Ha! This was a thing he had been waiting for. He had a transshipment rig. It was in fine working order. There were no planes in the air, no motors running. Psychlo! He would end right now that question of threat.
He strode over to the console and almost fell over Angus. The Scot was sitting in a pool of light, working intensely with some rods and wheels. He didn"t look up but he knew Jonnie was there.
"While you were settling up with Schleim," said Angus, fingers flying around his work, "I parked a picto-recorder on a peak on Tolnep to watch that moon. Reaction motors don"t mess up a firing- only teleportation motors do. So I just fired it. But that was the only gyrocage a.s.sembled. I"m putting together a spare.
"Angus," said Jonnie, "we are going to find out what happened to Psychlo! We"ve got the machine, we"ve got the time."
"Give me about half an hour," said Angus.
Jonnie saw he needed no help and he wasn"t going to stand around here and wait.
En route to his room he looked in at the hospital. They had left a woman nurse, an elderly Scot, and she resented being left behind. She looked up from a patient as Jonnie entered. "It"s time for your sulfa and your shot!" she said threateningly. Jonnie knew he shouldn"t have come in here. He had just wanted to see how the wounded were doing.
The two fractured-skull cases were lying in their beds. They seemed all right. But being Scots and left behind, they eyed him dully. The two burned antiaircraft gunners seemed all right but, being Scots, they didn"t want to be there with Edinburgh burning.
"Take off your jacket!" snapped the nurse. Then she took the bandage off his arm and looked at the arrow wound. "Hah!" she said, sounding disappointed, "it won"t even leave a scar!"
She made him take sulfa powder and wash it down with water. She jabbed an inch of needle into his good arm and squirted B Complex stingingly with a savage turn. She took his temperature and counted his pulse. "You"re perfectly well!" It sounded like an indictment.
Jonnie had had a lot of practice in diplomacy that day. He felt sorry for these people. Jacket and helmet dangling from his hand he said, "I sure am glad you people stayed. I may need lots of help defending this area."
After a moment of amazement, they all came alive. They said he could count on them! And when he left they were all chattering about what they could do and smiling- even the nurse.
With the exodus of the adult Chinese, he hadn"t really expected to find Mr.
Tsung. But there he was. He had laid out a blue jacket on the bed along with some other items for change. But he was bowing and beaming. With his hands tucked in his sleeves, he was going up and down like a pump.
He was trying to say something but his English wasn"t up to it and suddenly he bolted and came back with Chief Chong-won.
"Well, at least you"re here," said Jonnie. "I thought the place was near empty!"
"Oh, no," said the chief. "The Coordinators are all gone. But we have guests, you know. The emissaries. So I"m here and the cook; there"s an electrician and two antiaircraft gunners." He started counting off on his fingers. "Must be a dozen people left. We do have one problem." He saw Jonnie go alert. "It"s the food. I thought we"d be feeding all these emissaries and we got ready to fix the fanciest Chinese food you ever heard of. But they don"t eat our food! So we have all this food and n.o.body to eat it! Too bad!"
To a people who had been pressed starving into the snowy mountains for centuries, it must look like quite a tragedy. "Feed the children," said Jonnie.
"Oh, we have, we have," said the chief. "Even the dogs. But we"ve still got lots too much food. I tell you what we"ll do. There"s an empty apartment and we"ll set it up for a dining room and we will feed you a beautiful dinner."
"I"ve got something to do," said Jonnie.
"Oh, no problem, no problem. It is very stylish to eat late. The cook will be so pleased. Here," and he made a dash outside to the hall and brought back a tray with some soup and small patties of dough and meat. "These are...no Psychlo word...between-meal-bites. Help us out!"
Jonnie laughed. If that was all the problems they had, life would be a basking in the sun!
He sat down in a chair and began to eat the snack. Tsung, after setting up a small table, was back to bobbing again.
"What"s he bowing about?" said Jonnie.
