He opened up the wrappings and then got a big pair of tongs, big enough to lift a huge boulder. He screwed the gap down to about a quarter of an inch and reached into the package.
The picture didn’t show what he was lifting out at first. Then he dropped it and it hit the floor. Terl’s curse was very sharp.
He got down with the tongs and lifted a gray something about the size of a pea. For an instant the spot on the floor showed. Jonnie still-framed it. The metal floor was dented, deeply.
Terl managed to pick up the small object again with the tongs, a hard job because it had sunk in the floor. He lifted it back up to lay on the side of the table. Jonnie did a very quick calculation. He knew how strong Terl was within rough limits. The amount of effort, when you subtracted those big tongs, made that little pea-sized piece of metal weigh about seventy-five pounds at a wild guess.
Jonnie got busy. He called Angus and had him set up the mineral analyzer that should transfer traces from the disk and enlarge them. He went and got the trace code books.
For the next three hours they tried to find that trace. It wasn’t there! The Psychlos didn’t list it or any composite trace of it in any of their code books. They were dealing with a metal the Psychlos had but didn’t list.
Jonnie tried to estimate by weight and volume and periodic tables what its atomic number was.
The Earth tables were of no value at all. This thing would be way off the bottom of them.
He looked over the Psychlo periodic tables, so different from the old Earth ones. There were a lot of elements that would have atomic numbers as high as this one, maybe even higher, but if they didn’t have its name . . . ? Jonnie suddenly realized it probably wasn’t on the Psychlo table either if it wasn’t in their analysis books.
“I wish I were some good at this,” said Jonnie.
“But, laddie,” said Dunneldeen, “I think you’re a plain wizard. I fell in the mine shaft about two hours ago and haven’t been heard of since!”
Jonnie said, “These are atomic numbers. An atom is supposedly composed of a core with energy particles in it, some of them positively charged, some of them not charged at all. The number of positively charged particles is what they call the ‘atomic number,’ and these particles, together with the uncharged particles, make up the ‘atomic weight.’ Also, around the core are negatively charged particles that circle the core in what they call ‘rings’ or ‘shells,’ but they’re not; they’re more like envelopes. Anyway, the core and the negatively charged particles around it gives one the different elements. That’s about all there is to a periodic table, to oversimplify it.
“But ancient man here on Earth constructed his tables on oxygen and carbon, I think, because those were important to him. He is a carbon-oxygen engine. But a Psychlo has a different metabolism and burns different elements for energy so the Psychlo table is different. Also, Psychlos had a lot more universes to work in and they had metals and gases Earth’s old scientists never heard of.
“The ancients here on Earth also omitted distances of spacing between the core and the ring and between ring and ring, as a variable. So they didn’t realize that one core and one ring at one spacing could be quite something else when the spacing changed. Got it?”
“Laddie,” said Dunneldeen, “that thump you just heard was me hitting the bottom of the shaft!”
“Don’t be lonely down there,” said Jonnie. “I hit it every time I get tangled up in this. But the point is, what is he up to? This is not a transshipment rig component!”
They looked at other disks. Terl considered metal like a man would consider paper—easily worked with.
He had bullied Lars into getting him a sheet of a beryllium alloy and it almost hurt their ears when Lars couldn’t find it anywhere in the compound and Terl told him the ——— stuff was what they used for panel metal in vehicles and to go down to the ——— garages and get into that ——— Zzt’s repair supplies and get him a ——— sheet of the stuff!
Lars trotted back shortly, his panting clear on the disk sonic, bringing a sheet of beryllium alloy that rumbled as it was waved about. Terl kicked him out and locked the door.
They did a quick analysis of the metal and even Dunneldeen had no trouble with the traces. It was beryllium, copper and nickel, sort of rough, for it had not been polished.
On the disk, Terl took some shears and cut expertly. Then he folded some edges. He annealed the edges shut by molecular bind. Then he had a top which fit very well. He put a little knob on the top for lifting it. Then he cut a hole in the bottom of the box and made a screw-in access plate. He had begun to laugh, so it was easy to divine that this was something quite nasty.
It was a pretty box when he finished. He polished it up and buffed it and it looked like jewelry, a gold color. Pretty. It was hexagonal, each one of the six sides and corners geometrically precise. Quite a work of art. The top came off easily. The bottom hole access plate was left unscrewed. It was about a foot across and about five inches high.
The next day he went to work on the inside. He made some very precisely hinged rods, quite intricate. He fitted them into the box and tested them. There was a hinged rod in each of the six corners and it was fastened to the lid. When you raised the lid, these rods pushed sockets, empty as yet, to the center of the box. He tested it several times and laughed louder as he gazed up into it from the access hole in the bottom. The cover came off very smoothly; each of the six rods pushed an empty socket to the center.
Then he chased Lars all around finding different, common substances and eventually he had three different metals and three different nonmetals in a pile. They were just ordinary elements, the analyzer said: iron, silicon, sodium, magnesium, sulphur and phosphorus.
Why? To what end?
