Part 10

1

The doors were cracked open, just as he had left them so many years ago. Lying there, crusted with snow but just where he had dropped it, was the iron bar he had used to open the doors. The smell might or might not be there, for he was now wearing an air mask.

They had left just as soon as they could see to fly, and Jonnie had spotted them down accurately just before the door. Behind him in the canyon the Scots were unloading gear. The plane would have to leave and they would have to obliterate all tracks with snow before the recon drone came over on its daily round.

The calm voice of Robert the Fox was directing them: “Have you got the lamps? Check out the spare air bottles. Where is Daniel? Easy with those explosives. . . .”

A Scot came up with a sledgehammer to open the door wider and Angus rushed over and pushed him aside. “No, no, no. ’Tis just wanting a bit of penetrating oil.” Angus was popping the bottom of an oil can. His voice sounded muffled through the air mask.

They were all getting air masks on. The historian had found it was very unhealthy to enter tombs. Something called “spores” sometimes came off bone dust of the long dead and made a man cough his lungs out.

“Mind if I slip in first, Jonnie?” said Angus. Jonnie took his shoulder pack so Angus could slide through. The mine lamp played on the interior. “Och! Enough dead men!” His oil can was popping on hinges. “Try it, Jonnie.”

Jonnie put his shoulder to the doors and they swung back, shooting a blast of light down the stairs. Angus had stepped out of the way and was now wading on littered corpses, puffs of bone dust rising around his boots.

They all stood for a moment, looking down the steps, awed.

On this graveyard of a planet, they were no strangers to dead remains. They lay in structures and basements in abundance wherever there was any protection from wild animals or the weather, corpses more than a thousand years dead.

But reaching down this long flight of stairs were the remains of several hundred men. Protected from the air until a dozen years ago, their clothing, arms and equipment were somewhat preserved, but the bones had gone to powder.

“They fell forward,” said Robert the Fox. “Must have been a regiment marching in. See? These two fellows at the top of the steps must have been closing the doors.”

“The gas,” said Jonnie. “They opened the doors to let the regiment in, looks like, and the gas hit them from the canyon.”

“Wiped the place out,” said Robert the Fox. “Listen, all of you. Don’t go in there without a tight air mask.”

“We ought to bury these men,” said the parson. “They each have little tags on them,” he picked one up. “‘Knowlins, Peter, Private USMC No. 35473524. Blood Type B.’”

“Marines,” said the historian. “We’ve got a military base here all right.”

“Do you suppose,” said the parson to Jonnie, “that village of yours could once have been a marine base? It is different than other towns.”

“The village has been rebuilt a dozen times,” said Jonnie. “Robert, let’s go in.”

“Remember your priorities,” said Robert to the group. “Inventory only. Don’t touch records until they’re identified. This is a big place. Don’t stray or get lost.”

“We ought to bury these bodies,” said the parson.

“We will, we will,” said Robert. “All in good time. Gunners forward. Flush out and destroy any animals.”

Five Scots carrying submachine guns raced down the steps, alert for bears or snakes in hibernation or stray wolves.

“Ventilation team, stand by,” said Robert, and glanced over his shoulder to make sure the three assigned to carry the heavy mine ventilation fans were there and ready.

There was an uneven burst of fire below. The sub-Thompson ammunition was dud two rounds out of five, and to get a sustained burst one had to recock the bolt in midfire.

Robert’s small limited-range radio crackled. “Rattlesnakes. Four. All dead. End com.”

“Aye,” said Robert the Fox into the mike.

There was another ragged burst of fire.

The radio crackled. “Brown bear. Hibernating. Dead. End com.”

“Aye,” said Robert.

“Second set of doors, tight locked.”

“Explosives team,” Robert called over his shoulder.

“Naw, naw!” said Angus. “We may need those doors!”

“Go ahead,” said Robert. “Belay explosives team, but stand by.” Into the mike, “Mechanic en route.”

They waited. The radio crackled. “Doors open.” A pause. “Area beyond seems airtight. Probably no hostile animals beyond. End com.”

“Ventilation team. Forward,” said Robert.

The last man on that team was carrying a cage of rats.

Presently a current of air began to come out of the tomb.

The radio crackled: “Rats still alive. End com.”

“There you are, MacTyler,” said Robert.

Jonnie checked his face mask and walked down through the dust of the stairs. He heard Robert firing the rest of the teams behind him and then giving orders to clean up the outside area and dust all traces with snow when the planes left. The orders sounded way off and thin in the booming caverns of the primary defense base of a long-dead nation.

2

Jonnie’s miner’s lamp played upon the floors and walls of what seemed like endless corridors and rooms.

The place was huge. Offices, offices, offices. Barracks. Storerooms. Their footsteps resounded hollowly, disturbing the millennium-long sleep of the dead.

The first find was a stack of duplicated routing plans for the base. A Scot found them in a reception desk drawer. They were not very detailed, apparently intended to route visiting officers around. The Scot got permission to distribute and, racing up, miner’s lamp bobbing, shoved a copy into Jonnie’s hand.

Level after level existed. There was not just a maze at one level but also mazes down, down, and down.

He was looking for an operations office, someplace where dispatches might mount up, where information was collected. Operations . . . operations . . . where would that be?

Behind him an argument broke out. It was Angus and Robert the Fox at the other end of the corridor.

Angus’s voice was raised. “I know it’s all by elevators!”

There was a murmur from Robert.

“I know it’s all electrical. I’ve been through all this before at the first school! Electrical, electrical, electrical! It takes generators. And they’re just piles of congealed rust! Even if you got one to run, there’s no fuel—it’s just sludge in the tanks. And even if you put in juice, those light bulbs won’t work and the electric motors are frozen solid.”

Robert murmured something.

“Sure the wires may be all right. But even if you got juice in them, all you’d have is an intercom and we’ve got that. So stick to miner’s lamps! I’m sorry, Sir Robert, but there’s just so much dinosaur you can revive from a pile of bones!”

