Part 3

1

Zzt was banging around in the transport repair shop, throwing down tools, discarding parts, and generally making an agitated din.

He caught sight of Terl standing nearby and he turned on him in an instant attack.

“Are you at the bottom of this pay cut?” demanded Zzt.

Mildly, Terl said, “That would be the accounting department, wouldn’t it?”

“Why has my pay been cut?”

“It’s not just your pay, it’s also mine and everybody else’s,” said Terl.

“I’ve got three times the work, no help, and now half the pay!”

“The planet is running at a loss, I’m told,” said Terl.

“And no bonuses,” said Zzt.

Terl frowned. This was not the time or place for a favor. Leverage. He had no leverage at all these days.

“Been a lot of machines blowing up lately,” said Terl.

Zzt stood and looked at him. There was more than a hint of threat in that. One never knew about this Terl.

“What do you want?” said Zzt.

“I’m working on a project that could solve all this,” said Terl. “That could get our pay and bonuses back.”

Zzt ignored that. When a security chief sounded like he was doing favors, watch it.

“What do you want?” said Zzt.

“If it’s successful, we’d even get more pay and bonuses.”

“Look, I’m busy. You see these wrecks?”

“I want the loan of a small mine car puller,” said Terl.

Zzt barked a sharp, sarcastic laugh. “There’s one. Blew up yesterday down at the transshipment area. Take that.”

The small bladed vehicle had its whole canopy blown off and the green bloodstains had dried on its panel. Its interior wiring was charred.

“What I want is a small pulling truck,” said Terl. “A simple one.” Zzt went back to throwing tools and parts around. A couple narrowly missed Terl.

“Well?”

“You got a requisition?” said Zzt.

“Well—” began Terl.

“I thought so,” said Zzt. He stopped and looked at Terl. “You sure you haven’t got anything to do with this pay cut?”

“Why?”

“Rumor around you were talking to the Planet Head.”

“Routine security.”

“Hah!”

Zzt attacked the wrecked bladed vehicle with a hammer to remove the remains of its pressure canopy.

Terl walked away. Leverage. He had no leverage.

In deep gloom he stood in a hallway between domes, lost in thought. He did have a solution of sorts. And there were signs of unrest. He made a sudden decision.

A compound intercom was near to hand. He took hold of it and called Numph.

“Terl here, Your Planetship. Could I have an appointment in about an hour? . . . I have something to show you . . . Thank you, Your Planetship. One hour.”

He hung up, pulled his face mask off a belt hook, donned it, and went outside. Soft snowflakes were drifting down.

At the cage he went straight over to the far end of the flexirope and untied it.

Jonnie had been working at the instruction machine and he watched Terl warily. Terl, coiling up the rope, did not fail to notice that the man-thing was now using the chair to sit in. A bit arrogant, but it was good news, really. The thing had one of its hides rigged to the bars to keep snow off a sleeping place. There was another one tented over the machine and work place.

Terl yanked at the rope. “Come along,” he said.

“You promised I could build a fire. Are we going out to get firewood?” asked Jonnie.

Terl yanked on the rope and forced Jonnie to follow him. He went straight to the old Chinko offices and booted open the door. Jonnie looked around the place with interest. They were not inside the domes. This was an air-filled place. Dust lay in a blanket and stirred as they walked through the interior. There were papers scattered about, even books. There were charts on the walls. Jonnie saw that this was where the desk and chair had come from, for many just like them stood about.

Terl opened a locker and brought out a face mask and bottle. He hauled Jonnie close to him and slammed the mask over his face.

Jonnie batted it off. It was quite large. It was also full of dust. Jonnie found a rag in the locker and wiped the mask out. He examined the fastenings and discovered they were adjustable.

Terl was rummaging around and finally came up with a small pump. He put a fresh power cartridge in the pump, connected it to the bottle, and began filling it with air.

“What is this?” asked Jonnie.

“Shut up, animal.”

“If it is supposed to work like yours, why do you have different bottles?”

Terl kept on pumping up the air bottle. Jonnie threw down the mask and sat down against the locker door, looking the other way.

The amber eyes slitted. More mutiny, thought Terl. Leverage, leverage. He didn’t have any.

“All right,” said Terl, disgusted. “That is a Chinko air mask. Chinkos breathed air. You breathe air. You have to have it to go in the compound or you’ll die. My bottles contain proper breathe-gas and the compound domes are filled with breathe-gas, not air. Now, satisfied?”

“You can’t breathe air,” said Jonnie.

Terl controlled himself. “You can’t breathe breathe-gas! Psychlos come from a proper planet that has proper breathe-gas. You, animal, would die there. Put on that Chinko mask.”

“Did the Chinkos have to wear these in the compound?”

“I thought I told you.”

“Where are the Chinkos?”

“Were, were,” said Terl, thinking he was correcting the thing’s grammar. It already spoke with an accent. High and squeaky, too. Not a proper bass. Irritating.

“They’re not here anymore?”

