Part 7

1

The first trouble came from Terl. He had a hangover after his solo binge, and he had been irritated close to anger at the comings and goings and delays.

At first light, Jonnie began to load them as they arrived singly and in groups from their errands to their homes. The people in the meadow had not left but had slept on the ground around fires—no one was going to miss the departure. More Scots, having missed the gathering of the clans due to distance or infirmity, had come in, and the number had doubled.

Jonnie began showing them how to tie down their gear in the military supply locks of the personnel freighter, and how to fasten themselves into the seats, two to a seat, and adjust the belts. He had gotten about six fully settled when two of them promptly got out of their seats again and started showing newcomers where to stow their gear and how to handle the belts.

Some apologized for seeming to bring so little but times had been hard, they said. It was no longer safe to raid in the lowlands. Some thought perhaps they were bringing too much, but one never knew, did one?

Some were a bit late and streamed in in a breathless rush, the historian worriedly checking off their names.

The old women came in a clatter of kettles. The parson arrived rolling a keg—in case someone became ill. Jonnie strapped it down tightly, curious: he had never seen whiskey before.

The sun was getting higher. Terl roared from the cab, “Get these filthy animals loaded!” People became very quiet; Jonnie winked at them and they relaxed and got loading going once more.

Finally, they were all there. All eighty-three of them.

Jonnie said: “This flight will take several hours. We will go very high. It will be very cold and the air will be thin. Endure it somehow. If you feel lightheaded it will be from lack of air, so make an effort to breathe more often. Keep yourselves tightly strapped in. This plane can turn in all directions and even upside down. I am now going to the forward cab to help fly this thing. Remember that one day soon many of you will also be able to fly machines, so observe things closely. Robert the Fox is in charge here. Questions?”

There wasn’t one. He had made them more confident in their new environment. They seemed cheerful, not afraid.

“Take it up, MacTyler!” said Robert the Fox.

Jonnie waved at the crowd out of the side door and they roared back. He slammed and locked the door.

He settled himself in the copilot seat, wound the security belt around himself twice, put on his air mask, and got out the map. Terl was looking sourly at the crowd.

With vicious sudden gestures, Terl recompressed the cab with breathe-gas and ripped off his mask. And Jonnie saw his amber eyes were shot with green. Terl had been going heavy on the kerbango. There was an evil twist to his mouthbones.

He was rumbling something about “late” and “having no leverage on these blasted animals” and “teach a lesson.”

Jonnie stiffened in alarm.

The plane vaulted skyward at a speed enough to crush him into his seat. It was at three thousand feet in the wink of an eye. Jonnie’s map and hands were pressed painfully downward into the copilot control panel.

Terl’s talons snapped at some more buttons. The ship started over on its side.

“What are you doing?” shouted Jonnie.

“I’m going to set an example!” roared Terl. “We’ve got to show them what will happen if they disobey.”

The thick mob in the meadow was a small dot below them as the plane turned downward. Suddenly Jonnie knew that Terl was going to blast them.

The ground came screaming up, the crowd getting large.

“No!” screamed Jonnie.

Terl’s talons were reaching out for the fire buttons.

Jonnie heaved the map.

Open, it pinned itself against Terl’s face, cutting off his vision.

The ground was coming up with speed.

Jonnie hit his own controls with staccato fingers.

Two hundred feet up, the plane abruptly changed course to level. Its inertia sucked it down to only yards above the crowd’s heads.

Like a javelin it shot forward.

Ahead of them, the trees leaping larger, was the mountainside.

Jonnie’s fingers stabbed keys.

Branches hit the underbody. The plane rocketed up the mountainside only feet from the ground.

It shot into the clear as they passed the mountain crest. Jonnie leveled it and stabbed it at the distant beaches.

He reversed the tape that had taken them on the incoming voyage and fed it into the autopilot.

The sea sped by only yards below them. They were in the clear, undetectable by any minesite observation post, heading for home.

Jonnie, bathed in sweat, sat back.

He looked at Terl. The monster had gotten the map off his face. Flames were flickering in his green-shot eyes.

“You almost killed us,” said Terl.

“You would have spoiled everything,” said Jonnie.

“I’ve got no leverage on these animals,” snapped Terl. He looked over his shoulder to beyond the cab rear wall. “How,” he added with nasty sarcasm, “do you intend to keep them obedient? With little baby toys?”

“They’ve been obedient enough so far, haven’t they?” said Jonnie.

“You ruined this whole trip for me,” said Terl. He relapsed into moody silence. At length, he rubbed at his aching head and fumbled around for his kerbango. He brought up an empty container and threw it down. Jonnie clipped it into a rack so it wouldn’t go adrift. Terl found another one under the seat. He chewed off a slug of it and sat there gloomily.

“Why,” asked Terl, at length, “were they cheering yesterday?”

“I told them the end of the project would see them highly paid,” said Jonnie.

Terl thought that over. Then, “They were cheering because of pay?”

“More or less,” said Jonnie.

Terl was suspicious. “You didn’t promise any gold, did you?”

“No, they don’t know anything about gold. Their currency is horses and such things.”

“High pay, eh?” said Terl. He was suddenly very jovial. The kerbango was taking effect. He had just had a wonderful thought. High pay. He knew exactly the pay they would get. Exactly. At the muzzle end of a blast gun. He cheered up enormously.

“You fly this thing pretty good, rat brain, when you’re not trying to kill everybody.” This struck Terl as very, very funny and he laughed from time to time all the way home. But that was not what pleased him. How stupid these animals were! High pay, indeed. No wonder they’d lost the planet! He had his leverage. He’d never heard such enthusiasm!

2

Forty-eight hours after their arrival at the “defense base,” Jonnie was very glad he had Robert the Fox along. He had to handle a threatened war.

Two of the young men, amid all the flurry of settling in, had yet found time to discover the remains of a weapons cargo. A truck, in the last days of man’s civilization, had apparently run into a road cutbank and a cave-in had covered it. There it had remained for more than a thousand years until Scot hands uncovered it.

Jonnie had just come in to the base with a group driving wild cattle before them. He had been very busy settling the group in. He had lots of help. No one required much in the way of orders. They had swept out and apportioned off an old dormitory. They had dug latrines. The parson had made the chapel useful. And the old women had found a place that could be protected from deer and cattle and, being near the water, was ideal for a vegetable garden. Jonnie had used a drilling machine to plow it up and the women assured him that now nobody would get scurvy—they had brought seeds, and radishes and lettuce and spring onions would be up in no time in this sunlight and deep soil. The schoolmaster had appropriated the ancient academic building and had a schoolroom set up.

The Scots had proven remarkably ingenious with machinery; they seemed to know what some of these pipes and wires were all about, having heard of them and read of them in their books.

Thus Jonnie was not too startled to find a youth—Angus MacTavish—holding out an ancient piece of metal to him and requesting permission to “make this and the rest of the lot serviceable.” Jonnie had not thought that among all this bustle anyone would have time to dig up an old wrecked man-truck and its contents.

“What is this thing?” said Jonnie.

The youth showed him some stamped letters. The object was covered with what must have been a very thick grease that, down the ages, had become rock-hard but had preserved the object. The letters, which the youth had cleaned off, said “Thompson submachine gun . . .” It had a company name and serial number.

“There’s case on case of them,” said Angus. “A whole truckload. And airtight boxes of ammunition. When the grease comes off these, they might be fired. The truck must have run off the road and gotten buried in the cave-in. May I clean it up and test it, MacTyler?”

