Snith nodded gravely. “Just so! They won’t agree to it.” This Psychlo knew when he was in a boxed ambush. Maybe he could do business with him after all.
Terl had his answer. The piece of crap couldn’t do common arithmetic! “You were hired, you say, by the international bank to take Kishangani of Haut-Zaïre and then take Kinshasa and overthrow the government and wait for bank representatives to come in and negotiate for proper payment of loans. Is that right?”
Snith had said nothing of the sort, not in that detail. The legends were a trifle vague. But he realized abruptly that he was talking to somebody who really knew his business.
Terl always knew his business. He hadn’t even bothered to review any of this. It was a security chief joke and had been for more than a thousand years on this planet. They had had all the details from a captured mercenary, properly interrogated over several days way back when; it had made delicious reading. “But your ancestors,” Terl bore on remorselessly, “only captured Kishangani. They never went on to capture Kinshasa.”
Snith had dimly known that, but he had hoped it wouldn’t come up. His ancient forebears had been crudely interrupted by the Psychlo invasion. He wasn’t sure what was coming now.
“You see,” said Terl, “the international bank has been taken over.” He hoped this crap brain would swallow this outrageous set of lies. “The Galactic Bank, located in the Gredides System, bought them out.”
“Gredides System?” gawped Snith.
“You know,” said Terl, “Universe Eight.” This much was true, where the Galactic Bank was. Always sweeten lies with a little truth.
“Ah,” said Snith, totally adrift. He better watch it. This Psychlo would swindle him. It had happened before. He was on the alert.
“And,” lied Terl, “you will be glad to know that it took over all obligations of the international bank and that includes yours.” This quick reversal almost spun Snith.
“So as one of the agents for the Galactic Bank,” (if he only were!) “I am authorized to pay you the back pay. But your ancestors only did half their job so you only get half the back pay. That would be five hundred thousand dollars.” He was wondering what a dollar was. “I’m sure that will be acceptable.”
Snith came out of his fog like a shot. He had expected nothing! “Yes,” he said deliberately, “I think I can persuade my men to accept that.” Creepo! That would be ten dollars a man and the rest for himself. Riches!
“Now is there any other trouble? Quarters? They found you quarters?”
Snith said yes, they’d given them a whole “serbub” in the town up there, a square mile of old houses and buildings in the outskirts. Bad repair, but palaces really.
“You should also insist on some uniforms,” said Terl. He was looking at this filthy creature over there in its monkey skins and crossed bandoliers of poisoned arrows and a diamond in a peaked leather cap. “You should also clean yourself up, comb your fur. Look more military.”
This was rank criticism! Snith became very cross. He himself was spit and polish and so was his unit. All twenty of his commandos, fifty men in each, properly officered, trained to the nth degree! (He slowed down, hoping they wouldn’t notice it was only thirty-five to the commando these days, the food situation being what it had become.)
“And food?” said Terl.
Snith was startled. Could this Psychlo read his mind? “Food is bad!” said Snith. “There be plenty of dead bodies in those houses, but they be old and dried and unfit to eat. There would got to be a clause in any future contract about better food!”
Belatedly, Terl remembered that these Brigantes were reputed cannibals, a fact that had lessened their trade with the minesite over the centuries. Sternly he said, “There can be no such clause!” His whole plan could be wrecked if they threw these creatures out. His studies, when he was doing the lode plan, had isolated some data in Chinko books indicating that these human animals curiously objected to cannibalism. He had at onetime considered using the Brigantes for his gold plan but they had been far away, and also they might have run around yammering about no food due to the scarcity of humans in these parts.
“For the duration of this contract,” said Terl, “you will just have to put up with cattle as food.”
“It tastes funny,” said the Brigante chief. He was willing to concede the point. His brigade had had to eat an awful lot of water buffalo and monkey and elephant. But it wouldn’t do to be too agreeable. Be a hard bargainer! “But all right, if the pay is good.”
