He woke with a guilty start and looked up at the clock on the ceiling;
it was 0945. Kicking himself free of the covers, he slid his feet to
the floor and sprinted for the bathroom. While he was fussing to get
the shower adjusted to the right temperature, he bludgeoned his
conscience by telling himself that a wide-awake general is more good
than a half-asleep general, that there was nothing he could do but
hope that Hargreaves's patrols would keep the bomb away from Konkrook
until Pickering's brain-trust came up with one of their own, and that
the fact that the commander-in-chief was making sack-time would be
much better for morale than the spectacle of him running around in
circles. He shaved carefully; a stubble of beard on his chin might
betray the fact that he was worried. Then he dressed, put his monocle
in his eye, and called the headquarters that had been set up in Sid
Harrington's--now his--office. A girl at the switchboard appeared on
his screen, and gave place to Paula Quinton, who had been up for the
past two hours.
"The _Northern Lights_ got in about three hours ago, general," she
told him. "She had four of King Yoorkerk's infantry regiments
aboard--the Seventh, Glorious-and-Terrible, the Fourth,
Firm-in-Adversity, the Second, Strength-of-the-Throne, and the
Twelfth, Forever-Admirable. They're the sorriest-looking rabble I
ever saw, but Hideyoshi says they're the best Yoorkerk has, and they
all have Terran-style rifles. General M'zangwe broke them into
battalions, and put a battalion in with each of the Kragan regiments.
I think they're more afraid of the Kragans than they are of the
rebels."
He nodded. That was probably the best way to employ them, within the
existing situation. The trouble was, Them M'zangwe was incurably
tactical-minded. Put those geeks of Yoorkerk's in with the Kragans and
they'd be most useful in conquering Konkrook, but the trouble was
that, after associating with Kragans, they might develop into
reasonably good troops themselves, to the undesired improvement of
King Yoorkerk's army. On the other hand maybe not. Keep them in
Company service long enough, and they might want to forget about
Yoorkerk and stay there.
"How's the situation over in town?" he asked.
"Well, it's slowing up, since we began pulling contragravity out," she
told him, "but the geeks are breaking up rapidly.... Oh, there was
something funny about that hassle, last evening, when the _Procyon_
came in. Two contragravity vehicles, an aircar and an air-lorry, that
went out to meet the ship, are unaccounted for."
"You mean two of our vehicles are missing?"
She shook her head, frowning in perplexity. "Well, no. All the
vehicles that answered that unidentified-aircraft alert returned, but
there were these two that went out that we haven't any record of.
Colonel Grinell is investigating, but he can't find out anything...."
"Tell him not to waste any more time," he said. "Those two were
probably geeks from Konkrook. You know, that's how the von Schlichten
family got out of Germany, in the Year Three--flew a bomber to Spain.
The Konkrook war-criminals are getting out before the Army of
Occupation moves in."
"Well, the posts at the old Kragan castles report some contragravity,
and parties riding 'saurs, moving west from the city," she told him.
"There are a lot of refugees on the roads. And combat reports from
Konkrook agree that resistance is getting weaker every hour.... And
the supra-atmosphere observation-craft--they're beginning to call her
the _Sky-Spy_--is up a hundred and fifty miles over Keegark. We have
radar and vision screens and telemetered radiation and other detectors
here, tuned to her. They're installing a similar set on the _Northern
Lights_ at the shipyard. By the way, Air-Commodore Hargreaves wants to
know if he can take a pair of 155-mm rifles from the Channel Battery
and mount them on the _Lights_."
"Yes, of course, he can have anything he wants, as long as it isn't
urgently needed for the bomb project."
"_Sky-Spy_ reports normal contragravity traffic between Keegark and
the farming-villages around--aircars, lorries, a few scows--but
nothing suspicious. No trace of either of the Boer-class ships.
Kankad's people are building receiving sets to install on the
_Procyon_ and the _Aldebaran_, and another set for Kankad's Town.
Pickering and his people are still working, but they all look pretty
frustrated. They have Major Thornton, at the ammunition plant, doing
experimental work on chemical-explosive charges to bring the
subcritical masses together and hold them together till an explosion
can be produced; they're using most of the skilled electrical and
electronics people to work up a detonating device. That's why Kankad's
people are doing most of the detection-device work. Hargreaves is
fitting a lot of small craft-- combat-cars and civilian aircars--with
radar sets, to use for patrolling."
"That sounds good," von Schlichten said. "I'll be around and see how
things are, after I've had some breakfast."
