They found some thread initials in it. Yes, it was Allison’s. Where’d Sir Robert get it?
Sir Robert blasted them very proper. He told them, and Bittie was shocked to learn that the Brigantes had sold Allison to the Psychlos! And the Psychlos must have wanted him for interrogation and God help Allison now. Sold Allison? A human being? To the monsters? Neither Bittie nor the coordinators could get their wits around that.
There was a dreadful row then. Sir Robert ordered the two coordinators to come along with them. The coordinators said this was their duty: to lift these people out; it was a council order! And Sir Robert thundered at them that he was the war chief of Scotland and he damned well wasn’t going to leave them here. The two coordinators tried to leave and Sir Jonnie and Sir Robert, using the cargo lashings Bittie hastily found, simply tied them up. They put them on top of the supplies at the rear of the plane.
They withdrew their defense perimeter and took off, and Bittie was not surprised to hear one of the pilots ask permission to strafe these creatures from the air. Sir Robert said no, if they tried that the creatures would just run under the trees; they weren’t equipped to handle them right now and they had other things to do; but if they’d done what they appeared to have done, they’d have a bloody feud on their filthy hands. Everybody was pretty upset about Allison.
When they had taken off and were flying back to the compound, Bittie got to pondering those people down there.
He leaned over to Sir Jonnie and said, “Sir Jonnie, how in all this rain can they be so dirty?”
2
The big marine-attack plane landed in the night near the branch mine. It was still deserted. The rain still came down. But there were quarreling sounds of animals over where the skirmish had been fought. The snarls and spits of angry leopards, the shattering barks of some other beast, the eerie cackling laughter of yet another predator. They were fighting over the bodies of the dead.
The flatbed with the flying platform and blast mortar was where it had been prepared, just inside the hangar door. There was no sign that the other flatbed had returned in retreat. It must still be following the convoy.
Jonnie looked through the deserted compound again. The lights were still on. The distant mine pumps still pounded away. Unless disturbed by some outside force, all such machinery would probably continue to run for decades.
The planetary traffic printer was still sitting there spewing out paper that recorded current traffic. Jonnie glanced through it. “MacIvor, can you please bring extra fuel to Moscow?” “This is the traffic controller at Johannesburg. Are there any planes en route this way? If not, I can close down for the night.” “Isaac, please come in, Isaac. Listen, Isaac, were there any serviceable ore freighters left in the Grozny minesite? And can they be converted for passengers? Please let me know by morning. We’re a wee bit shy of carriers right now.” “Lundy, we’re cancelling you on the Tibet run. We need you and your copilot back here to help with an airlift. Please acknowledge, laddie.” Most of it in the pilot jargon of Psychlo.
It struck Jonnie that this stream of messages would give an attacker a pretty good idea of what areas were actively operating. It was almost a catalogue of targets for Mark 32s.
If the convoy got through and these Psychlos mounted an overall attack, they could take back the planet.
He wondered whether he shouldn’t put out a general call on this set and order a seventy-two-hour radio silence. But no, the damage was done. These same messages were probably reeling out of the Lake Victoria minesite printer, too. And any transmission he made here might be picked up by the convoy, alerting it. Well, he would just have to succeed with the attack on the convoy, that was all.
He walked back through the empty, echoing levels. The Psychlos, he noticed, had mainly stripped the place of armament. They were leaving no blast guns or portable weapons behind to fall into Brigante hands. Lucky they’d overlooked the mortars in their haste.
The flatbed was out of the hangar now, waiting in the dark yard. Jonnie shut the doors of the compound—no use letting in the leopards and elephants and snakes.
He went back to the big plane and did a rapid review of the actions that were about to occur. He told them to fly in very low indeed—hugging ground—from way over to the east and come in behind the ambush point. He didn’t want that plane on convoy tank screens. Then deploy along this ridge . . . this one here that flanked the road . . . and when the convoy was well into the ravine, give them a flanking fire. What if they turned around and started back? Well, he’d be back there with a mortar on the flying platform to keep them from retreating.
What? an incredulous Robert the Fox was saying. One mortar against tanks? That’s impossible. The convoy would be able to get back into the forest and they’d never get them out. Oh. You want this plane to take off and help block that. Well, that’s all right. It is a battle plane.
“Just try to roll the tanks and trucks over without exploding them,” said Jonnie. “Use no radiation bullets. Just blast gun force. Keep your weapons on ‘Broad Blast,’ ‘No Flame,’ and ‘Stun.’ We don’t want to kill them. As soon as they’re all strung out along this ravine, block the road from the ambush. I’ll block it from the rear. The rest of you flank it from the ridge. This battle plane is to help if they get loose and head back toward the forest. Right?”
“Right, right, right.” A coordinator tried unsuccessfully to make up for the absence of the Russian coordinator, who was now with Ivan, and then said, “I’ll make sure the Russian coordinator explains it when we get to the others. . . . Oh, I’ve got it straight. I can tell them then.”
“Remember,” said Jonnie, “there’s a slim possibility that Allison is in that convoy, so keep your eye out for him and if he gets away in the fight, don’t shoot him.”