Jonnie absently nodded and went on with the cattle. He was thinking about getting over to the base and getting a horse. There were plenty of wild horses but they needed to be broken, and driving in cattle for food on foot was not the safest occupation he knew of. He was also speculating about using one of these small Psychlo trucks to do the job. Food shortage had been a problem for the Scots and there was no reason they could not be very well fed; it would make them even tougher and more able to stand the work ahead.

He was not prepared for the deputation that came to him as he finished supper. A mess hall had been set up, and although the women were cooking outside, eating was being done inside—off broken tables with much eroded cutlery. Robert the Fox was sitting there with him.

Angus MacTavish held out the weapon to him. “It works. We cleaned it and figured out how to load and operate it, and the ammunition will fire.”

Jonnie could see that others in the mess hall were giving them their silent attention.

“There’s lots of these and lots of ammunition,” said Angus MacTavish. “If you climb the hill and look over to the east, off in the distance you can see the Psychlo minesite.” He smiled. “A group could sneak over tonight and blow them to pieces!”

There was an instant cheer from the rest.

Young men from other tables stood up and crowded around.

Jonnie had a horrible vision of slaughtered Scots and blasted plans.

Robert the Fox caught Jonnie’s eye. He seemed to want a nod and Jonnie gave him one. He stood up.

The old veteran was one of the few Scots who had ever seen a Psychlo up close before the freighter had arrived. Raiding for cattle down into the lowlands where cattle now wandered amid ruins, Robert the Fox had once encountered a party of Psychlo hunters from the minesite in Cornwall. The Psychlos had wiped out the other members of the party. But Robert, clinging to the belly of a horse, had been able to flee the carnage unobserved. He was well aware of the power of the Psychlo weaponry and the murderous character they exercised.

“This young man,” said Robert the Fox, pointing to Angus MacTavish who was standing there holding his man–machine gun, “has done very well. It is a credit to be resourceful and brave.” The young man beamed. “But,” continued Robert the Fox, “it is one of the great wisdoms that one best succeeds at what one prepares totally. One minesite destroyed will not end the power of the Psychlos. Our war is against the entire Psychlo empire and for this we must work hard and prepare.” He became conspiratorial, “We must not wipe out just one base and alert them to our intent.”

That did it. The young men thought this was very wise and happily finished their dinner of roasts and steaks.

“Thank you,” said Jonnie to Robert the Fox. The precipitate war was averted for the moment.

A bit later, in the lingering twilight, Jonnie took the older men down to show them the trench.

He had begun to realize he had a sort of council. It consisted of Robert the Fox, the parson, the schoolmaster, and the historian.

Jonnie probed about in the grass, looking for iron bits, and at last he uncovered the almost totally eroded frame of a weapon that might have been similar to the Thompson. It was very hard to tell what make it was, but it had been a gun.

Jonnie told his council the history of the spot according to Psychlo records.

They hardly needed to get the point. Such weapons had not stopped the Psychlos.

Then the historian—Doctor MacDermott—looked about curiously. “But where are the remains of the tank?”

“It defeated them,” said Jonnie.

“Now that is very odd,” said the historian. “Not that they were defeated here, but that there’s no rusting remains of any Psychlo battle equipment.”

“This was a defeat,” said Jonnie. “The Psychlos may have suffered damage, maybe not. But they would have taken any damaged equipment from the field.”

“No, no, no,” said the historian. And he told them about a handwritten romance in the university library about a similar battle. It had occurred on a line between two ancient villages known as Dumbarton and Falkirk, at the narrowest point above where England and Scotland had once met, just below the Highlands. “And the remains of Psychlo tanks can be detected there to this very day.”

“That’s true,” said Robert the Fox. “I have seen them.”

The historian said, “No Psychlo has ever come north of that point—not until you, MacTyler, flew in your demon. It is the only reason we can still exist in the Highlands.”

“Tell me more of this romance,” said Jonnie.

“Oh, it is quite badly written,” said the historian. “A curiosity, not literature. It was scribbled by a private in the Queen’s Own Highlanders who escaped north from the battle. A sapper, I think he was. They handle land mines.”

“Land mines?” said the parson. “Mines for ore?”

“No, no,” said the historian. “I think they used the word mine for explosives buried in the earth—when the enemy crossed them, they exploded. The private used the term tactical nuclear weapons. He goes on about how a fragment of a regiment that had been in bunkers escaped the gassing and withdrew north. The captain, I think, had a girl in the Highlands. And they laid a string of mines from Dumbarton to Falkirk. Psychlo tanks in pursuit hit them and these mines exploded. The Psychlos were not out of tanks or troops. They simply withdrew south and they never came back to recover their dead or their equipment. The romance says it was due to the spirit of Drake intervening, for drums could be heard. . . .”

“Wait,” said Jonnie. “Those were nuclear weapons.”

“Whatever those are,” said the parson.

“Uranium,” said Jonnie. “There must still be a band of uranium dust between those two towns.” He explained to them about Psychlo breathe-gas.

“Aye, it fits,” said Robert the Fox.

The historian looked enlightened and drew his shabby old cloak around his shrunken shoulders. “It sounds like the magic ring of fire, or the geometric signs the creatures of the netherworld dare not cross.”

Jonnie looked at the eroded remains of the weapon in his hands and then along the trench. “These poor men didn’t have any uranium, didn’t even really know about Psychlos. They had only these.”

“They died like brave men,” said the parson, removing his cap. The others also removed theirs.

“We just have to be sure,” said Jonnie, “we don’t wind up like them!”

“Aye,” said Robert the Fox.

Jonnie laid the remains of the gun down and they walked back thoughtfully toward the cooking fires. The wail of a piper was soft in the night wind.

3

Terl was working with maps of the mountains. He had the latest recon drone pictures of the lode and he was trying to find any trails or roads that came near this deep gash. It was one awfully difficult operation, and when he thought about the animals undertaking something that would make an experienced Psychlo miner cough, it put spots in front of his eyes. The site was simply not accessible by ground travel.

His newly acquired secretary, Chirk, came in. She was stupid enough not to be any menace and good-looking enough to be decorative. She got drunk with economical speed and had other advantages. Her utility was in blocking off callers and shuffling administration papers back for somebody else to handle. Since he was now in reality the top Psychlo on the planet, he shouldn’t be bothered with trivial details. Overload the already crushed Numph, was his motto.

“The animal is here to see you,” she trilled.

Terl had hastily covered up the maps when her paws touched the door. He scraped them into a top drawer and out of sight. “Send it in.”

Wearing his air mask and clothing of Chinko cloth, Jonnie came in. He had a long list in his hand.

Terl looked at him. Things were working out pretty well. The animal was on his good behavior, despite having no button camera surveillance now. They had an arrangement whereby Jonnie could come over every few days and take care of food for the girls and confer.

Jonnie had suggested a radio link, but Terl had become very cross and adamant. No radio. That was final. The animal could walk his feet off if he wanted to say anything to Terl. Terl knew there were plenty of receivers in the minesite, and radio might tip his paw and blow his security.

“I have a list,” said Jonnie.

“I can see that,” said Terl.

“I want piping and Chinko cloth and the tools to cut and sew it together and some pumps and shovels—”

“Give it to Chirk. Sounds like you’re rebuilding the whole defense base. Typical animal. Why don’t you get busy with machine instruction?”

“I am,” said Jonnie. And it was very true. He had been spending ten hours a day with the youths and schoolmaster.

“I’ll send over Ker,” said Terl.

Jonnie shrugged. Then he indicated the list. “There’s a couple of items here that should be cleared with you. The first is the Chinko instruction machines. There are about six of them in the old Chinko quarters. The equipment controls are all in Psychlo and so are the manuals. I want to take those and all their disks and books.”

