He flinched inwardly, and tightened his eye-muscles on the edge of the
monocle to keep from flinching physically as well, trying to freeze
out of his face the consternation he felt.
"That's bad, Kent," he said. "Very bad. I'd been counting heavily on
Dr. Gomes to design a bomb of our own."
"Well, general, if you please." That was Air-Commodore Leslie
Hargreaves. "You say you suspect that King Orgzild has developed a
nuclear bomb. If that's true, it's a horrible danger to all of us. But
I find it hard to believe that the Keegarkans could have done so, with
their resources and at their technological level. Now, if it had been
the Kragans, that would have been different, but...."
"Paula, you'd better carry on and explain what you told me, and add
anything else you can think of that might be relevant.... Is that
sound-recorder turned on? Then turn it on, somebody; we want this
taped."
Paula rose and began talking: "I suppose you all understand what
conditions are on Niflheim, and how these Ulleran native workers are
employed; however, I'd better begin by explaining the purpose for
which these nuclear bombs were designed and used...."
He smiled; she realized that he needed time to think, and she was
stalling to provide it. He drew a pencil and pad toward him and began
doodling in a bored manner, deliberately closing his mind to what she
was saying. There were two assumptions, he considered: first, that
King Orgzild already possessed a nuclear bomb which he could use when
he chose, and, second, that in the absence of Dr. Gomes, such a bomb
could only be produced on Gongonk Island after lengthy experimental
work. If both of these assumptions were true, he had just heard the
death-sentence of every Terran on Uller. The first he did not for a
moment doubt. The reasons for making it were too good. He dismissed it
from further consideration and concentrated on the second.
"... what's known as a Nagasaki-type bomb, the first type of
plutonium-bomb developed," Paula was saying. "Really, it's a
technological antique, but it was good enough for the purpose, and Dr.
Gomes could build it with locally available materials...."
That was the crux of it. The plutonium bomb, from a military
standpoint, was as obsolete as the flintlock musket had been at the
time of the Second World War. He reviewed, quickly, the history of
weapons-development since the beginning of the Atomic Era. The
emphasis, since the end of the Second World War, had all been on
nuclear weapons and rocket-missiles. There had been the H-bomb, itself
obsolescent, and the Bethe-cyle bomb, and the subneutron bomb, and the
omega-ray bomb, and the nega-matter bomb, and then the end of
civilization in the Northern Hemisphere and the rise of the new
civilization in South America and South Africa and Australia. Today,
the small-arms and artillery his troops were using were merely slight
refinements on the weapons of the First Century, and all the modern
nuclear weapons used by the Terran Federation were produced at the
Space Navy base on Mars, by a small force of experts whose skills were
almost as closed to the general scientific and technical world as the
secrets of a medieval guild. The old A-bomb was an historical
curiosity, and there was nobody on Uller who had more than a layman's
knowledge of the intricate technology of modern nuclear weapons. There
were plenty of good nuclear-power engineers on Gongonk Island, but how
long would it take them to design and build a plutonium bomb?
"... also has a good understanding of Lingua Terra," Paula was saying.
"He and Dr. Murillo conversed bilingually, just as I've heard General
von Schlichten and King Kankad talking to one another. I haven't any
idea whether or not Gorkrink could read Lingua Terra, or, if so, what
papers or plans he might have seen."
"Just a minute, Paula," he said. "Colonel Grinell, what does your
branch have on this Gorkrink?"
"He's the son of King Orgzild, and the daughter of Prince Jurnkonk,"
Grinell said. "We knew he'd signed on for Nif, two years ago, but the
story we got was that he'd fallen out of favor at court and had been
exiled. I can see, now, that that was planted to mislead us. As to
whether or not he can read Lingua Terra, my belief is that he can. We
know that he can understand it when spoken. He could have learned to
read at one of those schools Mohammed Ferriera set up, ten or fifteen
years ago."
"And Dr. Gomes and Dr. Murillo and Dr. Livesey left papers and plans
lying around all over the place," Paula added. "If he went to Niflheim
as a spy, he could have copied almost anything."
"Well, there you have it," von Schlichten said. "When Gorkrink found
out that plutonium can be used for bombs, he began gathering all the
information he could. And as soon as he got home, he turned it all
over to Pappy Orgzild."
"That still doesn't mean that the Kee-geeks were able to do anything
with it," Air-Commodore Hargreaves argued.
"I think it does," von Schlichten differed. "As soon as Orgzild would
hear about the possibility of making a plutonium bomb, he'd set up an
A-bomb project, and don't think of it in terms of the old First
Century Manhattan Project. There would be no problem of producing
fissionables--we've been scattering refined plutonium over this planet
like confetti."
