XIV.
The Reviewers Panned Hell Out of It
He woke with a guilty start and looked up at the clock on the ceiling;it was 0945. Kicking himself free of the covers, he slid his feet tothe floor and sprinted for the bathroom. While he was fussing to getthe shower adjusted to the right temperature, he bludgeoned hisconscience by telling himself that a wide-awake general is more goodthan a half-asleep general, that there was nothing he could do buthope that Hargreaves's patrols would keep the bomb away from Konkrookuntil Pickering's brain-trust came up with one of their own, and thatthe fact that the commander-in-chief was making sack-time would bemuch better for morale than the spectacle of him running around incircles. He shaved carefully; a stubble of beard on his chin mightbetray the fact that he was worried. Then he dressed, put his monoclein his eye, and called the headquarters that had been set up in SidHarrington's--now his--office. A girl at the switchboard appeared onhis screen, and gave place to Paula Quinton, who had been up for thepast two hours.
"The _Northern Lights_ got in about three hours ago, general," shetold him. "She had four of King Yoorkerk's infantry regimentsaboard--the Seventh, Glorious-and-Terrible, the Fourth,Firm-in-Adversity, the Second, Strength-of-the-Throne, and theTwelfth, Forever-Admirable. They're the sorriest-looking rabble Iever saw, but Hideyoshi says they're the best Yoorkerk has, and theyall have Terran-style rifles. General M'zangwe broke them intobattalions, and put a battalion in with each of the Kragan regiments.I think they're more afraid of the Kragans than they are of therebels."
He nodded. That was probably the best way to employ them, within theexisting situation. The trouble was, Them M'zangwe was incurablytactical-minded. Put those geeks of Yoorkerk's in with the Kragans andthey'd be most useful in conquering Konkrook, but the trouble wasthat, after associating with Kragans, they might develop intoreasonably good troops themselves, to the undesired improvement ofKing Yoorkerk's army. On the other hand maybe not. Keep them inCompany service long enough, and they might want to forget aboutYoorkerk and stay there.
"How's the situation over in town?" he asked.
"Well, it's slowing up, since we began pulling contragravity out," shetold him, "but the geeks are breaking up rapidly.... Oh, there wassomething funny about that hassle, last evening, when the _Procyon_came in. Two contragravity vehicles, an aircar and an air-lorry, thatwent out to meet the ship, are unaccounted for."
"You mean two of our vehicles are missing?"
She shook her head, frowning in perplexity. "Well, no. All thevehicles that answered that unidentified-aircraft alert returned, butthere were these two that went out that we haven't any record of.Colonel Grinell is investigating, but he can't find out anything...."
"Tell him not to waste any more time," he said. "Those two wereprobably geeks from Konkrook. You know, that's how the von Schlichtenfamily got out of Germany, in the Year Three--flew a bomber to Spain.The Konkrook war-criminals are getting out before the Army ofOccupation moves in."
"Well, the posts at the old Kragan castles report some contragravity,and parties riding 'saurs, moving west from the city," she told him."There are a lot of refugees on the roads. And combat reports fromKonkrook agree that resistance is getting weaker every hour.... Andthe supra-atmosphere observation-craft--they're beginning to call herthe _Sky-Spy_--is up a hundred and fifty miles over Keegark. We haveradar and vision screens and telemetered radiation and other detectorshere, tuned to her. They're installing a similar set on the _NorthernLights_ at the shipyard. By the way, Air-Commodore Hargreaves wants toknow if he can take a pair of 155-mm rifles from the Channel Batteryand mount them on the _Lights_."
"Yes, of course, he can have anything he wants, as long as it isn'turgently needed for the bomb project."
"_Sky-Spy_ reports normal contragravity traffic between Keegark andthe farming-villages around--aircars, lorries, a few scows--butnothing suspicious. No trace of either of the Boer-class ships.Kankad's people are building receiving sets to install on the_Procyon_ and the _Aldebaran_, and another set for Kankad's Town.Pickering and his people are still working, but they all look prettyfrustrated. They have Major Thornton, at the ammunition plant, doingexperimental work on chemical-explosive charges to bring thesubcritical masses together and hold them together till an explosioncan be produced; they're using most of the skilled electrical andelectronics people to work up a detonating device. That's why Kankad'speople are doing most of the detection-device work. Hargreaves isfitting a lot of small craft-- combat-cars and civilian aircars--withradar sets, to use for patrolling."
"That sounds good," von Schlichten said. "I'll be around and see howthings are, after I've had some breakfast."
