Part XXIX

Chapter 1

The next two days were the most horrible in Jonnie's life– cage, drone, and all!

Stormalong had simply flown into thin air and vanished.

He didn't answer on radio even when Jonnie said his name in clear.

The bank office in Luxembourg was open and answering but there was just a girl there, and she didn't speak any tongue anyone at Kariba could speak– French?– and even though they said "MacAdam" and she tried to tell them something back, they couldn't make it out.

Jonnie could not leave here.

The emissaries in the conference room would go in and out. They were working on and on with the trial. They didn't pay much attention to him.

Jonnie slept in the ops room and only got out when Chief Chong-won would spell him for a few minutes by standing in case anything urgent came through.

Truth told, there was not too much coming through that Jonnie had to handle. Even had he gotten urgent requests, he couldn't have done anything about them, for he had no available pilots, troops, or defense forces. He was actually the only one defending the planet. The woman, Tinny, was lots of help, but there was a limit to the number of hours anyone could stay awake, even a Buddhist nun.

Angus was spending some time with the transshipment rig. He had left the gyrocage on a Tolnep mountain to learn the full fate of the moon Asart. “I wanted to see whether there were earthquakes on Tolnep,” he told

Jonnie. “When you change mass in a system, you could expect changes in gravitational stresses. I read someplace that if our own moon got knocked out into space or something, it would cause earthquakes here. But Tolnep didn't shake up our gyrocage."

A few hours later, Jonnie had heard a motor running in the bowl and, edgy, had gone out to check. Angus was running a blade scraper. He was pushing a huge piece of the capital ship through the under-cable entrance; it was a piece that had hit the shore. Chief Chong-won was very sharp with him for it was scraping up the pavement and Chief Chong-won had no men to repair the scars.

Angus said something about wanting to see whether the ultimate bomb were still active.

“Well, don't bring anything back here that touches that area,” said Jonnie and went back in to answer a radio query.

The next morning Angus had come in to eat a bowl of noodles with him and tell him about it.

“I put that scrap metal way out beyond Asart," said Angus. “I thought it would fall through the gas-'

“What gas?” said Jonnie.

“Oh, Asart just seems to be gas now,” said Angus. “Just a huge cloud of gas. It was blackish for a while but then it cleared up. You can see it is a cloud of gas but you can see through it. It 's pretty obvious now why the Psychlos never used that bomb. As mining people they needed metal, not gas!”

“So what happened to the scrap iron?” asked Jonnie.

“I thought it would fall through the gas and go on down and hit the surface of

Tolnep. It didn't. It fell all right, but it just went to the center of the gas cloud and it's still there. Want to see a picture of it?”

“Just don't fire into that cloud and bring any of that stuff back here on recoil!” said Jonnie.

“Oh, I won't,” promised Angus. “But what I believe is, once that ultimate bomb converted everything to gas, it went null. It doesn't have anything to work on and the reaction isn't self-starting again once it's complete. The metal trace says that it's all very low-order gases now. Hydrogen.”

“Then the ultimate bomb brings about low-order fission,” said Jonnie. “It stimulates a split of the atoms of heavier metals. I’m no expert, but that's what it seems you're describing.”

“Anyway,” said Angus, “all I’m trying to tell you is that the mass of the moon didn't change so far as gravitic influence is concerned. In that coldness, the resulting gas has kind of gone liquid and the moon is a sort of bubble with a much bigger diameter. I think you could fly through it.”

“Great,” said Jonnie. “Don't.”

Angus finished up his noodles. “I just thought you'd like to know that destroying that moon won't upset our coordinate tables. A shift of mass could throw every coordinate out eventually.”

“Ah,” said Jonnie. “You do have a point! That was clever of you.”

Angus thought so, too.

But news from other areas was not so encouraging. It was not that anything bad was adding up. It was just the nonexistence of news so far as the fate of Chrissie and the people in Scotland was concerned, and the fate of his people in the Russian base.

They had found the Chief of Clanfearghus outside, very close to death, and after emergency transfusions had rushed him up to the old underground hospital in Aberdeen. There was not much hope.

They had drilled holes through rubble that blocked the tunnels and they hoped they had gotten air hoses into the shelters. There were rumors they had heard voices, but there had been no mine radios in those shelter areas to begin with and you couldn't tell much while trying to shout down an air hose, pumps running and all.

The city was just towers of smoke, as was Castle Rock.

They were having a terrible time trying to open the approach tunnels, working around the clock.

The Russian-base news was not much better. They had put the surface coal fires out but the mine was burning underground, and they did not know whether it was reaching the actual levels of the base. The huge doors were so warped they could not be opened even with burning torches, and they were now driving in a brand-new entrance to bypass them, a drift through solid rock, working over ground that was still burning under them down deep. The ventilator shafts were too tortuous and too barred with armor and filter to be of any use.

To add to the tension in Kariba, the original small gray man, Dries Gloton, had vanished. The one antiaircraft gunner on duty said that the man had simply come out about dawn, ordered a new set of signal lights and radio beacon signals near where his ship was parked, and sailed off, wham, into the sky, and they couldn't even track where he had gone to. The lights were out there now, two reds flashing, and the radio beacon was telling all ships to stay clear from a conference area.

Lord Voraz, when asked, had shrugged and said it probably came under the heading of prerogatives of a branch manager and was probably bank business, and he had gone on eating the perpetual bites-between-meals the cook served him up. He was no help.

But what gave Jonnie a shock in those two days was the sudden arrival of Captain Rogodeter Snowl.

The conference had called him in as a witness and they didn't tell Jonnie and didn't tell the antiaircraft gunner.

The first Jonnie knew of it was the antiaircraft gun going off.

Lord Dom came rolling into operations like a liquid jelly fish, roaring and rumbling to cease fire!

Jonnie got the gunner to quit. Fortunately, it had been at very extreme range and Angus had not been using the rig. But Rogodeter Snowl, omitting to ask permission to land a small launchcraft, almost got himself shot down.

“He's been called as a witness!” shouted Lord Dom. “Don't you know there's a trial going on?”

Trial or no trial, Jonnie stuck a Smith and Wesson with thermit bullets in his belt and plugs in his ears and went out to personally con the launchcraft down with a hand radio and make sure the Tolnep remained blind to their defenselessness.

Suppressing an urge to shoot Rogodeter on sight, he limited himself to confiscating his vision filter, making sure the Tolnep had no spare, and personally escorting him to the conference room. He left the Tolnep there but told them that when they were through with him, they better call ops to escort him out because Rogodeter was going to be stone blind all the time he was around Kariba.