Part 20

1

Their problem was really bugging the place more thoroughly than any place had ever been bugged while still preventing the bugs from being discovered by one who, although quite mad, was one of the sharpest security chiefs ever to walk out of the mine schools.

If they did this well, they would have a total record of the technology of teleportation and its mathematics. They would know what happened to Psychlo because they would be able to cast out picto-recorders. They would know the whereabouts and possibly the intentions of other races. They would be in communication with the stars and universes and could defend themselves on Earth.

Terl would have to work out and build from scratch a whole transshipment console, for the one out there near the old platform was a burned-out ruin.

They needed devices that could read over his shoulder every book he opened, every page of figures he made. They needed to fix up his workroom in his office and rig it so that every resistor he picked up, every wire he put in, would be recorded exactly.

It was certain that he would sweep the place with a probe before every work period and possibly after every day of toil. He would be meticulous in his bug detection.

If Terl had any inkling the technology would be observed he would not start. If he thought it had been taken away by an alien, he would commit suicide. For there was no doubt that Terl had in his skull both the devices they had found in the dead Psychlos.

Before they had left Africa, Dr. MacKendrick had been very pessimistic about being able to remove such brain devices from all that bone and still have a live, functioning Psychlo on his hands. That chance was not entirely gone. But it was nothing to be counted on.

Angus had lately begun to understand why Jonnie had kept Terl alive, why they didn’t just get out some battle planes and wipe this new political mess out. It was a very delicate situation. It was a thin chance. It had to work. But with what risks! Angus had no doubt whatever that Jonnie was holding his own life at stake. A huge and dangerous risk. But what a prize! The Psychlo technology of teleportation. Earth depended upon it.

Jonnie was a cool one, Angus thought. He himself would never have that much patience or be able to retain that detached an overview of the entire scene without permitting personal considerations from entering in.

Angus looked up from the locks. He was in awe of Jonnie as he thought about what they were doing. These people or Terl would kill Jonnie in a flash if they found him or knew what he was up to. Robert the Fox had denounced it as folly and a hopeless, unwarranted risk. Angus didn’t think so. It was a brand of courage he had never seen before.

He got the cabinets opened. They contained all the paraphernalia a security chief ever thought he would need. They contained papers and records Terl would consider vital.

Jonnie was looking for superconfidential notes on teleportation or its odd mathematics. On his inspection he did not find anything on those subjects beyond normal tests. But he did find an item of interest.

It was a record of all the mineral deposits left on Earth. The company had not made a mineral survey for itself for centuries, content with their originals. But Terl had.

Jonnie smiled. There were sixteen lodes of gold on the planet almost as good as the one they had mined! In the Andes and the Himalayas—they just weren’t that close to home and it would have been more public to have mined them. Ah, yes. All these other lodes were also associated with uranium.

There were thick records of Earth’s existing mineral resources. Hundreds of years of security chiefs had continued to log the findings of the drones, which were used for security but were essentially mineral spotters.

The company, with its “semicore” methods of mining, could go down almost to the molten core, to the very bottom of the crust without breaking through. And they were content to mine what they had and conserve their assets of unmined wealth.

Terl had simply removed the records from company view for his own purposes.

Ores, metals! The planet was still wealthy in resources.

Jonnie recorded every page rapidly. This was not what he was here for, but it was nice to know their planet had not been bankrupted of minerals. They would need them.

Angus had found what they were really looking for just now—Terl’s bug probe. It was an oblong box with an aerial sticking out of it and a disk cup on the tip of the aerial. It had on/off switches for various frequencies and light domes and buzzers.

Jonnie had done his apprenticeship well in the electronics shop. He knew that no wave this could detect would pass through lead or a lead alloy. Ordinarily this would not be a factor since any bug of any kind whatsoever would also not pass through lead. Therefore, why detect it since it wouldn’t work as a bug or button camera if it had lead over it?

The first job was to rig these switches.

Jonnie made a trip to electronics stores and got what he wanted. He came back to find that Ker had swept the area for bugs and found none.

They chose where Terl would do his shopwork: in Chirk’s former reception office. It was big enough to work in and the size console it would be would go in and out of the door.

While Jonnie, at his desk, worked on the bug probe, the other two rigged a workbench out of a metal slab and welded it to the floor and then armor annealed the welds so it would be an awful lot of trouble to move. They even got a stool and put it in front of it. When they had finished, they had a very nice layout. Jonnie moved his work over to it.

He had made excellent progress. Using microbutton transmitters employed normally in remote controls, he had rigged every switch in the probe so that when it was turned on it would send out an impulse from the remote relay. These relays took a microscope to see properly. They were fastened in with a small molecular spray. The worst part was getting them to stay where one wanted them while spraying them down. But the eye that could detect them unaided had never been made.

Using a scope set at a distance from the probe, he clicked each switch on in turn and the scope bounced in response.

The next part was hard because it involved the adaption of iris leaves taken from tubes of plane viewers. These were small devices that automatically adjusted the volume of a light path. They would close their concentric leaves from wide open to shut.

They had to take these delicate things apart and spray them, molecules thick, with lead, and reassemble them, so they would not only work but would go on working, opening and closing. Angus was the best at this sort of work.

They then got some contraction rings and put them around these leaded irises and installed microbuttons in them to activate them.

When they had built about fifteen of these, they made a thorough and extensive test. When the probe was clicked on, the iris instantly closed. When the probe was turned off, the irises sprang open.

In other words, the leaded irises would be shut whenever the probe was on, thus putting a lead screen over any bug and making it undetectable and for the moment unable to “see” and “hear.” But when the probe was off, the screen would be off and any bug or device could “see” and “hear.”

So far so good. They now went on an extensive tour of storerooms—telling Lars, who showed up, that they were looking for “spindle-buffers”—and located not only every other bug probe in the compound, but also every other key component it took to make a bug probe. They put these in a box and put the box in their car to be transported out of the country.

They now had a probe that wouldn’t probe while obviously working and fifteen irises they could put in front of bug devices.

Lars popped up again, saying they sure were quiet, and they told him to get lost. But presently Ker took a disk recording of hammering and pounding and drilling and let it play.

They cleaned up traces of their work so far and hid their products.

Suddenly they realized it had been a long day. They hadn’t eaten. They had a long way to go, but that, they agreed, was enough for now.

Jonnie and Angus, not wanting to tempt the fates by running into too many cadets at the Academy, elected to bed down in Char’s old quarters. Ker was going to drive back to the Academy and get them something to eat and bring them some work clothes. Dunneldeen should be there now and Jonnie had a message for him about the Psychlos. Jonnie typed it out on Chirk’s writing machine:

All’s well. In three days, engineer the transportation of the thirty-three Ps now in compound jailhouse to stated destination Cornwall. Report them crashed at sea. Deliver to the doctor. Not before three days. You will have no trouble with them. They’ll be screaming to leave. Eat this note.

Ker said he’d deliver it and rushed away.

Jonnie and Angus stretched out to unwind. So far it was okay. They had a ways to go.

2

A bit lost in Char’s twelve-foot bed, a bit tense in this echoing, empty compound, Jonnie was waiting for Ker’s return. It was getting very late and he was wondering what the delay might be. But to pass the time, he was reading.

Char, in packing, had tossed out odds and ends that he hadn’t cared to take back to Psychlo with him, and one of them was a Psychlo infant’s History of Psychlo, maybe from Char’s own early schooling, for it said under the coverleaf, in an immature scrawl, “Char’s Book. You stole it so give it back!” and then below that, “Or I’ll claw you!” Well, Char wouldn’t claw anybody now: he was dead, by Terl’s thrust, quite a time now.

Because Ker had mentioned underground mines, Jonnie was mildly interested to learn that the whole of the Imperial City on Psychlo and all the surrounding area was a maze of deep and abandoned shafts and drifts. As long as three hundred thousand years ago, Psychlo had exhausted surface minerals and had developed semicore techniques. Some of the shafts went down as far as eighty-three miles and in some cases that was within half a mile of the liquid core. How awfully hot those mines must have been! They could only be worked by machines, not living beings. The labyrinth was so extensive that it caused some buildings on the surface to sag from time to time.

He was just reading about the “First Interplanetary War to End Mineral Starvation” when Ker came back.

Ker looked a bit grave, even through his face mask. “Dunneldeen’s been arrested,” he said.

Dunneldeen, related Ker, had arrived in a battle plane just at sunset and had gone to find quarters and supper. As he came out of the mess hall, two men in monkey skins with crossbelts stepped out of the shadows and told him he was under arrest. A squad of several more were at a distance.

They had taken Dunneldeen in a ground car driven by Lars up to the big capitol building, the one with the painted dome up in the ruined city. They pushed him into the “courtroom” and the Senior Mayor Planet started to charge him with a whole lot of crimes like interrupting council projects and committing war and had then looked at him more closely and said, “You’re not Tyler!” And had called for the guard captain and there’d been a row. Then this Senior Mayor made Dunneldeen promise not to incite a war with Scotland over this and had let him go.

