When Stormalong had begun this orbit mining it had been with an eye to training pilots and, Jonnie suspected, to gratify a craving for wild flying. The stuff collected was odd enough. Meteorites and such got caught in orbit or perihelion and before they sizzled down through the atmosphere they were often crystalline and quite amazing. Jonnie was about to put a stop to it– it had served its purpose scaring the visitors half to death with limpet mines. But Angus, always prowling into something, had noted some pieces in a recent batch that were of different chemical structure.
An outer space comet, not native to the system, had been blasting across the skies for some time. Angus pointed out to Jonnie that it contained the tiniest traces of the unknown Terl had used for the center of his device. Angus had shown him on the analyzer: there they were! Microscopic traces of it. If the material had burned down through the atmosphere like meteorites usually do, the element might have vanished from the heat. But these “virgin” bits did contain it.
Jonnie had gone in circles for a day on how to extract it, and then remembered you could “pan” gold because it was heavier than dirt and rock.
The Psychlos used literally tons of mercury in some mining process. So they got pans of it and tested it. Iron, copper, nickel, most elements now in powder form, were lighter than mercury and floated off or combined. But this strange element went to the bottom with a thud. It was terribly cohesive and clung to itself. It took an awful lot of powdered metal to get any.
They could have rigged some machines to do the panning but these Psychlo females couldn't care less about a big pan of mercury and they happily sloshed it about, panning the powder. They smiled at Jonnie. They were all right unless somebody foolishly mentioned mathematics-you would lose one Psychlo female, right then. It had happened with Chirk and again with another one.
They said Angus would be back and they waited for him. He reappeared presently and they asked him: did he need any more? Angus shook his head and beckoned.
In the shop where he was working, Angus had duplicated Terl's box with one exception: it didn't push all the elements together when you raised the lid. A timed piston did that. You set the time and then the piston closed the rods.
Angus had six of them. The center bit was probably not as pure a metal as Terl's but they were sure that was of no importance. The weights were varied a bit but all around seventy-five pounds for the center bit. Angus had not put the centers in place: he had those sitting well apart and every one was making a dent in what it sat on.
“Unless you've got in mind to blow up the universe,” said Angus, “don't you think about eight will do? The load you just brought in should give us two more.”
“But what does it do?” begged Stormalong.
Jonnie shook his head. “We don't know. But if Terl made one with that expression on his face you can be very sure it is the deadliest weapon the Psychlos have. One thing you be sure of, Angus: pack the core separately and don't let anybody combine them on this planet! When you're all done, send them down to the underground armory in Kariba."
Jonnie went out. He was feeling fairly cheerful. Lots of good things were happening. The Chinese in Kariba said they had engineers and they did, but they were engineers expert in wood and stone and bridges and things. They also had some painters and that small bowl and its surrounds looked pretty strange– but artistic. They lined internal bunkers with tile they made. It was all very neat. They even had a little village of their own between the atmosphere armor cable and the shore of the lake made by the dam. Their antiaircraft pits had little pagoda rain domes over them.
Good progress being made in America.
He was almost cheerful. They might have a chance. Thin but possible.
Of course there was the mathematics thing. Lately all Terl seemed to do was scan pages and pages and pages of incomprehensible mathematical equations. He had not started building a console but he was obviously figuring it out from scratch. The old one was burned out. He had demanded it anyway for its case and they had brought him all kinds of scrap but none was it– it couldn't by for Jonnie had the original console, a burned-to-a-crisp wreck, down in the garage here. So Terl would even have to do the metal case.
Jonnie saw a couple of Hockners being taken to another room. These prisoners fought each other, race to race, like wildcats. The tallest Hockner, not too bad-looking in spite of having no nose, was a lower-grade officer but educated. He was showing vast interest in the vehicles parked around. Jonnie stopped the group, intending to ask some questions.
The tall Hockner was grinning superciliously at the vehicles. Ordinary Hockner crewmen didn't speak Psychlo but their officers did. He recognized Jonnie. “You know,” said the tall one, “that none of these vehicle frames are built on Psychlo, don't you?”
“I didn't know,” said Jonnie.
Although it made the sentries wary, the Hockner went over to a ground car and looked around under the edge of one of the bumpers. “There,” he said, pointing.
Jonnie looked at it. It was one of the alphabets on the Galactic bank notes.
“That's Duraleb," said the Hockner. “It says 'Made in Duraleb.' The Psychlos import all their plane bodies and tank bodies and machinery from other systems and peoples. The Psychlos only furnish metals and then motors and consoles. Nobody can use this stuff except Psychlos, since nobody has the drives. These other planets build other things for other peoples.
But this Psychlo stuff is useless if you don't have the consoles. They make those on Psychlo and only on Psychlo.”
Jonnie thanked him. He said, “Don't thank me, old fellow. If you ever start running out of consoles and motors, while you can buy all the bodies that you want, you won't have a thing. It 's the way the confounded Psychlos run things! They've got a throat-choke monopoly on every universe. You can't go up against them. Hockners have tried. You'll just lose.”
Jonnie knew these prisoners, while cooperative, tended to be malicious, but he had heard this too often for it to be just a guess. He changed the subject: “Did you fellows ever capture any Psychlo mathematics texts?”
The Hockner gave a laugh. It sounded like a horse neighing. “My dear fellow, every wizard brain in the universe for three hundred and two thousand years has tried to figure out Psychlo mathematics. It can't be done. Oh, it isn't their mathematic. An eleven-numeral system is not too strange. There's a race that had twenty-three different numerals. It 's their silly equations. Nothing ever balances. Texts? Anybody can pick up their texts. They're meaningless! Pure rubbish! Balderdash! Rot! Now will you order them to give me and my crew something to eat like you did the
Tolnep?"
Jonnie told them to see MacKendrick.
He went to his viewing room and looked at Terl's vast numbers of worksheets again. He wasn't feeling so good now.
Jonnie had a bomb to land on Psychlo if necessary. Great! He didn't have a thing to land it there with.
He had a rapidly growing force of visitors overhead. Terl was dawdling.
Jonnie had a very desperate plan to seize the console before it could be destroyed, but even if he got it, it might work just once and quit if the Tolnep was right.
He looked over Terl's equations again. They didn't balance. They didn't proceed one to the next logically. Yet the whole fate of this planet depended, in the final analysis, on solving them.
Maybe other people of other races had met this impasse, this same problem before. And lost. Maybe another being had sat here, like this, staring at texts and worksheets of Psychlo math, uneasy, and with a feeling of hopelessness, and then gone out to be destroyed by the Psychlos, his personal courage meaningless.