The bowl itself was so overgrown one could not see what was in it. But as the white smoke spired up, the truth hit Jonnie.
For centuries, perhaps, the company security officers of this planet had paid no attention to maintaining the elaborate planetary company defenses which once existed. No wonder Terl had thrown the map away. He looked so disappointed that Sir Robert tried to cheer him up. "We won"t really know until we look closer." But it certainly was wilderness, receiving no care for centuries.
Jonnie put them down on the upper edge of the crater, and with riflemen ready to handle any hostile game, others got axes and began to hack their way down.
"Be careful around here," said Dr. MacKendrick. "This area had an insect called the tsetse fly that brought on sleeping sickness. Also the water had a worm in it that gets into the blood stream. I don"t have much in the way of medicines but wear nets and stay out of the water."
"Great," said Jonnie. That was all they needed.
They cut their way down to the center of the bowl. They pa.s.sed one of the transshipment poles three times before they spotted it. They paced out in various directions and located another two. The fourth was easy.
Jonnie took a shovel and started down through the humus. He was hoping the company maxim of "never salvage anything" would hold true. Two feet of dead leaves and humus down, he hit the platform.
Axes ringing, they were getting trees and brush out of the way. They found the concrete base of the operations firing dome and then finally the dome itself, upside-down and some distance away.
No console!
Wires were eventually uncovered within the concrete base. Typically Psychlo, they were still well insulated when you sc.r.a.ped the mold off.
Jonnie was struck by the absence of the power lines. There should be power lines coming in from the dam.
There was a power channel marked on the map and also that old squiggle he couldn"t identify.
Light was failing and they would have kept on but MacKendrick made them get up to high ground. They spent the night listening to elephants trumpeting, lions roaring, and all the other cacophony of a very live jungle. But the night was quite cool since this plateau had a fairly high alt.i.tude.
In the morning they dug a crosscut trench and found the power line, being careful not to cut into it. They cut another trench and found the same line went on underground to the distant minesite.
And there was another cable they couldn"t identify that went along with the power line.
Flogging their way through the brush, they went over to the huge dam. It was a real soaring monster of a dam. It seemed intact. The spillways were running. There were signs that Psychlos had landed near it and gone in and out the access door to the powerhouse in some recent time.
Jonnie had never been inside one of these dams before. They vibrated with sheer, raw power. The thunder of the water and the high whine of generators made it impossible to be heard.
It was the usual Psychlo conversion, he supposed. It was very, very old and some bits of the original man-equipment that had been cast aside were very much older.
Angus found the switchboard and bus bars- a vast, towering affair in a separate control room. Only two of the handles were clean and it didn"t need a little tuft of fur caught in one of them to tell that Psychlos had come here to shut power on and off.
But what were all these other bus bars? They got some mine sacks and tried to wipe the panel down without causing short circuits. There were Psychlo letters inset into it. A whole row said, "Force Stage One, Force Stage Two, Force Stage Three." A second row said, "Transshipment One, Transshipment Two, Transshipment Three."
Jonnie gingerly rubbed some more with a mine sack, careful of closing any gap. "They"re color-coded." He tried to tell Angus this but there was no talking in this place. They went back out.
"Terl," said Jonnie to Angus and Sir Robert, "is working on force equations. There is something on the north side of the American dam I think he must want. The squiggles on this map must have to do with force." He sent Angus back into the power control house and placed some Scots along the underground line of squiggles and connected every one up with mine radios.
"Close Force Stage One!" he radioed to Angus.
The effect was far more drastic and dramatic than anything they expected.
All inferno broke loose!
Along the squiggle line of the map, all around the crater, trees erupted, splintered, soared, crashed.
It was as if a bomb had exploded.
Trunks and leaves and branches were falling for over a minute afterward.
Sir Robert was running to find out what had happened to their spotters. Were they all killed? Their radios had gone silent!
It took them an hour to dig the Scots out. One had been knocked unconscious, the rest were bruised and slightly cut. Six had been involved.
MacKendrick collected them and a.s.sessed the damages and began applying the antiseptics and tape. Jonnie made his way over to them from the dam. It looked like a first-aid station after a battle. The one who had been knocked out had come to now. He had been blown in the air.
Jonnie apologized to them.
The Scot that had been knocked out was grinning. "A little thing like that isn"t likely to ruin a Scot!" he said. "What was it?"
Yes, indeed. What was it?
"Did I do something wrong?" Angus"s voice came over the radio.
The Scots were all taking it as a joke so Jonnie said, "I think you did something right!" They were out of the area now. "Close that switch again!"
A bit of the tree wreckage stirred and moved and then was still. Jonnie cautiously moved toward the bowl. And couldn"t leave the dam area!
He walked straight ahead and then he couldn"t go any further. He could not walk through the air before him!
He threw a rock at it. The rock bounced! He tried again, throwing harder. Same result.