Dunneldeen was back at the Academy after taking Lars’s car away from him and he was all right. Ker had had to wait to give him the message and Dunneldeen said to warn Jonnie.

“It means,” concluded Ker, “that they expected you to come in and they’ve got their eyes out all over the place. We got to work fast, be careful, and get you out of here as soon as we can.”

Jonnie and Angus ate a bit of the food Ker had brought and then went to sleep for four hours. Ker had turned in in his old room, sleeping in a breathe-mask, for there was no breathe-gas circulation in the general compound.

They were at it again before dawn, working fast. Ker had another disk recording of hammering and pounding and he put it on. The kind of work they were doing didn’t sound at all like duct work.

What they had to do now was plant “eyes” and picture transmitters so they could not be seen or detected.

They attacked the lead glass dome and bored “bullet holes” in it in the exact right places, getting around the problem of their being covered by the blinds, if drawn. The very top of one of these upper-level domes was much more thickly tinted than the sides, so the detectors (“readers,” Ker called them) had to be up pretty high.

The “bullet holes” also had to be starred out, which is to say, given hairline cracks to make it look like they had come in from the outside. For good measure they put some in other domes and didn’t repair them so that the condition appeared more general than in just Terl’s quarters.

They sank readers and transmitters into the holes. Then they repaired the holes with one-way, see-through “bubble patch.” They put more glass repair sealing roughly on the “cracks.”

Each reader had a leaded iris in front of it and was in a little lead box. The result looked like a crudely repaired hole fixed up in slovenly fashion by careless workmen. Each of these was focused on a different part of the work areas in the two rooms.

“He won’t fool with that,” grinned Ker. “He’ll be afraid he’ll let his breathe-gas out and air in!”

It was afternoon by the time they completed the dome readers. They tested them with the probe and receivers. They went blind and undetectable with the probe on and read everything in their path with the scope off.

They took a short lunch break and turned off the disk that had been blasting their ears in. There was suddenly more din outside.

Ker went to the door and unbarred it. Lars got a whiff of breathe-gas and backed up. He demanded Ker to come out and talk to him right now.

“You’re interrupting our work,” said Ker. But he went out in the hall.

“You’ve got your nerve!” said Lars, quivering with rage. “You gave me a handful of junk that had radioactive dust on it! You got me in trouble! When I showed it to Terl this morning, it started to explode when it got near his breathe-mask. You knew it would! He almost bit me!”

“All right, all right, all right!” said Ker. “We will clean up everything in here before we turn on any big amount of breathe-gas.”

“Those were radioactive bullets!” shouted Lars.

“All right!” said Ker. “They came in through the dome. We’ll find them all. Don’t get so excited!”

“Trying to get me in trouble,” said Lars.

“You stay out of here,” said Ker. “It rots human bones, you know.”

Lars didn’t know. He backed up. He left.

Angus said, when Ker had come back in and barred the door, “Were they really radioactive bullets?”

Ker laughed and began to shove goo-food in his mask. Jonnie marveled. Ker was the only Psychlo he had ever seen that could chew kerbango with a mask on, and now he was eating goo-food and talking with a mask on.

“It was flitter,” said Ker, laughing. “It’s a compound that throws off blue sparks when sunlight hits it. I dusted some of it on the bullets. Harmless. A kid’s toy.” He was laughing even harder. Then he sighed. “We had to explain the bullet holes, so we had to ‘find’ some bullets. But that Terl—he is so clever that he sometimes can be awful dumb!”

Jonnie and Angus laughed with him. They could imagine Terl seeing the sparks when Lars held out the “finds” Ker had given him and the sunlight setting off the blue sparks. Terl’s conviction that the world was after him must have driven him halfway through the back wall of the cage! He would have thought his own breathe-mask exhaust was setting off uranium!

They were into the duct work now and they really did start hammering and pounding. The trick was to inset leadirised readers into the duct vent intakes and exhausts around the room so that they could not be seen and yet, peering out of the dark depths of the vents, could read an exact portion of the workrooms. The ducts actually required some very fancy work of their own. Although Ker was a midget, he could bend sheet iron with his paws like it was paper.

Ker fixed it so the ducts, as they entered and left the room, were rickety. If you touched them they appeared to be in danger of coming apart and falling out. But in actual fact the final fittings were armor-welded.

They set the readers into these, made sure the irises worked, put the ducts in place, and began on the circulator pumps. It was late evening by this time, but they worked straight on through. By about one in the morning they had completed a usable circulator system that would go on working.

They felt they were running behind in time so they didn’t stop. They had the problem now of centralizing the transmissions of all the readers and getting them clear over to the Academy, miles away.

None of these readers could be powered and picked up from more than a few hundred feet away. They all had different frequencies to keep them apart and this meant a bulky feeder system.

Jonnie worked on the probe some more and put an on/off remote in it that would turn off and on the multichanneled feeder box. That was the easiest part. One mustn’t have radio waves flying about with a probe on.

The tough part of it was getting the transmission through to the Academy. They solved it by using ground waves. Ground waves differ from air waves in that they can travel only through the ground. The “aerial” to send is a rod driven in the earth and the “aerial” to receive is simply another. It takes a different wavelength band so there was no danger of anything detecting it. Since ground waves were not in general use by the Earth Psychlos it required a feverish fabrication of components, converting normal radio to ground wave.

It was the fall of the year and it was still dark when Angus and Ker went screeching off to the Academy to install the receivers and recorders, one unit in a toilet, one in an unused telephone box and the third under a loose tile in front of the altar in the chapel.

Jonnie meanwhile buried the feeder outside the dome in the ground. He had the pretext ready of “looking for power cables” but he didn’t need it. The world slept. He shoved in fuel cartridges to run it for half a year or more, wrapped it in waterproofing, buried it in the hole, pounded in the ground aerial, and restored the turf. Nobody could detect the grass had even been touched—a hunter’s skill in making deadfalls came in handy.

Inside again, he checked. Every lead iris was working flawlessly. The readers were powered. They went on and off at the feeder. He let them run to give Angus and Ker a signal to set their recorders to, over at the Academy.

Jonnie busied himself with placing and armor-welding the desks and drawing board in place. No molecular cutter would ever dent those welds!

At eight o’clock Angus and Ker sauntered in as though just arriving for the day. They bolted the door and both turned huge grins on Jonnie.

“It works!” said Angus. “We watched you laboring away and even read the serial number of your welding torch. We got all fifteen readers on the screen!” He thrust out his hand. “And here’s the disks!”

They replayed them. They could even see the grain in material, much less read numbers!

They heaved a sigh of relief.

Then Angus took Jonnie by the shoulder and pointed to the door. “We needed your skill and ideas up to now. But from here on, it’s just putting cream on the oatmeal to convince Terl. Every minute you stay here is a minute too long.”

Ker was already putting the rigged probe back in exactly the same place, arranging the cabinet just as it had been. “When I took on this job and suspected you’d be coming,” he said as he worked, “I fueled a plane. It’s the one exactly opposite the hangar door—ninety-three is the last of its serial numbers. All waiting for you. They don’t want us, they want you!”

“It will take us only forty-five minutes or an hour to rig the rest,” said Angus. “You get out of here and that’s an order from Sir Robert—to get you gone the moment you can leave.”

Ker now had relocked the door of the cabinet and was prying at the corner with a jimmy to make it appear it had been unsuccessfully tampered with without being opened. “Goodbye!” he said emphatically.

Yes, it was true. They could handle the rest and were in no danger. But it was also true that it had to be completed. He would get ready and stand by in the plane. “Come down and tell me when it’s all done,” he said.

“You go!” said Angus.

Jonnie gave them a salute, and went out. They locked the door behind him. He went down the passage to Char’s room to get his kit. It was 8:23 in the morning. Already two hours too late.

3

By five o’clock that morning, Brown Limper Staffor knew he had found Tyler.

For days now he had been unable to sleep, to even sit down quietly or eat. Forgotten were all other cares of state, forgotten were all other tasks that ordinarily occupied his time. With a wild, intent glare in his eyes, for nearly twenty-four hours a day, he had concentrated only upon closing the trap which had been set. Crime must be punished! A malefactor must be brought to book. The safety and integrity of the state must be given priority. Almost every text he had studied on government, all advice he had been given, proved to him only one thing: he had to get Tyler!

Victory had begun to beckon with a drone picture he took off the machine at 3:00 a.m. He had trouble with these machines. Ever since these recorders had been moved to the capitol, he had been irritated by their incomprehensible complexity, and he often hit them when they failed to spit out what was wanted. It made him feel martyred having to do all this work with so little help. But he had been scanning the tray of drone takes that were rolling out from Scotland. The pilot who handled drone control and these machines was not here at this time of day. A nuisance.

And there was Tyler! Dancing one of those insane prances the Highlanders did. By bonfire with half a dozen others. Although the pictures were silent, a pain went through his ears as he imagined the crazy pipe music that must have been playing. Yes! Hunting shirt and all, it was Tyler.

The machine gave him a lot of trouble trying to backtrack its trace. He never could tell one Psychlo number from another. But he managed it and got a blown-up view.