He had breakfast at the main cafeteria, four floors down; there wasn'tas much laughing and talking as usual, but the crowd there seemed ingood spirits. He spent some time at headquarters, watching Keegark byTV and radar. So far, nothing had been done about directreconnaissance over Keegark with radiation-detectors, but Hargreavesreported that a couple of privately owned aircars were being fittedfor the job.
He made a flying inspection trip around the island, and visited thefarms south of the city, on the mainland, and, finally, made a sweepin the command-car over the city itself. Reconnaissance in person wasan archaic and unprogressive procedure, and it was a good way to getgenerals killed, but one could see a lot of things that would bemissed on TV. He let down several times in areas that had already beentaken, and talked to company and platoon officers. For one thing, KingYoorkerk's flamboyantly named regiments weren't quite as bad as Paulahad thought. She'd been spoiled by the Kragans in her appreciation ofother native troops. They had good, standard-quality, Volund-madearms; they were brave and capable; and they had been just enoughinsulted by being integrated into Kragan regiments to try to make agood showing.
By noon, resistance in the city was beginning to cave in. Surrenderflags were appearing on one after another of the Konkrookan rebelstrong-points, and at 1430, after he had returned to the Island, adelegation, headed by the Konkrookan equivalent of Lord Mayor andcomposed largely of prominent merchants, came across the channel undera flag of truce to surrender the city's Spear of State, with abjectapologies for not having Gurgurk's head on the point of it. Gurgurk,they reported, had fled to Keegark by air the night before, whichexplained the incident of the unaccountable aircar and lorry. TheChannel Battery stopped firing, and, with the exception of anoccasional spatter of small-arms fire, the city fell silent.
At 1600, von Schlichten visited the headquarters Pickering had set upin the office building at the power-plant. As he stepped off the lifton the third floor, a girl, running down the hall with her arms fullof papers in folders, collided with him; the load of papers flew inall directions. He stooped to help her pick them up.
"Oh, general! Isn't it wonderful?" she cried. "I just can't believeit!"
"Isn't what wonderful?" he asked.
"Oh, don't you know? They've got it!"
"Huh? They have?" He gathered up the last of the big envelopes andgave them to her. "When?"
"Just half an hour ago. And to think, those books were around here allthe time, and.... Oh, I've got to run!" She disappeared into the lift.
Inside the office, one of Pickering's engineers was sitting on themiddle of his spinal column, a stenograph-phone in one hand and a bookin the other. Once in a while, he would say something into themouthpiece of the phone. Two other nuclear engineers had similar booksspread out on a desk in front of them; they were making notes andlooking up references in the _Nuclear Engineers' Handbook_, and makingcalculations with their sliderules. There was a huddle around thedrafting-boards, where two more such books were in use.
"Well, what's happened?" he demanded, catching Pickering by the arm ashe rushed from one group to another.
"Ha! We have it!" Pickering cried. "Everything we need! Look!"
He had another of the books under his arm. He held it out to vonSchlichten, and von Schlichten suddenly felt sicker than he had everfelt since, at the age o
f fourteen, he had gotten drunk for the firsttime. He had seen men crack up under intolerable strain before, butthis was the first time he had seen a whole roomful of men blow theirtops in the same manner.
The book was a novel--a jumbo-size historical novel, of some seven or eighthundred pages. Its dust-jacket bore a slightly-more-than-bust-lengthpicture of a young lady with crimson hair and green eyes and jade earringsand a plunging--not to say power-diving--neckline that left her affiliationwith the class of Mammalia in no doubt whatever. In the background, amushroom-topped smoke-column rose, and away from it something intended tobe a four-motor propeller-driven bomber of the First Century was racingmadly. The title, he saw, was _Dire Dawn_, and the author was oneHildegarde Hernandez.
"Well, it has a picture of an A-bomb explosion on it," he agreed.
"It has more than that; it has the whole business. Casespecifications, tampers, charge design, detonating device, everything.Why, the end-papers even have diagrams, copies of the originalNagasaki-bomb drawings. Look."
Von Schlichten looked. He had no more than the average intelligentlayman's knowledge of nuclear physics--enough to recharge or repair aconversion-unit--but the drawings looked authentic enough. They seemedto be copies of ancient blueprints, lettered in First Century English,with Lingua Terra translations added, and marked TOP SECRET and U.S.ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS and MANHATTAN ENGINEERING DISTRICT.
"And look at this!" Pickering opened at a marked page and showed it tohim. "And this!" He opened where another slip of paper had beeninserted. "Everything we want to know, practically."
