"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."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"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 north-east. 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 where we are 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.

XII

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" 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 a.s.sociating 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 ha.s.sle, 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-cla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 his 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 slide-rules. 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.