It wasn’t Tyler! He realized then he was not being logical. Tyler would not be dancing and flinging his arms about. The last time he had seen him down at the compound, Tyler had been limping heavily on a cane and had no use of his right arm.

But at 4:48 a.m. a picture from another drone, then overflying the Lake Victoria area, spewed out and showed a man by the lake throwing rocks in the water. A man with a hunting shirt, same hair, same beard. Tyler! But it couldn’t be Tyler because he was using his right arm to throw, and as he drew back it was obvious he had no limp.

He had no more than thrown the picture down on the floor when Lars Thorenson rushed in as though he had news. Brown Limper let him have it but good. What were two Tylers doing visible on two different drones in such a short time apart, yet so widely separated on the earth’s surface?

“That’s what I am trying to say,” cried Lars. “There are three Scots who look like Tyler. But that isn’t it. You know what Terl told us to look for? Scars on Tyler’s neck from the collar he wore so long. I couldn’t understand why Stormalong was wearing his scarf so high around his neck. He never did before. And just five minutes ago I woke up with the whole thing plain as daylight! He’s hiding those scars! Tyler is down in that compound right now posing as Stam Stavenger! Stormalong!”

For all the wrong reasons, they had reached the right conclusions.

Brown Limper went into immediate action. Time and time again Lars had told him about this great military hero Hitler and his faultless campaigns. Terl had impressed foresight upon him. He had been ready for this moment.

Two days before, he had finalized the contract with General Snith. One hundred credits a day per man was a lot to pay, but Snith was worth it.

Two commandos had gone by truck to the village in the high meadow. There was no town meeting. The villagers had been swept up regardless of any protest. They had been hastily relocated in the distant village on the other side of the mountain Tyler had once chosen for them. The five youths who might have said something were at the Academy, three of them learning machine operation and how to keep the passes open in winter with blade scrapers, the other two learning to be pilots. Old people and young children didn’t have to be listened to and their pleas that their preparations for the coming winter were now ruined could be ignored. As a concession to political sagacity, they had been told they were being moved so the old tactical mines could be dug up and disposed of. These mines—they knew now that they were explosives buried long ago and Brown Limper had shown them this was just another instance of Tyler’s lies—had their own role to play in this clever strategy.

Tyler’s old home had then been booby-trapped with grenades and blasting caps and Brown Limper had been assured by the Brigante explosive experts that all Tyler would have to do was open a door and he would be blown to bits.

The story would be that Tyler had gone to his house despite warnings about the old mines and that one had blown up. In this way there could not possibly be any outcry or blame attached to Brown Limper. The Senior Mayor Planet was a bit hazy on whether this had been his own idea or Terl’s. But no matter, it was brilliant political thinking. The state and nation must be freed of the scourge, the arch-criminal Tyler, and with a minimum of repercussion to the body politic. Also Brown Limper had read someplace that the end justifies the means and this seemed to be a sound basic policy. Brown Limper realized, when he thought about it, that he was becoming a statesman ranked with the most stellar figures of ancient man.

At 6:00 a.m. he ordered General Snith to begin changing the guard at the compound. The cadets were to be permanently relieved on the grounds they didn’t like the duty and it interrupted their studies, and the state now had a proper standing army. Brigantes were to be on guard duty there by 8:00 a.m.

A hasty call had ascertained that the other two with “Stormalong” had left some time ago for the Academy and it was so logged by the duty officer at the compound.

Thompson submachine guns had been issued to the Brigante commando. Somehow assault rifles were not available but Thompsons were all right for this duty.

Lars had been briefed. He had been given two picked men armed with submachine guns. He was to go to the compound. He was to lie in wait inside until “Stormalong” appeared and then, with a minimum of disturbance, was to take him in custody. Lars was to bring him here to the courtroom. He was not to alarm Tyler into combat. When Tyler had been formally charged, he would be told his case would be tried by the world court to be formed in a couple of weeks, and then taken to the old village. “House arrest” and “awaiting trial” were terms Brown Limper had looked up. He would inform Tyler that he was under house arrest. Then it was up to Lars to get him to the meadow. There must be no chance taken of alerting cadets or some Russians holding out at the old tomb.

Lars had said, “I think I should grab him while he’s still in Terl’s office.”

Brown Limper said, “No. Terl has assured me that he can undo any mischief Tyler may get up to if he gets in the office. He has probably remained behind to do something criminal after the others finished. You want to take him alone. The other two might help him. We are after the criminal Tyler. We must get him here smoothly, charge him, and get him up to the meadow. Be polite. Grant any ordinary request. Be smooth. Cause no disturbance. And don’t damage the office. That is a request Terl made.”

It all seemed a bit muddy and out of sequence to Lars in the briefing, but he got the essential points. He got his two Brigantes, made sure they had their submachine guns, got an executive armored ground car, and left.

Brown Limper told General Snith, “Keep your mercenaries out of sight at the compound, but be alert for trouble this morning. Tell them not to start shooting unless they are attacked.”

General Snith got it. His men were ready to earn their pay.

Brown Limper had found the pattern of judicial robes judges used to wear and he had one made for this occasion. He got into it, hopping over to the window and looking out between times, and finally gazed at himself in an old cracked mirror.

The time of reckoning for a lifetime of abuse and insult was at hand!

4

Jonnie strode two paces inside the door of Char’s room.

The muzzle of a submachine gun jabbed into his left side!

A Brigante rose from behind a chair holding another Thompson grimly leveled.

Lars stood up from behind the bed, a blast pistol pointing at him.

“We are not here to kill you,” said Lars. He had worked this entire campaign out and added a few embellishments of his own. From all he had heard, this was a treacherous and dangerous criminal liable to do anything. To carry out his principal orders it was necessary to be very intelligent about this, as intelligent as Hitler would have been. “Just do as we request, and no harm will come to you. This is an entirely legal proceeding. You are under arrest by order of the council and these are council troops.”

Jonnie, as he entered, had been in the act of removing his air mask or he would have smelled the badly tanned skins and body stench of a Brigante.

An hour. Angus and Ker required an hour to put the vital finishing touches on that office. These creatures might go up to the office and might even have arrest orders for them. He would buy Angus and Ker that hour.

He realized then that Lars and these two Brigantes had been here for a while. Ker, when Jonnie asked for work clothes, had simply bundled up all of Stormalong’s gear. It had been in a neat kit by the bed. Now it was strewn about, thoroughly searched. The food bags from both Africa and the Academy were there. They had also been ransacked. Angus’s gear had been very slight and he had his tool bag with him, so there was no trace that two men’s gear was in this pile.

The Brigante behind him, with a glance at his mate to see that the action was covered, whisked the blast pistol out of Jonnie’s belt.

Jonnie shrugged. Buy time! “And you are taking me somewhere?”

“You are to appear this morning before the council to be charged,” said Lars.

Jonnie casually swung the door shut behind him, closing out any view of the corridor. Angus and Ker would not come out that way to go to the hangar but they might make some noise. And worse, might foolishly abandon what they were doing and take these fellows on!

“I haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday,” said Jonnie. “Do you mind if I have a bite first?”

Lars stepped back to the wall. The Brigante behind him backed away. The one behind the chair stepped to another position and Jonnie collected up the food bag contents and water gourds and sorted them out. He sat down and drank some water out of a gourd. There were some bananas there and he broke some off the small bunch.

The Brigantes hadn’t seen any bananas since leaving Africa and eyed them. Jonnie offered them some and they would have taken them, except that Lars barked a reprimand and they quickly snapped back to military duties.

Jonnie ate a banana. Then he found some millet bread and made himself a sandwich from local beef. He had quite a hard time selecting the exact right slices. The huge Psychlo wrist watch on his wrist was whirring off the seconds and minutes. He had marked it for the hour.

“What are these charges all about?” said Jonnie.

Lars smiled very thinly. He was being pumped for confidential council information. “You will be told in the proper time by the proper people.”

Jonnie finished the sandwich and found some wild berries. He ate these. The wrist watch whirred along. Forty-nine minutes to go.

He looked into the food bags and discovered some wild sugar cane from Africa. He peeled it with care and chewed on it, sipping from a gourd between times.

Then it occurred to him if they were all silent, Angus or Ker might come busting in here to see whether he was gone. Angus would suppose Jonnie had taken his kit to the plane, but still, they might just come barging in and get arrested or shot. Very shortly now he had better start this Lars talking so they would hear a strange voice in here.

Forty-two minutes to go.

“You sure messed up my clothes,” said Jonnie. “I’ll have to repack.”

But Lars was intent on something else. He wanted a real double-check on identity and in his haste he had forgotten it. He wanted to make doubly sure about the collar scars. He became clever. A military maneuver was needed here. He didn’t want this Tyler to be able to seize a Brigante and use him as a shield. Right now the collar of the work jacket covered his neck.

“There is no idea of inconveniencing you,” said Lars. “You are in your work clothes and I should think you would want to appear at your best before such an august body as the council. You can change your clothes if you wish. We’ve removed all knives and weapons. So go ahead.”