"I don't get this." He wasn't sick, anymore, just bewildered. "I readsome reviews of this thing. All the reviewers panned hell out ofit--'World War II Through a Bedroom Keyhole'; 'Henty in Black LacePanties'--that sort of thing."
"Yeh, yeh, sure," Pickering agreed. "But this Hernandez had illusionsof being a great serious historical novelist, see. She won't try towrite a book till she's put in years of research--actually, about sixmonths' research by a herd of librarians and college-juniors and othersuch literary coolies--and she boasts that she never yet has beencaught in an error of historical background detail.
"Well, this opus is about the old Manhattan Project. The heroine is asort of super-Mata-Hari, who is, alternately and sometimessimultaneously, in the pay of the Nazis, the Soviets, the Vatican,Chiang Kai-Shek, the Japanese Emperor, and the Jewish InternationalBankers, and she sleeps with everybody but Joe Stalin and MaoTse-tung, and of course, she is in on every step of the A-bombproject. She even manages to stow away on the _Enola Gay_, with thehelp of a general she's spent fifty incandescent pages seducing.
"In order to tool up for this production-job, La Hernandez did herresearching just where Lourenco Gomes probably did his--University ofMontevideo Library. She even had access to the photostats of the oldU.S. data that General Lanningham brought to South America after thedebacle in the United States in A.E. 114. Those end-papers are part ofthe Lanningham stuff. As far as we've been able to checkmathematically, everything is strictly authentic and practical. We'llhave to run a few more tests on the chemical-explosive charges--wedon't have any data on the exact strength of the explosives they usedthen--and the tampers and detonating device will need to be tested alittle. But in about half an hour, we ought to be able to startdrawing plans for the case, and as soon as they're finished, we'llrush them to the shipyard foundries for casting."
Von Schlichten handed the book back to Pickering, and sighed deeply."And I thought everybody here had gone off his rocker," he said. "Wewill erect, on the ruins of Keegark, a hundred-foot statue of SenoritaHildegarde Hernandez.... How did you get onto this?"
Pickering pointed to a young man with dull brick colored hair, who waspunching out some kind of a problem on a small computing machine.
"Piet van Reenen, over there, he has a girl-friend whose taste runs tothis sort of literary bubble-gum. She told him it was all in a bookshe'd just read, and showed him. We descended in force on the bookshopand grabbed every copy in stock. We are now running a sort ofgaseous-diffusion process, to separate the nuclear physics from thepornography. I must say, Hildegarde has her biological data very wellin hand, too."
"I'll bet she'd have fun writing a novel about these geeks," vonSchlichten said. "Well, how soon do you think you can have a bombready for us?"
"Casting the cases is going to slow us down the most," Pickering said."But, even with that, we ought to have one ready in three days, at themost. By two weeks, we'll be turning them out on an assembly-line."
"I hope we don't need more than one. But you'd better produce at leasthalf a dozen. And have some practice-bombs made up, out of concrete oranything, as long as they're the right weight and airfoil and havesome way of releasing smoke. Get them done as soon as you have yourcase designed. We want to be able to make a couple of practice drops."
There was no use, he thought, of raising hopes which might provepremature. He told Paula Quinton, of course, and ThemistoclesM'zangwe, and, by telecast on sealed beam, King Kankad andAir-Commodore Hargreaves. Beyond that, there was nothing to do butwait, and hope that Hargreaves could keep Orgzild's bombers away fromGongonk Island and Kankad's Town and that Hildegarde Hernandez hadbeen playing fair with her public. He visited the city, where a fewpockets of diehard resistance were being liquidated, and whereeverybody who had not been too deeply and publicly involved in the_znidd suddabit_ conspiracy was now coming forward and claiming tohave been a lifelong friend of the Terrans and the Company. VonSchlichten returned to Gongonk Island, debating with himself whetherto declare a general amnesty or to set up a dozen guillotines in thecity and run them around the clock for a week. There were cogentarguments for and against either procedure.
By 2100, the last organized resistance had been wiped out, and curfewhad been imposed, and peace of a sort restored. There was still thethreat from Keegark, but it was looking less ominous now than it hadthe evening before. Von Schlichten and Paula were having dinner in theBroadway Room, confident that there was nothing left to do that theycould do anything about, when the extension phone that had beenplugged in at their table rang.
"Colonel Quinton here," Paula identified herself into it, and listenedfor a moment. "There has? When?... Well, where did it come from?... Isee. And the direction?... Anything else?"
