Sometimes a mob like that"s worse than a fresh mob. They get stubborn; they act more deliberately."

The noises were growing clearer, louder. He picked up the phone and punched the wavelength of the military airport.

"Von Schlichten, my compliments to Colonel Jarman. Tell him there"s a geek mob, or possibly Firkked"s regulars, on the main highway from Skilk, two miles east of the Reservation. Get some combat contragravity over here, at once. We"ll light them up for you. And tell Colonel Jarman to start flying patrols up and down along the Hoork River; this may not be the only gang that"s coming out to see us."

The sounds were directly below, now--the scuffing of h.o.r.n.y-soled feet on the dirt road, the clink and rattle of slung weapons, the clicking and squeeking of Ulleran voices.

The lieutenant said, "Here go the flares, sir."

Von Schlichten shut his eyes, then opened them slowly. The driver, upon releasing the flares, had nosed up, banked, turned, and was coming in again, down the road toward the advancing column. Von Schlichten peered into his all-armament sight, his foot on the machine-gun pedal and his fingers on the rocket b.u.t.tons. The highway below was jammed with geeks, and they were all stopped dead and staring upward, as though hypnotized by the lights. A second later, they had recovered and were shooting--not at the airjeep, but at the four globes of blazing magnesium. Then he had the close-packed ma.s.s of non-humanity in his sights; he tramped the pedal and began punching b.u.t.tons. He still had four rockets left by the time the mob was behind him.

"All right, let"s take another pa.s.s at them. Same direction."

The driver put the airjeep into a quick loop and came out of it in front of the mob, who now had their backs turned and were staring in the direction in which they had last seen the vehicle. Again, von Schlichten plowed them with rockets and harrowed them with his guns.

Some of the Skilkans were trying to get over the high fences on either side of the road--really stockades of petrified tree-trunks. Others were firing, and this time they were shooting at the airjeep. It took one hit from a heavy sh.e.l.losaur-rifle, and, immediately, the driver banked and turned away from the road.

"Dammit, why did you do that?" von Schlichten demanded, lifting his foot from the gun-pedal. "Are you afraid of the kind of popguns those geeks are using?"

"I am not afraid to risk my vehicle, or myself, sir," the lieutenant replied, with the extreme formality of a very junior officer chewing out a very senior one. "I am, however, afraid to risk my pa.s.senger.

Generals are not expendable, sir; neither are they issued for use as clay pigeons."

He was right, of course. Von Schlichten admitted it. "I"m too old to play cowboy, like this," he said. "Back to the Reservation, telecast station."

Looking back over his shoulder, he saw eight or ten more flares alight, and the ground-flashes of exploding sh.e.l.ls and rockets; the air above the road was sparkling with gun-flames. Jarman must have had some contragravity ready to be sent off on the instant.

While he had been out, somebody had gotten a TV-pickup mounted on a contragravity-lifter and run up to two thousand feet, on the end of a steel-tough tensilon mooring-line. The big circular screen was lit, showing the whole Company Reservation, with the surrounding countryside foreshortened by perspective to the distant lights of Skilk. The map had been taken up from the floor, and a big terrain-board had been brought in from the Chief Engineer"s office and set up in its place. In front of the screen, Paula Quinton, Barney Mordkovitz, Colonel Cheng-Li, and, conspicuously silent, Jules Keaveney sat drinking coffee and munching sandwiches. Half a dozen Terrans, of both s.e.xes, were working furiously to get the markers which replaced the pink and white pills placed on the board, and one of Captain Inez Malavez"s non-coms, with a headset, was getting combat reports directly from the switchboard. Everything was clicking like well-oiled machinery.

On the TV-screen, the Residency area was ablaze with light, and so were the ship-docks, the airport and s.p.a.ceport, the shops, and the maintenance-yard. On the terrain-board, the latter was now marked as completely in Company hands. The ruins of the native-troops barracks were still burning, and there was a twinkle of orange-red here and there among the ruins of the labor-camp. Much of the equipment for the polar mines had already been shifted into defensible ground. The rest of the circle was dark, except for the distant lights of Skilk, where the nuclear power plant was apparently still functioning in native hands.

Then, without warning, a spot of white light blazed into being southeast of the Company area and southwest of Skilk, followed by another and another. Instantly, von Schlichten glanced up at the row of smaller screens, and on one of them saw the view as picked up by a patrolling airjeep.

