He got hold of Lars and raged at him.
Lars said there had been a lot of crashes and the cadets were simply replacing the lost machines from the hangar.
Just as he was about to rip Lars to bits, it suddenly occurred to Terl that company property was no longer his responsibility. So he let it go.
Three days later there was a tearing argument with Ker.
Sometime since, they had begun to clear away the wreckage and fused wires of the old transshipment rig and now that it was gone, Terl wanted to be sure that the points would be at the correct distances on the poles. He went out and he found . . .
Ker using the most sloppy, inexperienced machine operator trainees he had to dig the trench for the atmosphere-armor ionization cable! There was the trench half-dug. But these trainees had been digging all over the place!
And more! There was equipment scattered everywhere. Cranes, blade scrapers, you name it. Whenever one of these stupid animal trainees had dug something, he had simply left the machine there. Whenever he lifted something, he left the magnetic crane right there.
What a mess!
Standing on the platform, hating the bright winter sun, half-sick from the rotten-quality breathe-gas that was available, Terl had felt like clawing the midget to bits.
“You know better than this!” raged Terl.
“Can I help it if these animals break machines?” shouted Ker.
“Can’t you follow a straight, plain plan?” shouted Terl.
“Can I help it if these animals can’t follow a straight, plain line?” shouted Ker.
Terl realized Ker had a point. They weren’t going to get anywhere standing here shouting. “Look,” said Terl, “it is in your own best interest that I get safely to Psychlo.”
“Is it?” said Ker.
Leverage, leverage, Terl told himself. “I’ll tell you what I will do,” said Terl. “I will put ten thousand credits to your account in the Galactic Bank. You have a numbered account there with quite a bit in it already. But I will add—”
“Brown Limper Staffor paid me a hundred thousand Earth credits just to dig up that cable for you, that cable right over there. It was no easy job and I considered the pay cut-rate!”
Terl thought fast. “All right, I’ll pay you a hundred thousand Galactic credits to help install this firing rig and cooperate.”
“I can get double that from this Brown Limper not to do it,” said Ker.
“You can?” said Terl, suddenly alert. He thought hard. Yes, that Brown Limper had been acting furtively lately, like he was hiding something.
“He wants a certain party!” said Ker. “He doesn’t care if you get to Psychlo or not!”
“But doesn’t he know I have to record the deeds?”
“He’s only interested in getting one man!” said Ker.
“Look,” said Terl, “I will put half a million credits in your account if you cooperate in getting me to Psychlo.”
Ker thought about it. Then he said, “If you will get me new papers and destroy my old company records and deposit seven hundred fifty thousand credits to my account, I’ll see all goes smoothly.”
Terl was about to say he agreed when Ker spoke again: “You will have to make it all right with this Brown Limper Staffor also. Tell me how you intend to trap this man so I can reassure this Staffor. He controls these workers. So add that, and it’s a deal.”
Terl looked at Ker. He knew how money-hungry he was. “All right. I’m going to string five hundred Brigantes around outside that atmosphere armor, armed with poisoned arrows. Arrows won’t make a concussion if fired and they can shoot that animal to bits if he comes! You whisper that to Staffor and he’ll also cooperate with you. It’s a deal then?”
Ker smiled.
Terl went back inside, glad to get his breathe-mask off. He got some kerbango to soothe his nerves.
He reviewed this strange scene. It was Staffor. That was the one who was going to mess this plan up. Terl would take care of the animal: he hadn’t told Ker he also intended to have Snith and a squad on the platform armed with poisoned arrows or that he had a beautiful beryllium box to hand Staffor. The box would destroy all the evidence, the contract copies, everything.
And Ker, too!
He would have a hostage to handle the animal.
He felt quite satisfied about everything until three nights later when he noticed there were no guards in view. He went out and there they were, sprawled around the morgue, dead drunk.
It was obvious that Snith had used the information just to get a commission in whiskey.