The chief waved his hand and Jonnie saw that a fourth viewscreen had been installed, making two for the conference room. "He"s been in here all the time you were on that platform, working a Coordinator half to death translating. They"ve got discs of everything that went on. The second screen was so they could see both you and the emissaries. I looked in here a time or two-"
Mr. Tsung was volubly interrupting him. The chief translated, "He wants you to know that you are the fastest pupil he has ever seen. He says if you had been an imperial Prince of China and his family had still been chamberlains and not exiled, China would still be there."
Jonnie laughed and would have acknowledged with a return compliment but Mr. Tsung was talking very fast and drawing something from his sleeve. "He wants something," said the chief. "He wants you to put your "chop" on this paper. That is, your signature." He was unfolding it. It was a considerable expanse of Chinese characters.
The chief raised his eyebrows and translated the sense of it for Jonnie. "This says that you approve the cancellation of exile of his family from the Imperial Court and that you recommend its reinstatement as chamberlains to the princ.i.p.al government of this planet and yourself.
"I"m not a member of the government," said Jonnie.
"He knows all that, but he wants your chop on it. I warn you that he has two brothers and several relatives. They"re all educated in diplomacy and such. Oh, he tells me there"s a second paper here. Yes. This one restores their rank as Mandarins of the Blue b.u.t.ton- lets them wear a round cap with a blue b.u.t.ton on top- n.o.blemen, actually. It "s valid. They are n.o.blemen."
"But I"m not-" began Jonnie.
Mr. Tsung sang off into half-a-dozen trills of protest.
"He says you don"t know what you are. Put your chop on these and he"ll do the rest."
Jonnie said, "But I have no authority. The war isn"t over yet. Not by a long ways! I-"
"He says wars are wars and diplomats are diplomats and there is no point in the game when it ends. I"d sign them, if I were you, Lord Jonnie. They"re all studying Psychlo and English. It "s his chance to attain an eleven-hundred-year-old goal. I"ll read these word for word for you."
Well, Jonnie felt they might not have made it without Mr. Tsung, so he was given a brush and he signed them and Chief Chong-won witnessed them.
Mr. Tsung reverently folded the pieces of paper into a cover of gold brocade and laid them away like they were crown jewels.
"Oh, yes," said Jonnie as he left. "One more thing. Tell him how much I enjoyed that tale about the dragon who ate the moon."
- Part XXVIII -
Chapter 1.
Psychlo!
The home planet of two hundred thousand worlds.
The center of an empire that had ruled and ruined sixteen universes over a period of three hundred and two thousand years.
Psychlo. That had been the cause of man"s destruction.
What had happened to its empire, if anything?
What had happened to Psychlo? And if it still existed, what did it plan?
Was it a danger or not?
For a grueling and turbulent year they had wondered. It lay like a nagging barb under their thoughts.
Now they were going to find out.
Pale light lit the bowl. The metal of the platform shone dully. Not a motor to be heard in the sky. The stars were bright above.
Angus and Jonnie looked at each other. Now they would know.
"First," said Jonnie, "we will inspect minesites and see what transshipment rigs are active. Perhaps there is some indicator somewhere that would alert them to this. We will be cautious, not get too close to anything."
The coordinate book told them of a transshipment rig at Loozite, a Psychlo mining world without population other than Psychlo miners. It was a large planet but distant from Psychlo.
They put the new gyrocage down, put a picto-recorder in the armored case, calculated the coordinates for a point forty miles from the Loozite transshipment site, punched the console b.u.t.tons, and fired.
The wires hummed. The cage came back. There was a slight recoil.
Jonnie put the disc in the atmosphere projector that still stood there.
He pressed the b.u.t.ton.
For a moment both he and Angus thought they must have miscalculated and shot a mine instead. Forty miles was a long way off for detail and Jonnie adjusted and recentered the scene before them.
It was a hole!
But not a mine. There stood a transshipment pole at a drunken angle.
But it was otherwise just a hole in the planet surface. No trace even of compound domes.
Jonnie wondered whether they had different compound layouts on different planets. Perhaps that Loozite platform had been miles from anything else. Still, the Psychlos were demons for standard layouts. Usually the whole central administration of the planet was at the transshipment rig. For there was where the ore came from all over the planet. There was where the books were kept, where the main shops existed, where the top executives were.
