“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Tsung. “We always feed him a tub of fried rice. He loves it! And my son-in-law found a book of colored plates of fish and he made up some fish medallions and we give him one of those each time. He says they’re valuable.”
“And you pay Lin Li,” said Jonnie, wise to the ways of commerce and the Chinese.
“Of course. From your social petty cash.”
The term “petty cash” could be pretty general. The Earth Planetary Bank was paying for Earth’s defense system out of petty cash.
But Mr. Tsung was going on. “That button is a pre-run of prizes they are giving out in their new neighborhood bank program all through the universes—you know, to people who open up accounts. It will in each case be in the local language. You put it on your color tab or a place like that and then you hum a note and as long as you move your mouth, the button will sing. They are gathering up all the folk songs of each local region.”
Jonnie got a kit out of his bag. He had brought it to help the project he was on right now. He took a microannealer and opened the button up and looked at its insides with a microviewer. It was just a molecular-sized set of storage cells with little triggers and relays. A tiny battery charged itself from room heat. An electron vibrating prong set atmosphere molecules in motion to make sound. Simple, rather cheap.
But that wasn’t what Jonnie was looking for. He often suspected the bank acquired information in peculiar ways and he checked vocoders and suchlike to make sure they didn’t contain a radio mike or a recording thread that could be taken back later. He had never found one so far. But that was the world he now lived in.
He microannealed it back together and hung it on his buckskin collar.
“That isn’t a standard one, he said to tell you,” piped Mr. Tsung through his own monotone vocoder. “He collected some old records of American ballads and put them in it. There aren’t very many Americans, so it won’t be manufactured for them.”
Jonnie cleared his throat and moved his mouth. The button hummed a wordless tune. Hadn’t he heard that tune before? Scottish, German? Ah . . . it was called “Jingle Bells.” Then the button sang:
Galactic Bank!
Galactic Bank!
My friend so tried and true.
Oh, what fun it is to have
A neighbor such as you!
And then in a proud voice it said, “I am a customer of the Galactic Bank!”
Well, that certainly wasn’t any “American ballad”! Was Dries having a joke? He never joked, really. A very serious, small gray man.
Jonnie was about to take it off. But his laugh started it up again.
Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the buffalo play . . .
Jonnie remembered you had to keep moving your jaws to make it sing. Saliva pops or muscle tension or something. He started moving his jaws again.
I seldom have heard
A disparaging word . . .
“Mister Tyler!” came through the intercom from the nervous Pierre, “I can see Lake Victoria on the viewscreens through the overcast. It’s totally clouded in ahead. Hadn’t I better go on to Kariba?”
Jonnie went forward and took over the console. It was always overcast at Victoria.
Jonnie opened his mouth to call in for clearance. But the button sang:
And the skies are not cloudy all day!
What a lousy forecast, thought Jonnie, and put the button in his pocket.
4
After glancing over the flying conditions, Jonnie could not much blame Pierre. For a while now they had been flying through the night: a fact which an experienced instrument pilot would not have thought about twice, and indeed, Jonnie had scarcely noticed it.
By looking very hard, and only then with trained pilot’s eyes, one could just barely make out Mount Elgon rising above the black cloud carpet, for there was no moon and such a peak became mainly visible because it blocked out certain stars.
It was the screens which caused Jonnie to forgive Pierre. So thick was the cloud layer below them that the viewscreens, aimed at it, were more snowstorm than image. You would actually have to know the shape of the lake and the compound to have any notion of what you were looking at. A lot of electrostatic disturbance; it must be raining like fury at the compound, rain flicked with lightning.
Pierre, however, was in a state of mind that wasn’t asking for anything but to stand on solid ground. He could not read the screens. He could not see anything but some stars above them and blackness below them, a blackness lashed now and then by some internal flash. He thought they were done for if they tried to go down through that. Who knew what hill they would run into? He would have been petrified had he known that Mount Elgon was higher than they were flying, but mercifully, he did not know that. Nor, even more frightening, that they had passed by a couple of peaks even higher. Magnifying his alarm, Monsieur Tyler had come back to the pilot seat and hummed a strange song. Mon Dieu, one did not sing when one faced certain death. Lunacy!
