Part 129 (1/2)

The bank had already moved back to Zurich and Jonnie would have liked to live there too because of the nearby mountains.

Jonnie halted. Dries Gloton must have been here today for there was a burned spot in the lawn. Dries, after turning over his sector branch office, had been appointed Galactic Bank Liaison with the Earth Planetary Bank. He had been the finder of the ”one,” but a bank executive couldn't accept such rewards- they would undermine customer confidence- and Voraz had raised Dries' salary to a hundred thousand credits a year- quite enough to maintain his yacht and anything else. Dries had left the yacht here and teleported home, and while he was gone his Selachee crew had been teaching the Chatovarians gambling games and winning a lot of their pay. But the Chinese engineers had been winning it back from the Selachees so Jonnie had kept out of it.

Dries rambled all over in his yacht- an oddity to use a s.p.a.ce craft to go to the corner store for a bottle of schnapps, but that was Dries. He had taken the job on the condition that he would have long weekends and he seemed to always be going to northern Scotland. He said he was starting a ”peppermint industry” on the side, but Jonnie didn't believe him. He was sure some thing else was involved. Today he had probably brought Chrissie some b.u.t.ter or something.

On the other hand, he might have been settling some accounts with Mr. Tsung. Dries kept certain customers and Mr. Tsung was one of them. Jonnie's account was cared for by fifteen Selachees who worked down at the minesite, and Dries had nothing to do with that- it ran about a trillion a day income now and was growing. Mr. Tsung's account was, however, somehow interesting to Dries: Jonnie had offered Mr. Tsung a salary and Mr. Tsung had been very surprised for he said a chamberlain usually paid his boss, from which Jonnie got the explanation of how some guests were always invited and some weren't. But it was Mr. Tsung's daughter that was making money. She was named Lu, after the last Empress of the Han Dynasty, and she was becoming famous. She worked in a little paG.o.da-like structure out back that was really a disguised antiaircraft pit, and she turned out pictures of tigers in the snow and birds flying and things like that on both silk and rice paper, and they were collector's items, bringing in a thousand credits at a crack. She also worked around the house and helped Chrissie and cut hair.

Jonnie decided he'd better have a metal pad installed for Dries to land on. He got along fine with him now. No use to tell him off.

He couldn't get through the courtyard. Lin Li, Mr. Tsung's son-in-law, had all the banquet hall furniture out and was working it over with molecular metal spray. The young man had an audience of a couple of awed Chatovarians. He could ”paint” pictures, freehand, with a metal spray gun and a piece of card board to catch the splatters. He was very quick. Right now he was doing a scene Jonnie knew he must have gotten from pictures of tapestries- a lot of knights. He was putting it on the huge banquet tabletop.

He had stopped doing dragon medallions by hand. As they were all the same, a couple of Chatovarian mechanics, awed by his ability, had gotten him to do a perfect one and then had made a machine to turn them out at about ten thousand an hour. The demand out in the universe was such that they were back-ordered even so.

Jonnie couldn't get through without interrupting Lin Li. So he stood there watching. Chrissie and Mr. Tsung had been talking about the possibility of some of these Chatovarians getting out of hand at a party and eating up the furniture. That must be what this metal plating was all about! They had to suit the dwelling to the many guests they always had.

The vague feeling of disappointment hit him again. He had been certain, when he rose, that this was a sort of special day. That something wonderful was going to happen. It hadn't.

Lin Li had just started on a ferocious figure of a charging knight. He was using a scarlet metal, putting blood on a blade. It made Jonnie think of the red ink coming in so far on the Chatovarian company, ”Desperation Defense.” If he could just unravel motors he could put them over into pa.s.senger transport. But he was condemned if he would continue with reaction engines.

Lin Li was guiding the molecular spray, now gray, to make the armor. The Chatovarians were looking on with awe. One of them was holding a spare gun, ready to hand it to Lin Li. They weren't a.s.sistants. They just wished they could do things like that. The Chatovarian closed the trigger of the gun to test it.

Suddenly Jonnie knew it had happened. The nice thing!

He sped back out the arch and raced all around the palace side and jumped the creek and popped into the back door.

Chrissie, hair tied back, was filling a big bowl, held by Mr. Tsung, from a pot on the fire.

”Chrissie!” said Jonnie. ”Get your things!”

Pattie was sitting over in the corner. Pattie never said anything these days. She just looked down. Tinny, the Buddhist communicator, had been trying to talk to her as she often did.

”Tinny!” said Jonnie. ”Call the minesite! Get me a marine attack plane on the pad in twenty minutes! Call Dr. MacKendrick in Aberdeen and tell him to come right away to Victoria!”

”Pattie doesn't feel well,” said Chrissie.

”Bring her along!” said Jonnie.

”Is it a diplomatic conference or a scientific one?” said Mr. Tsung, monotone through the vocoder.

”Medical!” said Jonnie.

Mr. Tsung put down the bowl and raced off to put a white coat and a pair of spectacles- which had no gla.s.s in them- in a sack. That was proper dress he had seen in ancient pictures.

”Jonnie!” said Chrissie. ”This is venison stew!”

