It was so disappointing!
He drew off and watched for a while. Combined force planes were not having much luck with the dam lake due to atmosphere-armor cable around it and they were now giving their attention to the air cover planes from below. There was a boiling fight and he saw two Jamb.i.t.c.how combat battle planes blown to bits.
He had his ship moved up higher. Down to the south the combined force bombers had begun to drop bombs into the deserted ancient ruins of Singapore. A fire blossomed up. Then another. He wondered at the military mind that would bomb an undefended city with no military value but which might contain some loot that they so valued. But they always did it.
His indigestion was bothering him again. These were such awful times. There seemed to be no hope at all.
He knew there was a base in the northern continent man had once called "Russia" and he had his ship captain move up there.
One of the attacking-force war vessels was launching planes over that base. They were personnel carriers. The small gray man observed a force of about five hundred Hawvin marines deploying on the plain before the base. Behind fire shields they began to move forward. It almost seemed that the base was not defended. No answering fire came back to the advancing force. It got closer and closer to the base. Several fires erupted. Then the force began to move up a mountain slope toward what must be an underground defense point. The force was within a hundred yards of it now, pouring a hail of fire into it.
Abruptly the ground under the attacking force erupted.
Mines! The whole terrain was flaming.
Flashes of weapon fire blasted down the hill from the base. The attacking force withdrew in haste beyond the village. Officers were shouting and regrouping their marines. But they had left over a hundred dead or wounded on the ground before the base.
The attacking force formed up again and advanced on the base.
Planes streaked out of base hangar doors and ground-strafed the a.s.sault force.
The small gray man had seen no traces on his viewscreens. He had not really hoped to see any, not in all that firing.
Since it was not far out of the orbit course he now had, he told his ship captain to pa.s.s over the American minesite at a height of four hundred miles.
It took a while and the small gray man napped a little. A buzzer told him they were over it and he turned to his screens.
Way down below, the ruin of the minesite was utterly dead. The abandoned trucks and pumps still lay beside the river. What a desolate, lifeless scene! The dome hich had covered a console was still lying there, still attached to a crane hook but tipped over.
The city to the north was still burning.
His mineral tracer showed the whole area hot with radiation.
He directed his ship captain to change orbit to pa.s.s over Scotland. It was in his mind to stop and see whether the old woman might have come back, but then down on the horizon beyond, the sensors picked up heat and then a clear view of a Drawkin war vessel. He looked at his maps. They were not very good maps for they were just pages of schoolbooks, but he easily identified the city. It was "Edinburgh." And it was burning.
His radio was crackling and the communicator tuned it in more finely. What a rushing barrage of sound! Some of it was Drawkin and the small gray man could not understand that tongue even though they controlled twenty planets. It was a sort of hysterical-sounding language. He could take a vocoder to it, for he had the vocabulary circuits somewhere, but they would just be commands to pilots down below. The other language he had heard an awful lot of lately. It was a sort of smooth, meditative tongue. He had even dawdled over a frequency decoding table to try to get a grasp of it but it seemed to defy that.
But he didn"t need to understand the language. The physical facts were plain enough. There was a heavy air battle in progress.
He looked down through the port. A big promontory stood above the city.
Antiaircraft fire was coning up from it. The rock stood in a sea of fire as the city burned.
A Drawkin bomber exploded in midair and fell to add its bursting gouts of green flame to the orange of the burning city.
No teleportation traces possible there. That was for certain.
He felt very depressed, even sad. He wondered at himself. Was the strain of this past year making him emotional? emotional? Surely not! Yet the old woman in the north of Scotland, and particularly his finding her gone, had stirred sentient. And here he was feeling a bit of Surely not! Yet the old woman in the north of Scotland, and particularly his finding her gone, had stirred sentient. And here he was feeling a bit of anxiety anxiety lest she be down there in all that flame. lest she be down there in all that flame.
All this was quite unlike him. Quite unprofessional.
He thought he had better have a little nap so he could awake thinking more clearly, less clouded and blurred. What an absolutely terrible year it had been.
He went to his cabin and lay down. And it seemed only moments later that he woke with the whole thing bright and plain before him.
That criss-cross dance those terrestrial marine attack planes had done. How dull of him! Of course he was no military tactician, but he should have realized it long before now. That high-speeding group that flashed off to Singapore was the lure lure. The burned-out console was just bait.
