Giyt took that to be permission to do the same. So did everyone else, all at once. Even after Giyt got himself free of the restraining gear it took him a while to lever himself down through the tangle of other passengers and out into the shockingly frigid wind. The cold made him catch his breath, which actually hurt as it entered his lungs. It would have been even worse if it hadn't been for the foamed, but still hot, ground underfoot—
No, he discovered. It wasn't ground, and it wasn't foamed, either. What was underfoot was mud, soaked by the melting snow and cooked to a slurry by the landing rockets. It was still steaming, and it was ruining his shoes. They were in a sort of well surrounded by snowbanks, and meltwater was still gurgling away through culverts.
Someone had gouged out a series of planked steps to get them to the top of the snow, where a duckboard path led them to the waiting hovers. Giyt ran toward them, but Hoak Hagbarth ran faster. He was there before Giyt, panting and irritable, no longer bothering to pretend to be friendly. "This one," he ordered, pointing to one of the hovercraft. "Get in."
Giyt did as told; this was not the time to try making a break. A Delt followed him; then Will Tschopp, morose and shaky from his airsickness. Giyt was shivering too, his teeth chattering, but at least the car was relatively warm. The bad part of the warmth was that both Tschopp and Hagbarth, though swaddled in their bulky parkas, definitely stank. The Delt took one look at them with both his wandering eyes, then conspicuously leaned away from them as the car began to move.
A few hundred meters away, the factory buildings were bathed in light. Giyt squinted at them, trying to reconcile the remembered schematics of the polar complex with what was before his eyes. Most of the buildings were the familiar golden domes of Delt architecture, linked by their mole-run connecting tunnels, but what the car was heading for was a chunky, square-edged block, ten meters high but dark and windowless. That, Giyt realized, would be the central facility, from which all the others branched off. The car didn't stop outside, but went right through an air-curtain door without pausing.
Inside, they were in a bare room, corridors leading away from it in several directions. There was a sort of reception desk, untended except for a Delt technician, who roused himself from sleep to greet the Delt from the rocket. There was a distant thudding of heavy machinery in operation somewhere not too far away. At least in the building it was warm.
The two Delts disappeared in the direction of their dome while Tschopp and Hoak Hagbarth headed for toilet facilities—not the same ones, Giyt noticed—to clean up. "Wait here. Maury'll come and show us around," Hagbarth growled as he left.
That Giyt did not propose to do.
He looked swiftly around to orient himself. He knew that the Earth dome, as the latest built, was part of a necklace of three other domes, the Centaurians' and the Petty-Primes'. Since the factory plenum belonged to everybody, the wall readouts were in a wild variety of notations and languages. Giyt recognized the dancing dots and slashes of Petty-Prime script on one door and ducked into it. He hurried down the broad hall on the other side until he was almost run over by a pair of forklifts, one with a human driver and the other slaved to the first one—on the way, no doubt, to offload cargo from the rocket. "Excuse me," he called over the grinding whine of the forklifts. "I'm Evesham Giyt—the mayor, you know."
The driver was muffled in cold-weather gear, but his face mask was hanging loose from his helmet. "Really?" he said in surprise. "Still?"
Giyt disregarded it. "Am I going right for the human factory dome?"
The driver took his time about answering. "Shouldn't you be with somebody?" he asked.
"Of course not. I'm the mayor."
The driver brooded over that for a moment. "Well," he said, "most of the guys have taken some personal time. To watch the opening ceremonies of the conference, you know." He thought for a moment longer, then added doubtfully that he didn't personally get to the factory very often, but if Giyt wanted to keep going to the Centaurian control room there was a female there, stuck with the duty like himself, who might know the way. And who liked to gab. And since the whole operation was of course automated, didn't have much else to do.
Giyt didn't hesitate. It wouldn't take Hagbarth and Tschopp much longer to make themselves presentable, and he didn't want to waste his best chance to get rid of them.
He found the Centaurian control room easily enough, and at least part of what the forklift driver had said was true. The Centaurian shift manager was curled up on a pad in front of the controls, lying on her side with her paws relaxed and displayed: three of her paws were white, the other the dun color of her fur. A wall screen was displaying the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, but she wasn't attending to it. She was murmuring softly to the husband who was nestled in the soft fur under her chin.
They did not look as though they wanted to be interrupted. But the male was peering at Giyt with bright eyes, and when he whispered something to his mate she turned her snout toward the door. "What person are you?" she demanded.
"I'm Evesham Giyt. I'm looking for the Earth-human factory dome."
"You got visiting permission pass? No? You got no chance going that place alone, Large Male. You go away or I call—wait one." Her husband was whispering to her. Then she looked at Giyt in a different way. "Oh," she said. "You Mayor Large Male Evesham Giyt. You guy bitched up stinky Kalkaboo guy, right? Why had not spoken so right away?"
"That was just an accident—" he began instinctively, but she was still talking.
"Mrs. Brownbenttalon litter-sister of my junior husband here," she said with pride. "She say you pretty good guy. I also think it; damn Kalkaboos always getting damn feelings hurt. You want see Earth-human dome, sure, Mr. Threewhiteboots here take you, show you where everything located, no problem. But when you are got there, please, you tell him quickly hurry right back."
