helmet was crushed down on his oval head, bending his ear antennae. His untoothed but blade-gummed mouth was distorted in the lifted attitude of biting. “How would you know who was at war and who wasn’t at war! You cannot be less than five months out from any base!”
The Hockner super-lieutenant who commanded the star-shaped craft looked a little supercilious with his monocle and excessive amount of gold braid. The long, noseless face portrayed what passed for disdain among his people in the Duraleb System.
The Bolbod was just plain plug-ugly, as they always were, bigger than Psychlos but sort of shapeless. One wondered how they ever handled anything at all—their “hands” were always clenched into fists. The high sweater neck almost met the bill of his exaggerated cap. The Bolbods considered insignia beneath their dignity, but the small gray man knew he was Gang Leader Poundon, commanding the cylinder-shaped spacecraft. He certainly had a low opinion of all the rest as effete degenerates.
“All right!” snapped the Tolnep. “Are our races at war or aren’t they?”
The Hawvin said, “I don’t have any information that they are or aren’t! But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t. It would not be the first time a Hawvin ship came peacefully onto station only to be raked by a sneaking Tolnep.”
“Your Excellency!” snapped the Tolnep, suddenly including the small gray man. “Do you have any information that the Tolneps and Hawvins are at war?”
It was a military matter but this could fringe on the political. “The courier ship that met me here did not mention it,” he said tiredly. Maybe one of the crew had some different brand of indigestion tablets. No, he didn’t think they would. Mello-gest was all that was sold these days. He wished they’d stop wrangling.
“You see!” hissed the Tolnep half-captain. “No war exists. Yet you come in here denting my plates in an unprovoked assault—”
“Did I really dent your plates?” said the Hawvin, abruptly interested.
“Here,” said the Hockner super-lieutenant. “Here now. You are both completely off the subject of the strange interceptor. If you two fellows want to draw off somewhere and batter away at each other, that’s your business, isn’t it? But who and what was that interceptor?”
The Bolbod snorted, “Couldn’t be anything but Psychlo.”
“I know, old fellow,” said the Hockner, adjusting his monocle, “but I’ve looked it up and it isn’t listed under Psychlo military craft.” He held a recognition book to the screen: Known Types of Psychlo War Craft. It was of course in Psy
chlo. All of them spoke Psychlo and the whole of their cross-communication was in Psychlo, since they didn’t speak each other’s native tongues. “It isn’t listed here.”
The Hawvin was glad to drop the subject of his attack on the Tolnep, no matter how surprised he’d been to find a Tolnep ship here. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
The Bolbod was more practical. “Why did it veer away the moment you stopped shooting?”
They pondered that for a while. Then the Hockner adjusted his monocle and said, “I rather think I have it! He supposed that our attention would be distracted and that this,” he snorted, “‘battle’ would knock out some of us and he’d be able to mop up the damaged remainder.”
They talked about this for a while. The small gray man listened politely to their military theories. It was none of his concern. They finally came to the conclusion that that was what it was all about. The interceptor had come up, ready to take advantage of the “battle” and destroy the remainder left over when they were in a damaged condition.
“I think they must be very clever,” said the Hockner. “Probably they have other interceptors here and they’re ready and waiting.”
“I could have eaten that one with one bite,” said the Hawvin.
“I could have knocked it out with one punch,” said the Bolbod. “If they were strong they would have come up here and smashed us up some days ago. I don’t think they’re Psychlos and I never before heard of any race that had that torch insignia. So I say they are very weak. I don’t know why we just don’t go down and wipe them out. As a combined force!”
A combined force was a brand-new idea. The three others had always considered Bolbods rather stupid, if strong, and they looked at him on their viewscreens with a dawning respect.
“We’ve never, any of us,” said the Hockner, “made any real dent in the Psychlos. But it does seem to me that they are not really Psychlos. Strange ship, strange insignia. So possibly it would just be an afternoon’s work to go down as a combined force—”
“Knock them out and divide the loot,” finished the Tolnep.
This was verging on the political. So the small gray man said, “And what if they are the one?”
This was what they were here to determine. They chewed it over. They finally came to a unanimous conclusion: they would operate as a combined force. Any newcomer would be invited. They would wait for the return of the courier ship the small gray man had sent out even though it might not return for months. If it brought news that the one had been found elsewhere, this “combined force” would go down, knock the planet out, and divide the loot among them to recompense them for their time. They didn’t lay out any system for dividing the loot, for each had his own ideas of what would happen when that moment came. The plan was agreed to.
“What if something happens in the meanwhile to prove it is the one?” the small gray man asked. Violence, violence; all these military people ever thought about was violence and death.
Well, they decided, that was sort of political, and they would play it by ear. But also if it were the one, probably it ought to be knocked out, so the same plan applied.
It was the first time the small gray man had ever seen independent commanders of traditionally hostile ships reach a firm agreement on something. But these were very unusual times.
When they clicked off their viewscreens, the small gray man reached for another pill of Mello-gest to help his indigestion and then put it back in the bottle.
He thought he’d go down and visit that old woman again. Maybe she had an antidote for yarb tea.
