The blast rifle, driven from Terl’s paws, soared into the air toward Jonnie. He caught it in his left hand.
But Jonnie wasn’t thinking of the blast rifle as any more than a club. And he had his own kill-club up and striking before the bear could aim a second blow at Terl. The kill-club caught the grizzly square on the brain pan. The bear staggered, distracted and stunned.
Jonnie sailed in again.
The bear struck out with a massive clawed blow. Jonnie went under it. The kill-club hit again on the brain pan.
The bear reared up and struck at the kill-club as it came in again. The thong snapped.
Jonnie grasped the rifle by the barrel. The grizzly came at him with gaping jaws.
The rifle stock crashed into the bear’s teeth.
Jonnie struck again on the brain pan.
With a dwindling roar the bear went down.
It stayed down, its limbs twitching in death.
Jonnie backed up. Terl was lying on his side, conscious. His mask was in place. His eyes behind the faceplate were wide and staring.
Jonnie backed up farther. Thank god the leash hadn’t caught on anything and tripped him during the fight. He snapped the leash to him. Then he turned his attention to the gun. It had little labels on its controls. The safety catch was off. There was a charge under the trigger. It was scratched but not otherwise damaged.
Jonnie looked at Terl. Terl looked back, his claws flexing and unflexing, waiting. He was certain the animal would level the gun and kill him. His paw stole down to his belt gun.
If Jonnie saw the movement toward the belt gun he ignored it. He turned his back on Terl. He located the sights on the blast rifle and then, with six shots, put the crippled cattle out of their misery.
Jonnie put on the safety catch. He reached into his pouch and got a piece of sharp-edged glass and walked over to the bear and began to skin it.
Terl lay and looked at him. At length he realized he had better check himself out. A pain in his back, a rip in his collar, a bit of green blood on his paw. He tested his back. It was nothing serious. He went over to the car and sat down on a seat with the doors open and hunched there, still looking at Jonnie.
“You’re not going to carry that hide inside this car,” said Terl.
Jonnie didn’t look up from his skinning. “I’ll lash it on top.”
At length Jonnie bundled up the hide and went over to the youngest cow. Working deftly with the sharp glass, he took out the tenderloin and tongue, cut a haunch, and wrapped them in the bear hide.
Jonnie took some thongs from his pouch and lashed the hide with its meat to a gunmount on the car top.
Then he handed the blast rifle to Terl. “The safety is on,” he said. He was cleaning himself up with handfuls of grass.
Terl looked at him. Fear? Fear be damned. This animal had no fear in him.
Leverage. It had to be leverage. Lots of it!
“Get in,” said Terl. “It’s getting late.”
8
The following day, Terl was again a blur of activity. He was getting ready for another interview with Numph.
He rushed about doing mutiny interviews, recording each one on a type of tape that could be cut and spliced. It was a very artful task, requiring the greatest care. He approached numbers of employees on the job, inside the compound and out.
The interviews went very smoothly and rapidly.
Terl would ask, “What company regulations do you know concerning mutiny?” The employees, sometimes startled, always suspicious, would quote what they knew or thought they knew concerning mutiny.
The security chief would then request, “In your own words, tell me your opinion of mutiny.” The employees would of course get long-winded and reassuring: “Mutiny is a very bad thing. Executives would cause vaporizations wholesale and no one would be safe. I sure never intend to advocate or take part in any mutiny.”
The interviews went on and on through the day, Terl rushing about, mask on outside, mask off inside. Recording, recording, recording. He always wound up an interview shaking his head and smiling and saying it was just routine and they knew how it was with management being what it was, and he, Terl, was on the employee’s side. But he left a bit of worry in his wake, employees vowing to themselves to have nothing whatever to do with any mutiny, pay cut or no pay cut.
From time to time, passing through his office, Terl would look at the image of the cage where the high button cameras still performed their guard duty. Curiosity and a vague unease made him keep checking.
The animal seemed very industrious. It had been up with first light. It had worked and worked, scraping the bear hide clean, and had taken old ashes and worked them into it. The hide was now hanging, pinned to the bars.
Then the fire had been built up and an odd network of branches, sort of racks, had been made, around the fireplace. The beef was cut into long, thin strips and hung on the racks near the fire. Leaves from the chopped-up trees kept being put on the fire, creating a great deal of smoke, and the smoke was winding around the meat.
Terl could not quite make out what the animal was really doing. But toward the end of the day he thought he knew. The animal was observing some kind of religious ritual having to do with spring. He had read something about this in the Chinko guidebooks. They had dances and other silly things. The smoke was supposed to carry the spirits of slain animals to the gods. Yesterday they had certainly slain enough animals. The thought of it made Terl’s back twinge.
He had never believed any of these Earth creatures could actually hurt a Psychlo, but that grizzly bear had shaken his confidence slightly. It had been an awfully big bear—it weighed almost as much as Terl himself.
Probably come sunset, the animal down there in the cage would build the fire up and begin to dance or something. He concluded it wasn’t up to anything dangerous and kept on with his headlong interviewing.
That night the recreation hall saw nothing of Terl. And he also forgot to see whether the animal danced. He was too busy with his tapes.