“So?” said Terl.

Jonnie nodded. “The other item is flying trucks.”

“You’ve got flying platforms.”

“I think we should have some flying personnel carriers and flying trucks. I’ve been to see Zzt and he has a whole garage floor full of them.”

To Terl’s suspicious mind came the sudden feeling that the animal was looking through the desktop at the maps in the drawer. It was very true that there were no roads to that place. All carrying, he realized, would have to be by air—and it would be difficult flying at that. But a flying truck or a personnel carrier had the same controls as a battle plane and fewer guns. There was a hard rule that no alien race could be trained in battle. Then Terl thought of the inaccessible lode. Well, a mining truck was not a battle plane, that was for sure. Besides, he controlled the planet and he made the rules.

“How many you want?” said Terl, reaching for the list. “Hey! You’ve written twenty! And tri-wheel ground cars . . . three ground cars . . .”

“The order was to train them on equipment, and if I haven’t got the equipment—”

“But twenty!”

Jonnie shrugged. “Maybe they’re hard on equipment.”

Terl barked a sudden laugh as he remembered the animal nearly going over the cliff in the burning blade scraper. It tickled him.

He drew out one of the blanks Numph had signed and punched the animal’s list in above the signature.

“How much time have I got?” asked Jonnie.

Terl was too secretive to come flat out with times. The times actually coincided with the semiannual firing of personnel and dead Psychlos. He calculated rapidly. Nine months total. Maybe three months for training to the next transshipment, and six months for mining to the second in the early spring of next year. Better give it an edge.

“Two months to get them all trained,” said Terl.

“That’s awfully fast.”

Terl took the remote control box out of his pocket and tapped it and put it back. He laughed.

Jonnie frowned, his face mask obscuring the dangerous light that had leaped into his eyes.

He took a tight hold on his temper and voice. “I could use Ker to help ferry this stuff.”

“Tell Chirk.”

“Also,” said Jonnie, “I need some experience operating over those mountains. The updrafts and downdrafts are very strong and in winter they’ll be worse. I don’t want you getting ideas if I fly around up there.”

Terl put his paws protectively on the desktop as though to block a view into the drawer. Then he realized he was getting jumpy. Still, the longer he kept things in the dark, the less chance there was of the animal’s talking to other personnel. He began to weave an elaborate fantasy to explain to others why animals were flying in the mountains.

“You seem to know an awful lot,” he said suddenly.

“Only what you’ve told me,” said Jonnie.

“When?”

“Different times. Over in Scotland.”

Terl stiffened. True, he had been unguarded. Very unguarded if this stupid rat brain had picked it up. . . .

“If I hear just one leak of this real project, through Ker or anybody else”—he tapped the control box in his pocket—“the smaller female is going to have a collar explosion!”

“I know that,” said Jonnie.

“So get out,” said Terl. “I’m far too busy for all this chatter.”

Jonnie had Chirk copy the requisition on a duplicator and asked her to call Ker to help ferry the equipment. “Here you are, animal,” she said when she was through and handed him the copies.

“My name is Jonnie.”

“Mine is Chirk.” She batted her painted eyebones. “You animals are kind of funny and cute. How can you be so much fun to hunt like some of the employees say? You certainly don’t look dangerous. And I don’t think you are even edible. Crazy planet! No wonder poor Terl hates it so. We’re going to have a huge house when we go home next year.”

“A huge house?” said Jonnie, looking up at this rattlebrain in wonder.

“Oh, yes. We’ll be rich! Terl says so. Tah-tah, Jonnie. Bring me a sack of goodies when you want a favor next time.”

“Thank you, I will,” said Jonnie.

He went out with his warehouse-size list to get busy. He knew he had a new piece of the puzzle. Terl would not be here more than a year. Terl was going home and going home “rich.”

4

“I am sorry, gentlemen,” said Jonnie to his council.

They were seated on some bashed-up chairs in what had become Jonnie’s combined quarters and office—a spacious room that overlooked most of the area, chosen because it had whole windows.

Jonnie pointed to the stacks of books. “I have searched through everything I can find and am unable to locate it.”

Robert the Fox, Doctor MacDermott, the parson and the schoolmaster sat glumly looking at him. He never tried to fool them about anything. One thing about MacTyler—he was honest with them.

Things had been going well, too. Almost too well. The young men were progressing marvelously in their ability to handle equipment. There had been only one casualty with the flying trucks—two trainees had been attacking each other’s trucks in the air in simulated combat and one of the young lads had punched a wrong button at the wrong time and hit the ground. He was lying in the infirmary now, leg properly set by the parson and attended by the clucking old widows; the flying truck, according to Ker who came over to fix it, was fit only to be cannibalized.

The three young men who looked like Jonnie had bruised hands from the schoolmaster’s ruler; the schoolmaster kept them at the instruction machines from dawn to noon when they went off to study vehicles; they were learning Psychlo under heavy pressure and doing it very well.

Several young men had caught wild horses and broken them to ride, and they rounded up wild cattle and shot deer so there was no lack of food. Radishes and lettuce brightened their fare, proud trophies of the old women’s garden.

In fact everyone was working like fury and the place looked like an ant hill all day.

“Perhaps,” said Doctor MacDermott, “we could help you look.” He gestured at the books. “If you’d tell us exactly what it is we’re to be locating.”

“It’s uranium,” said Jonnie. “The key to this battle is uranium.”

“Ah, yes,” said Doctor MacDermott. “It isn’t harmful to humans but is deadly to Psychlos.”

“It is harmful to humans,” said Jonnie, pointing to a toxicology text. “Given too much exposure to it some humans die rather frightfully. But it apparently ignites the breathe-gas of Psychlos and makes it explode. It is uniformly fatal to them.

“These mountains,” he continued, sweeping his hand toward the mountains outlined by the sunset behind them, “are supposed to have been full of uranium. I know definitely the Psychlos believe they are. You can’t force a Psychlo up into them.

“The demon Terl is going to send us into those mountains to find, probably, gold. He has undoubtedly spotted some. We may or may not mine the gold. Probably we would have to, to keep going. But we could also mine uranium.”

“And you can’t locate any,” said Doctor MacDermott.

Jonnie shook his head. “There’s even lists of uranium mines. But they’re all marked ‘mined out,’ ‘mine closed,’ that sort of thing.”

“Must have been very valuable,” said Robert the Fox.

“They list a lot of uses for it,” said Jonnie. “Mainly military.”

The parson rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “Would your own village people know anything?”

“No,” said Jonnie. “They’re one of the proofs that there is uranium up there. That’s why I have not taken you gentlemen there, much as I would like to. I’m certain their illnesses and inability to reproduce have a lot to do with uranium.”

“It doesn’t seem to have affected you, MacTyler,” smiled the parson.

“I wandered a lot and was not home much of the time. And some are affected more than others, perhaps.”

“Heredity,” said Doctor MacDermott. “Over the centuries some of you may have developed a resistance or an immunity. They would not know?”

Jonnie shook his head. “I haven’t gone up there because I don’t want to stir them up—the recon drone flies daily. But one day soon I must find a way to move them. And a place to move them to. No, they would know nothing about uranium or they would have long since quit that valley.

“We do have to solve this problem,” he continued. “It is the center of every plan.”

Doctor MacDermott held out his hand. “Deal those books around and we will put aside some of our sleep and help you look.”

Jonnie started handing them books in rotation.

“I think,” said Robert the Fox, “we should send out some scouts. It is basic in the planning of any successful raid that one sends out some scouts first. How do you recognize this uranium?”

