MacKendrick saw their reaction. “Nothing new in this. Just electrical impulses approximating brain commands. Some man-scientist did this maybe thirteen hundred years ago and thought he’d found the secret of all thought and made up a cult about it called ‘psychology.’ Forgotten now. It wasn’t the secret of thought; it was just the mechanics of bodies. They started with frogs. I’m cataloging this body’s communication channels, that’s all.”
But it was very weird. The depths of superstition stirred in them as they saw a corpse move and breathe, and saw, for a couple of pumps, its heart beat.
MacKendrick’s gloved hands were slimy with green blood, but he moved in a very efficient and businesslike fashion until he had more than fifty little tags clipped to the nerve cords.
“Now for the answer!” said MacKendrick. He sent pulses through the two nerves to which the bronze item had been attached.
It was difficult work. The room was cold. The corpse stank, having gone even mustier than the common, rank smell of a Psychlo.
MacKendrick stood up, a little tired. “I’m sorry to say that I don’t think that piece of metal would cause any of these monsters to commit suicide. But I can make a pretty good guess now as to what it does do.”
He pointed to his tags. “Taste and sexual impulses branch off from that one as near as I can tell. Emotion and action branch off from the other one there.
“This metal clip was installed when it was an infant. See the faint, ancient scars in this side of the skull. At that time the bones would be soft and would heal fast.”
“And what does it do?” said Angus.
“My guess,” said MacKendrick, “is that it short-circuits pleasure with action. Maybe they did it to make a Psychlo happy only when he was working. But—and I can’t tell fully unless I dissect a lot of these nerves further down—I think its actual effect was to make a Psychlo enjoy cruel action.”
Suddenly Jonnie recalled an expression of Terl’s. He had seen him do something cruel and heard him mutter, “Delicious!”
“The effort,” said MacKendrick, “to make them industrious I think was miscalculated by their ancient metal specialists, and they made a race of true monsters.”
Everyone agreed with that.
“That wouldn’t make them commit suicide to protect technology!” said Robert the Fox. “You got another corpse here. He was an assistant mine manager by his papers, and got twice the pay of the one you just did. Get him on the table, man.”
MacKendrick got another table. He would have to picto-record and sketch the work he had just done.
They put the mammoth head of the second one on the machine. They had the setting now. And they looked into the dead brain of one who had been called Blo.
And Jonnie, who had been getting despondent, gruesome as this job was, suddenly smiled.
There were two metal pieces in this one’s head!
The whir-flap of the machine took the recording and he rushed out to tear through the analysis code books.
There it was, bright and clear: silver!
When he reentered the room, MacKendrick, being practiced now, had the brain stripped down. He was spot-dyeing the connections of the second bit of metal before he took it out.
It was about three-quarters of an inch long. The lack of oxygen in a Psychlo bloodstream had left it gleamingly bright. It was a cylinder. The nubs on each end were insulated from the silver.
Angus put it on the machine and it was hollow.
Jonnie made him adjust the equipment even more finely. There was a filament of some sort inside that cylinder.
They surmised they would find them in other executive corpses, so when MacKendrick had sterilized it, Jonnie cut it in half very delicately.
The inside of it resembled a component in remote controls but it was not a radio.
“I haven’t identified these nerves,” said MacKendrick, “because I can’t tell exactly what they go to right now. But I’ll work on it.”
“Could it be a thought wavelength vibrator?” asked Jonnie.
“A difference measurer?” said Angus. “Like difference of thought waves of another race?”
Jonnie would let them go on working on it, but he had a very good idea it was designed to release an impulse under certain conditions and that that impulse could cause attack and suicide.
“There’s only one thing wrong,” said MacKendrick. “It was put in an infant. Getting it out of the head of a live, adult Psychlo, through all these bones, would be a task one could never guarantee the success of.” Then he saw the look of disappointment on their faces. “But I’ll try, I’ll try!” He didn’t think it could be done. And he only had four Psychlos—and they looked like they were dying.
Part 19
1
Brown Limper Staffor chaired the council meeting in a black mood.
There they sat before the raised platform in the capitol room, wrangling, wrangling, wrangling. Disputing him, the senior councilman of the planet. Objecting to his measures.
That black fellow from Africa! That yellow creature from Asia! That tan idiot from South America! That dull, bullheaded brute from Europe! Ugh, ugh, ugh, and UGH!
Didn’t they realize he was doing the very best things that could be done for man? And wasn’t he, Brown Limper Staffor, now representing five tribes since the Brigantes had come, and he was indeed Senior Mayor America?
They were disputing the cost and contract terms of hiring the Brigantes. Of all things! The planet needed a defense force. And these clauses that he had so painstakingly sorted out—spending his valuable time hour after hour with that General Snith—were all necessary.
Senior Mayor Africa was challenging the pay. He was saying that one hundred credits per Brigante per day was excessive, that even council members only got five credits a day, and that if they spread credits around this way they would make them worthless! Wrangle, wrangle, wrangle, taking up picky and unimportant points!
Brown Limper had been making good progress. He had the council whittled down to five now, but it certainly looked like four too many!