Working with an expertise only a trained security chief cherished, Terl was editing tapes, slicing out single words and even phrases and juggling them about.
By his readjusting of word positions and scrapping of whole paragraphs, employees began to say things on the reels that were building up that could hang them.
A typical answer would become, “I intend to advocate mutiny. In any mutiny it would be safe to vaporize executives.” It was painstaking work. And the reels built up.
Finally he copied them onto new, clean disks that would show no sign of editing or splicing, and with the east graying he sat back, finished.
Yawning, he puttered around, cleaning up, destroying the originals and the scraps, waiting for breakfast time. He realized he had forgotten to keep an eye on the animal to see whether it danced.
Terl decided he needed sleep more than breakfast and laid himself down for a short nap. His appointment with Numph was not until after lunch.
Later he was to tell himself that it was because he had missed both breakfast and lunch that he made the blunder.
The interview began well enough. Numph was sitting at his upholstered desk sucking at an after-lunch saucepan of kerbango. He was his usual bumbling self.
“I have the results of the investigation you requested,” Terl began.
“What?”
“I interviewed a lot of local employees.”
“About what?”
“Mutiny.”
Numph was immediately alert.
Terl put the disk player on Numph’s desk and made ready to play the “interviews,” saying, “These are all very secret, of course. The employees were told that no one would hear about it and they did not know the interviews were recorded.”
“Wise. Wise,” said Numph. He had laid the saucepan aside and was all attention.
Terl let the disks spin one after another. The effect was everything he had hoped for. Numph looked grayer and grayer. When the disks were finished
Numph poured himself a saucepan full of kerbango and sucked it down in one whoosh. Then he just sat there.
If ever he had seen guilt, Terl decided, he was seeing it now. Numph’s eyes were hunted.
“Therefore,” said Terl, “I advise that we keep all this secret. We must not let them know what each is actually thinking, for it would lead them to conspire and actually mutiny.”
“Yes!” said Numph.
“Good,” said Terl. “I have prepared certain papers and orders about this.” He put the sheaf on Numph’s desk. “The first one is an order to me to take what measures I deem necessary to handle this matter.”
“Yes!” said Numph and signed it.
“The second one is to strip all arsenals of all minesites and keep all weapons under lock and key.”
“Yes!” said Numph and signed it.
“This next one is to retrieve any battle planes from other minesites and localize them under seals, except those I might need.”
“Yes,” said Numph and signed it.
Terl removed that which had been signed and left Numph staring at the next one.
“What’s this?” said Numph.
“Authority to round up and train man-animals on machine operation so that company ore shipments can be kept rolling in event of deaths of company employees or refusals to work.”
“I don’t think it’s possible,” said Numph.
“It’s only a threat to force employees back to work. You know and I know it is not really feasible.”
Numph signed it doubtfully and only because it said: “Emergency plan, strategic alternative ploy. Objective: employee dissuasion from strike.”
And then Terl made his blunder. He took the signed authorization and added it to the rest. “It permits us to handle forced reduction of employees,” he commented. Afterward he realized he need not have said a thing.
“Oh?” said Numph.
“And I am sure,” Terl had gone on, confirming his blunder, “I am very certain that your nephew Nipe would heartily approve of it.”
“Approve of what?”
“Reduction of employee numbers,” Terl rattled on.
And then Terl saw it. There was a relieved look on Numph’s face—a knowing look—a look of realization that gave Numph great satisfaction.
Numph gave Terl an almost amused glance. Relief seemed to soak into him. Confidence took the place of fear.
Terl knew he had messed it up. He had had only a hint of the leverage connected to Nipe. And right now he had been guilty of exposing that he was only pretending he knew. Numph knew that Terl really didn’t know. And Terl never had really known what Numph was up to. A real blunder.
“Well,” said Numph, suddenly expansive, “you just run along now and do your job. I’m sure everything will work out just fine.”
Terl stopped outside the door. What the blast was the leverage? What was the real story behind it? Numph was no longer afraid. Terl could hear him chuckling.
The security chief threw off the black cloud that threatened. He moved off. At least he had the animals and he could carry on. And when he had finished with them he could vaporize them. He wished he could also vaporize Numph!
Leverage, leverage. He had none on Numph. And he had none at all on the animal.
Terl would have to get busy.
9
The transshipment air was a loud clatter of hurtling shapes under the spring sun. A freighter had just roared in and the ore it spilled was racketing onto the field. The blade machines were nudging about, hurrying the ore to the conveyors. The giant buckets clanked and rattled, halting jerkily to spill their contents on the conveyor belt. Huge fans roared to blast dust in the air. A fall of ore flowed onto the transshipment platform.
Jonnie sat amid the din, chained to the controls of the dust analyzer, sprayed with fanned dirt and half-deafened from the clamor.
What he was doing was cross-testing the consecutive loads on the belt for uranium. The fans beat a fog of ore particles into the air at this point in the progressive steps. It was Jonnie’s job to throw a lever that sent beams through the whirlwind, check the panel to see whether a purple or a red light went on, and throw levers that sent the ore on for transshipment (purple), or dumped it to the side and sounded an alarm (red). When the red came on, it was urgent to dump.