The little male took Giyt in a Centaurian cart—no seats, just a sort of pad with grips to hold on to—and when he had delivered Giyt to the human autofactory dome, he didn't wait to be told to hurry back. He was quickly gone, to whatever intimate moments the couple had been heading toward.
There was a screen and a door, but the door wasn't open. The human autofactory, of course, was locked.
Giyt could hear rumblings from inside. That meant nothing about whether anyone was there; the nature of an autofactory was that it was automatic. Likely enough anybody who was supposed to be on shift had taken off to watch the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, like everybody else.
He flexed his fingers and sat down at the screen. There were not many combinations or passwords that could keep Evesham Giyt out, and it took only five minutes to establish that this wasn't one of them.
When he entered the chamber the rumbling sounds were louder. They came from where a cascade of the talking dolls were dropping out of the assembly machine onto a moving belt, to be picked up by the packing members and stowed in shipping cartons. Several dozen filled cartons were already stacked against a wall, waiting for shipment.
And none of that was of any interest to Giyt.
He looked around and found locked storerooms. These looked more promising. Their locks, too, were only a small inconvenience. But while he was working out the combination, his screen buzzed and half a dozen legends appeared on it. The one in English read: Earth human Evesham Giyt has wandered away from his party. If you see him please inform Central Command of his whereabouts so he can be returned.
He scowled and picked up his pace; the communications would not remain so polite. One after another the locked doors opened. Behind the nearest one, surprisingly in this warehouse where no one but humans ever went, was a store of Kalkaboo dawn-bangers—big, bomb-shaped firecrackers, of the size that required detonators. Behind the other doors—
Behind the other doors was worse.
There was no reason for any Earth human to possess Kalkaboo firecrackers, even little ones, to say nothing of these monsters. But the other things in
the locked storerooms simply had no business existing on Tupelo at all. They were Earthside weapons, and there were hundreds of them. Handguns. Minicarbines. Assault rifles. Grenades. Mortars. Even shoulder-launched missiles, the kind that rocketed to an enemy's position and then exploded with a shower of high-velocity shrapnel. And when he looked more closely at the missiles he saw the answer to two puzzles.
The missiles bore sniffer vents. They would follow the airborne odor of a target and explode over the target's head, and that explained why there had been that almost forgotten data file on the scents of the eetie races on Tupelo.
And to make them work required high-tech computation . . . and that explained something, too. That had to be where the missing chiplets had gone.
XXVI
The story of human warfare can be told as the evolution of handheld-weapons. As the English longbow spelled the end of armored knights at Agincourt, the machine gun marked the final defeat of the cavalry charge in World War I. World War II produced a temporary reversal, as the major weapons became the airplane and the tank, while the foot soldier could do little more than exploit the breakthroughs that air and armor made for him. But then came the handheld antitank rifle, the flamethrower, and most deadly of all, the shoulder-launched bus. This was a missile that could carry any sort of weaponry—shrapnel, chemical agents, even mini-nukes. It would be programmed to explode at a given point or on detection of enemy troops, given away by their body heat, their sounds, or even the aroma of their bodies. It could fire around corners and from concealment; it made the foot soldier the equal of a tank.
—BRITANNICA ONLINE, "WEAPONS."
The thought came too late to be useful, but if he had thought of it in time it would have been no trouble at all, Giyt told himself, to have brought a microcam along. He could be photographing the whole thing. That would be enough evidence to convince anybody, and then he could be taking it to the people at the six-species conference, there to blow the whistle on whatever foretaste of hell Hagbarth and his buddies were planning for Tupelo.
But he had no camera. What then?
There was plenty of physical evidence here, and that would do as well as pictures. The trouble was that the physical evidence was all too big to carry. He needed something small enough to hide on his person. There was no way he was going to get onto the return rocket—past Hoak Hagbarth—if he was carrying a shoulder-launcher or a carbine, much less one of the Kalkaboo bombs.
Thoughtfully he pocketed a Kalkaboo detonator, but that wouldn't prove anything; there were multitudes of them on sale in the Kalkaboo store in the town. What else? There was no ammunition visible for the minicarbines, but the assault guns were loaded; he slipped a clip out of one of them and stowed it away.
Then he tackled one of the buses. If he could take one of them apart to get its chiplet out, that would remove all doubt. On Earth there were plenty of experts who would be able to read the programming on the chiplet, and that would show just what the thing had been built to do.
Figuring out what had to be done was easy. The execution was a lot harder. The damn buses weren't meant to be disassembled by amateurs. Worse, he had no tools. There probably were tools somewhere around, maybe in the same place as the ammunition for the minicarbines, but he didn't know where that was. So he had to do it the hard way. It would have to be a simple smash and pry operation—with the added worry at every step that if he hammered a tad too hard he might detonate the explosives and fuel in the bus. Time was a problem that couldn't be ignored, either. Sooner or later Hagbarth and the others would be checking the factory in their search for him. By then he had to be elsewhere, and ready to give them some kind of lying apology for going off on his own . . . and hope they bought it . . . and then—assuming that somehow, against all the odds, he had been lucky enough to get away with that much—somehow manage to get back on the suborbital rocket's return flight with his booty intact.