Jonnie heard Robert laughing. He himself differed a little bit with Angus’s point of view. They did not know that there weren’t emergency systems that might work some other way, and they did not know that there might not be other fuels in sealed containers that might still function. The chances were thin, but they could not be ruled out. They were despairingly going to rig mine cables to get to the other levels when a Scot found ramps and stairwells going down.

Operations . . . operations . . .

They found a communications console, the communicator’s remains at the desk. Under the dust that had been his hand was a message:

URGENT. Don’t fire. It isn’t the Russians.

“Russians? Russians?” said a Scot. “Who were the Russians?”

Thor had come, absent without leave from his shift at the lode, but intending to get back. He was part Swedish. “They’re some people that used to live on the other side of Sweden. They were run by the Swedes once.”

“Don’t disturb any messages,” said Robert the Fox.

Operations . . . operations . . .

They found themselves in an enormous room. It had a huge map of the world on a middle table. Apparently clerks with long poles pushed little models around on the map. There were side-wall maps and a balcony overlooking it. Miner’s lamps flicked over maps, models and the remains of the dead. Impressive and well preserved. There were lots of clocks, all stopped long ago.

A crude, hastily made cylinder model rested on the map just east of the Rockies. A long pole was still touching it, the last action of a dead arm. Another map on the wall was plotting the course of something and the last X was straight above this base.

It was too much data to sort out in a moment. Jonnie went on looking.

They found themselves in a nearby room. It had lots of consoles. Top Secret had been the name of this room.

One console said Local Defense and had a chart and map over it. Jonnie went to it and looked closely. TNW Minefields, he read.

Then suddenly he found himself looking at marks of the string mines in the meadow below them. TNW 15.

There was a firing button: TNW 15. But there were rows and rows of these buttons.

TNW? TNW?

The reedy voice of the historian piped up behind him. “‘TNW’ means ‘tactical nuclear weapons.’ Those are the mines!”

Angus came over. “Och! Electrical firing buttons. You push the console button and up they go.”

“Might also be fused for contact,” said Jonnie cautiously. “No wonder the Psychlos thought these mountains were radioactive!”

“What’s a ‘silo’?” said the parson at another board. “It says ‘Silo 1,’ ‘Silo 2’ and so on.”

“A silo,” said Thor, “is where you keep wheat. They used to have them in Sweden. You put wheat in them for storage.”

“I can’t imagine why they’d be that interested in wheat. Look at the way these buttons are marked. ‘Standby,’ ‘Ready,’ ‘Fire.’”

The historian was hastily rifling through a dictionary he habitually carried. He found it. “‘1. A cylindrical upright storage facility for wheat, grain and other foodstuffs. 2. A large, underground structure for the storage and launching of a long-range ballistic missile.’”

Jonnie reached out and grabbed the parson’s wrist. “Don’t touch that console! It could contain emergency systems about which we know nothing.” He turned, excited. “Robert, get this whole board and layout picto-recorded. We have to know the exact location of every silo on that board. Those missiles might have uranium in them!”

3

They were in a storeroom area now. Angus had found a huge ring of keys and was scampering ahead of Jonnie, opening doors. Robert the Fox was following more sedately; he had his worn old cape wrapped very tightly about him, for it was bitterly cold in this place—probably the temperature seldom rose much, even in summer. Robert’s radio crackled occasionally as some Scot elsewhere reported in—the radios worked well underground, designed for miner use.

Jonnie had not yet found all he wanted by a long shot. The planning of a battle against an enemy whose battle tactics were all but unknown was a chancy business. And he did not yet know exactly how the Psychlos had done it. So he had half an ear to Robert’s radio and was not paying all that much attention to Angus.

They were at a heavy door that said Arsenal and Angus was changing keys, about to open it. Some faint hope that it might contain nuclear weapons rose in Jonnie. The door opened.

Boxes! Cases! Endless rows of them!

Jonnie played his lamp over the stencils. He did not know what all these letters meant: this military certainly loved to obscure things under letters and numbers.

Angus danced up with a book, fluttering the well-preserved pages. “‘Ordnance, Types and Models’!” he crooned. “All the numbers and letters will be here. Even pictures!”

“Inventory that,” said Robert the Fox to a Scot beside him who was making lists.

“Bazooka!” said Angus. “There, up there! Those long boxes! ‘Antitank, armor-piercing missile projectiles.’”

“Nuclear?” asked Jonnie.

“Non-nuclear. Says so.”

“I think,” said Robert, “this is just their local arsenal for possible base use. They wouldn’t be supplying the whole army from this spot.”

“Lots of it,” said Angus.

“Enough for a few thousand men,” said Robert.

“Can I open a box?” asked Angus to Robert.

“One or two for now, just to ascertain condition,” said Robert and waved a couple of the following Scots forward to assist.

Angus was flipping through the catalogue, miner’s lamp dancing on the pages. “Ah, here! ‘Thompson submachine gun’. . .” He stopped and looked up at the boxes. He shook his head and looked back at the page. “No wonder!”

“No wonder what?” prompted Robert, a bit impatient. The recon drone must have passed overhead by this time, and they had had no lunch and needed a break to recharge their air bottles outside.

“That ammunition we found was very well preserved. Airtight. Well, it maybe had to be. This sub-Thompson was a century out of date when we found the truckload. They must have just been sending them to the cadets to practice with. They were relics!”

Jonnie was not about to try to fight Psychlos with sub-Thompsons. He started to pass on.

Boxes were being opened behind him. Angus raced up. His lamp was shining on an all-metal, lightweight hand rifle. It was block-solid covered with grease that ages ago had formed into a tight, hard cast.

“Mark 50 assault rifle!” said Angus. “The last thing they issued! I can clean these up so they purr!”

Jonnie nodded. It was a sleek weapon.

MAGAZINE said the door ahead of him. It was a doubly thick door. Meant ammunition. Maybe tactical nuclear weapons?

Angus let another Scot open it for him. He was back there rummaging in cases.

