Well, Jonnie felt they might not have made it without Mr. Tsung, so he was given a brush and he signed them and Chief Chong-won witnessed them.
Mr. Tsung reverently folded the pieces of paper into a cover of gold brocade and laid them away like they were crown jewels.
“Oh, yes,” said Jonnie as he left. “One more thing. Tell him how much I enjoyed that tale about the dragon who ate the moon.”
Part XXVIII
Chapter 1
Psychlo!
The home planet of two hundred thousand worlds.
The center of an empire that had ruled and ruined sixteen universes over a period of three hundred and two thousand years.
Psychlo. That had been the cause of man's destruction.
What had happened to its empire, if anything?
What had happened to Psychlo? And if it still existed, what did it plan?
Was it a danger or not?
For a grueling and turbulent year they had wondered. It lay like a nagging barb under their thoughts.
Now they were going to find out.
Pale light lit the bowl. The metal of the platform shone dully. Not a motor to be heard in the sky. The stars were bright above.
Angus and Jonnie looked at each other. Now they would know.
“First,” said Jonnie, “we will inspect minesites and see what transshipment rigs are active. Perhaps there is some indicator somewhere that would alert them to this. We will be cautious, not get too close to anything.”
The coordinate book told them of a transshipment rig at Loozite, a Psychlo mining world without population other than Psychlo miners. It was a large planet but distant from Psychlo.
They put the new gyrocage down, put a picto-recorder in the armored case, calculated the coordinates for a point forty miles from the Loozite transshipment site, punched the console buttons, and fired.
The wires hummed. The cage came back. There was a slight recoil.
Jonnie put the disc in the atmosphere projector that still stood there.
He pressed the button.
For a moment both he and Angus thought they must have miscalculated and shot a mine instead. Forty miles was a long way off for detail and Jonnie adjusted and recentered the scene before them.
It was a hole!
But not a mine. There stood a transshipment pole at a drunken angle.
But it was otherwise just a hole in the planet surface. No trace even of compound domes.
Jonnie wondered whether they had different compound layouts on different planets. Perhaps that Loozite platform had been miles from anything else. Still, the Psychlos were demons for standard layouts. Usually the whole central administration of the planet was at the transshipment rig. For there was where the ore came from all over the planet. There was where the books were kept, where the main shops existed, where the top executives were.
Just that hole. It was pretty big, but a hole is a hole.
They chose another firing site: Mercogran in the fifth universe. It was shown as a planet five times the size of Earth but of less density.
They fired and recalled the gyrocage.
When Jonnie turned the projector on, they saw at once they had something different. They had to widen the view on the projector to see better.
Mercogran had been close to a mountain range and avalanches had apparently come down. They would have covered much of the space of any compound.
Jonnie brought the view in closer. There! At the lower right! The inverted bowl of a compound dome. It was lying like a broken soup plate. There was a transshipment pole and attached charred wires sitting in the middle of it. But nothing else.
So far no tight conclusion could be reached beyond the fact that those central compounds and transshipment rigs were certainly no longer working.
At random they took another planet: Brelloton. It was an inhabited planet, another reference told them, with a population of its own, governed by a Psychlo “regency,” enduring such rule for sixty thousand years.
They calculated the coordinates for a spot forty miles from the transshipment rig and fired the gyrocage.
They were not prepared for what they got. The atmosphere image showed a city. The transshipment rig there had apparently been on a raised plateau in the center of town.
Buildings that once must have been massive were blown to bits. They made a spreading pattern that radiated out from the plateau. Buildings that must have been two thousand feet high in a city that must have held a million beings or more had fallen outward like dominos.
The remains of the rig were plain. The platform was a hole. The poles were all leaning outward.
The compound domes had lain under the edge of the plateau and had been lifted by concussion and blown away, leaving the familiar underground layout plain in view.
Bringing the compound in closer one could see what must be a year's growth of grass in crevices.
There was no sign of life.
Jonnie went back and sat down and thought. He asked Angus to find some views the air cover had taken at the Purgatoire River. Views of the American compound.
Angus got them and Jonnie looked at them: the hole where the platform had been, the outward lean of the poles that still stood, the blasted city fifty or more miles away.
“I know what happened,” said Jonnie. “We could go on looking at Psychlo planets all night and get the same answer. Give me that computer. We're going to look at Psychlo on Day 92 last year!”
Light. It traveled approximately 5,869,713,600,000 miles a year. The
light which came from Psychlo on that hour and date was still traveling in space. They would get just ahead of it, and with a picto-recorder from a star drone set for 6,000,000,000,000X magnification, they would look at Psychlo at the instant it occurred. Whatever had occurred.
It had been just a few days ago over a year ago.
Choose a sidereal angle to aim the scope. Avoid nearby heavenly bodies so that the cage would not be influenced by gravity and would stay there for two or three minutes. No, let's be brave and put it there for fifteen minutes and hope it doesn't move and we get it back.
It took a while to set up. They had to readjust magnification, tune in heat sensors, and blind them to other bodies. Calculate seconds.
They fired the cage.
The wires hummed in holding for the long required time. They called the cage back.
It arrived!
It was a little misplaced on the platform. Jonnie would have touched it in his eagerness but Angus grabbed his hand. It would be cold enough for the metal to take one's skin off! They had to wait and let it warm up, for if they opened it cold they might warp a disc with the abrupt temperature shift.
It was like teasing a thirsty man by withholding a water skin from him.
Finally they projected it. What a brilliant picture! They had thought it might be fuzzy such as you get with heat waves. But the light that had traveled for over a year was crystal-clear and straight.
There was the imperial City of Psychlo. Circular tram rails, streets down from its cliffs like conveyor belts. They even carried the idea of mining into their city design.
Huge, bustling Psychlo! The center of power of the universes. The hub of the great, cruel claw that raked the bones from planets and peoples everywhere. There was the three-hundred-two-thousand-year-old monster itself, spread out in its sadistic and ugly might!
Neither Jonnie nor Angus had ever seen a live city of that size before. A hundred million population? A billion? Not the planet, just the city above the lower plain. Look at the trams. Rails that ran in circular spirals. Cars that looked for all the world like mine cars but full of people. Mobs in the streets. Mobs! Not riots. Just Psychlos.