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 envisi
oned 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.