Jonnie had smiled wryly when “august body of the council” was mentioned. What pomposity! But he said, “Oh, well, in that case I suppose I had better.”

He began to sort the scattered clothes into piles, making noise. It would be better if he could keep Lars talking. Thirty-nine minutes to go.

Ker certainly had brought all of Stormalong’s kit. He folded it all neatly and then began picking up items and looking at them critically as though deciding which he should wear, saying, “Would this do?” and “How about this?” and “How do they ordinarily dress when appearing before the council? In something like this?” He got Lars advising him. The council was very formal, very strict and mindful of its dignity, and its power was enormous and men were expected to realize it. Twenty-eight minutes to go.

Jonnie suddenly saw that Stormalong, who was always very neat as well as a bit dashing about clothes, had preserved the costume he had been issued in lode days to look like Jonnie. Chrissie had made several sets, pushed into it by Jonnie to take her mind off her imprisonment, and Jonnie had handed out sets to Dunneldeen, Thor and Stormalong to improve their duplication. He unwrapped the buckskin hunting shirt and breeches and belt. Yes, even the moccasins. Twenty-three minutes to go!

Jonnie took off his jacket, intending to sponge off a bit before dressing.

Lars leaned forward eagerly. Terl had told him that a good security chief always depended upon body marks for identification. How right! There were the small scars of the collar. He had his man. He became inwardly jubilant. Cheerful.

“You can hurry it along now, Tyler,” said Lars. “I know you for sure. The collar scars!”

So that’s what he had been looking for, thought Jonnie.

“The others left hours ago, didn’t they?” said Lars.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact they did,” said Jonnie. It came to him that the others had been logged out when they went to the Academy to install the recorders and must not have been logged back in. Great! Twenty minutes to go.

“And you stayed behind to rig some little tricks of your own, didn’t you?” said Lars. “We’ll find them later, never fear. Your masquerade is over, Tyler.” Lars thought that was pretty good. He had thought it up himself. “Get dressed.”

Jonnie took a piece of buckskin and gave himself a sponge bath, a procedure looked upon with total amazement by the Brigantes. They had never seen nor heard of anyone ever taking a bath.

“How did you get onto me?” asked Jonnie.

“I’m afraid,” said Lars, “that that is a state secret.”

“Ah,” said Jonnie. Seventeen minutes to go! “Something you learned from Hitter or Bitter or whomever that was?” He recalled Ker mentioning this fellow was crazy on the subject.

“You mean Hitler!” corrected Lars angrily.

“Ah, ‘Hitler,’” said Jonnie. “That doesn’t sound like a Psychlo name. Psychlo names aren’t two syllables, usually. Sometimes they are, though.”

“Hitler was not a Psychlo!” said Lars emphatically. “He was a man. He was the greatest military leader and the holiest church member man ever had!”

“Must have been a long time ago,” said Jonnie. Fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds to go! They were almost in the clear for their forty-five minutes. But it could be an hour.

Well, yes, said Lars, it was a long time ago. How’d Lars ever find out about Hitler? Well, his family was from Sweden and they were very literate. In fact his father was a minister. And they had some old books the church had kept that had been printed by the “German War Propaganda Ministry” in the purest Swedish and it really was inspirational. It seems that to be really religious, one had to be a pure Aryan and an Aryan was really a Swede. Most people in the tribe had the colossal nerve to scoff at such holy creeds, but it had been the state religion of Sweden.

“I wish I’d heard about him sooner,” said Jonnie. Twelve minutes and seven seconds to go! “Was he really a great leader?”

Oh, indeed he was, make no mistake about that. Hitler had conquered the whole world and enforced racial purity. You should really read those books. They are truly marvelous. Oh, you can’t read Swedish? Well, I could read them to you. What’s some parts of them? Oh, well, it would take weeks to cover it all, but for instance there’s a part of a book called Mein Kampf that outlines the whole destiny of the race. You see, there are really supermen and just plain men. And to be a superman one has to study and know the religious creed of fascism.

“Did they worship God?” said Jonnie. Seven minutes and twelve seconds to go. He began to dress, taking care with the thongs.

Well, of course. God’s real name was Der Führer but Hitler had taken his place on Earth to make a world of peace and goodwill. Now Napoleon was also a military leader and before him was Caesar and before him was Alexander the Great and before him was Attila the Hun. But these men were not holy. One really had to know history to tell the difference. Now even though Napoleon was a great military leader, on many points he didn’t favorably compare with Hitler. Even though Napoleon had conquered Russia, he did not show the finesse Hitler showed when he conquered Russia. Now all this was very ancient and a long time ago and man had come to grief since, though not through any fault of Hitler’s. So it was obvious that if man were to rise and be great again they should follow the creed of religious fascism, and who knew, but what some new Hitler might arise to bring peace on Earth and goodwill toward men like Hitler had. It’s a funny thing, you know, but his mother used to say when she looked at the old pictures that he, Lars, quite closely resembled—

The distant roar of a car starting up. The snarl of its going around the ramps to exit. The unmistakable mad driving of Ker! They were gone.

Jonnie finished dressing, packed the kit, especially Stormalong’s favorite coat and scarf and goggles, and bundled it all up.

“You will be sure this gets to Stormalong,” said Jonnie. But as Lars said nothing, Jonnie decided to take it along.

They had done it!

How he would get himself out of this mess he didn’t know. He was a little puzzled as to why the other two had driven off when the battle plane must still be down there. But he was grateful they were out of it.

“Let’s go,” he said.

5

They exited from a different ground-level door, one that was usually locked. Jonnie glanced around for a cadet to give Stormalong’s kit to and saw no one.

“I’ll see that it’s taken to the Academy,” said Lars, divining his purpose. He must not see too deeply into the dispositions Lars had made, most of which prevented them from being seen by anyone lest Lars find himself with a battle on his hands from cadets or Russians, some of whom had just arrived at the underground base in the mountains and were a considerable force.

A storm was coming in from over the mountains, rolling black clouds, studded with lightning around the distant Highpeak. The wind was picking up and bending the tall brown grass. A few dead leaves fled through the air. Autumn was here. There was a chill in the air on this mile-high plateau.

It gave Jonnie an eerie feeling, almost a premonition. He had left Africa in a storm and here was a storm again. He threw the kit in the back and got in. The windows were darkened so no one could see in. With submachine guns trained upon him, they drove toward the capitol.

Lars was a bad driver and Jonnie could see how he must have gotten the cracked neck the plaster cast advertised. Jonnie despised him. Jonnie had known lots of Swedes and they were good people; he had even gathered from Lars’s conversation that they despised him too.

The man tried to chatter on about the ancient military leader but Jonnie had had enough. “Shut up,” he said from the back. “You’re nothing but a turncoat traitor. I don’t see how you can stand yourself. So shut up.” It was unwise but he couldn’t go on listening to this insanity.

Lars shut up but his eyes slitted. He suddenly enjoyed the fact that this criminal would be dead in a few hours.

The ground car squatted down at a side entrance to the capitol, never used. There were no people to be seen. There were no people in the corridor either. Lars had seen to that.

They thrust him toward a door. Unseen Brigantes in the shadows kept their guns trained upon him. Two more were in the courtroom, in the corners, Thompsons cocked and ready.

And there sat Brown Limper.

He was at a high desk on a dais. He was in a black robe. Ancient law books flanked him on either side. His face had an unhealthy sheen. His eyes were too bright. He loomed like a vulture about to attack a corpse. Just himself, the Brigante guards, and this Tyler in an otherwise empty room.

It was Tyler! He had recognized that the moment the fellow strode through the door. There was an air about this Tyler one couldn’t miss. He had hated it since they were children. Hated that easy confident walk, hated that set of even features, hated those light blue eyes. He had hated everything Tyler was and he could never be. But who had the power now? He, Brown Limper! How he had daydreamed of this moment.

“Tyler?” said Brown Limper. “Come stand in front of the court bench! Answer me: is your name Jonnie Goodboy Tyler?” Brown Limper had a recorder running. Such proceedings must be regular and legal.

Jonnie came to a bored stand in front of the bench. “What is this farce, Brown Limper? You know my name well enough.”

“Silence!” said Brown Limper, hoping his voice was resonant and deep. “The prisoner will answer correctly and properly or become guilty of contempt of court!”

“I see no court,” said Jonnie. “What are you doing in that funny dress?”

“Tyler, I am adding contempt of court to these charges.”

“Add what you please,” said Jonnie, bored with it.

“You will not consider this lightly when I read you what you are charged with! This at present is just a hearing. In a week or two, a world court will be established and the trial will take place at that time. But as a felon and criminal you have the right to hear the charges so that you can organize your defense when tried!

“‘Now hear ye, hear ye. You are charged with a count of murder in the first degree, the victims being the Chamco brothers, loyal employees of the state, feloniously assaulted with intent to kill and later dying by their own hand due to pain of their wounds.

“‘Kidnapping in the first degree, the said Tyler assaulting and feloniously seizing the persons of two coordinators going about their legal duties as agents of the council.

