“He won't fool with that,” grinned Ker.
“He'll be afraid he'll let his breathe-gas out and air in!”
It was afternoon by the time they completed the dome readers. They tested them with the probe and receivers. They went blind and undetectable with the probe on and read everything in their path with the scope off.
They took a short lunch break and turned off the disc that had been blasting their ears in. There was suddenly more din outside.
Ker went to the door and unbarred it. Lars got a whiff of breathe-gas and backed up. He demanded Ker to come out and talk to him right now.
“You're interrupting our work,” said Ker. But he went out in the hall.
“You've got your nerve!” said Lars, quivering with rage. “You gave me a handful of junk that had radioactive dust on it! You got me in trouble! When I showed it to Terl this morning, it started to explode when it got near his breathe-mask. You knew it would! He almost bit me!”
“All right, all right, all right!” said Ker. “We will clean up everything in here before we turn on any big amount of breathe-gas."
“Those were radioactive bullets!” shouted Lars.
“All right!” said Ker. “They came in through the dome. We'll find them all. Don't get so excited!”
“Trying to get me in trouble,” said Lars.
“You stay out of here,” said Ker. “It rots human bones, you know.”
Lars didn't know. He backed up. He left.
Angus said, when Ker had come back in and barred the door, “Were they really radioactive bullets?”
Ker laughed and began to shove goo-food in his mask. Jonnie marveled. Ker was the only Psychlo he had ever seen that could chew kerbango with a mask on and now he was eating goo-food and talking with a mask on.
“It was flitter,” said Ker, laughing. “It’s a compound that throws off blue sparks when sunlight hits it. I dusted some of it on the bullets. Harmless. A kid's toy.” He was laughing even harder. Then he sighed. "We had to explain the bullet holes, so we had to 'find' some bullets. But that Terl-he is so clever that he sometimes can be awful dumb!”
Jonnie and Angus laughed with him. They could imagine Terl seeing the sparks when Lars held out the “finds” Ker had given him and the sunlight setting off the blue sparks. Terl's conviction that the world was after him must have driven him halfway through the back wall of the cage! He would have thought his own breathe-mask exhaust was setting off uranium!
They were into the duct work now and they really did start hammering and pounding. The trick was to inset lead-irised readers into the duct vent intakes and exhausts around the room so that they could not be seen and yet, peering out of the dark depths of the vents, could read an exact portion of the workrooms. The ducts actually required some very fancy work of their own. Although Ker was a midget, he could bend sheet iron with his paws like it was paper.
Ker fixed it so the ducts, as they entered and left the room, were rickety. If you touched them they appeared to be in danger of coming apart and falling out. But in actual fact the final fittings were armor-welded.
They set the readers into these, made sure the irises worked, put the ducts in place, and began on the circulator pumps. It was late evening by this time, but they worked straight on through. By about one in the morning they had completed a usable circulator system that would go on working.
They felt they were running behind in time so they didn't stop. They had the problem now of centralizing the transmissions of all the readers and getting them clear over to the Academy, miles away.
None of these readers could be powered and picked up from more than a few hundred feet away. They all had different frequencies to keep them apart and this meant a bulky feeder system.
Jonnie worked on the probe some more and put an on/off remote in it that would turn off and on the multichanneled feeder box. That was the easiest part. One mustn't have radio waves flying about with a probe on.
The tough part of it was getting the transmission through to the Academy. They solved it by using ground waves. Ground waves differ from air waves in that they can travel only through the ground. The “aerial” to send is a rod driven in the earth and the “aerial” to receive is simply another. It takes a different wavelength band so there was no danger of anything detecting it. Since ground waves were not in general use by the Earth Psychlos it required a feverish fabrication of components, converting normal radio to ground wave.
It was the fall of the year and it was still dark when Angus and Ker went screeching off to the Academy to install the receivers and recorders, one unit in a toilet, one in an unused telephone box, and the third under a loose tile in front of the altar in the chapel.
Jonnie meanwhile buried the feeder outside the dome in the ground. He had the pretext ready of “looking for power cables” but he didn't need it. The world slept. He shoved in fuel cartridges to run it for half a year or more, wrapped it in waterproofing, buried it in the hole, pounded in the ground aerial, and restored the turf. Nobody could detect the grass had even been touched– a hunter's skill in making deadfalls came in handy. Inside again, he checked. Every lead iris was working flawlessly. The readers were powered. They went on and off at the feeder. He let them run to give Angus and Ker a signal to set their recorders to, over at the Academy.
Jonnie busied himself with placing and armor-welding the desks and drawing board in place. No molecular cutter would ever dent those welds!
At eight o'clock Angus and Ker sauntered in as though just arriving for the day. They bolted the door and both turned huge grins on Jonnie.
“It works!” said Angus. “We watched you laboring away and even read the serial number of your welding torch.
We got all fifteen readers on the screen!” He thrust out his hand. “And here's the discs!”
They replayed them. They could even see the grain in material, much less read numbers!
They heaved a sigh of relief.
Then Angus took Jonnie by the shoulder and pointed to the door. “We needed your skill and ideas up to now.
But from here on, it's just putting cream on the oatmeal to convince Terl. Every minute you stay here is a minute too long.”
Ker was already putting the rigged probe back in exactly the same place, arranging the cabinet just as it had been. “When I took on this job and suspected you'd be coming,” he said as he worked, “I fueled a plane. It 's the one exactly opposite the hangar door– 93 is the last of its serial numbers. All waiting for you. They don't want us, they want you!”
“It will take us only forty-five minutes or an hour to rig the rest,” said Angus. “You get out of here and that's an order from Sir Robert– to get you gone the moment you can leave.”
Ker now had relocked the door of the cabinet and was prying at the corner with a jimmy to make it appear it had been unsuccessfully tampered with without being opened. “Goodbye!” he said emphatically.
Yes, it was true. They could handle the rest and were in no danger. But it was also true that it had to be completed. He would get ready and stand by in the plane. “Come down and tell me when it's all done,” he said.
“You got it!” said Angus.
Jonnie gave them a salute, and went out. They locked the door behind him. He went down the passage to Char's room to get his kit. It was 8:23 in the morning. Already two hours too late.
Chapter 3
By five o'clock that morning, Brown Limper Staffor knew he had found Tyler.
For days now he had been unable to sleep, to even sit down quietly or eat. Forgotten were all other cares of state, forgotten were all other tasks that ordinarily occupied his time. With a wild, intent glare in his eyes, for nearly twenty-four hours a day, he had concentrated only upon closing the trap which had been set. Crime must be punished! A malefactor must be brought to book. The safety and integrity of the state must be given priority. Almost every text he had studied on government, all advice he had been given, proved to him only one thing: he had to get Tyler!