“Piet van Reenen, over there, he has a girlfriend whose taste runs to this sort of literary bubble-gum. She told him it was all in a book she’d just read, and showed him. We descended in force on the bookshop and grabbed every copy in stock. We are now running a sort of gaseous-diffusion process, to separate the nuclear physics from the pornography. I must say, Hildegarde has her biological data very well in hand, too.”
“I’ll bet she’d have fun writing a novel about these geeks,” von Schlichten said. “Well, how soon do you think you can have a bomb ready for us?”
“Casting the cases is going to slow us down the most,” Pickering said. “But, even with that, we ought to have one ready in three days, at the most. By two weeks, we’ll be turning them out on an assembly-line.”
“I hope we don’t need more than one. But you’d better produce at least half a dozen. And have some practice-bombs made up, out of concrete or anything, as long as they’re the right weight and airfoil and have some way of releasing smoke. Get them done as soon as you have your case designed. We want to be able to make a couple of practice drops.”
There was no use, he thought, of raising hopes which might prove premature. He told Paula Quinton, of course, and Themistocles M’zangwe, and, by telecast on sealed beam, King Kankad and Air-Commodore Hargreaves. Beyond that, there was nothing to do but wait, and hope that Hargreaves could keep Orgzild’s bombers away from Gongonk Island and Kankad’s Town and that Hildegarde Hernandez had been playing fair with her public. He visited the city, where a few pockets of diehard resistance were being liquidated, and where everybody who had not been too deeply and publicly involved in the znidd suddabit conspiracy was now coming forward and claiming to have been a lifelong friend of the Terrans and the Company. Von Schlichten returned to Gongonk Island, debating with himself whether to declare a general amnesty or to set up a dozen guillotines in the city and run them around the clock for a week. There were cogent arguments for and against either procedure.
By 21:00, the last organized resistance had been wiped out, and curfew had been imposed, and peace of a sort restored. There was still the threat from Keegark, but it was looking less ominous now than it had the evening before. Von Schlichten and Paula were having dinner in the Broadway Room, confident that there was nothing left to do that they could do anything about, when the extension phone that had been plugged in at their table rang.
“Colonel Quinton here,” Paula identified herself into it, and listened for a moment. “There has? When? … Well, where did it come from? … I see. And the direction? … Anything else?”
Apparently there was nothing else. She hung up, and turned to von Schlichten.
“The Sky-Spy just detected a ship lifting out from Keegark, presumed one of the Boer-class freighters, either the Jan Smuts or the Oom Paul Kruger. It was first picked up on contragravity at about a hundred feet, rising vertically from near the Palace. The supposition is the geeks had her camouflaged since the time Commander Prinsloo first bombarded Keegark with the Aldebaran. That was about twenty minutes ago; at last report, she’s fifty miles north of Keegark, headed up the Hoork River.”
Von Schlichten started thinking aloud: “That could be a feint, to draw our ships north after her, and leave the approach to Konkrook or Kankad’s open, but that would be presuming that they know about the Sky-Spy, and I doubt that, though not enough to take chances on. They know we have ground and ship-radar, and they may think they can slip down the Konk Valley either undetected or mistaken for one of our ships from North Uller.”
He picked up the phone. “Get me through on telecast to Air-Commodore Hargreaves, aboard the Procyon,” he said. “I’ll take it in the office; I’ll be up directly.” He rose. “Finish your dinner, and have the rest of mine sent up,” he told Paula.
Leaving the elevator, he rushed into the big headquarters room just as contact was established with the Procyon, on station over the northwestern corner of Takkad Sea, between Kankad’s Town and Keegark. The Aldebaran, he knew, was west of Keegark; the Northern Lights, now fitted with a pair of 155 mm guns, in addition to her 90’s, had just arrived at Kankad’s. He had the Aldebaran sent north along the crest of the mountain-range between the Hoork and Konk river-valleys, where she could cover both with her own radar and other detection-devices and exchange information with the Sky-Spy, and the Gaucho sent in what looked like the right course to intercept the Boer-class freighter from Keegark. The Northern Lights, also with screens tuned to the Sky-Spy, was sent to take over the Aldebaran’s regular station. Finally, he called Skilk and had the Northern Star sent south down the Hoork Valley.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait, and watch the screens. Paula Quinton put in an appearance shortly after he had finished calling Skilk, pushing a cocktail-wagon on which their interrupted dinners had been placed. They finished eating, and drank coffee, and smoked. Most of the rest of his staff who were not busy on the bomb-project or at the shipyards or with the occupation of Konkrook drifted in; they all sat and stared from one to another of the screens, which told, in radar-patterns and direct vision and telescopic vision and heat and radiation detection, the story of what was going on to the northeast of them.
Keegark was dark, on the vision-screen; evidently King Orgzild had invented the blackout, too. Not that it did him any good; the