"Well, an A-bomb's a pretty complicated piece of mechanism, even if
you have the plans for it," Kent Pickering said. "As I recall, there
have to be several subcritical masses of plutonium, or U-235, or
whatever, blown together by shaped charges of explosive, all of which
have to be fired simultaneously. That would mean a lot of electrical
fittings that I can't see these geeks making by hand."
"I can," Paula said. "Have you ever seen the work these native
jewelers do? And didn't you tell me about a clockwork thing they have
at the university here, to show the apparent movements of the sun...."
"That's right," von Schlichten said. "And what they couldn't make,
they could have bought from us; we've sold them a lot of electrical
equipment."
"All right, they could have built an A-bomb," Buhrmann said. "But did
they?"
"We assume they tried to. Gorkrink got back from Nif on the Canberra,
three months ago," von Schlichten said. "If Orgzild decided to build
an A-bomb, he wouldn't give the signal for this uprising until he
either had one or knew he couldn't make one, and he wouldn't give up
trying in only three months. Therefore, I think we can assume that he
succeeded, and had succeeded at the time he sent Gorkrink here to get
that four tons of plutonium we let him have, and, incidentally, to
tell Ghroghrank to pass the word to have Sid Harrington poisoned
according to plan."
"Then why didn't he just use it on us at the start of the uprising?"
Meyerstein wanted to know.
"Why should he? Getting rid of us is only the first step in Orgzild's
plan," Grinell said. "Back as far as geek history goes, the Kings of
Keegark have been trying to conquer Konkrook and the Free Cities and
make themselves masters of the whole Takkad Sea area. Let Konkrook
wipe us out, and then he can move in his troops and take Konkrook. Or,
if we beat off the geeks here, as we seem to be doing, he can bomb us
out and then move in on Konkrook. I think that as long as we're
fighting here, he'll wait. The more damage we do to Konkrook, the
easier it'll be for him."
"Then we'd better start dragging our feet on the Konkrook front,"
Laviola said. "And get busy trying to build a bomb of our own."
Von Schlichten looked up at the big screen, on which the battle of
Konkrook was being projected from an overhead pickup.
"I'll agree on the second half of it," von Schlichten said. "And we'll
also have to set up some kind of security-patrol system against
bombers from Keegark. And as soon as _Procyon_ gets here, we'll have
to send her out to hunt down and destroy those two Boer-class
freighters, the _Jan Smuts_ and the _Kruger_. And we'll have to
arrange for protection of Kankad's Town; that's sure to be another of
Orgzild's high-priority targets. As to the action against Konkrook,
I'll rely on your advice, Them. Can we delay the fall of the city for
any length of time?"
M'zangwe shook his head. "When we divert contragravity to
security-patrol work, the ground action'll slow up a little, of
course. But the geeks are about knocked out, now."
"The hell with it, then. I doubt if we'd be able to buy much time from
Orgzild by delaying victory in the city, and we'll probably need the
troops as workers over here." He turned to Pickering. "Dr. Pickering,
what sort of a crew can you scrape together to design a bomb for us?"
he asked.
"Well, there's Martirano, and Sternberg, and Howard Fu-Chung, and Piet
van Reenen, and...." He nodded to himself. "I can get six or eight of
them in here in about twenty minutes; I'll have a project set up and
working in a couple of hours. There has to be somebody qualified on
duty at the plant, all the time, of course, but...."
"All right, call them in. I want the bomb finished by yesterday
afternoon. And everybody with you, and you, yourself, had better
revert to civilian status. This isn't something you can do by the
numbers, and I don't want anybody who doesn't know what it's all about
pulling rank on your outfit. Go ahead, call in your gang, and let me
know what you'll be able to do, as soon as possible."
He turned to Hargreaves. "Les, you'll have charge of flying the
security patrols, and doing anything else you can to keep Orgzild from
bombing us before we can bomb him. You'll have priority on everything
second only to Pickering."
Hargreaves nodded. "As you say, general, we'll have to protect
Kankad's, as well as this place. It's about five hundred miles from
here to Kankad's, and eight-fifty miles from Kankad's to Keegark...."
He stopped talking to von Schlichten, and began muttering to himself,
running over the names of ships, and the speeds and pay-load
capacities of airboats, and distances. In about five minutes, he would
have a programme worked out; in the meantime, von Schlichten could
only be patient and contain himself. He looked along the table, and
caught sight of a thin-faced, saturnine-looking man in a green shirt,
with a colonel's three concentric circles marked on the shoulders in
silver-paint. Emmett Pearson, the communications chief.
"Emmett," he said, "those orbiters you have strung around this planet,
two thousand miles out, for telecast rebroadcast stations. How much of
a crew could be put on one of them?"