Victoria gave them permission to land and Jonnie felt his way down through the rain clouds. His screens didn’t clear up, but knowing the area, he could identify the scraps of image he sometimes glimpsed. It was useless to look through the screen: it looked like it had a fire hose being played on it.
Jonnie felt for the ground with his skids, more concerned about a bump affecting his passengers than about where he was. He did it very smoothly and Pierre was again alarmed when Jonnie turned off the motors—he thought they were still in the air!
The rain was actually making it hard to talk in the cab of the plane. Jonnie threw open the door and there was Ker standing there, water cascading off him in the plane lights.
Even allowing for the deluge, Ker was awfully glum-looking. He was usually very glad to see Jonnie.
The last time Jonnie had been in Africa, he and Ker had spent three nights working the Kariba rig. The planet Fobia had been very elusive: they had no coordinates for it beyond “somewhere around the Psychlo sun,” and for a while it had seemed they would never discover it and Ker would eventually die from having no breathe-gas.
The planet was, however, located: it was doing a squashed ellipse. Fobia’s perihelion (the point in its orbit where it was nearest its sun) was so much closer to its sun than its aphelion (the point in its orbit where it was farthest), and the distance to its sun from these two points was so vastly different, near and far, that anyone trying to live on Fobia would have perished, even a Psychlo.
Fobia went through three states: as it swung away from its sun, its atmosphere chilled and became liquid; as its distance increased, the liquid froze to solidity; as it again approached its sun, the sequence reversed and the atmosphere became gaseous again. But this long period of having a “summer”—and the Fobia year was about eighty-three of Earth’s—permitted moss and other plants to grow and these flourished for a time and then, as the atmosphere liquefied, remained in a state of suspended animation until summer came again.
Although they had an awful time with camera triangulation to estimate its orbit, the end product had been beyond Ker’s wildest dreams. The planet was well into “autumn” and it was no real trick to pump huge cable tanks full of liquid breathe-gas. Not only that but they had brought back about fifty tons of the material needed to make real goo-food. Yes, Ker had been acting like a Psychlo gone to heaven, a most unlikely event, when Jonnie and he had last met.
And here he stood, glum in the rain.
“Hello, Jonnie,” he said woodenly.
“What’s the matter with you?” said Jonnie. “Lost your loaded dice?”
“Oh, it’s not you, Jonnie. I’m always glad to see you. It’s that Maz. He was chief engineer here when the place was operating. One of the wounded ones. I got about seventy ex-prisoners from all over and I’m trying to earn my pay by getting this tungsten mine going again.”
He moved nearer, the rain cascading down his breathe-gas mask, his tunic sodden with the hot rain that batte
red him. “I’m no engineer!” he suddenly wailed. “I was an operations officer. We ran out of ore body and the next one is just beyond it someplace. That ——— Maz and all those other ——— ——— Psychlos just sit down there on their butts and gloom! Some ——— fool showed them the pictures of Psychlo blowing up and they just won’t do anything!
“I don’t know any ——— ——— ——— math and I can’t calculate the next ore deposits!”
That’s two of us, thought Jonnie. He was glad the girls didn’t speak Psychlo. The ex-underworld midget could really swear. But he almost never did unless he was terribly upset. “That’s why I’m here,” he said.
“Really?” Ker brightened up like a mine charge had gone off in him.
“Has MacKendrick arrived?” said Jonnie.
“Control got a drone report on a plane from Scotland. That MacKendrick? He’d be about three hours behind you.”
Three hours! Jonnie had wanted to get to work right away. Well, there was something else he had to do first anyway—get some Psychlo corpses.
