He returned to idly watching the terrestrial ship. It seemed to be finished now, possibly had a full hold. It was slowly going down into the atmosphere, making its way to the African base.
4
Jonnie watched Stormalong’s old orbit miner come in. A sentry turned off the atmosphere-armor shield and let the plane through, and they turned it back on. There was always a faint sizzle from it when the power went on, but after that it was silent. Aside from some luckless birds and insects that hit it and sometimes left a feather or feelers, one wouldn’t know it was there. All pilots had had to be warned, and a complex set of guard signals had had to be developed lest some pilot crash his ship.
Stormalong put the old ship alongside a metal pulverizer. The Psychlos used a device which first “softened” metal by breaking down its molecular cohesion and then let it go through armored rollers that really tore it apart and smashed it. The result was a metal powder so fine that if one threw a handful into the air, a lot of it stayed there like fine dust. The Psychlos needed it that way for part of their fuel and ammunition processes.
Using the ship’s own cranes, the copilot began unloading the “catch” into the metal pulverizer. Stormalong got out and came over. “Fifty-five tons this trip,” he said smugly. “There’s plenty up there, trapped in orbit. Think we’ll need any more?”
Jonnie wasn’t sure. He had been onto other things. They walked down into the compound to verify.
One of the Buddhist communicators came up. They had a way of moving which always intrigued Jonnie. They would put their right hand into their left sleeve and their left hand into their right sleeve and then they would move their feet in a sort of fast trot-shuffle. Their shoulders didn’t bob. The result made them look like they were floating or scooting. Until yesterday many had continued to wear their reddish yellow robes; these and their shaven heads made them too easy to single out from above. A huge batch of packages and uniforms had come in from Ivan: people there had been reworking cloth sent to them from some looms now operating in Luxembourg. They were green uniforms with an armored, aluminum helmet, also green. Jonnie supposed that all their forces would be in these soon. The Buddhist was wearing his now. He bowed—always a bow—and handed Jonnie a package. He was so very sorry. There was so much in, distribution was delayed. Jonnie bowed back. It was contagious.
He and Stormalong walked on through the compound looking for Angus. Jonnie was opening his package. It was from Ivan. A helmet. Plain green like everyone else’s. Ear pads put on that would lift. There was a letter (some coordinator had written it for Ivan) on top of the helmet:
Dear Marshal Jonnie:
Your village people arrived and are very happy and so are we. Dr. Allen got the old man Jimson off some weed he was eating and he looks like he will live. Your people all say how do you do, hello. Tom Smiley also says how do you do, hello. Your horses got shipped over here and they are now learning to speak Russian (joke). But they are fine. I worked on Blodgett and she can run pretty good now. You must always look after horses. We got the Buddhist library down deep now and it’s safe. On the helmet, I wish I could tell you I had an angel visit me the night before you left that told me you had to wear it. Your letter thanking me is received with embarrassment. I was not trying to save your life but I would anytime, anyway. So I can’t accept your gratitude. It was no angel. I just knew that in those high mountains you can freeze your (scratched out) ears off. This helmet is less conspicuous. I didn’t even put a star on it. Give my best to Chrissie when you write. I hope somebody is looking after your clothes.
Your comrade,
Ivan
(Colonel Commanding
Russian base until you can
dig up some Americans)
It was a nice helmet and it fit. There were a couple of small creases on it they hadn’t quite rubbed out. Ivan must have fired some shots at it to make sure it would stop bullets.
There was also a package of ammunition for the AK 47s. Jonnie had advised them to bore a hole in the ends and put some thermit explosive powder in them so they would be useful against Tolneps. They said it worked and they were converting.
Stormalong and Jonnie had arrived at the “meteorite powder washing area.” Four Psychlo females were working hard, sloshing pans of metal powder around in huge tubs of mercury. They were gloved and clothed to protect them from mercury poisoning.
When Stormalong had begun this orbit mining it had been with an eye to training pilots and, Jonnie suspected, to gratify a craving for wild flying. The stuff collected was odd enough. Meteorites and such got caught in orbit or perihelion, and before they sizzled down through the atmosphere they were often crystalline and quite amazing. Jonnie was about to put a stop to it—it had served its purpose scaring the visitors half to death with limpet mines. But Angus, always prowling into something, had noted some pieces in a recent batch that were of different chemical structure.
An outer space comet, not native to the system, had been blasting across the skies for some time. Angus pointed out to Jonnie that it contained the tiniest traces of the unknown element Terl had used for the center of his device. Angus had shown him on the analyzer: there they were! Microscopic traces of it. If the material had burned down through the atmosphere like meteorites usually do, the element might have vanished from the heat. But these “virgin” bits did contain it.
Jonnie had gone in circles for a day on how to extract it, and then remembered you could “pan” gold because it was heavier than dirt and rock.
The Psychlos used literally tons of mercury in some mining process. So they got pans of it and tested it. Iron, copper, nickel, most elements now in powder form, were lighter than mercury and floated off or combined. But this strange element went to the bottom with a thud. It was terribly cohesive and clung to itself. It took an awful lot of powdered metal to get any.