Terl was about to tell him to shut up when a streak of sadism took over. “No, they’re not here anymore! The Chinkos are dead—the whole race of them. And you know why? Because they tried to strike. They refused to work and do as they were told.”

“Ah,” said Jonnie. It came together for him. One more piece of evidence that added up to the smoke on the belt buckle design. The Chinkos had been another race; they had worked long and hard for the Psychlos; their reward had been extermination. It bore out his estimate of the Psychlo character.

Jonnie looked around at the shambles; the Chinkos must have been killed a long time ago.

“See this gauge?” said Terl, pointing to the air bottle he had now filled. “It registers one-zero-zero when the bottle is full. As it is used up, this needle goes down. When it gets as low as five you’re in trouble and will run out of air. There’s an hour of air in the bottle. Watch the gauge.”

“Seems like there should be two bottles and one should carry the pump,” said Jonnie.

Terl looked at the air bottle and saw it had clamps on it for a mate and there was a pocket for the pump. He had not bothered to look at the labels and directions on the bottle.

“Shut up, animal,” Terl said. But he filled a second bottle, joined it to the first, and put the pump in the slot between them. Roughly he put the mask and rig on Jonnie.

“Now hear me, animal,” said Terl. “We are going inside the compound and I am going to talk to a very important executive, His Planetship himself. You are to speak not one word and you are going to do exactly what you are told to do. Understand, animal?”

Jonnie looked at him through the Chinko faceplate.

“If you don’t obey,” said Terl, “all I have to do is pull your face mask loose and you’ll go into convulsions.” Terl didn’t like the look he always got from those ice-blue eyes. He yanked the lead rope.

“Let’s go, animal.”

2

Numph was nervous. He looked at Terl uncertainly as the security chief entered.

“Mutiny?” said Numph.

“Not so far,” said Terl.

“What do you have there?” said Numph.

Terl yanked on the lead rope to pull Jonnie from behind him. “I wanted to show you the man-thing,” said Terl.

Numph sat forward at his desk and stared. A nearly naked, unfurred animal. Two arms, two legs. Yes, there was fur. On its head and lower face. Strange ice-blue eyes. “Don’t let it pee on the floor,” said Numph.

“Look at its hands,” said Terl. “Manually adept . . .”

“You sure there’s no mutiny?” said Numph. “The news was released this morning. I haven’t heard any response from two continents yet, the minesites there.”

“They probably aren’t very pleased, but no mutiny yet. If you look at these hands—”

“I’ll watch the ore output carefully,” said Numph. “They might try to cut that down.”

“Won’t mean anything. We’re pretty short of personnel,” said Terl. “There are no maintenance mechanics left in transport. They’ve all been transferred to operations to up production.”

“I’m told there’s widespread unemployment on the home planet. Maybe I should pull in more personnel.”

Terl sighed. Bumbling fool. “With reduced pay and no bonuses and this planet being as awful as it is, I shouldn’t think you’d get many takers. Now this animal here—”

“Yes, that’s so. I should have brought in more personnel before we cut the pay. You sure there’s no mutiny?”

Terl plunged. “Well, the best way to halt a mutiny is to promise upped production. And within a year, I think we can replace fifty percent of our outside machine and vehicle operators with these.” Damn, he wasn’t getting through.

“It hasn’t peed on the floor, has it?” said Numph, leaning forward to look. “Really, that thing smells bad.”

“It’s these untanned hides it wears. It doesn’t have any proper clothes.”

“Clothes? Would it wear clothes?”

“Yes, I believe it would, Your Planetship. All it has right now is hides. As a matter of fact, I have a couple of requisitions here—” He advanced to the desk and laid them there for signature. Leverage, leverage. He didn’t have any leverage on this fool.

“I just had this place cleaned,” said Numph. “Now it will have to be ventilated thoroughly. What are these things?” he added, looking at the requisitions.

“You wanted a demonstration that this man-thing could operate machines. One of those is for general supplies and the other is for a vehicle.”

“They’re marked ‘urgent.’”

“Well, we have to raise hope fast if we want to avoid a mutiny.”

“That’s so.” Numph was reading the whole requisition form even though he had seen thousands of them.

Jonnie stood patiently. Every detail of this interior was being taken in. The breathe-gas ports, the material of the dome, the strips that held it together.

These Psychlos didn’t wear masks inside, and for the first time he was seeing their faces. They were almost human faces except they had bones for eyebrows and eyelids and lips. They had amber orb eyes like those of wolves. He was beginning to be able to read their emotions as they related to their expressions.

When they had come down the compound halls they had passed several Psychlos, and these had looked at him with curiosity, but they had looked at Terl with outright hostility. Apparently he had some special job or rank that wasn’t popular. But then all the relationships among these people were hostile, one to another.

Numph eventually looked up. “You really think one of those things could run a machine?”

“You said you wanted a demonstration,” said Terl. “I have to have a vehicle to train it.”

“Oh,” said Numph. “Then it isn’t trained yet. So how do you know?”