The army of King Firkked of Skilk had finally put in its appearance, coming in two columns, one southward from Skilk and the other northward along the west bank of the dry river. The former had crossed over and joined the latter, about three miles south of the Reservation. The scene in the screen was similar to the one he had, himself, witnessed through his armament-sight. The Skilkan regulars had been marching in formation, some on the road and some along parallel lanes and paths. They had the look of trained and disciplined troops, but they had made the same mistake as the rabble that had been shot up on the north side of the Reservation. Unused to attack from the air, they had all halted in place and were gaping open-mouthed, their opal teeth gleaming in the white flare-light. However, before the aircar had pa.s.sed over them, the lead company of one regiment, armed with Terran rifles, had begun firing.

In the big screen, it could be seen that Colonel Jarman had thrown most of his available contragravity at them, including the combat-cars, that had already started to form the second wave of the attack on the mob to the north. Other flares bloomed in the darkness, and the fiery trails of rockets curved downward to end in yellow flashes on the ground.

The airjeep with the pickup circled back; the troops on the road and in the adjoining fields had broken. The former were caught between the fences which made Ulleran roads such death-traps when under air-attack. The latter had dispersed, and were running away, individually and by squads; at first, it looked like a panic, but he could see officers signaling to the larger groups of fugitives to open out, apparently directing the flight. By this time, there were ten or twelve combat-cars and about twenty airjeeps at work. In the moving view from the pickup-jeep, he saw what looked like a 90-mm rocket land in the middle of a company that was still trying to defend itself with small-arms fire on the road, wiping out about half of them.

"Make the most of it, boys," Barney Mordkovitz, his mouth full of sandwich, was saying. "Heave it to them; you won"t get another chance like that at those b.u.g.g.e.rs."

"Why not?" Colonel Paula Quinton wanted to know. Her military education was progressing, but it still had a few gaps to fill in.

"The next time they"re air-struck, they won"t stay bunched,"

Mordkovitz replied. "A lot of them didn"t stay bunched this time, if you noticed. And they"ll keep out from between the fences."

In the large screen, a quick succession of gun-flashes leaped up from the direction of the Hoork River and sh.e.l.ls began bursting over the scene of the attack. The screen tuned to the pickup on the airjeep went dead; in the big screen, there was a twinkling of falling fire. Almost at once, thirty or forty rocket-trails converged on the gun-position, and, for a moment, explosions burned like a bonfire.

"They had a 75-mm at the rear of the column," somebody called from the big switchboard. "Lieutenant Kalanang"s jeep was. .h.i.t; Lieutenant Vermaas is cutting in his pickup on the same wavelength."

The small screen lighted again. In the big screen, a cl.u.s.ter of magnesium-lights appeared above where the Skilkan gun had been; in the small screen, there was a stubbled grain-field, pocked with craters, and the bodies of fifteen or twenty natives, all rather badly mangled.

An overturned and apparently destroyed 75-mm gun lay on its side.

Five or six fairly large fires had broken out, by this time, around the point of attack. Von Schlichten nodded approvingly.

"I was wondering how long it"d take somebody to think of that," he said. "Granaries and forage-stacks on some of these farms. They"ll burn for half an hour, at least." He looked at his watch. "And by that time, it"ll be daylight."

"As far as we know, that was the only 75-mm gun Firkked had," Colonel Cheng-Li said. "He has at least six, possibly ten, 40-mm"s. It"s a wonder we haven"t seen anything of them."

"Well, there"s no way of being sure," Jules Keaveney said, "but I have an idea they"re all at or around the Palace. Firkked knows about how much contragravity we have. He"s probably wondering why we aren"t bombing him, now."

"He doesn"t know we"ve sold the Palace to King Jonkvank for an army,"

von Schlichten said. "And that reminds me--how much contragravity could Firkked sc.r.a.pe together, for an attack on us? I"ve been expecting a geek _Luftwaffe_ over here, at any moment."

Colonel Cheng-Li studied the smoking tip of his cigarette for a moment. "Well, Firkked owns, personally, three ten-pa.s.senger aircars, a thing like a troop-carrier that he transports some of his courtiers around in, four airjeeps armed with a pair of 15-mm machine-guns apiece, and two big lorries. There are possibly two hundred vehicles of all types in Skilk and the country around, but some of them are in the hands of natives friendly to us and or hostile to Firkked. I can get the exact figures from the Constabulary office at Company House."