Well, he could handle Snith when the time came.
The one to keep an eye on was this Staffor. His suspicions were right. It was Staffor that was plotting, plotting, plotting. Sneaky rat! It was plain he would try to steal this money back.
Warned, Terl was confident he could outsmart them all.
He went in and checked the money coffins, sealed them, marked them “radiation killed” so nobody on Psychlo would want to open them, and put his private X on the bottom of each one.
He would be a wealthy tycoon on Psychlo!
He spread his bedding out on top of the coffins and slept a beautiful sleep with beautiful dreams where royalty bowed when they met The Great Terl on the street. And all evidence and this planet would have been totally destroyed behind him.
6
Deep in the African minesite, bent over the viewscreens in the half-lit dark, Jonnie was taking a loss.
Day 92 was coming up on them like a whirlwind.
At first he had hoped that he could get a separate console built using Terl’s plans and install it down at Kariba. Such would bypass any real necessity for a hopeless attack in America to seize that one. It looked as if it remained their best chance, but it was hardly any chance at all. He would have had to stop Terl from using that strange bomb, but he could not do that without the almost foolhardy risks of letting it go right on up to firing time on Day 92 and trying to attack the platform and grab that console at the last moment.
Other news was not good. There had been two more raids by the visitors in different places and casualties had been suffered. An ore plane, returning empty from a ferrying trip, had been swooped down upon by the Hawvins and blasted out of the sky with the loss of both pilot and copilot. A hunting party from the Russian base had been gunned from above and three Siberians and a Sherpa had been killed before their air cover had shot down the intruder.
Also the Edinburgh defense planning had gone wrong. Sir Robert had wanted to bring in a couple of miles of atmosphere cable and surround Castle Rock with it. The power dams in Scotland of long ago were not in shape or converted to Psychlo power. The Cornwall minesite power supply was a tidal dam at Bristol in the Bristol Channel, and while it worked well on the ebb and flow of those gigantic tides, it was not possible to run a line clear up to Edinburgh—and that line would have been open to attack in any case. The hauling of that much cable, itself, was a formidable block, for it would have had to be flown in sections to Scotland. No other means than antiaircraft fire was available to protect Edinburgh. And the Scots, having regained it, were not going to abandon it. It was the center of the most ancient Scottish nationalism. Moving the whole remaining population down to Cornwall, as proposed by Jonnie, had not been approved, and it was true it would be pretty crowded. Jonnie knew Edinburgh was going to catch it.
Terl was going about his job in a way that seemed backward. He spent a lot of time measuring up poles and stringing outside wire and putting in firing points. Everything he did was being duplicated exactly down at Kariba. They now had the wires up and all the points in, down at that base. Angus, each time they got a new item, would go tearing down to Kariba and install an equivalent in the secondary defense platform there.
It had looked very hopeful for some days. Terl had gotten a lot of metal and had built the console case, a heavy, massive thing about a yard square. They had built the same case here and it was sitting down in a locked room,
an empty shell, waiting.
But after all this spurt of energy, Terl for the last several days had just been fooling with fuses. He wasn’t getting on with construction.
Reams of mathematics had been worked out by Terl. But a lot of good they were. Who understood them?
Now it was just fuses. Jonnie had gotten duplicates out of supply here of all the fuses Terl was working with and tried to figure out what he was doing.
Jonnie had learned one thing: that some of the items in a console that would appear to be different components were fakes. They were not resistors or capacitors. They were actually fuses made up to look like other things.
Terl was doing something Jonnie had not heard of before. With meters and such, he was working with an “underload” type of fuse. The circuit would be connected only so long as current was going through it. When the current ceased to flow, the fuse burned out. It was an odd kind of circuit breaker, made of a filament so tiny and thin it had to be worked under a magnifying scope.
Well, that seemed to be all Terl was doing.
Jonnie’s attention was drifting when he suddenly realized that the filament Terl was using looked awfully like the ones in the silver capsule in Psychlo heads.
