Chapter 6.
Since Terl seemed to be working on other things than teleportation, which was the key to this entire dilemma, Jonnie, for the time being, turned his attention to other things.
He had not entirely lost hope of unraveling the Psychlo technology through the restoration and possible cooperation of the remaining Psychlos. If he could get the two pieces of metal out of the head of a trained Psychlo engineer, there was a possibility that some of these mysteries would be solved, and solved they would leave them in better control of the planet"s future.
Dr. MacKendrick had returned. One or two of the African base people had come down with a touch of what MacKendrick said was "malaria," carried by mosquitoes. MacKendrick had procured "chinchona bark" from South America and had made them mop up standing pools of water in the base and put nets over the air intake vents and all that seemed to be under control.
MacKendrick"s three remaining Psychlo patients, two of whom were rated engineers, were not, however, so easily handled as the malaria. They were not getting well. They remained barely alive.
The thirty-three live Psychlos from the American compound arrived in Africa without incident and were put in a prepared dorm section. They had been duly reported as "lost at sea in a plane crash."
But the doctor did not have much hope for it. "I have tried every way I can think of," he told Jonnie one evening in his underground African surgery, "and one can"t get through the intricate skull structure to the items without severely damaging it. Every Psychlo cadaver I have worked with so far plainly shows that critical skull bone joints would be very damaged and vital brain nerves would be severed. Those things were put into the soft skull of a newborn pup, and even within a few months the skull would have been hardened to a point where they could not be removed. I will go on working with Psychlo cadavers but I cannot hold out any real hope."
Jonnie wandered off from the conference, trying to think of some solution to that problem. It seemed these days he had a lot more problems than he had solutions. He felt that if he didn"t come up with some solutions fairly soon, the human race might well be a write-off.
He heard his name called. He was pa.s.sing by one of the doors that housed the new Psychlo arrivals and he stopped and went over. There was a small view port and an intercom inset into the door panel.
It was Chirk!
He had never had anything against Chirk. A rattlebrain and dedicated to wrong conclusions though she might be, the times when he had seen her they had not fought.
"Jonnie," said Chirk, "I just want to thank you for saving us."
Jonnie realized somebody had been talking to the Psychlos, maybe Dunneldeen.
"When I think of what that awful Terl planned to do- murder us all, you know- my fur crackles! I always thought you were kind of cute, Jonnie. You know that. So I know you saved our lives."
Jonnie said, "You"re welcome. Can I do anything for you?" She looked pretty forlorn, really. No clothes but a wraparound, fur all matted.
"No," said Chirk. "Just thank you."
Jonnie walked off and was halfway down the pa.s.sage before the weirdness of it struck him. A Psychlo being thankful? Expressing appreciation? Not wanting something? impossible! He had never had much to do with female Psychlos. They were not numerous in the company. But a grateful Psychlo? Never!
He acted fast. Ten minutes later they had a mineral a.n.a.lyzer rigged and Chirk"s head in it. Twenty minutes of investigation and they had an answer.
Chirk did not have any bronze object in her head. She did have a silver capsule, but it was of different shape and size.
There were twelve females from the American compound, and after a great deal of hustle and bustle and a.s.sembly line treatment, they had established that none of the females had a bronze object in their brains but they did have silver ones of the same pattern as Chirk"s.
Two pilots took off for the morgue in the clouds, accompanied by a fur-wrapped MacKendrick, and they soon established, working in the icy blast of a keen wind, that they had three females in that lot.
That night MacKendrick held out the different capsule to Jonnie and Angus. He had removed it from the female corpse that had been brought back.
Careful examination showed it to have a less complex internal filament but that was all they could tell.
"I don"t think that could be cut out either," said Dr. MacKendrick. "The structure of the female skull is even more complicated than the male"s. All I can contribute is that it probably puts out a different message when activated."
That seemed to be pretty well that.
However, the bronze cruelty factor was missing in a female, so the following morning Jonnie had another talk with Chirk.
"How would you like a job?" said Jonnie.
Well, that would be wonderful. It just showed he was cute. Because she couldn"t go back to Psychlo now. Terl had ruined her company record and they would never reemploy her with the black marks of disobedience all over the file. And if he promised not to send her back to Psychlo and paid her usual wage of two hundred Galactic credits a month, a job would be a very good thing for she was going mad from inactivity and no cosmetics.
