Chapter 13: A Bag of Tricks We Don't Have

He flinched inwardly, and tightened his eye-muscles on the edge of the monocle to keep from flinching physically as well, trying to freeze out of his face the consternation he felt.

“That’s bad, Kent,” he said. “Very bad. I’d been counting heavily on Dr. Gomes to design a bomb of our own.”

“Well, general, if you please.” That was Air-Commodore Leslie Hargreaves. “You say you suspect that King Orgzild has developed a nuclear bomb. If that’s true, it’s a horrible danger to all of us. But I find it hard to believe that the Keegarkans could have done so, with their resources and at their technological level. Now, if it had been the Kragans, that would have been different, but...”

“Paula, you’d better carry on and explain what you told me, and add anything else you can think of that might be relevant ... Is that sound-recorder turned on? Then turn it on, somebody; we want this taped.”

Paula rose and began talking: “I suppose you all understand what conditions are on Niflheim, and how these Ulleran native workers are employed; however, I’d better begin by explaining the purpose for which these nuclear bombs were designed and used...”

He smiled; she realized that he needed time to think, and she was stalling to provide it. He drew a pencil and pad toward him and began doodling in a bored manner, deliberately closing his mind to what she was saying. There were two assumptions, he considered: first, that King Orgzild already possessed a nuclear bomb which he could use when he chose, and, second, that in the absence of Dr. Gomes, such a bomb could only be produced on Gongonk Island after lengthy experimental work. If both of these assumptions were true, he had just heard the death-sentence of every Terran on Uller. The first he did not for a moment doubt. The reasons for making it were too good. He dismissed it from further consideration and concentrated on the second.

“ ... what’s known as a Nagasaki-type bomb, the first type of plutonium-bomb developed,” Paula was saying. “Really, it’s a technological antique, but it was good enough for the purpose, and Dr. Gomes could build it with locally available materials...”

That was the crux of it. The plutonium bomb, from a military standpoint, was as obsolete as the flintlock musket had been at the time of the Second World War. He reviewed, quickly, the history of weapons-development since the beginning of the Atomic Era. The emphasis, since the end of the Second World War, had all been on nuclear weapons and rocket-missiles. There had been the H-bomb, itself obsolescent, and the Bethe-cyle bomb, and the subneutron bomb, and the omega-ray bomb, and the nega-matter bomb, and then the end of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere and the rise of the new civilization in South America and South Africa and Australia. Today, the small-arms and artillery his troops were using were merely slight refinements on the weapons of the First Century, and all the modern nuclear weapons used by the Terran Federation were produced at the Space Navy base on Mars, by a small force of experts whose skills were almost as closed to the general scientific and technical world as the secrets of a medieval guild. The old A-bomb was an historical curiosity, and there was nobody on Uller who had more than a layman’s knowledge of the intricate technology of modern nuclear weapons. There were plenty of good nuclear-power engineers on Gongonk Island, but how long would it take them to design and build a plutonium bomb?

“ ... also has a good understanding of Lingua Terra,” Paula was saying. “He and Dr. Murillo conversed bilingually, just as I’ve heard General von Schlichten and King Kankad talking to one another. I haven’t any idea whether or not Gorkrink could read Lingua Terra, or, if so, what papers or plans he might have seen.”

“Just a minute, Paula,” he said. “Colonel Grinell, what does your branch have on this Gorkrink?”

“He’s the son of King Orgzild, and the daughter of Prince Jurnkonk,” Grinell said. “We knew he’d signed on for Nif, two years ago, but the story we got was that he’d fallen out of favor at court and had been exiled. I can see, now, that that was planted to mislead us. As to whether or not he can read Lingua Terra, my belief is that he can. We know that he can understand it when spoken. He could have learned to read at one of those schools Mohammed Ferriera set up, ten or fifteen years ago.”

“And Dr. Gomes and Dr. Murillo and Dr. Livesey left papers and plans lying around all over the place,” Paula added. “If he went to Niflheim as a spy, he could have copied almost anything.”

“Well, there you have it,” von Schlichten said. “When Gorkrink found out that plutonium can be used for bombs, he began gathering all the information he could. And as soon as he got home, he turned it all over to Pappy Orgzild.”

“That still doesn’t mean that the Kee-geeks were able to do anything with it,” Air-Commodore Hargreaves argued.

“I think it does,” von Schlichten differed. “As soon as Orgzild would hear about the possibility of making a plutonium bomb, he’d set up an A-bomb project, and don’t think of it in terms of the old First Century Manhattan Project. There would be no problem of producing fissionables--we’ve been scattering refined plutonium over this planet like confetti.”