“Right, right, right.” And they’d get it explained to these Russians here when they caught up with Ivan.
“Smooth,” said Robert the Fox. “Oh, so very smooth. The bulk of our force can’t be briefed because the translator is elsewhere. What stupendous planning and coordination! I wish us luck. We will need it.”
Jonnie said, “But we’ve got the Psychlos outnumbered.”
“What?” exclaimed Robert the Fox. “There’s more than a hundred of them and only fifty or so of us.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Jonnie. “We’ve got them outnumbered one-half to one!”
They got it, and some Russians more advanced in English than the rest explained the joke to the other Russians. They all laughed. The rain had been getting them down. They felt better.
Jonnie was getting down to the flatbed where a Scot and four Russians, one of them a driver, waited, when a scurry in the plane drew his attention. It was Bittie MacLeod, all set to go with him, draped around with equipment.
This was something Jonnie did not want. The coming battle was nothing to drag the boy into. But there was a problem—the boy’s pride. Jonnie thought fast. This was almost harder to solve than the tactics!
Bittie’s world was filled with the romances of two thousand years ago, when knighthood was in flower, with flame-breathing dragons and pure knights and rescued fair damsels. Nothing wrong with that. He was a sweet little boy and his greatest ambition was to grow up and become a man like Dunneldeen or himself. Nothing wrong with that either. But his dreams risked bruising against the brutal realities of this world in which they fought, a world with its own brand of dragons. He would never live to become like “Prince” Dunneldeen or “Sir” Jonnie if he were not protected. But there was his pride. And it was showing now when he saw Jonnie’s pause, saw the search for an excuse to say no in Jonnie’s ice-blue eyes.
Hurriedly, Jonnie grabbed a mine radio from a seat and thrust it into the boy’s hands. Jonnie tapped the one in his own belt. He leaned very close to Bittie’s ear and whispered, “I need a reliable contact on this plane who can tell me, after the battle is joined, if anything is going wrong. Don’t use it until the first shot is fired. But if there
’s anything amiss after that, you tell me fast.” He put a finger to his lips.
Bittie was instantly bright, if a trifle conspiratorial. He nodded. “Oh, yes, Sir Jonnie!” and he faded back into the plane.
Jonnie hobbled down the squishy road to the flatbed. It was sitting there, lights stabbing through the sheets of rain. He checked his crew, got in, and nodded to the driver.
The flatbed, with its flying mine platform and mortar, roared, drowning out the snarling fight over in the woods.
They were off in a truck to do combat with tanks.
3
Brown Limper Staffor sat in his new palatial office and stared down at the offending object on the desk. He was revolted.
Things had been moving well lately. The domed government building—some said it had been the state capitol building—had been partially restored and even its dome painted white. The halls had been refinished. A chamber had been provided for council sessions—a very ideal chamber with a high dais and bench on one end and wooden seats before it. Huge, upholstered Psychlo executive desks had been carted in to furnish separate offices for council members (they were a bit dwarfing to sit at, but if one put a man-chair on a box behind them they were all right). A hotel had been opened that provided living space for dignitaries and important visitors, and under the ministrations of a cook from Tibet, it was serving very passable meals on real plates.
The tutelage he was getting while standing in the shadows of a post over at the compound at night was truly excellent. Utterly invaluable data about government. Terl hardly deserved the extreme conditions of living in a cage. The Psychlo had repented and was doing all he could to help. How misunderstood the Psychlos were!
The fruits of such learning were already showing up. It was taking a little time and it required a considerable amount of political skill. But Terl had traveled all over the universes as one of the most trusted executives of Intergalactic Mining, and the things he knew about governments and politics were far in excess of anything else available.
Take this matter of having too numerous a council. The tribal chiefs from over the world resented having to come here and spend endless time wrangling in the chamber; they had their own tribal affairs to look after. They were also too numerous, thirty of them, to really get anything done. And it was almost with joy that they divided the world up into five continents with one representative from each. From an unwieldy throng of thirty, the council had been reduced to a more easily handled five. And when it was explained to them that their own tribal work was far more vital than this humdrum paper shuffling at the council, and that the most competent men were needed at home, they had gladly pushed some cousins and such into the five continental seats.
The five-man council, of course, was a bit unwieldy, and it was in the process now of appointing a two-man executive. With a little more work and the application of some invaluable tips Terl had given him, sometime in the coming weeks, Brown Limper would find himself the council representative with authority to act independently in the name of the council, assisted only by the council secretary who, of course, did not need to have a vote and would be required just to sign his name. It would be so much neater.
The Scots had been a bit of trouble. They had protested Scotland being included with Europe, but it was shown that it always had been. This made their representative a German from a tribe in the Alps. Well, majority votes of the old council had handled that, and now there were no more of those accursed Scots around challenging every sensible measure proposed by Brown Limper.