For a long time now they had been taking Galactic credits out of company payroll offices, out of the wallets of dead Psychlos, out of canteen cash drawers, and they had a couple of million credits kicking around. So it was feasible. They struck a bargain.
Loosed with a breathe-mask and a sentry, Chirk promptly found a few yards of cloth in supply, was escorted down to the lake, and, oblivious of crocodiles, took a bath. She then demanded access to the minerals sample room of the compound. She got some white gypsum, put it in a mortar and finely pulverized it, and put it in a sample bag. She threw some copper in a retort, added some acid, boiled it all away, washed the residue, and mixed it with some clear motor grease. She put it in a can. She got some tractor paint out of the storeroom, deepened its color to a brilliant purple by boiling it and added simple stain dye, and then poured in a pungent thinner. She put the last in a bottle.
Then she went to the tailor shop and slashed and annealed dress uniform cloth. She took some seat covering and cut it and annealed it into a pair of flare-topped boots and demanded to be taken back to her room.
Shortly there emerged the most stylish female a Psychlo street had ever seen. Although the breathe-mask hid the face makeup, one supposed that it was there for morale. And if you looked closely through the leaded faceplate you could see that she had brilliant green lipbones, a glaring white nosebone, and white and green circles around her eyebones. Her claws were a glaring shade of purple. The white dress uniform cloth was topped with a flaring gold collar and bound about by a gold-colored belt, and her boots were gold with purple sole lines.
Chirk then demanded access to another room where the other females were kept, and thereafter the current base commander was beseiged with demands for more contracts at two hundred Galactic credits a month and clothes! clothes!
Although Jonnie had not really expected much help from that quarter, he got it unexpectedly. Shortly he would get trouble, but to begin with it was revelatory.
Chirk made a trip out to find some mud. In that area there was lots of mud but she was looking for a certain kind of mud. She chattered away at Angus as they tramped about. She was carrying a two-hundred-pound scope under her arm like it was a handbag. Jonnie saw them walking around the edge of a swamp, Angus dwarfed by the eight-hundred-pound female, two sentries following, mostly in case of wild beasts.
Jonnie went over to them. She was looking for mud. She would stick in a paddle and put a dab on the scope plate and shake her head and walk on. She didn"t seem to be getting anywhere.
Jonnie noticed something odd in animal behavior. When he went out, the game ignored him. But Chirk? You couldn"t see game as far as you could look. Not an elephant, not a lion, no deer, nothing! He reasoned it must be the smell of a Psychlo. Where once animals fled at the smell of a man, over the centuries they had transferred their survival instincts. They wouldn"t let a Psychlo within miles of them. Still, this area hadn"t been hunted out and neither had any other area.
"Oh, Psychlo men don"t ma.s.s hunt," said Chirk, busy with her paddle and scope. "The silly things find just one animal and follow it and then they sit around in a circle and take three days to kill it little by little. So they don"t often get three days off. Not in this company. Silly things, males."
Jonnie did not enlighten her as to what made them "silly."
After a while she found her mud. She filled a mine bucket with it and easily carried the two-hundred-pound scope and the four hundred pounds of mud back to the compound.
She put the mud in gla.s.s bottles and added some green liquid goo-food and then rinsed the mud out. She handed the bottles to MacKendrick who gazed at them in mystery.
Chirk said, "Put that in the wounds, you foolish creature. How can you expect them to heal up if you don"t use a counter-virus! Any child knows that!"
MacKendrick got it. His treatments were all aimed at bacterial control on beings who were basically virus-structured. Within the next three days all his Psychlo patients began to get well, their festering wounds closed, and it appeared they were going to have three completely cured ones soon.
Chirk got to work on the library. It shocked her that the volumes were so strewn about and for two days she did nothing but collect Psychlo books into huge piles. The other females helped and also began to clean up large areas of old Psychlo berthings.
Jonnie was working one day in the old Psychlo operations room when Chirk suddenly presented herself. "Your library," she said, "is in disgraceful condition. According to company regulations, certain booklists must be in every minesite and you can see by this form that the manager here has been negligent and should be given a black mark on his record. But I am working for you now so I must call to your attention Form 2,345,980-A. If you place this order with Psychlo, they will send them out on the next shipment. It is a very serious matter. An incomplete library!"