Terl told him then that he himself intended to go back to Psychlo very soon and he would personally collect their back pay at the Galactic Bank and return it here. And that meanwhile they should hire on as the sentries and military force of this compound and the council.
“You’ll bring the back-pay back?” said Snith. “All half-million?”
“Yes, you have my word on it.”
The word of a Psychlo? Snith said, “I and six of my picked men will go with you to see that you do!”
Although Terl didn’t know whether the imperial government would want to interrogate them—the imperial government would want a very important, knowledgeable man—he readily agreed. Who cared about what happened to Snith once Terl’s plan was executed!
“Of course, and welcome,” smiled Terl. “Providing of course you help me all you can until we go. Anything else?”
Yes, there was. Snith fished out something and gingerly approached the cage. He laid it down between the temporarily de-electrified bars and withdrew, as was proper.
Terl tugged his chain over and picked the item up.
“They want to pay us in that stuff,” said Snith. “It’s only printed on one side and I think it might be counterfeit!”
Terl took it closer to a cage light. What was this thing? He couldn’t read any of the characters on it. “I doubt you can even read this!” he challenged.
“Oh yes, I did,” said Snith. He couldn’t read either, but somebody had read it to him. “It do say it is one credit and is legal for payment of all debts. And around the picture it says, ‘Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, The Conqueror of the Psychlos.’” That was what disturbed him really, that the Psychlos were said to have been conquered.
Terl thought fast. “Indeed it is a counterfeit and a lie as well!”
“I thought so,” said Snith. They always tried to trick you. His ancestors had known that very firmly. Trick before you are tricked, they used to say about all dealings.
“But I’ll tell you what I will do,” said Terl into the mine radio. “Just so you know who you are really working for, you accept this and say nothing, and when we get to the Galactic Bank, I will redeem it in cold, hard cash!”
That was fair. Now he knew who he was really working for. Made a lot of sense, quite proper. Paid by one group, but working for another. This Psychlo was straight after all.
“That’s fine,” said Snith. “By the way, I know that man in the picture.”
Terl looked closer. The light had been bad. By crap, it did look like his animal! He tried to remember whether he had ever heard its name. Yes, he dimly recalled the strange words. Yes, it was the damned animal!
“That bird just waltzed in and wiped out a whole commando of mine,” said Snith. “Not too long ago. Attacked them without even a salute, mowed them down. And then stole their bodies and a truckload of trade goods!”
“Where?”
“In the forest, where else?”
This was news! His intelligence said that this creature in the picture had been flying around visiting tribes! Or maybe this was how he visited tribes! That was probably it. Terl knew he himself would visit tribes that way. Ah, well, he knew Staffor would be very, very happy indeed to know that! The animal was not where he was thought to be and he was making war on peaceful tribes. Staffor was a very apt political pupil. Now he would make him a very apt military pupil: in the dumb way that was the only one possible.
But to business. He put the bank note back on the le
dge between the bars, withdrew, and Snith retrieved it.
“So we’ve settled the contract matter and you can negotiate it further,” said Terl. “Get settled in, and in a very few weeks or even sooner you’ll be doing your duty here. Right?”
“Indeed so,” said Snith.
“And as a bonus,” said Terl, “I’ll persuade certain parties to authorize you to kill the animal who wronged you on sight.”
That was very, very good. And Snith was driven back to the old city by a dutiful Lars, who endured the stink in the name of spreading the righteous creed of fascism and the great military leader, Hitler.
9
The underground room at the Lake Victoria minesite was chilled. Angus had rigged heavy-duty motor cooling coils along the wall and the humidity in the air dripped from them and made dark pools along the floor.
The metal and mineral analysis machine hummed; its screen cast an eerie green light on everything around it. Five tense faces were turned to that screen: Dr. MacKendrick’s, Angus’s, Sir Robert’s, Dunneldeen’s and Jonnie’s.