“Indicators are there in the mine books,” said Jonnie. “But the main tool we do not have. It’s called a ‘Geiger counter,’ and though I’ve looked it up and have a vague idea of how one is made, the point is we don’t have one.”

“Perhaps,” said the schoolmaster, “there may be one in some of these old villages. Do they have directories for factories?”

“I doubt such an instrument would be worth much after a thousand years,” said Doctor MacDermott. “But I do see there a . . . goodness, but this has almost gone to pieces . . . a telephone? book . . . to ‘Dev . . . Denve . . .’ Telephones,” he added for the others, “used to exist in cities. Here . . . ‘Instruments . . . International Business Machines Research?’ Oh, drat. The address can’t be made out.”

“The writing exists on many buildings there,” said Jonnie.

Robert the Fox leaned forward. “As I say, it takes a scout. Scout before raid is the watchword. We must be very careful that the demons do not suspect us of snooping about.”

“They have body heat detectors,” said Jonnie. “That’s how you escaped them clinging under a horse. They knew horses were running away. But the recon drone takes only pictures, and one should get under cover when he hears the rumble far off. The sound of a ground car, however, means real danger, for they have spinners that fly up in the air and look for heat. I have some covers that we can throw over ourselves to block heat, but we have to be very, very careful. I think it’s best that I go.”

“Na, na,” said Robert the Fox, his accent thickening into dialect from sudden alarm. “We canna ha’ ye dae thet, laddie.”

The rest of the council also shook their heads.

The parson said, “You keep yourself safe, MacTyler. That’s why we’re here—to help you.”

“The small demon . . .” said Jonnie.

“The one that came to fix the flying machine?”

“The same,” said Jonnie. “His name’s Ker. He told me an order had been issued, he said by the Planet Head, to forbid all hunting parties in this whole area and to restrict them all to the mining areas and compound. There was some talk, Ker said, of coming over here for some sport. So there aren’t any demons wandering around and it’s perfectly safe to go up to the Great Village on a scout—so long as we don’t stay in sight of the recon drone.”

“Scouts,” said Robert the Fox firmly, “are not done by chiefs. Raids, perhaps. Scouts, no! We will send young Angus MacTavish. All those in favor?” And Jonnie was firmly voted down.

Thus it was that young Angus MacTavish went scouting to Denver in a small ground car in the dark that night. He was peculiarly adept at operating machinery: he had taken piping and brought the water closer, and he had worked out how the water mains and sewers worked, and he had even gotten a couple of inside toilets working, to the amazement of his friends.

He was gone forty-eight hours and came back with a lot of wonders to report. But the International Business Machines Research Laboratories were in ruins that bore no fruit. There was nothing there even vaguely resembling the Geiger counter that had been described to him. He had also located a “Bureau of Mines,” but it had only decayed records. He discovered a “Prospector’s Outfitter,” and though he had found some stainless steel sample picks that he brought back, and an assortment of stainless steel knives that delighted the old women in their work, there had been no Geiger counter there either.

The council met again and grimly decided to carry on and get ready anyway, and the parson said a prayer that pleaded with the good Lord to have pity on them and lead them somewhere, somehow, to a Geiger counter and uranium.

They also decided to send out more scouts, but without too much hope.

5

Jonnie awoke in the middle of the night to the abrupt realization that he knew where a uranium detector existed. The ore duster at the transshipment area! He had even spent apprentice time on it.

So, despite Robert the Fox’s prohibition against his scouting, Jonnie was on a scout, dangerous or not.

Every few days he saw Chrissie. Each time he did, he made it a habit to ride around the minesite idly just to accustom the Psychlos to his being there. He would sit Windsplitter and wander around.

Today Chrissie and Pattie looked very forlorn. Jonnie had brought fresh meat and more deerskin for them to tan and sew. He had cut plenty of firewood—one of the Scots had unearthed a stainless steel axe from a village ruin, and it made such work remarkably fast. He placed all this outside the wooden barrier to be taken in when Terl was “not busy” and could come out.

It was frustrating to talk through the wooden barrier and the cage bars. Chrissie and Pattie held up some buckskin shirts and breeches for him to admire and then repackaged them for him to take. He called to them that they looked fine. Pattie exhibited a new arrangement for their pitiful shelter—they could fasten nothing to the bars—and he said it looked much better.

What was he doing? they wanted to know. He said he was working. And was he all right? Yes, he was fine. And were things going well? Just fine. Difficult to carry on a conversation across a space of forty feet through two screening barricades and under the surveillance of at least two button cameras. Difficult to be calm and reassuring when what he really wanted to do was blow the place up and get them out of there.

He had a picto-recorder on a strap around his neck. With a couple of buckskin thongs he had steadied it to his chest so that with a slight motion of his hand he could start and stop it without raising it to his eye. He had practiced doing that and had gotten pretty accurate at pointing it without looking through the finder. He requisitioned a dozen of the things and plenty of miniature disks. As he talked he took pictures of the girls and the cage from several angles, pictures of the switch box and wires. It was a risk, he knew.

He told Chrissie and Pattie he would be back and rode casually to a high point above the Chinko quarters. Seemingly idle, he took broad panoramas, both wide-angle and telephoto, of the minesite. He took pictures of the twenty battle planes lined up in the field, the distant cartridge fuel dump, and, beyond that, the breathe-gas storage dump. He took pictures of the morgue a hundred yards beyond the transshipment area. And he covered the freighter landing area and ramps and conveyor belt and control tower.

Then luck! He saw a freighter on its way in with a load of ore. He idled down off the knoll. As he passed the cage, he felt a sudden need for cautiousness. He dismounted and slipped the disks he had already taken into the waiting pack, making it appear that he was just putting in some flowers.

Remounted, he wandered on down to the ore-dusting area. He let Windsplitter pause near tasty clumps of grass and at last came to the dust-coated area of transshipment.

The freighter had not unloaded yet. Employees were coming out and getting onto their machines. He rode up to the ore-dusting machine. The operator was not there. A hook was swinging from a crane and he pretended to duck it. But in actual fact he leaned over and pulled out a wire from the back of the machine’s controls. He did not know its circuit, but with luck he would very soon.

The operator knew him slightly from his apprentice days but glanced at him with normal Psychlo disdain. “You better get that horse out of here! Ore coming in.”

Jonnie backed Windsplitter off.

The freighter discharged with a dusty roar. The blade machines raced about neatening up the pile. The first load was ready for the buckets on the conveyor belt.

A red light flared.

A horn went off.

The ore duster operator cursed and banged at his controls.

All activity stopped.

The air around the operator’s dome and mask might well have turned blue from his cursing.

Char came rumbling like a tank out of the dome of the transshipment control office, shouting as he came.

Far off was the faint moan of another freighter coming in from an overseas minesite.

It was not a transshipment firing day, but schedules were about to ball up on freighter discharge.

Char was shouting for electronics repair, and somebody in the dome, on the loudspeaker system, was demanding to know where the duty electronics was.

Jonnie could have told them where duty electronics was. He’d seen the employee walking toward the compound fifteen minutes ago.

Char was raving at the operator on the ore duster. The operator was hammering paws on the control panel.

Jonnie slid off his horse and went to them. “I can fix it.”

With a roar that had concussion in it, Char told him to get the ——— ——— ——— out of there!

“No, I can fix it,” said Jonnie.

A voice coming closer said, “Let him fix it. I trained him.” It was Ker.

Char was distracted by the new interruption. He whirled to storm abuse at the midget Psychlo.

