Crossing the puddled surface of the street, he sheltered in a doorway and took his communicator from an inner pocket. There was a delay of only a few seconds while the local relay operator patched him through to his uncle’s office in Kisumu.
“This is Curt,” he said tersely on hearing his uncle’s identification. “Are you free to speak?”
“I’m free to speak to you, Lieutenant, but I have no inclination to do so.” Colonel Freeborn replied with the voice of a stranger, and the fact that he was using the formal mode of address was a bad omen.
“I’ve just carried out a solo reconnoitre at the mine,”
Curt said hurriedly. “I got close enough to hear what Snook and the daktari were saying, and…”
“How did you accomplish that?”
“Ah…I used one of the K.80 remote Listening sets.”
“I see—and did you bring it back with you?”
“Of course/ Curt said indignantly. “Why do you ask?”
“I merely wondered if Mister Snook or his friend Murphy had decided to relieve you of it. From what I hear, you’ve been setting them up in the ex-army supplies business.”
Curt felt a needle spray of ice on his forehead. “You’ve heard about…”
“I think everybody in Barandi has heard—including the President.”
The sensation of stinging coldness began to spread over Curt’s entire body, making him tremble. “It wasn’t my fault. My men were…”
“Don’t whine, Lieutenant. You went after a piece of white meat—regardless of my views on that sort of behaviour—and you let a couple of civilians disarm you in a public place.”
“I recovered the Uzis a few minutes later.” Curt did not mention that his automatic had not been found in the jeep.
“We can discuss the brilliance of your rearguard action at another time, when you’re explaining why you didn’t report the incident to me,” Colonel Freeborn snapped. “Now get off the air and stop wasting my time.”
“Wait,” Curt said desperately, “you haven’t heard my report about the mine.”
“What about it?”
“They aren’t leaving. They’re planning to work on.”
“So?”
“But the President wants them to leave.” Curt was baffled by his uncle’s reaction to his news. “Wasn’t it a firm order?”
“Firm orders have gone out of fashion in Barandi,” the Colonel said.
“With you, perhaps.” Curt could feel himself nearing a precipice, but he plunged onwards. “But some of us haven’t gone soft from sitting behind a desk all day.”
“You are hereby suspended from duty,” his uncle said in a cold, distant voice.
“If you can’t do this to me.”
“I’d have done it sooner if I’d known where you were hiding. I’ve already awarded floggings to the three soldiers you contaminated with your ineptness and reduced them to kitchen patrol. In your case, though, I think a court martial is called for.”
“No, uncle, no!”
“Do not address me in that manner.”
“But I can get them out of the mine for you,” Curt said, struggling against the wheedling note which was creeping into his voice. “The President will be pleased, and that’ll make everything…”
“Wipe your nose, Lieutenant,” the Colonel ordered. “And when you have finished wiping it, report to barracks. That is all.”
Curt Freeborn stared incredulously at his communicator for a moment, then he opened his fingers and let it fall to the concrete at his feet. Its pea-sized function indicator light continued to glow like a cigarette end in the gathering dimness. He smashed a metal-shod heel down on it, then stepped out into the rain, his smooth young face as impenetrable as that of an ebony carving.
At nightfall Ambrose called a temporary halt to the work and the group moved under the platform to drink coffee which he shared out from a huge flask. The rain had begun to ease off slightly and the presence of refreshments, coupled with the jostling comradeship, made the crude shelter seem cosy. They had been joined by. Gene Helig, who added to the picnic atmosphere by producing a paper bag full of chocolate bars and a bottle of South African brandy. Culver and Quig became cheerfully intoxicated almost at once.
Twice during the amiable scrimmage Snook found himself standing next to Prudence. Selfconsciously, like a schoolboy, he attempted to touch her hand—hoping to recreate something of the former moment of intimacy—but each time she moved away, seemingly oblivious to his presence, leaving him feeling thwarted and lonely.
Automatically, he countered with the defence measures which had served him without fail for many years in many countries. He threw the coffee from his cup, filled it to the brim with brandy, retreated to the outer edge of the shelter and lit a cigarette. The neat spirit kindled a fire inside him, but it was fighting a losing battle with the darkness which pressed in from the wilderness outside. Snook began to develop a gloomy conviction that Ambrose’s enterprise was about to go disastrously wrong. He glanced around without interest as Ambrose came to stand beside him.
“Don’t weaken,” Ambrose said. “We’ll be pulling out in the morning.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Positive. I had planned to follow later top dead centres up into the sky, but it’s all becoming too difficult—I cancelled the helicopter today. I doubt if I would have been allowed to use it anyway.”
Snook swallowed more brandy. “Boyce, what makes you so positive that Felleth will be ready to attempt a transfer next time around?”
“He’s a scientist. He knows as well as I do that tomorrow morning we’ll have optimum conditions for the experiment.”
“Optimum, but not unique. I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I can see that when the surface of Avernus comes out through the Earth there’ll be two top dead centres, one heading north and one heading south, but that only applies to this longitude, doesn’t it? And what if they are moving? With a bit of time in hand, and international funding, you could beat that problem. And what about the poles? There must be very little movement there—just the .sideslip.”
“You have been thinking, haven’t you?” Ambrose raised his cup in a mock toast. “Where would the international funding come from? It’s the UN that’s trying to block us right now.”
“But that’s only their first reaction.”
“You want to bet?”
“All right—but what about the other points?”
“Can the Avernians travel round their equator at will?
Have they got land in their temperate zones? Can they even reach their north and south poles?”
Snook delved into his fragmentary second memory. “I don’t think so, but…”
“Believe me, Gil, tomorrow morning is the right time for this experiment.”
Snook was raising his cup to his lips when the significance of Ambrose’s final word reached him. “Wait a minute—that’s the second time you’ve called it an experiment. Do you mean it isn’t all cut and dried?”
“Hardly.” Ambrose gave Snook a strangely wan smile. “That piece of paper you wrote on will advance our nuclear science by twenty years when I get it back to the States, but your friend Felleth is pushing his theoretical physics to the limit. I’ve looked at his equations and interactions, but—quite frankly—I’m not good enough to predict whether they’ll work or not. They seem all right to me, but I’m not sure if Felleth will get through. There’s also the possibility that he could make it and be dead on arrival.”