The tribes were satisfied. They had been given title to all the lands about them with absolute right to allocate them as they chose. They had each been given the exclusive ownership of the ancient cities and anything contained therein. This had made Brown Limper quite popular with the chiefs of most tribes—but not the Scots, of course. Nothing could please them. They had had the nerve to point out that this gave all property and the whole continent of America and everything in it to Brown Limper. But that was quashed by simply indicating that there were four tribes in America now—British Columbia, where two people had been found, the Sierra Nevada, where four people had been found, the little group of Indians to the south, and Brown Limper’s. That they all now lived in Brown Limper’s village had been quite beside the point!
The selection of a capital had been another victory. For some reason, some tribes thought the world capital should be in their area. Some even thought it should shift about. But when it was pointed out how much trouble and expense it was to maintain a capital, and that Brown Limper Staffor, out of the goodness of his heart and with philanthropy as his only motive, would let his tribe pay all the costs, there was no further argument. The world capital had been decreed to be “Denver,” although its name one of these days would be changed to “Staffor.”
The resolution of the old council, before it became only five, to establish a planetary bank, was what had started this trouble now before him.
A Scot named MacAdam had been called in, and he had advised them that the Galactic credits they had would be meaningless to Earth people at this time. Instead, he proposed that he and a German now residing in Switzerland, a German who had an awful lot of dairy cows and home cheese factories, be granted a charter. They would issue currency to a tribe to the amount of land it had in actual productive use, and in return, they would charge a small percent. It was a good idea, for any tribe could only get more currency by getting more area into productive use. The currency was then backed by “The Tribal Lands of Earth.” The bank was to be called the Earth Planetary Bank and the charter given it was quite broad and sweeping.
With amazing speed they had printed currency. The German had come in on it because he had a brother who had preserved the art of making woodcutting blocks that printed on paper. They had found warehouses full of untouched currency paper in an old ruin called London, and hand presses in a town once called Zurich. In no time at all, they were issuing currency.
The notes only had one denomination: one Earth credit. Apparently they had made one trial issue and it didn’t go. People didn’t know what to do with it. They had been bartering with horses and suchlike and they had to be taught what money was. So they had made a second issue.
It was a specimen of this second issue that was lying on Brown Limper’s desk and giving him much trouble. Not just trouble but a revulsion so deep it was making him ill. The woodblock bill was very nicely printed. It said Earth Planetary Bank. It had a figure 1 in each corner. It had One Credit spelled out in all the languages and calligraphy used by existing tribes. It had Legal Tender for All Debts, Private and Public on it, similarly repeated in the various tongues. It had Exchangeable for One Credit at the Bank Offices of Zurich and London or any Branch of the Earth Planetary Bank. It had Secured by the Tribal Lands of the Tribes of Earth as Attested in Production. It had By Charter of the Council of Earth. And it had the signatures of the two bank directors. All that was fine.
But it had, squarely in the center of it, in a big oval, a portrait of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler!
They had copied a picture of him somebody had taken with a picto-recorder. There he was in a buckskin hunting shirt, bareheaded, a silly look on his face somebody thought must be noble or something. And of all things he had a blast gun in his hand.
Worse! There was his name curled over the top of the picture: Jonnie Goodboy Tyler.
And even worse! On the scroll under the picture it said, Conqueror of the Psychlos.
Nauseating. Awful.
But how could the bank make such a blunder?
Not fifteen minutes ago, he had finished a conversation with MacAdam on the radio. MacAdam had explained that the first issue was not popular at all. So they had instantly gotten out this second issue. It seemed people might not know what money was, but they could comprehend Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, and in some places they were not using it as money, but putting it up on their walls, even framing it. Yes, bundles of it now had gone to every tribe. No, they
couldn’t be recalled, for it would hurt the bank’s credit.
Brown Limper had tried to explain that this was totally against the council’s intentions in chartering the bank. There had been a unanimous council resolution that there must be no more war. The resolution had meant “War between tribes is hereby forbidden,” but Brown Limper had seen that it was worded so as to include all war everywhere including interplanetary.
This bank note, he had explained with all the logic he could bring to bear, was contrary to that antiwar resolution. They had this . . . this . . . fellow brandishing a weapon and they were actually inciting war in the future against the Psychlos and who knew who else.
MacAdam had been sorry and so had the German in Zurich, but they really didn’t sound sorry. They had their charter, and if the council wanted to ruin its own credit, it would be unfortunate if funds were cut off to America in the future, so the charter must stay valid and unchanged and the bank must do what it saw fit to do in order to carry on its business. And it would be too bad when the world court, now in planning, convened, if it had as its first suit a member of the bank against the council for breach of trust and corollary expenses.
No, Brown Limper thought gloomily. They didn’t sound sorry.
He would take no more advice from council members about this. He would go down and get some while standing in the shadows of the post near the cage. But he didn’t have any real hope.
“Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. Conqueror of Psychlos.” Brown Limper spat on the bill.
He suddenly seized the bill and tore it frantically into little pieces.
Then he threw the pieces around with angry gestures.
After that he gathered them all up again and, with a set, malevolent expression on his face, burned them.
Then he pulverized the ashes with his fist. But somebody came in soon after and said with a delighted smile, “Have you seen the new bank note?” And waved one!
Brown Limper rushed out of the room and found a place to vomit.