Damn, thought Terl. This fool was worse than he had thought. But wait. There was something bothering Numph. There was something Numph was not talking about. The intuition of a security chief always sensed it. Leverage, leverage. If he could know this, maybe he’d have leverage. He’d have to keep his eyes and ears open. “It learned to operate an instruction machine very quickly, Your Planetship.”

“Instruction?”

“Yes, it can read and write its own language now, and can speak, read and write Psychlo.”

“No!”

Terl turned to Jonnie. “Greet His Planetship.”

Jonnie fastened his eyes on Terl. He said nothing.

“Speak!” said Terl loudly, and in an undertone added, “You want that face mask ripped off?”

Jonnie said, “I think Terl wants you to sign the requisitions so that I can be trained to operate a machine. If you ordered it, you should sign it.”

It was as though he had said nothing at all. Numph was looking out the window, thinking about something. Then his nostrils flared. “That thing certainly stinks.”

“It will be gone,” said Terl, “just as soon as I get the requisitions signed.”

“Yes, yes,” said Numph. He dashed initials on the forms.

Terl took them quickly and started to leave.

Numph leaned forward and looked. “It didn’t pee on the floor, did it?”

3

Terl had had no sleep and two fights already today, and he was in no mood for a third.

The snow was drifting down on a gray white day, covering the half-wrecked, small bladed vehicle, deepening on the broad expanse beyond the zoo. The man-thing looked utterly ridiculous in the huge Psychlo seat. Terl snorted.

The first fight had been over the uniform requisition. The clothing shop foreman—a mangy half-wit named Druk—had maintained that the requisition was forged: he had even said that knowing Terl he did not doubt it; and he had had the effrontery to verify it with an administrator. Then Druk had said he didn’t have any uniforms that size and he wasn’t in the habit of outfitting midgets and neither was the company. Cloth, yes, he had cloth. But it was executive cloth.

Then the animal had spoken up and said that under no circumstances would it wear purple. Terl had batted it. But it got up and said the same thing again. Leverage, leverage, damn not having leverage on this animal.

But Terl had had an inspiration and had gone out to the old Chinko quarters and found a bale of the blue stuff the Chinkos had once worn. The tailor said it was trash, but he could think of no more arguments.

It had taken an hour to hack out and fuse together two uniforms for the man-thing. And then it had refused to wear a regulation company buckle on the belt—almost had a fit in fact. Terl had had to go back to the Chinko quarters and dig around until he found what must have been an artifact—a small gold military buckle with an eagle and arrows on it. At least that made an impression on the man-thing. Its eyes had just about popped out.

The second fight had been with Zzt.

First Zzt wouldn’t talk at all. Then he finally condescended to look at the requisition. He pointed out that there were no registration numbers in the blanks provided and maintained that this authorized him to provide anything he cared to at his own discretion. He said Terl could have the wrecked bladed vehicle. It was a write-off but it still ran. That was what had brought on the actual blows.

Terl had hit Zzt hard and they had gone around and around for almost five minutes, blow and counterblow. Terl had finally tripped over a tool dolly and gotten himself kicked.

He had taken the wrecked bladed vehicle. He had to walk beside it, running it, to get it out through the garage atmosphere port.

He now had the animal on it and it looked like another fight.

“What’s this green stuff all over the seat and floor?” said Jonnie. The gently falling snow was covering it, but it turned patches of the snow pale green as it dissolved.

At first Terl wasn’t going to answer. Then his sadistic streak got the better of him. “That’s blood.”

“It isn’t red.”

“Psychlo blood isn’t red; it’s real blood and it’s a proper color—green. Now shut up, animal. I’m going to tell you how—”

“What’s all this charred stuff around the edges of this big circle?” And Jonnie pointed to the edges where the canopy had once been.

Terl hit him. Jonnie almost flew off the huge high seat where he had been standing. But with some agility he caught hold of a roll bar and didn’t fall.

“I have to know,” said Jonnie when he caught his breath. “How can I be sure somebody didn’t press the wrong button and blow this thing up?”

Terl sighed. The arms of the man-thing weren’t long enough to reach the controls and he’d have to stand up on the floor plates to run it. “They didn’t push any wrong button. It just blew up.”

“But how? Something must have made it blow up.” Then he realized that this was the vehicle that had killed a Psychlo down on the landing field. He himself had heard it explode.

Jonnie pushed away some snow and sat down on the seat and looked the other way.

“All right!” snarled Terl. “When these vehicles are run by Psychlo operators they have a transparent hood over them. That is needed for breathe-gas. You won’t be using any canopy or breathe-gas, animal, so it won’t blow up.”

“Yes, but why did it blow up? I have to know if I’m going to run the thing.”

Terl sighed, long and shudderingly. Exasperation made his fangs grate. The animal was sitting there looking the other way.

“Breathe-gas,” said Terl, “was under the canopy. They were loading gold ore and it must have had a trace of uranium in it. There must have been a leak in the canopy or a crack and the breathe-gas touched the uranium and exploded.”

