Terl"s next actions were carefully observed by keen Scottish eyes in the hills.
Late the previous afternoon Terl had gone tearing off in an executive tank at high speed. He had headed toward the ancient city to the north and entered it.
About noon he left the ruins there and came roaring down the remains of the overgrown highway to the Academy.
Terl got out of the tank, faceplate of the breathe-mask glinting in the sun, and strode in a free and relaxed fashion in the direction of the sentry who came forward.
There was very little at the Academy now; a housekeeping unit and three Scot sentries, usually light-duty invalids recovering from some mishap.
This one had his arm in splints and in a sling. "What can I do for you, sir?" said the sentry in acceptable Psychlo.
Terl looked around. No vehicles left here- no, there was the tail of a small pa.s.senger plane. Must have them all up at the mine. Probably even running out of them.
He looked at the sentry. Probably running out of personnel, too, if Terl knew anything about the dangers of mining. Well, no matter. There were still some of them left alive.
He was wondering how to communicate with this animal. It had not registered on him that he had been addressed in Psychlo, simply because he didn"t believe it. Animals were stupid.
Terl made gestures with his paws, indicating the height and beard of the head animal. He went through a pantomime of looking around, sweeping his arm toward himself and pointing at the spot beside him. Very difficult to get anything across to an animal.
"You probably mean Jonnie," said the sentry in Psychlo.
Terl nodded absently and wandered off. He"d probably have to wait until they flew up to the mine and brought him back, but that was quite all right.
He realized with an expansive good feeling that he now had lots of time; but more than that, he had freedom. He could go where he pleased and do what he pleased. He flexed his arms and wandered off. It might be an accursed planet but he had s.p.a.ce now. It was as though invisible walls had been moved off him and miles away.
Some horses were grazing in a nearby park. Terl, to pa.s.s the time, practiced drawing his belt gun and firing. One by one he broke their legs. The resulting screaming of the agonized mounts was quite satisfactory. He was just as fast on the draw as ever, just as accurate. At two hundred yards, even! A black horse. Four draws, four fires. The horse was a skidding cloud of snow. What a caterwaul! Delicious.
Jonnie"s voice behind him was a bit hard to hear in the racket but it didn"t surprise Terl. He turned easily, mouthbones wreathed in a smile behind the faceplate.
"Want to try?" said Terl, pretending to hand over the gun.
Jonnie reached for it. Terl laughed an enormous laugh and put it back in his belt.
Jonnie had long since been waiting for Terl: from the moment Terl had started on this route from the city, he had known Terl would call here and he had flown down from the mine. It had seemed better not to let Terl know he was under observation and he had intended to delay a bit longer. But the screaming of the tortured horses had sickened him.
This was a much-changed Terl, very like his old self.
"Let"s walk," said Terl.
With a signal of the hand that Terl did not see, an angry Jonnie sent a Scot to slit the throats of the tortured, maimed horses and put them out of their misery. He steered Terl around the corner of a building to block his view of the action.
"Well, animal," said Terl. "I see you are getting along just fine. I suppose you are trying for a second pocket."
"Yes," said Jonnie, controlling his anger, "we don"t have quite enough gold yet." That was an understatement. All the gold they had he was carrying in a bag right this minute.
"Fine, fine," said Terl. "Need any equipment? Any supplies? Just say the word. Got a list with you?" Jonnie didn"t. "No, well all you have to do is put a list in those bundles you keep leaving outside the cage and I"ll just have them run right over to you. Label it "training supplies," of course."
"Fine," said Jonnie.
"And if you want to talk to me, just flash a light through the gla.s.s at my quarters, three short flashes and I"ll come out and we can talk. Right?"
Jonnie said that was fine. There were some mining points that came up every now and then.
"Well, you just ask the right party," said Terl, patting himself on the chest.
"What I don"t know about mining has never been written up!" He laughed loudly.
Indeed this was a different Terl, thought Jonnie. Something had taken the pressure off him.
They were still out in a field and hidden from view by a knoll.
"Now to business," said Terl. "On Day 89 you are to deliver my gold to this building in the old city up there." He took a picture out of his pocket and showed it to Jonnie.
It said on the building: "United States Mint." Jonnie started to take it but Terl pulled it back and showed him three other views: the street, the building from two sides.
"Day 89," said Terl. "Two hours after sunset. Don"t be seen. There"s a room I"ve fixed up. Put it in there."
Jonnie studied the views. Obviously Terl was not going to give him physical possession of them. There were some mounds he knew were old cars, and back of the building was a bigger mound, probably a truck. The doors of the place were sound and closed, but undoubtedly Terl had them unlocked.
