“Don’t they have to import all the breathe-gas here?”
“Yes, indeed. You can’t make it on other planets. It takes certain elements that seldom exist off Psychlo.”
“I should think the home planet would run out of atmosphere.”
“Oh, no!” said Ker. “The elements are in the rocks and even the core and it just makes more and more. See those drums over there?”
Jonnie looked at a pyramid of drums that had evidently just come in on reverse teleportation from Psychlo. Trucks with lifts were loading them. And just as he looked, a truck was shifting some barrels aboard the last freighter in.
“Those drums are going back overseas,” said Ker.
“How many minesites are there?” said Jonnie.
Ker scratched where his dome met his collar. “Sixteen, I think.”
“Where are they located?” said Jonnie, being very casual.
Ker started to shrug and then had a happy thought. He reached into a rear pocket and brought out a sheaf of papers. He had used the back of a map to make some work assignment notes on. He unfolded it. Although it was covered with creases and dirt it was quite plain. It was the first time Jonnie had seen a map of the whole planet.
With a searching talon, Ker counted. “Yep. Sixteen with two substations. That’s the lot.”
“What’s a substation?”
Ker pointed up at the pylon. Other pylons marched southwest into the distance until they were dwindling specks. “That power line comes in from a hydroelectric installation several hundred miles from here. It’s an ancient dam. The company changed all the machinery in it and it gives us all our power here for transshipment. It’s a substation.”
“Any workers there?”
“Oh, no. All automatic. There’s another substation on the overseas south continent. It’s not manned either.”
Jonnie looked at the map. He was excited but showed none of it. He counted five continents. Every minesite was precisely marked.
He reached over and took a pen out of Ker’s breast pocket. “How many machines do I still have to be checked out on?” asked Jonnie.
Ker thought about it. “There’s drillers . . . hoist . . . ”
Jonnie reached over and took the map and folded it so there was a fresh blank space on the back. He began to list the machines as Ker called them out.
When the list was finished, Jonnie gave Ker his pen but casually put the map in his pouch.
Jonnie stood up and stretched. He hunkered back down and said, “Tell me some more about Psychlo. Sure must be an interesting place.”
The assistant operations officer chattered on. Jonnie listened intently. The data was a valuable flood and the map in his pouch crackled comfortingly.
When just one man was taking on the whole empire of the Psychlos in the hope of freeing his people, every scrap of information had value beyond price.
The engulfing roar of company operations thundered around them in enormous power.
Part 5
1
Eyes on the sky of an evening, noting the slow yearly wheel of the constellations, Jonnie knew he would have to escape.
In about three weeks the year would be up. He had a horrible vision of Chrissie coming into the plains and, if she survived there, blundering onto the minesite.
There were many obstacles. It would be almost insurmountably difficult, given the search tools of the Psychlos. But he set about planning his road to freedom with stubborn relentlessness.
Complicating his plans was the self-set goal of an Earth free of Psychlos and the resurrection of the human race.
Lying awake, he saw the cage revealed in all its ugliness by a rising moon, and he almost ridiculed himself for his own timidity.
Here he was, collared like a dog, chained up, locked behind bars, subject to swift detection and swifter pursuit. Yet he knew that even if he died trying, he would more than try.
First he must escape.
A key to possible freedom came to him only two days later. Freedom, at last, from his collar.
For some reason Terl had insisted that he be trained in electronic repair. The explanation Terl gave was thin: sometimes the controls of a machine broke, sometimes the remote control systems went awry, and the operator had to handle it. That Terl had done the explaining was enough to disqualify the reason. But more than that, in all the time Jonnie had been training on machines, he had never seen an operator touch electronic repair. When something went wrong somebody came screeching in on a tri-wheeled cart from the electronics section and fixed it fast. That Terl insisted that Jonnie know how to do it—Ker had not objected for an instant—was one more piece of the puzzle that was Terl. Whatever Terl wanted of him eventually would happen somewhere where there were no electronics repairmen.
So Jonnie sat, dwarfed on a bench, learning circuits and diagrams and components. They didn’t give him too much trouble. The electrons went here, got changed there, and wound up doing something else over at this place. The little wires and components and pieces of binding metal all made pretty good sense.
It was the tools that mystified him at first. There was a thing like a little knife that had a big handle—big to Jonnie, small to a Psychlo—that did the most remarkable thing. When you turned a switch to the proper number in its heel and put the blade down on a piece of wire, the wire fell apart. And when you reversed it and touched it to the wires you were now holding together, they became one piece once more. It only happened when you were splitting or binding the same type of metal. You had to use a binding substance when handling two different types of metal that you wanted to join.
When Ker wandered off for one of his frequent snacks and Jonnie was tied up alone for the moment in the electronics shop, he tested the tool against the frayed end of the leash.
It came apart, cleanly cut.
Jonnie reversed the switch, held the cut pieces together, and touched the tool to it.
They went back together with no trace of the cut.
Jonnie knew without trying it that it would do the same thing to his metal collar.
