Jonnie put them down on the upper edge of the crater, and with riflemen ready to handle any hostile game, others got axes and began to hack their way down.
“Be careful around here,” said Dr. MacKendrick. “This area had an insect called the tsetse fly that brought on sleeping sickness. Also the water had a worm in it that gets into the blood stream. I don't have much in the way of medicines but wear nets and stay out of the water.”
“Great,” said Jonnie. That was all they needed.
They cut their way down to the center of the bowl. They passed one of the transshipment poles three times before they spotted it. They paced out in various directions and located another two. The fourth was easy.
Jonnie took a shovel and started down through the humus. He was hoping the company maxim of “never salvage anything” would hold true. Two feet of dead leaves and humus down, he hit the platform.
Axes ringing, they were getting trees and brush out of the way. They found the concrete base of the operations firing dome and then finally the dome itself, upside-down and some distance away.
No console!
Wires were eventually uncovered within the concrete base. Typically Psychlo, they were still well insulated when you scraped the mold off.
Jonnie was struck by the absence of the power lines. There should be power lines coming in from the dam.
There was a power channel marked on the map and also that old squiggle he couldn't identify.
Light was failing and they would have kept on but MacKendrick made them get up to high ground. They spent the night listening to elephants trumpeting, lions roaring, and all the other cacophony of a very live jungle. But the night was quite cool since this plateau had a fairly high altitude.
In the morning they dug a crosscut trench and found the power line, being careful not to cut into it. They cut another trench and found the same line went on underground to the distant minesite.
And there was another cable they couldn't identify that went along with the power line.
Flogging their way through the brush, they went over to the huge dam. It was a real soaring monster of a dam. It seemed intact. The spillways were running. There were signs that Psychlos had landed near it and gone in and out the access door to the powerhouse in some recent time.
Jonnie had never been inside one of these dams before. They vibrated with sheer, raw power. The thunder of the water and the high whine of generators made it impossible to be heard.
It was the usual Psychlo conversion, he supposed. It was very, very old and some bits of the original man-equipment that had been cast aside were very much older.
Angus found the switchboard and bus bars– a vast, towering affair in a separate control room. Only two of the handles were clean and it didn't need a little tuft of fur caught in one of them to tell that Psychlos had come here to shut power on and off.
But what were all these other bus bars? They got some mine sacks and tried to wipe the panel down without causing short circuits. There were Psychlo letters inset into it. A whole row said, “Force Stage One, Force Stage Two, Force Stage Three.” A second row said, “Transshipment One, Transshipment Two, Transshipment Three.”
Jonnie gingerly rubbed some more with a mine sack, careful of closing any gap. “They're color-coded." He tried to tell Angus this but there was no talking in this place. They went back out.
"Terl," said Jonnie to Angus and Sir Robert, “is working on force equations. There is something on the north side of the American dam I think he must want. The squiggles on this map must have to do with force.” He sent Angus back into the power control house and placed some Scots along the underground line of squiggles and connected every one up with mine radios.
“Close Force Stage One!” he radioed to Angus.
The effect was far more drastic and dramatic than anything they expected.
All inferno broke loose!
Along the squiggle line of the map, all around the crater, trees erupted, splintered, soared, crashed.
It was as if a bomb had exploded.
Trunks and leaves and branches were falling for over a minute afterward.
Sir Robert was running to find out what had happened to their spotters. Were they all killed? Their radios had gone silent!
It took them an hour to dig the Scots out. One had been knocked unconscious, the rest were bruised and slightly cut. Six had been involved.
MacKendrick collected them and assessed the damages and began applying the antiseptics and tape. Jonnie made his way over to them from the dam. It looked like a first-aid station after a battle. The one who had been knocked out had come to now. He had been blown in the air.
Jonnie apologized to them.
The Scot that had been knocked out was grinning. “A little thing like that isn't likely to ruin a Scot!” he said. “What was it?”
Yes, indeed. What was it?
“Did I do something wrong?” Angus's voice came over the radio.
The Scots were all taking it as a joke so Jonnie said, “I think you did something right!” They were out of the area now. “Close that switch again!”
A bit of the tree wreckage stirred and moved and then was still. Jonnie cautiously moved toward the bowl. And couldn't leave the dam area!
He walked straight ahead and then he couldn't go any further. He could not walk through the air before him!
He threw a rock at it. The rock bounced! He tried again, throwing harder. Same result.
He had Angus open the bus bar again. No barrier! Closed. Barrier!
For the next two hours, by opening and closing the first and second row of bus bars and throwing rocks, they found that the dam itself was surrounded by a protective screen. The bowl had a screen all around its top and was completely enclosed!
Riflemen even fired shots at it and they glanced off.
At Stage Two the air got a bit shimmery, and Angus reported the power output meters were lower. At Stage Three there was a strange electrical smell in the air and the output meters of the total dam power dropped way down.
Defense and more defense. A transshipment platform operating in that bowl could not be interfered with by attack. Not from the sides and not from above. And neither could the dam.
The amount of raw power it took to operate it was a large portion of the total output of this huge dam, and Jonnie surmised that they changed stages of output to repel extreme attack and then eased them off to Stage One when they needed power to transship.
Jonnie had them booby-trap the entrances in case their visitors upstairs came down for a look and prowl. And they took off in the early afternoon for home.
A glimmer of hope. Not much, but a glimmer, Jonnie told Sir Robert on the way home.
He wanted Sir Robert, Jonnie said, to take charge in the African area for the moment for Jonnie had some other things to look into elsewhere. He rebriefed the grizzled War Chief on the existing situation: they were threatened by a possible counterattack from Psychlo; the visitors upstairs were waiting for something– he did not know what, but he was certain they would eventually strike; the political scene in America was a lesser menace but existed and they had to let it go on for now. The thing that would solve their troubles, Jonnie said, was to get control of teleportation or at least an operating console; with that they could operate far more widely, but it seemed to be the most closely guarded secret the Psychlos had, and avenues to cracking it were not very hopeful.