Part 31

1

Jonnie was riding Windsplitter along the banks of the Alzette River in Luxembourg. He was leisurely wending his way home.

It was a lovely summer day: the sunlight spattered down through the leafy trees along the trail, making patterns of green and gold that shifted gently and seemed to slowly echo the soft music of the purling stream.

Windsplitter snorted and tried to rear. It was the bear. The same bear they had seen there several times during the three months they had been in Luxembourg, using this same trail from the old minesite to Jonnie’s house. The bear was fishing. He stopped now and tested the environment with his nose and saw them. He was a pretty big bear, brown, about six and a half feet tall as he stood up.

“It’s just the bear, you old fraud,” said Jonnie.

Windsplitter sort of laughed and settled down. He did what he could to make life more exciting. And ever since the horses had been flown down from Russia they had been getting fat from idleness. Jonnie always rode him down to the minesite mornings and left him to poke around the strange doings there until Jonnie rode home. Just now he would have been far happier with a good old flat-out run through these interesting, summer-dressed woods. But he stood still, obedient to a heel command.

Jonnie sat and idly watched the bear. It had resumed its fishing, seeing no menace in the horse and rider on the other bank of the shallow stream. Jonnie bet if he had been a Psychlo, that bear would have left the country! And would have still been running all the next day. Jonnie indifferently wanted to see if the bear would catch any of the big trout with which the stream abounded.

For all this beautiful day, Jonnie had a small feeling of disappointment. He had awakened that morning with the odd conviction that this new day was going to bring something really eventful, some piece of good news. And all day he had been anticipating it.

He reviewed what had happened so far to see if any bright event had been missed by him.

He had gone, pretty much as usual, down to the old minesite to find the routine bedlam in progress. Three months ago he had bought the old Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the Intergalactic holdings. The Psychlos had had an iron mine there which they had worked in a lackadaisical fashion. They had also built a small steel mill and a forge which they used to turn out hooks, ore buckets and such for their mines on Earth.

The invaders had not touched the place, already well defended, and the deep underground levels had been ideal for doing the final setup of consoles. Angus MacTavish and Tom Smiley Townsen worked there, behind vault doors. They had streamlined assembly so all they had to do was implant the pattern of the circuit on the insulating board, assemble the console, and shove it into a shipping case. Everything else was preconstructed practically out in the open since it gave away nothing.

In fact nobody but Jonnie, Angus, Tom Smiley and Sir Robert knew that the consoles were completed at Luxembourg. The preassembly even included boxing. People who did it thought Angus and Tom Smiley were just inspectors. But these two, working only a couple of hours a day, using designed patterns and tools, withdrew the “preconstructed” console out of the case, finished it, sealed it, and then lined it up in the rows of them.

A heavily guarded convoy of trucks then drove them an incredible distance down to an ancient tunnel, once called Saint Gottard, about nine miles long. There the boxes were unloaded onto mine platform cars and sent on the ancient rails to the tunnel center. An automatic machine stamped them “completed” as they were passed through a blocked chamber and put them onto a new set of mine platform cars.

A brand-new set of trucks, much more heavily guarded, then rushed them to the new firing platform that was now located in a mountain bowl outside Zurich. There, they were routed and shipped.

As Jonnie, Angus and Tom Smiley had set up the tunnel and as it was heavily gunned and guarded, nobody knew who did the final assembly. Some thought there were special personnel or gnomes or something that lived in that tunnel and did the work.

They were batting out about two hundred consoles a day. The preassembly people were making the whole platform and poles and wiring since none of that was secret, and they were being shipped right along with the consoles.

No, mused Jonnie. There was nothing startlingly new in all that today. It was last week when Tom Smiley had told him Margarita was going to have a baby.

The bear had gotten his first trout. He batted it way up on the bank, looked around, and then went back to fishing. Windsplitter had found some young grass and was noisily pulling it up and eating it.

There had been nothing new with the Chatovarians. The bank had informed Sir Robert the moment all arms and related firms had crashed but good in the Chatovarian Empire and Sir Robert and Angus and half a dozen Selachees had sped there.

The Chatovarians had the reputation of being the best defense builders. It was their boast that no Psychlo attack had ever broken through in the entire seven-hundred-planet empire. They had even shot down gas drones. So, for that and other reasons, the new teleportation company—now called “The Rig Industry” after Jonnie rejected using his name on it—had done business with the Chatovarians. The Selachees had helped Angus find the right companies and had helped Sir Robert do the purchasing, and they now owned eleven Chatovarian firms, each one specialized in what they needed. There had been no dearth of firms for sale and no lack of engineers and workers in that heavily overpopulated empire—forty-nine trillion!