Pearson laughed. "Crew of what, general? White mice, or trained
cockroaches? There isn't room inside one of those things for anything
bigger to move around."
"Well, I know they're automatic, but how do you service them?"
"From the outside. They're only ten feet through, by about twenty in
length, with a fifteen-foot ball at either end, and everything's in
sections, which can be taken out. Our maintenance-gang goes up in a
thing like a small spaceship, and either works on the outside in
spacesuits, or puts in a new section and brings the unserviceable one
down here to the shops."
"Ah, and what sort of a thing is this small spaceship, now?"
"A thing like a pair of fifty-ton lorries, with airlocks between, and
connected at the middle; airtight, of course, and pressurized and
insulated like a spaceship. One side's living quarters for a six-man
crew--sometimes the gang's out for as long as a week at a time--and
the other side's a workshop."
That sounded interesting. With contragravity, of course, terms like
"escape-velocity" and "mass-ratio" were of purely antiquarian
interest.
"How long," he asked Pearson, "would it take to fit that vehicle with
a full set of detection instruments--radar, infrared and ultra-violet
vision, electron-telescope, heat and radiation detectors, the whole
works--and spot it about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles above
Keegark?"
"That I couldn't say, general," Emmett Pearson replied. "It'd have to
be a shipyard job, and a lot of that stuff's clear outside my
department. Ask Air-Commodore Hargreaves."
"Les!" he called out. "Wake up, Les!"
"Just a second, general." Hargreaves scribbled frantically on his pad.
"Now," he said, raising his head. "What is it, sir?"
"Emmett, here, has a junior-grade spaceship that he uses to service
those orbital telecast-relay stations of his. He'll tell you what it's
like. I want it fitted with every sort of detection device that can be
crammed into or onto it, and spotted above Keegark. It should, of
course, be high enough to cover not only the Keegark area, but
Konkrook, Kankad's, and the lower Hoork and Konk river-valleys."
"Yes, I get it." Hargreaves snatched up a phone, punched out a
combination, and began talking rapidly into it in a low voice. After a
while, he hung up. "All right, Mr. Pearson--Colonel Pearson, I mean.
Have your space-buggy sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix it
up." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live through
this, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in service
on this planet.... Now, general, I have a tentative setup. We're
going to need the _Elmoran_ for patrol work south and east of
Konkrook, and the _Gaucho_ and _Bushranger_ to the north and
northeast, based on Kankad's. We'll keep the _Aldebaran_ at Kankad's,
and use her for emergencies. And we'll have patrols of light
contragravity like this." He handed a map, with red-pencil and
blue-pencil markings, along to von Schlichten. "Red are Kankad-based;
blue are Konkrook-based."
"That looks all right," von Schlichten said. "There's another thing,
though. We want scout-vehicles to cover the Keegark area with
radiation-detectors. These geeks are quite well aware of
radiation-danger from fissionables, but they're accustomed to the
ordinary industrial-power reactors, which are either very lightly
shielded or unshielded on top. We want to find out where Orgzild's
bomb-plant is."
"Yes, general, as soon as we can get radiation detectors sent out to
Kankad's, we'll have a couple of fast aircars fitted with them for
that job."
"We have detectors, at our laboratory and reaction-plant," Kankad
said. "And my people can make more, as soon as you want them." He
thought for a moment. "Perhaps I should go to the town, now. I could
be of more use there than here."
Kent Pickering, who had been talking with his experts at a table
apart, returned.
"We've set up a programme, general," he said. "It's going to be a lot
harder than I'd anticipated. None of us seem to know exactly what we
have to do in building one of those things. You see, the uranium or
plutonium fission-bomb's been obsolete for over four hundred years. It
was a classified-secret matter long after its obsolescence, because it
hadn't been rendered any the less deadly by being superseded--there
was that A-bomb that the Christian Anarchist Party put together at
Buenos Aires in 378 A.E., for instance. And then, after it was
declassified, it had been so far superseded that it was of only
antiquarian interest; the textbooks dealt with it only in general
terms. The principles, of course, are part of basic nuclear science;
the "secret of the A-bomb" was just a bag of engineering tricks that
we don't have, and which we will have to rediscover. Design of
tampers, design of the chemical-explosive charges to bring subcritical
masses together, case-design, detonating mechanism, things like that."
"The complete data on even the old Hiroshima and Nagasaki types is
still in existence, of course. You can get it at places like the
University of Montevideo Library, or Jan Smuts Memorial Library at
Cape Town. But we don't have it here. We're detailing a couple of
junior technicians to make a search of the library here on Gongonk
Island, but we're not optimistic. We just can't afford to pass up any
chance, even when it approaches zero-probability."