Apparently there was nothing else. She hung up, and turned to vonSchlichten.
"The _Sky-Spy_ just detected a ship lifting out from Keegark, presumedone of the Boer-class freighters, either the _Jan Smuts_ or the _OomPaul Kruger_. It was first picked up on contragravity at about ahundred feet, rising vertically from near the Palace. The suppositionis the geeks had her camouflaged since the time Commander Prinsloofirst bombarded Keegark with the _Aldebaran_. That was about twentyminutes ago; at last report, she's fifty miles north of Keegark,headed up the Hoork River."
Von Schlichten started thinking aloud: "That could be a feint, to drawour ships north after her, and leave the approach to Konkrook orKankad's open, but that would be presuming that they know about the_Sky-Spy_, and I doubt that, though not enough to take chances on.They know we have ground and ship-radar, and they may think they canslip down the Konk Valley either undetected or mistaken for one of ourships from North Uller."
He picked up the phone. "Get me through on telecast to Air-CommodoreHargreaves, aboard the _Procyon_," he said. "I'll take it in theoffice; I'll be up directly." He rose. "Finish your dinner, and havethe rest of mine sent up," he told Paula.
Leaving the elevator, he rushed into the big headquarters room just ascontact was established with the _Procyon_, on station over thenorthwestern corner of Takkad Sea, between Kankad's Town and Keegark.The _Aldebaran_, he knew, was west of Keegark; the _Northern Lights_,now fitted with a pair of 155-mm guns, in addition to her 90's, hadjust arrived at Kankad's. He had the _Aldebaran_ sent north along thecrest of the mountain-range between the Hoork and Konk river-valleys,where she could cover both with her own radar and otherdetection-devices and exchange information with th
e _Sky-Spy_, and the_Gaucho_ sent in what looked like the right course to intercept theBoer-class freighter from Keegark. The _Northern Lights_, also withscreens tuned to the _Sky-Spy_, was sent to take over the_Aldebaran's_ regular station. Finally, he called Skilk and had the_Northern Star_ sent south down the Hoork Valley.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait, and watch the screens.Paula Quinton put in an appearance shortly after he had finishedcalling Skilk, pushing a cocktail-wagon on which their interrupteddinners had been placed. They finished eating, and drank coffee, andsmoked. Most of the rest of his staff who were not busy on thebomb-project or at the shipyards or with the occupation of Konkrookdrifted in; they all sat and stared from one to another of thescreens, which told, in radar-patterns and direct vision andtelescopic vision and heat and radiation detection, the story of whatwas going on to the northeast of them.
Keegark was dark, on the vision-screen; evidently King Orgzild had inventedthe blackout, too. Not that it did him any good; the radar-screen showedthe city clearly, and it was just as clear on the radiation andheat-screens. The Keegarkan ship was completely blacked out, but theradiations from her engines and the distinctive radiation-pattern of hercontragravity-field showed clearly, and there was a speck that marked herposition on the radar-screen. The same position was marked with a pin-pointof light on the vision-screen--some device on the _Sky-Spy_, synchronizedwith the detectors, kept it focused there. The Company ships andcontragravity vehicles all were carrying topside lights, visible only fromabove, which flashed alternate red and blue to identify them.
Time crawled slowly around the clock-face on the wall, thesixty-five-second minutes of Uller dragging like hours. The spots thatmarked the enemy ship and her hunters crawled, too; seen from thehundred-and-fifty-mile altitude of the _Sky-Spy_, even thesix-hundred-mile speed of the _Gaucho_ was barely visible. They drankcoffee till the stuff revolted them; they smoked until their throatsand mouths were dry, they watched the screens until they thought thatthey would see them in their dreams forever. Then the _Gaucho_reported radar-contact with the Keegarkan ship, which had begun toturn in a hairpin-shaped course and was coming south down the KonkValley.
After that, the _Gaucho_ began reporting directly, and her topsideidentification-light went out.
"... doused our lights; we're down in the valley, altitude about athousand feet. We're trying to get a glimpse of her against the sky,"a voice came in. "We're cutting in our forward TV-pickup." The voicerepeated, several times, the wavelength, and somebody got an auxiliaryscreen tuned in. There was nothing visible on it but the darkness ofthe valley, the star-jeweled sky, and the loom of the East KonkMountains. "We still can't see her, but we ought to, any moment; radarshows her well above the mountains. Ah, there she is; she justobscured Beta Hydrae V; she's moving toward that big constellation tothe east of it, the one they call Finnegan's Goat. Now she'll be rightin the center of the screen; we're going straight for her. We're goingto try to slow her down till the _Aldebaran_ can get here...."
