"Whyn't you let me thump him?" Cloric asked. "He deserved it."
"Probably," Chetwynd said. "But do us both a favor. Keep your eye on him. But your hands off. Got me?"
Cloric nodded. He did not know what was going on, and he was pretty sure he did not want to find out. As for Chetwynd, he still thought he recognized Sten. But the cop business was probably pure foolishness. Probably. Still, he was not taking any chances.
L'n went at her rote tasks with new interest. She even hummed a Kerr lullaby to herself as she worked. She had been startled and badly frightened when the man Horatio had slipped into her lab. She almost had not flipped on the small blue light that was just barely comfortable to her eyes but would have allowed Horatio to see. For a moment she had almost let him bump around in the dark while she found a place to hide.
But the man had stayed perfectly still and whispered her name. Finally, she had responded. Without hesitation, the man walked directly to her, as if he could see in the dark as well as she could.
Horatio seemed to understand her right away: He made soothing noises at her and talked about things that interested her, like the geometric pattern and colors produced when light was refracted in a certain, special way. He said he had heard about her art, although he had not actually ever seen one of her light paintings. He promised to help her set up a studio at the prison.
He had also asked her for help. Not in return for any favors he would do. Of that she was quite sure. L'n had the idea that Horatio would provide the studio no matter what she did.
Why did she trust him? Well, he had trusted her, hadn't he?
He had confessed that he was Big X. That information alone was a death warrant in her hands. And the things that he had asked her to do also depended on his absolute trust in her.
She would be the forger. She would use her many skills as an artist to produce fake Tahn documents and
ID cards and a host of other things the prisoners would need when and if they escaped.
L'n had only one hesitation. There was no way she could escape with them. In the Tahn sunlight, she was blind.
Hansen had said—No. Not Hansen, she corrected herself. Silly me. Horatio had said that as Big X he could not escape, either. So they would work together and help the others.
L'n liked that. She also liked the second thing he had asked her. It also involved danger, but not as much. He wanted her to do a little sabotage, to approve as many sections of flawed tubing as she could. That would be a pleasure. In fact, she had thought about it before but had been afraid to try it.
Since she had met Horatio, she was not afraid anymore.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The third gate in the center sanctuary opened, and Security Major Avrenti stalked into the prisoners' courtyard.
The base of the triangle—the support for the escapers—went into operation.
Sergeant Major Isby leaned on his stool and lifted the bandage away from the stump of his leg to get a little more of the dim sun above.
Lance Corporal Morrison, on the second-level balcony, dropped his propaganda leaflet.
Major F'rella, at the far end of the prisoners' courtyard, curled one tentacle under—another Tahn recorded as entering—and, with her second brain, continued puzzling over whether that unusual archaic Earth tune written by someone named Weill could be polyphonically hummed using six of her eight lungs.
Technician Blevens yelped—supposedly at the heat of the caldron he had just touched—and dropped the caldron on the floor of the prisoners' kitchen.
The klang rang through the courtyard.
And the word was out.
"Great One protect us," Cristata said. "And now it is time to go."
Instantly Markiewicz dropped her improvised spade and began slithering backward, away from the face of the tunnel. She, like any sensible tunneler who might have to pass inspection at a moment's notice, worked naked.
Cristata grabbed her legs and helped yank her back toward the nearest way station. He looked at her body, interestedly. He was wondering why some, of the religious humans he had met saw shame in a body without covering. And suddenly he had a flash. Of course. They realized that their bodies should have been fur rather than pale flesh. They were ashamed of what they should have been instead of what they were.
Cristata, finding that thought worthy of his next meditation with the Great One and thanking the Great One for one more enlightenment, scurried back up the shaft after Markiewicz.
Markiewicz tugged on her coverall, and then they burst out of the tunnel, into the courtyard, as the paving stones slid away and then closed. Two soldiers dropped a very smelly basket of lichens over the stones and busied themselves peeling them for the evening meal.
Sorensen was lowering the eighteenth plate of glass into position, with Kraulshavn waggling final instructions when the boot thudded against the door. The plate came back up and went hastily down onto the table beside them while Kraulshavn signed frantically for clues.
Tahn. They're approaching.
Clots!
Kraulshavn pulled at the cord hanging close to him, and the ties of a mattress cover, fastened to the rafters above them, came open. Dust clouded down around them.
All the pieces they had worked on that day would have to be laboriously cleaned and sterilized before the project could continue.
Sorensen swore as the two beings slid out the door of the workshop, into the corridor, and closed the door behind them. Their waiting watchman relocked the door, then covered it with more dust blown from a small bellows. He took one final precaution: Just in case the Tahn checked the corridor with heat detectors, he drooped a length of live lighting wire from the overhead so that it dangled across the cell door. Burn marks had already been artistically painted on the door, and the wire occasionally spit sparks. Any heat pickup would, everyone hoped, be attributed to that continuing short.
The watchman wondered what the clot the two beings were doing inside that workshop. But as Mr. Kilgour had reminded him, that was na' his't' fash aboot. He headed for the courtyard.
What was going on inside the workshop was the slow, laborious construction of the computer that Sten needed.
Dreamers often wondered what would happen if they could appear in another, earlier time and build some sort of common tool that would make them gods, or even kings. The problem they never considered was that almost all technology required six steps of tooling before that trick item showed up.
And so Sten's computer had to begin with a chip—a series of chips.
No one would have recognized what Sorensen and Kraulshavn were constructing as a computer chip, however.
Their "chips" were cubes, almost a third of a meter to any side. For simplicity's sake, they had decided to use a basic design of a twenty-four-layer chip. Each layer was a slab of glass. Each slab had the circuitry scratched on its surface and then acid-etched. Where each resister, diode, or whatever belonged, an open space was left. Full-scale components were either built or stolen by the working parties. The circuitry was then "wired" as molten silver was poured into the acid etching. The chips' connecting legs were hand constructed of gold and wired in. Twenty-four of those plates made up each chip.
They had twelve chips ready and were about a third of the way through their task.
Both Sorensen and Kraulshavn wondered where Alex planned to put together their computer. He had not told them, and they recognized that as yet they had no need to know. They also wondered what Kilgour was planning to use for a storage facility. Another impossibility—but somehow they thought that there would be, when the time was right, an answer.