A box right ahead, standing among vast tiers of boxes, said Ammunition, Mark 50 Assault. Jonnie took a jimmy out of his belt and pried open the top. It was not airtight. The cardboard dividers were decayed and stained. The brass was okay and the bullet clean, but the primer at the bottom told its tale. The ammunition was dud. He called Angus and showed him the cartridge.

They went on looking for nuclear weapons.

More storerooms and more storerooms.

And then pay dirt!

Jonnie found himself looking at literally thousands of outfits, neatly arranged on shelves, even with sizes, complete with shoes and faceplated helmets, packed in a kind of plastic that was airtight and nearly imperishable: COMBAT RADIATION PROTECTION UNIFORMS.

His excited hands ripped open a package. Lead-impregnated clothing. Lead-glass faceplates.

And in mountain camouflage: gray, tan and green.

Riches! The one thing that would let them handle radiation!

He showed Robert the Fox. Robert put it on the radio as real news but told the others to go on with their own searches and inventories.

They were on their way outside for food and air when another piece of news came through. It was Dunneldeen. Apparently he had relieved Thor, who had to go on shift at the mine. Dunneldeen wasn’t even supposed to be there. “We got some great big huge security safes here,” Dunneldeen’s voice came over the radio. “No combination. One is marked ‘Top Secret Nuclear’ and ‘Classified Personnel Only. Manuals.’ We need an explosives team. End com.”

He guided them to him. Robert the Fox looked at Angus and Angus shook his head. “No keys,” said Angus.

The explosives team rigged nonflame blasting cartridges to the hinges and everyone went into the next corridor while the explosives team trailed wire. They held their ears. The concussion was head-splitting. A moment later they heard the crash of a door hitting the floor. The fire member of the team raced in with an extinguisher but it was not needed.

Lamps beamed through the settling dust.

Presently they were holding in their hands operations manuals, maintenance manuals, repair manuals, hundreds and hundreds of separate manuals that gave every particular of every nuclear device that had been built, how to set it, fire it, fuse and defuse it, store it, handle it, and safeguard it.

“Now we’ve got everything but the nuclear devices,” said Robert the Fox.

“Yes,” said Jonnie. “You can’t shoot with papers!”

4

It must have been night outside, but nothing could be darker than the deep guts of this ancient defense base. The black seemed to press in upon them as though possessed of actual weight. The miner’s lamps were darting shafts through ink.

They had come down a ramp, gone through an air-sealed door, and found an enormous cavern. The sign said Heliport. The time-decayed bulks of collapsed metal that stood along the walls had been some kind of planes, planes with large fans on top. Jonnie had seen pictures of them in the man-books: they were called “helicopters.” He stared at the single one sitting in the middle of the vast floor.

The small party of Scots with him were interested in something else. The doors! They were huge, made of metal, reaching far right and far left and up beyond their sight. Another entrance to the base—a fly-in entrance for their type of craft.

Angus was scrambling around some motors to the side of the doors. “Electrical. Electrical! I wonder if these poor lads ever thought there would be a day when you had to do something manually. What if the power failed?”

“It’s failed,” said Robert the Fox, his low voice booming in the vast hangar.

“Call me the lamp boys,” said Angus. And presently the two Scots who were packing lamps, batteries, wires, and fuses for their own lighting trotted down the ramp, pushing their gear ahead of them on a dolly they had found.

Hammering began over by the motors that operated the doors.

Robert the Fox came over to Jonnie. “If we can get those doors to open and close, we can fly in and out of here. There’s a sighting port over there and it shows the outside looks like a cave opening, overhung, not visible to the drone.”

Jonnie nodded. But he was looking at the center helicopter. The air was different here; he could feel it on his hands. Drier. He went over to the helicopter.

Yes, there was his eagle. With arrows in its claws, dim but huge on the side of this machine. Not like the other machines, which had minor insignia. He made out the letters: President of the United States. This was a special plane!

The historian answered his pointing finger. “Head of the country. Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.”

Jonnie was puzzled. Yes, possibly he had gotten here on that day of disaster a thousand or more years ago. But if so, where was he? There had been no such sign on the offices. He walked around the hangar. Ha! There was another elevator, a smaller one in a different place. He looked further and found a door to a stairwell that led upward. The door was hard to open, apparently air-sealed. He got through it and mounted upward. Behind him the hammer and clang of the group faded and died. There was only the soft pat of his feet on the stairs.

Another air-sealed door at the top, even harder to open.

This was an entirely different complex. It stood independent of the rest of the base. And due to dry air and seals and possibly something else, the bodies were not dust. They were mummified. Officers on the floor, slumped over desks. Only a few.

Communication and file rooms. A briefing room with few chairs. A bar with glasses and bottles intact. Very superior grade of furnishings. Carpets. All very well preserved. Then he saw the door symbol he was looking for and went in.

The sign was on the splendid polished desk. A huge eagle plaque on the wall. A flag, with some of its fabric still able to stir when he caused a faint breeze opening the door.

The man was slumped over the desk, mummified. Even his clothing still looked neat.

Jonnie looked under the parchment hand and without touching it slid out the sheaf of papers.

The top date and the hour were two days later than the ones that ended in the operations room in the other complex.

The only explanation Jonnie could think of was that the ventilation systems didn’t join: when gas hit the main base, the system was turned off here. And they had not dared turn it back on.

The president and his staff had died from lack of air.

Jonnie felt strangely courteous and respectful as he removed more papers from the desk and trays. He held in his hands the last hours of the world, report by report. Even pictures and something from high up called satellite pictures.

He hastily skimmed through the reports to make sure he had it all.

A strange object had appeared over London without any trace of where it came from.

Teleportation, filled in Jonnie.

It had been at an altitude of thirty thousand feet.

Important, thought Jonnie.

It had dropped a canister and within minutes the south of England was dead.

Psychlo gas. The myths and legends.

It had cruised eastward at 302.6 miles per hour.

Vital data, thought Jonnie.

It had been attacked by fighter planes from Norway; it had not fought back; it had been hit with everything they had without the slightest evidence of damage to it.