He went to his small gray office and did a very efficient playback of that "dance of planes" and then plotted the course of the real group quite accurately. Yes, on that course they would arrive at that paG.o.da in the southern hemisphere of the planet.
He gave his orders to his ship captain and away they sped, right up to 2X light.
He was just in time to see the death of the Capture.
Lt startled him.
He was not sure how it could happen. A Terrify-cla.s.sbattle-plane-launching capital ship? Exploded in orbit?
With a cautionary word to the bridge to draw off, the small gray man watched the huge vessel disintegrate down through the atmosphere and strike the lake of the dam. For a bit he watched to see whether the dam would give. It might be damaged, he decided, but it appeared to be holding for the moment. A huge amount of water was rushing down the river channel in an overpowering flood. But there was nothing down there.
He telephotoed his viewscreens on the dam itself. Yes, it had been damaged. Quite a bit of water was escaping on the lower left-hand side, much of it under the dam there. A big hole from the looks of it.
There had been quite a fight here. The woods were burning. Yes, and there went a squadron of the Capture"s planes, streaking off over the horizon in the hopes of being taken aboard some Tolnep ship in the Singapore area. They must have been outside when the Capture exploded. Well, they probably wouldn"t make it. They didn"t have the range. They"d wind up in the sea.
But he better watch this paG.o.da. There were no planes around it now. His infrabeams couldn"t pick up anything but religious music. It drowned out any voices.
From a respectful distance he watched his screens intently. He did not have too long to wait.
A teleportation trace!
Yes, yes, yes! He played it back.
Hope surged.
Then he felt this was too good to be true. Consoles when captured had been known to fire once and then that was it. They never fired again.
It seemed absolutely ages that he waited.
There it was again.
It had fired twice. It had fired twice! twice!
Joy surged up in him. Then he found an instant to wonder at himself. Sentiment? Anxiety? And now joy? How very unprofessional! Get to the urgent business at hand.
How could he communicate with them?
The radio channel was full of the calm, religious-sounding speech. What would they speak down there?
He grabbed a vocoder. He threw on his transmit and put the vocoder in front of a microphone. But what language? He had several in the vocoder bank. One called "French"- no, that was utterly dead. One called "German?" No, he had never heard that in their channels. "English." He would start off with English.
He muttered into the vocoder and it said, "I am requesting safe conduct through your lines. My vessel is not armed. You may train your guns on it or on me. I have no hostile intentions. It might be mutually beneficial were you to grant me an interview. I am requesting safe conduct through your lines. My vessel is not armed. You may train your guns on it or on me. I have no hostile intentions. It might be mutually beneficial were you to grant me an interview."
The small gray man waited. He hardly dared breathe. An awful lot of things depended upon the reply.
- Part XXVI -
Chapter 1.
Jonnie and Angus were straight up against it.
They had their heads bent over the worktable in the console enclosure. Before them lay an open technical manual Angus had found in Terl"s recycler basket. Psychlo technical manuals were bad enough but this was exceptionally bad. There is nothing worse than a cloudy operator"s handbook produced for an already informed reader which omits basics and essentials.
It was ruining Jonnie"s half-formed plans and introducing a tactical dilemma. Ent.i.tled "Cautionary Examples for the instruction of Trained Transshipment Console Operators," it, of course, made no mention of the essential switch position. But it did discuss what was called the "sames.p.a.ce" phenomena.
The manual warned against firing a transshipment item nearer than twenty-five thousand miles.
Jonnie had hoped he could somehow lay a tactical nuclear weapon inside each of those major war vessels and get rid of them.
The "sames.p.a.ce" phenomena informed them that s.p.a.ce "considered itself" identical on the principle of nearness. By a law of squares, the farther another point in s.p.a.ce was away, the more "different" it was from the point of origin. Total difference did not occur until one reached a point approximately twenty-five thousand miles away.
Teleportation motors used this to run and they were quite different from transshipment functions. A motor ran on the principle that "sames.p.a.ce" resisted distortion heavily. The shorter the distance, the more the distortion. Thus the motor thrived on the refusal of s.p.a.ce to distort. But here one was not moving an object; one was moving merely the position of the motor housing. You could even run a dozen motors in the same room and though they would cross-distort, they would function.
