Uller Uprising

Prologue On Satan’s Footstool

The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the contragravity field alternated on and off, occasionally varying its normal rate of five hundred to the second when some thermal updraft lifted the vehicle and the automatic radar-altimeter control acted to alter the frequency and lower it again. Sometimes it rocked slightly, like a boat on the water, and, in the big screen which served in lieu of a window at the front of the control cabin, the dingy-yellow landscape would seem to tilt a little. If unshielded human eyes could have endured the rays of Nu Puppis, Niflheim’s primary, the whole scene would have appeared a vivid Saint Patrick’s Day green, the effect of the blue-predominant light on the yellow atmosphere. The outside ’visor-pickup, however, was fitted with filters which blocked out the gamma-rays and X-rays and most of the ultraviolet-rays, and added the longer light-waves of red and orange which were absent, so that things looked much as they would have under the light of a G0-type star like Sol. The air was faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and the clouds were green-gray.

A thousand feet below, the local equivalent of a forest grew, the trees, topped with huge ragged leaves, looking like hundred-foot stalks of celery. There would be animal life down there, too⁠—little round things, four inches across, like eight-legged crabs, gnawing at the vegetation, and bigger things, two feet long, with articulated shell-armor and sixteen legs, which fed on the smaller herbivores.

Von Schlichten, on the right, glanced idly down, puffing slowly on his cigarette. Then he stiffened, the muscles around his right eye clamping tighter on the monocle. Leaning forward, he punched Harry Quong lightly on the shoulder.

“Circle back, sergeant; let’s have a look at that street again,” he directed. “Something going on, down there; looks like a riot.”

“Yes, sir; I saw it,” the Chinese-Australian driver replied. “Terrans in trouble; bein’ mobbed by geeks. Aircar parked right in the bloody middle of it.”

The car made a twisting, banking loop and came back, more slowly. Colonel Hideyoshi O’Leary was using the binoculars.

“That’s right,” he said. “Terrans being mobbed. Two of them, backed up against a house. I saw one of them firing a pistol.”

Von Schlichten had the handset of the car’s radio, and was punching out the combination of the Company guardhouse on Gongonk Island; he held down the signal button until he got an answer.

“Von Schlichten, in car over Konkrook. Riot on Fourth Avenue, just off Seventy-second Street.” No Terran could possibly remember the names of Konkrook’s streets; even native troops recruited from outside found the numbers easier to learn and remember. “Geeks mobbing a couple of Terrans. I’m going down, now, to do what I can to help; send troops in a hurry. Kragan Rifles. And stand by; my driver’ll give it to you as it happens.”

The voice of somebody at the guardhouse, bawling orders, came out of the receiver as he tossed the phone forward over Harry Quong’s shoulder; Quong caught it and began speaking rapidly and urgently into it while he steered with the other hand.

Governor-General Sidney Harrington sat on the comfortably upholstered bench on the dais of the Audience Hall, flanked by von Schlichten and Eric Blount. He didn’t look particularly regal, even on that high seat⁠—with his ruddy outdoorsman’s face and his ragged gray mustache and his old tweed coat spotted with pipe-ashes, he might have been any of the dozen-odd country-gentleman neighbors of von Schlichten’s boyhood in the Argentine. But then, to a Terran, any of the kings of Uller would have looked like a freak birth in a lizard-house at a zoo; it was hard to guess what impression Harrington would make on an Ulleran.

He took the false palate and tongue-clicker, officially designated as an “enunciator, Ulleran” and, colloquially, as a geek-speaker, out of his coat pocket and shoved it into his mouth. Von Schlichten and Blount put in theirs, and Harrington pressed the floor-button with his toe. After a brief interval, the wide doors at the other end of the hall slid open, and the Konkrookan notables, attended by a dozen Company native-officers and a guard of Kragan Rifles, entered. The honor-guard advanced in two columns; between them marched an unclad and heavily armed native carrying an ornate spear with a three-foot blade upright in front of him with all four hands. It was the Konkrookan Spear of State; it represented the proxy-presence of King Jaikark. Behind it stalked Gurgurk, the Konkrookan equivalent of Prime Minister or Grand Vizier; he wore a gold helmet and a thing like a string-vest made of gold wire, and carried a long sword with a two-hand grip, a pair of Terran automatics built for a hand with six four-knuckled fingers, and a pair of matched daggers.

Motioning the sergeant to accompany him, he spoke briefly to Keaveney and then came around the table to where von Schlichten sat, the Resident-Agent accompanying him.

“Message just came in from Konkrook, general,” he said softly. “Sid Harrington’s dead.”

It took von Schlichten all of a second to grasp what had been said. “Good God! When? How?”

“Here’s all we know, sir,” the sergeant said, giving him a radioprint slip. “Came in ten minutes ago.”

It was an all-station priority telecast. Governor-General Harrington had died suddenly, in his room, at 22:10; there were no details. He glanced at his watch; it was 22:43. Konkrook and Skilk were in the same time-zone; that was fast work. He handed the slip to Mordkovitz, who gave it to Keaveney.

“You from the telecast station, sergeant?” he asked. “All right, let’s go.”

“Wait a minute, general.” Keaveney put out a hand to detain him as he took his belt and put it on. “How about this?” He gestured nervously with the radioprint slip.

“Get up and make an announcement, now,” von Schlichten told him, fastening the buckle and hitching his pistol and survival-kit into place. “It’ll be out all over the planet in half an hour. Never hold news out unnecessarily.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “Come on, sergeant.”

As he hurried from the banquet-room, he could hear Keaveney tapping on his wineglass.

“Everybody, please! Let me have your attention! There has just come in a piece of the most tragic news.⁠ ⁠…”

“Well, how about nuclear weapons?” Paula asked. “I hate to suggest it⁠—I know what they did on Mimir, and Fenris, and Midgard, and what they did on Terra, during the First Century. But it may be our only chance.”

He finished his beer and shoved the bottle into the waste-receiver, then got out his cigarettes.

“I’d hate to have to make a decision like that, Paula,” he told her. “The military use of nuclear energy is the last⁠—well, the next-to-last⁠—thing I’d want to see on Uller. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it’s a decision I won’t have to make. There isn’t a single nuclear bomb on the planet. The Company’s always refused to allow them to be manufactured or stockpiled here.”

“I don’t think there’d be any criticism of your making them, now, general. And there’s certainly plenty of plutonium. You could make A-bombs, at least.”

“There isn’t anybody here who even knows how to make one. Most of our nuclear engineers could work one up, in about three months, when we’d either not need one or not be alive.”

“Dr. Gomes, who came in on the Pretoria, two weeks ago, can make them,” she contradicted. “He built at least a dozen of them on Niflheim, to use in activating volcanoes and bringing ore-bearing lava to the surface.”

Von Schlichten’s hand, bringing his lighter to the tip of his cigarette, paused for a second. Then he completed the operation, snapped it shut, and put it away.

“When did all this happen?”