He had breakfast at the main cafeteria, four floors down; there wasn't
as much laughing and talking as usual, but the crowd there seemed in
good spirits. He spent some time at headquarters, watching Keegark by
TV and radar. So far, nothing had been done about direct
reconnaissance over Keegark with radiation-detectors, but Hargreaves
reported that a couple of privately owned aircars were being fitted
for the job.
He made a flying inspection trip around the island, and visited the
farms south of the city, on the mainland, and, finally, made a sweep
in the command-car over the city itself. Reconnaissance in person was
an archaic and unprogressive procedure, and it was a good way to get
generals killed, but one could see a lot of things that would be
missed on TV. He let down several times in areas that had already been
taken, and talked to company and platoon officers. For one thing, King
Yoorkerk's flamboyantly named regiments weren't quite as bad as Paula
had thought. She'd been spoiled by the Kragans in her appreciation of
other native troops. They had good, standard-quality, Volund-made
arms; they were brave and capable; and they had been just enough
insulted by being integrated into Kragan regiments to try to make a
good showing.
By noon, resistance in the city was beginning to cave in. Surrender
flags were appearing on one after another of the Konkrookan rebel
strong-points, and at 1430, after he had returned to the Island, a
delegation, headed by the Konkrookan equivalent of Lord Mayor and
composed largely of prominent merchants, came across the channel under
a flag of truce to surrender the city's Spear of State, with abject
apologies for not having Gurgurk's head on the point of it. Gurgurk,
they reported, had fled to Keegark by air the night before, which
explained the incident of the unaccountable aircar and lorry. The
Channel Battery stopped firing, and, with the exception of an
occasional spatter of small-arms fire, the city fell silent.
At 1600, von Schlichten visited the headquarters Pickering had set up
in the office building at the power-plant. As he stepped off the lift
on the third floor, a girl, running down the hall with her arms full
of papers in folders, collided with him; the load of papers flew in
all directions. He stooped to help her pick them up.
"Oh, general! Isn't it wonderful?" she cried. "I just can't believe
it!"
"Isn't what wonderful?" he asked.
"Oh, don't you know? They've got it!"
"Huh? They have?" He gathered up the last of the big envelopes and
gave them to her. "When?"
"Just half an hour ago. And to think, those books were around here all
the time, and.... Oh, I've got to run!" She disappeared into the lift.
Inside the office, one of Pickering's engineers was sitting on the
middle of his spinal column, a stenograph-phone in one hand and a book
in the other. Once in a while, he would say something into the
mouthpiece of the phone. Two other nuclear engineers had similar books
spread out on a desk in front of them; they were making notes and
looking up references in the _Nuclear Engineers' Handbook_, and making
calculations with their sliderules. There was a huddle around the
drafting-boards, where two more such books were in use.
"Well, what's happened?" he demanded, catching Pickering by the arm as
he rushed from one group to another.
"Ha! We have it!" Pickering cried. "Everything we need! Look!"
He had another of the books under his arm. He held it out to von
Schlichten, and von Schlichten suddenly felt sicker than he had ever
felt since, at the age of fourteen, he had gotten drunk for the first
time. He had seen men crack up under intolerable strain before, but
this was the first time he had seen a whole roomful of men blow their
tops in the same manner.
The book was a novel--a jumbo-size historical novel, of some seven or eight
hundred pages. Its dust-jacket bore a slightly-more-than-bust-length
picture of a young lady with crimson hair and green eyes and jade earrings
and a plunging--not to say power-diving--neckline that left her affiliation
with the class of Mammalia in no doubt whatever. In the background, a
mushroom-topped smoke-column rose, and away from it something intended to
be a four-motor propeller-driven bomber of the First Century was racing
madly. The title, he saw, was _Dire Dawn_, and the author was one
Hildegarde Hernandez.
"Well, it has a picture of an A-bomb explosion on it," he agreed.
"It has more than that; it has the whole business. Case
specifications, tampers, charge design, detonating device, everything.
Why, the end-papers even have diagrams, copies of the original
Nagasaki-bomb drawings. Look."
Von Schlichten looked. He had no more than the average intelligent
layman's knowledge of nuclear physics--enough to recharge or repair a
conversion-unit--but the drawings looked authentic enough. They seemed
to be copies of ancient blueprints, lettered in First Century English,
with Lingua Terra translations added, and marked TOP SECRET and U.S.
ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS and MANHATTAN ENGINEERING DISTRICT.
"And look at this!" Pickering opened at a marked page and showed it to
him. "And this!" He opened where another slip of paper had been
inserted. "Everything we want to know, practically."
