"No. That spinning disc on the roof is a detection wave neutralizer. You needn"t worry about our being traced."
Jonnie looked up at the top of the tank. In the very dim light he could see a thing planted there. It looked like a fan. It was running.
"Turn a light on this," said Jonnie. Terl looked at his screens. There were no telltales. "I"ll drive ahead under that tree."
Jonnie steadied the ore sack as Terl slowly put the car under a mask of evergreens. He stopped again and turned on a light that lit up the area in front of the windshield.
With a lift of his arm, Jonnie spilled about ten pounds of ore onto the tank bonnet. It flashed under the light. It was white quartz and wire gold. And it shone and glittered as though it had jewels in it as well. Eight pounds of it was pure wire gold from the lode.
Terl sat and stared through the windscreen at it. He swallowed hard.
"There"s a ton of it there," said Jonnie. "If it can be gotten out. It "s in plain view."
The Psychlo just sat and looked at the gold through the windscreen. Jonnie scattered it so it shone better.
He picked up the intercom again. "We"re keeping our bargain. You must keep yours."
"What do you mean?" said Terl, detecting accusation.
"You promised to give food and water and firewood to the females."
Terl shrugged. "Promises," he said indifferently.
Jonnie put his arm around the gold and started to sweep it back into the ore sack and withdraw it.
The motion was not lost on Terl. "Quit it. How do you know they aren"t being cared for?"
Jonnie let the gold lie. He moved over so the light touched his face. He tapped a finger against his forehead.
"There"s something you don"t know about humans," said Jonnie. "They have psychic powers sometimes. I have psychic powers with those females." It would not do to tell Terl that it was the absence of a fire or a scout that alerted him. All"s fair in love and war, as Robert the Fox would say, and this was both love and war.
"You mean without radios, right?" Terl had read about this. He hadn"t realized these animals had it. d.a.m.ned animals.
"Right," said Jonnie. "If she is not well cared for and if she isn"t all right, I know!" He tapped his head again.
"Now I have a pack here," said Jonnie. "It has food and water and flints and firewood and warm robes and a small tent. I"m going to lash it on top of this tank and right away when you get back, you"re to put it in the cage. Also get the cage cleaned up, inside and outside, and fix the water supply."
"It"s just the tank," said Terl. "It goes empty, needs to be topped up. I"ve been busy."
"And take those sentries away. You don"t need sentries!"
"How did you know there were sentries?" said Terl suspiciously.
"You just told me so, tonight," said Jonnie into the intercom. "And my psychic powers tell me they tease her."
"You can"t order me around," bristled Terl.
"Terl, if you don"t take care of the females, I just might take it into my head to wander up to those sentries and mention something I know."
"What!" demanded Terl.
"Just something I know. It wouldn"t cause you to be fired but it would be embarra.s.sing."
Terl suddenly vowed he had better get rid of those sentries.
"You"ll know if I don"t do these things?" said Terl.
Jonnie tapped his own forehead in the light.
But the threat had unsettled Terl"s spinning wits. On an entirely different tack he demanded, "What"ll you do with the gold if you don"t deliver it?"
"Keep it for ourselves," said Jonnie, starting again to put it back in the bag.
Terl snarled deep and threateningly. His amber eyes flared in the darkness of the tank. "I"ll be d.a.m.ned if you will!" he shouted. Leverage, leverage! "Listen! Did you ever hear of a drone bomber? Hah, I thought not. Well, let me tell you something, animal: I can lift off a drone bomber and send it right over that site, right over your camp, right over any shelter, and bomb you out of existence. All by remote! You"re not as safe as you think, animal!"
Jonnie just stood there, looking at the blank, black windows of the tank as the words avalanched through the intercom.
"You, animal," snarled Terl, "are going to mine that gold and you"re going to deliver that gold and you are going to do it all by Day 91. And if you don"t I"ll blast you and all animals on this planet to h.e.l.l, you hear me, to h.e.l.l!" His voice ended in a shriek of hysteria and he stopped, panting.
"And when Day 91 comes, and we"ve done it?" said Jonnie.
Terl barked a sharp, hysterical laugh.
He felt he really had to get control of himself. He sensed he was acting strangely. "Then you get paid!" he shouted.
"You keep your side of the bargain," said Jonnie. "We"ll deliver it."
Good, thought Terl. He had cowed the animal. This was more like it. "Put that pack on the tank," he said magnanimously. "I"ll fill the water tank and clean up the place and take care of the sentries. But don"t forget my remote control box, eh? You act up and dead females!"