Armor, thought Jonnie.

An interchange on something called the hotline prevented a nuclear missile exchange between the United States and Russia.

The “Don’t fire. It isn’t the Russians” message on the desk in the other complex, thought Jonnie.

It was hit with nuclear weapons over Germany without the slightest apparent damage.

No pilots, thought Jonnie. It was a drone. No breathe-gas in it. Very heavy motors.

It had then toured the major population centers of the world, dropping canisters and wiping out populations.

And wiped out the other complex of this base without even knowing or caring that it was there, thought Jonnie. On the operations map of the other complex, they had plotted it only just to the east of this location.

It then went on to obliterate the eastern part of the United States. The reports had come in from DEW line stations in the Arctic and some parts of Canada. It continued on its almost leisurely way to wipe out all population centers in the Southern Hemisphere. But at this point something else began to happen. Isolated observers and satellites reported tanks of a strange design materializing one after the other in various parts of the world and mopping up fleeing hordes of human beings.

Stage two: teleportation, thought Jonnie.

Military reports, out of sequence and incomplete, were shuffled in with the reports of the tanks. All major military airfield installations, whether gassed out of existence or not, were being blown to bits by strange, very fast flying craft.

Battle planes teleported in at the same time as the tanks.

Reports of some tanks exploding, some battle planes exploding. Reasons not known.

Manned craft, thought Jonnie. Breathe-gas hitting areas of radiation caused by firing on the drone with nuclear weapons.

The drone spotted by satellite landing near Colorado City, Colorado. Causes most structures there to collapse.

Preset remote control, thought Jonnie. Even their central command minesite had been picked out. Whole area carefully plotted and observed by casting picto-recorders. Rough, uncontrolled landing of drone near preplanned command area.

Tank spotted by satellite shooting at pocket of cadets wearing flight oxygen masks at the Air Force Academy. Report by acting commander of corps of cadets. Then no further communication.

The last battle, thought Jonnie.

Efforts from the com room to contact somebody, anybody, anywhere, via a remote antenna located three hundred miles to the north. Antenna location bombed by enemy battle plane.

Radio tracking, thought Jonnie.

Unspotted, but with their air shut off, the president and his aides and staff had lasted two more hours until they died of asphyxiation.

Jonnie put the papers respectfully in a protecting mine bag.

Feeling a bit strange for speaking, he said to the corpse, “I’m sorry no help came. We’re something over a thousand years late.” He felt very bad.

His gloom would have followed him as he left the dreary, dark, cold quarters had not the barking, cheery voice of Dunneldeen sprung from the radio at his belt. Jonnie halted and acknowledged.

“Jonnie, laddie!” said Dunneldeen. “You can stop worrying yourself about scraping uranium out of the dirt! There’s a full nuclear arsenal, complete with assorted bombs, intact, just thirty miles north of here! We found the map and a plane just checked it out! Now all we’ve got to worry about is blowing off our innocent little heads and exploding this whole planet in the bargain!”

5

Disaster struck in the form of an earthquake on Day 32 of the new year.

Shortly after midnight, the tremor awakened Jonnie. Equipment on his bureau in the London Palace Elite Hotel rattled together and he sat up in his bed. The prolonged throb of vibration was still occurring!

The old building groaned.

The rumble of the earthquake traveled on. It was followed by a second, lesser tremor a half-minute later, and then that was gone.

It was not too unusual in the Rockies. No damage seemed to be done in the old mining town.

Uneasy, but not really alarmed, Jonnie pulled on buckskin pants and moccasins and, throwing a puma skin over his shoulders, sprinted through the snow to the Empire Dauntless.

The duty sentry’s light was on. The young Scot was tapping a buzzer key that activated the communication system to the mine: it was a directional laser radio, limited to an exact width and undetectable beyond these mountains.

The Scot looked up. His face was a bit white. “They don’t answer.” He tapped the key again more rapidly as though his finger by itself could shoot the beam through. “Maybe the receiver pole got twisted in the quake.”

In minutes, Jonnie had a relief crew routed out, spare ropes and winches assembled, blankets and stimulants packaged and being loaded on the passenger plane. Strained faces turned repeatedly toward the mine even though it was far out of their line of sight. They were worried for the mine duty shift: Thor, a shift leader named Dwight and fifteen men.

The night was black as coal; even the stars were masked by high, invisible clouds. It was no mean stunt flying these mountains in the dark. The instruments of the mine plane glowed green as the ship vaulted upward. The image screen painted a blurred picture of the terrain ahead. Jonnie adjusted it to sharpness. Beside him a copilot made some console plane-weight corrections. Jonnie was depending on his eyes to avoid the first mountain slope. He flipped on the plane’s beam lights. They struck the snow slope and he eased the plane up over it.

He knew that things had been going too well.

They had been making real progress in their preparations. They were far from ready, but what they had accomplished had been miraculous.

He hunted ahead for the next mountainside, checking the viewscreen. Good Lord, it was dark! He checked his compass. The men in the back were tense and silent. He could almost feel what they were thinking.

The top knoll flipped by under them. A little too close. Where was the next one?

The assault rifles he had at first considered worthless were proving the very thing. With a great deal of ingenuity they had salvaged the ammunition. They had drawn out the bullets from the case and tapped out the primer. By careful experimentation they had found out how to substitute a blasting cap in the bottom of the shell case. At first they had thought they would also need powder and had blown up a rifle trying it—no casualties. It turned out that the blasting cap was enough to fire a bullet at high velocity.

Jonnie swerved the plane to avoid a suddenly looming cliff and went a little higher. If he went too high he could lose his way entirely if lights were out at the mine. His lights might also become visible at the compound. Stay low. Dangerous, but stay low.

Then they had taken the bullets and drilled a small hole in the nose and, wearing radiation suits, inserted a grain of radioactive material from a TNW. They had covered this with a thin bit of melted lead. In this way a man could carry the ammunition without danger of radiation hitting him.

