Part 17 (1/2)
The book was a novel--a jumbo-size historical novel, of some seven or eight hundred pages. Its dust-jacket bore a slightly-more-than-bust-length picture of a young lady with crimson hair and green eyes and jade earrings and a plunging--not to say power-diving--neckline that left her affiliation with the cla.s.s of Mammalia in no doubt whatever. In the background, a mushroom-topped smoke-column rose, and away from it something intended to be a four-motor propeller-driven bomber of the First Century was racing madly. The t.i.tle, he saw, was _Dire Dawn_, and the author was one Hildegarde Hernandez.
”Well, it has a picture of an A-bomb explosion an it,” he agreed.
”It has more than that; it has the whole business. Case specifications, tampers, charge design, detonating device, everything.
Why, end-papers even have diagrams: copies of the original Nagasaki-bomb drawing. Look.”
Von Schlichten looked. He had no more than the average intelligent layman's knowledge of nuclear physics--enough to recharge or repair a conversion-unit--but the drawings looked authentic enough. They seemed to be copies of ancient blueprints, lettered in First Century English, with Lingua Terra translations added, and marked TOP SECRET and U. S.
ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS and MANHATTAN ENGINEERING DISTRICT.
”And look at this!” Pickering opened at a marked page and showed it to him. ”And this!” He opened where another slip of paper had been inserted. ”Everything we want to know, practically.”
”I don't get this.” He wasn't sick, any more; just bewildered. ”I read some reviews of this thing. All the reviewers panned h.e.l.l out of it--'World War II Through a Bedroom Keyhole'; 'Henty in Black Lace Panties'--that sort of thing.”
”Yeh, yeh, sure,” Pickering agreed. ”But this Hernandez has illusions of being a great serious historical novelist, see. She won't try to write a book till she's put in years of research--actually, about six months' research by a herd of librarians and college-juniors and other such literary coolies--and she boasts that she never yet has been caught in an error of historical background detail.
”Well, this opus is about the old Manhattan Project. The heroine is a sort of super-Mata-Hari, who is, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, in the pay of the n.a.z.is, the Soviets, the Vatican, Chiang Kai-Shek, the j.a.panese Emperor, and the Jewish International Bankers, and she has affairs with everybody from Joe Stalin to Joe McCarthy, and of course, she is in on every step of the A-bomb project. She even manages to stow away on the Enola Gay, with the help of a general she's spent fifty incandescent pages seducing.
”In order to tool up for this production-job, La Hernandez did her researching just where Lourenco Gomes probably did his--University of Montevideo Library. She even had access to the photostats of the old U. S. data that General Lanningham brought to South America after the debacle in the United States in A.E. 114. Those end-papers are part of the Lanningham stuff. As far as we've been able to check mathematically, everything is strictly authentic and practical. We'll have to run a few more tests on the chemical-explosive charges--we don't have any data on the exact strength of the explosives they used then--and the tampers and detonating device will need to be tested a little. But in about half an hour, we ought to be able to start drawing plans for the case, and as soon as they're finished, we'll rush them to the s.h.i.+pyard foundries for casting.”
Von Schlichten handed the book back to Pickering, and sighed deeply.
”And I thought everybody here had gone off his rocker,” he said. ”We will erect, on the ruins of Keegark, a hundred-foot statue of Senorita Hildegrade Hernandez.... How did you get onto this?”
Pickering pointed to a young man with dull brick colored hair, who was punching out some kind of a problem on a small computing machine.
”Piet van Reenen, over there; he has a girl-friend 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 p.o.r.nography. 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 made up and all 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 a.s.sembly-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 die-hard 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 2100, the last organized resistance had been wiped out, a 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 s.h.i.+p lifting out from Keegark, presumed one of the Boer-cla.s.s freighters, either the _Jan s.m.u.ts_ 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p-radar, and they may think they can slip down the Konk Valley either undetected or mistaken for one of our s.h.i.+ps from North Ullr.”
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 north-western corner of Takkad Sea, between Kankad's Town and Keegark.