Authors: Hubbard,L. Ron
Damn Terl!
At first, Jonnie had thought he had data on the point positions of the poles. He had no adequate viewing equipment in his house in Scotland; he had only taken a quick scan and a glance at a box Ker had sent that seemed to have just a piece of cable in it. It was months to Day 92 and so he was happy to stay for lunch and see
Aunt Ellen and the parson again. And to try to cheer up Pattie.
He had flown back to the African minesite in good spirits. He had gotten up this morning all ready to really plow into it. And now this!
Glencannon had said the delay was occasioned by Terl’s spending most of his time outside measuring. Terl apparently didn’t like to stay outside very long: Glencannon hinted that a bit of air had been injected into breathe-gas vials when the office was set up in order to discourage Terl from developing too much of a fondness for wandering around. Also, Glencannon had told him, they had omitted something in their original planning- they didn’t have a picto-recorder to record what went on around the platform itself. But they had rigged one in a tree now and the Brigantes hadn’t noticed and they didn’t have to depend on drone overflys anymore.
Looking at them now, Jonnie saw how meticulous Terl had been in measuring distances to poles. He had almost used a micrometer. But he had not been measuring point positions for teleportation firing!
Here it was, the full layout and plan, complete with the exact dimensions: the firing platform, the new position for the console, and a squiggly line.
Jonnie knew now why Terl had spent so many days on force equations. He had been calculating exactly how close you could put the squiggly line to the firing platform without messing up the teleportation! There it was on his final plan: seven and eight-elevenths feet. All around the firing platform and the new console.
The box Ker had sent contained a little note, written with his wrong paw if Jonnie knew Ker.
To You know who.
Here is a chunk that got sawed off by accident- ha, ha. I am digging it up for them from beside that dam to the southwest where it ain’t used anymore. In case you don’t know it’s called “atmosphere-armor ionization cable.” I won’t include the parts order number because you won’t be ordering any from Psychlo. Ha, ha. Also it is a fine of three months’ pay to give away company property so if I’m caught, you owe me another three months’ pay. You’re going to go broke at this rate. Ha, ha.
-You know who
Added: They are paying me a fortune to dig this up. You get your split when we swap lunch boxes. Ha, ha, ha!
Jonnie inspected it. The cross-section was obviously the same as that around the dam and site in Kariba. But now he had a look at what it was composed of. It had to be put in right-side up and be pointed in the direction you wanted the screen to go. It itself was armored, and how Ker had cut it, he did not have any idea.
The way it worked seemed fairly obvious: the bottom insulation interior was really a reflector. Just above that went the main current source. Then above that there was another wire and above that a third and so on up. A stack of fifteen wires. Each apparently amplified the charge of the one just below it. Out at the end it must be fastened together with a box, not included here, which assisted amplification. The resulting fabulously boosted charge must be tuned to the fields of the core and ring particles of air atoms. Hit, the molecules of air realigned themselves into molecular cohesion. The final product was an invisible curtain wall entitled “atmosphere-armor ionization cable.” They had proved it at Kariba. Not even a bullet would go through it.
It wasn’t a “force screen.” Those were used in space and the Hawvins employed them on major war vessels. It was air armor.
And Terl was going to put this seven and eight-elevenths feet all around the console and platform?
Jonnie’s tentative plan had been to let Terl build the console and set up the firing platform and then somehow seize it.
But this changed things.
How could one get through a solid curtain like that?
Damn Terl!
Dully, Jonnie made quite a few copies of the firing platform plan. He got out the Intergalactic Mining Company map of their one-time defenses and noted where Ker must be digging up cable for reinstallation at the platform.
The map was so old and creased that he hadn’t really noticed before that all minesites had these cables around their dams and along their lines. He saw now that this African minesite had a second underground power transmission line and that what had been known as the Owens Falls Dam back in man-days was protected. He called for Angus and told him to go down there and check, and if the cable was still there, to get the trees removed from above it, using a blade scraper, and then if the switchboard at the dam still worked, to shift over to underground transmission and drill the sentries on turning it on and off so one could get in and out of the dam and in and out of the minesite.
Jonnie, trying to work his way through this new one, wandered around the compound. He saw Sir Robert had just arrived and showed him on the old map that all minesites had these and that he should probably use them.
Jonnie wandered on, troubled.
Teleportation! The secret of the Psychlos. With it they had controlled universes. Without it he didn’t see how he could defend this one planet.
He saw MacKendrick. Yes, the wounded Psychlos were all well now. Except Chirk who just lay there. No, he hadn’t figured any way to get those things out of a Psychlo’s head-disturbance at that bone structure would kill the monster. Yes, he realized that if they tried to consult Psychlos on technical matters they would attack and kill themselves, or, if female, probably go into a coma like
Chirk.
What MacKendrick was really worried about was the diet of the prisoners. The Psychlos in their manuals didn’t consider it valuable information, being Psychlos; the prisoners themselves knew what they ate but didn’t know the names for it that applied to this planet, and if he didn’t solve it, they’d shortly have no prisoners.
Did Jonnie know they now had three Jambitchows? It was last night. Evidently a scouting party had been sent down to investigate all the new activity that was going on at Kariba, and the Scot officer there, the moment he got word a small craft had detached itself from the Jambitchow cruiser up in orbit, had put into action something dreamed up by the Chinese. They called it a “tiger-net.” They put a dummy dressed like a Chinese down near a pool away from the camp and the Jambitchows went right in to grab the dummy and a big net had been tripped up in the trees and they’d been caught. Evil-looking brutes.