Jonnie tore through some books. Sodium, magnesium, sulphur and phosphorus had one thing in common. They were of use, one way or another, in explosives. Knowing Terl, that was the first thing Jonnie looked up. But this combination he didn’t think would explode, because there they lay, right on the table in an earlier frame, right together and they didn’t explode. Iron and silicon? It seemed that they were very common indeed in the composition of the earth’s crust and core.
He looked at a later frame, quite apprehensive. What if Terl made something and then hid it outside and they couldn’t find it? What was this devil up to? Ah! Terl might have jumbled up the six elements but the strange pea-sized mineral had vanished. Jonnie backtracked on the disk.
Terl had taken the heavy bit of strange metal and measured it and then had wrapped it all up and put it back in the false cabinet. The place where it had lain now had a dent!
He made a braced basket to hold the pea in the center. But he didn’t put it in, for it was now back in the cabinet. Then he put the six common elements, each one, in the slots on the rods.
When one opened the lid, the rods pushed them all in to the center. They would go into contact with each other and with the pea.
Jonnie knew something about radiation and elements after their early battle. He knew that all you had to do was stimulate the atoms to get a chain reaction going.
But Terl was not working with uranium radiation. He couldn’t. Not with the overstimulation radiation gave to breathe-gas!
So that pea thing must be some higher order of stimulation.
Knowing Terl, it would be deadly. He was sure that when that heavy, heavy pea-sized piece of metal was in the center and somebody opened the lid and all those metals pushed together and against it, something ghastly was going to happen.
Terl locked the pretty box away, cleaned up things, and opened a mathematics text entitled Force Equations which had nothing to do with teleportation! What was he up to now?
And that was as far as the disks went.
Their own clock had moved up to noon as they had gone nonstop, no sleep, no food.
“Now I know who made Satan,” said Dunneldeen. “His name was Terl.”
6
Si
nce Terl seemed to be working on other things than teleportation, which was the key to this entire dilemma, Jonnie, for the time being, turned his attention to other things.
He had not entirely lost hope of unraveling the Psychlo technology through the restoration and possible cooperation of the remaining Psychlos. If he could get the two pieces of metal out of the head of a trained Psychlo engineer, there was a possibility that some of these mysteries would be solved, and solved, they would leave them in better control of the planet’s future.
Dr. MacKendrick had returned. One or two of the African base people had come down with a touch of what MacKendrick said was “malaria,” carried by mosquitoes. MacKendrick had procured “chinchona bark” from South America and had made them mop up standing pools of water in the base and put nets over the air intake vents and all that seemed to be under control.
MacKendrick’s three remaining Psychlo patients, two of whom were rated engineers, were not, however, so easily handled as the malaria. They were not getting well. They remained barely alive.
The thirty-three live Psychlos from the American compound arrived in Africa without incident and were put in a prepared dorm section. They had been duly reported as “lost at sea in a plane crash.”
But the doctor did not have much hope for it. “I have tried every way I can think of,” he told Jonnie one evening in his underground African surgery, “and one can’t get through the intricate skull structure to the items without severely damaging it. Every Psychlo cadaver I have worked with so far plainly shows that critical skull bone joints would be very damaged and vital brain nerves would be severed. Those things were put into the soft skull of a newborn pup, and even within a few months the skull would have been hardened to a point where they could not be removed. I will go on working with Psychlo cadavers, but I cannot hold out any real hope.”
Jonnie wandered off from the conference, trying to think of some solution to that problem. It seemed these days he had a lot more problems than he had solutions. He felt that if he didn’t come up with some solutions fairly soon, the human race might well be a write-off.
He heard his name called. He was passing by one of the doors that housed the new Psychlo arrivals and he stopped and went over. There was a small view port and an intercom inset into the door panel.
It was Chirk!
He had never had anything against Chirk. A rattlebrain and dedicated to wrong conclusions though she might be, the times when he had seen her they had not fought.
“Jonnie,” said Chirk, “I just want to thank you for saving us.”
Jonnie realized somebody had been talking to the Psychlos, maybe Dunneldeen.
“When I think of what that awful Terl planned to do—murder us all, you know—my fur crackles! I always thought you were kind of cute, Jonnie. You know that. So I know you saved our lives.”
Jonnie said, “You’re welcome. Can I do anything for you?” She looked pretty forlorn, really. No clothes but a wraparound, fur all matted.
“No,” said Chirk. “Just thank you.”
Jonnie walked off and was halfway down the passage before the weirdness of it struck him. A Psychlo being thankful? Expressing appreciation? Not wanting something? Impossible! He had never had much to do with female Psychlos. They were not numerous in the company. But a grateful Psychlo? Never!
He acted fast. Ten minutes later they had a mineral analyzer rigged and Chirk’s head in it. Twenty minutes of investigation and they had an answer.
Chirk did not have any bronze object in her head. She did have a silver capsule, but it was of different shape and size.
There were twelve females from the American compound, and after a great deal of hustle and bustle and assembly-line treatment, they had established that none of the females had a bronze object in their brains, but they did have silver ones of the same pattern as Chirk’s.
Two pilots took off for the morgue in the clouds, accompanied by a fur-wrapped MacKendrick, and they soon established, working in the icy blast of a keen wind, that they had three females in that lot.
