Jonnie expelled a sigh of relief. He hadn’t known about the buffalo but he had intended them to think the rest of it. He had even recovered the burned-off thong. The explosion would have masked the other damage, and he’d found his kill-club in a mad last-second scramble before escape. Yes, there was no evidence.
“What a raid!” exulted Dunneldeen. “And ooo what a bonnie chief our Jonnie is!”
Jonnie sipped at the whiskey the parson gave him to hide his embarrassment.
“You’re a scamp,” said Robert the Fox to Dunneldeen. “You might have been caught.”
“Ah, bit we haed tae know noo, didn’t we?” laughed Dunneldeen, unabashed.
They wanted to parade the pipers. But Robert the Fox would give no clue to the eyes of a watching enemy that tonight was any different. He sent them to bed.
Well, thought Jonnie, as he settled down in the wool plaid blanket, they had their uranium detector, perhaps.
But that didn’t help Chrissie. No radio. No personal contact. How was he going to force Terl to come over?
5
A haggard, nervous Terl approached the rendezvous. He drove his armored ground car with one paw and held the other on the firing triggers of the fully charged heavy guns.
He had not figured out Jayed’s presence on Earth. The Imperial Bureau of Investigation agent had been assigned to a lowly ore-sorting post by personnel; Terl had not dared suggest any assignment. An ore sorter only worked when there was ore coming up at the end of shifts, and a fellow could disappear off the post for hours and not be missed and reappear as though he’d been there all the time. Terl dared not put surveillance equipment near him for Jayed was a past master at that, after decades in the I.B.I.
Terl had tried to get Jayed involved with Chirk, his secretary. He offered Chirk wild promises if she could get Jayed into bed with her—with a button camera of the smallest size imbedded in a mole. But Jayed had paid no attention to her. He had just gone on shuffling about, head down, giving the exact appearance of an employee up to absolutely nothing. But what else? That was how the I.B.I. would work.
With shaking paws Terl had ransacked the dispatch boxes to home planet. There was nothing from Jayed in them. No new types of reports, no strange alterations of routine paper. Terl had spent agonizing nights going through the traffic. He could find nothing.
Rumbling about, feeling like he was spinning, Terl had tried to figure out whether the I.B.I. had invented some new means of communication. The company and the imperial government did not invent things—they had not, to Terl’s knowledge, for the last hundred thousand years. But still, there could always be something he didn’t know about. Like writing on ore samples being shipped through. But it would take specially designated ore and there was no departure he could find.
The imperial government was usually only interested in the company’s ore volumes—the government got a percentage. But it could also intervene in matters of serious crime or intended crime.
Terl could not find what Jayed was doing. And the appearance of a deadly secret agent on the base, with falsified papers, had not permitted Terl a single relaxed moment for the past two months.
He did his own work with a fury and an impeccable thoroughness quite foreign to him. He got through investigations at once. He answered all dispatches at once. Anything questionable in his files was buried or destroyed at once. Terl had even personally overhauled and fueled and charged the twenty battle planes in the field so that he would appear alert and efficient.
He had filed a banal report about the animals. There were dangerous posts in mining, slopes one could not get into, and as an experiment “ordered by Numph,” he had rounded up a few animals to see whether they could run simpler machine types. The animals were not dangerous; they were actually stupid and slow to learn. It did not cost the company anything and it might increase their profits in case the experiment worked out. It was not very successful yet anyway. Nothing was taught the animals about metallurgy or warfare, both because of company policy and because they were too stupid. They ate rats, a vermin plentiful on this planet. He sent the report through with no priority. He was covered. He hoped.
But fifteen times a day Terl decided that he should wipe out the animals and return the machines to storage. And fifteen times a day he decided to go on with it just a little longer.
The sentry affair had disturbed him, not because Psychlos had been killed (he needed the dead bodies for his plans), but because one of the sentries, when Terl put the body in a coffin for transshipment next year, had had a criminal brand burned into the fur of his chest. This three-bar brand was put on criminals by the imperial government. It represented someone “barred from justice procedures, barred from government assistance, and barred from employment.” It meant the personnel department on the home planet was careless. He had made an innocuous report of it.
For a flaming moment of hope he thought perhaps Jayed might be investigating that or looking for some such. But when he had a fellow employee mention it casually to Jayed, no interest had been shown.
Terl simply could not find out what Jayed was looking for, nor why Jayed was there. The tension and uncertainty of it had brought him near to perpetual hysteria.
And this morning, out of the blue, the animal had done something that literally stood Terl’s fur on end with terror.
As was his usual practice, Terl was stripping the day’s photos from the recon drone receiver, when he found himself looking at a photo of the minesite with a sign in it.
There, sharp and clear, at the lode, was the animal steadying a huge twelve-by-twelve-foot sign. It was resting on a flat place the animals had made back of the lode. In clearest Psychlo script it said:
URGENT
Meeting Vital.
Same place. Same time.
That was bad enough! But a machine tarpaulin seemed to have fallen over the last part of the sign. There was another line. It said:
The w——
Terl couldn’t read the rest of it.