“Uranium? Uranium?”

“You’re pronouncing it wrong. It’s uranium.”

“How do you say it in English?”

That was enough. “How the crap nebula would I know?” snapped Terl.

Jonnie carefully didn’t smile. Uranium, uranium, he said to himself. It blew up breathe-gas!

And he had incidentally learned that Terl could not speak English.

“Which controls are which?” said Jonnie.

Terl was mollified a trifle. At least the animal wasn’t looking the other way. “This button stops it. Learn that button good, and if anything else goes wrong, push it. This bar turns it to the left, that one to the right. This lever lifts the front blade, that one tilts it, the next one angles it. The red button backs it up.”

Jonnie stood on the floor plates. He made the front blade lift, tilt and angle, peering over the hood each time to see what was happening. Then he made the blade lift well up.

“See that grove of trees over there?” said Terl. “Start it toward them, dead slow.”

Terl walked beside the vehicle. “Now stop it.” Jonnie did. “Now back it up.” Jonnie did. “Now go forward in a circle.” Jonnie did.

Although Terl seemed to think this was a small vehicle, the seat was fifteen feet off the ground. The blade was twenty feet wide. And when it started up it shook not only itself but the ground, such was its heavy power.

“Now start pushing snow,” said Terl. “Just a couple of inches off the top.”

It was very difficult at first getting the blade to bite in varying degrees while the machine rolled forward.

Terl watched. It was cold. He had had no sleep. His fangs ached where Zzt had landed a good one. He clambered up on the vehicle and took Jonnie’s rope and wrapped it around a roll bar, tying it at a distance where Jonnie wouldn’t be able to get to it.

Jonnie stopped the vehicle, ready for a breather.

“Why didn’t Numph hear me speaking?” asked Jonnie.

“Shut up, animal.”

“But I have to know. Maybe my accent is too bad.”

“Your accent is awful, but that isn’t the reason. You had a face mask on and Numph is a bit deaf.” This was a plain, outright security-chief lie.

Numph had been able to hear all right and the animal’s face mask had not muffled his speech a bit. Numph had been distracted by something else. Something Terl didn’t know. And the reason Terl had had no sleep was that he had spent the entire night rummaging through dispatches, records and Numph’s files trying to get to the bottom of it. Leverage. Leverage. That’s what Terl needed. He had found nothing of importance, nothing at all. But there was something.

Terl felt dead on his feet. He was going in to take a nap. “I have some reports to write,” said Terl. “You just keep this thing going around and practice with it. I’ll be out soon.”

Terl took a button camera out of his pocket and stuck it on the after roll bar, out of the animal’s reach. “Don’t get any ideas. This vehicle only goes at a walk.” And he left.

But the nap, aided by a heavy shot of kerbango, was a bit longer than he intended, and it was nearly dark when he came lumbering hurriedly back.

He stopped and stared. The practice field was all chewed up. But that wasn’t the amazing thing. The animal had neatly knocked down half a dozen trees and pushed them all the way up the hill to the cage where they were now stacked. More—he had used the blade drop to slice up the trees into sections a few feet long and slit them.

The animal was sitting on the seat now, hunkered down out of the keening wind that had sprung up.

Terl untied the rope and Jonnie stood up.

“What’s that all about?” said Terl, pointing at the chopped-up trees.

“Firewood,” said Jonnie. “Now that I’m untied I will carry some into the cage.”

“Firewood?”

“Let’s say I’m tired of a diet of raw rat, my friend.”

That night, having eaten his first cooked food in months and thawing the winter chill from his bones before the pleasant fire on the cage floor, Jonnie heaved a sigh of relief.

The new clothes were hung up on sticks to dry. He sat cross-legged, digging into his pouch.

He drew out the gold metal disk and then he reached for the gold belt buckle he had just acquired. He studied them.

The bird with the arrows was essentially the same on each one. And now he could read the squiggles.

The disk said The United States of America.

The belt buckle said The United States Air Force.

So his people long ago had been a nation. And it had had a force of some sort devoted to the air.

The Psychlos wore belt buckles that said they were members of the Intergalactic Mining Company.

With a smile that would have frightened Terl had he seen it, Jonnie supposed that he was as of this minute a member, the only member, of the United States Air Force.

He put the buckle carefully under a piece of robe he used for a pillow and lay for a long time looking at the dancing flames.

4

The mighty planet Psychlo, “king of the galaxies,” basked beneath the forceful rays of triple suns.

The courier stood to the side of Intergalactic’s transshipment receipt area, waiting. Above him the mauve skies domed the purple hillsides of the horizon. All about him spread the smoke-spewing factories, the power lines, the tense and crackling might of the company. Machines and vehicles boiled in purposeful turmoil throughout the multilayered roads and plains of the vast compound. In the distance lay the pyramidal shapes of the Imperial City. Spotted among the outlying hills were the compounds of many other companies—factories that spewed out their products to whole galaxies.

