Jonnie smiled. It s just arithmetic. Here, I’ll show you-'
Chirk's eyes glazed. She fell forward across the desk.
There was no response from her. She was totally unconscious. They had to get a forklift in and take her to her room and put her to bed.
Three days later, MacKendrick told Jonnie, “She's just lying there in a coma. Maybe in time she'll come out of it. She seems to have had a heavy shock.”
Although he felt bad about it, Jonnie had an idea now of what the silver capsule in the females was. They were not to be taught any Psychlo mathematics ever!
The key to the whole Psychlo empire must be mathematics. And aside from their arithmetic, he couldn't make head or tail of their equations. It seemed to be a dead end.
Chapter 7
They had just completed the installation of a radio telescope when the courier came in.
Angus, his face red, first from sun at lake level and then from wind and snow up at the summit of nearby Mount Elgon, was very proud of himself. The German and Swedish pilots, with something to do besides train under the relentless Stormalong, had helped find and install the huge reflector bowls and relays from the peaks and down to the minesite.
Now that they had the frequencies, Angus was saying, they would soon be hearing everything those monkeys up there were saying to each other. He'd even have them on the screens!
Jonnie's ear caught the far-off approach of the plane above the overcast. He thanked Angus and the pilots and said they had done very well, and yes, now maybe they would know more about the intentions of their visitors.
Glencannon had taken over the ferrying of the vital discs from America. A copy was now going to Doctor MacDermott to bury in a deep underground vault and the originals were coming through to Jonnie in Africa.
Glencannon had lots of news. Pattie had been extremely ill for weeks but Chrissie was nursing her and there was hope. And Chrissie sent her love and said she'd found a lovely old house right near Castle Rock, and some of the Chiefs' wives were helping her find real furniture in old ruins, and she sent her love and when was he coming back?
Castle Rock was now so surrounded with antiaircraft blast cannon it made one fair nervous to fly near it.
Dunneldeen? Oh, he was flying the pants off new recruits but there weren't as many coming in now. Mostly machine operators were getting trained. Ker was fine and sent him some brand-new air masks he'd made that fit better and said not to turn him in for stealing company materials, ha, ha. And here were some personal letters for Sir Robert. And here was the latest set of you-know– whats.
Jonnie went deep underground and got the discs rolling. They had the place well set up now. Watching the female Psychlos, while not letting them handle anything vital, they had learned the use of some of the office machinery they had earlier ignored, and they could copy discs and make blowups of sections with a fine– line accuracy they had not thought possible. They had cabinets for files and all in all they could make the discs “talk” much better.
Terl! He was sitting there doing force equations, incomprehensible. The equations didn't balance and didn't make any sense. He was filling pages and pages with them. Still nothing to do with teleportation.
Jonnie almost skimmed by it. He backtracked. The pictures showed Terl getting up, going over to the cabinet, and opening up another false bottom. He took out a huge sheet of paper, so big it would take three scanners' views to encompass it. The paper was very old, creased until it nearly fell apart, stained brown and faded.
Terl spread it out, looked at it and then shook his head over it. He traced one claw along the north side of the big dam, way to the southwest of the American minesite. He nodded. Then he wadded the paper up and threw it at the shredder bin. He wrote down some footage figures and some voltage figures and then went back to his equations, and it was just equations for the next two days. And that was all there was in the discs.
It took an hour of patching from three different scanner channels to get it. But Jonnie recovered the huge piece of paper in its entirety and got a half-dozen huge copies of it.
It was entitled, “Defense Installations of Planet Number 203,534.” Jonnie knew already that was the Psychlo name for Earth.
It showed every minesite, every dam, every gun battery, and every ? A little symbol that trailed around each dam and below each power line from dams to minesites and branch minesites. Jonnie had no idea what that symbol was.
But there was a goody he had never, never dreamed of. Marked clearly was a firing, transshipment platform!
He compared the Psychlo mass of numbered locations with a man-map of ancient times. The second platform was alongside a dam which had once been named "Kariba" in a country which had once been called "Rhodesia" and then “Zimbabwe.”
The platform was marked
“Emergency Defense Armament Receipt Point.” Obviously, if the main minesite were ever knocked out, Psychlo could send in another force or the Psychlo command on the planet could demand troops or at least inform the home office.
Hopes soaring, but a little held down by the age of the map and Terl's treatment of it, Jonnie had a marine attack plane on the line and Scots piling into it. Robert the Fox boarded hastily. Just as they were about to close the door, MacKendrick piled in with a medical kit. Jonnie sent the plane racing to the south.
It was only about a thousand miles away, and it only took them thirty-five minutes to spot the huge dam and lake and the mammoth installation. Some distance to the south and east of that they saw what had been called “Victoria Falls,” one of the biggest waterfalls on the planet.
Spectacular country!
Because the area had been marked “heavily defended,” Jonnie approached it cautiously. It was another branch mine they hadn't known the existence of.
They found the compound some distance to the east and landed a platoon with assault rifles and radiation ammunition to make a cautious approach. A half-hour later they had the report on mine radio. The place was deserted and, the platoon officer reported, not much different from the one in the Ituri Forest to the north.
The map had not shown the second platform at the minesite but it was quite close to the huge dam. They took the platoon back aboard and Jonnie began to cruise the area.
Trees, trees, trees. This was a high plateau, but not an open plain. Trees had been knocked down in swathes where elephant herds had passed through.
There were lots of little hills. Everything was masked with undergrowth except a few open places.
Cruising along, elephant and African buffalo looking up at them, Jonnie searched and searched. He had found before that it was one thing to look at a map and quite another to be on the ground, and he was experiencing it again.
Time after time, he studied the map while Stormalong in the copilot's seat kept them cruising above the treetops. Jonnie finally got out some dividers and very carefully measured the distance from the dam edge and then, taking the plane to that point and cruising it at the speed a horse walks, finally got them in the center of what must have been the point. Stormalong threw out a smoke flare to mark it and a couple of big elephants took off. It was a bowl in the ground, the edges of which rose about two hundred feet above the middle. It was like a crater, possibly even made with a bomb blast. It was about a thousand feet in diameter.
The bowl itself was so overgrown one could not see what was in it. But as the white smoke spired up, the truth hit Jonnie.
For centuries, perhaps, the company security officers of this planet had paid no attention to maintaining the elaborate planetary company defenses which once existed. No wonder Terl had thrown the map away. He looked so disappointed that Sir Robert tried to cheer him up. “We won't really know until we look closer.” But it certainly was wilderness, receiving no care for centuries.