Jonnie tied the vital pack on the vehicle roof. In the process of doing so he removed the wave-neutralizer and put it behind a tree. Terl would think it had been knocked off by the tree branches, perhaps. It might be useful.
Terl had turned the bonnet light off and Jonnie put the ore back in the sack. He knew Terl wouldn"t take it with him.
Without saying goodbye, Terl drove off and the tank vanished.
Minutes later, when it was hidden from view and miles away, Dunneldeen climbed out of a mine hole where he had been holding a submachine gun in sweaty hands. He had realized the weapon would do nothing to that tank, but they had not expected Terl to stay in the armored vehicle. Although they would not have shot him, they thought he might have tried to kidnap Jonnie if the girls were dead. Dunneldeen gave a short whistle. Ten more Scots bobbed into view from mine holes, putting their guns on safety.
Robert the Fox came down the from an old ruined wall. Jonnie was still standing there looking off toward the compound.
"That demon," said Robert the Fox, "is on the verge of insanity. Did ye ken how his talk darted this way and that? The hysteria in his laughter? He"s hard driven by something we don"t know about."
"We didn"t know about the drone bombers," said Dunneldeen.
"We know now," said Robert the Fox. "MacTyler, you know this demon. Wouldn"t you say he was borderline daft?"
"Do you suppose he meant to blast you when he drove in?" asked Dunneldeen. "But you handled it very well, Jonnie MacTyler."
"He"s dangerous," said Jonnie.
Two hours later he saw a fire start, a tiny pinpoint of light in the distant cage. Later a scout would confirm the removal of the sentries and he himself would check on the water and Chrissie.
An insane Terl was making this a much more hazardous game they were playing. A treacherous Terl was one thing. A maniac Terl was quite another.
- Part IX -
Chapter 1.
The snows were late, but when they came they made up for it with a violent, howling vengeance that almost stopped the work at the lode.
The staircase was not working. Jonnie had helped all he could, flying an overheating platform to drive in the pins, hanging from safety wires over the yawning chasm, encouraging the others. They had almost made it, had even taken out another ninety pounds in gold, when the first real storm of winter hit them. Under winds of near hurricane force, driving frozen pellets as hard as bullets, almost shaking the very mountains themselves, the staircase had collapsed. Fortunately it had just been abandoned during a shift change when it went, and there were no casualties.
They were waiting now for a lull in the storm to see what else they could do.
It was mandatory that they appear industrious, for it was the opinion of Robert the Fox that Terl would not act violently unless it appeared there was no hope. But just now the driving snow masked any pictures the recon drone might take in its daily overfly.
Besides, it was not vital, they all a.s.sured him, that Jonnie be there. Long ago the planning had provided that three who looked like him keep up the appearance that he was always there. One of these three was always visible to the recon drone- each one to his own watch. It had even been Thor who had held up the sign, not Jonnie. Three watches were vital, for no crew could stand it for more than two hours in this bitter cold.
So Jonnie was not there today. Through the driving storm, he and three others were heading for a place once called "Uravan."
The historian, Doctor MacDermott, was developing quite a knack for picking up information out of the tattered remains of books. He even had a young Scot, an accomplished scout, a.s.signed to him now just to go off and dig up ancient maps and books. And MacDermott had found a reference that said that Uravan had one of the world"s largest uranium deposits." It was supposed to be west and slightly south of the base about two hundred twenty miles, just beyond and a bit southwest of an enormous, distinctive plateau.
Uranium!
So Jonnie and one of the pilots and Angus MacTavish were on their way in a personnel plane. Who knew, they might be lucky.
Angus MacTavish was delighted. He was the one who figured out man-mechanics and got things working.
Jonnie had trained him and another half-dozen Scots in electronics and they were all good at that and mechanics, but it was Angus MacTavish who was the star. Pugnacious, never knowing the meaning of defeat, a bundle of enthusiastic black-haired optimism, Angus was quite certain they would find mountains of uranium right there, all ready to shovel into a bag and cart off.
Jonnie didn"t think so. In the first place they had no protection from radiation yet, so they were a long way from shoveling anything. But a uranium mine might have enough left around to test breathe-gas. He wisely refrained from dampening Angus"s enthusiasm. All they were out for was, in fact, a scout to find a place to test breathe-gas.
The storm made visibility very poor. The pa.s.senger craft bucketed along, battered by the machine-gunning of occasional local storms. The plane had d.a.m.n-all in the way of instruments and it was all contact flying. A time or two a peak would flash by a mite too close, but from way up high it was a carpet of turbulent whiteness and one might lose his bearings. Fortunately the storm was blowing eastward and its worst furies were past by the time they had gone a hundred miles.