Who would be elsewhere? thought the courier. He sat astride his small ground-go, momentarily idle in his daily rounds, waiting. Who would want to live and toil on some forgotten light-gravity planet, wearing a mask, working under domes, driving pressurized vehicles, digging in alien soil? Or, drafted, fighting some war on territory nobody cared about anyway? Not this Psychlo, that was for sure.

A shrieking whistle pierced the day: the warning signal to get clear of the transshipment receipt platform, chasing away a fleet of blade, brush and vacuum vehicles that had been clearing it.

The courier automatically checked his own proximity. Good, he was outside the danger area.

The network of lines and cables about the platform hummed. Then they shrieked into a crescendo that ended with a roaring explosion.

Tons of ore materialized on the platform surface, teleported in an instant across the galaxies.

The courier gazed through the momentarily ionized air. Look at that. The incoming ore had a crust of whitish substance overlying it. The courier had seen it before from time to time. Somebody said it was called “snow.” Trickles of water took the place of the flakes. Imagine having to work and live on a crazy planet like that.

The all-clear signal sounded and the courier gunned his ground-go forward to the new ore heap. The receipt foreman rumbled out to the new pile of ore.

“Look at that,” said the courier. “Snow.”

The receipt foreman had seen it all, knew it all, and held junior couriers in contempt. “It’s bauxite, not snow.”

“It had some snow on it when it landed.”

The receipt foreman scrambled over to the right side of the pile and fished around. He brought up a small dispatch box. Standing on the ore, he noted the box number on his clipboard and then brought it over to the courier.

Blade vehicles were charging in on the new pile. The receipt foreman impatiently handed the clipboard to the courier, who signed. The box was thrown at him. He threw back the clipboard and it caught the receipt foreman on his massive chest.

The courier gunned his ground-go and swiftly threaded his way through the incoming machines, speeding toward the Intergalactic Central Administration Compound.

A few minutes later a clerk, carrying the box, walked into the office of Zafin, Junior Assistant to the Deputy Director for Secondary Uninhabited Planets. The office was little more than a cubicle, for space at Intergalactic Central housed three hundred thousand administrative personnel.

Zafin was a young ambitious executive. “What’s that box doing wet?” he said.

The clerk, who was about to set it down among papers, hastily withdrew it, got out a cloth and dried it. He looked at the label. “It’s from Earth; must be raining there.”

“Typical,” said Zafin. “Where’s that?”

The clerk tactfully hit a projector button and a chart flared on the wall. The clerk shifted the focus, peered, and then put a claw on a small dot.

Zafin wasn’t bothering to look. He had opened the dispatch box and was sorting the dispatches to different departments under him, zipping an initial on those that required it. He was almost finished when he held up a dispatch that required some work and couldn’t just be initialed. He looked at it with distaste.

“Green-flashed urgent,” said Zafin.

The clerk took it apologetically and read it. “It’s just a request for information.”

“Too high a priority,” said Zafin. He took it back. “Here we have three wars in progress and somebody from . . . where?”

“Earth,” said the clerk.

“Who sent it?”

The clerk took the dispatch back and looked. “A security chief named . . . named Terl.”

“What’s his record?”

The clerk put his talons on a button console and a wall slot clattered and then spat out a folder. The clerk handed it over.

“Terl,” said Zafin. He frowned, thinking. “Haven’t I heard that name before?”

The clerk took back the folder and looked at it. “He requested a transfer about five months ago, our time.”

“Steel trap brain,” said Zafin. “That’s me.” And he meant it. He took the folder back. “Never forget a name.” He leafed through the papers. “Must be a dead, dull place, Earth. And now a dispatch with wrong priority.”

The clerk took the folder back.

Zafin frowned. “Well, where’s the dispatch?”

“On your desk, Your Honor.”

Zafin looked at it. “He wants to know what connections . . . Numph? Numph?”

The clerk worked the console and a screen flashed. “Intergalactic Director, Earth.”

“This Terl wants to know what connections he has in the main office,” said Zafin.

The clerk pushed some more buttons. The screen flashed. The clerk said, “He’s the uncle of Nipe, Assistant Director of Accounting for Secondary Planets.”

“Well, write it on the dispatch and send it back.”

“It’s also marked ‘confidential,’” said the clerk.

“Well, mark it ‘confidential,’” said Zafin. He sat back, thinking. He turned his chair and looked out the window at the distant city. The breeze was cool and pleasant. It dissipated some of his irritation.

Zafin turned back to his desk. “Well, we won’t discipline this what’s-his-name . . .”

“Terl,” said the clerk.

“Terl,” said Zafin. “Just put it in his record that he assigns too high priorities to nonsense. He’s simply young and ambitious and doesn’t know much about being an executive. We don’t need a lot of excess and incorrect administration around here! You understand that?”

The clerk said that he did and backed out with the box and its contents. He wrote into Terl’s record, “Assigns too high priorities to nonsense; young, ambitious and unskilled as an executive. Ignore further communications.”

