“The headman witch doctor hankers to chew the rag with the rest of the sky pilots.”
“You want Circuit A?”
“Most bodaciously.”
There was a brief pause, then Thomas answered. “O. K., Chief, you’ve got it. I’ll stay cut in to interpret it probably won’t be necessary, since the boys have practiced this kind of double talk. Go ahead you’ve got five minutes, if they are to surrender on time.”
Any cipher can be broken, any code can be compromised. But the most exact academic knowledge of a language gives no clue to its slang, its colloquial allusions, its half statements, over statements, and inverted meanings. Ardmore felt logically certain that the PanAsians had planted a microphone in his cell. Very well, since they were bound to listen to his end of the conversation, let them be confused and baled by it, uncertain whether he spoke in gibberish to his god, or had possibly lost his mind.
“Look, cherubs — mamma wants baby to go to the nice man. It’s all hunkydory as long as baby-bunting carries his nice new rattle. Yea, verily, rattle is the watchword — you don’t and they do. Deal this cold deck the way it’s stacked and the chopstick laddies are stonkered and discombobulated. The stiff upper lip does it.”
“Check me if I’m wrong, Chief. You want the priests to give themselves up, and to rattle the PanAsians by their apparent unconcern. You want them to carry it off the way you did, cool as a cucumber, and bold as brass. I also take it that you want them to hang on to their staffs, but not to use them unless you tell them to. Is that right?”
“Elementary, my dear Watson!”
“What happens after that?”
“No thirty.”
“What’s that? Oh, ‘No thirty’ — more to come on this story; you’ll tell us later. All right, Chief — it’s time!”
“Okey-dokey!”
Ardmore waited until he was reasonably certain that all the PanAsians not immediately concerned with guarding the prisoners would be asleep, or at least in their quarters. What he proposed to do would be effective fully only in the event that no one knew just what had happened. The chances were better at night.
He called Thomas by whistling a couple of bars of “Anchors Aweigh.” He responded at once — he had not gone off duty, but had remained at the pararadio, giving the prisoners an occasional fight talk and playing records of martial music. “Yes, Chief?”
“The time has come to take a powder. Allee-allee out’s in free!”
“Jailbreak?”
“In the manner of the proverbial Arab — the exact manner.”
They had discussed this technique before; Thomas gave itemized instructions and then said, “Say when, Chief. ”
“When!”
He could almost see Thomas nod. “Right — oh! O. K., troops, get going!”
Ardmore stood up and stretched his cramped limbs. He walked over to one wall of his prison and stood so that the single light cast a shadow on the wall. That would be about right there! He set the controls of his staff for maximum range in the primary Ledbetter effect, checked to see that the frequency band covered the Mongolian race, and adjusted it to stun rather than kill. Then he turned on power.
A few moments later he turned it off, and again regarded his shadow on the wall. This required an entirely different setting, directional and with fine discrimination. He turned on the red ray of Dis to guide him in his work, completed his set-up, and again turned on power.
Quietly and without fuss, atoms of metal rearranged themselves and appeared as nitrogen, to mix harmlessly with the air. Where there had been a solid wall was now an opening the size and shape of ,a tall man dressed in priestly robes. He looked at it, and, as an after thought, he meticulously traced an ellipse over the head of the representation, an ellipse the size and shape of his halo. That done, he reset the controls of his staff to that he had used before, turned on power, and stepped through the opening. It was a close fit; he had to wriggle through sideways.
Outside it was necessary to step over the piled-up bodies of a dozen or more PanAsian soldiers. This was not the side of the welded-up entrance; he guessed that he would have found guards outside each and any of the four walls, probably floor and ceiling as well.