“He already bought them,” said
MacAdam. “Down to the last bauble in their boots!”
All but Jonnie boomed out laughter. His head was going round. Quintillions? The number was unreal. Maybe he could buy one of those woven leather lead ropes for Windsplitter. Or buy some new furniture if Chrissie had lost all hers....
The thought of Chrissie hit him. He had been keeping it suppressed so he could keep on going.
MacAdam and the baron collected up their things again and walked out shaking their heads and muttering, “Brown Limper!" And, “Made trouble clear to the end!”
A wailing, petulant voice cut into the room and Sir Robert looked up. Stormalong was behind two Russians at the room entrance who were stolidly blocking him out of it. “Sir Robert! Please come out here! I’ve had a dispatch that's been waiting for you for hours and hours and hours!”
Sir Robert pushed past the Russian guards and vanished.
Jonnie sat there, a little bit spent, trying to get oriented to what the rush of events added up to, trying to decide what he should do now. He made up his mind. Nothing was holding him here. He would go out and get a plane and get to Scotland to help. He grabbed his helmet off the floor. The two Russians at the door parted to let him through.
He collided with Sir Robert. The old Scot was standing there, a written message in his hand. He was crying and laughing all at the same time.
Sir Robert pushed the dispatch into Jonnie's hand. “Ah, weel! 'Tis quite a mess. But Jonnie, Jonnie, th'auld Rock protected them a!”
Edinburgh! They had gotten through the last tunnel at dawn today. They were half-starved, some injured, all in a state of greater or lesser shock, but they had gotten them out! All twenty-one hundred of them.
Jonnie felt dazed with relief. There were no specific names mentioned in the radio dispatch. He stumbled out into the bowl, meaning to go to ops.
There was someone across the bowl, someone covered with dust but wearing the domed helmet they used in high-speed flying. It was Thor!
Thor was beckoning to him gladly. Thor shouted, “Look who we got here for you, Jonnie!"
Somebody was rushing toward him. She threw her arms about him, crying his name.
It was Chrissie! Gaunt and pale, her black eyes flooding with tears.
“Oh, Jonnie! Jonnie!" she was saying. "I’m never going to leave you again! Never! Hold me, Jonnie!”
Jonnie did. He just stood there, almost crushing her ribs. He held her for a long time. He couldn't talk.
Part XXXI
Chapter 1
Jonnie was riding Windsplitter along the banks of the Alzette River in Luxembourg. He was leisurely wending his way home.
It was a lovely summer day: the sunlight spattered down through the leafy trees along the trail, making patterns of green and gold that shifted gently and seemed to slowly echo the soft music of the purling stream.
Windsplitter snorted and tried to rear. It was the bear. The same bear they had seen there several times during the three months they had been in Luxembourg, using this same trail from the old minesite to Jonnie's house. The bear was fishing. He stopped now and tested the environment with his nose and saw them. He was a pretty big bear, brown, about six and a half feet tall as he stood up.
It's just the bear, you old fraud,” said Jonnie.
Windsplitter sort of laughed and settled down. He did what he could to make life more exciting. And ever since the horses had been flown down from Russia they had been getting fat from idleness. Jonnie always rode him down to the minesite mornings and left him to poke around the strange doings there until Jonnie rode home. Just now he would have been far happier with a good old flat-out run through these interesting, summer-dressed woods. But he stood still, obedient to a heel command.
Jonnie sat and idly watched the bear. It had resumed its fishing, seeing no menace in the horse and rider on the other bank of the shallow stream. Jonnie bet if he had been a Psychlo, that bear would have left the country!
And would have still been running all the next day. Jonnie indifferently wanted to see if the bear would catch any of the big trout with which the stream abounded.
For all this beautiful day, Jonnie had a small feeling of disappointment. He had awakened that morning with the odd conviction that this new day was going to bring something really eventful, some piece of good news. And all day he had been anticipating it.
He reviewed what had happened so far to see if any bright event had been missed by him.
He had gone, pretty much as usual, down to the old minesite to find the routine bedlam in progress. Three months ago he had bought the old Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the Intergalactic holdings. The Psychlos had had an iron mine there which they had worked in a lackadaisical fashion. They had also built a small steel mill and a forge which they used to turn out hooks, ore buckets and such for their mines on Earth.
The invaders had not touched the place, already well defended, and the deep underground levels had been ideal for doing the final setup of consoles. Angus MacTavish and Tom Smiley Townsen worked there, behind vault doors. They had streamlined assembly so all they had to do was implant the pattern of the circuit on the insulating board, assemble the console, and shove it into a shipping case. Everything else was preconstructed practically out in the open since it gave away nothing.
In fact nobody but Jonnie, Angus, Tom Smiley, and Sir Robert knew that the consoles were completed at Luxembourg. The preassembly even included boxing. People who did it thought Angus and Tom Smiley were just inspectors. But these two, working only a couple of hours a day, using designed patterns and tools, withdrew the "preconstructed" console out of the case, finished it, sealed it, and then lined it up in the rows of them.
A heavily guarded convoy of trucks then drove them an incredible distance down to an ancient tunnel, once called Saint Gottard, about nine miles long. There the boxes were unloaded onto mine platform cars and sent on the ancient rails to the tunnel center. An automatic machine stamped them “completed” as they were passed through a blocked chamber and put them onto a new set of mine platform cars.
A brand-new set of trucks, much more heavily guarded, then rushed them to the new firing platform that was now located in a mountain bowl outside Zurich. There, they were routed and shipped.
As Jonnie, Angus, and Tom Smiley had set up the tunnel and as it was heavily gunned and guarded, nobody knew who did the final assembly. Some thought there were special personnel or gnomes or something that lived in that tunnel and did the work.
They were batting out about two hundred consoles a day. The preassembly people were making the whole platform and poles and wiring since none of that was secret, and they were being shipped right along with the consoles.
No, mused Jonnie. There was nothing startlingly new in all that today. It was last week when Tom Smiley had told him Margarita was going to have a baby.
The bear had gotten his first trout. He batted it way up on the bank, looked around, and then went back to fishing. Windsplitter had found some young grass and was noisily pulling it up and eating it.
There had been nothing new with the Chatovarians. The bank had informed Sir Robert the moment all arms and related firms had crashed but good in the Chatovarian Empire and Sir Robert and Angus and half a dozen Selachees had sped there.
The Chatovarians had the reputation of being the best defense builders. It was their boast that no Psychlo attack had ever broken through in the entire seven-hundred-planet empire. They had even shot down gas drones. So, for that and other reasons, the new teleportation company– now called “The Rig industry” after Jonnie rejected using his name on it– had done business with the Chatovarians. The Selachees had helped Angus find the right companies and had helped