“‘Murder and felonious assault upon a peace-loving and unoffending tribe called the Brigantes including the slaughter of half a commando.

“‘Massacre of a convoy of peaceful commercial people going about their business and viciously and maliciously slaughtering them to the last man.’”

“Psychlos,” said Jonnie. “They were Psychlos organizing an attack upon this capital.”

“That’s stricken from the records!” said Brown Limper. Indeed, he would have to erase it from this disk. “You are not on trial. These are just the charges that have been brought against you by decent and deserving citizens of this planet. Remain silent and hear the charges!

“‘It is noted by the court,’” continued Brown Limper—how he had slaved over this parlance from ancient books; he hoped he had it all right and legal—“‘that numerous other charges could be brought, but at this time have not been brought.’”

“Such as?” said Jonnie, indifferent to this clown.

“When you seized the remote control panel from one Terl and launched the drone against man, it has also been stated that you then and thereupon shot down said Terl when he was in the act of trying to shoot down the drone. However, there being witnesses, undoubtedly perjured and extorted by you to speak false testimony, who speak otherwise, the charges have not been included at this time, though of course they may be brought at some later date.”

“So that’s all you could come up with,” said Jonnie, with irony. “Nothing about stealing babies’ milk? I’m surprised!”

“You won’t be so arrogant when you hear the rest of this,” threatened Brown Limper. “‘I am an impartial judge and this is a legal and impartial court. In the interim time pending your trial, you are forbidden to use any more of my’ . . . I mean, ‘council property such as planes, cars, houses, equipment, or tools!’”

Brown Limper had him! Quick as a flash he pulled out the bill of sale of the Earth branch of the Intergalactic Mining Company and thrust it at Tyler.

Tyler took it and looked at it. “For a sum of two billion credits, one Terl, duly authorized representative of the party of the first part which shall hereafter be called the party of the first part, did hereby convey all lands, mines, minesites, compounds, planes, tools, machinery, cars, tanks . . . on and on . . . to the council of Earth, the duly elected and authorized government of said planet, to have and to hold forever and from this day forward.” It was signed “Terl,” but Jonnie, who knew Terl’s signature, saw that it must have been written with the wrong paw. He started to put it in his pouch.

“No, no!” shouted Brown Limper. “That is the original!” He fussed around in the papers on his desk and handed over a copy and exchanged it for the original. Jonnie put the copy in his pouch.

“And not only that,” said Brown Limper, “the whole planet was the property of Intergalactic and there is a deed for that as well!” He started to hand over the original, thought better of it, found a copy, and handed it over.

Jonnie glanced at it. Terl had actually sold these fools their planet!

“The deeds are valid,” said Brown Limper pompously. “That is, they will be when fully recorded.”

“Where?” said Jonnie.

“On Psychlo, of course,” said Brown Limper. “Out of the goodness of his heart and in spite of the trouble, Terl himself will take these deeds there and get them fully recorded.”

“When?” said Jonnie.

“Just as soon as he can rebuild the apparatus you feloniously and maliciously destroyed, Tyler!”

“And he’s taking the money with him?”

“Of course! He has to turn it in to his company. He is an honest man!”

“Psychlo,” corrected Jonnie.

“Psychlo,” corrected Brown Limper, and then instantly became furious with himself for permitting this judicial proceeding to assume other than a judicial tone.

“‘So therefore,’” said Brown Limper, reading, “‘and as stated nothwithstanding, in accordance with the legal tribal rights of the said Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, he is hereby placed under house arrest in his own home in the meadow and is herewith and hereby not to quit said home and said vicinity until hailed before a world court, duly to be constituted under the authority of the council, said council being duly elected and invested with the total authority of total government of Earth. Hey man!’” He had thought the last religious note gave it style and he now sat proudly on the bench. “So unless the prisoner has some last request . . .”

Jonnie had been thinking hard and quickly. He had never before paid much attention to Brown Limper, and such malice, falsehood, and evil was a little surprising. There was a fueled battle plane in the hangar at the compound.

“Yes,” said Jonnie. “There is a request. If I am going to the meadow, I would like to pick up my horses first.”

“Those and your house are all the property you own now, so it is only fit that you do so. Out of courtesy and feelings for the rights of the prisoner, and possibly even out of a fatherly feeling for him as his own mayor, this request is granted so long as you go at once from there straight to the village in the meadow and into your house!”

Jonnie looked at him with contempt and strode from the room.

Brown Limper, eyes overbright, watched him go. That would be the end of Tyler! He let out a shuddering sigh. What a relief all this was! And how long sought? Twenty years. No, this was not revenge. He had to do it. Duty demanded it! The peoples of Earth would now be wholly in good hands—his, Brown Limper’s. He would do his very best for them, as he was doing now. Despite the toil it cost him.

6

The incident that would later become known as “The Murder of Bittie MacLeod,” which would bring the planet toward war, cost many men their lives, and later become the subject of ballads, romances and legend, began at noon that day with Bittie’s unfortunate spotting of Jonnie in the capitol area of Denver.

When the head of the Russian contingent had been given orders in Africa to close the American underground base, it was very plain to the Russians that neither they nor Jonnie would thereafter be resident in America, which brought up the subject of horses. Horses were wealth to the Russians; they had developed a small herd of their own in America and they were not going to abandon them.

Bittie MacLeod considered himself responsible for Jonnie’s horses. He informed Colonel Ivan in no uncertain terms that he must go along with them to bring back Jonnie’s horses. When objections were raised, he doggedly countered them: he was with the Russians and he would be safe; the horses knew him; Windsplitter, Dancer, Old Pork and Blodgett would be frightened on the long plane ride unless they had somebody soothing them they knew they could trust. After hours of this, Colonel Ivan gave in.

The Russians, just before dawn of that day, had thoroughly closed the American underground base as well as the nuclear missile store. If anyone tried to get into them now who didn’t know the way or have the keys, they would be blown to bits. Planes had been arranged for the return, any material they were taking back abroad was already loaded, and before dawn that day they had left the base in a small convoy of trucks and cars to do their last job: pick up the horses from the plains.

The way from the base led through the ancient ruins of Denver and few of the Russians had ever been there. Further, recently they had begun to get paid. They were going home, and they had sisters and wives and sweethearts, mothers and friends.

A few tiny stores had opened lately in Denver, the proprietors from other places, the customers the people of the world making pilgrimages to the minesite. The goods were salvaged and repaired items from the ruins of sprawling cities and even some new products of native tribes. Dresses, shoes, cloth, jewelry, utensils, souvenirs and relics were the main stocks in trade. The stores were few and widely scattered.

The Russians decided that since they were many hours early for their departure time that evening from the Academy field, and since they did not favor sitting around in the grass waiting, they would spend a little shopping time in Denver.

They had parked their vehicles near the capitol, for there was much space there, and its dome could be seen from all around as a landmark and gotten back to easily. They had scattered out, each on his own errands.

Bittie had been given a special guard, a strong, tough Russian who was a special friend of Bittie’s named Dmitri Tomlov, and Dmitri had been charged by Colonel Ivan to stay close to Bittie and not be careless and to carry his assault rifle and magazine pouch wherever he went. So it seemed all right.

Bittie and his guardian had found a little jewelry and trinket shop that had been opened by an old Swiss couple and their son. The old Swiss had found and repaired an engraving machine; he was also clever with repairing items found in ancient wrecked stores—where and when they had been overlooked by metal-hungry Psychlos.

The son was in a back room of the shop recovering from trying to defend the store from being robbed by the Brigantes—it seemed the Brigantes would go around telling everyone they were “police” and they carried clubs and would pick up anything that took their fancy and put it in their pockets. The council, when approached by the few people now in Denver, had admitted that yes, the Brigantes were “police,” and that law and order was vital and that it was a felony to resist “police.” Nobody really knew what “police” meant as a word, but they had come to realize it was something very bad. So the old Swiss had decided to move away and a lot of his items were for sale at very low prices.

The wife was waiting on Dmitri. He had lots of relatives. But his first purchase was a little silver-headed riding crop for Bittie. Although Bittie would have been aghast at the idea of hitting a horse, the crop looked very nice. It was about two feet long, about the length of a Brigante bow although no one noticed this at the time.

Despite all these very low prices, Bittie was having a rough time. He wanted something special for Pattie. He thought he would be seeing her shortly. He looked and looked, helped by the old man. Also Bittie did not have very much money with him: his pay was only two credits a week whereas a soldier’s was a credit a day. Pay had not been going on very long so Bittie only had four credits and the better items were as much as ten. Bittie’s problems were also complicated by the limited command of English on the part of the Swiss people, who spoke a combination of German and French. The Russian was no help—he had practically no English and nobody spoke Russian there, including Bittie. But they were making out with signs and count marks on scraps of wrapping paper and raised eyebrows and pointing fingers.

At last Bittie found it! It was a real gold-plated locket in the shape of a heart. It had a red rose, still bright red, inset on it. It opened and you could put pictures inside and it had had its hinge nicely repaired and it had a thin chain. Also it had enough space on the back to engrave something, and yes, the old Swiss would be happy to engrave it. With one credit for the engraving, it all came to six credits. It was the very thing. But six credits! He only had four.