Massive, more than eighteen inches in diameter, the ugly head of the Psychlo corpse lay on the machine’s plate. Such a head was mostly bone. It bore considerable resemblance to a human head and could be mistaken for one in bad light, but where a human had hair, eyebrows, fleshy lips, nose and ears, the Psychlo had bone whose shape was more or less the same as the corresponding human features, and the distribution and spacing were similar; the result was a kind of caricature of a human head. Until you touched the features, they did not seem to be bone, but contact proved them hard and unyielding.
The analysis machine was not penetrating the head. Not only were the features bone, but the whole top half of the skull was bone. As the parson in his earlier, inexpert autopsy had discovered, the brain was low down and to the back; he had discovered nothing in the brain because he had not opened the brain of the cadavers.
“Bone!” said Angus. “It’s almost as hard to penetrate as metal!”
Jonnie could attest to that from the negligible effects of his kill-club on Terl’s skull back in the morgue.
Angus was resetting dials. The Psychlo letters were codings for various metals and ores. He swung the intensity dial up five clicks.
“Wait!” said MacKendrick. “Back it up one! I thought I saw something.”
Angus backed the intensity of penetration dial back one, then two. It was sitting on “Lime” now.
There was a hazy difference in density on the screen, one little spot. Angus adjusted the beam’s “in depth” control, focusing it. The internal bones and fissures of the skull came clear on the screen. Five pairs of eyes watched intensely.
The Scot’s fingers took another knob, one that swept a second beam to various positions in the subject.
“Wait,” said MacKendrick. “Move the beam back to about two inches behind the mouth cavity. There! Now focus it again.” Then, “That’s it!”
There was something there, something hard and black on the screen that was not passing waves at this intensity. Angus touched the recorder of the machine and the whir-flap sound of registry of the images on the paper roll was loud.
“They do have something in their skulls!” said Robert the Fox.
“Not so fast,” said MacKendrick. “We jump to no conclusions. It could be some fragment of an old injury, some metal picked up in a mine explosion.”
“Naw, naw, naw,” said Robert the Fox. “It’s very plain!”
Jonnie had pulled out the recording sheets. They had the metal analysis trace squiggling down one side. He had left the Psychlo metal analysis code book, usually used to analyze drone transmissions as they hunted a surface for ore, outside. It was chill and dank and odorous in this room and he didn’t care much for this job, vital as it was. He took this opportunity to go out and look it up.
Page after page he compared the squiggle he had with the illustrations. It took a long time. He was no expert at this. He couldn’t find it. Then he got clever and began to compare composites of two squiggle illustrations.
The Psychlo engineers who would do this sort of thing could probably have told him with no code book. He cursed the anger of the Russians who, believing they were avenging their colonel, had slaughtered the Psychlos. The four in the guarded room of the dormitory were in very bad condition. Two of them were ordinary miners, one was an executive by his clothes and papers, and the other was an engineer. MacKendrick was very doubtful that they would make it. He had extracted bullets and sewn them up but they were all still unconscious or appeared so, and they lay there in the breathe-gas ventilated room, chained to their beds, breathing shallowly. There wasn’t even a first-aid handbook for Psychlos that Jonnie had ever seen. He didn’t think there was one issued. The company might require all bodies to be returned but it didn’t require that anybody keep them alive—a fact that tended to confirm that the sole reason for returning dead Psychlo bodies was to prevent examination by alien eyes—there was no sentiment involved. There were never even any hospital sections in these compounds, and mine accidents were very frequent.
Hold it. One of these squiggles in the book almost matched: copper! Now if he could find the little tail squiggle somewhere—here it was: tin! He overlaid the two squiggles. They seemed to match better. Copper and tin? Not quite. There was a tiny squiggle remaining. He searched for it. He found it: lead!
Mainly copper, some tin and a little bit of lead! He put the patterns one on top of the other. They matched now.