MacKendrick wanted to know whether he’d heard what they ate. No? Well, the old woman from the Mountains of the Moon was helping and maybe they could work it out.
Jonnie wandered on. Damn Terl! It was getting too chancy! Somewhere, somehow he should be able to get the information on some other channel.
Once before he had thought of exploring a teleportation motor to see whether he could get some sort of answer out of it. A motor wasn’t a transshipment rig, but it did work on space-position change.
He had a motor and console to fool with: the ones from the wrecked tank in the battle of the pass. It had been carted in to the garage repair shop. Maybe if he just tore it apart…a thin hope, for he’d already looked at such rigs. But he got into some work clothes and went down to the repair level.
The Basher was sitting there, badly scarred and with a couple of plates sprung. He got into it, checked the fuel, and started the motor with a “right here” space coordination punched in on the console. It ran! One thing you could say about the
Psychlos, their stuff lasted forever.
He shut the motor off and took a screwdriver to the top screws of the console. He loosened them a half-turn, each one.
Jonnie was distracted by a sentry appearing at the tank port and handing him some ear pads, asking him to put them on. Jonnie stood up and looked out the turret port to find out what was going on.
It was Stormalong and the Tolnep, Double-Ensign Slitheter Pliss, surrounded by guards.
“What’s up?” called Jonnie.
They didn’t hear him. They all had ear pads on. Then Jonnie saw that the Tolnep patrolcraft had been dollied in here and he could guess the rest of it. Stormalong probably wanted to know how it flew so he could teach pilots how to handle Tolnep craft. Probably
Angus wanted to know the cycles of vibration of that paralysis beam.
Slitheter Pliss seemed quite amiable. He had obviously written himself off as a Tolnep. He saw Jonnie and hissed a greeting.
But if they were going to let the Tolnep near that lethal sound vibrator, they were taking no chances that he would turn it on, paralyze the lot of them, and escape. Jonnie didn’t think so for the Tolnep had nowhere to go. But he put the ear pads on anyway.
The Tolnep seemed to find it a bit provoking that the accumulator terminals had been bent. They responded to his dumb-show signs and gave him some tools and he straightened them and rehooked the power cable. The craft promptly began to run and he shut it off. With more dumb-show he pointed the switches out to Stormalong, indicating what they connected to, and Stormalong seemed to find it quite elementary; he nodded to the Tolnep and signaled the guards to take him away.
Once Pliss was away from the craft, Jonnie cautiously removed the ear pads and started to duck down out of the turret to resume his work.
The Tolnep alarmed the guards by pausing and swinging open the side door of the tank. He almost got himself shot. But Jonnie gestured for them to back up. He could shove the screwdriver into the Tolnep’s teeth if he tried to bite.
“You people aren’t Psychlo-commanded, are you?” said the Tolnep, hanging in the door. Getting no answer- since Jonnie was not going to volunteer information to a potential escapee no matter how remote escape might be- the Tolnep said, “What are you trying to do with that tank motor?”
Jonnie just looked at him for a moment and then it occurred to him that as a Tolnep officer, Pliss might have been trained on these things. “You know how this works?”
“Blast no! And neither does anyone else in any universe that I ever heard of,” said Pliss. “We’ve never raided this planet but we have raided other Psychlo bases. According to the textbooks, we’ve brought in thousands of these things just for the experts to look at.” He smiled a rather frightening smile. “I’ll bet my next month’s pay, which I’ll never get, that you people are up against the same thing that everybody else is up against.”
Allowing for possible malice, Jonnie looked encouraging.
“We’ve gotten their textbooks, their mathematics texts even. We’ve actually captured a transshipment console intact. It said in the text that it worked once and then as soon as they tried to find how it was built, pop, no console.
“The very best Tolnep commanders have interrogated Psychlo engineers,” continued Pliss, “and nothing happened. Some use that is. They chew you up and kill themselves.
Been going on, I read once, for three hundred and two thousand years!”
The Tolnep changed the subject. “You got a metals sample room around here? I’m hungry and maybe I can find something.”
Jonnie told the guards to take him there.
“So good luck,” said the Tolnep with a sarcastic-sounding hiss. They took him away.
Possibly it was just malice, Jonnie thought. But he didn’t believe it.
He’d lost track of the sequence of actions he had been involved in when interrupted. So he started all over again. He put the console buttons in “right here” and tapped the power switch to start the tank motor.
Nothing happened. He checked the connections. All usual.
He tried to recall whether the Tolnep had touched anything, and the Tolnep hadn’t.
He once more tried to start the motor. Nothing.
What had Ker told him once about consoles? They’d had a blade machine back up. The canopy had been open because Jonnie didn’t need breathe-gas and a torrent of dirt had come spraying down on the console and the blade machine wouldn’t start afterward. Oh, yes. Ker had said to leave it, that he’d get an engineer on it. Not a mechanic but an engineer! And an engineer had come down and disconnected the console and taken it off to an underground workshop with a small traveling crane.
Jonnie had been more interested in the crane at the time. The cranes had magnetic plates in a circle with springs between them. They didn’t have any motors. The arms of the crane moved by applying power to the magnets. Jonnie wished he had watched when they pulled the console out.
What had he done before the Tolnep arrived? Let’s see. He had loosened the top-plate screws. Psychlos once in a while used screws. Most of the time they just annealed metal with a molecular adhesion/cohesion blade.
But they were a bit unusual.
He now took all the screws out and lifted off the plate. The screws went into a black material that held, on its underside, all the complex components of the console.
The screws. They must connect something to something in addition to holding the cover on. But he couldn’t find any switch. They just seemed to be screws. But turning one or another of them had certainly disabled this console.