They burst out of a cloud into clear weather. The panorama of the western Rockies spread out, glistening in the late morning sun, breathtaking in its beauty.
"Scotland may be the best land in the world," said the copilot, "but "tis never like this!"
Jonnie punched their speed up to about five hundred, and the white vast world fled by. He spotted the plateau, estimated from the ancient schoolbook map he held where Uravan might be. Even in the snow they could make out where an ancient, curving road had been. He spotted the southeast point where the road forked and, down to treetop level and counting the white-coated remains of towns, brought them to the mounds and dumps that must be Uravan. He landed in front of some buildings, the plane crunching into the fresh snow.
Angus MacTavish was out of the door like a running buck, his kilt flying behind him. He dashed into one ruined building after another and suddenly came speeding back.
His voice thin in the sharp air, he yelled, " "Tis Uravan!" He held up some tattered sc.r.a.ps of paper.
Jonnie reached in back and got out a breathe-gas cartridge and the equipment. He and Angus had worked half the night making a remote control that would turn the regulator on and off. All they had to do was find a hot radiation spot, back off, turn on the remote, and see whether they got a flash of exploding breathe-gas. Jonnie also got out some shovels, climbing ropes, and mine lamps.
Running all over the place like a hunting hound, Angus was tracking down likely spots. There were ore dumps. There had been fences but these had long since rusted away.
They tried repeatedly. They would scoop out an old dump and put the breathe-gas cartridge down, back off, release some breathe-gas, and see whether it flashed in a small explosion.
After a dozen tries, Angus became convinced it must be a spent cartridge. He switched it on in front of his face and promptly turned blue with coughing. No, it wasn"t a spent cartridge. They went down in pits. They scrambled into drifts long since unsafe.
They used up five cartridges of breathe-gas.
No explosions.
Jonnie felt a bit disheartened. He let Angus and the pilot go on with the experiments while he wandered around through the ruins. It was all so badly decayed there was difficulty in recognizing what the buildings had been used for. How Angus had found paper simply added up to Angus: it must have been protected by being preserved under something.
Then Jonnie started to get suspicious. In all this area he had only found one pitiful remnant that might have been a body, merely teeth fillings and b.u.t.tons lying in a certain pattern in a room.
No remains of file cabinets. No distinguishable remains of machinery aside from some decayed hoists. But no bodies save that one.
He went back to the plane and sat down. This place had been mined out before the Psychlo attack. And it had been mined out with such care that the waste dumps weren"t even hot.
Angus came streaming back shouting: "It works! It works!" He was carrying something that had been framed.
Jonnie got out and looked at it. One corner of the ancient frame was not charred. Inset into the dilapidated mounting was a piece of ore. It had a bra.s.s plate under it, mostly undecipherable. There must have been a leaded gla.s.s face on the frame once, for a sc.r.a.p of it remained in a corner.
He carried it over to a rock and sat down and studied it. The ore was brown and black. It had been mounted as an exhibit on a lead background. He held the inscription this way and that. He couldn"t make out more than that it was the "first" something. And then a person"s name he couldn"t make out either. He turned the plate in another way and then saw the letters at the top more plainly. They said "PITCHBLENDE.".
"Look!" said Angus. "Let me show you." He took the frame from Jonnie and put it about thirty feet away. He pointed the breathe-gas cartridge at it and came back to Jonnie. He flipped on a remote switch. The breathe-gas emission exploded!
"I"ll do it again," yelped Angus. He turned the switch full on and left it on. He wouldn"t have had time to turn it off any way.
The bottle, its emitting snout flaming like a rocket engine, took off and went about ten feet. The pilot and Angus shouted with delight.
"Pitchblende," said Jonnie, who had done a lot of homework. "That"s uranite ore. It"s the source of a lot of radioactive isotopes. Where"d you get it?"
They dragged him off to the broken shambles of a building that was so collapsed they had to tug and pull at a lot of roof to get at anything else in it.
Covered with dust and hot from work despite the chill air, Jonnie at last went out and sat down on what had once been a porch.
A museum. A small museum it had been. Other specimens were there. Rose quartz, hemat.i.te, things that weren"t from this immediate place. There wasn"t even any evidence that the pitchblende had been from here. "The test for breathe-gas works!" said the irrepressible Angus.
Jonnie felt depressed. He knew it worked. He had seen a blade sc.r.a.per canopy blow up and kill a Psychlo long ago when some radioactive dust hit it.
"I"m glad it works," he said. "But even if there is any uranium left under us it"s too deep for us to get to. Collect some more lead and wrap that specimen up. We"ll take it home."