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 payload 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 cockroaches? 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 spaceship, and either works on the outside in spacesuits, 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 spaceship, 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 spaceship. 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 “mass-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 spaceship 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 snatched 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 space-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 anticipated. 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 classified-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 AE, for instance. And then, after it was declassified, 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 masses 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 Smuts 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