They had left the main offices in Chatovaria and only working sections were here.

No, there’d been no new good news about all that! Rather, a bit of bad news. The main offices of those firms were costly to maintain as they couldn’t fire key staff there. And the problem of what they should now manufacture at home was coming up.

Their technology and ability were good. Jonnie had a little trouble with their math—they used a binary system as everything they had ran on computers and circuits. But everything they built was just great. With one exception.

Jonnie could not abide reaction engines. Flying one was a drag. And they required special runways and pads to land. They were fine out in space but not for atmosphere transport. You couldn’t even stunt them really.

The Chatovarians themselves were all over the place at Luxembourg. They were nice people. They stood about five feet tall, had somewhat flat heads and big buck teeth. They were a bright orange tan. Their hands were a trifle webbed but very nimble. And they were strong. Jonnie had found that out when he was fooling around wrestling with one of their engineers. Jonnie had come within an ace of not being able to throw him. And they were always going fast. Work, work, work!

They ate wood. And the first thing they did when their crews arrived was plant about fifteen thousand acres of assorted trees, planted with the speed of machine guns into what they called “catalyst pots.” This was so they could have something to eat.

They had a bit of conflict with the three Chinese engineers that were here. The Chinese like to build out of wood and the Chatovarians thought that was an awful waste of good food. The Chatovarians loved to work with stone: they had small beam tools, like swords, and they cut stone with splice-notches so it would hang together with no mortar. Then they annealed the stone and made it join molecularly so it was armor-hard. And the whole grain of the stone came out in bright, glossy colors. Very pretty. They taught the Chinese how to do it and the Chinese taught them how to weave silk, so all was forgiven and it came out with smiles, but it was touchy for a while.

Going to a Chatovarian dinner was like walking into a lumber yard. Jonnie had to make them promise not to gnaw down all the trees in sight.

The Chatovarians tended to overstaff. And unless Jonnie dreamed up some consumer product for the home offices to build, the red ink on their balance sheets would splash into blood.

He wanted to get them building teleportation motor cars and planes. But he didn’t know how to make a teleportation motor and all efforts to work it out failed. Those blasted Psychlo mathematics! Nothing ever balanced.

The thought made him restless. The bear had caught another fish. The sunlight played over Jonnie’s buckskin shirt.

He had been sure something nice would happen today. Well, the day wasn’t over.

He touched Windsplitter’s shoulder, and the horse decided it was a signal to run, which it wasn’t, and went tearing up the trail for home.

2

They burst out of the forest and rushed toward the palace and then Windsplitter made a huge show of how hard it was to stop—it wasn’t—and reared and pawed the air.

“Showoff,” Jonnie accused him.

It hadn’t been all that much of a run—only half a mile. But Windsplitter was content. The row that was going on in the middle of the ten-acre lawn attracted him.

Stormy, the lame Blodgett’s colt—he looked just like Windsplitter even with his much-too-long legs—and a huge tan dog that had recently trotted out of the forest and adopted Chrissie, were romping and plunging and racing away and pretending to stomp and bite, always missing. Blodgett was looking on without much concern and Windsplitter walked over to her.

Jonnie slid off and raised his hand to the Russian in the control turret hidden in the right-hand tower. A flick of a white sleeve as the guard waved back.

This place had really changed. The only trouble with it was, it looked too new and shiny and it certainly now would never age. The Chinese engineers had understood, but the Chatovarians just couldn’t grasp that a place should show a little age.

Jonnie remembered when Chrissie had first spotted the place. They were in a small plane and Jonnie, having just bought the duchy, was trying to get some idea of its layout. Chrissie had all of a sudden leaned out the window and shouted, “There! There! There!” and nothing would do but that he land and let her look at the place. She had still been gaunt and he couldn’t refuse her much.

The building had stood in the middle of a wilderness that might have once been parks. Hard to tell. Hard to tell even that the piled ruin of stone had ever been much but rocks.

Chrissie had raced around, heedless of the briars that plucked at her buckskin leggings, shouting back at him in wild excitement. She pointed to a fifty-acre plot crying, “And that’s just the place for a cattle yard!” And to another place, “Ideal for your horses!” And spreading her arms, indicating some pits, “Perfect for tanning vats!” And then tracing a stream that was bubbling along minding its own business, “And this can be diverted to run right by the kitchen door and we can have running water all the time!”