The stupid animal apparently had not noticed part of its sign was obscured.
With shaking claws, Terl had tried to find another frame in the sequence that looked back of the tarpaulin. He could not.
Panic gripped him.
Gradually his scattered wits collected down to seething anger. The panic died out as he realized that his was the only recon drone receiver on the planet; the telltale on the side of it that showed whether anything else was receiving was mute. He daily watched these photos and had exactly tracked the progress at the lode. The animal he had captured always seemed to be there with a crew. While all these animals looked alike, he thought he could recognize the blond beard and size of the one he had trained. This usually reassured him, for it seemed to mean the animal was busy and not wandering around elsewhere.
The progress at the lode was minimal but he knew the problems of mining it, and he also knew they might solve them without his advice. He had months to go—four months more, actually—before Day 92.
He got over his panic and shredded the photos. Jayed had no possible access to them.
But to directly link Terl with the project was not to be allowed. He began to imagine that the sign had started with his name and regretted having shredded it so fast. He should have made sure. Maybe it did start: “Terl!”
Terl was not introspective enough to realize that he was bordering upon insanity.
The darkness spread like a black sack over the tank. He had been driving on instruments without lights. It was treacherous terrain: an old city had been here once, but it was now just a honeycomb of abandoned mine holes where the company had followed an old deposit centuries before.
Something showed on his detector screen right ahead. Something live!
His paw rested alertly on the firing knob, ready to blast. He cautiously made sure he was headed away from the compound and masked by a hill and ancient walls. Then he turned on a dim inspection light.
The animal was sitting
on a horse at the rendezvous point. It was a different horse, a wild horse nervous because of the tank. The dim, green tank light bathed the rider. There was another, someone else! No, it was just another horse . . . it had a large pack on its back.
Terl swept his scanners around. No, there was nobody else here. He looked back at the animal. Terl’s paw quivered an inch above the firing lever. The animal did not seem to be alarmed.
The interior of the tank was compressed with breathe-gas but Terl also had on a breathe-mask. He adjusted it.
Terl picked up an intercom unit and pushed it through the atmosphere-tight firing port. The unit fell to the ground outside the tank. Terl picked up the interior unit.
“Get down off that horse and pick up this intercom,” ordered Terl.
Jonnie slid off the half-broken horse and approached the tank. He picked the unit off the ground and looked through the tank ports for Terl. He could see nothing. The interior was dark and the glass was set to block a view in.
Through the intercom, Terl said, “Did you kill those sentries?”
Jonnie held the outside unit to his face. He thought fast. This Terl was in a very strange state. “We haven’t lost any sentries,” he said truthfully.
“You know the sentries I mean. At the compound.”
“Have you had trouble?” said Jonnie.
The word trouble almost made Terl’s head spin. He didn’t know what trouble he had, or what kind of trouble, or from where. He got a grip on himself.
“You obscured the last part of that sign,” he said accusingly.
“Oh?” said Jonnie innocently. He had obscured it on purpose so that Terl would come. “It meant to say, ‘The winter is advancing and we need your advice.’”
Terl simmered down. Advice. “About what?” He knew about what. It was next to impossible to get out that gold. But there had to be a way. And he was a miner. Top student of the school, actually. And he studied the recon drone pictures daily. He knew the flexing rods would not let them build a platform. “You need a portable shaft stairway. You’ve got one in your equipment. You nail it to the outside face and work from it.”
“All right,” said Jonnie. “We’ll try it.” He had Terl calmer now that he was on a routine subject of interest.
“We also need some protection in case of uranium,” said Jonnie.
“Why?”
“There’s uranium in those mountains,” said Jonnie.
“In the gold?”
“I don’t think so. In the valleys and around.” Jonnie thought he had better emphasize that Terl was barred from those places, and also he was desperate for the data. He could not experiment with uranium without protection from it. “I’ve seen men turn blotchy from it,” he added, which was true but not of his present crew.
This seemed to cheer Terl up. “No crap?” he said.
“What gear protects one?”
Terl said, “There’s always radiation around on a planet like this and a sun like this. Small amounts. That’s why these breathe-masks have leaded glass in their faceplates. That’s why all the canopies are leaded glass. You don’t have any.”
“It’s lead that protects one?”
“You’ll just have to take your chances,” said Terl, amused, feeling better.
“Can you turn a light up here?” asked Jonnie. There was a thump as he laid a sack on the flat section in front of the windscreen.
“I don’t want any lights.”
“Do you think you were followed?”
“No. That spinning disk on the roof is a detection wave neutralizer. You needn’t worry about our being traced.”
Jonnie looked up at the top of the tank. In the very dim light he could see a thing planted there. It looked like a fan. It was running.
“Turn a light on this,” said Jonnie.
Terl looked at his screens. There were no telltales. “I’ll drive ahead under that tree.”
Jonnie steadied the ore sack as Terl slowly put the car under a mask of evergreens. He stopped again and turned on a light that lit up the area in front of the windshield.