But when it was fired—oh my! They tried it on breathe-gas in a glass bottle, and did that breathe-gas explode!

Too low, Jonnie had recognized a lone scrub on a ridge. He lifted the plane over it. They were on course. Hold down the speed. Don’t have another disaster flying in the dark.

The bullets were also armor-piercing to some degree and, when fired into a breathe-gas vial two hundred yards away, caused a violent reaction that brought concussion all the way back to them.

They put every available Scot onto an assembly line converting bullets and they had cases and cases of them now.

A hundred assault rifles and five hundred magazines had been cleaned to perfection. They fired without a stutter or dud.

No good against a tank or a thick, lead-glass compound dome, but those assault rifles would be deadly to individual Psychlos. With breathe-gas in their bloodstreams, they would literally explode.

He spotted the river that ran out of the gorge. He eased down, following it, the plane’s lights flashing on the uneven ice and snow.

They’d been so happy about the assault rifles that they had gone to work on the bazookas. They had found some nuclear artillery shells and had converted their noses over to the bazooka noses, and now they had armor-piercing, nuclear bazookas. There were still a number of those left to make.

Yes, it had been too smooth, too good to be true.

There were no lights on the mine pad ahead.

There was no one visible there at all.

He set the plane down on the pad.

The passengers boiled out of it.

Their lights darted this way and that.

One of them who had run to the chasm edge called back, his voice thin in the cold darkness: “Jonnie! The cliff face has gone!”

6

A light shone down from the present edge and confirmed it. The fissure, thirty feet back from the old edge, had simply opened in the earthquake and fallen into the gorge.

The cliff face was no longer overhanging but sloped up toward them.

In the light, the wide edge of the broken-off quartz lode was visible. It was pure white. No gold in the remaining vein. The pocket of gold was gone!

But Jonnie was thinking right now of the crew. They had not reached the fissure, for the avalanche had exposed no tunnel.

They were somehow trapped under them, if they were still alive.

Jonnie raced back to the shaft edge. It yawned blackly, a large circle of emptiness, silent. The shaft was about a hundred feet deep.

He looked around, flashing his light. “The hoist! Where is the hoist?”

The entire apparatus used to take out ore and lower and raise men was missing.

Lights played down the mountain. It was not on the slope.

Jonnie approached the hole more closely. Then he saw the slide marks of the cross timbers that had supported the hoist cage over the hole.

The hoist was down there in the shaft.

“Be very quiet, everyone,” said Jonnie. Then he bent over and cupped his hands and shouted down, “Down there! Is anyone alive?”

They listened.

“I thought I heard something,” said the parson, who had come along.

Jonnie tried again. They listened. They could not be sure. Jonnie turned on his belt radio and spoke into it. No answer. He saw Angus in the rescue team. “Angus! Drop an intercom on a cable down into that hole.”

While Angus and two others were doing that, Jonnie pulled a picto-recorder out of the rescue gear. He found more cable and extended its leads.

Angus had rigged and lowered the intercom. Jonnie signaled to the parson. The place was broadly lit now with lamps the relief crew had put on poles. The parson’s hand was shaking as he held the intercom mike.

“Hello the mine!” said the parson.

The intercom mike down there should pick up voices if there was any reply. There wasn’t.

“Keep trying,” said Jonnie. He paid out the line of the picto-recorder and lowered it into the hole. Robert the Fox stepped forward from the relief group and took charge of the portable screen.

At first there was just the shaft wall sliding by as the picto-recorder went down. Then a piece of timber, then a tangle of cable. Then the hoist!

Jonnie rotated the cable and shifted the remote control to wide-angle.

The hoist was empty.

A sigh of relief joined the night wind as the tense group saw that no one had been killed in the hoist.

Jonnie worked the remote to look over the hoist. It was hard to tell, but it did not appear there was anybody crushed under the fallen hoist.

The picto-recorder swung idly on its cable ninety feet below them. Eyes strained at the viewscreen, begging it for data.

“No drift hole!” said Jonnie. “The drift hole isn’t visible! When the hoist fell it caved in the entrance to the drift down there!”

Pressing a flying platform into service, they flew a three-man crew down to the bottom of the drift. Robert the Fox wouldn’t let Jonnie go down on it.

One of the men dropped down from the platform and fixed lifting hooks into the cage cable and they pulled it back up to the top of the hole.

They rigged a crane, pulleys and a winch, and thirty-three minutes later—clocked by the historian who also had sneaked aboard the relief plane—they had the hoist out of the shaft and sitting off to the side.

Jonnie put the picto-recorder back down and it confirmed his guess. The shaft end of the level drift down there was blocked, knocked shut when the hoist fell.

They rigged buckets to crane cable and very shortly they had four men down at the bottom. Jonnie ignored Robert and went this time.

They tore at the rocks with their hands, filling up buckets that shot aloft to be replaced by empty ones. More tools and welcome sledges came down.

Two hours went by. They changed three of the men twice. Jonnie stayed down there.

They worked in a blur of speed. The rattle of rocks and thud of sledges freeing them resounded in the dusty hole bottom. The rockfall was thicker than they had hoped.

Two feet into the drift. Three feet. Four feet. Five feet. Maybe the whole drift had collapsed!

They changed crews. Jonnie stayed down there.

Three hours and sixteen minutes after their arrival at the bottom, Jonnie heard a distant whisper of sound. He held up his hand for silence. “In the mine!” he shouted.

Very faintly it came back: “. . . air hole . . .”

“Repeat!” shouted Jonnie.

It came back, “. . . make . . .”

Jonnie grabbed a long mine drill. He looked for the thinnest place he could imagine in the white rock wall before him, socked the rock drill point into it, and signaled the man on the drill motor. “Let her spin!”

They bucked the drill into it with the pressure handles. The others would hear it in there and get out of the way.

With a high scream the drill went through.

They dragged it out.

“Air hose!” yelled Jonnie. And they fed the hose through the drill hole and turned the air compressor on. Air from the drift squealed back past the sides of the hose and into the rescue crew’s faces.