He cudgeled his brains as to how to solve this dilemma.
Driven by Lars out to the Brigante suburb of the city that day, it is true he had been taken a bit aback by what the Brigante women were doing. Right in the streets and with no clothes on at any time. But General Snith, during their conference, had said they were just frolicking.
Coming back, Lars had been talking about that wonderful, wonderful military leader of ancient times named . . . Bitter? . . . no . . . Hitler? Yes, Hitler. How he had been a champion of racial purity and moral uprightness. Racial purity didn’t seem very interesting but “moral uprightness” had caught Brown Limper’s attention. His father had always been a champion of it.
Sitting there listening to these endless arguments and objections, he recalled a conversation—purely social—he had had with that friendly creature, Terl. It had been on the subject of leverage. If one had leverage, one could do pretty well what he pleased. Sound philosophy. Brown Limper had grasped that. He truly hoped Terl thought him an apt pupil, for he was very happy to have his friendship and help.
He sure didn’t have any leverage on this council! He tried to think of some way he could maneuver them into appointing himself and a secretary as the sole authority for the planet. He couldn’t quite come up with anything, and he pondered other things Terl had said: good, down-to-earth advice. Something about it being the right thing to do to pass a law and then arrest the violators or use their violations as leverage. Something like that.
It came to him in a flash.
He rapped for silence.
“We will table the resolution to accept the Brigante contract for now,” said Brown Limper in his best voice of authority.
They quieted down and Asia folded his robes with a gesture of—of what was that—defiance? Well, he’d take care of him!
“I have another measure,” said Brown Limper. “It has to do with morality.” And he pr
oceeded to make a speech about morality being the backbone of all societies and that officials must be honest and true and that their conduct must be beyond reproach and that they must not be discovered in any scandalous situations or circumstances.
It went down rather well. They were all reasonably honest men and they saw that official conduct should also be moral even though their different moral codes varied.
They unanimously passed the offered resolution that scandalous official conduct should result in removal from post of any offender. They felt very upright about it.
At least they had gotten one resolution passed. They adjourned.
Back in his office, Brown Limper reviewed some data with Lars about “button cameras.” Lars had some knowledge of them. Yes, he thought Terl could tell him where some were in the compound.
The following morning, when all the officials were out of their rooms at the hotel, Lars, in the name of decency, put some button cameras in unsuspected places in rooms and connected them to automatic picto-recorders. The following night, Brown Limper had a very confidential meeting with General Snith. As a result, a dozen of the better-looking Brigante women were employed at the hotel in various capacities by the manager, who was short of help, and who agreed that such good-looking women should be in posts that directly contacted his guests to make their stay more comfortable.
The evening after that, Terl thought Brown’s measures were very wise and said he was proud of him to have thought of it all on his own.
Brown Limper was very pleased and he went back to his office to work late at night assembling the steps of his plans. Notable among them were charges to bring against Jonnie Goodboy Tyler when Brown Limper at last had a free hand. The list of charges were getting pretty long, and punishment was overdue.
2
It was the dark of the moon. The lights of the cage area had been turned out. The sentry had been told to stay elsewhere.
Brown Limper sat on the ground. Terl crouched close to the bars. Lars Thorenson, using a tiny masked light to occasionally resort to his dictionary, sat between them.
Their voices were very low. There must be no possibility of any of this being overheard. Tonight was the big one!
Terl’s claws twitched and little surges of energy ran through him. This conference was so important, its successful outcome so vital to his plans, he was having trouble breathing. Yet he must sound indifferent, casual, helpful (a new word he had learned). Conflicting impulses had to be sealed off, such as reaching through the bars (which he had de-electrified, unbeknownst to them, by using the inside remote control hidden in the stones); the pleasure of tearing them with claws was very, very subordinate to what he was attempting tonight. He made himself tensely concentrate on the business at hand.
Brown Limper was relating in whispers that he had succeeded in exposing blatant scandal in the council. He had taken each of the four other Senior Mayors aside and shown them certain recordings, and they had realized their conduct was a total violation of their own laws. Each had looked at himself performing perversions he had recently been introduced to by the Brigante women, as many as four women at a time, and had agreed with shame he was a potential disgrace to the government. (Lars had trouble finding “shame” in the Psychlo dictionary, but at last discovered it in the archaic section as an old Hockner word, obsolete.)
A resolution appointed Brown Limper Staffor executive for the council, assisted by the secretary (who could sign his name after much drilling, but who otherwise could not read). The entire authority of the council now reposed in one Brown Limper Staffor as Senior Mayor Planet from here on out and forevermore as the most deserving and competent councilman. The others had packed and gone home. Brown Limper’s word was now law for the whole planet
Terl would have thought some note of elation would be detectable. That was how he would have felt. He whispered an approval and a commendation on how statesmanlike this conduct was. But Brown Limper did not brighten. “Is there something else I could help you with?” whispered Terl.
Brown Limper drew a long breath, almost a sigh of despair. He had drawn up a list of criminal charges against that Tyler.