With a lift of his arm, Jonnie spilled about ten pounds of ore onto the tank bonnet. It flashed under the light. It was white quartz and wire gold. And it shone and glittered as though it had jewels in it as well. Eight pounds of it was pure wire gold from the lode.
Terl sat and stared through the windscreen at it. He swallowed hard.
“There’s a ton of it there,” said Jonnie. “If it can be gotten out. It’s in plain view.”
The Psychlo just sat and looked at the gold through the windscreen. Jonnie scattered it so it shone better.
He picked up the intercom again. “We’re keeping our bargain. You must keep yours.”
“What do you mean?” said Terl, detecting accusation.
“You promised to give food and water and firewood to the females.”
Terl shrugged. “Promises,” he said indifferently.
Jonnie put his arm around the gold and started to sweep it back into the ore sack and withdraw it.
The motion was not lost on Terl. “Quit it. How do you know they aren’t being cared for?”
Jonnie let the gold lie. He moved over so the light touched his face. He tapped a finger against his forehead. “There’s something you don’t know about humans,” said Jonnie. “They have psychic powers sometimes. I have psychic powers with those females.” It would not do to tell Terl that it was the absence of a fire or a scout that alerted him. All’s fair in love and war, as Robert the Fox would say, and this was both love and war.
“You mean without radios, right?” Terl had read about this. He hadn’t realized these animals had it. Damned animals.
“Right,” said Jonnie. “If she is not well cared for and if she isn’t all right, I know!” He tapped his head again.
“Now I have a pack here,” said Jonnie. “It has food and water and flints and firewood and warm robes and a small tent. I’m going to lash it on top of this tank and right away when you get back, you’re to put it in the cage. Also get the cage cleaned up, inside and outside, and fix the water supply.”
“It’s just the tank,” said Terl. “It goes empty, needs to be topped up. I’ve been busy.”
“And take those sentries away. You don’t need sentries!”
“How did you know there were sentries?” said Terl suspiciously.
“You just told me so, tonight,” said Jonnie into the intercom. “And my psychic powers tell me they tease her.”
“You can’t order me around,” bristled Terl.
“Terl, if you don’t take care of the females, I just might take it into my head to wander up to those sentries and mention something I know.”
“What?” demanded Terl.
“Just something I know. It wouldn’t cause you to be fired but it would be embarrassing.”
Terl suddenly vowed he had better get rid of those sentries.
“You’ll know if I don’t do these things?” said Terl.
Jonnie tapped his own forehead in the light.
But the threat had unsettled Terl’s spinning wits. On an entirely different tack he demanded, “What’ll you do with the gold if you don’t deliver it?”
“Keep it for ourselves,” said Jonnie, starting again to put it back in the bag.
Terl snarled deep and threateningly. His amber eyes flared in the darkness of the tank. “I’ll be damned if you will!” he shouted. Leverage, leverage! “Listen! Did you ever hear of a drone bomber? Hah, I thought not. Well, let me tell you something, animal: I can lift off a drone bomber and send it right over that site, right over your camp, right over any shelter, and bomb you out of existence. All by remote! You’re not as safe as you think, animal!”
Jonnie just stood there, looking at the blank, black windows of the tank as the words avalanched through the intercom.
“You, animal,” snarled Terl, “are going to mine that gold and you’re going to deliver that gold and you are going to do it all by Day 91. An
d if you don’t, I’ll blast you and all animals on this planet to hell, you hear me, to hell!” His voice ended in a shriek of hysteria and he stopped, panting.
“And when Day 91 comes, and we’ve done it?” said Jonnie.
Terl barked a sharp, hysterical laugh. He felt he really had to get control of himself. He sensed he was acting strangely. “Then you get paid!” he shouted.
“You keep your side of the bargain,” said Jonnie. “We’ll deliver it.”
Good, thought Terl. He had cowed the animal. This was more like it. “Put that pack on the tank,” he said magnanimously. “I’ll fill the water tank and clean up the place and take care of the sentries. But don’t forget my remote control box, eh? You act up and dead females!”
Jonnie tied the vital pack on the vehicle roof. In the process of doing so he removed the wave-neutralizer and put it behind a tree. Terl would think it had been knocked off by the tree branches, perhaps. It might be useful.
Terl had turned the bonnet light off and Jonnie put the ore back in the sack. He knew Terl wouldn’t take it with him.
Without saying goodbye, Terl drove off and the tank vanished.
Minutes later, when it was hidden from view and miles away, Dunneldeen climbed out of a mine hole where he had been holding a submachine gun in sweaty hands. He had realized the weapon would do nothing to that tank, but they had not expected Terl to stay in the armored vehicle. Although they would not have shot him, they thought he might have tried to kidnap Jonnie if the girls were dead. Dunneldeen gave a short whistle. Ten more Scots bobbed into view from mine holes, putting their guns on safety.
Robert the Fox came down the hill from an old ruined wall. Jonnie was still standing there looking off toward the compound.
“That demon,” said Robert the Fox, “is on the verge of insanity. Did ye ken how his talk darted this way and that? The hysteria in his laughter? He’s hard driven by something we don’t know about.”
“We didn’t know about the drone bombers,” said Dunneldeen.