”We'll eat it on the plane! We're headed for Africa!”

Chapter 3.

Jonnie headed the marine attack plane slightly east of south and turned on his viewscreens. This copilot was new, from the French refugees in the Alps, named Pierre Solens: he was quite young, recently trained; he still had a little trouble speaking Psychlo. Usually his duties consisted of simply s.h.i.+fting the minesite planes about, but as compound duty pilot it had been up to him to deliver the s.h.i.+p to Jonnie's house; he had not dreamed that in the next few minutes he would be flying copilot to the Tylerand heading for Africa. He had started out all right but when he saw how Jonnie took off he had become overawed. He had never seen a plane lofted that way, like firing a bullet! And now they were flying hypersonic at only fifteen thousand feet. Would they clear the French and It alian Alps?

”We're awfully low,” he timidly offered.

”People in back,” said Jonnie. ”Can't let them get too cold. Get to work with those viewscreens so we won't be running into any drones.”

Drones, drones, drones! All his life Jonnie had been being looked at by drones! It was no exception now. The Chatovarian defense system was only half-complete: despite buying the company, it was an expensive system, almost three times as costly as the one the small gray men had described, but it was about ten times as good. Automatic blast cannon that fired fifteen hundred miles into s.p.a.ce could shoot down a s.p.a.ce fleet with one salvo; atmosphere drones that fired; s.p.a.ce drones that patrolled orbits; probes that scanned anything moving within ten light-years. Real armor cable would make every city untouchable.

As the system was incomplete, a lot of emergency stand-in drones were about and they were attracted to anything flying. A huge green flas.h.i.+ng light was going on top of the plane, and the box there, newly installed, was sending out the ”code of the day,” which was so fast and so scrambled and changing microsecond to microsecond that an attacker could not hope to duplicate it. If the drones didn't see and hear it, they'd shoot.

Ah, yes, here came the Mediterranean emergency drones, three of them, shooting over to ”have a look.” The copilot was slow and Jonnie tuned a k.n.o.b to focus them.

Chatovarian drones, all right. Each one had a big eye painted on its nose. But those big, staring eyes were not a Chatovarian fixation on decoration: a pilot would instinctively shoot into the center of them, and if a pilot did, the drone used the shot as a return carrier wave to send a surge back that blew up the attacker's own ammunition and thereby his s.h.i.+p. Don't shoot at one of those eyes!

Nevertheless they were a bit disconcerting, glaring out of the viewscreen. They nudged in like sniffing dogs, and then satisfied by automatically cross-verifying with each other, they fell away and returned to their patrol sectors.

The French pilot was looking back at the Alps. They hadn't hit any!

But Jonnie had his screens on the orbit drones now. They seemed to be disinterested, satisfied by the code of the day.

And what was this? He had a s.p.a.ce probe on the screen. He hadn't known you could see one. Was it hostile?

Like any star drone or probe, these things had a ”lens” that was made of a ”light magnet.” This reacted on light beams and pulled them in from a zone many miles in diameter and concentrated them, magnetically corrected for aberration, into a spot smaller than a dot on paper. In effect, it made a lens many, many miles in diameter. The problem was too much light rather than too little, and they had blinders or filters that dropped into place to keep them from burning out their receivers or recording discs should they turn toward a sun too close. In that way one could get magnifications into the tens of trillions.

One of the contractors had drilled Jonnie in on command controls and a box of these existed overhead. Jonnie flipped a switch and tapped the probe's receiver and s.h.i.+fted the image to his own central viewscreen.

It was their own s.p.a.ce probe all right.

He was looking at the copilot and himself behind their own viewscreen. Yet that s.p.a.ce probe was over ten thousand miles away. It must be at the near end of a run. Friendly, so he threw the tap off.

He didn't really think anybody would attack Earth now. The peace treaty had gone in, as promised, with claws! Very, very popular. The delegates had even taken home copies of the end of Psychlo and the death of Asart.

The bank was shoveling out food loans like a waterfall. Consumer products had not yet begun to roll. That would take time. He hoped he could get at the secret of how one built a teleportation motor: that would open the door to a lot of consumer products. And even more important, keep the vehicles they had here operating. These planes wouldn't last forever.

”Take over,” he told the French pilot, Pierre, and went back into the body of the plane.

Chrissie stirred herself and unwrapped a bowl. ”I'm afraid the venison stew might be cold now.”

Jonnie sat down in one of the huge bucket seats. Pattie was down at the back of the plane, just sitting there, looking down. It worried him. Sometimes she went for walks at night. Sometimes he could hear her in her room, crying. Because she was only ten he had thought she would recover. But she hadn't.

Mr. Tsung, he saw, was going to use this time-s.p.a.ce to catch up with his diplomatic and social duties, for here he came with about ten pounds of paper. Jonnie put his attention on the stew. It wasn't cold.

”The week's dispatch box came in from Snautch,” he said.

So that was what Dries was doing coming down from Zurich. ”Send the business matters down to the minesite office; it's their job.”

”Oh, I did, I did,” said Mr. Tsung. ”These are all social and diplomatic. Invitations to weddings, banquets, christenings. Requests to address meetings-”