“Good,” said Terl in a very low voice. “You now have the power to handle him. Are they strong charges?”
“Oh, yes,” whispered Brown Limper, brightening. “He interrupted a council-ordered removal of a tribe, kidnapped the coordinators, murdered some of the tribesmen, stole their goods and violated their tribal rights.”
“I should think,” whispered Terl, “that that was serious enough.”
“There’s even more,” said Brown Limper. “He ambushed a Psychlo convoy and mercilessly slaughtered it, gave no quarter and stole their vehicles.”
“You have proof of all this?” whispered Terl.
“Witnesses from the tribe are right here. And picto-recorder pictures of the ambush are being shown nightly at the Academy right over there in the hills. Lars has made copies.”
“I should think all that is more than adequate to bring about justice,” said Terl. The word “justice” was another one they had to look up in the translations going back and forth.
“There’s even more,” said Brown Limper. “When he turned over the two billion Galactic credits found at the compound, it was over three hundred credits short. That’s theft, a felony.”
Terl gasped. He wasn’t gasping at the shortage. He was gasping at two billion Galactic credits. It made the coffins he supposed were in the cemetery on Psychlo mere kerbango change.
He needed a few minutes to sort this out and he told Lars he needed a fresh breathe-gas cartridge for his mask. Lars got him one, not noticing the electrification switch had been reversed. Terl had to flip his remote, which he did in the nick of time to prevent an electrocution.
As he fitted the new cartridges in place, Terl thought furiously. Old Numph? Must have been. Why, the bumbling idiot wasn’t so bumbling after all! He’d had other swindles going for . . . thirty years? . . . must be! Two billion Galactic credits! Suddenly Terl updated his plans. He knew exactly what he could do with this. Those two billion were going into three or four sealed coffins marked “radiation killed” so they never would be opened and they were going to go right into his cemetery. He had had slightly less workable plans. He abandoned them and a whole new panorama spread before him, one that not only could not fail but also would be enormously profitable. All in a flash he had things rearranged. A plan far safer than he had had. Far more workable. No desperation in it.
The close, dark conference got going again.
“What,” whispered Terl, “is your problem really, then?” He knew what it was exactly. This idiot couldn’t lay his paws on the animal Tyler!
Brown Limper sagged once more. “It’s one thing to have charges. It’s quite another to get my hands on Tyler.”
“Hmm,” said Terl, hoping he sounded very thoughtful and considerate (a new word Terl had looked up). “Let me see. Ah. Hmm. The operating principle here is to attract him to the area.” This was just common security chief technology. “You can’t go out and find him as he is elusive or too well protected, so the right thing to do is to lure him here, away from protection, and then pounce.”
Brown Limper sat up with a sudden surge of hope. What a brilliant idea!
“The last time he was active here,” whispered Terl, keeping the twitches down to a minimum, “was when we did a transshipment firing. If another transshipment firing were done and he knew about it, he would be here in a flash. Then you could pounce.”
Brown Limper saw that clearly.
“But,” said Terl, “you have another problem, too. He is using company property. Company planes, company equipment. Now if you personally owned all that, you would really have him on grand theft.”
Brown Limper got lost. Lars repeated it and clarified it. Brown Limper couldn’t quite grasp it.
“And,” whispered Terl, staying very calm, “he is using the planet. Now I don’t know whether you know that
the Intergalactic Mining Company paid the imperial Psychlo government trillions of credits for this planet. It is company property!”
Lars had to look up things in both the Psychlo and an old English dictionary to get across how much was a trillion and then had to write it for Brown Limper. At last Brown Limper could at least grasp that it was an awful lot of money.
“But the planet,” said Terl, “is now mostly mined out.” This was a flagrant falsehood, but these two wouldn’t know that. A planet wasn’t “mined out” until you were almost through the crust to the liquid core. “It just so happens that it is now worth only a few billion credits.” It was still worth about forty trillion. Crap, he’d sure have to cover his tracks on this one! But it was brilliant.
“I am,” whispered Terl, “the resident agent and representative of the company and authorized to legally dispose of its property.” What a lie! Oh, would he have to cover his tracks. “You realized that, of course. The animal Tyler did, which was why he kept me alive.”
“Oh!” whispered Brown Limper. “That had puzzled me! He is so bloodthirsty I couldn’t understand how he let you live when he murdered the Chamcos that very same day.”
“Well, now you know his secret,” said Terl. “He himself was trying to negotiate with me to buy the earth branch of Intergalactic Mining and the planet. That’s why he feels he can go around using company equipment and stamping all over the globe. Of course, I wouldn’t hear of it, knowing his bad character.” (The last was another word Terl had looked up.)
Brown Limper was suddenly engulfed by the trap Tyler had “set” for him. For a moment he felt the very earth he was sitting on was crumbling under him.
“He knows where this two billion is?” asked Terl.
“Yes,” whispered Brown Limper tensely. Good heavens, how blind he had been! Tyler was going to buy the company and the planet, and what would happen to Brown Limper then?
Terl had it all sized up. “But I wouldn’t sell. Not to the animal Tyler. I was thinking of you.”