She had gone tearing around on the cracked remains of what might have been room floors and pointed to outlines Jonnie could not see, “A fireplace here. And one here! And another there!”

Then she had stood in front of him and said, “Here we will never be hungry, we will never be snowed in, we will never be cold!” And then defiantly, as though he might say no, “This is where we are going to live!”

Jonnie got the Chatovarian chief engineer who had arrived with the two-hundred-Chatovarian first construction contingent and told him to build something modern on the site. He thought he was rid of the problem but the following day he found himself confronted by a very irate Chatovarian architectural team.

When a Chatovarian became incensed he sort of whistled through his teeth, quite distinct from the gurgling sound, like air coming up through a water bottle, when they laughed. The leading architect was whistling his indignation.

It didn’t matter whether Jonnie owned the company, but Jonnie was really a Chatovarian, proven by the fact that he had his title direct from the Empress Beaz. And he had to be told that he should know better!

Completely at sea, Jonnie was treated to a dissertation on architecture. They had studied Earth forms and many were all right. Classic Greek and Roman were known in other systems and, if impractical, were still acceptable. Gothic, Neo-Gothic and Renaissance architecture they actually thought quite novel. They could even strain their artistic sensibilities by going along with Baroque.

But modern? They quit. Send them back to Chatovaria. Send them back even though they would starve there. Some things one just couldn’t do!

It was only then that Jonnie found that “modern” had been a type of architecture prevalent on Earth about eleven hundred years ago: that it consisted of plain, straight up-and-down walls on a rectangular base; that it often was a vast expanse of glass windows; that it had been conceived by somebody dedicated to stamping out all indigenous architecture of an area. In short, modern was an architecture that wasn’t architecture, but just a cheap way to throw rubbish in the air and get paid for it.

The Chatovarian, with a quivering, pointing finger in the direction of the old city of Luxembourg and backed up by the serious nods of five assistants, wailed that that whole town had been built in modern, and on his artistic soul, no such abominations would be perpetuated while he lived!

Jonnie had apologized. The Chatovarian said maybe it came from having to talk in Psychlo. And Jonnie asked what they recommended.

Five assistants presented a huge plan instantly.

This building, they said, had been the palace of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg in ancient times. And even though Jonnie did not think so, he didn’t say so.

The indigenous architecture, from the castles that lay about, probably had been Gothic and Neo-Gothic. And this palace should be like this. Jonnie had delayed long enough to ask Chrissie, but all she gave him were the items she had found that made the place charming, and he had made sure those were included and had told them to go ahead.

Chrissie and he had camped out in the woods, happy to be away from the din, cheerful in a buckskin tent and eating good food cooked on an open fire.

The Chatovarians had cleared the site and erected an armor steel shell. They had then flown down to a couple of marble quarries north of Leghorn in Italy and operated a ferry of ore freighters until they had piles of green and rose and other colored slabs. They had spliced them together into an exterior and interior of polished, armored rock. They had underplated the stream so that it did what it was supposed to do. But they had also installed full plumbing. The fireplaces would burn wood but since this was a waste of good food, they also put solar driven infraheaters in them and a simulated flame.

It was a palace all right. And it might be Gothic. But it sure was colorful! Chrissie had been enthralled with it.

Jonnie, as he walked to the arches on the other side of the drawbridge, could hear in the distance the crash and bang of the Chatovarians ripping the old city of Luxembourg into chips. They had gone through it with historical and artifact survey teams and then the rams had been turned loose. That was the one piece of modern that would not survive.

The bank had already moved back to Zurich and Jonnie would have liked to live there too because of the nearby mountains.

Jonnie halted. Dries Gloton must have been here today, for there was a burned spot in the lawn. Dries, after turning over his sector branch office, had been appointed Galactic Bank Liaison with the Earth Planetary Bank. He had been the finder of the one, but a bank executive couldn’t accept such rewards—they would undermine customer confidence—and Voraz had raised Dries’s salary to a hundred thousand credits a year, quite enough to maintain his yacht and anything else. Dries had left the yacht here and teleported home, and while he was gone, his Selachee crew had been teaching the Chatovarians gambling games and winning a lot of their pay. But the Chinese engineers had been winning it back from the Selachees, so Jonnie had kept out of it.