“There’s people in the back. Do me a favor and get them into the compound.”
“Right,” said Ker, cheered up. He had a folded mine tarp on his arm he could use on the others as a rain shield. He sloshed toward the rear door unfolding it.
Pierre had been recovering. But now he was horrified to find that Jonnie was rummaging around in a locker for high-altitude suits. Jonnie threw one at him and began to pull on another one.
Jonnie heard the door slam in back and saw dim figures running toward the compound in the rain. He finished zipping up his suit and checked his fuel. Plenty.
Twenty seconds later they were hurtling into the sky again. Pierre was still struggling into the unfamiliar high-altitude suit. Mon Dieu, life around Monsieur Tyler was hair-raising!
Jonnie was unperturbed about it all. Up above the rain clouds the screens were clean, and by seeing what stars were omitted, he could even eyeball the peaks. He left the plane lights on, heading for the glacial snows where they had left the Psychlo corpses. He needed two, he thought. A workman and an executive.
It did not help Pierre’s frame of mind at all not to be told where they were going, nor why. Charging into the ink at such speeds appalled him. He did not even look at the viewscreens. His eyes were riveted through the now-streaked windscreen.
Very shortly Jonnie was in the right location. He knew they had left a forklift up here. He would use that to guide in. He supposed that after all this time, the corpses would be pretty well covered with snow.
But Pierre, not knowing what was being looked for or where or why, simply looked through the windscreen, his eyes dilated with something that was getting up close to terror.
Suddenly Pierre saw a whiteness. It had puffs blowing off it in the plane lights. With horror he heard the engines wind down for a landing.
“Don’t!” he screamed. “Don’t! Don’t! You’re landing on a cloud!”
Jonnie glanced up through the viewscreen. It did look like a cloud at that, seen from this angle. A high wind was blowing snow about.
Ah, there was the forklift! Up to its seat in snow and ice. The corpses would be lying, covered up, just beyond it.
He had been flying by screens only. They were a long way from the nearest drop-off. He let the ship crunch down into the snow and shut off the motors. The wind was screaming up here; enough to make the plane tremble.
Jonnie settled his air mask on tighter. “Get out and give me a hand!”
Pierre was in a total confusion. He had clearly seen them land on a cloud and he could not understand what was holding the ship up. He knew from their earlier course that they must be close to, if not on, the earth’s equator, and recent studies had told him that the equator was very hot. So snow was the furthest thing from his imagination.
His small tribe had been under the domination of Jesuit priests and they had controlled by instilling a heavy fear of heaven and hell, mostly the latter. The reputation of Monsieur Tyler was itself a matter of growing superstition and awe. It surprised him less that they had landed on a cloud than it did to be told to get out.
Pierre looked at the puffs of white in the ship’s light. Yes, a cloud! He fingered the image of a crucified Christ that hung about his neck; he felt he was too young to be a martyr. But there was a solution. He snatched the jet backpack from the compartment behind the seat and hastily shrugged into it. Monsieur Tyler quite probably was able to walk on clouds but that didn’t include Madame Solens’s son Pierre.
It took a lot of courage to open the door but he did so. He closed his eyes tightly and sprang out, hand on the backpack firing trigger. It was about eight feet down from a seat of such a plane to the ground. But Pierre had been nerved up to fall twelve thousand. When he hit the ground, despite snow, he almost broke his legs. Pierre fell backward in total confusion and lay propped on his elbows in the snow. He could not understand why he had not fallen through the cloud.
Jonnie, intent on his project, was oblivious of all this confusion. He had taken a mine crowbar from the plane’s tool kit and was prospecting through the snow for the corpses. They certainly were covered up.
The tip of the iron bar found one. He knelt and brushed away some snow, the particles flying away in the wind. He uncovered the tip of a breathe-gas mask and then the ornament of a cap. Yep, an executive!
