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 c.o.c.kroaches? 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 s.p.a.ceship, and either works on the outside in s.p.a.cesuits, 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 s.p.a.ceship, 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 s.p.a.ceship. 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 "ma.s.s-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 s.p.a.ceship 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.p.a.ce-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 antic.i.p.ated. 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 cla.s.sified-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 decla.s.sified, 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 ma.s.ses 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 s.m.u.ts 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 pa.s.s 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 s.m.u.ts 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Lourenco 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 bal.u.s.trade 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.

XIV.

The Reviewers Panned h.e.l.l Out of It

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."