The clerk grinned wickedly in his own little cubicle as he realized the description also fit Zafin. He put the answer to Terl’s dispatch on it in a precise, clerkly calligraphy and didn’t even bother to file a copy. In a few days it would be teleported back to Earth.

The mighty, imperious, and arrogant world of Psychlo hummed on.

5

The day for the demonstration had arrived and Terl went into a flurry of activity.

Up early, he had again put the animal through its paces. He had made it drive the blade machine up and down and up and down and around and around. Terl had pushed it so hard that the machine had finally run out of fuel. Well, he could fix that.

He went to see Zzt.

“You don’t have a requisition,” said Zzt.

“But it’s just a fuel cartridge.”

“I know, I know. But I have to account for them.”

Terl grated his fangs. Leverage, leverage, all was leverage, and he didn’t have anything at all on Zzt.

Suddenly Zzt halted what he was doing. There was a flicker of a smile on his mouthbones. It made Terl suspicious. “Tell you what I will do,” said Zzt. “After all, you did give up five recon drones. I’ll just check out that blade machine.”

Zzt put on a face mask and Terl followed him outside.

The animal was sitting on the machine, collared, the lead rope firmly fastened to a roll bar. It was kind of bluish and shivering in the bitter wind of late winter. Terl ignored it.

The hood popped up as Zzt released the catches. “I’ll just make sure it’s all functional,” he said, his voice muffled by his face mask and further muffled because his head was in the motor mounts. “Old machine.”

“It’s a wrecked machine,” said Terl.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Zzt, busily pulling and pushing connections. “But you got it, didn’t you?”

The animal was watching everything Zzt did. It was standing there on the top edge of the instrument panel looking down. “You left a wire loose,” said the animal.

“Ah, so I did,” said Zzt. “You talk?”

“I think you heard me.”

“Yes, I did hear you,” said Zzt. “And I also heard no proper, polite phrases.”

Terl snorted. “It’s just an animal. What do you mean, polite phrases? To a mechanic?”

“Well, there,” said Zzt, ignoring Terl. “I think that will be fine in there.” He pulled out a power cartridge and shoved it into the casing and screwed on the cap. “Start it up.”

Terl reached over and pushed a button and the machine seemed to run all right.

Zzt turned it off for him. “I understand you’re giving some kind of a demonstration today. I never seen no animal drive. Mind if I come out and watch?”

Terl eyed him. He didn’t have any leverage on Zzt and all this cooperation and interest was out of character. But he couldn’t put a talon on anything wrong. “Come ahead,” he grunted. “It’ll take place here in an hour.”

He would kick himself later, but right now he had a lot on his mind.

“Could I get warmed up?” said Jonnie.

“Shut up, animal,” said Terl, and he rushed off into the compound.

Nervously Terl waited in the outer office of Numph. One of the clerks had announced him but there had been no invitation to enter.

Finally, after forty-five minutes, he scowled another clerk into announcing him again and this time he was signaled to enter.

Numph had nothing on his desk but a saucepan of kerbango. He was looking at the mountain view through the canopy wall. Terl scratched his belt to make a small noise. Numph eventually turned around and gave him an absent look.

“The demonstration you ordered can take place right away,” said Terl. “Everything is all ready, Your Planetship.”

“Does this have a project number?” said Numph.

Terl hastily made up a number. “Project 39A, Your Planetship.”

“I thought that had to do with new site recruitment.”

Terl had saved himself by adding an A, which no projects had. “That was probably 39. This is 39A. Substitution of personnel—”

“Ah, yes. Transferring more personnel from home.”

“No, Your Planetship. You remember the animal, of course.”

Recollection cut into Numph’s fog. “Ah, yes. The animal.” And he just sat there.

Leverage, leverage, thought Terl. He had no leverage on this old fool. He had combed the offices inside and out and could find none. The home office had merely said he was the uncle of Nipe, Assistant Director of Accounting for Secondary Planets. All this meant, apparently, was that he had his job by influence and was a known incompetent. At least that was all Terl could make out of it.

Obviously, Numph was not going to stir. Terl could see his plans crumbling. He would wind up just vaporizing that damned animal and forgetting it. And all for lack of leverage.

Behind his impassive face, Terl was thinking so hard sparks were flashing internally.

“I’m afraid,” said Numph, “that—”

Hastily Terl interrupted. Don’t let him say it. Don’t let him condemn me to this planet! The inspiration was on his lips in a miraculous bypass of his thinking.

“Have you heard from your nephew lately?” he said. He meant it socially. He was about to add a lie that he had known Nipe in school.

But the effect was out of proportion. Numph jerked forward and looked at him closely. It was not much of a jerk. But it was enough. There was something there!

Terl said nothing. Numph kept looking at him, seeming to wait. Was Numph afraid? He had started to say so, but that was a figure of speech.

“There’s no reason to be afraid of the animal,” said Terl, smoothly, easily, deliberately misinterpreting things. “It doesn’t bite or scratch.”