Well, the old Swiss was selling out, and when he saw the disappointment on Bittie’s face, he relented and let him have it, with a box thrown in, all engraved, repolished and ready to go.

When given a card to put the message on so it could be copied, Bittie fell into more difficulty. What was he going to put on the back of the locket? Jonnie and others had told him that he and Pattie were far too young to get married and that was true. So he couldn’t put “To my future wife” really, for people might smile and this was no smiling matter. He didn’t want to simply put “To Pattie, Love Bittie” as the old Swiss seemed to be suggesting. The Russian was no help at all. Then he had it! “To Pattie, my ladye faire, Bittie.” The old Swiss then said that was too long to fit on the back. So he had to come back, after all, to “To Pattie, my future wife.” The old Swiss counted that up and said he could fit that in. It wasn’t too satisfactory and people might laugh, but he couldn’t do any better and the old Swiss set up his engraving machine and had at it.

All this was taking time and Bittie was getting edgy. He might miss the Russians, and after all, Jonnie’s horses were his job as squire and that’s why he had come over to America. He hopped from one foot to the other and pushed at them all to hurry. The Swiss finally finished and put the locket in a nice box and wrapped it in some old paper, and the Russian finally got all the things he wanted and they paid it all up and went rushing out to get back to the trucks.

It was a cold day. There had been a frost and dead leaves were blowing about. A storm was rumbling over the mountains. It all seemed to tell Bittie to hurry.

But when they got back to the trucks, the position of the sun, seen through scudding cloud, said it was only noon. There were no Russians returned.

The guard got into the driver’s seat of their cab and began to sort out the presents he had bought. Bittie, almost engulfed by the huge Psychlo passenger seat, closed the window against the chill wind and dead flying leaves and sat there impatiently twiddling his new riding crop and looking out the window, his eyes just above the level of the bottom, keeping watch for the rest of the Russians.

From where he sat he could see a side entrance to the capitol building. There was a big executive ground car sitting there with blacked-out windows.

Suddenly he saw Sir Jonnie! There he was, dressed as usual in buckskin, unmistakable. He walked out of the side entrance of the capitol. The door of the executive ground car was swung open from inside and Jonnie got into it.

Bittie scrambled to get down the window and shout. He got it open partway. He couldn’t get it all the way down.

Then somebody else came out of the capitol, somebody dressed like a cadet. A plaster cast around his neck. This second person stopped and called back into the capitol stairway where somebody must have asked a question.

The man in cadet clothes yelled back, “He’s just going down to the compound first to pick up his horses.” Then he too got into the ground car and it started up.

Bittie was wild! He hadn’t been able to get the window down and call to Sir Jonnie. Get the horses! That was why he was here, what he’d come all the way to America to do!

He tried to get his guard to just start up the truck and follow. But Bittie’s command of Russian was not up to it. Gestures and motions and repeating the sense of what he was saying got no place. This Russian was not about to go after that executive ground car. He was here to wait for the rest of the contingent.

But Bittie got him out of the cab and they went sprinting around looking for the rest of the Russians. Minutes went by and they couldn’t find them. This ruined city was too big, too spread out, too filled with rubble.

Suddenly they spotted one Russian. He was walking along the edge of a park by himself, eating some nuts he had bought. He was a man named Amir, and he had no reputation for being quick in the wits, although he was a nice fellow.

Bittie reeled off the situation to him, using gestures and a Russian word he did know, Skahryehyee! meaning “Hurry up!” and trying to get the man to understand he was to find the others and tell them to come along right away.

He was not at all sure the man got it, for he looked blank, but the action was enough to convince Dmitri that it was now all right to follow the ground car so they got back to the truck and the Russian started it up, and they went roaring out of the city to catch up to the vehicle Bittie had seen Jonnie enter.

7

Lars Thorenson had taken every precaution. He had gone over it very carefully. If there was no public display of arms and guards, while making sure that this Tyler was thoroughly covered at all times by adequate weaponry, then no alert would go out and no misguided friends of this felon would come pouring around to rescue him.

Lars had left guards in the car, had let no other Brigantes appear on the streets or openly in corridors, had sent word to the commando now posted at the compound to keep out of sight but ready, and not to shoot unless attacked.

He had a little surprise for this Tyler at the compound, but all should go smoothly and well. He thought even Hitler would have approved of the tactical skills Lars was displaying. They would pick up the horses, drive up through the pass to the meadow, order this Tyler to go into his own house, and that would be that. The scourge and menace to the stability of the state would be ended. Thoroughly and with no blame at all to the council.

The day had gone gray. The sun was more and more overcast. The wind was picking up and billows of dust and clouds of dead grass were running before the approaching storm.

Lars’s driving was not all that good to begin with, and gusts were buffeting the ground car, swerving it from already badly chosen courses. He was not driving fast.

Jonnie was considering his chances. He had no idea they intended to let him out of this alive, for all their smooth assurances. What point of that plaster cast, if hit, would finish the job of breaking this traitor’s neck? How familiar were these two evil-smelling Brigantes with a Thompson submachine gun?

The weapon, deadly though it was, had been obsolete for a century at the time of the Psychlo attack. It fired pistol ammunition that was too heavy for a hand-held automatic weapon and caused it to kick upward furiously so that you had to hold the muzzle down with great force. These weapons they had were not equipped with “Cutts Compensators” that used some of the muzzle blast to help hold down the upward kick. They were loaded with sixty-shot drums and the springs of those drums were often weak and failed to feed. A certain percentage of the very ancient ammunition failed to fire and one had to know the trick of recocking rapidly to keep the gun shooting on automatic. Jonnie knew these things for he had fired a lot of practice rounds with them when Angus had first dug them out of the old camion where they had lain through the ages, protected by heavy grease and airtight ammunition packaging. But did the Brigantes? Probably they had fired a few rounds with them, the first firing of powder missile weapons they had ever done in their lives. The improbable and rapidly discarded ploy had occurred to him to talk to them about the weapon, and then take one to explain a fine point and blow their foul matted heads off.

Unless he thought of something, this was going to be his last ride. It was in Lars’s manner. It was in the looks the Brigantes gave him. They were very, very confident.

The compound appeared in the distance ahead of them. There was some stock scattered about in the plains. Lars narrowly avoided a group of buffalo, dodged a scrub tree, nearly dumped them in a gully, jolted them over some boulders anyone who could drive would have avoided, and finally halted about a hundred feet short of the beginning of the rise that ended in the plateau near the cage.

It was not as close to the compound as Jonnie had expected them to stop. And then he saw the reason for it. The ground, aside from some boulders, was open, and a man trying to run away could be cut down.

There were his horses, three of them standing with their heads away from the wind. Where was Dancer? Then he saw her. She was up on the plateau and she seemed to be wearing a lead rope, not too unusual. She wasn’t facing away from the wind. What was that? Ah, her lead rope was caught in some rocks. Just beyond her was a large boulder, and beyond that the compound itself offered numerous points of cover for a marksman as they had learned to their concern in the old battle here. Jonnie looked at it through the windscreen. What was this, some kind of ambush or trap? Where one expected some cadet sentries, there wasn’t a soul in sight.

Now Lars chose his moment to spring his little compound surprise. He had read in the works of Hitler—or was it Terl?—“If you want someone to remain inactive, crush their hope. Then guide false hope into a new channel where you can finish them off!” It was an extremely wise military maxim.

Lars, lolling easily now over the console, said, “You know that battle plane, the one with the serial ending in ninety-three that was parked and refueled just inside the hangar door? I’m sure you know the one I mean. Well, it isn’t there anymore. The fuel was removed from it and it was put way back in the hangar out of sight this morning.”

So that was why Angus and Ker didn’t stop when they left, thought Jonnie. They saw no battle plane and thought he had flown safely away. This accounted for no one’s showing up to trace him. Well, he hadn’t expected any help anyway. And it was a very good thing they had not walked in on these nervous Brigantes and their submachine guns.

The traitor let him digest the surprise and then said, “But we won’t be riding horses to the meadow. I will go down to the garage and get a stake truck and we can load the mounts in and I might even be persuaded to let you drive up into the mountains.” He had no intention of doing that. But it was a good false hope. In fact, masterful! Hitler—or was it Terl?—would have approved. “You can get out and start collecting the horses. The two Brigantes here will keep you covered.”

Lars got out and jogged off in the direction of the garage entrance on the other side of the compound.

Jonnie was pushed out with gun muzzles and he stood on the left side of the car, a Brigante on either side of him with their guns on him and fingers on the trigger. He was studying the apparently unpeopled compound. Was this the assassination area?

8

Jonnie heard the rumble of a truck above the wind. He looked to the north. An empty truck was approaching at considerable speed, the occupants of the cab invisible to him in this light. From behind that truck to the horizon in the north it was only empty plain, no other vehicles.

He heard another rumble. A plane? He spotted it in the east, approaching slowly just below the overcast. Only a slow-flying drone scanning for its endless millions of pictures.