Picto-recorder running, Jonnie slid up to the front of the ore duster control panel. He snapped it open. He stood at right angles to the layout of components and pretended to study it. Then he reached in and touched a couple of points, doing nothing to them. Given pictures of this, he could build it!

He closed the box.

He rapidly connected the wire he had earlier loosened.

Char turned back to him after chomping on Ker.

“It’s fixed,” said Jonnie. “It was just a loose wire.”

Ker yelled to the operator, “Try it now!”

The operator did and the ore duster purred.

“See?” said Ker. “I trained him myself.”

Jonnie got back on Windsplitter, using the motion to turn off his picto-recorder.

“It’s working now,” said the operator.

Char looked venom at Jonnie. “You keep that horse out of this area. If this was a firing time he’d land in Psychlo!” He went off muttering something about damned animals.

The conveyor belt and buckets and machines were roaring away again, making haste to clear the load before the new freighter came in. The old one took off.

Windsplitter wandered down toward the morgue. This building, remarkable for its refrigerator coils, stood well back. Jonnie turned and looked from it back at the compound. It was a straight course from here, across the transshipment platform and up the hill to the cage.

“And what,” said a voice, “are you doing down here with a picto-recorder?”

It was Terl. He had stepped out of the morgue and had a list in his hand. In the dark reaches of the building, coffins were stacked. Terl had been checking Psychlo corpses scheduled for return home at the semiannual firing.

“Practicing,” answered Jonnie.

“For what?” growled Terl.

“Sooner or later you’ll want me to take pictures for you up in the—”

“Don’t talk about that around here!”

Terl tossed his list back of him toward the morgue and stepped close to Jonnie. He yanked the picto-recorder off Jonnie’s chest, snapping the holding straps. The thongs bit into Jonnie’s back as they resisted just before they gave.

Turning the machine over, Terl snapped the disk out of it, threw it in the dust, and stamped on it with his boot heel.

He poked sharp talons into Jonnie’s belt and flipped out four more disks.

“They’re just blanks,” said Jonnie.

Terl threw those into the dust and ground them under a heavy toe.

He shoved the picto-recorder back at Jonnie. “It’s a company rule not to record a transshipment area.”

“When you want me to take pictures,” said Jonnie, “I hope you’ll be able to make them out.”

“I better be able to,” snarled Terl illogically and stamped back into the morgue.

Later, when Jonnie was let in to take Chrissie supplies, he had no trouble slipping the earlier disks from his incoming pack to Chrissie’s outgoing pack.

But they weren’t the circuit diagrams that would detect uranium.

Out of plain revenge that night he showed his whole crew the earlier pictures he had taken. He showed them all the locations of the whole transshipment area. He would have to do it again later when proper plans were formed. But for now he wanted to show them pictures of Chrissie and Pattie.

The shots showed the girls, showed the collars, showed the switch box to the bars. But mainly it showed their faces, the faces of a little girl and a beautiful woman.

The Scots watched the pictures, attentive to the geography of the transshipment area, the battle planes, the breathe-gas dump, the fuel dump, the morgue and the platform. But when they saw the pictures of Chrissie and Pattie they began with pity and ended with rage.

Robert the Fox had to speak again to prevent them from tearing over right then and ripping the place to pieces. The pipers played a mournful lament.

If the Scots had been enthusiastic before, they were deadly determined and angry now.

But Jonnie lay unable to sleep that night. He had had it right in the camera—the circuit of a uranium detector. He had not memorized it. He had counted upon getting the pictures. He blamed himself for depending on machines. Machines were all right but they did not replace man.

There would come a day of reckoning with Terl. He vowed it bitterly.

6

In the clear, cold noon they were on their way for a first look at the lode. Jonnie, Robert the Fox, the three who looked similar to Jonnie, and the two Scot mining shift leaders who had been appointed sped along in the small personnel carrier, high above the grandeur of the Rockies.

Terl had come early that morning, threatening and secretive. His ground car had been spotted some time since by a posted sentry and Jonnie had been warned.

Wrapped in a puma skin against the dawn chill, Jonnie met the ground car as it stopped. Breakfast was just over in the mess hall and a warning had been sent to stay inside. The grounds were nearly deserted and there was nothing to distract Terl’s attention.

He got out, tightening his breathe-mask, and stood there tossing the remote control box idly into the air and catching it in his paw.

“Why,” said Terl, “are you interested in a uranium detector?”

Jonnie frowned and looked mystified—or tried to.

“I heard after you left the other day that you ‘repaired’ the ore duster. With a picto-recorder around your neck? Ha!”

Jonnie decided on a sudden verbal attack. “You expect me to go up into those mountains without knowing what to avoid? You expect me to go tearing around getting myself wrecked—”

“Wrecked?”

“Physically wrecked from uranium contamination—”

“See here, animal, you can’t talk this way to me!”

“—when you know very well that I could be made sick if I didn’t avoid uranium dust! You’ve told me there’s uranium up there! And you expect me—!”

“Wait a minute,” said Terl. “What are you talking about?”

“Mining toxicology!” snapped Jonnie.

The kilted sentry who had called him was standing by the mess hall door, looking daggers and dirks at Terl.

“Sentry!” shouted Jonnie. “Grab a book, any book in English, and bring it here! Fast!”

Jonnie turned back to Terl. The running footsteps of the sentry could be heard inside the building. Terl put the control box back in his pocket so his gun paw could be free just in case.

The sentry rushed out with an ancient volume labeled The Poems of Robert Burns. He had snatched it from the parson who was reading at breakfast. It would have to do.

Jonnie snapped it open. He put his finger on a line that said “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie . . .”

“See there!” he demanded of Terl. “In the presence of uranium, a man’s hair falls out, his teeth fall out, his skin develops red blotches and his bones crumble! And it happens in just a few weeks of exposure.”

“You don’t explode?” said Terl.

“It doesn’t say anything here about explosion, but it says that continuous exposure to uranium dust can be fatal! Read it yourself!”

Terl looked at a line that said something about “O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” and said, “So it does. I didn’t know that.”

“You know it now,” said Jonnie. He closed and thumped the book. “I found this by accident. You didn’t tell me. Now are you going to let me have a detector or aren’t you?”

Terl looked thoughtful. “So your bones turn to dust, do they? And it takes a few months?”

“Weeks,” said Jonnie.

Terl began to laugh. His paw dropped from his belt gun and he swatted himself in the chest, catching his breath. “Well,” he said at length, “I guess you’ll just have to take your chances, won’t you?”

It hadn’t worked. But Terl was totally off the scent now. Actually feeling more secure.

“That wasn’t what I came over here for, anyway,” said Terl. “Can we go some place less public?”

Jonnie handed the book back to the sentry with a wink to reassure him. The Scot had enough sense not to grin. But Terl was rummaging around the ground car.

He beckoned Jonnie to follow and took him back of the chapel where there were no windows. He had a big roll of maps and photos and he sat down on the ground. He motioned for Jonnie to hunker down.

“Your animals are all trained?” said Terl.

“As well as can be expected.”

“Well, notice you’ve had a couple extra weeks.”

“They’ll do.”

“All right, now. We have come to the time to be real miners!” He rolled out the map. It was a patch-up of sectional running shots from a recon drone, and it condensed about two thousand square miles of the Rocky Mountains from Denver to the west. “You can read one of these?”

“Yes,” said Jonnie.

Terl snapped the head of a canyon with his talon. “It’s there.” Jonnie could almost feel the surge of greed in Terl. His voice was a conspiratorial mutter. “It’s a lode of white quartz with streamers of pure gold in it. It’s a freak. Exposed by a landslide in recent years.” And he took a large photograph out of the pack.