Chirk might not be in present time about the company but she certainly had filled out the form.
Jonnie hadn"t even known the form existed. And he found himself staring at one item checked as missing: "War Vessel Recognition Tables of Hostile Races." And another, "Individual Troop Combat Capabilities Catalogued by Alien Races."
Chirk went back to work putting books in order on shelves, but within minutes, Jonnie had thirty people including two pilots ransacking the place. The "visitors" upstairs could be identified, and some means of defense might exist!
Sir Robert had returned from Scotland that morning and it was he who guessed it. "Jonnie, that group here didn"t know who was attacking. Anyone in command here would have been tearing through those books. Have you looked on the corpses?"
That"s where they were! In a shoulder bag on the body of the former mine manager up in the snow.
Not more than three hours later, comparing his own and Stormalong"s pictures and the texts, he knew he was dealing with Tolneps, Hockners, Bolbods, and Hawvins. And he knew what they looked like and what their capabilities were- all dangerously nasty. There was no listing for the globe-shaped ship with the ring around it or any race of small gray men.
But the following day his luck ran out with Chirk. She had been doing very well. But he made a mistake.
She was sitting, all eight hundred pounds of her, at a desk in the library making some lists. Jonnie was looking at a sheet of figures he had drawn up.
The sheet concerned distances from Earth to various hostile bases nearest to it and the speeds of the types of alien ships. They had different types of drives. For the most part they ran on energy acc.u.mulated from suns, but they handled it differently. He was trying to calculate how many months those ships were from their relative bases. Terl"s lists of inhabited planets had now been copied off in sheet form and it was evident they didn"t include all systems or suns but only those in which Psychlo had an interest.
Jonnie had been amazed to find in other texts that there were four hundred billion suns in this galaxy alone and that this universe contained more than a hundred billion galaxies. And he had sixteen universes to look at.
The possible bases of hostile peoples were easier to mentally encompa.s.s. From Earth to this galaxy"s center was about thirty thousand light-years. And one light-year was about six trillion miles. All these enemy ships exceeded the speed of light one way or another, but this still made it necessary to compute by how much they exceed it against what base where.
It was an awful lot of Psychlo arithmetic. He was not too patient doing it by hand. Thoughtlessly, he said to Chirk, "Could you help me add these figures up?"
She looked at him, totally blank for about a minute. Then she said, "I don"t know how."
Jonnie smiled. It s just arithmetic. Here, I"ll show you-"
Chirk"s eyes glazed. She fell forward across the desk.
There was no response from her. She was totally unconscious. They had to get a forklift in and take her to her room and put her to bed.
Three days later, MacKendrick told Jonnie, "She"s just lying there in a coma. Maybe in time she"ll come out of it. She seems to have had a heavy shock."
Although he felt bad about it, Jonnie had an idea now of what the silver capsule in the females was. They were not to be taught any Psychlo mathematics ever!
The key to the whole Psychlo empire must be mathematics. And aside from their arithmetic, he couldn"t make head or tail of their equations. It seemed to be a dead end.
Chapter 7.
They had just completed the installation of a radio telescope when the courier came in.
Angus, his face red, first from sun at lake level and then from wind and snow up at the summit of nearby Mount Elgon, was very proud of himself. The German and Swedish pilots, with something to do besides train under the relentless Stormalong, had helped find and install the huge reflector bowls and relays from the peaks and down to the minesite.
Now that they had the frequencies, Angus was saying, they would soon be hearing everything those monkeys up there were saying to each other. He"d even have them on the screens!
Jonnie"s ear caught the far-off approach of the plane above the overcast. He thanked Angus and the pilots and said they had done very well, and yes, now maybe they would know more about the intentions of their visitors.
Glencannon had taken over the ferrying of the vital discs from America. A copy was now going to Doctor MacDermott to bury in a deep underground vault and the originals were coming through to Jonnie in Africa.
Glencannon had lots of news. Pattie had been extremely ill for weeks but Chrissie was nursing her and there was hope. And Chrissie sent her love and said she"d found a lovely old house right near Castle Rock, and some of the Chiefs" wives were helping her find real furniture in old ruins, and she sent her love and when was he coming back?
Castle Rock was now so surrounded with antiaircraft blast cannon it made one fair nervous to fly near it.
