"Pattie doesn't feel well,” said Chrissie.
“Bring her along!” said Jonnie.
“Is it a diplomatic conference or a scientific one?” said Mr. Tsung, monotone through the vocoder.
“Medical!” said Jonnie.
Mr. Tsung put down the bowl and raced off to put a white coat and a pair of spectacles– which had no glass in them– in a sack. That was proper dress he had seen in ancient pictures.
"Jonnie!" said Chrissie. “This is venison stew!”
“We'll eat it on the plane! We're headed for Africa!”
Chapter 3
Jonnie headed the marine attack plane slightly east of south and turned on his viewscreens. This copilot was new, from the French refugees in the Alps, named Pierre Solens: he was quite young, recently trained; he still had a little trouble speaking Psychlo. Usually his duties consisted of simply shifting the minesite planes about, but as compound duty pilot it had been up to him to deliver the ship to
Jonnie's house; he had not dreamed that in the next few minutes he would be flying copilot to the Tylerand heading for Africa. He had started out all right but when he saw how Jonnie took off he had become overawed. He had never seen a plane lofted that way, like firing a bullet! And now they were flying hypersonic at only fifteen thousand feet. Would they clear the French and It alian Alps?
“We're awfully low,” he timidly offered.
“People in back,” said Jonnie. “Can't let them get too cold. Get to work with those viewscreens so we won't be running into any drones.”
Drones, drones, drones! All his life Jonnie had been being looked at by drones! It was no exception now. The Chatovarian defense system was only half-complete: despite buying the company, it was an expensive system, almost three times as costly as the one the small gray men had described, but it was about ten times as good. Automatic blast cannon that fired fifteen hundred miles into space could shoot down a space fleet with one salvo; atmosphere drones that fired; space drones that patrolled orbits; probes that scanned anything moving within ten light-years. Real armor cable would make every city untouchable.
As the system was incomplete, a lot of emergency stand-in drones were about and they were attracted to anything flying. A huge green flashing light was going on top of the plane, and the box there, newly installed, was sending out the “code of the day,” which was so fast and so scrambled and changing microsecond to microsecond that an attacker could not hope to duplicate it. If the drones didn't see and hear it, they'd shoot.
Ah, yes, here came the Mediterranean emergency drones, three of them, shooting over to “have a look.” The copilot was slow and Jonnie tuned a knob to focus them.
Chatovarian drones, all right. Each one had a big eye painted on its nose. But those big, staring eyes were not a Chatovarian fixation on decoration: a pilot would instinctively shoot into the center of them, and if a pilot did, the drone used the shot as a return carrier wave to send a surge back that blew up the attacker's own ammunition and thereby his ship. Don't shoot at one of those eyes!
Nevertheless they were a bit disconcerting, glaring out of the viewscreen. They nudged in like sniffing dogs, and then satisfied by automatically cross-verifying with each other, they fell away and returned to their patrol sectors.
The French pilot was looking back at the Alps. They hadn't hit any!
But Jonnie had his screens on the orbit drones now. They seemed to be disinterested, satisfied by the code of the day.
And what was this? He had a space probe on the screen. He hadn't known you could see one. Was it hostile?
Like any star drone or probe, these things had a “lens” that was made of a “light magnet.” This reacted on light beams and pulled them in from a zone many miles in diameter and concentrated them, magnetically corrected for aberration, into a spot smaller than a dot on paper. In effect, it made a lens many, many miles in diameter. The problem was too much light rather than too little, and they had blinders or filters that dropped into place to keep them from burning out their receivers or recording discs should they turn toward a sun too close. In that way one could get magnifications into the tens of trillions.
One of the contractors had drilled Jonnie in on command controls and a box of these existed overhead. Jonnie flipped a switch and tapped the probe's receiver and shifted the image to his own central viewscreen.
It was their own space probe all right.
He was looking at the copilot and himself behind their own viewscreen. Yet that space probe was over ten thousand miles away. It must be at the near end of a run. Friendly, so he threw the tap off.
He didn't really think anybody would attack Earth now. The peace treaty had gone in, as promised, with claws! Very, very popular. The delegates had even taken home copies of the end of Psychlo and the death of Asart.
The bank was shoveling out food loans like a waterfall. Consumer products had not yet begun to roll. That would take time. He hoped he could get at the secret of how one built a teleportation motor: that would open the door to a lot of consumer products. And even more important, keep the vehicles they had here operating. These planes wouldn't last forever.
“Take over,” he told the French pilot,
Pierre, and went back into the body of the plane.
Chrissie stirred herself and unwrapped a bowl. "I’m afraid the venison stew might be cold now.”
Jonnie sat down in one of the huge bucket seats. Pattie was down at the back of the plane, just sitting there, looking down. It worried him. Sometimes she went for walks at night. Sometimes he could hear her in her room, crying. Because she was only ten he had thought she would recover. But she hadn't.
Mr. Tsung, he saw, was going to use this time-space to catch up with his diplomatic and social duties, for here he came with about ten pounds of paper. Jonnie put his attention on the stew. It wasn't cold.
“The week's dispatch box came in from Snautch," he said.
So that was what Dries was doing coming down from Zurich. “Send the business matters down to the minesite office; it's their job.”
“Oh, I did, I did,” said Mr. Tsung. “These are all social and diplomatic. Invitations to weddings, banquets, christenings. Requests to address meetings-”
“Well, thank them or tell them no,” said Jonnie.
“Oh, I have, I have,” said Mr. Tsung. “We don't have any trouble. We use a vocoreader, a vocoder, and a vocotyper. We can handle correspondence in about eighteen thousand languages now. But this is going to get heavier.”
Here it comes, thought Jonnie. Mr. Tsung's elder brother had been appointed chamberlain to the court of the Chief of Clanfearghus. His younger brother was busy starting up a diplomatic college in Edinburgh.
“You got another brother?” said Jonnie around a mouthful of stew.
“I am sorry that I don't,” retorted Mr. Tsung. "I’m talking about the nephew of Baron von Roth. He wants to apprentice as a diplomat in my office.”
“Fine,” said Jonnie.
Mr. Tsung adjusted the vocoder volume higher as the plane was roaring more with Pierre at the console. “I want to hire about thirty more Russian and Chinese girls to train as clerks and vocotyper operators. It 's really very simple. One reads invitations with a vocoreader into one's own language and then one uses a vocoder to talk to the vocotyper and it types the answer back into the tongue of the original letter-”
“Go ahead,” said Jonnie.
“I think there should be a new building to take care of all these people and files. Something more on a Chinese-”
“Go ahead,” said Jonnie.