He looked at the door to make sure Ker was not coming back and no one else coming in, and then he swept his eyes over the rest of the room. There was a tool cupboard at the far end. He knew better than to have the knife he was using vanish. Jonnie parted his leash, raced to the tool cupboard, and opened it. It was a messy pile of parts, wires and tools. He rummaged in it frantically. Seconds sped by. Then he saw what he was looking for at the bottom—an old tool of the same kind.
From far off he could feel the rumble of returning feet.
He rushed back to his bench and with the newly found tool put his leash ends back together again. It worked!
Ker returned, lazy and disinterested. Jonnie had already slid the tool down into the cuff of his moccasin.
“You’re doing pretty good,” said Ker, looking at his work.
“Yes, I’m doing pretty good,” said Jonnie.
2
Terl was deep into the puzzle of Numph. Somehow and some way Terl knew he had gotten onto something, and then somehow and some way, he had messed it up.
The thing kept him awake nights and gave him a headache.
For some of the things he was now going to be seen doing, he had to have the insurance of big leverage on Numph.
He had lazied along with the fake “mutiny” measures. They weren’t important anyway. He had caused the few battle planes on the other minesites to be flown in and parked. He had picked up their arsenals and had them under seal. He had taken over control of the single remaining recon drone. On its last pass over the high mountains he had gloated.
The beautiful vein was still there, naked to view, exposed a hundred feet down a two-thousand-foot cliff. Pure white quartz studded with wires and knobs of gleaming yellow gold! A fortuitous earthquake had caused the cliff face to shear off and fall into the dark depths of the canyon, exposing the fortune. The ancient volcano higher up must have spewed out a geyser of pure liquid gold in some ancie
nt eruption and then covered it shallowly. A stream had cut the canyon through the ages and now the slide.
The site had a few disadvantages. The approaches to it showed uranium in some form or another, which put it out of bounds for a Psychlo. It rested in a cliff face so sheer that it could only be mined from a lowered platform. The rest of two thousand feet would gape dizzyingly below and the canyon winds would batter at the mining stage. Room for machinery at the top of the cliff was minimal and precarious. Several miners’ lives would be expendable at such a site.
Terl only wanted the cream of it. No mining in depth down to the next pocket. Just that pocket right there, the one that was exposed. There must be a ton of gold in sight.
At Psychlo prices—where very scarce gold ran at very high prices—it was worth nearly a hundred million credits. Credits that could bribe and buy and open the doors to unlimited personal power.
He knew how to get it out. He had even worked out how to transship it to home planet and get it to arrive there undetected and recoverable.
He looked at the recon drone photos again and then falsified their date and place markings with a clever bit of forgery and hid them deep in otherwise innocuous, boring files.
To guarantee it, he needed leverage on Numph. Then in the event of any slip or mishap he would be protected.
There was also the matter of getting his ten-year sentence—he thought of it as a sentence—contracted down to just another year on this cursed planet.
Whatever Numph had going involved Nipe and Nipe’s home-planet post in accounting. Terl had gotten that far. He sat hunched over his desk thinking.
He needed leverage on the animal, and it would have to be big—big enough to force the animal to dig without supervision and, not only that, to deliver. Well, the animal’s learning was going well and plans for other animals were all in place. He would come up with something; Terl believed in his own luck. The animals somehow would do it and then he would vaporize them and get the gold to home planet.
The unknown was Numph. With a single order he could dismiss the animals or have them killed. He could simply withdraw permission to use the machinery. And soon the bumbling old fool, seeing no mutiny, would withdraw the blanket authorizations. The “mutiny” was too thin.
Terl looked at the clock. It was within two hours of transshipment time.
He got up, took his breathe-mask off a peg and a few minutes later was at the transshipment platform.
Terl stood there in the swirling dust and din of preshipment time. The dispatch-box courier had already been there, and the box, sealed and ready, lay on a corner of the platform. Char came over, interrupted in his preparation for transshipment firing and unfriendly.
“Routine check of dispatch transmission,” said Terl. “Security business.” He showed him the blanket authorization.
“You’ll have to be fast,” shouted Char. “No time to wait around.” He glanced at his clock.
Terl scooped up the dispatch box and took it over to the car he had arrived in. He unlocked it with his master key and laid it on the seat. Nobody was watching. Char was back harassing blade machine operators to neaten up the ore.
Terl adjusted the button camera on his collar tab and speedily riffled through the sheaves. They were routine reports, routine day-to-day recounting of operational data.
Terl had done all this before and it hadn’t yielded anything, but there was always hope. The Planetary Director had to initial everything and sometimes added data and comments.
The button camera whirred and in short order every sheet had been recorded.
Terl put them back in the box, locked it, and took it over to the platform.
“Everything all right?” said Char, relieved not to have another detail pushed too close to firing time.
“No personal mail, nothing,” said Terl. “When do you send the dead ones back?” He indicated the morgue.
“Semiannually as always,” said Char. “Get your car out of here. This is a big shipment and we’re in a hurry.”
Terl went back to his office. Without really hoping, he put the report copies onto a screen, one after the other, studying them.