Numph just kept on sitting there. But what was that in his eyes?

“You ordered the demonstration and it’s all ready, Your Planetship.”

“Ah, yes. The demonstration.”

“If you’ll just get a mask and come outside . . .”

“Ah, yes. Of course.”

The Intergalactic head of the planet drank off the kerbango in steady gulps, got up, and took his face mask off the wall.

He went into the hall and signaled some of his staff to put on their breathe-masks and follow, and then, with many slit-eyed, darting glances at Terl, he walked with him to the outside air. A mystified Terl was jubilant nevertheless. The old fellow positively reeked with fear. The plan was going to come off!

6

Jonnie sat high on the blade machine. The aching cold wind blew puffs of snow, momentarily obscuring the compound. Jonnie’s attention was caught by the approaching crowd. Their combined footfalls made the earth shake.

The place chosen for the demonstration was a small plateau jutting out from the compound. It was a few thousand square feet in extent but ended in a sharp-edged cliff that dropped more than two hundred feet into a ravine. There was room to maneuver but one had to stay away from that edge.

Terl came stomping toward him through the light snow. He stepped up on a lower frame of the blade machine to put his huge face near Jonnie’s.

“See that crowd?” said Terl.

Jonnie looked at them. They were gathered by the compound. Zzt was over to their left.

“See this speaker?” said Terl. He jostled a speaking-horn thing in his hand. He had used it before in the drilling.

“See this blaster?” said Terl, and he patted a belt handgun he had buckled on, a huge thing.

“If you do one thing wrong,” said Terl, “or foul up in any way, I will gun you right off that rig. You’ll be very dead. Splattered dead.”

Terl reached up and made sure the leash was secure; he had wrapped it around the roll bar and welded the end to the rear bumper. It didn’t leave much room for Jonnie to move.

His instructions had gone unheard by the small crowd. Now Terl approached them and turned, stood with his huge feet apart, seemed to swell, and yelled, “Start it up!”

Jonnie started it up. He felt uneasy; a sixth sense was biting him, like when you had a puma behind you that you hadn’t seen. It wasn’t Terl’s threats. It was something else. He looked over the crowd.

“Raise the blade!” roared Terl, through the horn.

Jonnie did.

“Lower the blade!”

Jonnie did.

“Roll it ahead.”

Jonnie did.

“Back it up.”

Jonnie did.

“Put it in a circle.”

Jonnie did.

“Now build a mound of snow from all angles!”

Jonnie started maneuvering, handling the controls, taking light scrapes of snow, pushing them to a center. He was doing better than just making a mound; he was building a square-sided pile and leveling off its top. He worked rapidly, backing up, pushing in more snow. The precisely geometric mound took shape.

He had just one more run to make inward, a run that would carry him toward the cliff a few hundred feet away.

Suddenly the controls did not respond. There had been a prolonged whirring whine in the guts of the control box. And every knob and lever on the control panel went slack!

The blade machine yawed to the right, yawed to the left.

Jonnie hammered at the slack controls. Nothing bit! The blade abruptly rose high in the air.

The machine rumbled relentlessly forward and rose up to the top of the pile, almost summersaulted over backward. At the top, it slammed down flat. Then it almost did a forward flip as it went down the other side.

It was rolling straight toward the cliff edge!

Jonnie punched the kill button time after time but it had no effect on the roaring engine.

He fought the controls. They stayed slack.

Wildly he looked back at the crowd. He got a fleeting impression of Zzt off to the side. The brute had something in its paw.

Jonnie strained at the collar that held him to this deadly machine.

He tugged at the flexirope. It was as unyielding as ever.

The cliff edge was coming nearer.

There was a manual blade control to his left, held by a hook. Jonnie fought to get the hook loose. If he could drop the blade it might stick and hold. The hook wouldn’t let go.

Jonnie grabbed in his pocket for a fire flint and banged the flint against the hook. The hook let go. By its own weight the scraper blade came down in a swooping arc and gouged into the rocky earth. The machine rocked and slowed.

There was a small explosion under the hood. An instant later smoke shot up in the air. And a split second after that a roaring tongue of flame rose.

The cliff edge was only a few feet away. Jonnie stared at it for an instant through the growing sheets of flame. The machine edged forward, buckling its scraper blade.

Jonnie whirled to the roll bar behind him. The flexirope was wrapped around and around it. Pressing the rope against the metal he attacked it with the flint. He had tried it before with no success. But on the verge of being yanked, in flames, two hundred feet down, hope was all he had left.

His back was getting scorched. He turned to face front. The instrument panel was beginning to glow red hot.

The machine inched closer to the edge.

Small explosions sounded as instruments burst. The searing metal of the panel’s upper edge was glowing with heat.

Jonnie grabbed what slack he had on the flexirope and held it against the red-hot metal edge. The rope began to melt!

It took all his willpower to hold his hands there. The flexirope dripped molten drops.