Dunneldeen? Oh, he was flying the pants off new recruits but there weren"t as many coming in now. Mostly machine operators were getting trained. Ker was fine and sent him some brand-new air masks he"d made that fit better and said not to turn him in for stealing company materials, ha, ha. And here were some personal letters for Sir Robert. And here was the latest set of you-know- whats.
Jonnie went deep underground and got the discs rolling. They had the place well set up now. Watching the female Psychlos, while not letting them handle anything vital, they had learned the use of some of the office machinery they had earlier ignored, and they could copy discs and make blowups of sections with a fine- line accuracy they had not thought possible. They had cabinets for files and all in all they could make the discs "talk" much better.
Terl! He was sitting there doing force equations, incomprehensible. The equations didn"t balance and didn"t make any sense. He was filling pages and pages with them. Still nothing to do with teleportation.
Jonnie almost skimmed by it. He backtracked. The pictures showed Terl getting up, going over to the cabinet, and opening up another false bottom. He took out a huge sheet of paper, so big it would take three scanners" views to encompa.s.s it. The paper was very old, creased until it nearly fell apart, stained brown and faded.
Terl spread it out, looked at it and then shook his head over it. He traced one claw along the north side of the big dam, way to the southwest of the American minesite. He nodded. Then he wadded the paper up and threw it at the shredder bin. He wrote down some footage figures and some voltage figures and then went back to his equations, and it was just equations for the next two days. And that was all there was in the discs.
It took an hour of patching from three different scanner channels to get it. But Jonnie recovered the huge piece of paper in its entirety and got a half-dozen huge copies of it.
It was ent.i.tled, "Defense Installations of Planet Number 203,534." Jonnie knew already that was the Psychlo name for Earth.
It showed every minesite, every dam, every gun battery, and every ? A little symbol that trailed around each dam and below each power line from dams to minesites and branch minesites. Jonnie had no idea what that symbol was.
But there was a goody he had never, never dreamed of. Marked clearly was a firing, transshipment platform!
He compared the Psychlo ma.s.s of numbered locations with a man-map of ancient times. The second platform was alongside a dam which had once been named "Kariba" in a country which had once been called "Rhodesia" and then "Zimbabwe."
The platform was marked "Emergency Defense Armament Receipt Point." Obviously, if the main minesite were ever knocked out, Psychlo could send in another force or the Psychlo command on the planet could demand troops or at least inform the home office.
Hopes soaring, but a little held down by the age of the map and Terl"s treatment of it, Jonnie had a marine attack plane on the line and Scots piling into it. Robert the Fox boarded hastily. Just as they were about to close the door, MacKendrick piled in with a medical kit. Jonnie sent the plane racing to the south.
It was only about a thousand miles away, and it only took them thirty-five minutes to spot the huge dam and lake and the mammoth installation. Some distance to the south and east of that they saw what had been called "Victoria Falls," one of the biggest waterfalls on the planet.
Spectacular country!
Because the area had been marked "heavily defended," Jonnie approached it cautiously. It was another branch mine they hadn"t known the existence of.
They found the compound some distance to the east and landed a platoon with a.s.sault rifles and radiation ammunition to make a cautious approach. A half-hour later they had the report on mine radio. The place was deserted and, the platoon officer reported, not much different from the one in the Ituri Forest to the north.
The map had not shown the second platform at the minesite but it was quite close to the huge dam. They took the platoon back aboard and Jonnie began to cruise the area.
Trees, trees, trees. This was a high plateau, but not an open plain. Trees had been knocked down in swathes where elephant herds had pa.s.sed through.
There were lots of little hills. Everything was masked with undergrowth except a few open places.
Cruising along, elephant and African buffalo looking up at them, Jonnie searched and searched. He had found before that it was one thing to look at a map and quite another to be on the ground, and he was experiencing it again.
Time after time, he studied the map while Stormalong in the copilot"s seat kept them cruising above the treetops. Jonnie finally got out some dividers and very carefully measured the distance from the dam edge and then, taking the plane to that point and cruising it at the speed a horse walks, finally got them in the center of what must have been the point. Stormalong threw out a smoke flare to mark it and a couple of big elephants took off. It was a bowl in the ground, the edges of which rose about two hundred feet above the middle. It was like a crater, possibly even made with a bomb blast. It was about a thousand feet in diameter.