"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 ma.s.ses 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sume 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 his amba.s.sador to pa.s.s 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-cla.s.s freighters, the _Jan s.m.u.ts_ 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 h.e.l.l 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 sc.r.a.pe 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--sooner than--it"s 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 program 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 ultraviolet 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 used 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 awhile, 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 set-up. We"re going to need the _Elmoran_ for patrol work south and east of Konkrook, and the _Gaucho_ and _Bushranger_ to the north and north-east, 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 program, 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."