Forgotten was his stiff neck. He went tearing out and got one they had removed from a corpse. Yes, the same thing!
Abruptly he added it all up and rushed out to find MacKendrick. The doctor was working with a Psychlo skull he had cleaned and whitened. He was trying to find some means of entering it with instruments. He put it down on the table before him where the sockets stared sightlessly at him and composed himself to listen to Jonnie.
“That isn’t anything very mysterious!” said Jonnie, pointing excitedly into the silver capsule he held. “It’s just a fuse! It doesn’t vibrate or put out radio signals or anything. It’s just a fuse!”
Jonnie grabbed some pictures of one inside a Psychlo brain. “Look! You said the nerves this was fastened between were the primary impulse channels of their thought.
“All right. Mathematics is logical thought! It is the approximation of being sensible! Now even if a Psychlo has a soul and does his thinking with a soul, or even if he doesn’t have, mental action works between those two channels.
“So long as a Psychlo is thinking logically, there is a constant current between those two nerves. Even asleep there would be a current, a very slight one.
“Now up comes an alien. The Psychlo knows his whole race and empire depends upon keeping his mathematics a secret. And the alien wants to know about Psychlo mathematics. The Psychlo instantly shuts off thinking about them. Or a surge occurs and then a shutoff. Pop. Blown fuse!”
MacKendrick was quite interested. But he said, “That doesn’t explain suicide.”
“All right! Look at this picture and look at this fuse. The silver capsule is very close to that bronze item that short-circuits pleasure and pain and action. Look at this fuse filament! When it parts, the ends drop down inside the capsule and you get a short circuit into the bronze item.
“The Psychlo has an instant impulse to kill! If he can’t right then, the short circuit between the silver and bronze items acts as an obsession to kill that doesn’t let up. He has to kill something and he winds up killing himself!”
MacKendrick thought it over and nodded. “But,” he said, “that doesn’t explain the females.”
Jonnie got that type of capsule and looked at it. “It’s another kind of fuse. Since mathematics is logical thought, it would cause a concentration of current to begin. They probably are taught not to teach females mathematics—it’s part of their moral code. And the females are noted for being illogical. When they start to think in mathematical terms or even try to, a current gets too heavy and they blow the fuse. They don’t have a bronze object and they just go into a coma. Their wits won’t connect anymore and they go out of communication with the nervous system.”
Jonnie paused. “My explanation may not be complete. But I know these are just fuses and short circuits. And that’s how they protected their empire!”
“And why they’re so crazy,” said MacKendrick. “I am sure you have the explanation and that those things are what you say they are.”
MacKendrick turned the Psychlo skull around on the table. It was a huge, massive, heavy thing. A complex mass of bone and joints. “There’s only one thing wrong.”
Jonnie was all revved up with having gotten that far. He listened.
“We’re no closer to getting those things out of their heads than we were,” said MacKendrick.
Jonnie laid the pictures and the capsules down on the table beside the skull and walked quietly out of the room.
It was definitely not a hopeful day.
7
Jonnie lanced northwest in the Mark 32 battle plane.
The alert had come just over half an hour ago. Glencannon was in trouble.
It was Day 78, only fourteen days before Terl had scheduled himself to fire. He had not begun his panel on the last disks Jonnie had had. There had been a delay.
And now this! Glencannon was under attack en route.
The visitors, four hundred miles above Earth, had increased. There were eighteen of them now. Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl had come back and with him he had brought four heavy war vessels. One of them at least, if not more, was a plane carrier. It was probably from this that the attack on Glencannon had been launched.
Jonnie had no communicator with him. He had simply been outside when the alert came. Stormalong and two other pilots had scrambled and Jonnie had simply grabbed an air mask and a plane. All the communication in the air right now was in Pali—both Glencannon and Stormalong had communicators with them and were using them. Thus Jonnie could not tell what was happening. The singsong of the Buddhists never showed excitement even in combat, so their voice tones told him nothing.