"I don't get this." He wasn't sick, anymore, just bewildered. "I read
some reviews of this thing. All the reviewers panned hell out of
it--'World War II Through a Bedroom Keyhole'; 'Henty in Black Lace
Panties'--that sort of thing."
"Yeh, yeh, sure," Pickering agreed. "But this Hernandez had illusions
of being a great serious historical novelist, see. She won't try to
write a book till she's put in years of research--actually, about six
months' research by a herd of librarians and college-juniors and other
such literary coolies--and she boasts that she never yet has been
caught in an error of historical background detail.
"Well, this opus is about the old Manhattan Project. The heroine is a
sort of super-Mata-Hari, who is, alternately and sometimes
simultaneously, in the pay of the Nazis, the Soviets, the Vatican,
Chiang Kai-Shek, the Japanese Emperor, and the Jewish International
Bankers, and she sleeps with everybody but Joe Stalin and Mao
Tse-tung, and of course, she is in on every step of the A-bomb
project. She even manages to stow away on the _Enola Gay_, with the
help of a general she's spent fifty incandescent pages seducing.
"In order to tool up for this production-job, La Hernandez did her
researching just where Lourenço Gomes probably did his--University of
Montevideo Library. She even had access to the photostats of the old
U.S. data that General Lanningham brought to South America after the
debacle in the United States in A.E. 114. Those end-papers are part of
the Lanningham stuff. As far as we've been able to check
mathematically, everything is strictly authentic and practical. We'll
have to run a few more tests on the chemical-explosive charges--we
don't have any data on the exact strength of the explosives they used
then--and the tampers and detonating device will need to be tested a
little. But in about half an hour, we ought to be able to start
drawing plans for the case, and as soon as they're finished, we'll
rush them to the shipyard foundries for casting."
Von Schlichten handed the book back to Pickering, and sighed deeply.
"And I thought everybody here had gone off his rocker," he said. "We
will erect, on the ruins of Keegark, a hundred-foot statue of Señorita
Hildegarde Hernandez.... How did you get onto this?"
Pickering pointed to a young man with dull brick colored hair, who was
punching out some kind of a problem on a small computing machine.
"Piet van Reenen, over there, he has a girl-friend whose taste runs to
this sort of literary bubble-gum. She told him it was all in a book
she'd just read, and showed him. We descended in force on the bookshop
and grabbed every copy in stock. We are now running a sort of
gaseous-diffusion process, to separate the nuclear physics from the
pornography. I must say, Hildegarde has her biological data very well
in hand, too."
"I'll bet she'd have fun writing a novel about these geeks," von
Schlichten said. "Well, how soon do you think you can have a bomb
ready for us?"
"Casting the cases is going to slow us down the most," Pickering said.
"But, even with that, we ought to have one ready in three days, at the
most. By two weeks, we'll be turning them out on an assembly-line."
"I hope we don't need more than one. But you'd better produce at least
half a dozen. And have some practice-bombs made up, out of concrete or
anything, as long as they're the right weight and airfoil and have
some way of releasing smoke. Get them done as soon as you have your
case designed. We want to be able to make a couple of practice drops."
There was no use, he thought, of raising hopes which might prove
premature. He told Paula Quinton, of course, and Themistocles
M'zangwe, and, by telecast on sealed beam, King Kankad and
Air-Commodore Hargreaves. Beyond that, there was nothing to do but
wait, and hope that Hargreaves could keep Orgzild's bombers away from
Gongonk Island and Kankad's Town and that Hildegarde Hernandez had
been playing fair with her public. He visited the city, where a few
pockets of diehard resistance were being liquidated, and where
everybody who had not been too deeply and publicly involved in the
_znidd suddabit_ conspiracy was now coming forward and claiming to
have been a lifelong friend of the Terrans and the Company. Von
Schlichten returned to Gongonk Island, debating with himself whether
to declare a general amnesty or to set up a dozen guillotines in the
city and run them around the clock for a week. There were cogent
arguments for and against either procedure.
By 2100, the last organized resistance had been wiped out, and curfew
had been imposed, and peace of a sort restored. There was still the
threat from Keegark, but it was looking less ominous now than it had
the evening before. Von Schlichten and Paula were having dinner in the
Broadway Room, confident that there was nothing left to do that they
could do anything about, when the extension phone that had been
plugged in at their table rang.
"Colonel Quinton here," Paula identified herself into it, and listened
for a moment. "There has? When?... Well, where did it come from?... I
see. And the direction?... Anything else?"