"Have you got a flatbed ground truck?" asked Terl. "No? I"ll give you one." He became impressive, commanding. "Now listen carefully: you and two other animals, no more, are to arrive at that exact time. You, personal. Tell the others you won"t return until Day 93 and you"ll bring them their pay. From Day 89 to 93 I have some other things for you to do. Understand? You personally and two animals, no more; the rest stay at the mine. Right?"
Jonnie said that was understood. They were standing well screened from any view behind some bushes. "Do you want to see a sample of what was hauled up?"
Yes, Terl certainly did. So Jonnie threw down a piece of heavy cloth and spilled wire gold onto it. It glowed softly in the sunlight.
Terl glanced up to be sure there was no overhead surveillance and then hunkered down. He fondled the nets of gold, some of the quartz still sticking to it. He spent some time at it and then stood up with a paw signal to put it away. Jonnie did so. Carefully. It was all they had.
Gazing at the bag, Terl let out a long sigh into his breathe-mask. "Beautiful," he said. "Beautiful."
He came out of it. "So on Day 89, I get a ton of gold, right?" He patted his pocket where the remote control lay. "And then on Day 93 you get your payoff!"
"Why the delay?" said Jonnie. "That"s four days."
"Oh, you"ve got a few things to do," said Terl. "But never fear, animal. Come Day 93 you will be paid off. With interest. Compounded. I promise you very faithfully!" He laughed a huge guffaw into his mask, and Jonnie knew that Terl might be feeling high today but he was not entirely sane.
"You"ll get everything that"s coming to you, animal!" said Terl. "Let"s walk back to the car."
Never in his whole life had Terl felt so good. He recalled from the Scotland trip how eager they were for pay. This animal was going to get paid on Day 89! Then he could kill the females. With no fear of "psychic powers." Delicious!
"Goodbye, animal," he said, and drove off in great spirits.
Chapter 6.
The next weeks were filled with tension. They were driving along the vein in hopes of a second pocket but as yet saw only white quartz, no gold. And without gold, nothing else was going to work.
The incident of the horse herd caused an uproar among them. They had trained those horses and they had become pets, left at the Academy where there was grazing, waiting for better days. The Scots were outraged, not only because of the loss but because of the sickening way it had been done. It brought home to all of them the nature of the enemy. Were all Psychlos like that? Yes, unfortunately. Lookouts had spotted other crippled animals around the compound. Didn"t this put the girls in great danger? Yes, but one had to grit one"s teeth and make sure their plan came off on schedule. By all that was holy, they mustn"t m.u.f.f a single thing! It was like playing a violent kind of chess with maniacs.
In other areas than the gold they were making progress.
Angus had made keys to everything in sight. It was very risky: heat-shielded bodies, silent feet in the snow of night, impressions in wax, dusted-over tracks. There was double jeopardy in this, for any discovery might not only cost the man his life but also alert the Psychlos that something was intended.
They had a good break in studying the old battle of a thousand years ago. The records were all in order now, all satellite overviews of it in sequence.
Jonnie and Doctor MacDermott had been going over them, looking for something that might help. There were numerous reports on the battle planes in that one-sided struggle.
An oddity was that a Psychlo battle plane had dive-bombed a tank in downtown Denver, but there was no tank detailed to downtown Denver according to U.S. Army statements on it. This attracted Jonnie"s attention and led him to discover a second report on the same plane.
After bombing the tank that the report said was not there, the battle plane took off at high speed to the northwest and was sighted colliding with a snow-covered mountainside. It didn"t explode. The spotting gave the exact position.
They looked it up on their maps. It was only about three hundred miles to the north of them.
Dunneldeen verified it with an overfly and metal detector, and the battle plane was still there, buried- all but a tip of its tail- in perpetual snows.
Using two flying ore platforms, they dug it out and airlifted it at night, to avoid detection, to the old base, and there in the heliport, subjected it to minute study.
The battle plane was unserviceable but it contained a host of information that could not be gained by a stealthy scout to the compound. The two Psychlo pilots had been killed on impact but their equipment, though decayed, was intact.
They went over every detail of the breathe-masks. They found there was a compartment that contained jet-driven backpacks as a form of parachute in case of necessary bailout. The security belts were no different from those used in the mine vehicles. The pilots also wore belt guns.
The controls of the plane were identical to the pa.s.senger mining ships. The only additions were the gun triggers and switches for a magnetic "grappler."
Examining the skids on which the plane stood, they found, indeed, that they were electromagnetic. The plane could be fixed with this to any metal surface and obviated the necessity of tying it down.
They also located the key slots and determined the type of keys.