He was gaining altitude and widening his viewscreens. He had Stormalong and the other two ships just ahead of him. He had not yet picked up Glencannon.
Jonnie threw a scanner upward. Three of their visitors were way up there, not as clear in this bright daylight as they would be on scanners at night due to daytime ultraviolet in the air.
Was that the Vulcor-class vessel? The other two with it were larger, more bulky. Yes, that was the Vulcor-class: diamond-shaped bridge. Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl himself.
The three weren’t coming down—apparently it took a lot of solar accumulation to do that and they tended to reserve themselves. The other two must be plane carriers.
Yes! From one of them came a new launch.
Six needle-like craft were coming down like arrows.
Clearly, using Psychlo, Jonnie said, “Six new hornets from above!” That would warn Stormalong.
There was Glencannon. Streaking along at about one hundred thousand feet, flat-out, heading for the minesite. Where was his escort? He should have an escort. No sign of them!
Four needles were shooting along behind Glencannon. Occasionally a long-range flash of fire laced out from them.
There went Stormalong!
In tight formation, the three planes cut straight through the pursuing Tolneps.
An explosion! A second gout of hot blue flame. And a third.
There was only one Tolnep racing out of the smoke.
Jonnie turned up to intercept the six coming down. They grew larger and larger in his sights.
He centered on the nose of the leader. His thumb hit the firing trip as he wildly swung sideways, sweeping his awesome firepower into the Tolnep’s tight formation.
His viewscreen flared out with the explosions ahead.
A slight thump as a broken piece of a Tolnep plane touched his wing.
Jonnie flipped around as they went by him. He sighted in on the tail of the last ship. He hit the trip of the blast cannon. He was skidding so wildly from his turn that he missed.
Four Tolneps left to go.
He flashed ahead of them and spun about. He was almost head-on with t
he Tolnep now leading. An instant before they would have collided, Jonnie’s shots stuffed the Tolnep’s own fire up his cannon barrels. The ship exploded.
Three Tolneps left. They looped and came on, firing in formation. The air about Jonnie was slashed. The Mark 32 took a hit in the windscreen. Half of it went black.
Jonnie’s guns were going. One Tolnep! Two Tolneps!
The last one tried to make a run for it, shooting back into the heights.
Jonnie steadied his battle plane. He threw the firing sets onto “Flame” and “Maximum Range.” He sent searching needles straight up.
The Tolnep shattered into a ragged ball of fire.
Where was Glencannon?
There he was, racing down to the minesite, almost there.
He had a Tolnep right on his tail.
Stormalong and his other two ships were slashing down on the Tolnep.
The guard opened the atmosphere-armor curtain and Glencannon flashed through. He was safe!
A scythe of fire hit the Tolnep as Stormalong and the other two pilots let drive from extreme range.
The guard got the atmosphere curtain on. The Tolnep hit it and slammed through.
The air had not had time to reionize enough.
The Tolnep ship exploded in a ball of flame in the scramble area, narrowly missing Glencannon’s ship as it landed.
Jonnie and Stormalong scanned the skies for more enemy. There was none. Some smoke palls rose in the distance where enemy ships had dis-integrated.
The guard opened the atmosphere curtain. A fire-fighting crew was there now, spraying the burning wreckage of the Tolnep ship. Jonnie, Stormalong and the other two landed.
Glencannon was sitting in his seat still. His Buddhist communicator was trying to calm him. Glencannon was crying. His hands were shaking. It was a reaction of total frustration.
“I had orders to come through,” Glencannon was repeating over and over. The communicator waved the others away and then came to them.
“There are many things for the Academy of pilots to do in America,” the Buddhist told Jonnie and Stormalong. “They also have to maintain their air cover. There were no escort pilots and we delayed coming for days. Then Glencannon felt he could not delay anymore.