That night MacKendrick held out the different capsule to Jonnie and Angus. He had removed it from the female corpse that had been brought back.
Careful examination showed it to have a less complex internal filament, but that was all they could tell.
“I don’t think that could be cut out either,” said Dr. MacKendrick. “The structure of the female skull is even more complicated than the male’s. All I can contribute is that it probably puts out a different message when activated.”
That seemed to be pretty well that.
However, the bronze cruelty factor was missing in a female, so the following morning Jonnie had another talk with Chirk.
“How would you like a job?” said Jonnie.
Well, that would be wonderful. It just showed he was cute. Because she couldn’t go back to Psychlo now. Terl had ruined her company record and they would never reemploy her with the black marks of disobedience all over the file. And if he promised not to send her back to Psychlo and paid her usual wage of two hundred Galactic credits a month, a job would be a very good thing for she was going mad from inactivity and no cosmetics.
For a long time now they had been taking Galactic credits out of company payroll offices, out of the wallets of dead Psychlos, out of canteen cash drawers, and they had a couple of million credits kicking around. So it was feasible. They struck a bargain.
Loosed with a breathe-mask and a sentry, Chirk promptly found a few yards of cloth in supply, was escorted down to the lake, and, oblivious of crocodiles, took a bath. She then demanded access to the minerals sample room of the compound. She got some white gypsum, put it in a mortar and finely pulverized it, and put it in a sample bag. She threw some copper in a retort, added some acid, boiled it all away, washed the residue, and mixed it with some clear motor grease. She put it in a can. She got some tractor paint out of the storeroom, deepened its color to a brilliant purple by boiling it and added simple stain dye, and then poured in a pungent thinner. She put the last in a bottle.
Then she went to the tailor shop and slashed and annealed dress uniform cloth. She took some seat covering and cut it and annealed it into a pair of flare-topped boots and demanded to be taken back to her room.
Shortly there emerged the most stylish female a Psychlo street had ever seen. Although the breathe-mask hid the face makeup, one supposed that it was there for morale. And if you looked closely through the leaded faceplate, you could see that she had brilliant green lipbones, a glaring white nosebone, and white and green circles around her eyebones. Her claws were a glaring shade of purple. The white dress uniform cloth was topped with a flaring gold collar and bound about by a gold-colored belt, and her boots were gold with purple sole lines.
Chirk then demanded access to another room where the other females were kept, and thereafter the current base commander was besieged with demands for more contracts at two hundred Galactic credits a month and clothes!
Although Jonnie had not really expected much help from that quarter, he got it unexpectedly. Shortly he would get trouble, but to begin with, it was revelatory.
Chirk made a trip out to find some mud. In that area there was lots of mud but she was looking for a certain kind of mud. She chattered away at Angus as they tramped about. She was carrying a two-hundred-pound scope under her arm like it was a handbag. Jonnie saw them walking around the edge of a swamp, Angus dwarfed by the eight-hundred-pound female, two sentries following, mostly in case of wild beasts.
Jonnie went over to them. She was looking for mud. She would stick in a paddle and put a dab on the scope plate and shake her head and walk on. She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
Jonnie noticed something odd in animal behavior. When he went out, the game ignored him. But Chirk? You couldn’t see game as far as you could look. Not an elephant, not a lion, no deer, nothing! He reasoned it must be the smell of a Psychlo. Where once animals fled at the smell of a man, over the centuries the
y had transferred their survival instincts. They wouldn’t let a Psychlo within miles of them. Still, this area hadn’t been hunted out and neither had any other area.
“Oh, Psychlo men don’t mass hunt,” said Chirk, busy with her paddle and scope. “The silly things find just one animal and follow it and then they sit around in a circle and take three days to kill it little by little. So they don’t often get three days off. Not in this company. Silly things, males.”
Jonnie did not enlighten her as to what made them “silly.”
After a while she found her mud. She filled a mine bucket with it and easily carried the two-hundred-pound scope and the four hundred pounds of mud back to the compound.
She put the mud in glass bottles and added some green liquid goo-food and then rinsed the mud out. She handed the bottles to MacKendrick who gazed at them in mystery.
Chirk said, “Put that in the wounds, you foolish creature. How can you expect them to heal up if you don’t use a counter-virus! Any child knows that!”
MacKendrick got it. His treatments were all aimed at bacterial control on beings who were basically virus-structured. Within the next three days all his Psychlo patients began to get well, their festering wounds closed, and it appeared they were going to have three completely cured ones soon.
Chirk got to work on the library. It shocked her that the volumes were so strewn about and for two days she did nothing but collect Psychlo books into huge piles. The other females helped and also began to clean up large areas of old Psychlo berthings.
Jonnie was working one day in the old Psychlo operations room when Chirk suddenly presented herself. “Your library,” she said, “is in disgraceful condition. According to company regulations, certain booklists must be in every minesite and you can see by this form that the manager here has been negligent and should be given a black mark on his record. But I am working for you now so I must call to your attention Form 2,345,980-A. If you place this order with Psychlo, they will send them out on the next shipment. It is a very serious matter. An incomplete library!”
Chirk might not be in present time about the company, but she certainly had filled out the form.