He had Angus open the bus bar again. No barrier! Closed. Barrier!
For the next two hours, by opening and closing the first and second row of bus bars and throwing rocks, they found that the dam itself was surrounded by a protective screen. The bowl had a screen all around its top and was completely enclosed!
Riflemen even fired shots at it and they glanced off.
At Stage Two the air got a bit shimmery, and Angus reported the power output meters were lower. At Stage Three there was a strange electrical smell in the air and the output meters of the total dam power dropped way down.
Defense and more defense. A transshipment platform operating in that bowl could not be interfered with by attack. Not from the sides and not from above. And neither could the dam.
The amount of raw power it took to operate it was a large portion of the total output of this huge dam, and Jonnie surmised that they changed stages of output to repel extreme attack and then eased them off to Stage One when they needed power to transship.
Jonnie had them b.o.o.by-trap the entrances in case their visitors upstairs came down for a look and prowl. And they took off in the early afternoon for home.
A glimmer of hope. Not much, but a glimmer, Jonnie told Sir Robert on the way home.
He wanted Sir Robert, Jonnie said, to take charge in the African area for the moment for Jonnie had some other things to look into elsewhere. He rebriefed the grizzled War Chief on the existing situation: they were threatened by a possible counterattack from Psychlo; the visitors upstairs were waiting for something- he did not know what, but he was certain they would eventually strike; the political scene in America was a lesser menace but existed and they had to let it go on for now. The thing that would solve their troubles, Jonnie said, was to get control of teleportation or at least an operating console; with that they could operate far more widely, but it seemed to be the most closely guarded secret the Psychlos had, and avenues to cracking it were not very hopeful.
The main problem, Jonnie said, was protecting what was left of the human race; they were no longer very numerous; a wide attack by the visitors or a counterattack by Psychlo could, either one, finish them as a race forever. Jonnie, as soon as they landed, was going to leave for Russia to begin to handle this point.
Would Sir Robert, Jonnie concluded, take a few local protective measures which Jonnie then named.
Robert the Fox said he was honored and certainly would. Such things were easily done, but did Jonnie much care what happened to any visitors who might wander down?
Jonnie said no. And Sir Robert smiled.
- Part XXII -
Chapter 1.
The Bolbod punchcraft was quite clear on the screen. Cylindrical, a small miniature of the Bolbod war vessel from which it came, it was about to make its landing near the dam.
The small gray man sat in his small gray office and watched. He was mildly interested in a detached sort of way.
He was very glad he had asked his communications officer to install the racks and extra screens. A Jamb.i.t.c.how war vessel had joined them- commanded by an officer in glittering gold scales and eyes where his mouth ought to be- had been informed of the situation, had been told that they didn"t know yet whether this was the one, had agreed to join the combined force, and was now in orbit with the rest. The Jamb.i.t.c.how face was now on its own viewscreen, watching, like the rest, the outcome of this "punch" as the Bolbod called it. Six screens, five of them with intent faces, the sixth carrying the long-range view of this raid.
For the last few days the small gray man had felt much better. It had been a good idea to go down and see that old woman again. She was certain it could not have been her yarb tea that had caused his indigestion. Had he drunk anything in some heathen country? Well, never mind, drink this "b.u.t.termilk."
He had drunk the b.u.t.termilk. It was quite cold and good to taste and shortly his indigestion had greatly eased. But the old woman had not let it go at that. A cousin in some distant past had sent some plants to some ancestors of hers and they were still flourishing up the hill near the spring. It was called "peppermint" and she would go get some, and she had, steering a bit wide around the parked s.p.a.ceship. The green leaves had a pleasant aroma and he had chewed some, and astonishingly, his indigestion eased even more! She had given him a whole pocketful of the leaves.
The small gray man had tried to pay her but she wouldn"t have it; she said it was just the neighborly thing to do. He had persisted however, and she finally said, well, there was a Swedish colony up the coast she was never able to talk to, and that thing around his neck, the one he talked into and it talked English, would it talk Swedish? He"d been happy to give it to her- he had several- and had changed its microplates while sitting pleasantly on a bench outside her door with both the dog and the cow seemingly quite interested in what he was doing. It had been a pleasant afternoon.
The Bolbod punchcraft banged down near the overgrown walkway at the dam. They were carrying a demolition kit.
"I thought this was just a probe," said the Hawvin. "Didn"t we agree they were just to discover what those people had done down at that dam?" They had watched the terrestrial antics around them, had seen them blow up a bunch of trees, and their curiosity had been greatly aroused.
No heat had accompanied the eruption of trees and nothing had burned. "If we use demolition on the dam, it could become political."
"I command my own crew," rumbled the Bolbod on his screen. That was the trouble with combined forces, everyone tried to run everybody else"s ship! But combined force had been his idea so he couldn"t say much more.