There it was, a diagonal slash of white in the red side of a canyon. Terl took a closer shot and showed it. Fingers of pure gold could be seen threading through the quartz.

Jonnie would have spoken but Terl held up his paw to stop him. “You fly over and take a close look at it. When you’ve seen it and gotten it oriented as a mining problem, you come back and see me and I will clarify any questions as to procedure.” He tapped the location on the larger map. “Memorize that spot.” Jonnie noted that the map bore no markings. Clever Terl. No clues if the map went adrift.

He sat there and let Jonnie study the map.

Jonnie knew these mountains, but he had never had a detailed picture of them from this angle: above.

Terl put all his papers away except the map. “Hold on to that.” He stood up.

“How long do we have to get it out?” said Jonnie.

“Day 91 of the coming year. That’s six and a half months away.”

“That’s also winter,” said Jonnie.

Terl shrugged. “It’s always winter up there. Ten months of winter and two months of fall.” He laughed. “Fly over and look at it, animal. Take a week or two to study it out. And then come over and we’ll have a private meeting. And this is confidential, do you hear? Outside of your animals, say nothing.”

Terl had gone off playing catch with the control box. His ground car roared away back to the compound.

A couple of hours later Jonnie’s party was flying high above the Rockies.

“That’s the first time,” said one of the Scots behind Jonnie, “that I knew Robbie Burns was toxic.”

Jonnie turned. He thought the sentry must have gotten aboard. “You speak Psychlo that well?”

“Of course,” said the Scot and showed the ruler bruises on the back of his hand. He was one of the lads chosen because of his resemblance to Jonnie. “I was putting an ear to a window on the second floor above you. He can’t understand English, can he?”

“One of our very few advantages,” said Jonnie. “I didn’t get the uranium detector.”

“Well,” said Robert the Fox, “it’s a very optimistic man that thinks he can win all the battles. What are all those villages down there?”

It was true. There were old towns here and there throughout this section of the mountains.

“They’re deserted,” said Jonnie. “I’ve been to some of them. No population but rats. Mining ghost towns.”

“’Tis a sad thing,” said Robert the Fox. “All this space and all kinds of food and no people. And over in Scotland there’s little space that will grow anything and hardly any food at all. It’s a dark chapter in history we’ve been through.”

“We’ll change it,” said a young Scot behind him.

“Aye,” said Robert the Fox. “If we have any luck. All this great broad world full of food and no people! What are the names of those grand peaks down there?”

“I don’t know,” said Jonnie. “If you look on the mine map you’ll see they just give them numbers. I think they had names once but people forgot. That one over there we just call ‘Highpeak.’”

“Hey!” said a young Scot. “There’s sheep down on that mountainside!” He was using a hand telescope.

“They’re called bighorns,” said Jonnie. “It’s quite a feat to hunt one down. They can stand on a ledge not bigger than your hand and sail off and land on another one not wider than two fingers.”

“And there’s a bear!” said the Scot. “What a big one!”

“The bears will go into hibernation soon,” said Jonnie. “I’m surprised one is out at this altitude.”

“Some wolves are following him,” said the Scot.

“Laddies,” said Robert the Fox, “we are hunting bigger game! Keep your eye out for the canyon.”

Jonnie spotted it shortly before one o’clock.

7

It was a startling sight. The grandeur of the scene in this thin, cold air made one feel small.

Out of a river, a thin, silver thread in the depths far below, reared a reddish, massive wall of rock rising sheer and raw. Narrowly across from it was its echoing face. Down through the eons, the river, finding a softer strata between the two faces, had gnawed its turbulent way to make at last this gigantic knife slice in the all but impregnable stone. A thousand feet deep, a hundred yards wide, the enormous wound gaped.

All around it rose majestic peaks, hiding it from the world.

The sparkling white line of quartz, many feet thick, marked it with a brief, diagonal line. And in that quartz, imbedded and pure, gold shone and beckoned.

It had in its reality a much greater impact than any photograph. It was like a jewel band set upon the wrinkled skin of a hag.

One could see far below where a portion of the cliff face had fallen; the fragments lay like crashed pebbles in the depths. The river had eaten too deep under the cliff and an earthquake had shaken a slice of the face loose.

Snow had not fallen yet, for the year was dry, and there was nothing to impede the view. Jonnie dropped the plane lower.

And then the wind hit them.

Funneled up the long gorge, compressed and screaming to get free, the turbulent currents tore at the cliff.

With fingers racing across the overlarge keys of the console, Jonnie fought to keep the light personnel plane in position.

It was not a dazzling lode at that moment. It was a brutal, elemental wall that could crush them if they touched it.

Jonnie leaped the plane a thousand feet up, clear of the updrafts, and steadied it. He turned to one of the Scots, the one who looked like him and who had spoken of Burns. His name was Dunneldeen MacSwanson. “Can you handle this plane?”

Dunneldeen came forward. Robert the Fox went to a rear seat and strapped himself into the copilot seat.

In these teleportation drives, there were a number of corrections that had to be constantly watched. Some were built in to the computers; some were preprogrammed for any flight. Space itself was absolute and motionless, having no time, energy, or mass of its own. But to stay in one place relative to the mass around one, it was necessary to parallel the track of such mass. The world turned daily, and that was a near thousand-mile-an-hour correction. Earth orbited the Sun and that required second-to-second correction. The solar system was precessing, and even if the correction was minute, it had to be compensated for. The whole solar system was en route to somewhere else at a blinding speed. The universe itself was twisting in relation to other universes. These factors and others made control of the ship a dicey business in normal times. Down there in that canyon it was a nightmare.

The irregular external buffetings of the wind upset the inertia of the motor housing and made instant shifts of coordination continual.

Dunneldeen had been schooled and trained in all this. But he had seen Jonnie’s fingers flying over that console and knew it was no routine flight. In the first place the Psychlo keys allowed for wide talons and wider paws, and it required a snapping tension in the wrists to compensate for these spacings with human hands.

Dunneldeen looked down at the canyon top. “It is no ‘roam in the gloamin’,’” he said. “But I can try!” He started down.

Jonnie unwrapped his seat belt and had them pass a small contrivance called a core gun to him. By firing a small rotating borer, the gun would take a one-inch diameter chunk out of a rock face, the length of the core varying by how long one let the borer stay there before hauling it back on a line. With it one obtained a cylindrical sample of a vein or rock.

“Start taking pictures,” he yelled at the rest of them. They had three picto-recorders aboard, an instrument that measured depth below surfaces, and one that measured densities while drawing a pattern. The instruments were “light” Psychlo prospecting tools, but being Psychlo, they required a lot of muscle.

The Scots took the equipment and began individually operating through the slots in the side of the fuselage.

Jonnie lowered his own port and readied the core gun. “Take us in as close to the vein as you can get without risking us.”

“Aye!” said Dunneldeen. “There’s the rub. Ready? Down we go!”

They shot back into the chasm. Jonnie could hear Dunneldeen’s fingers on the console keys: they sounded like a miniature of that Thompson. Then the sound was blotted out by the shrieking howl of the canyon wind.

They swerved. The wall came within inches and swept back to yards. It danced up and down. The scream of the motors began to match the wind as they raced to correct positions.

Jonnie forced himself to concentrate. He wanted a core on the first shot, for it took time to rewind. The sparkling lode danced and leaped in his sights. He pressed the trigger. With a bark and sizzle of paying out line, the corer hit the lode.

Dead on!

He triggered the rotator. The line whipped up and down in the wind.

