Part 15 (2/2)

He stopped talking to von Schlichten, and began muttering to himself, running over the names of s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+rt 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.ces.h.i.+p, 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.ces.h.i.+p, 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.ces.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+pyard 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.ces.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+pyard. 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+elded or uns.h.i.+elded 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 Hiros.h.i.+ma 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.”

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