He didn't quite see how he. was going to manage any of that, but meanwhile he had the present job.
Wonderfully he managed to get two of the buses open enough to fish out the chiplets, all the while rehearsing—and rejecting—the things that he might say to Hagbarth. Not that there was anything he could say that would make a difference if Hagbarth had the animal cunning to check out his secret arms cache for himself, because anyone who looked at the two buses would see they had been tampered with. For what good it might do, he put them at the back of the stack. Then he locked all the storeroom doors, erased his programs from the screen, let himself out, relocked the door, and started back down the hall.
He didn't get far before he heard the whir of an approaching cart, and of course it was Hagbarth.
Hagbarth wasn't alone. Tschopp and that other man from the fire company—Maury Kettner?—jammed the cart beside him. They all leaped out as soon as the cart had stopped, scowling angrily at Evesham Giyt.
It was time for the lying to start. "Jesus," Giyt cried enthusiastically, "am I glad to see you guys! This place is wild. I finally did find the factory, but the damn thing's locked up."
Hagbarth studied him thoughtfully without speaking. He gave Maury Kettner a nod; the man turned and walked away as Hagbarth said, "So you were just wandering around, is that what you're saying?"
"Trying to find the factory," Giyt agreed, doing his best to see where Kettner was going; afraid he knew the answer in advance, but seeing no choice but to tough it out. "This is a very confusing place, Hoak."
"Of course it is. Why didn't you wait for us?"
"Well, you took so long," Giyt improvised, looking over his shoulder. Kettner had opened the factory door and disappeared inside. He was taking a long time in there, though. Had Giyt left some sign of his entrance? "Anyway," he added, "I ran into a couple of eeties, and they gave me directions."
"But when you got there it was locked."
"Locked, right," Giyt agreed.
Hagbarth nodded, poker-faced, "Was there any special part you wanted to see?"
"Oh," Giyt said, shrugging vaguely, "just to get a general idea, you know? So I'll know what I'm talking about when I see Dr. Patroosh."
"She's a busy woman, Giyt. You don't want to bother her with a lot of unimportant stuff."
"No, of course not," Giyt agreed. "It's just that—"
But his voice trailed off. The factory door opened. Maury Kettner came out, and his expression was cold. Worse than that, he was carrying one of the carbines from the store, and Giyt observed unhappily that Kettner, at least, had known just where to go to find its ammunition clip.
He was staring at Giyt, but it was to the others that he spoke. "He was into the stash, all right," he said. "The seals were broken."
Hagbarth exhaled a sigh. "Ah, Giyt," he said reproachfully, "what did you do that for? More important, what are we going to do with you now?"
It was a rhetorical question. If aimed at anybody, it was at Evesham Giyt; but it was Wili Tschopp who answered it. "There's always the Heckslider way," he mentioned.
It took a moment for Giyt to make the connection, and then Tschopp spelled it out for him. "You know about Harry Heckslider, don't you? The one who fell out of the chopper on the Way to Energy Island. See, he got curious, and he just wouldn't listen to reason."
"Now, wait a minute," Hagbarth said good-naturedly. "Why do you think Evesham here would be like that? You don't have any special love for our alien brothers, do you, Evesham?"
Hagbarth's tone was friendly enough—no, Giyt decided, a lot too friendly. The man was putting him on. He said, temporizing, "I've got nothing against them."
"Really? Not even the Kalks?"
"Well, I thought they gave me a lot harder time than was called for—"
"Damn right they did! I really hated to see them working you over like that, Evesham. Not that the others are all that much better. Can't ever trust any of the freaks, that's what I say. You know they've all been scouting Earth for years, don't you?"
Giyt was honestly surprised. "Scouting Earth?
"
"You bet! They've got their ships orbiting the Sun, watching us, learning everything about our capabilities—how do you think they got that portal to Earth so fast?"
"Why, I guess I never thought—"
"No," Hagbarth agreed bitterly. "You never did. Most people don't, but there they are, and you know what kind of weapons they've got, because your Centaurian friend told you all about their old wars." He was breathing heavily. He collected himself and spoke more reasonably. "Anyway, Evesham, you're a patriotic guy, aren't you?"
I am? Giyt asked, but not out loud. Actually he didn't know the answer. He had never given much thought to patriotism, but now. . .
Hagbarth was going right on: "I mean, you know what the score is. The freaks would do us in in a minute if they had the chance. What do you think the Kalks have all those big explosives for? And the Delts have those harpoons—think they don't think of using them on the rest of us now and then? They've got all the weapons they need to wipe us all out, they just don't call them weapons. And what do we have?"
"Well," Giyt said, pretending to think it over, "I guess we have those water cannons."
Hagbarth grinned at him, then turned to the others. "See? I told you he wasn't so dumb. But that's just piss-ant stuff, the water cannons. They couldn't really save us if the freaks tried a coup. Which they could do at any time. So that's what we need the other stuff for, right?"
Giyt gave another imitation of a man trying to work a hard question out. "Maybe you're right," he admitted. "One thing that kind of puzzles me—"