Apparently there was nothing else. She hung up, and turned to von
Schlichten.
"The _Sky-Spy_ just detected a ship lifting out from Keegark, presumed
one of the Boer-class freighters, either the _Jan Smuts_ or the _Oom
Paul Kruger_. It was first picked up on contragravity at about a
hundred feet, rising vertically from near the Palace. The supposition
is the geeks had her camouflaged since the time Commander Prinsloo
first bombarded Keegark with the _Aldebaran_. That was about twenty
minutes ago; at last report, she's fifty miles north of Keegark,
headed up the Hoork River."
Von Schlichten started thinking aloud: "That could be a feint, to draw
our ships north after her, and leave the approach to Konkrook or
Kankad's open, but that would be presuming that they know about the
_Sky-Spy_, and I doubt that, though not enough to take chances on.
They know we have ground and ship-radar, and they may think they can
slip down the Konk Valley either undetected or mistaken for one of our
ships from North Uller."
He picked up the phone. "Get me through on telecast to Air-Commodore
Hargreaves, aboard the _Procyon_," he said. "I'll take it in the
office; I'll be up directly." He rose. "Finish your dinner, and have
the rest of mine sent up," he told Paula.
Leaving the elevator, he rushed into the big headquarters room just as
contact was established with the _Procyon_, on station over the
northwestern corner of Takkad Sea, between Kankad's Town and Keegark.
The _Aldebaran_, he knew, was west of Keegark; the _Northern Lights_,
now fitted with a pair of 155-mm guns, in addition to her 90's, had
just arrived at Kankad's. He had the _Aldebaran_ sent north along the
crest of the mountain-range between the Hoork and Konk river-valleys,
where she could cover both with her own radar and other
detection-devices and exchange information with the _Sky-Spy_, and the
_Gaucho_ sent in what looked like the right course to intercept the
Boer-class freighter from Keegark. The _Northern Lights_, also with
screens tuned to the _Sky-Spy_, was sent to take over the
_Aldebaran's_ regular station. Finally, he called Skilk and had the
_Northern Star_ sent south down the Hoork Valley.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait, and watch the screens.
Paula Quinton put in an appearance shortly after he had finished
calling Skilk, pushing a cocktail-wagon on which their interrupted
dinners had been placed. They finished eating, and drank coffee, and
smoked. Most of the rest of his staff who were not busy on the
bomb-project or at the shipyards or with the occupation of Konkrook
drifted in; they all sat and stared from one to another of the
screens, which told, in radar-patterns and direct vision and
telescopic vision and heat and radiation detection, the story of what
was going on to the northeast of them.
Keegark was dark, on the vision-screen; evidently King Orgzild had invented
the blackout, too. Not that it did him any good; the radar-screen showed
the city clearly, and it was just as clear on the radiation and
heat-screens. The Keegarkan ship was completely blacked out, but the
radiations from her engines and the distinctive radiation-pattern of her
contragravity-field showed clearly, and there was a speck that marked her
position on the radar-screen. The same position was marked with a pin-point
of light on the vision-screen--some device on the _Sky-Spy_, synchronized
with the detectors, kept it focused there. The Company ships and
contragravity vehicles all were carrying topside lights, visible only from
above, which flashed alternate red and blue to identify them.
Time crawled slowly around the clock-face on the wall, the
sixty-five-second minutes of Uller dragging like hours. The spots that
marked the enemy ship and her hunters crawled, too; seen from the
hundred-and-fifty-mile altitude of the _Sky-Spy_, even the
six-hundred-mile speed of the _Gaucho_ was barely visible. They drank
coffee till the stuff revolted them; they smoked until their throats
and mouths were dry, they watched the screens until they thought that
they would see them in their dreams forever. Then the _Gaucho_
reported radar-contact with the Keegarkan ship, which had begun to
turn in a hairpin-shaped course and was coming south down the Konk
Valley.
After that, the _Gaucho_ began reporting directly, and her topside
identification-light went out.
"... doused our lights; we're down in the valley, altitude about a
thousand feet. We're trying to get a glimpse of her against the sky,"
a voice came in. "We're cutting in our forward TV-pickup." The voice
repeated, several times, the wavelength, and somebody got an auxiliary
screen tuned in. There was nothing visible on it but the darkness of
the valley, the star-jeweled sky, and the loom of the East Konk
Mountains. "We still can't see her, but we ought to, any moment; radar
shows her well above the mountains. Ah, there she is; she just
obscured Beta Hydrae V; she's moving toward that big constellation to
the east of it, the one they call Finnegan's Goat. Now she'll be right
in the center of the screen; we're going straight for her. We're going
to try to slow her down till the _Aldebaran_ can get here...."
