“Is it?” said Ker.
Leverage, leverage, Terl told himself.
"I’ll tell you what I will do,” said Terl. "I will put ten thousand credits to your account in the Galactic Bank. You have a numbered account there with quite a bit in it already. But I will add-'
“Brown Limper Staffor paid me a hundred thousand Earth credits just to dig up that cable for you, that cable right over there. It was no easy job and I considered the pay cut-rate!”
Terl thought fast. “All right, I’ll pay you a hundred thousand Galactic credits to help install this firing rig and cooperate.”
“I can get double that from this Brown Limper not to do it,” said Ker.
“You can?” said Terl, suddenly alert. He thought hard. Yes, that Brown Limper had been acting furtively lately, like he was hiding something.
“He wants a certain party!” said Ker.
“He doesn't care if you get to Psychlo or not!”
“But doesn't he know I have to record the deeds?”
“He's only interested in getting one man!” said Ker.
"Look," said Terl, “I will put half a million credits in your account if you cooperate in getting me to Psychlo.”
Ker thought about it. Then he said, "If you will get me new papers and destroy my old company records and deposit seven hundred fifty thousand credits to my account, I’ll see all goes smoothly.”
Terl was about to say he agreed when Ker spoke again: “You will have to make it all right with this Brown Limper Staffor also. Tell me how you intend to trap this man so I can reassure this Staffor. He controls these workers. So add that, and it's a deal.”
Terl looked at Ker. He knew how money-hungry he was. “All right. I’m going to string five hundred Brigantes around outside that atmosphere armor, armed with poisoned arrows. Arrows won't make a concussion if fired and they can shoot that animal to bits if he comes! You whisper that to Staffor and he'll also cooperate with you. It 's a deal then?”
Ker smiled.
Terl went back inside, glad to get his breathe-mask off. He got some kerbango to soothe his nerves.
He reviewed this strange scene. It Staffor. That was the one who was going to mess this plan up. Terl would take care of the animaclass="underline" he hadn't told Ker he also intended to have Snith and a squad on the platform armed with poisoned arrows or that he had a beautiful beryllium box to hand Staffor. The box would destroy all the evidence, the contract copies, everything.
And Ker, too!
He would have a hostage to handle the animal.
He felt quite satisfied about everything until three nights later when he noticed there were no guards in view. He went out and there they were, sprawled around the morgue, dead drunk.
It was obvious that Snith had used the information just to get a commission in whiskey.
Well, he could handle Snith when the time came.
The one to keep an eye on was this Staffor. His suspicions were right. It was Staffor that was plotting, plotting, plotting. Sneaky rat! It was plain he would try to steal this money back.
Warned, Terl was confident he could outsmart them all.
He went in and checked the money coffins, sealed them, marked them “radiation killed” so nobody on Psychlo would want to open them, and put his private “X” on the bottom of each one.
He would be a wealthy tycoon on Psychlo!
He spread his bedding out on top of the coffins and slept a beautiful sleep with beautiful dreams where royalty bowed when they met The Great Terl on the street. And all evidence and this planet would have been totally destroyed behind him.
Chapter 6
Deep in the African minesite, bent over the viewscreens in the half-lit dark, Jonnie was taking a loss.
Day 92 was coming up on them like a whirlwind.
At first he had hoped that he could get a separate console built using Terl's plans and install it down at Kariba. Such would bypass any real necessity for a hopeless attack in America to seize that one. It looked as if it remained their best chance but it was hardly any chance at all. He would have had to stop Terl from using that strange bomb but he could not do that without the almost foolhardy risks of letting it go right on up to firing time on Day 92 and trying to attack the platform and grab that console at the last moment.
Other news was not good. There had been two more raids by the visitors in different places and casualties had been suffered. An ore plane, returning empty from a ferrying trip, had been swooped down upon by the Hawvins and blasted out of the sky with the loss of both pilot and copilot. A hunting party from the Russian base had been gunned from above and three Siberians and a Sherpa had been killed before their air cover had shot down the intruder.
Also the Edinburgh defense planning had gone wrong. Sir Robert had wanted to bring in a couple of miles of atmosphere cable and surround Castle Rock with it. The power dams in Scotland of long ago were not in shape or converted to Psychlo power. The Cornwall minesite power supply was a tidal dam at Bristol in the Bristol Channel, and while it worked well on the ebb and flow of those gigantic tides, it was not possible to run a line clear up to Edinburgh– and that line would have been open to attack in any case. The hauling of that much cable, itself, was a formidable block, for it would have had to be flown in sections to Scotland. No other means than antiaircraft fire was available to protect Edinburgh. And the Scots, having regained it, were not going to abandon it. It was the center of the most ancient Scottish nationalism. Moving the whole remaining population down to Cornwall, as proposed by Jonnie, had not been approved, and it was true it would be pretty crowded. Jonnie knew Edinburgh was going to catch it.
Terl was going about his job in a way that seemed backward. He spent a lot of time measuring up poles and stringing outside wire and putting in firing points. Everything he did was being duplicated exactly down at Kariba. They now had the wires up and all the points in, down at that base. Angus, each time they got a new item, would go tearing down to Kariba and install an equivalent in the secondary defense platform there.
It had looked very hopeful for some days. Terl had gotten a lot of metal and had built the console case, a heavy, massive thing about a yard square. They had build the same case here and it was sitting down in a locked room, an empty shell, waiting.
But after all this spurt of energy, Terl for the last several days had just been fooling with fuses. He wasn't getting on with construction.
Reams of mathematics had been worked out by Terl. But a lot of good they were. Who understood them?
Now it was just fuses. Jonnie had gotten duplicates out of supply here of all the fuses Terl was working with and tried to figure out what he was doing.
Jonnie had learned one thing: that some of the items in a console that would appear to be different components were fakes. They were not resistors or capacitors. They were actually fuses made up to look like other things.
Terl was doing something Jonnie had not heard of before. With meters and such, he was working with an “underload” type of fuse. The circuit would be connected only so long as current was going through it. When the current ceased to flow, the fuse burned out. It was an odd kind of circuit breaker, made of a filament so tiny and thin it had to be worked under a magnifying scope.
Well, that seemed to be all Terl was doing.
Jonnie's attention was drifting when he suddenly realized that the filament Terl was using looked awfully like the ones in the silver capsule in Psychlo heads.