Would Sir Robert, Jonnie concluded, take a few local protective measures, which Jonnie then named.
Robert the Fox said he was honored and certainly would. Such things were easily done, but did Jonnie much care what happened to any visitors who might wander down?
Jonnie said no. And Sir Robert smiled.
Part 22
1
The Bolbod punchcraft was quite clear on the screen. Cylindrical, a small miniature of the Bolbod war vessel from which it came, it was about to make its landing near the dam.
The small gray man sat in his small gray office and watched. He was mildly interested in a detached sort of way.
He was very glad he had asked his communications officer to install the racks and extra screens. A Jambitchow war vessel had joined them—commanded by an officer in glittering gold scales and eyes where his mouth ought to be—had been informed of the situation, had been told that they didn’t know yet whether this was the one, had agreed to join the combined force, and was now in orbit with the rest. The Jambitchow face was now on its own viewscreen, watching, like the rest, the outcome of this “punch” as the Bolbod called it. Six screens, five of them with intent faces, the sixth carrying the long-range view of this raid.
For the last few days the small gray man had felt much better. It had been a good idea to go down and see that old woman again. She was certain it could not have been her yarb tea that had caused his indigestion. Had he drunk anything in some heathen country? Well, never mind, drink this “buttermilk.”
He had drunk the buttermilk. It was quite cold and good to taste and shortly his indigestion had greatly eased. But the old woman had not let it go at that. A cousin in some distant past had sent some plants to some ancestors of hers and they were still flourishing up the hill near the spring. It was called “peppermint” and she would go get some, and she had, steering a bit wide around the parked spaceship. The green leaves had a pleasant aroma and he had chewed some, and astonishingly, his indigestion eased even more! She had given him a whole pocketful of the leaves.
The small gray man had tried to pay her, but she wouldn’t have it; she said it was just the neighborly thing to do. He had persisted however, and she finally said, well, there was a Swedish colony up the coast she was never able to talk to, and that thing around his neck, the one he talked into and it talked English, would it talk Swedish? He’d been happy to give it to her—he had several—and had changed its microplates while sitting pleasantly on a bench outside her door, with both the dog and the cow seemingly quite interested in what he was doing. It had been a pleasant afternoon.
The Bolbod punchcraft banged down near the overgrown walkway at the dam. They were carrying a demolition kit.
“I thought this was just a probe,” said the Hawvin. “Didn’t we agree they were just to discover what those people had done down at that dam?” They had watched the terrestrial antics around them, had seen them blow up a bunch of trees, and their curiosity had been greatly aroused. No heat had accompanied the eruption of trees and nothing had burned. “If we use demolition on the dam, it could become political.”
“I command my own crew,” rumbled the Bolbod on his screen. That was the trouble with combined forces, everyone tried to run everybody else’s ship! But combined force had been his idea so he couldn’t say much more.
There had been three Bolbod crewmen in the punchcraft. The first one, carrying the demolition kit, was followed at some distance by the other two.
The faces on the viewscreens were very intent as they followed this operation. It was their first probe down to the surface. The small gray man had tended to advise against it but this was a military matter. They all knew that one must test the enemy’s defenses.
The leading Bolbod was now about fifty feet from the powerhouse door. The roar of the spillway was coming back up the infrabeam, very strong. That was an awfully big dam.
Abruptly there was a flash!
A rolling ball of flame rocketed skyward.
The image on the screen jittered from the concussion.
The first Bolbod had vanished, blown to bits. Whatever he tripped had also detonated his own demolition kit.
The other two Bolbods who had been well behind him had been knocked flat.
“Aha!” said the Hockner super-lieutenant as though he had known it all the time.
But the “aha!” wasn’t for the explosion. A marine-attack plane that a moment before hadn’t been on their screens landed clear of the explosion area. A small unit of people leaped out.
Swedes, thought the small gray man, seeing their blonde hair. Led by a black-bearded young officer in kilts who carried a claymore and a blast pistol.
A ramp went down on the attack plane’s side and a forklift rolled to the ground.
The Swedes had some chains in their hands and were wrapping up the two recumbent Bolbods. Thin little shouts of command were coming back up the infrabeam, almost engulfed by the roar of the dam spillway.
The Scot officer was trying to find pieces of the exploded Bolbod, picking up items of bloody cloth. He seemed to find something. He put it in a bag and waved to the forklift. They now put the huge Bolbod bodies into the plane with the forklift. The lift came back and put the punchcraft inside.
The plane took off and went back north. The terrestrial group went into the powerhouse and vanished from sight.
The faces on the viewscreens were hard to read. They were grappling with this situation.
They didn’t have too much time to ponder, for their second probe was now in progress, and infrabeams shifted to the snowy crest of Mount Elgon, which gleamed above the clouds far below.
It had annoyed them to see an old device they took to be an ancient radio telescope mounted up there. It seemed to be tracking them as they orbited.