Twenty-one minutes later they had the top of the rockfall cleared and could drag men out.

They had to drop the gap farther to get the last one. It was Dunneldeen and he had a broken ankle and broken ribs.

Seventeen men, only one with a serious injury.

They passed them to the top silently in the hoist buckets.

A dust- and sweat-covered Jonnie was the last one up. The parson threw a blanket around him. The salvaged crew were bundled up, sitting in the snow, most of them drinking something hot that one of the old women had sent in a huge jug. The parson had finished setting the ankle of Dunneldeen and, helped by Robert the Fox, was taping up the ribs.

Finally Thor said, “We lost the lode.”

Nobody said anything.

7

With dawn making a faint, pale line in the east, Jonnie looked down into the abyss.

The pure white lode showed not the slightest trace of gold. It was in plain sight.

When the recon drone came over, Terl would have a picture of this. Far, far below, as yet invisible in the darkness, a new fall of rock would tell the story.

Jonnie tried to guess Terl’s reaction. It was difficult to do so, for Terl was undoubtedly over his own edge into madness.

How many hours did Jonnie have until the drone? Not many.

The air was unaccountably still. The morning wind had not started up. The dawn light was reflected back from the surrounding majestic peaks.

Jonnie ran over to a flying platform and gestured to a pilot to join him. He lifted it up, put it over the edge of the chasm, and dropped it like a rocket to the bottom. He braked it and hovered.

Turning on the beam lights of the platform he examined the mass of fallen rock. Some of it had gone through the river ice. Some of it made a new bank for the stream. He played the light through the debris. It was an enormous mass.

Hopefully, he looked for some slightest whiteness that would indicate a piece of the lode.

None!

A ton of gold perhaps. But now it was buried under a mountain of rock-fall, possibly even plunged into the river bottom.

The debris was so peaked and broken one couldn’t even land on it. He tossed around the idea of clearing a flat place. But it would take hours and the winds would be here soon.

He had to face it. The gold was gone.

The morning wind was beginning to blow now. He couldn’t stay down here and live to tell about it. If he had another short period of morning quiet he might do something. But they’d used up their time.

He sent the flying platform screaming up to the cliff top. It was already being buffeted by turbulent air. He landed.

He told Robert the Fox, “Get these men back to the town.”

Jonnie walked back and forth. The parson looked at him in sympathy. “We aren’t done yet, laddie,” said the parson. The whole group looked to be in the shock of disappointment.

Robert the Fox was looking at Jonnie. They were loading the saved crew and two pilots were at the controls of the plane. Dunneldeen was being eased gently aboard.

“I’m going to do it!” said Jonnie suddenly.

Robert the Fox and the parson walked over.

“Terl,” said Jonnie, “doesn’t know how close that drift was to the inside of the lode. He doesn’t know that we hadn’t already mined the back of it. If he sees that white quartz out there he’ll know we didn’t get to it before the slide. Thor!” he shouted. “How close were you to the fissure?”

Thor asked the shift leader and they did some calculations. “About five feet,” Thor finally shouted from the plane.

“I’ll blow it in,” said Jonnie. “It doesn’t matter now if we blast. I’m going to blow the last end of the drift so it looks like it was through! Take that plane back fast and get me explosives and a shot-holer gun!”

He rattled off the exact explosives needed and the plane with the salvaged crew vibrated, ready to take off.

“And bring in the next shift!” shouted Jonnie. “We’ve very little time till the recon drone pass-over. Fly fast!” It was daylight now and they could. The plane roared off the pad.

Jonnie didn’t wait for it to get back before he started to work. He went down the shaft, carrying some tools, got out of the bucket at the bottom, and made his way over the rubble and into the drift.

The crew’s equipment was still lying about. The lamps were still on. Jonnie picked up a drill and began to make six-inch-deep holes all around the extreme edges of the white quartz. Two Scots picked up other drills and began to help him when they saw what he was doing: he was putting in shot holes.

While he worked he had others of the rescue team clear the remaining equipment out of the drift and take it above. No reason to waste that. Only the shift radio had been smashed in the rockfall. This drift would never be used again and it might well blow to bits.

He was surprised the plane came back so fast. He was in radio contact with the surface and he told them what he wanted down there.

Very shortly the explosives arrived. He put powerful, molding explosive into each one of the shot holes. Then on top of that he put a giant concussion-fired blasting cap. On top of all that he packed neutral goo. It was rigged so it would blow outward toward the cliff face.

He went back up to the surface, talking on the radio as he was hoisted aloft. They had a harness and cable rigged and he went out to the cliff edge, shrugging into the harness. He ignored Robert the Fox’s request that somebody else do it; they had not used explosives that much and Jonnie knew them well.

Using a winch and safety wires, they lowered him over the edge. He found it very easy to go down the cliff face now that it was slightly inclined. He signaled when he was opposite the lode and they halted the lowering winch.

Bouncing himself about with his moccasins against the cliff, he looked for the pinhole. From inside he had put a very thin drill all the way through to the outside.

There was the tiny hole! It marked the top center of the inside ring of shot holes.

The shot-holer gun bounced down to him. This was the dicey part. The gun might set off the inside blast with concussion, and if it did he’d be blown off the cliff by the explosion. But he had no time to just drill.

He made a plaited cable of blasting cord. With the shot-holer set at minimum power he made holes for pins in the lode. Getting himself adjusted up and down by the winch and with a thousand feet of chasm gaping below him, he wound the blasting cord through the pins. Presently he had a big circle on the vein.

He fixed an electric firing wire to the cord and let it pay out as they reeled him up.

He was pressed for time. It would be at most half an hour before the recon drone came over and the smoke must be cleared.

The firing wire was run to the plane. He made everyone including himself get into the plane in case more cliff went.

“Stand by!” he shouted.

He pressed the firing button.

Smoke and flame flashed on the cliff face. White quartz and country rock blasted toward the other wall of the canyon.

The ground shook.

No more cliff fell.