Dries rambled all over in his yacht—an oddity to use a spacecraft to go to the corner store for a bottle of schnapps, but that was Dries. He had taken the job on the condition that he would have long weekends and he seemed to always be going to northern Scotland. He said he was starting a “peppermint industry” on the side, but Jonnie didn’t believe him. He was sure something else was involved. Today he had probably brought Chrissie some butter or something.

On the other hand, he might have been settling some accounts with Mr. Tsung. Dries kept certain customers and Mr. Tsung was one of them. Jonnie’s account was cared for by fifteen Selachees who worked down at the minesite, and Dries had nothing to do with that—it ran about a trillion a day income now and was growing. Mr. Tsung’s account was, however, somehow interesting to Dries: Jonnie had offered Mr. Tsung a salary and Mr. Tsung had been very surprised, for he said a chamberlain usually paid his boss, from which Jonnie got the explanation of how some guests were always invited and some weren’t. But it was Mr. Tsung’s daughter that was making money. She was named Lü, after the last empress of the Han dynasty, and she was becoming famous. She worked in a little pagodalike structure out back that was really a disguised antiaircraft pit, and she turned out pictures of tigers in the snow and birds flying and things like that on both silk and rice paper, and they were collector’s items, bringing in a thousand credits at a crack. She also worked around the house and helped Chrissie and cut hair.

Jonnie decided he’d better have a metal pad installed for Dries to land on. He got along fine with him now. No use to tell him off.

He couldn’t get through the courtyard. Lin Li, Mr. Tsung’s son-in-law, had all the banquet hall furniture out and was working it over with molecular metal spray. The young man had an audience of a couple of awed Chatovarians. He could “paint” pictures, freehand, with a metal spray gun and a piece of cardboard to catch the splatters. He was very quick. Right now he was doing a scene Jonnie knew he must have gotten from pictures of tapestries—a lot of knights. He was putting it on the huge banquet tabletop.

He had stopped doing dragon medallions by hand. As they were all the same, a couple of Chatovarian mechanics, awed by his ability, had gotten him to do a perfect one and then had made a machine to turn them out at about ten thousand an hour. The demand out in the universe was such that they were back-ordered even so.

Jonnie couldn’t get through without interrupting Lin Li. So he stood there watching. Chrissie and Mr. Tsung had been talking about the possibility of some of these Chatovarians getting out of hand at a party and eating up the furniture. That must be what this metal plating was all about! They had to suit the dwelling to the many guests they always had.

The vague feeling of disappointment hit him again. He had been certain, when he rose, that this was a sort of special day. That something wonderful was going to happen. It hadn’t.

Lin Li had just started on a ferocious figure of a charging knight. He was using a scarlet metal, putting blood on a blade. It made Jonnie think of the red ink coming in so far on the Chatovarian company, “Desperation Defense.” If he could just unravel motors, he could put them over into passenger transport. But he was condemned if he would continue with reaction engines.

Lin Li was guiding the molecular spray, now gray, to make the armor. The Chatovarians were looking on with awe. One of them was holding a spare gun, ready to hand it to Lin Li. They weren’t assistants. They just wished they could do things like that. The Chatovarian closed the trigger of the gun to test it.

Suddenly Jonnie knew it had happened. The nice thing!

He sped back out the arch and raced all around the palace side and jumped the creek and popped into the back door.

Chrissie, hair tied back, was filling a big bowl, held by Mr. Tsung, from a pot on the fire.

“Chrissie!” said Jonnie. “Get your things!”

Pattie was sitting over in the corner. Pattie never said anything these days. She just looked down. Tinny, the Buddhist communicator, had been trying to talk to her as she often did.

“Tinny!” said Jonnie. “Call the minesite! Get me a marine-attack plane on the pad in twenty minutes! Call Dr. MacKendrick in Aberdeen and tell him to come right away to Victoria!”

“Pattie doesn’t feel well,” said Chrissie.

“Bring her along!” said Jonnie.

“Is it a diplomatic conference or a scientific one?” said Mr. Tsung, monotone through the vocoder.

“Medical!” said Jonnie.

Mr. Tsung put down the bowl and raced off to put a white coat and a pair of spectacles—which had no glass in them—in a sack. That was proper dress he had seen in ancient pictures.

“Jonnie!” said Chrissie. “This is venison stew!”

“We’ll eat it on the plane! We’re headed for Africa!”