A Hockner probe ship with five Hockners had been assigned to disable the device. And there was the Hockner probe now, nearing its destination. A Hockner probe carried no artillery itself but the men did. The noseless, overly ornamented crew members were visible under the probe canopy. It was little more than a sled and was jet-powered. There seemed to be very high winds and it was having trouble setting down on a broad, icy shoulder of the peak. There was a precipice there that dropped down into the clouds. Yes, it was a high wind; plumes of snow were blowing away from the peak. Just ahead of them, but set well back from the edge, was the offending radio telescope. Beyond that object, out of the view of the probecraft, a glacier fell away.
The faces watching it on their separate screens were quite different in reactions. It was taking the probecraft so long to get down to a landing, going out and back again time after time, that their attention was drifting.
The Tolnep half-captain was doing some calculations about slave prices. He knew an air planet where you could get a thousand credits a slave if you could get them there alive. He estimated that he had a potential here of about fifteen thousand, landed live, out of maybe thirty thousand shipped. That was fifteen million Galactic credits. His nineteen percent of that, the prize money he would get personally, would be 2,850,000 credits. His loaners were owed 52,860 credits in gambling debts (the reason he was happy to undertake a very long cruise) and this left him 2,797,140 credits. He could retire!
The Hawvin was thinking about all the silver and copper coins that must be in the ruins of old banks—the Psychlos valued neither metal, but he knew a market for it.
The Bolbod had been thinking about all the Psychlo machinery down there up until the time his punchcraft was captured. Now he was thinking about punching terrestrials.
The Jambitchow commander was wondering how he could do the rest of these aliens out of slaves, metal and machinery.
Finally the probecraft made it and sat down on the ledge and their attention riveted on it.
The five Hockners got out, bulky in their fancy space suits and clumsy in swinging their blast rifle straps off their shoulders.
Suddenly the voice of the Hockner landing contro
l officer in orbit crackled out of their radios down there and came back up the infrabeam.
“Alert to the battle plane!”
There was a battle plane up at about two hundred thousand feet. But it had been there for an hour, doing nothing. And it was doing nothing now. The five Hockners were looking at it way up there, a tiny speck to them, hard to find in the blue sky they saw.
“No, no!” barked the Hockner landing control officer. “Around the corner from you! Coming up the glacier!”
Only then did the watching faces see it. From their viewpoint it was just a line on the glacier, just the top of its body showing, the rest cut off by the jutting crag above the telescope. The battle plane had hugged the glacier all the way up! It was almost a hundred yards back of the telescope when it stopped. No one here could see whether anyone got out of it. It must be holding in that position on its motors. The glacier was steep.
The five Hockners, alert now but seeing no one yet, crouched, guns ready. Then they sprinted forward.
A hammering burst of blast guns flared just behind the telescope.
One Hockner, near the edge, was hit, thrown out into space, and went spinning down through the clouds.
The Hockner sled, struck by a burst, slithered backward, teetered and dropped into empty space.
The four remaining Hockners charged through the snow and wind, guns going.
The relentless pounding of blast rifles racketed up the infrabeam. The whole area under the telescope seemed to be erupting continuous green gouts of thundering energy.
One Hockner down. Two down. Three down! The fourth almost reached the telescope and then thudded into the snow.
The only sound now was the whistle of wind around the peak.
Several terrestrials sprang into view from beyond the radio telescope. They rushed forward, their red-and-white high-altitude suits looking like splashes of blood against the snow. They turned over the Hockners, took their weapons. One terrestrial looked over the edge where the fifth Hockner and the probecraft had fallen, but the only cushion down there was the tops of the clouds far below.
The Hockners were picked up and lugged off by the terrestrials. Using safety lines and slipping and sliding down the glacier, they loaded the Hockners into the marine-attack plane which was now more visible.
One terrestrial came back and checked over the radio telescope and then he went sliding down the glacier, grabbed the door of the plane, and swung aboard.
The plane took off and went down through the clouds. The infrabeam shifted to penetrate the overcast and followed it back to the minesite.
“That proves it,” said the Tolnep half-captain. “It was just as I thought all along.”
He ignored the comments to the effect that he had favored the probes.
“It was a lure,” he continued. “It is quite obvious that at the dam yesterday they went down and made a harmless eruption of trees to intrigue us. Then they lay in wait and succeeded in capturing two Bolbod crewmen.
“The radio telescope,” he went on, “is just a dummy, as I suspected. They have not been used for centuries. Everyone uses infrabeams to pick up faint signals and broadcasts. So they put it there in an elaborate charade to attract down a probe. None of the Hockner crew besides the one so clumsy as to fall off the cliff were killed. The guns were all on ‘Stun.’ Thus they succeeded in luring four Hockners.”
“Should you be talking so plainly?” said the Jambitchow commander, stroking his polished scales. “They may have us on monitor.”
“Nonsense,” said the Tolnep. “Our detectors show no infrabeams and we are just on local. I tell you no one has used radio telescopes since . . . since . . . the Hambon Sun War! They have far too much clutter; they are too bulky. That’s just a dummy down there. And did you notice the cute way that officer came back and ‘adjusted’ it. They’re just hoping we’ll try again.”
“I shouldn’t think they need to,” said the Hawvin. “They now have two Bolbod crew and four Hockners to interrogate at leisure. Knowing Psychlo methods of interrogation, I shouldn’t care to be those crewmen!”