There had been three Bolbod crewmen in the punchcraft. The first one, carrying the demolition kit, was followed at some distance by the other two.
The faces on the viewscreens were very intent as they followed this operation. It was their first probe down to the surface. The small gray man had tended to advise against it but this was a military matter. They all knew that one must test the enemy"s defenses.
The leading Bolbod was now about fifty feet from the powerhouse door. The roar of the spillway was coming back up the infrabeam, very strong. That was an awfully big dam.
Abruptly there was a flash!
A rolling ball of flame rocketed skyward.
The image on the screen jittered from the concussion.
The first Bolbod had vanished, blown to bits. Whatever he tripped had also detonated his own demolition kit.
The other two Bolbods who had been well behind him had been knocked flat.
"Aha!" said the Hockner super-lieutenant as though he had known it all the time.
But the "aha!" wasn"t for the explosion. A marine attack plane that a moment before hadn"t been on their screens landed clear of the explosion area. A small unit of people leaped out.
Swedes, thought the small gray man, seeing their blonde hair. Led by a black-bearded young officer in kilts who carried a claymore and a blast pistol.
A ramp went down on the attack plane"s side and a forklift rolled to the ground.
The Swedes had some chains in their hands and were wrapping up the two rec.u.mbent Bolbods. Thin little shouts of command were coming back up the infrabeam, almost engulfed by the roar of the dam spillway.
The Scot officer was trying to find pieces of the exploded Bolbod, picking up items of b.l.o.o.d.y cloth. He seemed to find something. He put it in a bag and waved to the forklift. They now put the huge Bolbod bodies into the plane with the forklift. The lift came back and put the punchcraft inside.
The plane took off and went back north. The terrestrial group went into the powerhouse and vanished from sight.
The faces on the viewscreens were hard to read. They were grappling with this situation.
They didn"t have too much time to ponder for their second probe was now in progress, and infrabeams shifted to the snowy crest of Mount Elgon which gleamed above the clouds far below.
It had annoyed them to see an old device they took to be an ancient radio telescope mounted up there. It seemed to be tracking them as they orbited.
A Hockner probe ship with five Hockners had been a.s.signed to disable the device. And there was the Hockner probe now, nearing its destination. A Hockner probe carried no artillery itself but the men did. The noseless, overly ornamented crew members were visible under the probe canopy. It was little more than a sled and was jet-powered. There seemed to be very high winds and it was having trouble setting down on a broad, icy shoulder of the peak. There was a precipice there that dropped down into the clouds. Yes, it was a high wind; plumes of snow were blowing away from the peak. Just ahead of them but set well back from the edge was the offending radio telescope. Beyond that object, out of the view of the probecraft, a glacier fell away.
The faces watching it on their separate screens were quite different in reactions. It was taking the probecraft so long to get down to a landing, going out and back again time after time, that their attention was drifting.
The Tolnep half-captain was doing some calculations about slave prices. He knew an air planet where you could get a thousand credits a slave if you could get them there alive. He estimated that he had a potential here of about fifteen thousand, landed live, out of maybe thirty thousand shipped. That was fifteen million Galactic credits. His nineteen percent of that, the prize money he would get personally, would be two million, eight hundred fifty thousand credits. His loaners were owed fifty-two thousand, eight hundred sixty credits in gambling debts (the reason he was happy to undertake a very long cruise) and this left him two million, seven hundred ninety-seven thousand, one hundred forty credits.
He could retire!
The Hawvin was thinking about all the silver and copper coins that must be in the ruins of old banks- the Psychlos valued neither metal but he knew a market for it.
The Bolbod had been thinking about all the Psychlo machinery down there up until the time his punchcraft was captured. Now he was thinking about punching terrestrials.
The Jamb.i.t.c.how commander was wondering how he could do the rest of these aliens out of slaves, metal and machinery.
Finally the probecraft made it and sat down on the ledge and their attention riveted on it.
The five Hockners got out, bulky in their fancy s.p.a.ce suits and clumsy in swinging their blast rifle straps off their shoulders.
Suddenly the voice of the Hockner landing control officer in orbit crackled out of their radios down there and came back up the infrabeam.
"Alert to the battle plane!"
There was a battle plane up at about two hundred thousand feet. But it had been there for an hour, doing nothing. And it was doing nothing now. The five Hockners were looking at it way up there, a tiny speck to them, hard to find in the blue sky they saw.
"No, no!" barked the Hockner landing control officer. "Around the corner from you! Coming up the glacier!"
Only then did the watching faces see it. From their viewpoint it was just a line on the glacier, just the top of its body showing, the rest cut off by the jutting crag above the telescope. The battle plane had hugged the glacier all the way up! It was almost a hundred yards back of the telescope when it stopped. No one here could see whether anyone got out of it. It must be holding in that position on its motors. The glacier was steep.