“Well, an A-bomb’s a pretty complicated piece of mechanism, even if you have the plans for it,” Kent Pickering said. “As I recall, there have to be several subcritical masses of plutonium, or U-235, or whatever, blown together by shaped charges of explosive, all of which have to be fired simultaneously. That would mean a lot of electrical fittings that I can’t see these geeks making by hand.”

“I can,” Paula said. “Have you ever seen the work these native jewelers do? And didn’t you tell me about a clockwork thing they have at the university here, to show the apparent movements of the sun...”

“That’s right,” von Schlichten said. “And what they couldn’t make, they could have bought from us; we’ve sold them a lot of electrical equipment.”

“All right, they could have built an A-bomb,” Buhrmann said. “But did they?”

“We assume they tried to. Gorkrink got back from Nif on the Canberra, three months ago,” von Schlichten said. “If Orgzild decided to build an A-bomb, he wouldn’t give the signal for this uprising until he either had one or knew he couldn’t make one, and he wouldn’t give up trying in only three months. Therefore, I think we can assume that he succeeded, and had succeeded at the time he sent Gorkrink here to get that four tons of plutonium we let him have, and, incidentally, to tell Ghroghrank to pass the word to have Sid Harrington poisoned according to plan.”

“Then why didn’t he just use it on us at the start of the uprising?” Meyerstein wanted to know.

“Why should he? Getting rid of us is only the first step in Orgzild’s plan,” Grinell said. “Back as far as geek history goes, the Kings of Keegark have been trying to conquer Konkrook and the Free Cities and make themselves masters of the whole Takkad Sea area. Let Konkrook wipe us out, and then he can move in his troops and take Konkrook. Or, if we beat off the geeks here, as we seem to be doing, he can bomb us out and then move in on Konkrook. I think that as long as we’re fighting here, he’ll wait. The more damage we do to Konkrook, the easier it’ll be for him.”

“Then we’d better start dragging our feet on the Konkrook front,” Laviola said. “And get busy trying to build a bomb of our own.”

Von Schlichten looked up at the big screen, on which the battle of Konkrook was being projected from an overhead pickup.

“I’ll agree on the second half of it,” von Schlichten said. “And we’ll also have to set up some kind of security-patrol system against bombers from Keegark. And as soon as Procyon gets here, we’ll have to send her out to hunt down and destroy those two Boer-class freighters, the Jan Smuts and the Kruger. And we’ll have to arrange for protection of Kankad’s Town; that’s sure to be another of Orgzild’s high-priority targets. As to the action against Konkrook, I’ll rely on your advice, Them. Can we delay the fall of the city for any length of time?”

M’zangwe shook his head. “When we divert contragravity to security-patrol work, the ground action’ll slow up a little, of course. But the geeks are about knocked out, now.”

“The hell with it, then. I doubt if we’d be able to buy much time from Orgzild by delaying victory in the city, and we’ll probably need the troops as workers over here.” He turned to Pickering. “Dr. Pickering, what sort of a crew can you scrape together to design a bomb for us?” he asked.

“Well, there’s Martirano, and Sternberg, and Howard Fu-Chung, and Piet van Reenen, and...” He nodded to himself. “I can get six or eight of them in here in about twenty minutes; I’ll have a project set up and working in a couple of hours. There has to be somebody qualified on duty at the plant, all the time, of course, but...”

“All right, call them in. I want the bomb finished by yesterday afternoon. And everybody with you, and you, yourself, had better revert to civilian status. This isn’t something you can do by the numbers, and I don’t want anybody who doesn’t know what it’s all about pulling rank on your outfit. Go ahead, call in your gang, and let me know what you’ll be able to do, as soon as possible.”

He turned to Hargreaves. “Les, you’ll have charge of flying the security patrols, and doing anything else you can to keep Orgzild from bombing us before we can bomb him. You’ll have priority on everything second only to Pickering.”

Hargreaves nodded. “As you say, general, we’ll have to protect Kankad’s, as well as this place. It’s about five hundred miles from here to Kankad’s, and eight-fifty miles from Kankad’s to Keegark...”

He stopped talking to von Schlichten, and began muttering to himself, running over the names of ships, and the speeds and pay-load capacities of airboats, and distances. In about five minutes, he would have a programme worked out; in the meantime, von Schlichten could only be patient and contain himself. He looked along the table, and caught sight of a thin-faced, saturnine-looking man in a green shirt, with a colonel’s three concentric circles marked on the shoulders in silver-paint. Emmett Pearson, the communications chief.

“Emmett,” he said, “those orbiters you have strung around this planet, two thousand miles out, for telecast rebroadcast stations. How much of a crew could be put on one of them?”

Pearson laughed. “Crew of what, general? White mice, or trained cockroaches? There isn’t room inside one of those things for anything bigger to move around.”