Jonnie took the plane up and into the height and position the recon drone would be.

They had a black hole in the cliff side. It looked like the drift had reached the lode.

They landed again to look busy with equipment. The smoke of the blast dissipated in the mountain air.

The rumble of the drone grew louder in the distance.

8

A very hungover Terl sat beside the drone receiver in his office, woodenly taking the lode scans out of the roller.

He had slept the sleep of the very drunk both last night and this morning, and he had not felt any earthquake, nor had anyone informed him of it since the compound was proof against such slight tremors, and it had been much more severe in the mountains.

What little pleasure he got in life these days was looking at the scan photos, even though they showed only a bit more waste ore around the shaft and a little activity.

He was no closer to solving the puzzle of Jayed than he had been when the fellow arrived. The endless searching and trying to figure out the reasons I.B.I. might have an interest here had cost Terl weight, had sunken in and dulled his eyes, and had put a tremor in his talons when he lifted the all-too-frequent kerbango saucepans to his mouthbones. His hatred of this planet with its accursed blue skies and white mountains deepened day by day. This routine moment at the scanner, taken only after locking all doors and checking with a debug probe, was his only hopeful instant in the day.

Terl raised the scan picture to the light. It took him a moment or two to realize it was different today. Then he quivered with abrupt shock.

The face of the cliff had avalanched.

There was no lode there.

He didn’t have yesterday’s pictures. He always tore them up promptly. He tried to estimate how much of the face was gone. The incline of it was different. He couldn’t estimate how deep the sheer-off had cut into the cliff.

There was a hole. That would be the drift. They had been drifting along the vein.

He was about to put the photo down to think about it when he noticed the mineral side scan trace. The primary purpose of a recon drone was not surveillance. It scanned ceaselessly for minerals and recorded them on a trace. This trace was different.

Indeed it was different. He knew the lode trace: the jagged spectrum of gold. He quickly ran the trace into the analyzing machine.

Sulphur? There was no sulphur in that lode. That gold was not a sulphide gold compound. Carbon? Fluorine? What in the name of the crap nebula . . . none of these minerals were in that area!

He wondered whether he was looking at the six-common-mineral formula of what the Psychlos called “trigdite.” None of the explosives or fuels were imported from Psychlo. They were dangerous to transship and easy to make on this planet. The little factory stood about ten miles south of the compound, served by the power lines from the distant dam, and every now and then a crew went down to combine the elements into fuel cartridges and explosives. So all these elements were present on this planet.

He ran it through the scanner again to get the exact balance of the mix.

Trigdite!

Terl’s unbalanced wits instantly leaped to a wrong conclusion. Trigdite was the commonest trace one got around any Psychlo mine. It would almost be unusual not to find it as it hung in the rocks and air after blasting.

He leaped from his chair and ripped the scan photo to bits in savage paws. He threw down the fragments. He stamped on them. He pounded his fists against the wall.

The vicious rotten animals had blown the face of the cliff off! Just to spite him! Just to get even with him! They’d destroyed his lode!

He collapsed in the chair.

He heard a knocking at his door and Chirk’s worried voice, “Whatever is the matter, Terl?”

Suddenly he realized he must get control of himself. He must be very cold, very clever.

“The machine broke,” he shouted, a clever explanation.

She went away.

He felt cool, dispassionate, masterful. He knew exactly what he would do, knew it step by step. He would have to remove all possible threats to his life. He would have to cover all traces.

First he would commit the perfect crime. He had worked it all out.

Then he would release the drone and exterminate the animals.

His talons were still shaking a bit. He knew it would make him feel much better if he went out and killed the two females. He had that planned for Day 94. He would make a couple of explosive collars for the horses and then he would lead the horses up to the cage and show the females the red blob on the horses’ collars was the same as on theirs, and then he would hit a switch and explode a horse’s head off. The females would go into terror. Then he’d do it to the other horse. Then he’d pretend to let them loose but step back and blow the smaller female’s head off. The amount of terror he could generate would be delicious. He felt he needed such a boost now. Then he remembered the animal’s “psychic powers.” That animal up in the hills would know about it and might do something to avoid getting killed.

No, attractive and needful to his nerves as it might be, he must not indulge himself. He must be cool, masterful and clever.

He had better set the perfect crime in motion right this instant.

He got up with deliberate, calm determination and went about it.

9

The perfect crime began by appointing Ker the deputy head of the planet. It was all done within the hour and distributed and posted. The company rules allowed for a deputy, there was none, and it was only logical that one be appointed.

To do this, Terl used the already signed order pages he had gotten from Numph.

In the evening, Terl took Numph aside, swearing him to strict secrecy and hinting his swindle with pay and bonus funds might be at risk, and got him to make an appointment with a new employee named Snit.

He did not inform Numph that “Snit” was the cover name of Jayed of the Imperial Bureau of Investigation.

Terl impressed on Numph that no one must know of the appointment. It must take place at the hour just before midnight in the administration compound. He also didn’t mention that the offices would be deserted at that time.

Telling Numph it was all for his own protection, Terl arranged to be standing behind a curtain in Numph’s office when Jayed arrived.

With very expert care, Terl had oiled and charged an assassin gun, a silent weapon. He had also prepared two remote explosion blasting caps.

Just before the appointment time, Terl told Numph to be sure his handgun was loaded and ready in his lap. This frightened Numph a little, but Terl said, “I’ll be right behind this curtain protecting you.”

Numph was at the desk, gun in lap; Terl was behind the curtain. The hour of the appointment arrived. So far, Terl had been calm and masterful, but as he waited his nerves were playing him tricks and making his eyebones twitch. What if Jayed didn’t come?

A dreadful minute went by. Then another. Jayed was late.

Then, what a relief to Terl, the slither of footsteps in the outside hall. Of course! Jayed must have been putting a probe to the area to see whether it was free of surveillance devices. What a fool, thought Terl illogically. Terl had already done that and very thoroughly, too. There were no surveillance devices here.