The plane suddenly slid sideways in a sickening swoop and almost hit the opposite wall. The core came out and dangled below the ship. Jonnie reeled the looping, twisting line in.

“Take her up!” he shouted.

Dunneldeen vaulted the ship up two thousand feet to quieter air. He sat there, limp, his arms and wrists aching, sweat heavy on his forehead. “Ooo, mon! ’Tis like danc’n’ wi’ the devil’s wife!” he panted, relapsing to dialect.

“Did you get your readings and pictures?” Jonnie called over his shoulder.

The instrument men had gotten their depths and densities. But those operating the picto-recorders, struck by the awesome scene and seeing much more of it to take, said no, they wanted another crack at it.

“I’ll take her,” said Jonnie.

“The devil’s wife?” said Dunneldeen. “Na, MacTyler. I have a feeling I’ll be dancing this dance again some other day. I’ll keep her, thank you.” He yelled back over his shoulder: “What do you want?”

They wanted the slide debris at the canyon bottom.

“I hope you all made your peace with the parson before we left,” said Dunneldeen. “Here we go!”

They plummeted to the bottom of the gorge and made a pass. The boiling white froth of the river fanged at the fallen fragments. They were mainly underwater.

The plane fought back up the narrow gorge slowly so the picture takers could track it on both sides. Dunneldeen’s hands were a blur on the controls. The bucking ship screamed as its motors over-revved.

“Something is getting hot,” called Robert the Fox. And it had become warm in the cabin despite the altitude. It was the motor housings, overworked in compensating for the lunging and changing inertia of the ship.

They drew opposite the top of the cliff. Jonnie looked at it while the picto-recorders were busy.

There was no flat surface there where one could set down a ship. There was no space where one could operate a lowered drilling platform. It was all pinnacles and clefts.

Jonnie saw something else and called for vertical shots down the cliff face. The cliff was not vertical. It fell away inward. Anything lowered from above would hang fifteen to twenty feet away from the face of the cliff. How could one hope to rig ore nets?

They went directly above it and Jonnie saw something else. “Shoot more verticals of that top!” he called.

Yes, he saw it plainly now. There was a crack inset about thirty feet from the top edge of the cliff, parallel to it. Another such crack had caused the fall of rock that bared the lode. But here was a second one. Just waiting for another earthquake. The whole lode would pitch into the gorge.

They went up two thousand feet and the picto-recorder operators had to be content with general scenery. It was impressive enough in its gigantic beauty.

“By your leave, MacTyler,” said Dunneldeen, “if it’s home we’re going now, I’ll exchange with Thor.”

Jonnie nodded, and a near-duplicate of him, who was nicknamed Thor due to his Swedish background, slid over the seat top, matched his motions to Dunneldeen’s, and took over. Dunneldeen dragged himself back to the rear. “It’s a reel a bit fast for the piper,” he said. “Are we going to have to operate in that?”

The core in Jonnie’s hand was part white quartz and part gold. It was a very pretty thing. This was a lure that had wooed Terl, that had given them their chance. He wondered how many lives it would take.

“Head for home,” he told Thor.

They were very quiet on the way back.

8

Jonnie was very edgy as he walked Windsplitter around the minesite as casually as he could. What he was doing was dangerous, but one could not have told it from the easy way he sat his horse. It was a semiannual firing day and the personnel at the minesite were hurried, snappish, and preoccupied.

Jonnie had a picto-recorder hidden in a tree that overlooked the site and he had a remote control hidden in his pouch. He had gotten a long-play disk into the recorder, but that would not permit it to run for hours untended. He had to get all the data he could. Robert the Fox would not have approved, for this was a scout pure and simple. And if Terl spotted the picto-recorder or detected the remote, there could be repercussions.

Jonnie had delayed reporting to Terl, taking advantage of the “week or so” order. He had heard by accident of this semiannual firing from Ker the chatterer.

Ker had come over at Jonnie’s request to inspect the personnel carrier motor. Jonnie needed the data. If it was faulty that was one thing, but if it was only underpowered for the job at the lode, that was another.

So Ker had come to the base, growling a bit about it: he was an operations officer, not a mechanic. But Terl had sent him.

The midget Psychlo’s temper was sweetened, however, by Jonnie’s handing him a small gold ring a scout had found on the “finger” of a corpse long gone to dust.

“Why give me this?” said Ker, suspiciously.

“Souvenir,” said Jonnie. “Not very valuable.”

It was valuable. It was a month’s pay.

Ker dented it slightly with a fang. Pure gold.

“You want something, don’t you,” Ker decided.

“No,” said Jonnie. “I’ve got two so I gave you one. We’ve been shaftmates quite a while now.” This was a Psychlo mining term for a pal who pulled one out of a cave-in or a fight.

“We have, haven’t we,” said Ker.

“Besides, I might want somebody killed,” Jonnie added.

This sent Ker off into a gale of laughter. He appreciated a good joke. He put the ring in his pocket and got busy on the motor.

Half an hour later he came over to where Jonnie lolled in the shade. “Nothing wrong with that motor. If it got hot, it was just being overdriven. You want to watch it, though. You keep running one that hard and it will go up in smoke.”

Jonnie thanked him. Ker hunkered down in the building’s shade. They talked, mostly Ker chattering. Ker got on the subject of being pushed by schedules and Jonnie eased in casually with his question. “What happens on Day 91 of the new year?”

“Where’d you get that?”

“Saw it posted at the minesite.”

Ker scratched his greasy neck fur. “You must have read wrong. It would be Day 92. That’s a semiannual firing date. One’s happening in just seven days, you know. What a lot of bother.”

“Something different about it?”

“Aw, you must have seen a couple when you were in the cage down there. You know, semiannual firing.”

Jonnie may have seen it, but at that time he didn’t know what he was looking at. He put on a stupid look.

“It’s a slow firing,” said Ker. “No ore. Personnel incoming and outgoing. Including the dead ones.”

“Dead ones?”

“Yeah, we’re shipping dead Psychlos home. They want them accounted for because of pay and they don’t want them looked into by aliens, I guess. Nutty company rules. Lot of trouble. They put them in coffins and hold them down in the morgue and then . . . crap, Jonnie. You’ve seen the morgue. Why am I telling you?”

“Better than working,” said Jonnie.

Ker barked a laugh. “Yep, that’s true. Anyway, a slow firing means a three-minute buildup and then zip. On a semiannual day, the home planet sends in the personnel and then they hold a tension between here and home planet, and a couple of hours later we fire off returning personnel and dead bodies.

“You know,” he continued, “you don’t want to fool around on ordinary transshipments. I see you around on that horse sometimes. Ordinary firing is all right for dispatches and ore, but a live body would get ripped up in the transition. You’d come apart. On a slow firing the bodies come through great, live or dead. If you’re trying to get to Psychlo, Jonnie, don’t do it with the ore!” He laughed and thought it very funny. A human, breathing air and built for light gravity, wouldn’t live two minutes on Psychlo.

Jonnie laughed with him. He had no intention of ever going to Psychlo. “They really bury those dead bodies on Psychlo?”

“Sure enough. Names, markers and everything. It’s in the employee contract. Of course the cemetery is way out of town in an old slag heap, and nobody ever goes there. But it’s in the contract. Silly, ain’t it?”

Jonnie agreed it was.

Ker left in very good spirits. “Remember to tell me who you want killed.” And he went into howls of laughter and drove off in his old truck.

Jonnie looked up to the window above him where Robert the Fox had been running a recorder out of sight. “Turn it off.”

“Off,” said Robert the Fox, leaning out and looking down at Jonnie.

“I think I know how Terl is going to ship the gold to Psychlo. In coffins!”

