People would slaughter me!”
“You want to see inside his head,” said Angus. “Well, why didn't you say so?” Angus went off muttering about electricity.
He told a standby pilot at the heliport that he needed to get to the compound fast. The pilots were very few and they were being run ragged. They were zipping off to all parts of the world; they had a sort of international airline going that was beginning to visit every remaining pocket of men on the planet at least once a week. They were ferrying World Federation Coordinators and chiefs and tribal leaders as fast as they could. More pilots were in training, but right now they only had thirty plus the two in hospital. So a casual request, even from a Scot, even from a member of the original combat force, was not likely to get much heed. Travel from the underground base to the compound was usually by ground car.
Angus told him it had to do with Jonnie, and the pilot said why hadn't he said so and pushed him into a plane and said he would wait for him to come back.
With grim purpose, Angus went to the compound section where they kept the captive Psychlos. A small area of the old dormitory level had been rigged to circulate breathe-gas and “unreconstructed” Psychlos were there under heavy guard. They numbered about sixty now, for occasional ones were brought here from distant minesites when they surrendered peacefully. Terl was captive elsewhere.
Angus got an air mask and the Scot guard let him in. The place was very dim and the huge Psychlos sat around in attitudes of despair. One didn't walk in the place without being covered by the guard. The prisoners expected a Psychlo counterattack and were not too cooperative.
The Scot engineer located Ker and dug him out of his apathy. He demanded of Ker to tell him whether he knew of any mining equipment that would let one look through solid objects. Ker shrugged. Angus told him who it was for and Ker sat there for a while, his amber eyes thoughtful.
Then suddenly he wanted to be reassured as to who this was for, and Angus told him it was for Jonnie. Ker was turning a tiny gold band around in his claws. Suddenly he sprang up and demanded that Angus give him an escort and a breathe-mask.
Ker went down to the shops and in a storeroom there dug up a strange machine. He explained it was used to analyze the internal structure of mineral samples and to find crystalline cracks inside metals. He showed Angus how to work it. You put the emanation tube under the object to be examined and you read the results on the top screen. There was also a trace paper reader that showed metals in alloys or rocks. It worked on some wavelength he called sub-proton field emanation, and this was intensified by the lower tube, and the influence went through the sample and you read it on the top screen. Being Psychlo, it was quite massive, and Ker carried it for him to the waiting plane. A guard took Ker back and Angus returned to the military base.
They tried it with some cats they had that were cleaning the rat population out, and the cats afterward seemed cheerful enough. The screen showed the skull outline very nicely. They tried it on one of the wounded Scots who volunteered and they found a piece of stone in his hand from a mine injury, and he too seemed fine afterward.
About 4:00 that afternoon they used it on Jonnie. By 4:30 they had a three-dimensional picture and the trace paper.
A very relieved Dr. MacKendrick pointed it out to Angus. “A piece of metal! See it? A sliver just below one of the trephine holes. Well! We'll just get him ready and I can have that out with a scalpel soon enough!”
“Metal?” said Angus. “Scalpel? On Jonnie? No you don't! Don't you dare touch him! I’ll be right back!”
With the metal trace paper flying behind him, Angus fifteen minutes later charged in on the Chamco brothers. They worked in a separate breathe-gas dome at the compound, industriously trying to assist Robert the Fox to put things back together.
Angus shoved the trace under their pug nosebones: “What metal is this?”
The Chamcos examined the trace squiggles. “Ferrous daminite," they said. “A very strong support alloy.”
“Is it magnetic?” demanded Angus. And they said yes, of course it was.
By six o'clock Angus was back in the hospital. He had a heavy electrocoil he had just made. It had handgrips on it.
Angus showed MacKendrick how to guide it and MacKendrick worked out the best path to bring the sliver out with the least damage to tissue.
A few minutes later they had the broad sliver in their hands, withdrawn by the magnet.
Later the Chamco brothers identified it with closer analysis as a piece of a battle plane skid strut “which has to be very strong and very light.”
Jonnie had not been conscious enough to tell anyone what he had done on the drone and Chrissie had shooed off the historian when he tried to find out earlier. So it was a bit of a mystery as to how a sliver piece of a strut could have been daggered into Jonnie's head.
But whatever they had done to him, Chrissie was extremely relieved. The fever he had had dropped. His breathing improved and his color got better.
The following morning he came out of the coma and smiled a little at Chrissie and MacKendrick and dropped into a natural sleep.
Planetary radio was not slow in crackling with the news. Their Jonnie was out of danger!
The pipe major paraded his pipes and drums all around the compound on the heels of the crier who was yelling it out to work parties. Bonfires blazed both there and in various other parts of the world, and a Coordinator in the Andes relayed the news that the chiefs of some peoples they had found there had declared this an annual celebration day, and could they come now and pay homage? A pilot standing by with a plane in the Mountains of the Moon in Africa had to get help from both Coordinators and chiefs of that small colony in order to get space to take off again, so mobbed had the field become with celebrating, jubilant people. The compound radio operators had to double up on shifts to handle the message traffic roaring in on them as a result of the announcement.
Robert the Fox just went around grinning at everybody.
Chapter 3
As the days wore on into weeks, it became obvious to the Council, originally composed of the parson, the schoolmaster, the historian, and Robert the Fox, and now augmented by several Clanchiefs who left deputies in Scotland, that Jonnie was brooding about something.
He would smile at them from his bed and talk to them when spoken to, but there was something deep in his eyes that was dull and moody.
Chrissie tried not to let them come very often, and when they did she was a bit impatient with them if they overstayed.
Some of the Russians and some Swedes were rebuilding parts of the Academy due to the desperate need for pilots. Until the ancient capital building in Denver could be rebuilt, the Council had a room at the Academy. They could get to both the compound and the underground military base from there, and all their berthing quarters were there.
At this particular meeting Robert the Fox was walking up and down, his kilt flaring out each time he turned, his claymore held snug enough by an ancient officer's belt from the base-which also held a Smith and Wesson-knocking against chairs. “Some thing is bothering him. He is not like the old Jonnie."
“Does he think we are doing something wrong?” said the Chief of Clanfearghus.
“No, no, it isn't that,” said Robert the Fox. “There's not a scrap of criticism for anyone in his makeup. It 's just he...he seems worried.”
The parson cleared his throat, “It just could be his side has something to do with it. He cannot much move his right arm and he cannot walk as yet. He is, after all, used to being about and very briskly as well. After all, the lad had a dreadful time of it, all alone, injured. I can't think how he managed. All that time in a cage, earlier... You're all expecting too much, too fast, gentlemen. He is a brave spirit and I have faith....”