The door slid quietly open and Jayed came in. His head was down. He had not even bothered to change out of his tattered ore-sorter clothes.

“You sent for me, Your Planetship,” muttered Jayed.

As he had been coached, Numph said, “Are you certain that no one knows you are here?”

“Yes, Your Planetship,” mumbled Jayed. What an act, thought Terl contemptuously.

He stepped out from behind the curtain and walked forward. “Hello, Jayed,” said Terl.

The fellow was jolted. He looked up. “Terl? Is it Terl?” I.B.I. agents were trained. They never forgot a face. Terl knew the fellow had not seen him for years and years, and then only as a security student at the mine school when Jayed had been investigating a crime there. One interview. But it didn’t fool Terl. He knew Jayed must have studied and studied the photographs and records of every executive here, and especially the security chief’s. Terl smiled disdainfully.

Then Jayed saw the assassin pistol at Terl’s side. He stepped back. He raised his mangy paws. “Wait. Terl! You don’t understand—!”

What was he trying to do? Open his shirt? Reach for a secret weapon?

It made no difference. Terl stepped into position and raised the gun, putting it on a direct line from Numph to Jayed.

Terl fired one accurate, deadly shot into Jayed’s heart.

Jayed was trying to say something. Some protest. He was dead, crumpled and mangy on the green-stained carpet.

Terl thrilled a bit with the murder. Jayed had been afraid! But this was no time for self-indulgence.

A calm, masterful Terl turned to Numph.

Numph was sitting there in terror. Terl thought it was delicious. But he had a job to do.

“Don’t worry, Numph,” said Terl. “That fellow was an agent of the I.B.I. come to smoke you out. He hasn’t. You’re safe. I have saved your life.”

Numph tremblingly laid his own gun down on the desktop. He was panting, but much relieved.

Terl walked up on the side of Numph that held the gun. He raised the assassin gun quickly.

Numph’s eyes shot wide, his mouth opened in incredulity.

Terl pushed the muzzle of the silent weapon against Numph’s head and pulled the firing catch.

The jolt knocked Numph sideways. Green blood began to pour from a wound that went all the way through his head.

A calm, completely in charge, cool Terl steadied the body and then tipped it forward so that it fell across the desk. He arranged the still twitching arm so that it might have fired the shot. The twitches stopped. Numph was dead.

Working with precision and care, he put a remote-controlled blast cap in the barrel of Numph’s gun.

Terl produced a new weapon from his boot. He went over to Jayed’s body and put the stiffening paw around the butt on it.

Into the muzzle of Jayed’s gun, he put the second remote-control cap.

He looked around. It was all in order.

Walking casually but very silently, he went out to the nearly empty recreation hall, entering as though just coming in from outside, even taking his breathe-mask off. He ordered a saucepan of kerbango from the attendant. It was Terl’s usual routine. He was a little surprised to notice he needed it.

After a few minutes, when the yawning attendant was hinting he wanted to close up and was letting down a blind in preparation for the morrow, Terl casually put his hand in his pocket.

He pressed the first remote. Far off, there was a muzzled explosion. The attendant looked up, listening, looking toward the other end of the compound.

Terl pressed the second remote.

There was another explosion.

“That sounded like gunfire,” said the attendant.

A door slammed somewhere. Somebody else had heard it.

“It did, didn’t it,” said Terl.

He stood up. “Sounded like it was in the compound! Let’s see if we can find it.”

With the attendant in his wake, Terl started running through the berthing areas, opening doors. “Did a shot go off in here?” he was barking at startled, just-awakened Psychlos. Some of them had heard the shots, too.

“Where did it sound like it came from?” Terl was demanding of people out in the halls.

Some pointed toward the administration building. Terl thanked them and efficiently went plowing in that direction, followed by a crowd of Psychlos.

He industriously searched through the offices, turning on lights. The crowd was also searching.

Somebody yelled from Numph’s corridor, “They’re in here. They’re in here!”

Terl let a lot of fellows get there first. Then he went plowing through them. “Who is it? Where?”

They babbled at him, pointing in through the open door. The two bodies were in view.

Char was regarding them sourly from just inside the door. He made as if to walk forward. Terl swept him back.

“Don’t touch anything!” commanded Terl. “As security chief, I am in charge here. Back!”

He bent over the bodies one after the other. “Anybody recognize this one?” he said, pointing to Jayed’s body.

After a moment and craning necks, “I think his name’s Snit,” from a personnel officer. “I really don’t know.”

“They’re both dead,” said Terl. “Call for some stretchers. I’ll record this.” There was a picto-recorder on Numph’s desk, as always. Terl whirred it at the room and each body. “I’ll want statements from all of you.”

Somebody had called the medical staff. They had heard the shots and were prompt. They loaded the bodies on the stretchers.

“Take them directly to the morgue unless you want to examine them first,” said Terl.

“They’re both dead,” said the medical chief. “Blast gun wounds.”

“Move along,” said Terl efficiently to the crowd. “It’s all over.”

Tomorrow morning he would write his report, all backed by witnessed statements: An agent of the I.B.I., recognized by the keen eye of Terl, had not seen fit to announce himself to the planet’s security chief but, proceeding alone, had apparently visited Numph late in the evening and possibly had attempted a foolhardy, single-handed arrest. Numph had shot him with a hidden gun and then committed suicide. Terl had now followed through, seeing whether Numph were guilty of some crime, had continued an investigation begun long since, and had found a pay swindle, papers and evidence to hand. Meanwhile, Terl respectfully submitted all was under control; a competent, experienced deputy Numph had earlier appointed was now on the job, etc. Bodies en route at next semiannual firing, Day 92.

Tomorrow afternoon, as soon as he had verified the animals were still there, he would launch the drone and obliterate “the foolish experiment Numph had been engaged upon.” All evidence would be covered, all tracks obliterated. Whatever Jayed had been after, it made no difference now.

Terl felt very calm, very cool, very masterful. He had brought off the perfect crime.

It was odd that he couldn’t sleep and kept twitching.