The enemy ship was vaguely visible, now, becoming clearer in thestarlight. She was a Boer-class freighter, all right. Probably the_Jan Smuts_; the _Oom Paul Kruger_ had last been reported at Bwork,and there was little chance that she had slipped into Keegark sincethe uprising had started. For all anybody knew, she could have beendestroyed in the fighting before the Bwork Residency fell.
"All right, we have her spotted; we're going to open up on her," thevoice from the _Gaucho_ announced. "She has two 90's to our one; we'lltry to disable them, first." The vision-screen lit with the indirectglare of the gun-flash, and the image in it jiggled violently as theship shook to the recoil, then steadied again, with the enemy shipvisible in the middle of it, growing larger and larger as the _Gaucho_rushed toward her. The gun fired again and again, flooding the screenwith momentary yellow light and disturbing the image as the recoilshook the gun-cutter. The enemy ship began firing in reply, the shotswere all wide misses. Apparently the geek guncrew didn't know how tosynchronize the radar sights, and were ignorant of the correct settingfor the proximity-fuses. The _Gaucho_'s searchlights came on, bathingher quarry in light. It was the _Jan Smuts_; the name and thefigurehead-bust of the old soldier-philosopher were plainly visible.Her forward gun had been knocked out, and she was trying to swingabout to get a field of fire for her stern-gun.
"We're going to give her a rocket-salvo," the voice said. "Watch this,now!"
The rockets leaped forward, from the topside racks, four and four andfour and four, at half-second intervals. The first four hit the_Smuts_ amidships and low, exploding with a flare that grew before itcould die away as the second four landed. Nobody ever saw the thirdand fourth four land. The _Jan Smuts_ vanished in a blaze of lightthat blinded everybody in the room; when they could see again, aftersome thirty seconds, the screen was dark.
In the direct-vision screen from the _Sky-Spy_, the whole countrysideof the Konk Valley, five hundred miles north of Konkrook, was lighted.The heat and radiation detectors were going insane. And in theshifting confusion on the radar-screen, there was no trace either ofthe _Jan Smuts_ or the _Gaucho_.
"Well, the geeks did have an A-bomb," Themistocles M'zangwe said, atlength. "I'd been trying to kid myself that we were just preparingagainst a million-to-one chance. I wonder how many more they have."
"Paula, find out who was in command of the _Gaucho_; he'd be ajunior-grade lieutenant. Fix up orders promoting him to navy captain,as of now. It's probably the only thing we can do for him, anymore.And promotions of the same order for everybody else aboard thatcutter. Authority Carlos von Schlichten, acting Governor-General." Hepicked up a phone. "Get me Commander Prinsloo, on _Aldebaran_...."
He ordered Prinsloo to launch airboats and make a search; cautionedhim to be careful of radiation, but to take no chances on any of the_Gaucho_'s complement being still alive and in need of help. Whilethat was going on, the _Sky-Spy_ reported another ship coming over herhorizon to the east, from the direction of Bwork. That would be the_Oom Paul Kruger_. Hargreaves had already learned of the advent of thesecond freighter. He was unwilling to take the _Procyon_ off herstation until the _Aldebaran_ returned from the Konk Valley. In this,von Schlichten concurred.
Somebody suggested that a drink would be in order. They had justwatched the all-but-certain death of three Terran officers, fifteenTerran airmen, and ten Kragans, but they had all been living in tooclose companionship with death in the past three days--or was it threecenturies--to be too deeply affected. And they had also watched, atleast for a day or so, the removal of the threat that had hung overtheir heads. And they had seen proof that they had a defense againstKing Orgzild's bombs.
They were still mixing cocktails when Pickering phoned in.
"Some good news, general, from Operation 'Hildegarde.' We ought tohave at least one bomb ready to drop by 1500 tomorrow, four or fivemore by next midnight," he said. "We don't need to have cases cast. Wegot our dimensions decided, and we find that there are a lot of bigempty liquid-oxygen flasks, or tanks, rather, at the spaceport,that'll accommodate everything--fissionables, explosive-charges,tampers, detonator, and all."
"Well, go ahead with it. Make up a few of them; as many as you canbetween now and 2400 Sunday." He thought for a moment. "Don't wastetime on those practice bombs I mentioned. We'll make a practice dropwith a live bomb. And don't throw away the design for the cast case.We may need that, later on."