He spotted it almost at once and had a surge of hope. It was a console! A transshipment console right there near the platform! There were even some men about it as though working it.
Intently, he watched his viewscreens for a teleportation trace. He watched for quite a while. There was none. He wondered that the military men in the war vessels had not noticed this lack. Maybe they did not know the telltale trace existed. Maybe they had a different make of viewscreen. But the probability was that they had never seen one because they were always shooting and you couldn't shoot-
The small gray man sighed. He was no detective, and the evidence so plain before him had gone unnoticed. Those men down there could not be using a transshipment rig. They even had their own planes in the air. And either one, planes or shots, would prevent any use of teleportation. The rig itself would blow to bits with distortions.
The military had begun to give attention to the power dam lake now and were trying to drop bombs into it to cut off the minesite power supply. This gave a respite to the minesite itself and the small gray man had been put onto that console.
He looked up the mineral traces which resulted.
Carbon!
That settled it. That thing down there was a burned-out console.
It was so disappointing!
He drew off and watched for a while. Combined force planes were not having much luck with the dam lake due to atmosphere-armor cable around it and they were now giving their attention to the air cover planes from below. There was a boiling fight and he saw two Jambitchow combat battle planes blown to bits.
He had his ship moved up higher. Down to the south the combined force bombers had begun to drop bombs into the deserted ancient ruins of Singapore. A fire blossomed up. Then another. He wondered at the military mind that would bomb an undefended city with no military value but which might contain some loot that they so valued. But they always did it.
His indigestion was bothering him again. These were such awful times. There seemed to be no hope at all.
He knew there was a base in the northern continent man had once called “Russia” and he had his ship captain move up there.
One of the attacking-force war vessels was launching planes over that base. They were personnel carriers. The small gray man observed a force of about five hundred Hawvin marines deploying on the plain before the base. Behind fire shields they began to move forward. It almost seemed that the base was not defended. No answering fire came back to the advancing force. It got closer and closer to the base. Several fires erupted. Then the force began to move up a mountain slope toward what must be an underground defense point. The force was within a hundred yards of it now, pouring a hail of fire into it.
Abruptly the ground under the attacking force erupted.
Mines! The whole terrain was flaming.
Flashes of weapon fire blasted down the hill from the base. The attacking force withdrew in haste beyond the village. Officers were shouting and regrouping their marines. But they had left over a hundred dead or wounded on the ground before the base.
The attacking force formed up again and advanced on the base.
Planes streaked out of base hangar doors and ground-strafed the assault force.
The small gray man had seen no traces on his viewscreens. He had not really hoped to see any, not in all that firing.
Since it was not far out of the orbit course he now had, he told his ship captain to pass over the American minesite at a height of four hundred miles.
It took a while and the small gray man napped a little. A buzzer told him they were over it and he turned to his screens.
Way down below, the ruin of the minesite was utterly dead. The abandoned trucks and pumps still lay beside the river. What a desolate, lifeless scene! The dome hich had covered a console was still lying there, still attached to a crane hook but tipped over.
The city to the north was still burning.
His mineral tracer showed the whole area hot with radiation.
He directed his ship captain to change orbit to pass over Scotland. It was in his mind to stop and see whether the old woman might have come back, but then down on the horizon beyond, the sensors picked up heat and then a clear view of a Drawkin war vessel. He looked at his maps. They were not very good maps for they were just pages of schoolbooks, but he easily identified the city. It was “Edinburgh.” And it was burning.
His radio was crackling and the communicator tuned it in more finely. What a rushing barrage of sound! Some of it was Drawkin and the small gray man could not understand that tongue even though they controlled twenty planets. It was a sort of hysterical-sounding language. He could take a vocoder to it, for he had the vocabulary circuits somewhere, but they would just be commands to pilots down below. The other language he had heard an awful lot of lately. It was a sort of smooth, meditative tongue. He had even dawdled over a frequency decoding table to try to get a grasp of it but it seemed to defy that.
But he didn't need to understand the language. The physical facts were plain enough. There was a heavy air battle in progress.
He looked down through the port. A big promontory stood above the city.
Antiaircraft fire was coning up from it. The rock stood in a sea of fire as the city burned.
A Drawkin bomber exploded in midair and fell to add its bursting gouts of green flame to the orange of the burning city.
No teleportation traces possible there. That was for certain.
He felt very depressed, even sad. He wondered at himself. Was the strain of this past year making him emotional? Surely not! Yet the old woman in the north of Scotland, and particularly his finding her gone, had stirred sentient. And here he was feeling a bit of anxiety lest she be down there in all that flame.
All this was quite unlike him. Quite unprofessional.
He thought he had better have a little nap so he could awake thinking more clearly, less clouded and blurred. What an absolutely terrible year it had been.
He went to his cabin and lay down. And it seemed only moments later that he woke with the whole thing bright and plain before him.
That criss-cross dance those terrestrial marine attack planes had done. How dull of him! Of course he was no military tactician, but he should have realized it long before now. That high-speeding group that flashed off to Singapore was the lure. The burned-out console was just bait.
He went to his small gray office and did a very efficient playback of that “dance of planes” and then plotted the course of the real group quite accurately. Yes, on that course they would arrive at that pagoda in the southern hemisphere of the planet.
He gave his orders to his ship captain and away they sped, right up to 2X light.
He was just in time to see the death of the Capture.
Lt startled him.
He was not sure how it could happen. A Terrify-classbattle-plane-launching capital ship? Exploded in orbit?
With a cautionary word to the bridge to draw off, the small gray man watched the huge vessel disintegrate down through the atmosphere and strike the lake of the dam. For a bit he watched to see whether the dam would give. It might be damaged, he decided, but it appeared to be holding for the moment. A huge amount of water was rushing down the river channel in an overpowering flood. But there was nothing down there.
He telephotoed his viewscreens on the dam itself. Yes, it had been damaged. Quite a bit of water was escaping on the lower left-hand side, much of it under the dam there. A big hole from the looks of it.