They could have rigged some machines to do the panning, but these Psychlo females couldn’t care less about a big pan of mercury and they happily sloshed it about, panning the powder. They smiled at Jonnie. They were all right unless somebody foolishly mentioned mathematics—you would lose one Psychlo female, right then. It had happened with Chirk and again with another one.
They said Angus would be back and they waited for him. He reappeared presently and they asked him: did he need any more? Angus shook his head and beckoned.
In the shop where he was working, Angus had duplicated Terl’s box with one exception: it didn’t push all the elements together when you raised the lid. A timed piston did that. You set the time and then the piston closed the rods.
Angus had six of them. The center bit was probably not as pure a metal as Terl’s, but they were sure that was of no importance. The weights were varied a bit but all around seventy-five pounds for the center bit. Angus had not put the centers in place: he had those sitting well apart and every one was making a dent in what it sat on.
“Unless you’ve got in mind to blow up the universe,” said Angus, “don’t you think about eight will do? The load you just brought in should give us two more.”
“But what does it do?” begged Stormalong.
Jonnie shook his head. “We don’t know. But if Terl made one with that expression on his face you can be very sure it is the deadliest weapon the Psychlos have. One thing you be sure of, Angus: pack the core separately and don’t let anybody combine them on this planet! When you’re all done, send them down to the underground armory in Kariba.”
Jonnie went out. He was feeling fairly cheerful. Lots of good things were happening. The Chinese in Kariba said they had engineers, and they did, but they were engineers expert in wood and stone and bridges and things. They also had some painters and that small bowl and its surrounds looked pretty strange—but artistic. They lined internal bunkers with tile they made. It was all very neat. They even had a little village of their own between the atmosphere-armor cable and the shore of the lake made by the dam. Their antiaircraft pits had little pagoda rain domes over them
.
Good progress was being made in America.
He was almost cheerful. They might have a chance. Thin but possible.
Of course there was the mathematics thing. Lately all Terl seemed to do was scan pages and pages and pages of incomprehensible mathematical equations. He had not started building a console but he was obviously figuring it out from scratch. The old one was burned out. He had demanded it anyway for its case and they had brought him all kinds of scrap but none was it—it couldn’t be, for Jonnie had the original console, a burned-to-a-crisp wreck, down in the garage here. So Terl would even have to do the metal case.
Jonnie saw a couple of Hockners being taken to another room. These prisoners fought each other, race to race, like wildcats. The tallest Hockner, not too bad-looking in spite of having no nose, was a lower-grade officer but educated. He was showing vast interest in the vehicles parked around. Jonnie stopped the group, intending to ask some questions.
The tall Hockner was grinning superciliously at the vehicles. Ordinary Hockner crewmen didn’t speak Psychlo but their officers did. He recognized Jonnie. “You know,” said the tall one, “that none of these vehicle frames are built on Psychlo, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know,” said Jonnie.
Although it made the sentries wary, the Hockner went over to a ground car and looked around under the edge of one of the bumpers. “There,” he said, pointing.
Jonnie looked at it. It was one of the alphabets on the Galactic Bank notes.
“That’s Duraleb,” said the Hockner. “It says ‘Made in Duraleb.’ The Psychlos import all their plane bodies and tank bodies and machinery from other systems and peoples. The Psychlos only furnish metals and then motors and consoles. Nobody can use this stuff except Psychlos, since nobody has the drives. These other planets build other things for other peoples. But this Psychlo stuff is useless if you don’t have the consoles. They make those on Psychlo and only on Psychlo.”
Jonnie thanked him. He said, “Don’t thank me, old fellow. If you ever start running out of consoles and motors, while you can buy all the bodies you want, you won’t have a thing. It’s the way the confounded Psychlos run things! They’ve got a throat-choke monopoly on every universe. You can’t go up against them. Hockners have tried. You’ll just lose.”
Jonnie knew these prisoners, while cooperative, tended to be malicious, but he had heard this too often for it to be just a guess. He changed the subject: “Did you fellows ever capture any Psychlo mathematics texts?”
The Hockner gave a laugh. It sounded like a horse neighing. “My dear fellow, every wizard brain in the universe for 302,000 years has tried to figure out Psychlo mathematics. It can’t be done. Oh, it isn’t their arithmetic. An eleven-numeral system is not too strange. There’s a race that had twenty-three different numerals. It’s their silly equations. Nothing ever balances. Texts? Anybody can pick up their texts. They’re meaningless! Pure rubbish! Balderdash! Rot! Now will you order them to give me and my crew something to eat like you did the Tolnep?”
Jonnie told them to see MacKendrick.
He went to his viewing room and looked at Terl’s vast numbers of worksheets again. He wasn’t feeling so good now.
Jonnie had a bomb to land on Psychlo if necessary. Great! He didn’t have a thing to land it there with.
He had a rapidly growing force of visitors overhead. Terl was dawdling.
Jonnie had a very desperate plan to seize the console before it could be destroyed, but even if he got it, it might work just once and quit, if the Tolnep was right.
He looked over Terl’s equations again. They didn’t balance. They didn’t proceed one to the next logically. Yet the whole fate of this planet depended, in the final analysis, on solving them.