He felt around under the monstrous shoulders to see where he had to insert the flat end of the crowbar to pry the monster loose from the adhesions of ice. One of these Psychlos weighed about a thousand pounds, more in all this snow and ice.
Jonnie inserted the crowbar deeper and heaved down on it. The monster was so stuck that the top end of the bar slipped and tore open his high-altitude jacket fastenings.
He tried again, this time giving it all the strength he had. With a creaking, low-pitched sound, the monster moved upward.
But the sound must have been close to that of clearing one’s throat. The bank’s singing button in his pocket gave out a ballad line with a baritone voice:
Ghost riders in the sky . . .
Pierre, already badly shaken, beheld a demon rising from out of the cloud. And not only that, it was singing in a sepulchral voice.
It was a lot too much. With a low moan, he fainted dead away.
5
Jonnie loosened a workman’s corpse with the bar and then went to the forklift and knocked the ice out of its cogs and ratchets. He was about to start it up when he noticed the absence of Pierre. He had expected him to open the loading doors of the plane at least.
He spotted the man, lying in a shadow made by a balance motor. The snow was already blowing over him. A bit anxiously he checked to see if he was injured, puzzled by the presence of the jet backpack, wondering why he was lying there unconscious. Well, this was no place for even first aid.
Jonnie got the forklift moving and scooped up Pierre. He ran the machine down the length of the ship to the doors and, standing on the seat, got them open.
But the wind, coming from the tail of the plane, was trying to bang the door closed. Jonnie jumped up to the fuselage flooring in hopes of finding something to block the door and stopped in his tracks.
Pattie! She was still in the plane. They must have overlooked her in their scramble to get through the rain. She made so little sound and motion these days she easily went unnoticed.
She must be freezing. Jonnie opened an equipment locker and dragged out a blanket and threw it around her. She hardly even looked up.
All he could find to block the door open was the stick from a map roller and he tried to make it do by butting it against a floor equipment ring and pushing it against a hinge.
He got down and operated the forklift to boost the inert body of Pierre into the plane. He had almost made it when a powerful gust of wind banged the door shut. Once more he climbed into the plane to try to make the stick prop the door. But this time the frail wood splintered.
A soft voice sounded
behind him. “I will hold it open for you.”
Pattie, gripping the blanket to her with one hand, put the other on the door and braced it open.
This was the first time he had seen her volunteer anything for months.
Jonnie jumped down onto the forklift and raised Pierre up and dumped him on the floor plates. He got into the plane once more and began tugging the man over to the side out of the way and was a bit amazed to see Pattie pulling on the body to help.
So, with Pattie to hold the door open, Jonnie was able to fork the two monstrous bodies out of the snow and dump them into the plane. Pattie was watching him and what he was doing intently.
Shortly he parked the forklift, closed up the plane, and got into the cab out of the cutting wind. He phoned the compound to have a flatbed and forklift waiting and then, checking to see if Pattie was strapped in, shot the plane up into the sky.
He had been prepared to feel his way down through the overcast with half-blind screens and was very happy to see that the worst of the storm and all of its electrical interference had passed by.
It was no longer raining at the compound and they had every pole spotlight on. Quite a crowd had gathered around the waiting vehicles to see the plane come in. The last time Jonnie had seen some of these ex-marines and ex-spacemen had been through gunsights, and it was a trifle strange beholding Jambitchows and Hawvins and such standing around, but they seemed inoffensive enough. Three Chatovarian engineers in bright orange work suits that had “Desperation Defense” written on their chests were in the crowd, probably there doing preparatory surveys to convert this minesite protection over to the new system.
A new plane was there with nobody around it and Jonnie realized that MacKendrick must have arrived. He called Pattie forward and with her under one arm jumped down from the plane.
Ker was sitting on a forklift. “The copilot is in there. He is breathing but he must be injured or something,” said Jonnie. “Get him and the two Psychlos down to the hospital.”
Jonnie, still carrying Pattie, rushed into the compound to find MacKendrick.