Yes, my Lord Dom had one. He went and got it and they went through the same procedure as before.
Angus updated the time, cast the recorder to a new angle, and got it back.
Lord Dom, a little bit frightened at the implications of this to the twelve hundred worlds of his republic, had a quaver in his voice when he put it on the disc.
Jonnie hit the switches.
Asart gleamed in the dark before them.
About a hundredth of the moon had become a hole edged in curling black clouds. And just before the view went off, down in the lower left, it looked like a door had opened in the crust, not part of the growing hole.
A breath of terror trembled through the gathering. But Jonnie was not going to let it become a riot.
“You see, my lords, the dragon hungry.” He laughed lightly. “He is also a very obedient dragon. Told to eat the moon, he is eating Asart! A very controllable dragon after all.”
Had he hit them with ice water he could not have produced a more chilling effect. Their eyes focused on him in growing horror.
Schleim broke the spell. It had occurred to him that he had a new way to guarantee success. He had a spare gun in his hamper as well as a recorder. He had just felt in his boot and discovered the weapon gone.
Damn that valet! Hawvin slaves were never any good.
“All you are doing,” said Schleim, “is casting that recorder out somewhere to a model you've made in the hills. And you have people regulating a model for it to photograph! You're a fraud!” And Schleim really believed it. But he had to make sure before he went off the edge. “There's a recorder in my hamper.”
“Go get it,” said Jonnie.
Schleim rushed to his apartment. He scrambled through the hamper. Ah! Not just a spare gun but also a spare scepter hidden in the bottom, a spare with another paralysis beam in its heel. He could leave one on in a chair while he carried the other one out to turn the power cable off. Ha-ha! Three blast grenades! After he turned the beam on he'd pitch one into the ops room and use the other two to silence anyone rushing out of another door. Perfect! He wouldn't torture the Hawvin slave after all. Good fellow!
Schleim carried the whole hamper back to the gathering and set it beside his chair. Cautiously opening it so they wouldn't see what else was in it, he removed the picto-recorder. It was a different make and type but it played a disc.
“Devil,” said Schleim, “we will end your fraud here and now. You would not know, not being a native of a proper planet, that on the back of Asart is a huge diamond with a slash. It is done with hyperband nullifying material to act as a navigation and identification marker. It is unknown to practically everyone except a fleet officer. The marker will not show up on your standard recorders. And you have none like this one that takes the hyper-spectrum as well as what you call visible light. It will show that diamond and slash. Yours won't. So of course you didn't put one on your fake model. I am about to expose you as the fraud of all time!”
He sounded confident. But before that rig was destroyed he really had to know. Was it a model up in the hills or was that Asart? If it was Asart...should he be sure his torturer got the secret of teleportation? What a weapon!
He slithered over and put his recorder into the gyrocage, sealed the cage shut with a claw pattern, and walked off the platform.
Angus had heard it all. He shifted coordinates so that the recorder would view both the back of Asart and the hole.
He fired it and recalled it, and when the recoil died, Lord Schleim raced up to it, checked the claw pattern. It had not been broken.
He came back to the projector. He made absolutely sure it was not projecting something else. He put, “This is Lord Schleim!" on the disc and put it into the machine.
Did his ear detect a far-off whine in the sky?
Chapter 8
Lord Schleim felt there would be no diamond and slash beacon in the picture that would, in a moment, be shown. Only Tolnep eyes would ever detect that and only a Tolnep modified picto-recorder could film it. He would use this moment to distract the others.
Yes! That was a whine in the sky. The fleet would be over them in moments.
The timing was just right. How clever of him. But he had a well-deserved reputation as a slippery diplomat. Formidable in fact.
He walked over to his chair, made very sure his hamper was well within reach. He glanced back at the assembled emissaries. They were all craning forward tensely, waiting for the picture to come on– totally off guard. He spotted exactly where the devil was standing, slightly in front of them all and well clear of the projector. Schleim fingered the bottom ring of the scepter.
“Turn on the latest picture of your fake model!” jeered Schleim.
Jonnie hit the buttons. Off went the mine spotlights. On went the three-dimensional picture of Asart.
It was a new angle. It showed the back side of the moon as well as some of the front. Filtration gave it a bluish hue, but it was Asart. It seemed to float hugely before them.
And right there in the center, massive and unmistakable, was the diamond and slash insignia of Tolnep, jet-black on the surface of the moon.
Schleim gasped. It was real. That really was Asart.
One of the ends of the slash was supposed to point to a hangar door. And even as they looked, that door finished opening. The huge, yawning mouth of a Tolnep-made cavern!
The moon had deflated further now. It resembled a blue balloon with one side being poked relentlessly in, a great pucker that was growing bigger now and at a more rapid rate.
What appeared to be black gases were eddying up to fill the sunken part.
And then out of that yawning hangar bolted a war vessel! Although it must have been traveling very fast, the enormous size of it caused it to seem to move in slow motion. At least thirty thousand tons of Tolnep capital ship was seeking to escape into space.
But it was too late. It had already been touched by the pucker within the moon. A whole back section of the ship was gone!
Before the fixated eyes of the delegates, the vast space vessel was eaten up from tail to nose, its massive metal turned to gases.
Other hangar doors were starting to open.
But that was the extent of the picture. One last puff of black gas as the final bit of capital ship was overtaken by disaster and the recorded voice said “This is Lord Schleim!"
Schleim screamed! Then he acted.
He popped his earplugs shut. He leaped up. He wrenched at the bottom ring of the scepter and, as though it were a machine gun, swept it in an arc from left to right to freeze them all.
“Paralyze!” screamed Schleim. “Stand dead! Damn you, stand dead!”
It wasn't happening fast enough! There was a surge of emissaries away from him, some falling.
He snatched the other scepter from the basket. He twisted the bottom ring and swept it all around, taking in guards in rifle pits.
They were not falling quickly enough.
Schleim dove into the hamper and came up with three grenades. With all his considerable might he hurled one into the open door of the ops room. He sent another at the bowl entrance. He hurled the third at the devil.
Before they could even land, such was his speed of reaction, he had the gun out of the hamper. He lined it up on the devil, square at his face thirty feet away. With joy he pulled the trigger.
It did not fire.
Lord Dom, a bulbous creature from a mostly liquid world, was bouncing to his feet and coming at him.
Schleim raised the pistol on high, preparing to bring it down on Dom and splatter him. A Tolnep could physically smash them all.