The machine teetered. At any moment the blade was going to go into vacant space to shoot the machine into thin air.

The flexirope parted!

Jonnie went off the machine in a long dive and rolled.

With a shuddering groan, the last support of the blade snapped. Flames geysered. As though shot from a catapult, the machine leaped into empty space.

It struck far below on the slope, bounced, plunged to a stop, and was consumed in fire.

Jonnie pressed his burned hands into the cooling snow.

7

Terl was looking for Zzt.

When the machine finally went over, Terl had looked around in sudden suspicion. But Zzt wasn’t there.

The crowd had laughed. Especially at the last part of it when the machine went. And their laughter was like daggers in Terl’s ears.

Numph just stood there, shaking his head. He seemed almost cheerful when he commented to Terl, “Well, just shows you what animals can do.” Only then had he laughed. “They pee on the floor!”

They had drifted back to their offices and Terl was now searching the transport compound. In the underground floors, he walked past rows and rows of out-of-use vehicles, battle planes, trucks, blade scrapers . . . yes, and ground cars, some of them quite posh. It had not struck him before how villainous was Zzt’s pawing off on him of that old wreck of a Mark II.

He searched fruitlessly for half an hour and then decided to try the repair room again.

Seething, he stomped into it and stared around.

His earbones picked up a tiny whisper of metal on metal.

He knew that sound. It was the safety slide being pulled back on a blaster.

“Stand right there,” said Zzt. “Keep your paws well away from your belt gun.”

Terl turned. Zzt had been standing just inside a dark tool locker.

Terl was boiling. “You installed a remote control when you ‘fixed’ that motor!”

“Why not?” said Zzt. “And a remote destruct charge as well.”

Terl was incredulous. “You admit it!”

“No witnesses here. Your word, my word. Means nothing.”

“But it was your own machine!”

“Written off. Plenty of machines.”

“But why did you do it?”

“I thought it was pretty clever, actually.” He stepped forward, holding the long-barreled blast gun in one hand.

“But why?”

“You let our pay and bonuses be cut. If you didn’t do it, you let it be done.”

“But look, if I could make animal operators, profits would come back.”

“That’s your idea.”

“It’s a good idea!” snapped Terl.

“All right. I’ll be frank. You ever try to keep machines going without mechanics? Your animal operators would have just messed up equipment. One just did, didn’t it?”

“You messed that up,” said Terl. “You realize that if this occurred on your report, you’d be out of work.”

“It won’t occur on my report. There are no witnesses. Numph even saw me walk off before the thing went wild. He would never forward the report. Besides, they all thought it was funny.”

“Lots of things can be funny,” said Terl.

Zzt motioned with the blaster barrel. “Why don’t you just walk out of here and have a nice crap.”

Leverage. Leverage, thought Terl. He was fresh out of it.

He left the garage.

8

Jonnie was a mound of misery in the cage.

The monster had pitched him in there before going off.

It was cold but Jonnie could not hold a flint in his hands to start a fire. His fingers were a mass of blisters. And somehow, right then, he didn’t want much to do with fire.

His face was scorched, eyebrows and beard singed away. Some of his hair was gone. The old Chinko uniform cloth must have been fireproof—it had not ignited or melted, thus saving body burns.

Bless the Chinkos. Poor devils. With their polite phrases and brightness, they had yet been exterminated.

That was one lesson to be learned. Anyone who befriended or sought to cooperate with the Psychlos was doomed from the beginning.

Terl had not made one motion in the direction of that burning vehicle to salvage him, knowing he was tied to it. Compassion and decency were no part of the Psychlo character. Terl had even had a gun and could have shot the flexirope in half.

Jonnie felt the ground rumble. The monster was in the cage. A boot toe turned him over. Slitted, amber eyes appraised him.

“You’ll live,” grunted Terl indifferently. “How long will it take you to get well?”

Jonnie said nothing. He just looked up at Terl.

“You’re stupid,” said Terl. “You don’t know anything about remote controls.”

“And what could I have done, tied to the seat?” said Jonnie.

“Zzt, the bastard, put a remote control under the hood. And a firebomb.”

“How was I supposed to see that?”

“You could have inspected.”

Jonnie smiled thinly. “Tied to the cab?”

“You know now. When we do it again I’ll—”

“There won’t be any ‘again,’” said Jonnie.

Terl loomed over him, looking down.

“Not under these conditions,” said Jonnie.

“Shut up, animal!”

“Take off this collar. My neck is burned.”

Terl looked at the frayed flexirope. He went out of the cage and came back with a small welding unit and a new coil of rope. It wasn’t flexirope. It was thinner and metallic. He burned off the old rope and welded the new one on, ignoring Jonnie’s effort to twist away from the flame. He fixed the far end of the new rope into a loop and dropped it over a high cage bar out of reach.

With Jonnie’s eyes burning holes in his back, Terl went out of the cage and locked the door.

Jonnie wrapped himself in the dirty fur of a robe and lay in sodden misery beneath the newly fallen snow.