The enemy ship was vaguely visible, now, becoming clearer in the
starlight. She was a Boer-class freighter, all right. Probably the
_Jan Smuts_; the _Oom Paul Kruger_ had last been reported at Bwork,
and there was little chance that she had slipped into Keegark since
the uprising had started. For all anybody knew, she could have been
destroyed in the fighting before the Bwork Residency fell.
"All right, we have her spotted; we're going to open up on her," the
voice from the _Gaucho_ announced. "She has two 90's to our one; we'll
try to disable them, first." The vision-screen lit with the indirect
glare of the gun-flash, and the image in it jiggled violently as the
ship shook to the recoil, then steadied again, with the enemy ship
visible in the middle of it, growing larger and larger as the _Gaucho_
rushed toward her. The gun fired again and again, flooding the screen
with momentary yellow light and disturbing the image as the recoil
shook the gun-cutter. The enemy ship began firing in reply, the shots
were all wide misses. Apparently the geek guncrew didn't know how to
synchronize the radar sights, and were ignorant of the correct setting
for the proximity-fuses. The _Gaucho_'s searchlights came on, bathing
her quarry in light. It was the _Jan Smuts_; the name and the
figurehead-bust of the old soldier-philosopher were plainly visible.
Her forward gun had been knocked out, and she was trying to swing
about to get a field of fire for her stern-gun.
"We're going to give her a rocket-salvo," the voice said. "Watch this,
now!"
The rockets leaped forward, from the topside racks, four and four and
four and four, at half-second intervals. The first four hit the
_Smuts_ amidships and low, exploding with a flare that grew before it
could die away as the second four landed. Nobody ever saw the third
and fourth four land. The _Jan Smuts_ vanished in a blaze of light
that blinded everybody in the room; when they could see again, after
some thirty seconds, the screen was dark.
In the direct-vision screen from the _Sky-Spy_, the whole countryside
of the Konk Valley, five hundred miles north of Konkrook, was lighted.
The heat and radiation detectors were going insane. And in the
shifting confusion on the radar-screen, there was no trace either of
the _Jan Smuts_ or the _Gaucho_.
"Well, the geeks did have an A-bomb," Themistocles M'zangwe said, at
length. "I'd been trying to kid myself that we were just preparing
against a million-to-one chance. I wonder how many more they have."
"Paula, find out who was in command of the _Gaucho_; he'd be a
junior-grade lieutenant. Fix up orders promoting him to navy captain,
as of now. It's probably the only thing we can do for him, anymore.
And promotions of the same order for everybody else aboard that
cutter. Authority Carlos von Schlichten, acting Governor-General." He
picked up a phone. "Get me Commander Prinsloo, on _Aldebaran_...."
He ordered Prinsloo to launch airboats and make a search; cautioned
him to be careful of radiation, but to take no chances on any of the
_Gaucho_'s complement being still alive and in need of help. While
that was going on, the _Sky-Spy_ reported another ship coming over her
horizon to the east, from the direction of Bwork. That would be the
_Oom Paul Kruger_. Hargreaves had already learned of the advent of the
second freighter. He was unwilling to take the _Procyon_ off her
station until the _Aldebaran_ returned from the Konk Valley. In this,
von Schlichten concurred.
Somebody suggested that a drink would be in order. They had just
watched the all-but-certain death of three Terran officers, fifteen
Terran airmen, and ten Kragans, but they had all been living in too
close companionship with death in the past three days--or was it three
centuries--to be too deeply affected. And they had also watched, at
least for a day or so, the removal of the threat that had hung over
their heads. And they had seen proof that they had a defense against
King Orgzild's bombs.
They were still mixing cocktails when Pickering phoned in.
"Some good news, general, from Operation 'Hildegarde.' We ought to
have at least one bomb ready to drop by 1500 tomorrow, four or five
more by next midnight," he said. "We don't need to have cases cast. We
got our dimensions decided, and we find that there are a lot of big
empty liquid-oxygen flasks, or tanks, rather, at the spaceport,
that'll accommodate everything--fissionables, explosive-charges,
tampers, detonator, and all."
"Well, go ahead with it. Make up a few of them; as many as you can
between now and 2400 Sunday." He thought for a moment. "Don't waste
time on those practice bombs I mentioned. We'll make a practice drop
with a live bomb. And don't throw away the design for the cast case.
We may need that, later on."