The Chatovarian, with a quivering, pointing finger in the direction of the old city of Luxembourg and backed up by the serious nods of five assistants, wailed that that whole town had been built in modern, and on his artistic soul, no such abominations would be perpetuated while he lived!
Jonnie had apologized. The Chatovarian said maybe it came from having to talk in Psychlo. And Jonnie asked what they recommended.
Five assistants presented a huge plan instantly.
This building, they said, had been the palace of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg in ancient times. And even though Jonnie did not think so, he didn't say so.
The indigenous architecture, from the castles that lay about, probably had been Gothic and neo-Gothic. And this palace should be like this. Jonnie had delayed long enough to ask Chrissie, but all she gave him were the items she had found that made the place charming, and he had made sure those were included and had told them to go ahead.
Chrissie and he had camped out in the woods, happy to be away from the din, cheerful in a buckskin tent and eating good food cooked on an open fire.
The Chatovarians had cleared the site and erected an armor steel shell. They had then flown down to a couple of marble quarries north of Leghorn in Italy and operated a ferry of ore freighters until they had piles of green and rose and other colored slabs. They had spliced them together into an exterior and interior of polished, armored rock. They had underplated the stream so that it did what it was supposed to do. But they had also installed full plumbing. The fireplaces would burn wood but since this was a waste of good food they also put solar driven infraheaters in them and a simulated flame.
It was a palace all right. And it might be Gothic. But it sure was colorful! Chrissie had been enthralled with it.
Jonnie, as he walked to the arches on the other side of the drawbridge, could hear in the distance the crash and bang of the Chatovarians ripping the old city of Luxembourg into chips. They had gone through it with historical and artifact survey teams and then the rams had been turned loose. That was the one piece of modern that would not survive.
The bank had already moved back to Zurich and Jonnie would have liked to live there too because of the nearby mountains.
Jonnie halted. Dries Gloton must have been here today for there was a burned spot in the lawn. Dries, after turning over his sector branch office, had been appointed Galactic Bank Liaison with the Earth Planetary Bank. He had been the finder of the “one,” but a bank executive couldn't accept such rewards– they would undermine customer confidence– and Voraz had raised Dries' salary to a hundred thousand credits a year– quite enough to maintain his yacht and anything else. Dries had left the yacht here and teleported home, and while he was gone his Selachee crew had been teaching the Chatovarians gambling games and winning a lot of their pay. But the Chinese engineers had been winning it back from the Selachees so Jonnie had kept out of it.
Dries rambled all over in his yacht– an oddity to use a space craft to go to the corner store for a bottle of schnapps, but that was Dries. He had taken the job on the condition that he would have long weekends and he seemed to always be going to northern Scotland. He said he was starting a “peppermint industry” on the side, but Jonnie didn't believe him. He was sure some thing else was involved. Today he had probably brought Chrissie some butter or something.
On the other hand, he might have been settling some accounts with Mr. Tsung. Dries kept certain customers and Mr. Tsung was one of them. Jonnie's account was cared for by fifteen Selachees who worked down at the minesite, and Dries had nothing to do with that– it ran about a trillion a day income now and was growing. Mr. Tsung's account was, however, somehow interesting to Dries: Jonnie had offered Mr. Tsung a salary and Mr. Tsung had been very surprised for he said a chamberlain usually paid his boss, from which Jonnie got the explanation of how some guests were always invited and some weren't. But it was Mr. Tsung's daughter that was making money. She was named Lu, after the last Empress of the Han Dynasty, and she was becoming famous. She worked in a little pagoda-like structure out back that was really a disguised antiaircraft pit, and she turned out pictures of tigers in the snow and birds flying and things like that on both silk and rice paper, and they were collector's items, bringing in a thousand credits at a crack. She also worked around the house and helped Chrissie and cut hair.
Jonnie decided he'd better have a metal pad installed for Dries to land on. He got along fine with him now. No use to tell him off.
He couldn't get through the courtyard. Lin Li, Mr. Tsung's son-in-law, had all the banquet hall furniture out and was working it over with molecular metal spray. The young man had an audience of a couple of awed Chatovarians. He could “paint” pictures, freehand, with a metal spray gun and a piece of card board to catch the splatters. He was very quick. Right now he was doing a scene Jonnie knew he must have gotten from pictures of tapestries– a lot of knights. He was putting it on the huge banquet tabletop.
He had stopped doing dragon medallions by hand. As they were all the same, a couple of Chatovarian mechanics, awed by his ability, had gotten him to do a perfect one and then had made a machine to turn them out at about ten thousand an hour. The demand out in the universe was such that they were back-ordered even so.
Jonnie couldn't get through without interrupting Lin Li. So he stood there watching. Chrissie and Mr. Tsung had been talking about the possibility of some of these Chatovarians getting out of hand at a party and eating up the furniture. That must be what this metal plating was all about! They had to suit the dwelling to the many guests they always had.
The vague feeling of disappointment hit him again. He had been certain, when he rose, that this was a sort of special day. That something wonderful was going to happen. It hadn't.
Lin Li had just started on a ferocious figure of a charging knight. He was using a scarlet metal, putting blood on a blade. It made Jonnie think of the red ink coming in so far on the Chatovarian company, “Desperation Defense.” If he could just unravel motors he could put them over into passenger transport. But he was condemned if he would continue with reaction engines.
Lin Li was guiding the molecular spray, now gray, to make the armor. The Chatovarians were looking on with awe. One of them was holding a spare gun, ready to hand it to Lin Li. They weren't assistants. They just wished they could do things like that. The Chatovarian closed the trigger of the gun to test it.
Suddenly Jonnie knew it had happened. The nice thing!
He sped back out the arch and raced all around the palace side and jumped the creek and popped into the back door.
Chrissie, hair tied back, was filling a big bowl, held by Mr. Tsung, from a pot on the fire.
“Chrissie!” said Jonnie. “Get your things!”
Pattie was sitting over in the corner. Pattie never said anything these days. She just looked down. Tinny, the Buddhist communicator, had been trying to talk to her as she often did.
“Tinny!” said Jonnie. “Call the minesite! Get me a marine attack plane on the pad in twenty minutes! Call Dr. MacKendrick in Aberdeen and tell him to come right away to Victoria!”