"That"s close enough," von Schlichten told him. "And there"ll be oodles of thermoconcentrate-fuel, and blasting explosives. Colonel Quinton, suppose you call Ed Wallingsby, the Chief Engineer, right away; have him commissioned colonel. Tell him to get to work making this place secure against air attack; tell him to consult with Colonel Jarman. Tell him to get those geeks Leavitt has penned in the repair-dock at the airport and use them to dig slit-trenches and fill sandbags and so on. He can use Kragan limited-duty wounded to guard them.... Mr. Keaveney, you"ll begin setting up something in the way of an ARP-organization. You"ll have to get along on what n.o.body else wants. You will also consult with Colonel Jarman, and with Colonel Wallingsby. Better get started on it now. Just think of everything around here that could go wrong in case of an air attack, and try to do something about it in advance."

X.

The Geek Luftwaffe and the Kragan Airlift

At 0245, an attack developed on the northwestern corner of the Reservation, in the direction of the explosives magazines. It turned out to be relatively trivial. Remnants of the mob that had been broken up by air attack on the road had gotten together and were making rushes in small bands, keeping well spread out. Beating them off took considerable ammunition, but it was accomplished with negligible casualties to the defenders. They finally stopped coming around daylight.

In the meantime, Themistocles M"zangwe called from Konkrook, appearing in the screen with his left arm in a freshly white sling.

"What the h.e.l.l have you been doing to yourself?" von Schlichten wanted to know.

"Crossbow-bolt, about half an hour ago. A couple of inches lower and acting Brigadier-General Colbert"d have been talking to you, now, instead of me."

"Lucky it didn"t have a nitro-capsule on the end. How are you making out? Have Kankad"s people started coming in, yet?"

"Oh, yes, about six hundred of them have gotten in already, in the d.a.m.nedest collection of vehicles you ever saw. Kankad must be using every sc.r.a.p of contragravity he has; it"s a regular airborne Dunkirk-in-reverse. Kankad sent word that he"s coming here in person, as soon as he has things organized at his place. And the geeks here have sc.r.a.ped together an air-force of their own--farm-lorries, aircars, that sort of thing--and they"re using them to bomb us here and at the mainland farm, mostly with nitroglycerine. We"ve shot down about twenty of them, but they"re still coming. They tried a boat-attack across the Channel; that"s how I got this. We"ve been doing some bombing, ourselves; we made a down payment for Eric Blount and Hendrik Lemoyne. Took a fifty-ton tank off a fuel-lorry, fitted it with a detonator, filled it with thermoconcentrate, and ferried it over on the _Elmoran_ and dumped it on the Keegarkan Emba.s.sy. It must have landed in the middle of the central court; in about fifteen seconds, flames were coming out every window in the place." His face became less jovial. "We had something pretty bad happen here, too," he said. "That Konkrook Fencibles rabble of Prince Jaizerd"s mutinied, along with the others; they got into the hospital and butchered everybody in the place, patients and staff. The Kragans got there too late to save anybody, but they wiped out the Fencibles. Jaizerd himself was the only one they took alive, and he didn"t stay that way very long."

"How are you making out with your Civil Administration crowd?"

M"zangwe grimaced. "I haven"t had to put any of them under actual arrest, so far, but we"ve had to keep Buhrmann away from the communications equipment by force. He wanted to call you up and chew you out for not evacuating everybody in the north to Konkrook."

"Is he crazy?"

"No, just scared. He says you"re going to get everybody on Uller ma.s.sacred by detail, when you could save Konkrook by bringing them all here."

"You tell him I"m going to hold this planet, not just one city. Tell him I have a sense of my duty to the Company and its stockholders, if he hasn"t; put it in those terms and he may understand you."

"Yes, I"ll try that out on Meyerstein, too. He"s in a h.e.l.l of a state about the losses the Banking Cartel are taking on this deal.... Well, I"ll call you when there"s anything new."

By 0330, it was daylight; the attacks against the northwest corner of the perimeter stopped entirely. Wallingsby had the three-hundred-odd Skilkan laborers at work; he had gathered up all the tarpaulin he could find, and had the two sewing-machines in the tentmaker"s shop running on sandbags. Jules Keaveney, to von Schlichten"s agreeable surprise, had taken hold of his ARP a.s.signment, and was doing an efficient job in organizing for fire-fighting, damage-control and first aid. Colonel Jarman had his airjeeps and combat-cars working in ever-widening circles over the countryside, shooting up everything in sight that even looked like contragravity equipment. Some of these patrols had to be recalled, around 1030, when sporadic nuisance-sniping began from the side of the mountain to the west. And, along with everything else, Paula Quinton managed, along with her other work, to get a complete digest prepared of the situation elsewhere in the Terran-occupied parts of the planet.