A scythe of fire hit the Tolnep as Stormalong and the other two pilots let drive from extreme range.
The guard got the atmosphere curtain on. The Tolnep hit it and slammed through.
The air had not had time to reionize enough.
The Tolnep ship exploded in a ball of flame in the scramble area, narrowly missing Glencannon's ship as it landed.
Jonnie and Stormalong scanned the skies for more enemy. There was none. Some smoke palls rose in the distance where enemy ships had disintegrated.
The guard opened the atmosphere curtain. A fire-fighting crew was there now spraying the burning wreckage of the Tolnep ship. Jonnie, Stormalong, and the other two landed.
Glencannon was sitting in his seat still. His Buddhist communicator was trying to calm him. Glencannon was crying. His hands were shaking. It was a reaction of total frustration.
“I had orders to come through,” Glencannon was repeating over and over. The communicator waved the others away and then came to them.
“There are many things for the Academy of pilots to do in America,” the Buddhist told Jonnie and Stormalong. “They also have to maintain their air cover. There were no escort pilots and we delayed coming for days. Then Glencannon felt he could not delay anymore.
“A Swiss pilot, a close friend of his but a very new pilot, volunteered. The Tolneps hit us just after we crossed the coast in northern Africa. It was too far away for Cornwall or Luxembourg to help us.
“The Swiss fought them off. He shot down three. But he needed help and Glencannon had orders to keep going in such an event and he kept going.
“He feels that if he had turned back to help the Swiss, they wouldn't have got him. The Swiss pilot was alone, he had no communicator, but he also told Glencannon to keep going.
“The Tolneps shot the Swiss to pieces. When he ejected and tried to get down by backpack they closed in and killed him in the air.
“Glencannon wants to go up and shoot down those ships in orbit. They would murder him. Please help.”
They got Glencannon calmed down. Stormalong said that he would call Sir Robert and get the vital communication line made more secure. Sir Robert was going over to move the Academy out of America and to the Cornwall minesite in a few days but meanwhile better arrangements should be made. The ferrying of innumerable planes and equipment to safe places was now all complete. The tribes were centralized. Stormalong also said he would take over the run.
Glencannon handed over the pouch of discs.
Jonnie looked at the packet. He hoped it was worth it.
Chapter 8
It was!
Minutes after Jonnie opened the courier pouch and got a disc on a viewscreen, he realized that for the first time in all ofPsychlos long and sadistic history, non-Psychlo eyes were looking upon the actual construction of a teleportation transshipment console.
Terl, having no models or patterns, was working from scratch. And crazy though he might be, his workmanship was exact. Of course, his own life depended upon its being so.
He had already made the console case. He had fitted the rows of buttons, spares from the storerooms, all properly marked, into the panel top. He had made the screw holes which held the top on to the bottom case.
Watching the view discs, fascinated, Jonnie saw him take a yard-square piece of common black insulating board, the kind that was used to back all electronic assemblies, and fit it into the area between the top panel and the case sides. It was this board, evidently, which would hold the various components of the circuit he would build. He carefully and precisely drilled the holes in this insulating board so it would fit between the top panel and the case and be held in place by the same joining screws.
He temporarily fastened down the board in the case and put a smear of powder over it and then pressed each button so the location where it touched the board was exactly marked. Then he took it all apart again and made more exact marks with a red pencil wherever the powder had been dented. He drilled small holes in each one of these points and put in a metal plug. Now the buttons of the top panel, when pressed, would come down and touch a metal plug.
Terl now turned the insulating board over. The little metal plugs showed on the underside. He marked which was the top and which was the bottom of the board and really went to work.
Scarcely consulting his notes and formulas at all, he began to cover the underside of the board with various electronic components: resistors, capacitors, tiny amplifiers, relays and switches. It was actually a rather crude and old-fashioned sort of layout. It seemed to match up to the metal plugs the buttons would hit from above and often connected to it.
But there was an oddity. He was putting fuses in places where, if you used the board at all, they would certainly blow. In fact, for every metal plug through the board, there was a fuse that would disconnect it from the circuitry now being built. It looked to Jonnie that all you had to do was hit one button on the upper console and a fuse would blow. Dozens of such fuses.
In a dumb kind of way, this mysterious circuit he was building made sense. All except these fuses. Why would one put fuses all through a piece of electronic circuitry?
Terl neatened up this whole complicated circuit. He color-coded it and polished it. And at last it was complete. It really looked marvelous, if one admired all the complexities of an electronic circuit board. It almost made sense– you pushed a top console button and current went here, you pushed another and current would go there.
The board was complete. Terl admired it, even took a break and bit off some kerbango. Then he did the strangest thing imaginable. With a flourish of his paws, he hooked up some leads to a power source, snapped the clips to the terminals of the very artistic board circuit he had just built, and blew all the fuses in it!
They went with little glowing pops and smoke puffs.
He had just made the whole circuit inoperational.
Now he really got down to work. He pulled over his vast pile of equations and worked-out formulas, got out micrometer measuring tools, cleaned up a set of drafting triangles and rulers, sharpened up white marking pens to a hairline point.
He turned the board he had just made over to the blank side, made some reference points on it, and for the next two days, meticulously consulting his notes, he
circuit. Aside from matching up with the metal plugs for the console buttons, this new circuit had nothing whatever to do with the one he had so laboriously built on the bottom side of the board.
He drew in the resistors and amplifiers and capacitors and every other electronic component. All in tiny lines and squiggles and curls.
Terl consulted his equations and worksheets and duplicated the measurements with enormous exactitude in white on the board. It was a long and complicated procedure and it was a very complex circuit that emerged. The console buttons, when pressed, would activate it if it were composed of wire.
He got that finished. Then he dusted the whole drawing with a thin coating of reddish paste. You could see the circuit through it but when you put something on the paste like a pencil it would show that that bit of the circuit had been traced.
Terl now got a thin-bladed annealing knife. One end of these knives, by the process of separating molecules through destruction of their cohesion, cut metal. The other end was used to restore the molecular cohesion and “sew” the metal up.
He took the sewing end of the knife and began to trace his circuit with it. Wherever he followed a line, the thin red paste showed he had followed it. Thus, he could keep track of where he had traced and work without any skips.