Robert the Fox nodded. “Aye, it all fits. He’ll load them here, and then most likely when he goes home he will just dig them up some dark Psychlo night with nobody the wiser. What a ghoul!”

And so Jonnie, sitting Windsplitter at the firing site, was making very sure he had all the data on a semiannual just in case it was needed.

The incoming load had not arrived and Terl was rumbling around getting things organized. He had medical personnel and administrative clerks waiting to receive the incoming employees. He was very sure that there would be quite a few, for Numph was in pocket for every new worker and he had said he was bringing in lots of employees.

The network of wires around the staging area was being checked out by technicians. A white light went on. Jonnie, sitting Windsplitter up the slope, touched his remote to start his concealed picto-recorder.

A red light over the operations dome began to flash. A horn wailed. A bullhorn roared, “Stand clear!”

The wires started to hum. Jonnie glanced at a Psychlo watch, big as a turnip on his wrist. He marked the time.

There was a building roar. Trees began to quiver from ground vibration. An electrical pulse beat in the air.

All employees had withdrawn from the platform. All machines and motors were off. There was nothing but that growing roar.

A huge purple light over the dome flashed on.

The platform area wavered like heat waves. Then three hundred Psychlos materialized on it.

They stood in a disorderly mass with their baggage. Breathe-gas helmets were on their heads. They staggered a trifle, looking around. One of them dropped to his knees. An intermittent white light began to pulse. “Coordinates holding!” the bullhorn roared.

Minesite medical rushed in with a stretcher for the one who had collapsed. Baggage carriers converged on the platform. Administrative personnel rushed the newcomers into a solid mass on a field and then got them into a snake line.

Terl took a list from an incoming executive and began to pat down uniforms for weapons and contraband, working fast. A detector in his hand played on baggage. Terl occasionally extracted an item and tossed it to a growing pile of forbidden articles. He was working very fast, like a huge tank battering away at the line, dislodging odd bits from it.

Personnel people were sorting new employees toward freighters or toward the berthing section of the compound. The newcomers looked like half-asleep giants, accustomed to this sort of thing, paying little heed, not even protesting when Terl took things away from them, not challenging any of the assignments of the personnel people, not resisting, not helping.

To Jonnie on the knoll, this mass of creatures were in discreditable contrast to the Scots who were interested in things, and alive.

Then Jonnie came alert. Terl was about two-thirds down the line. He had stopped. He was looking at a new arrival. Terl backed up and then suddenly gave a wave for the rest of the line to pass on and didn’t inspect anymore. He let everybody through.

A few minutes later the newcomers were in compound barracks or sitting in waiting personnel carriers to go to other minesites.

The bullhorn roared, “Coordinates holding and linked in second stage.” The white light on the dome began to flash intermittently. The personnel transports started up and took off.

Jonnie realized that interference was being held down on the coordinate frequence. Knowing what he did now about teleportation, he realized that motors could not run during a firing. It was an important point. Teleportation motors interfered with the teleportation in transshipment.

That was why the Psychlos didn’t locally teleport ore on the planet from one point to another but used freighters. A small motor was one thing, but teleportation of ore was reserved for transport between planets and universes.

Apparently if any motor were running around the transshipment area while those wires were humming and building up, it would mess up the firing due to overly disturbed local space.

Jonnie knew he was now watching a holding between the space of Psychlo and the space of this planet. A secondary holding was just keeping coordinates punched in, and he could visualize the operators in that control tower punching consoles with staccato paws to keep this planet and Psychlo lined up for the second firing.

It was the second one Jonnie was interested in. It apparently would not take place for a while. He turned off his picto-recorder remote.

After a wait—he timed it and found it was one hour and thirteen minutes—the white light on the dome began a very rapid flashing. The bullhorn bawled, “Stand by for return firing to Psychlo!”

A semiannual seemed to use up far more electricity. Technicians had auxiliary bus bars closed on the high poles. There was still a faint hum in the air.

Sweepers rolled and whirred over the firing platform, cleaning it, getting rid of scraps the new personnel may have dropped.

Jonnie noticed that the conveyor belt detectors were not manned and all the ore apparatus was standing still, neglected. He had hoped to pass by the ore duster with the sample from the lode in his pocket and see whether the ore duster registered any uranium mixed in with the gold. But he couldn’t. The thing wasn’t running.

Terl came rumbling down toward the morgue. Jonnie turned on his picto-recorder. Psychlos were getting busy again around the firing platform. The bullhorn bawled: “Coordinates holding and linked in second stage.” They were still lined up with Psychlo.

Jonnie envisioned that far-off planet, universes away, purple and heavy like a huge discolored boil, infecting and paining the universes. He knew there were scraps of its space right in front of him, linked to the space of Earth. Psychlo: a parasite larger than the host. Voracious, pitiless, without even a word for “cruelty.”

Terl was now opening up the morgue. Small lift trucks dashed by him and into it. Terl stood there watching, a list in his hand. The first lift truck came out. Terl looked at the closed coffin number and checked his list. The truck with the huge coffin borne in its claws sped to the firing platform and dumped its burden with a thud. The coffin teetered and then fell flat.

A second truck came out of the morgue with another coffin. Terl read the number and checked it off, and that coffin was carried up and dumped on the firing platform. Then rapidly a third and a fourth truck repeated the action. The first truck was bringing another coffin out.

Jonnie watched while sixteen coffins were piled, this way and that, carelessly, on the platform.

A line of returning personnel were dropped off a flatbed ground truck with their baggage near Terl at the morgue. He went through their clothing and glanced into their effects. There were twelve of them. As they finished, the lift trucks moved them and their baggage to the firing platform.

The white light went steady. “Coordinates on first stage!” bawled the bullhorn. “Motors off!”

The twelve departing Psychlos stood there or sat on their mounds of baggage. The sixteen coffins were mixed up with the baggage.

It suddenly struck Jonnie that nobody waved or said goodbye. It meant nothing to anyone here that these creatures were going home. Or maybe it did, he thought, looking more closely. The machine operators around seemed to be moving with more savage jerks; one couldn’t see well into their helmets, or at this distance, but Jonnie felt they resented the homegoers.

A red light over the operations area began to flash. A horn wailed. The bullhorn bawled, “Stand clear!”

The wires began to hum. Jonnie glanced at his watch.

The tree leaves quivered. The ground vibrated. The hum of the wires gradually and slowly built to a roar.

Two minutes went by.

On went the purple light.

A wavering haze appeared over the platform.

The personnel and coffins were gone.

Then Jonnie noticed an undulating wave of sound and a quiver in the wires. It was almost like a recoil.

A different horn went off. A white light flashed. The bullhorn bawled, “Firing completed. Start motors and resume normal actions.”

Terl was locking the morgue. He came rumbling up the slope. Jonnie turned off his picto-recorder remote and started to move off. Terl seemed to be very distracted but the movement caught his eye.

“Don’t hang around here!” snapped Terl.

Jonnie guided the horse toward him.

In a low guttural, Terl said, “You must not be seen around here anymore. Now clear out.”

“What about the girls?”

“I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it.”

“I wanted to give you the report.”

“Shut up!” Terl looked around. Was he frightened? He drew close to the horse’s shoulder, bringing his eyes to the level of Jonnie’s head. “I’ll come over and see you tomorrow. Hereafter, don’t come near this place.”

“I—”

“Go over to your car and get to your base. Right now!” And Terl made sure that he did.

It took a very dicey scout that night to recover the picto-recorder from the tree. But with a heat shield to prevent detection, Jonnie did it.

What was up with Terl?