There was another code book, very thick, called Composite Ore Bodies for Drone Scan Analysis, and because it had about ten thousand characters in it, he had shunned it. But this one he had just done made a look-up easy. He looked under “Copper Deposits,” and then its subheading, “Tin Deposits,” and then its sub-subheading, “Lead Deposits,” and he found his squiggle. Not only that, he found, by comparing it to variations, that the analysis of “per-elevens” (Psychlos used the eleven integer) was five copper, four tin and two lead.
He went further and looked this up in a man-book and it said Bronze for such a combination. Apparently it was a very durable alloy that lasted for centuries and there had even been a Bronze Age where implements were mainly bronze. Great. But it struck him as funny that an advanced technical race should be using ancient bronze in a skull. Amusing.
He went back inside with his findings to discover that MacKendrick, with a hammer and chisel-like instrument, had been taking the head apart. Jonnie was just as glad not to have been around to watch that.
“We searched all through the rest of the skull with the machine,” said Angus. “That’s the only odd thing in there.”
“I went through its pockets,” said Robert the Fox. “He is the lowest-class miner. His identity card says his name was Cla and he had forty-one years’ service and three wives back on Psychlo.”
“The company paid them benefits?” said Dunneldeen.
“No,” said Robert the Fox, showing him the crumpled record, “it says here the company paid him also for the female earnings in a company ‘house,’ whatever that is.”
“The economics of Psychlo husbandry,” said Dunneldeen, “are a credit to their morality.”
“Don’t joke,” said Jonnie. “The object in his head is an alloy called ‘bronze.’ It is not magnetic, worse luck. It would have to be operated out. It can’t be pulled out with a magnet.”
Dr. MacKendrick now had the brain laid bare. With a surgeon’s skill, he was parting things that looked like cords.
And there it was!
It was shaped like two half-circles back to back and the circles were slightly closed, each one around a separate cord.
“I think these are nerves,” said MacKendrick. “We will know shortly.” He was delicately pulling the objects off the cords. He wiped the green blood off it and put it on the table. “Don’t touch any of this,” said MacKendrick. “Autopsies can be deadly.”
Jonnie looked at the thing. It was a dull yellow. It wa
s about half an inch across at its widest point.
Angus picked it up with a tweezer and put it on the analysis machine plate. “It’s not hollow,” he said. “It’s just solid. Just a piece of metal.”
MacKendrick had a little box with wires and clips on it. It had a small fuel cartridge in it to generate electricity. But before he connected anything with his gloved hands he was distracted by the character of these cords in the head. It was a brain, but it was vastly different from a human brain.
He cut off a small cord end and a slice of skin from the cadaver’s paw and went over to an old makeshift microscope. He made a slide from a thin specimen and looked into the eyepiece.
MacKendrick whistled in surprise. “A Psychlo isn’t made of cells. I don’t know their metabolism but their structure isn’t cellular. Viral! Yes. Viral!” He turned to Jonnie. “You know, big as a Psychlo is, his basic structure seems to be clumps of viruses.” He saw Jonnie looking at him askance and added, “Purely academic interest. It does mean, however, that their bodies probably hold together much tighter and have a greater density. Probably of no interest to you. Well, let’s get to work on these cords.”
He attached one clip to the end of a cord in the brain and grounded the other on an arm and, watching a meter, measured the resistance of the cord to electrical flow. When he had determined that, he stood back and touched a button to send electricity through the cord.
The others felt their hair rise.
The Psychlo cadaver moved its left foot.
“Good,” said MacKendrick. “Nerves. There is no rigor mortis in these bodies and they’re still flexible. I have found the nerve that relays walk commands.” He put a little tag on the nerve. He had marked the places from which they had removed the metal with a spot of dye on each of the two nerves involved with it. But he wasn’t checking those yet.
His spectators were quite horrified to see, as MacKendrick identified nerves with tags, a Psychlo cadaver that moved its claws, clenched the remains of its jaw, moved an ear, and lolled out its tongue, one after the other as various nerves were given an electrical jolt.