“They’re not Psychlos!” said the Hockner super-lieutenant, covering up the fact that he was aghast at the fate of his crewmen.
“Yes, they are,” said the Bolbod. “You saw that Psychlo with the terrestrials the other day down by the lake. The Psychlos are using aliens as a subject race. They’ve done it before. I vote we go down in an actual mass attack and pound out any installation they have, now! Before they are further prepared.”
But at that moment they were startled when a hazy image appeared on all their screens. It was a gray black-haired and bearded human visage. The eyes were blue. The being seemed to be wearing an old cloak.
“If you will turn up your transmission to planetary strength,” this newcomer said in Psychlo, “I would like to discuss returning your members to you. The two Bolbods are shaken up but not hurt. The four Hockners are just stunned, though one has a broken arm.”
They turned up to planetary strength, but their response was an emphatic uniform no!
The Tolnep half-captain managed to get his voice above the uproar. “So you can capture the rescue party? Emphatically, no!”
“We can put them all out on a slope—over by that black volcanic cone. All in the open and no ships of ours in the air.” The terrestrial was persuasive. “Call it a truce. Your pickup ship will not be fired upon or molested.”
“You haven’t interrogated them that fast,” said the Jambitchow, “so they must be dead!”
“They are quite all right,” said the terrestrial. “Are you sure you won’t pick them up?”
Emphatically, no!
“Very well,” said the terrestrial with a shrug of his shoulders. “At least tell us what they eat.”
The Tolnep gave a signal on his screen to the others. Let him speak. “Why, of course,” he said smoothly, smiling. “We will make up a food package and send it down.”
They went off planetary. “I told you,” said the Tolnep, “that those incidents were a lure. Now two of you have bungled, so let me handle this.”
Presently a rocket-borne package went out of an airlock of the Tolnep ship. It was very well aimed and its parachute burst open below the overcast. It went drifting down and landed just short of the lake shore.
Presently a vehicle went speeding away from the compound toward it. The faces on the viewscreens smiled. If those were Psychlos down there, or whoever they were, they were in for a surprise!
Then suddenly the Hockner super-lieutenant, who had been leafing hurriedly through a recognition book, said, “Oh, I say! That’s a Basher ‘Bash Our Way to Glory’ tank! Totally armored!”
The tank went down near the package, lowered a turret gun, and fired a mild stun shot into it. The package, being a bomb of course, exploded in a geyser of flame. The tank fired a second shot at the remains. Then somebody got out of it and collected the hot fragments.
“We even gave them bomb fragments for analysis!” shouted the Hawvin.
They held a hasty conference. The small gray man listened to them. Military minds, he thought to himself, could be quite remarkable at times. They decided that anything those terrestrials did was just a lure; that the strategy of those people was to take the invader to bits piecemeal and then pulverize him; that they should now wait for the courier the small gray man said was coming sometime, the one that might tell them if the one had been found; meanwhile only the safest type of probes should be attempted in areas obviously not guarded or covered. Then the moment they knew, one way or the other, whether this was the one, they would plunge in with a mass war-vessel attack and defeat and gut the place.
All the commanders agreed except the Tolnep. He was still in a rage about his bomb failing.
“I should go down there right now,” hissed the Tolnep, “and bite the lot of them to death!”
“We think that’s an excellent idea,” drawled the Hockner, adjusting his monocle.
“Yes, why
don’t you do that!” the rest agreed. And, “We’re sure you should.”
The Tolnep realized they would only be too happy to get rid of him. He subsided for now. Later would be another matter.
2
Jonnie had gone on his trip to look at bases but he found himself looking at people.
The flight had been pleasant enough. A new pilot had thought he would be flying Jonnie, but the very idea of having to be flown about amused him: he didn’t have a broken arm! But an escort of three Mark 32 battle planes, long-range ones that also were designed to carry a squad of Psychlo marines or employees, got into the air behind him when he took off and stayed right with him. He had flown northeast over Africa, the Red Sea, and the Middle East and into Russia, making good time two hundred thousand feet up and looking for a pattern of lakes and rivers Colonel Ivan had showed him with a finger in sand. He had expected to find snow, but although it was late autumn, the only snow was on towering peaks below and to the east. He found his landmarks, found his preplanned landing space, and found himself in the middle of a sea of surging people! Colonel Ivan was holding them back with a dozen mounted lancers so that he had a place to land. There must be five hundred people in that throng.
He opened the door and was blasted with sound. They were cheering themselves hoarse! He couldn’t even understand what they were saying, such were the rolling waves of sound. He couldn’t really distinguish individual faces among so many.
Colonel Ivan dismounted as Jonnie got down from the plane. The colonel was a little stiff and too formal, thinking possibly Jonnie blamed him because of Bittie—the colonel was wearing a black band around his sleeve. But Jonnie threw an arm around his shoulders and it was abruptly all right.
They had brought him a horse, a golden-colored stallion with a sheepskin saddle, and he swung up. The crowd cheered. He only knew one word of Russian and that was Zdrastvuitye, which meant “How do you do, hello.” So he called it loudly and the crowd cheered.