But to move an object cleanly, without destruction of it or harm to the transshipment rig, one had to have two s.p.a.ces to coincide with each other, and s.p.a.ce would not do that so long as it "considered itself" "sames.p.a.ce." You would just get a mangled mess.
It was all quite obtuse and Jonnie did not feel well. Every time he leaned over, he felt dizzy. Dr. Allen came out and insisted he take some more of this sulfa.
"We can"t bomb the ships with this," said Jonnie. "And if we bomb their home planets with this rig, the attacking force won"t find out about it for months. They"re all just reaction drives and they"re months from home." He sighed. "This rig won"t serve us offensively!"
The rig worked. They knew that because they had just proven it. They had taken a gyro-mounted camera from drone spares. It was the type of picture-regulating device which a drone used to look for things and it moved any kind of a recorder around through any degrees of a sphere according to how you set it. You could put any picto-recorder in it and they had done just that.
The rig could "cast" an object out and bring it back or it could "cast" one out and leave it. You moved "this s.p.a.ce" out there and brought it back in order to just send out an object and recover it. Or you moved "this s.p.a.ce" out to the coordinates of "that s.p.a.ce" and "that s.p.a.ce" now would hold the object and you brought this s.p.a.ce back empty. Actually nothing moved through s.p.a.ce at all. But "this s.p.a.ce" and "that s.p.a.ce" were made to coincide.
They had put a picto-recorder in the gyro-mounted camera and sent it to the moon"s surface, an easy one since the moon was up and in their line of sight. They had gotten back some very nice pictures of glaringly bright craters.
They had then "cast" the picto-recorder out to Mars, of which they had the path and coordinates, and had just looked at a huge valley that could be imagined to have a river in it.
The rig worked. They had had no doubts of that. But they weren"t here to take pretty pictures. They could hear the mutter from the nearby ops room and they knew their friends were being hammered mercilessly. There must be something something they could do with this rig. they could do with this rig.
And it didn"t help to feel lightheaded and dizzy.
One might threaten the invaders by saying their planets would be destroyed but more than likely they would just attack this place again.
Suddenly the strung intercom from ops buzzed. Stormalong"s voice: "You better hold up firing. We have an unknown vessel about four hundred miles up and to the north. Stand by. Will advise."
At the end of the line, Stormalong took his finger off the intercom and started to put the gun trace that had just come in through his playback resolver to get a picture from it.
His communicator, a young Buddhist woman on this shift, touched his shoulder. "Sir," she said in Psychlo, "I"ve got a message on the battle line I can"t make out. It "s in a monotone but it sounds sort of like the language I hear you and Sir Robert use to each other. I"ve got the recording of it, sir."
Stormalong didn"t pay much attention. He was pulling the paper transfer out of the trace resolver. "Play it," he said.
My vessel is not armed. You may train guns on it or on me"...."
Stormalong blinked. English? A funny kind of machine English?
He had the picture out of the resolver now. He looked at it, grabbed the recorder, and raced out to the console.
Jonnie and Angus looked up in alarm. "No, no," said Stormalong. "I think it"s all right. Look!"
He put the picture in front of them urgently. It was a ship shaped like a ball with a ring around it. "Remember the ship I ran into that wasn"t there? And the old woman on the Scottish coast? This is the same ship!" He looked at them demandingly. "Do I let it through?"
"Might be a trick," said Angus.
"Any way you can be sure?" said Jonnie. "You know, that it"s not a different ship?"
The Buddhist had followed Stormalong with a cable mike. He grabbed it away from her. "h.e.l.lo. h.e.l.lo up there. Do you read me?"
A metallic, monotone, "Yes."
"What did the old woman serve you?" demanded Stormalong.
The monotone, metallic voice, "Yarb tea."
Stormalong grinned. "Land in the open field north of this place where guns can be trained on you. Leave your ship by yourself and come unarmed. You will be met by sentries."
Metallic voice, "Very good. Safe conduct accepted."
Stormalong sent the needful orders to the guns and guards outside.
He played Jonnie the whole message.
"Who is this guy?" asked Angus. He spoke for them all.
Chapter 2.
The small gray man was escorted into the paG.o.da area by two polite, but alert, Scottish guards. He was about as high as Jonnie"s shoulder. He was dressed in a neat gray suit. He looked like a human being except that his skin was gray.