He was not operating independently. He was closely supervised by Ker, the assistant operations officer of the minesite. Ker was protected by domed headgear. Jonnie was catching the hurricane of dust and din full in the eyes and face. He did not even have goggles. Ker walloped him on the shoulder to indicate that this bucketful could be sent on, and Jonnie thrust at the levers.
Ker had been carefully chosen by the security chief as the very fellow to instruct the animal in the operation of minesite machinery. And Terl had his reasons.
A midget for a Psychlo, Ker was only seven feet tall. He was a “geysermouth,” as they called it, since he chattered incessantly; nobody bothered to listen to him. He had no friends but tried to make them. He was reputedly dimwitted even though he knew his machines well. If these reasons were not enough, Terl had leverage: he had caught Ker in a compromising situation involving two female Psychlo clerks in an out-of-bounds operations office. Terl had picto-recorded but not reported it, and Ker and the females had been very grateful. There were other things: Ker was a habitual criminal who had taken employment on Earth one jump ahead of arrest, and Terl had fixed up a name change. Before the animal idea had occurred to Terl, he had tried to work out something involving Ker, but it would have been impossible for a Psychlo to go into those mountains, and he had been forced to abandon taking Ker into his confidence.
But Ker had his uses. He was chattering away now, voice dimmed by the helmet he wore and by the din. “You have to be sure to detect every scrap of radiation dust. Not one isotope must get through to the platform.”
“What would it cause?” shouted Jonnie.
“There’d be a spark-flash on the home planet, like I told you. The teleportation platform there would get disrupted and we’d catch blazes. It’s just the dust. You have to make sure there’s none in the dust. No uranium!”
“Has it ever happened?” shouted Jonnie.
“Blast, no!” roared Ker. “And it never will.”
“Just dust?” said Jonnie.
“Just dust.”
“What about a solid piece of uranium?”
“You won’t detect that.”
“Would anything detect it?”
“We never ship it!”
They got along pretty well. At first Ker had thought the animal was a peculiar thing. But it seemed friendly and Ker didn’t have any friends. And the animal asked questions constantly and Ker loved to talk. Better an animal audience than none at all. Besides, it was a favor to Terl and staved off possible disclosures.
Terl brought the man-thing down each morning, tied it up to the machine it would operate, and picked it up each night. Ker, much cautioned and threatened with the consequences if Jonnie got loose, had the right to untie the animal and put it on another machine.
The regular operator this morning was glad of a break. The post was extremely dangerous and had killed several Psychlos in past decades. One usually got danger pay for it, but that was now suspended with the economy wave.
The freighter load was handled. The last bucketful went by on the conveyor belt position and the whole area drifted down to momentary idleness. The regular operator came back, looking suspiciously at his equipment.
“Did it break anything?” said the regular operator with a talon jerk at Jonnie.
“It hasn’t broke anything around here yet,” said Ker defensively.
“I heard it blew up a blade scraper.”
“Oh, that scraper was one that had already blown up,” said Ker. “You know the one a few months ago that got Waler.”
“Oh, that one. The one that got a hairline crack in its canopy?”
“Yeah,” said Ker. “That one.”
/>
“I thought this animal blew it up.”
“That’s just that Zzt making excuses for lack of maintenance.”
Nevertheless the regular operator carefully checked over his uranium detection station.
“Why are you so nervous about it?” said Jonnie.
“Hey,” said the regular operator, “it talks Psychlo!”
“He could have a leak in his helmet,” explained Ker to Jonnie. “Or you could have left some dust on the controls.”
Jonnie looked at the regular operator. “You ever have a helmet blow up?”
“Blazes, no! I’m still alive, ain’t I? And I ain’t going to have any breathe-gas blow up around me. Get off my machine. Another freighter is coming in.”
Ker untied the animal and led it over to the shade of a power pylon. “That about completes you on the transshipment machinery. Tomorrow I’m going to start you on actual mining.”
Jonnie looked around. “What’s that little house over there?”
Ker looked. It was a small domed structure with a bunch of cooling coils on the back of it. “Oh, the morgue. Company orders require all dead Psychlos to get returned to home planet.”
Jonnie was interested. “Sentiment? Families?”
“Oh, no. Blazes, no. Nothing silly like that. They got some dumb idea that if an alien race had dead Psychlos to fool around with they could work out the metabolism and get up to mischief. Also, it’s a sort of nose count. They don’t want names riding on a payroll after a guy is dead—somebody else could collect the pay. It used to be done.”
“What happens with them—the corpses?”
“Oh, we let them collect and then schedule their teleportation back, just like any other package. When they get them home they bury them. The company has its own cemetery on Psychlo.”
“Must be quite a planet.”
Ker glowed with a smile. “You can say that! None of these damned helmets or canopies. Unlimited breathe-gas! The whole atmosphere is breathe-gas. Wonderful. Good gravity, not thin like this. Everything a gorgeous purple. And females aplenty! When I get out of here, maybe—if Terl fixes it so I can—I’m going to have ten wives and just sit all day chomping kerbango and rolling the females.”