Maybe other people of other races had met this impasse, this same problem before. And lost. Maybe another being had sat here, like this, staring at texts and worksheets of Psychlo math, uneasy, and with a feeling of hopelessness, and then gone out to be destroyed by the Psychlos, his personal courage meaningless.
5
Terl was getting suspicious.
It was a whole series of little things.
First, there was the trouble with the money, and trouble with money was one thing Terl would not tolerate.
They had his contracts and Terl had supposed they would simply hand it over in due course. But no. It seemed the two billion Galactic credits had been safeguarded in the Denver branch of the Earth Planetary Bank. Worse, it also seemed that this Brown Limper Staffor was running up huge bills and loans with the Earth Planetary Bank. The most recent had been one to build a castle up on a hill. He wanted to call it “Bergsdorfen” or some such thing.
Brown Limper Staffor, to get the money, had offered as collateral the Terl contracts.
Directors of the Earth Planetary Bank, a man named MacAdam and a German, had turned up here at the compound with new documents for Terl to sign. And unless they were signed, then the Galactic credits could not be turned over.
The last thing Terl wanted was valid evidence lying about. But there was no help for it. MacAdam said the original contracts were not properly notarized and no one had attested to the signature. Terl had signed them with his left paw since he hated the idea of all this evidence. He could have claimed the first contracts were forgeries he knew nothing about.
But these bankers had typed up brand-new, much more valid-looking contracts. The new ones attested that Terl was political officer, war officer, security officer, and acting head of Intergalactic Mining Company. True enough, locally.
It was pointed out that there was no Earth branch of the company, that there was just the company as a whole. So Terl had to sign as acting for the whole board of Intergalactic Mining Company, and the contract sold “the company and any interests the company might have that could be sold, transmitted, conveyed . . .” You could read this contract in a way that sold all of Intergalactic everywhere! And all its planets. Or you could read it that it was just this planet and this branch. Very general.
It made Terl’s claws curl in fear. If the imperial government of Psychlo learned of this they would take days to torture him to death. Not in over three hundred thousand years had Intergalactic ever sold any part of itself or its interests.
They had brought a Swiss notary and witnesses. The contract was in English, German and Psychlo. It had fifteen originals that had to be signed.
But no sign, no money. Terl, rage and fear suppressed, had signed every copy and then Brown Limper had signed as the “Custodian of Interests for Any Legally Constituted Government of the Planet, said contract binding on all Successors” and then had also signed an addition to it conveying the contract to the Earth Planetary Bank “to have and to hold and to execute or convey in return for sums advanced.”
With horror Terl saw this document witnessed, stamped, covered with red seals, covered with gold seals, and packaged in wax seals. Fifteen separate copies of it!
But they gave him his money. They said the Denver branch of the bank was closing and they could not keep it there and Terl had to take it right now. Terl raised no objection to that.
They brought the boxes on a flatbed truck and put them in his bedroom.
They gave Terl his copies of the contract and he signed a receipt for those and the money. They all left, and the moment they were out the door, his first act was to shred, burn, and destroy the ashes of his copies. If Psychlo ever got word of it—!
He felt soothed then and he sat and petted the money for a while. Then he realized he couldn’t go to bed amid all these boxes.
He got the guards to let him go out to the morgue and get three coffins. It seemed to him that there were fewer coffins there than there used to be. However, he brought the coffins in and put them in the bedroom and got to work putting the money into them, counting it by bundles.
It was late and he still hadn’t finished the job, so he spread some blankets on one of the coffins and went to sleep.
The n
ext day, still working on packing the money—he had never realized before what an enormous lot of money two billion credits was—he found he was short one coffin. It was going to take four.
Accordingly, he got the guards to let him out and he went to the morgue to get another coffin. On his last visit, there had been one quite close to the door. Now it was no longer there. Somebody was doing something with these coffins.
Only a security chief of Terl’s talents and training ever could have gotten to the bottom of it. That he was sure of.
First he questioned guards. Then he questioned a Captunk Arf Moiphy. And he found these Brigantes, these allegedly reliable, trained mercenaries, had been trafficking in coffins with the cadets.
The night duty commando had been selling coffins to the cadets for whiskey. Whiskey was some drink made in Scotland. Intoxicating.
Oh, Terl got the whole story. Late of an evening, some cadet, different ones, would come to the compound with an open pail of whiskey and trade it for a coffin. The guard would simply open the morgue and hand one over and take the whiskey.
It did no good for Captunk Arf Moiphy to show him that the cadets used the lead to make little cast-model spaceships and soldiers. Moiphy even had a couple. Terl knew those. They were for a game called klepp. Those cadets were selling game pieces and game boards made out of melted-down lead coffins. Company coffins!
Terl had demanded to see Snith. He ordered him to put a stop to it.
Three days later, Terl had gotten himself escorted down to the metal supply storeroom to get some needed sheets of material when he noticed that the hangar was nearly empty. There were a few ore carriers and a half-dozen battle planes and that was all that was left in those vast hangars. He had promptly gone to the garage, and that, too, was nearly empty. There were just a dozen flatbeds and a couple of Basher tanks left in there.
The place was being stolen blind!