They cleaned it up as best they could and used it for drilling their pilots.
The dead, mummified Psychlos were dissected by the parson to ascertain where their vital organs were located. Their hearts were in back of their belt buckles and their lungs were high in their shoulders. Their brains were very low in the back of the head and the rest of the head was bone. The parson then buried them with proper solemnity.
They were busy on many projects. They built a large-scale model of the compound in the huge loft of the Empire Dauntless Mining building and drilled every team member.
They marked out approximate distances in a meadow- without betraying anything to a drone- and timed everything: how fast did one have to go to get from this place to that, what were the starting times from zero time in order to converge simultaneously. There was much information they did not have and could not get, so they made up for it with flexibility.
A problem they had to solve was replacing the horses. By rounding up and training wild ones, and working very fast, a small group was able to do this.
They had all become excellent marksmen with the a.s.sault rifles and bazookas.
With the relentless drilling by Robert the Fox, that past master of raids, they were really getting someplace.
"If we miss," Robert the Fox repeatedly told them, "and slip up on the tiniest detail, those plains out there will once again be crawling with transshipped Psychlo tanks and the sky studded with battle planes. The home planet of the Psychlos would retaliate with ferocity. We would have no course open save to withdraw into the old military base and probably perish of asphyxiation when they resort to gas. We have one thin chance. We must not miss in any tiniest detail. Let"s go through it all again."
A strike force of only threescore men taking on the whole Psychlo Empire?
They would harden their determination and go through the drill again. And again and again.
But they did not yet have the vital, crucial chip: the gold gold.
Chapter 7.
They labored in the mine twenty-four hours a day with three shifts. Inward further and further they drove along the barren, white quartz vein.
And then on Day 60 the vein faulted. Some ancient cataclysm had shifted it up or down, to the right or left. Suddenly there was just country rock before them. No more vein.
The possibility that they would lose it had not been missing from their calculations. For weeks now they had been sending out scouts to locate any stored gold within their range of recovery.
They had been given hope by Jonnie"s earliest discovery of a gold coin in a bank vault in Denver. But most of the coins left were just curiosities, worthless souvenirs: they were silver-plated copper. Only five more gold coins were in that vault, and these few ounces were a long way from making up a ton of gold.
A few bits from what must have been jewelry shops added another pitiful two ounces.
Mining company officials at old mines through the mountains had no gold in their vaults, though they found plenty of receipts: the receipts all said "Shipped (so many) ounces to the U.S.
Mint, Denver" or "Shipped (such and such) poundage of concentrate to the smelter."
In a perilous journey in a plane, carrying heavy supplies of fuel in reserve, Dunneldeen, a copilot, and a gunner, flying by night to escape drone detection, went all the way to the eastern coast to a place once called New York. They found the buildings mostly knocked down but some gold vaults: tunneled into and empty.
They also visited a place the historian had found called Fort Knox, but it was just a gutted ruin.
Dunneldeen had acc.u.mulated a remarkable fund of information and picto-recorder shots: bridges gone, tumbled rubble, wild game, wild cattle and varmints abundant, no trace of people, and they had had some hair-raising experiences.
But they got no gold.
They had to come to the conclusion that the Psychlos, as much as a thousand years ago, had thoroughly gutted this planet of gold. They must have even taken it from corpses in the streets, rings from fingers and fillings from teeth. Possibly this, along with the Psychlo sport of hunting humans on days off, accounted for the thoroughness of population wipeout. There was evidence that in the early days of conquest they had even ma.s.sacred people just for their rings and fillings. They began to understand Terl a little better in his dangerous enterprise to possess the yellow metal for himself. To the humans, the metal meant very little: they had no experience of using it in trade; it was pretty and didn"t tarnish and was easily pounded into shape, but stainless steel had a lot more utility. Their own ideas of trade and thrift had to do with useful items that were real wealth.
None of this got them any closer to getting a ton of gold. They frantically test-drilled for the lost vein.
On Day 70 they found the vein again. It had been shifted by some past upheaval two hundred thirty-one feet to the north and only thirty feet from the surface.
They wiped off their sweating faces, the droplets tending to freeze in the bitter winter winds of these alt.i.tudes, made a new level area for equipment and a new shaft, and began to drift again along the white quartz. The vein had thinned down to about three feet in width. They drove on, filling the dark air of the drift with white chips and blast fumes.
Jonnie went back to studying the battle reports. They must know Psychlo tactics very precisely. He was once again struck with the oddity of this attack on a "tank" in Denver where no tank existed. He narrowed down the location on the faded satellite photos- they had kept coming off the machine even after the president was dead. Yes, there was smoke at that place.