Well, no real help was coming from those directions. He was on his own. The truck, now quite near, was probably one of theirs and part of this snare.

Jonnie looked back at the compound. He had a feeling of watchful eyes and danger there.

The two Brigante guards were on either side of him about a pace to the rear. They seemed to be watching this new truck. That they held guns was masked from the truck’s view by the ground car’s bulk.

The huge vehicle roared on by them on the other side of the ground car. It went a short distance up the rise toward Dancer. It stopped suddenly, banging to earth in a cloud of dust as its suspension drive cut off.

Somebody leaped down through the dust from the eight-foot height of the cab floor and began to run up the slope toward Dancer.

Jonnie couldn’t believe his eyes.

It was Bittie MacLeod! He was carrying something in his hand. A crop? A switch?

“Bittie!” shouted Jonnie in alarm.

The boy’s voice floated back to him, carried by the wind: “I’ll get the horses, Sir Jonnie. It’s my job!” Bittie was racing up on the hill.

“Come back!” shouted Jonnie. But the throb of the drone and a rumble of thunder in the mountains drowned his voice.

The Russian had had trouble getting his truck level. It had tilted on a boulder. But now he flung open the door and shouted toward Bittie, “Bitushka! Astanovka! (Halt!)” A sudden spurt of wind and the drone muted his words. “Vazvratnay! (Return!)”

The boy ran on. He was almost to Dancer to free the lead rope.

“Lord God, Bittie, come back!” screamed Jonnie.

It was too late.

From behind a boulder, just beyond the horse, a Brigante stood up, raised his submachine gun, and fired at full burst directly into the stomach of the running boy.

Bittie was slammed back, pummeled by bullets that drove his body into the air. He crashed to earth.

The Russian was running forward, trying to unsling the assault rifle from his back, trying to get to Bittie.

Two more Brigantes rose into view in different places and three Thompsons roared. The Russian was cut to pieces.

Jonnie went berserk!

The two Brigante guards stood no chance. With one backward stride, Jonnie was behind them. He sent them slamming together like egg shells.

He caught the gun of one as that Brigante went down and stamped his heel into the side of the mercenary’s skull, crushing it.

He reversed the gun and battered the other Brigante with bullets from a range of three inches.

Jonnie dropped on one knee, turned the Thompson on its side so its kick would fan the bullets, and blew the two last Brigantes who had risen to bits.

He spun to find the one who had shot Bittie. That one was not in sight.

Five Brigantes rushed from a door in the compound and sent a hail of lead in his direction.

The Thompson he had used was jammed. It would not recock. He threw it down and picked up the other one.

Totally unmindful of the slugs ripping up the ground, running low and firing as he went, he raced forward toward the fallen Russian.

He knelt behind the body, turned the Thompson on its side, and fanned a storm of bullets into the five. They crashed back against the compound, bodies jerking as a second spray of slugs hit them before they could even collapse.

Jonnie got the assault rifle off the Russian and yanked its slide to get a bullet in the chamber.

He was after the Brigante who had shot Bittie.

To his left and behind him eight mercenaries who had been lying in wait in the ravine rushed into view.

Jonnie whirled. Then he stood there braced until the last one was out of the ravine.

They came on firing. Jonnie raised the assault rifle to his shoulder and took careful aim. He shot the last in the line first so the others would not see him go down and then fanned a barrage of shots from there to the first one in the lead.

The squad came sprawling forward in an avalanche of dead men.

Down in the garage, Lars heard the firing. He sprinted up toward the plateau. Then he heard the assault rifle’s sharper bark racketing against the compound. Instantly he knew that Jonnie was not dead. No Brigantes had assault rifles. This intermediate ammunition, halfway between a pistol and a rifle, was far more accurate than a Thompson. He knew. He had tried to get some and he could not. He halted.

There was another prolonged burst from the assault rifle. The heavier staccato thud of the submachine guns had dwindled. Lars suddenly hit upon a better course of action for himself.

He scuttled backward into the garage. He sprinted into its depths. He found an old wrecked car and he crawled under the heaps of damaged body plates stripped from it. A far-off hammer of the assault rifle again. He burrowed deeper, sobbing with terror.

Jonnie raced over to the side to get a view behind the boulder, still trying to nail the mercenary who had shot Bittie.

A group of Brigantes sprinted into sight on the other side of the compound, firing submachine guns as they came.

Jonnie braced himself on a rock, fired over its top and riddled them.

Terl in his cage had dropped down below the parapet that held the upright bars, lying flat to be out of the path of bullets. He raised himself cautiously now. It was the animal! He ducked back. At any moment now he supposed the animal would charge over here and riddle him. It’s what Terl would have done. He wondered whether he could get to the hidden explosive charge in the cave and make a grenade out of it, and then he saw he would expose himself if he did so and abandoned the idea. He lay there, panting a little in fear.

Taking advantage of trees and boulders, running from one to the next with deadly purpose, Jonnie was still trying to get the Brigante who had shot Bittie.

The wind was rising. Thunder was sounding amid the gunfire. The slow-flying drone was very near overhead now.

Where, where was that Brigante?

Two mercenaries jumped into view in a door and bore down on him with Thompsons. A bullet flicked the side of his neck.

Jonnie pounded them into rolling balls of dead flesh with the assault rifle.

He snapped in a fresh magazine from the bag. The ape he was looking for must have taken refuge back of a wrecked tractor. Jonnie probed it with bullets fired to ricochet behind it.

Running, he rushed it, firing as he went.

There he was!

The Brigante ran away. Jonnie sighted in on him. The Brigante turned and started to shoot.

Jonnie sliced him in two with the assault rifle.

The sound of the drone grew less. There was no thunder at the moment. Save for the moan of the wind it seemed strangely quiet.

Jonnie put another magazine in the assault rifle. He quickly walked over the ground, glancing at one or another of the strewn dead.

A mercenary was crawling, trying to get his hands on a Thompson. Jonnie put a burst into him.

He waited. There seemed to be no sound or movement in the area that would be dangerous.

Dancer had broken free in the firing and fled down the slope.

Jonnie held the assault rifle ready in the crook on his arm. His battle rage died.

He went down the slope to Bittie.

9

The little boy lay on the bloodstained ground, his head back and in the direction of the lower slope.

Jonnie had been certain he was dead. Nobody could take that many submachine gun slugs in the middle of his body—and a small body—and live.

He felt awful. He knelt beside the torn boy. He was going to pick the body up and he put his hand under the head and lifted it slightly.

There was a light flutter of breath!

Bittie’s eyes trembled open. They were glazed in shock but they saw Jonnie, knew him.

Bittie was moving his lips. A very faint whisper of a voice. Jonnie bent closer to hear.

“I . . . I wasn’t a very good squire . . . was I . . . Sir Jonnie.”

Then tears began to roll sideways from the boy’s eyes.

Jonnie reacted, incredulous! The child thought he had failed.

Jonnie tried to get it out, tried to speak. He couldn’t make his voice work. He was trying to tell Bittie, no, no, no, Bittie. You were a great squire. You have just saved my life! But he couldn’t speak.

The shock was wearing off in the boy; the numbness that had held back the pain vanished.

Bittie’s hand, which had risen to clutch Jonnie’s wrist, suddenly clenched bruisingly in a spasm of agony. The body did a wrenching twist. Bittie’s head fell to the side.

He was dead. No heartbeat. No breath. No pulse.

Jonnie sat there for a long time, crying. He hadn’t been able to speak, to tell Bittie how wrong he was. He was not a bad squire. Not Bittie. Never!

After a while, Jonnie picked the boy up in his arms and went down the hill. He laid the body very gently on the seat of the ground car.

He went back and picked up the dead body of the Russian and carried it to the car and put it in.

Windsplitter had seen him from a distance and came up, and the other horses, over their fright now, approached.

Jonnie put the dead boy on his lap and drove very slowly toward the Academy. The horses, seeing him go at that pace, followed. The little cortege crossed the plain.

It took them a long time to make the trip. Jonnie stopped at last beside the trench where the sixty-seven cadets had fought the last battle so very long ago. He just sat there holding Bittie’s body.

A cadet sentry had seen them approach. In a little while cadets started to come out of the buildings. Word spread further and more came. The schoolmaster, from an upper window, saw the crowd gathering around the ground car and went out. Dunneldeen and Angus and Ker came up to the fringe of the crowd.

Jonnie got out, holding the dead boy. He wanted to talk to them and he couldn’t speak.

Several truckloads of Russians suddenly roared up to a halt and they spilled out, joining the crowd.

Several cadets raced back to the armory and came out with assault rifles and shoulder bags of magazines and began to pass them around to men who were looking in the direction of the compound.

An angry mutter was rising higher and higher among them.

Several cadets raced back to their rooms to get personal side arms and came back, buckling on belts and loading magazines.

The thunder in the mountains reverberated now and then across the plain and an angry, cold wind whipped around the mob.

A truckload of Russians who had swung over by the compound arrived back and stopped in a geyser of dust. The Russians were shouting and pointing toward the compound, trying to say what was over there now. No one could understand them.

