Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III by A. Bertram Chandler Page B

he was to what he regarded as enemy headquarters. Since the first landing he had travelled many kilometers by blimp, but, he realized, it had just been a case of there and back, there and back, there and back. This was the most thickly populated part of Taraplan with the major industries, the coal mines, the natural gas wells, the iron and the copper.
    He picked up a pair of dividers, did some measuring off. As the crow flew it was just over five hundred drli from the temple to Plirrit. He consulted the conversion scale; that was three hundred kilometers almost exactly. The cave was a mere six drli from the railway track, the line between Korong and the copper mining town of Blit in the mountains to the north west. He assumed that his army— his army?— would have to be assembled in or near the temple and then would have to be transported to Plirrit. It was too far to walk, and a convoy of rail cars would be conspicuous. And, talking of rail cars . . .
    He asked, “Mr. Lennay, has there been any sort of search for us? Has anybody found the rail cars that we abandoned?”
    Lennay replied, “Very little time has passed since your rescue, Captain Grimes, and we have never, as a people, been in such a hurry as you Earthmen.” He shrugged. “Often I have deplored this, but there are times, such as now, when this leisurely attitude is to the advantage of the True Believer. We have had ample time to ensure that the rail cars cannot be spotted from the air and that the marks of their precipitant passage through the bush have been erased. But there has been considerable activity by the Shaara flying patrols, up and down the railway line. And at least four square drli of the city of Korong have been burned, melted, vaporized with the marketplace as the focal point for the destruction.”
    “How many killed?” demanded Grimes.
    Lennay shrugged again. “Only seventeen—in exact retaliation for the number of Shaara killed. There were none of our people among them.”
    “Wasn’t that fortunate?” said Grimes.
    “You have a saying,” Lennay told him. “You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
    It was Grimes’ turn to shrug. He realized that a sarong is not a suitable garment in which to perform such a gesture. But it did not matter. The god Samz would go clothed or unclothed as he saw fit. He resumed his study of the map, jabbed the symbol for Blit with the points of his dividers.
    “Copper mines . . .” he murmured. “Smelters, presumably.”
    “Yes, Captain Grimes.”
    “And the copper from Blit goes where?”
    “Some to the householdware factory in Korong. Some to Plirrit, to the arsenal. Some to be transshipped to barges to Plirrit for passage to the coast, to Blargo, for export.”
    “Mphm.” Grimes traced the course of the Kahar River with his dividers. At one point it was less than a drli from the field in which Baroom and Little Sister had landed.
    He asked, “Do you have people in Blit?”
    “Yes.”
    “In the railway service? But you must have. Those rail cars. The river steamer and barge crews?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m thinking out loud,” said Grimes slowly. “Don’t hesitate to shove your oar in, Mr. Lennay, if I’m getting too far off the beam . . .”
    “Please?”
    “Interrupt me if what I’m saying doesn’t seem to make sense. What I have in mind is a consignment of copper ingots—it comes in ingots, doesn’t it?—from Blit. It will be a normal shipment, up to a point. Korong will get their full quota. So will Plirrit. But the trucks that should be full of transshipment copper won’t have any copper, although they’ll have a full load. Us.”
    “I begin to understand, Captain Grimes. Our forces will proceed down the Kahar River in the copper barges, will be disembarked at the closest point to the Shaara ships and then attack. But what can we do with our puny weapons against what is no less than a flying battleship?”
    “Precious little,” admitted Grimes. “But I do