Just that hole. It was pretty big, but a hole is a hole.
They chose another firing site: Mercogran in the fifth universe. It was shown as a planet five times the size of Earth but of less density.
They fired and recalled the gyrocage.
When Jonnie turned the projector on, they saw at once they had something different. They had to widen the view on the projector to see better.
Mercogran had been close to a mountain range and avalanches had apparently come down. They would have covered much of the s.p.a.ce of any compound.
Jonnie brought the view in closer. There! At the lower right! The inverted bowl of a compound dome. It was lying like a broken soup plate. There was a transshipment pole and attached charred wires sitting in the middle of it. But nothing else.
So far no tight conclusion could be reached beyond the fact that those central compounds and transshipment rigs were certainly no longer working.
At random they took another planet: Brelloton. It was an inhabited planet, another reference told them, with a population of its own, governed by a Psychlo "regency," enduring such rule for sixty thousand years.
They calculated the coordinates for a spot forty miles from the transshipment rig and fired the gyrocage.
They were not prepared for what they got. The atmosphere image showed a city. The transshipment rig there had apparently been on a raised plateau in the center of town.
Buildings that once must have been ma.s.sive were blown to bits. They made a spreading pattern that radiated out from the plateau. Buildings that must have been two thousand feet high in a city that must have held a million beings or more had fallen outward like dominos.
The remains of the rig were plain. The platform was a hole. The poles were all leaning outward.
The compound domes had lain under the edge of the plateau and had been lifted by concussion and blown away, leaving the familiar underground layout plain in view.
Bringing the compound in closer one could see what must be a year"s growth of gra.s.s in crevices.
There was no sign of life.
Jonnie went back and sat down and thought. He asked Angus to find some views the air cover had taken at the Purgatoire River. Views of the American compound.
Angus got them and Jonnie looked at them: the hole where the platform had been, the outward lean of the poles that still stood, the blasted city fifty or more miles away.
"I know what happened," said Jonnie. "We could go on looking at Psychlo planets all night and get the same answer. Give me that computer. We"re going to look at Psychlo on Day 92 last year!"
Light. It traveled approximately 5,869,713,600,000 miles a year. The light which came from Psychlo on that hour and date was still traveling in s.p.a.ce. They would get just ahead of it, and with a picto-recorder from a star drone set for 6,000,000,000,000X magnification, they would look at Psychlo at the instant it occurred. Whatever had occurred.
It had been just a few days ago over a year ago.
Choose a sidereal angle to aim the scope. Avoid nearby heavenly bodies so that the cage would not be influenced by gravity and would stay there for two or three minutes. No, let"s be brave and put it there for fifteen minutes and hope it doesn"t move and we get it back.
It took a while to set up. They had to readjust magnification, tune in heat sensors, and blind them to other bodies. Calculate seconds.
They fired the cage.
The wires hummed in holding for the long required time. They called the cage back.
It arrived!
It was a little misplaced on the platform. Jonnie would have touched it in his eagerness but Angus grabbed his hand. It would be cold enough for the metal to take one"s skin off! They had to wait and let it warm up, for if they opened it cold they might warp a disc with the abrupt temperature shift.
It was like teasing a thirsty man by withholding a water skin from him.
Finally they projected it. What a brilliant picture! They had thought it might be fuzzy such as you get with heat waves. But the light that had traveled for over a year was crystal-clear and straight.
There was the imperial City of Psychlo. Circular tram rails, streets down from its cliffs like conveyor belts. They even carried the idea of mining into their city design.
Huge, bustling Psychlo! The center of power of the universes. The hub of the great, cruel claw that raked the bones from planets and peoples everywhere. There was the three-hundred-two-thousand-year-old monster itself, spread out in its s.a.d.i.s.tic and ugly might!
Neither Jonnie nor Angus had ever seen a live city of that size before. A hundred million population? A billion? Not the planet, just the city above the lower plain. Look at the trams. Rails that ran in circular spirals. Cars that looked for all the world like mine cars but full of people. Mobs in the streets. Mobs! Not riots. Just Psychlos.