A small ground car raced up from the direction of Denver, spraying clods of dirt as it screeched to a stop. The pilot officer in charge of drones jumped out, a stream of drone printout pictures crackling in the wind as he forced his way into the crowd, trying to tell them it had all come through on a drone overfly, trying to show people what had happened. He had ripped the printouts and the disks out of the machines and come at once.

A coordinator was finally able to make himself heard. He had gotten now what the single Russian truck had seen at the compound. “The Brigantes are all dead over there! A whole commando!”

“Is that Psychlo Terl still alive over there?” somebody shouted.

There was an angry roar from the crowd. Several surged forward to see whether Terl was visible in the pictures.

“He’s still alive,” shouted the Russians’ coordinator who had gotten the information from the truck.

The crowd surged and some started to climb into the Russian trucks. The Russians had been drawn up in a line by a Russian officer and they were checking their rifles on command.

Colonel Ivan, who had come to stand near Jonnie, was gazing, stricken with guilt, at the face of the dead boy. “The Psychlo dies!”

Jonnie had finally gotten a grip on himself. Still holding the boy he climbed to the top of the ground car. He looked down at them and they quieted to hear him.

“No,” said Jonnie. “No, you must not do anything now. In the star systems of the universe around us there is a far greater danger than Brigantes. We are fighting a dangerous battle. A bigger battle. We have made a mistake and it has resulted in the death of this innocent boy. I killed his murderer. We cannot undo the mistake. But we must go on.

“In that trench there, sixty-seven cadets died, fighting the last battle of the Psychlo invasion over a thousand years ago. When I first saw that trench, it gave me my first hope. It was not that they lost, it was that they fought at all against hopeless odds. They did not die in vain. We are here. We are fighting again. You and your fellow pilots control the skies of Earth.

“I will make a request of one or another of you in times to come. Will you honor those requests?”

There was a massed stare. Did he think they would not? Then there was a concerted roar of assent. It took minutes for it to quiet.

Jonnie said, “I am leaving you now. I am taking this boy to Scotland. To be buried by his own people.”

Jonnie got down off the car.

The pilot whose ore carrier had been readied for the Russians was pointing it out to the Russian coordinator. They loaded Jonnie’s horses. They found Stormalong’s kit in the ground car and put it aboard.

The Russians took over the body of Dmitri Tomlov to take it home.

Jonnie climbed to the cockpit of the big ore carrier, still holding Bittie.

Before he closed the door, he looked down at the crowd and said, slowly and clearly, “It is not the time for revenge.” And then he added a bitter, grim “Yet!” The crowd nodded. They understood. Later it would be an entirely different matter.

The huge plane rose and turned in the gray, storm-discolored sky. It dwindled and was gone.

10

A much more serious crisis awaited him in Scotland, one that threatened to wreck all his plans.

Pilots on the ground talked the ore plane down through the dark swirling mists of autumn. The Scots had begun to rebuild Castle Rock in Edinburgh, cleaning up and trying to restore the ancient buildings that two thousand years before had been the seat of Scottish nationalism and that was now being called its original Gaelic word: Dunedin, “the hill fort of Edin.” Jonnie landed in a park below the Rock, just in front of the ruins of the ancient National Gallery of Scotland.

Swarms of people had been there to meet him and gillies had been hard pressed to clear space in the throng for the plane to land.

Unfortunately, the drone pictures of the compound fight had come in on the Cornwall minesite recorders, and they had been rushed by mine passenger plane to Scotland long before Jonnie’s arrival. The Scots were making good use of the vast amounts of transport taken from the Psychlos, and flatbeds were being used as buses now that trainee machine operators were back home.

Bittie’s mother and family were there and Jonnie gave over the corpse to them to dress and prepare for a funeral. Pipers were wailing a lament, drums beating its slow and doleful cadence. Women in the crowd were openly crying and men were beating their fists together as they dwelt on what they conceived to be the necessity of war.

It was nearly dark. An honor guard of kilted Highlanders approached and its officer courteously told Jonnie he was there to escort him through the crowds to a meeting of the chiefs. They had not yet restored the parliament house on the Rock; the chiefs, brought hastily in from the hills, were meeting in the nearby open park before the ruined Royal Scottish Academy.

To the mournful cry of pipes, Jonnie walked toward the space. It was lit with a towering bonfire in its center. The flame’s glow was flickering over the buckles and swords of clanchiefs and their retainers. It was an assembly with only one, single-minded purpose: WAR!

Belatedly, Robert the Fox, just in from Africa, rushed to Jonnie’s side. They were already on the outskirts of the assembly, the honor guard opening the way, heading for some raised stone slabs that served as a rostrum. Clanchief Fearghus was coming forward in courtesy to escort him to this rostrum.

“Do you want war?” said Robert the Fox into Jonnie’s ear. “I think not! It would ruin all your plans.”

“No, no,” said Jonnie. “That is the last thing we want. Without it we have a chance.”

“Then why,” said Sir Robert, “didn’t you change your clothes before this meeting? You might have known it would take place!”

Jonnie had not thought about his clothes. He glanced down. The buckskin shoulder was dark red from the bleeding of the superficial wound at the side of his neck, long since staunched by coagulation. The entire front of his shirt and his trousers down to the knee were saturated with Bittie’s blood.

At that very moment, the chief of the Campbells was speaking to the assembled chiefs. “. . . And I say this is a blood feud that can only be settled in war!”

There was a savage roar of agreement. “War!” “War!” Lochaber axes were flashing in the light of the leaping flames. The slither of swords coming from their sheaths was a deadly, martial declaration.

Jonnie stepped up on the stone rostrum. He held up his hand for quiet. They gave him a silence electric with tension and punctuated by the crackling flame of the bonfire.

“We want no war,” said Jonnie. It was the wrong thing to say. A clamor of disagreement rolled at him.

“By the very blood on his clothes,” shouted the chief of the Argylls, “this cries out for war!”

“The murderer of the boy is dead!” said Jonnie.

“What of Allison?” cried the chief of the Camerons. “His vile murder has not been avenged! The chief of the Brigantes, he that brought it about, still lives! These are matters of blood feud!”

Jonnie realized they were out of control. They were demanding pilots and transport. Their target was the obliteration of the entire force of Brigantes. And now! He knew this had all been decided before his arrival on the slow ore carrier. He could see all their labors going for nothing. If that area in America were wiped out, that would end their plans!

He looked for the face of Robert the Fox and found only this sea of enraged chiefs and retainers. He did not dare tell them so openly and in public of his plans. Lars had shown there could be traitors.

He tried to tell them the planet was under a much greater threat, that they did not really know what had happened to Psychlo, that there were other races out in the stars, but not one single word he said was heard in the tumult.

Finally the big and lordly chief of Clanfearghus leaped up beside him and bellowed at the throng: “Let the MacTyler speak!”

They quieted under that, tense, determined.

Jonnie was tired. He had not slept for days. He summoned up reserves of energy and spoke in a strong, confident voice: “I can promise you SUCCESSFUL war! If you will let me guide you, if you will each one contribute men and time to a daring enterprise, if you will but plan with me and work in preparation for the next few months, we will have war, we will have revenge, and we will have a chance of everlasting victory!”

They heard that. After a moment, while it sank in, they burst into a savage din of agreement. The Lochaber axes were raised higher; claymores flashed back the light of flames. The pipes suddenly burst into the stirring tunes of war. They hailed Jonnie until they were hoarse. As he stepped down and was led away by Robert the Fox, big hands clapped him on the back as he passed, others sought to grip his. Men leaped before him, claymores held before their faces in devoted salutes. Somebody started a chant of “MacTyler! MacTyler! MacTyler!” The pipes screamed and drums added to the din.

“Count on you, laddie,” said Robert the Fox fondly as he led Jonnie off to temporary quarters in an old house, a bath, clean clothes and rest. “But I’m only hoping we can deliver!”

They buried Bittie MacLeod the next day in a crypt in the old Cathedral Saint Giles. The funeral procession was over a mile long.

To the chief of Clanfearghus Jonnie had said, “He died a squire. We must bury him as a knight.”

Placing a robe on the corpse, Fearghus, as titular king of Scotland—and now the entire British Isles—knighted Bittie with the tender touch of a sword.

A rock carver had worked straight through to complete a sarcophagus—a stone casket—and it was ready.

The parson read the funeral oration, and to the doleful mourn of pipes, Bittie was laid away.

On the plaque, beneath the new armorial bearings they had given Bittie, was carved:

Sir Bittie
A True Knight

They knew Bittie would have liked that.

Pattie, her face frozen in shock since she had first heard the news of his death, at the funeral’s end was given the small packet they had found in his pocket. It was the locket. She numbly read the engraving on it: “To Pattie, my future wife.”

The dam of her tears broke and she collapsed across the sarcophagus, weeping uncontrollably.

But Bittie was not really gone. He had become a legend. Future generations, if they survived, would hold in song and story the memory of Sir Bittie who they said had saved the life of Jonnie.