Von Schlichten nodded. "That's about what I'd expected," he said. "I
suppose Gomes got his data out of one of the dustier storage-stacks at
Jan Smuts or Montevideo, in the first place.... Well, I still want
that bomb finished by yesterday afternoon, but since that's
impractical, you'll have to take a little--but as little as
possible--longer."
"What are we going to do about publicity on this?" Howlett, the
personnel man, asked. "We don't want this getting out in garbled
form--though how it could be made worse by garbling I couldn't
guess--and having the troops watching the sky over their shoulders and
going into a panic as soon as they saw something they didn't
understand."
"No, we don't. I've seen a couple of troop-panics," von Schlichten
said. "There can't be anything much worse than a panic."
"I think the Terrans ought to be told the worst," Hargreaves said.
"And told that our only hope is to get a bomb of our own built and
dropped first. As to the Kragans.... What do you think, King Kankad?"
"Tell them that we are building a bomb to destroy Keegark; that we are
running short of ammunition, and that it is our only hope of finishing
the war before the ammunition is gone," Kankad said. "Tell them
something of what sort of a bomb it is. But do not tell them that King
Orgzild already has such a bomb. Old Kankad, who made me out of
himself, told me about how our people fled in panic from the weapons
of the Terrans, when your people and mine were still enemies. This
thing is to the weapons they faced then as those weapons were to the
old Kragans' spears and bows.... And when the geeks from Grank come
here, tell them that we are winning and that if they fight well, they
can share the loot of Konkrook and Keegark."
Von Schlichten looked up at the big screen. Already, Themistocles
M'zangwe had ordered the Channel Battery to reduce fire; the big guns
were firing singly, in thirty-second-interval salvos. There was less
bombing, too; contragravity was being drawn out of the battle.
"Well, we all have things to do," he said, "and I think we've
discussed everything there is to discuss. Anybody think of anything
we've forgotten?... Then we're adjourned."
He and Paula Quinton took the elevator to the roof, and sat side by
side, silently watching the conflagration that was raging across the
channel and the nearer flashes of the big guns along the island's
city side.
"Wednesday night, I thought we were all cooked," Paula told him.
"Cleaning up the north in two days seemed like an impossibility, too.
Maybe you'll do it again."
"If I pull this one out of the fire, I won't be a general; I'll be a
magician," he said. "Pickering'll be a magician, I mean; he's the boy
who'll save our bacon, if it's saveable." He looked somberly across
the flame-reflecting water. "Let's not kid ourselves; we're just
kicking and biting at the guards on the way up the gallows-steps."
"Well, why stop till the trap's sprung?" she asked. "What'll happen to
these people on this planet, after we're atomized?"
"That I don't want to think about. Kankad's Town will get the second
bomb; Orgzild won't dare leave the Kragans after he's wiped us out.
Yoorkerk and Jonkvank, in the north, will turn on Keaveney and Shapiro
and Karamessinis and Hid O'Leary and wipe them out. And when the next
ship gets in here and they find out what happened, they'll send the
Federation Space Navy, and this planet'll get it worse than Fenris
did. They'll blast anything that has four arms and a face like a
lizard...."
Half a dozen aircars lifted suddenly from the airport and streaked
away to the northeast. As they went past, in the light of the burning
city, he could see that at least three of them had multiple
rocket-launchers on top. In a matter of seconds, a gun-cutter raced
after them, and a second, which had been over Konkrook, jettisoned a
bomb and turned away to follow.
"Maybe that's it," Paula said.
"Well, if it is, we won't be any better off anywhere else than here,"
he told her. "Let's stay and watch."
After what seemed like a long time, however, a twinkle of lights
showed over the East Konk Mountains. They weren't the flashes of
explosions; some were magnesium flares, and some were the lights of a
ship.
"That's _Procyon_, from Grank," he said. "Everybody gets a good mark
for this--detection stations, interceptors, gun-cutters. If that had
been it, there'd have been a good chance of stopping it." He felt
better than he had since Pickering had told him that Lourenço Gomes
was dead. "It's a good thing Gorkrink didn't pick up any dope on
guided missiles, while he was at it. As long as they have to deliver
it with contragravity, we have a chance."
They rose from the balustrade where they had been sitting, and, for
the first time, he discovered that he had had his left arm over her
shoulder and that she had had her right hand resting on the point of
his right hip, just above his pistol. He picked up the folder of
papers she had been carrying, and put her into the elevator ahead of
him, and it was only when they parted on the living-quarters level
that he recalled having followed the older protocol of gallantry
rather than the precedence of military rank.