3

Jonnie headed the marine-attack plane slightly east of south and turned on his viewscreens. This copilot was new, from the French refugees in the Alps, named Pierre Solens: he was quite young, recently trained; he still had a little trouble speaking Psychlo. Usually his duties consisted of simply shifting the minesite planes about, but as compound duty pilot, it had been up to him to deliver the ship to Jonnie’s house; he had not dreamed that in the next few minutes he would be flying copilot to the Tyler and heading for Africa. He had started out all right, but when he saw how Jonnie took off he had become overawed. He had never seen a plane lofted that way, like firing a bullet! And now they were flying hypersonic at only fifteen thousand feet. Would they clear the French and Italian Alps?

“We’re awfully low,” he timidly offered.

“People in back,” said Jonnie. “Can’t let them get too cold. Get to work with those viewscreens so we won’t be running into any drones.”

Drones, drones, drones! All his life Jonnie had been being looked at by drones! It was no exception now. The Chatovarian defense system was only half-complete: despite buying the company, it was an expensive system, almost three times as costly as the one the small gray men had described, but it was about ten times as good. Automatic blast cannon that fired fifteen hundred miles into space could shoot down a space fleet with one salvo; atmosphere drones that fired; space drones that patrolled orbits; probes that scanned anything moving within ten light-years. Real armor cable would make every city untouchable.

As the system was incomplete, a lot of emergency stand-in drones were about and they were attracted to anything flying. A huge green flashing light was going on top of the plane, and the box there, newly installed, was sending out the “code of the day,” which was so fast and so scrambled and changing microsecond to microsecond that an attacker could not hope to duplicate it. If the drones didn’t see and hear it, they’d shoot.

Ah, yes, here came the Mediterranean emergency drones, three of them, shooting over to “have a look.” The copilot was slow and Jonnie tuned a knob to focus them.

Chatovarian drones, all right. Each one had a big eye painted on its nose. But those big, staring eyes were not a Chatovarian fixation on decoration: a pilot would instinctively shoot into the center of them, and if a pilot did, the drone used the shot as a return carrier wave to send a surge back that blew up the attacker’s own ammunition and thereby his ship. Don’t shoot at one of those eyes!

Nevertheless they were a bit disconcerting, glaring out of the viewscreen. They nudged in like sniffing dogs, and then satisfied by automatically cross-verifying with each other, they fell away and returned to their patrol sectors.

The French pilot was looking back at the Alps. They hadn’t hit any!

But Jonnie had his screens on the orbit drones now. They seemed to be disinterested, satisfied by the code of the day.

And what was this? He had a space probe on the screen. He hadn’t known you could see one. Was it hostile?

Like any star drone or probe, these things had a “lens” that was made of a “light magnet.” This reacted on light beams and pulled them in from a zone many miles in diameter and concentrated them, magnetically corrected for aberration, into a spot smaller than a dot on paper. In effect, it made a lens many, many miles in diameter. The problem was too much light rather than too little, and they had blinders or filters that dropped into place to keep them from burning out their receivers or recording disks should they turn toward a sun too close. In that way one could get magnifications into the tens of trillions.

One of the contractors had drilled Jonnie in on command controls and a box of these existed overhead. Jonnie flipped a switch and tapped the probe’s receiver and shifted the image to his own central viewscreen.

It was their own space probe all right. He was looking at the copilot and himself behind their own viewscreen. Yet that space probe was over ten thousand miles away. It must be at the near end of a run. Friendly, so he threw the tap off.

He didn’t really think anybody would attack Earth now. The peace treaty had gone in, as promised, with claws! Very, very popular. The delegates had even taken home copies of the end of Psychlo and the death of Asart. The bank was shoveling out food loans like a waterfall. Consumer products had not yet begun to roll. That would take time. He hoped he could get at the secret of how one built a teleportation motor: that would open the door to a lot of consumer products. And even more important, keep the vehicles they had here operating. These planes wouldn’t last forever.

“Take over,” he told the French pilot, Pierre, and went back into the body of the plane.

Chrissie stirred herself and unwrapped a bowl. “I’m afraid the venison stew might be cold now.”

Jonnie sat down in one of the huge bucket seats. Pattie was down at the back of the plane, just sitting there, looking down. It worried him. Sometimes she went for walks at night. Sometimes he could hear her in her room, crying. Because she was only ten he had thought she would recover. But she hadn’t.

Mr. Tsung, he saw, was going to use this time-space to catch up with his diplomatic and social duties, for here he came with about ten pounds of paper. Jonnie put his attention on the stew. It wasn’t cold.