5
Their heads were bent together in the dull green reflection of the viewers. They were in a small, converted, lead-lined storage room in the lowest level of the African minesite. Jonnie was getting his first look at the fruits of earlier work.
There were ten days’ worth of disks and it was a considerable pile. Dunneldeen had explained that he couldn’t come earlier: there were lots of pilots graduating and needing their final checkout flights and it would have been suspicious to leave America at a busy peak. He had also brought fourteen new pilots to Africa and Jonnie and Stormalong could nurse them through their advanced combat here. They were good lads—Swedes and Germans. Ker was going full blast training machine operators; every tribe seemed to want a blade scraper and flatbeds for buses. Brown Limper was selling the tribes equipment even from their own nearby minesites and they had to have operators. Ore carriers were busy lugging machinery over the globe and they had to have pilots. Angus had come back with Dunneldeen, for he was finding it too hard not to shoot Lars Thorenson on sight.
There was also the matter of page one.
Jonnie skimmed through the beginnings of Terl’s reoccupancy. It was enough to know that that crucial hour after he had left had really been pay dirt. They’d planted thirty-two false bugs and even feeders and recorders, and there was Terl big as life dumping them on his desk, convinced. When he saw that Terl was apparently using a mine radio to detect feeder channels to the recorders, he had a moment’s qualm, but then he realized their main feeder was a ground wave.
A false bottom to the cabinets! He hadn’t suspected that, for they simply looked armored. And this huge, thick book he was bringing out . . . about three feet wide and two feet high and seven inches thick and on the thinnest paper he had ever seen. Thousands of pages!
Each page was divided into about forty vertical columns. Over at the left, the widest column gave the name of a system, and below it the names of planets in that system. From left to right in the columns followed every movement of the system such as its speed of travel and direction, precession, torque and the weight and quality of the sun or suns if double or treble.
In the columns beside every planet of that system were noted that planet’s own weight, rotation period, atmosphere, surface temperatures, races, city coordinates, relative mineral estimate by symbols and value in Galactic credits and the location of its minesites, if any.
All speeds and directions of travel were based on the zero center of that universe and three-dimensional compass coordinates, using the inevitable Psychlo numeral eleven, and parts of eleven and powers of eleven.
Terl had sat there, day after day, turning pages of it, one by one, running a claw down one particular column. He had gone through the whole book. They had every page!
“Except page one,” said Dunneldeen. “I don’t understand several of these symbols because they’re so abbreviated. Look at how tiny these figures are. We reviewed it and found we didn’t have page one. We figured that would be the symbol key code and Terl knew it all so well that he never referred to it. But look at the last disk there.”
Jonnie was a bit dazzled. He had had no idea there were that many populated systems, much less planets. Thousands and thousands and thousands. It would take somebody a month or two just to count them! Sixteen universes! And these were only the ones the Psychlos had an interest in. This accumulated knowledge must have taken several millennia to compile. He looked very closely at the writing. He could swear it was Chinko. He came out of it a bit. “I don’t understand some of these symbols,” he said.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That was part of the delay. I didn’t want to put you in the frying pan waiting for the key to the symbols. So we did the waiting. Look at the last disk.”
Jonnie did so. Terl had thrown the whole book down and the ventilator had blown up the cover by accident and there was page one! All the symbols listed and what they meant.
“We’ve got all the positions and firing coordinates of sixteen universes!” said Jonnie. Then he sobered. “What was he looking for?”
Terl had thrown the book down in disgust, that was plain. Jonnie played the disk a little more. The sound on it, which was not of much use, was very colorful Psychlo cursing.
For those whole two days a blank piece of paper had been lying there with not a mark on it. Now Terl almost ruined his pen as he wrote a figure on it.
Jon
nie went back to an earlier disk and looking more critically at what column Terl’s claw was moving down. By the symbol at the top of it, the column was “Transshipment firing times to/at Psychlo.” Jonnie understood it. Terl was trying to find an open period at Psychlo so that nothing he shipped would collide with something some other planet was shipping. Jonnie recalled from his machine training days that the Psychlos never changed these tables for decades on end. Looking at the number of planets sending and receiving, the Psychlo platform must run constantly, day and night. He also had gotten the impression that one planet couldn’t have two platforms operating, for it made interference. The nearest second platform for transshipment had to be about fifty thousand miles away, and since the diameter of Psychlo was only about twenty-five thousand miles, they only had one platform.
So, if Terl didn’t want to collide with somebody else’s ore arriving or smelted metal going out to some buyers or maybe military hardware, he had to be careful to find an open period.
If one fired ore or machinery, one could be quick about it. But live personnel required a longer time period or it shook them up. Terl was taking no chances with his own neck.
The figure he so disgustedly wrote, almost breaking his pen, was “Day 92”!
He had been forced to choose a time more than five months from now. It was quite evident from the amount of kerbango he then consumed that the thought of spending all that additional time on “this accursed planet,” as the sonic recorded him saying, was upsetting.
He had had to choose Earth’s next scheduled semiannual. And finally, by the next day, he had reconciled himself to it.
Expecting the next disks would show the beginning calculations and circuits of a transshipment console, Jonnie was amazed not to find it.
Terl had gone to another cabinet and opened up its back. Using both paws he removed a package. It appeared to be a bit heavy.