He was only interested in the ones that had Numph’s writing on them. Somehow, somewhere, there was a secret communication in these reports that only Nipe in accounting could decipher; of that Terl was certain. There was no other way to get a communication back to home planet.
When he finally got this—and when he got a real lever on the animal—he could launch his private mining mission.
Terl sat late, missing dinner, studying these and older dispatch box copies until his amber eyes were dulled to a dim flicker.
It was here someplace. He was certain of it.
3
Collecting things that would aid his escape was not easy.
At first Jonnie had thought he might handle the two button cameras that overlooked his cage—one inside and one outside. If he could bypass these, then at night he could open his collar and freely get about and prepare.
He had spent valuable time studying button cameras in the electronics shop. They were simple devices. They had a small mirror to catch the image, and the image became transmitted electrons; the pattern was simply picked up and recorded on a disk. There was no power in the button camera; power was transmitted to it on a closed circuit from the receiver.
He tried to modify his instruction machine to perform the same function. His object was to record a view of the cage with him in it. Then, with a quick switchover, he could leave the button cameras transmitting that picture while he himself was elsewhere. But there were two cameras, viewing from different angles. He only had one recorder.
Terl caught him one day with the instruction machine in pieces. He was bringing in a rabbit he had shot.
The monster stood there for a while and finally said, “Teach an animal a trick and it has to work it on everything. I think you’ve wrecked that playing machine.”
Jonnie went on reassembling it.
“Put it back together so it works and you can have this rabbit.”
Jonnie ignored him. But when he had the machine back together, Terl threw down the rabbit.
“Don’t monkey with things that don’t need fixing,” Terl said with the air of good-god-what-you-have-to-teach-an-animal.
But later Jonnie got a break. The problem was body-heat detection equipment. If in some way he could nullify such surveillance, then he hoped he could get to the mountains. He doubted he could be traced, if the heat-seeking equipment could be fooled.
Ker had him running a drill into the side of a mine shaft over at the actual mine. It was an abandoned hole, about fifty feet in diameter. Ker had lowered the drill platform down into the hole. At that point a rock outcropping was exposed. Under the platform was an ore net.
The drill was heavy, having been built for Psychlos. Jonnie’s muscles bulged as he bucked the bit into the outcropping. He had a phone in his ear and Ker was chattering away into it.
“Don’t push steady. Just lean on it and let up, time after time. After you got a hole drilled, trip the second trigger and the drill will expand and break off the ore. Keep the net in place to catch it as it falls. Now just keep that sequence going. . . .”
“It’s hot!” Jonnie had yelled back up at him. And it was hot. The drill, spinning at high revs, was heating the wall and in itself was almost glowing with friction.
“Oh,” said Ker. “You haven’t got a heat protector.” He fished around in his pockets amid papers and bits of old snacks and finally dug out a very small package. He put it in a lowering cup and let it down on a line.
Jonnie opened it up. It was a sheet of thin, transparent stuff. It had two sleeves.
“Put it on,” yelled Ker.
Jonnie was amazed that so much area could be compressed into such a small package. The garment was built for a Psychlo and the sleeves were enormous, and it was much too long. He took some tucks in it and put it on over his head and down the fr
ont of his body.
He resumed bucking the drill. It was amazing. The reflected heat from the wall and the drill bit did not reach him.
After Ker finally decided Jonnie could use the drill and handle the rig and Jonnie was back on level ground, he went through the motions of giving back the heat shield.
“No, no,” said Ker. “Throw it away. It’s disposable. They get dirty and torn. A driller usually carries half a dozen. I don’t know why I forgot. But I ain’t been a driller for years.”
“It’s the only one I got,” said Jonnie.
“And you’re sure a driller,” said Ker.
Jonnie neatly repackaged it and put it in his pouch. He was betting that no heat detector could detect through it. If he wore it and kept it from gaping, the spinning scanner would be blind to it. He hoped.
The food problem he had solved. The smoked beef was compact and would keep him from starving if he was running so fast that he had no time to hunt.
He carefully patched up moccasins and made sure he had an extra pair. Terl observed that, too.
“You don’t have to wear those, you know,” Terl said one evening as he came out to check the cage locks. “There are old Chinko boots that could be cut down. Didn’t they give you any boots with your clothes?”
The following day the compound tailor came out, complaining in his breathe-mask, and measured Jonnie for boots. “I am not a bootmaker!” he protested. But Terl had shown him the blanket requisition, so the tailor also measured Jonnie for a heavy knee-length overcoat and cold-weather cap. “It is coming on to summer,” said the tailor. “It’s not the time of year for winter clothing.” But he had done the measuring anyway and very soon the boots and clothing were delivered to the cage. “Freaky executives,” the tailor had muttered during the final try-on. “Dressing up animals!”
It made Jonnie uneasy that Terl was being obliging. He carefully checked all his preparations over to see whether any could give away his plans to escape. He decided not. Terl seemed very preoccupied these days, indifferent. Or was that a pose?
The thing that was really giving Jonnie a problem was how to get his hands on a gun.