“The week’s dispatch box came in from Snautch,” he said.

So that was what Dries was doing coming down from Zurich. “Send the business matters down to the minesite office; it’s their job.”

“Oh, I did, I did,” said Mr. Tsung. “These are all social and diplomatic. Invitations to weddings, banquets, christenings. Requests to address meetings—”

“Well, thank them or tell them no,” said Jonnie.

“Oh, I have, I have,” said Mr. Tsung. “We don’t have any trouble. We use a vocoreader, a vocoder and a vocotyper. We can handle correspondence in about eighteen thousand languages now. But this is going to get heavier.”

Here it comes, thought Jonnie. Mr. Tsung’s elder brother had been appointed chamberlain to the court of the chief of Clanfearghus. His younger brother was busy starting up a diplomatic college in Edinburgh.

“You got another brother?” said Jonnie around a mouthful of stew.

“I am sorry that I don’t,” retorted Mr. Tsung. “I’m talking about the nephew of Baron von Roth. He wants to apprentice as a diplomat in my office.”

“Fine,” said Jonnie.

Mr. Tsung adjusted the vocoder volume higher as the plane was roaring more with Pierre at the console. “I want to hire about thirty more Russian and Chinese girls to train as clerks and vocotyper operators. It’s really very simple. One reads invitations with a voco-reader into one’s own language and then one uses a vocoder to talk to the vocotyper and it types the answer back into the tongue of the original letter—”

“Go ahead,” said Jonnie.

“I think there should be a new building to take care of all these people and files. Something more on a Chinese—”

“Go ahead,” said Jonnie.

“There was one letter that I pulled out that you should see,” said Mr. Tsung. “It’s from Lord Voraz to MacAdam with a copy to you, and Dries said MacAdam had to hear from you before he answered.”

Trouble, thought Jonnie.

“Voraz wants a formula to determine the validity of a commercial loan.”

“That’s not diplomatic or social,” said Jonnie.

“It’s kind of diplomatic,” said Mr. Tsung, “Voraz and MacAdam being who they are, one does not wish to see tensions. The whole problem is what consumer products should arms companies convert to. If they convert to the wrong ones, the whole program will fail and the bank will have granted useless loans.”

His own problem in a different dress, thought Jonnie. He thought of the red ink of Desperation Defense.

“Intergalactic Mining,” said Mr. Tsung, looking at the Voraz letter, “was sitting on hundreds of thousands of inventions that were on file in the Hall of Legality to prevent other nations from using them. I know this isn’t diplomatic, but it could make a big diplomatic mess if the bank lends money to make the wrong products. Also, all the invention formulas are in Psychlo math.”

Jonnie had finished the venison stew and he gave the bowl back to Chrissie. There was something in the old man-books about this. What was the subject? . . . Marketing as a factor in profit. “You tell MacAdam to have banks get out survey teams—people that go around and ask people questions—and find out what people in each planetary area think they would want to buy: not what they should buy, but what they want to buy. Don’t offer suggestions. Just ask them. For all they know it might be as little as a”—he recalled his own discovery that glass would cut—“as something to skin hides more easily. The subject is ‘marketing surveys.’ And I’m working on Psychlo math right now.”

Tinny had been listening. She was already punching phone buttons. This was a new system. But it was kind of overdone. The smallest exchange the Chatovarians made for a planet had two billion individual radio channels, and since the war, they only had about thirty-one thousand people. There were radio phone printers everywhere. She was on to the Zurich bank, plugging in the recording she had just made of his voice. Tsung saw Jonnie wasn’t going to say more and nodded to her and she let it start. The printed reply would be rolling off onto MacAdam’s desk right now. She fed in the reference letter Tsung gave her.

“Dries left you this,” said Mr. Tsung. He handed Jonnie a little blue disk with a pin on the back of it. It said “Galactic Bank” on the front of it. When he saw Jonnie looking at it but not taking it, he added, “The Chatovarian deadly device officer passed it.”

Jonnie took it. “He give you anything else?”

“Oh, you know Dries,” said Mr. Tsung. “He said there was an excess supply of butter up in the Highlands now and he brought Chrissie a whole bucket of it. Some old woman has fifteen Holstein cows and he says he’s financing a butter business.”

Jonnie laughed. There had been no Holstein cows in Scotland that he knew of. Dries must have persuaded a pilot to fly them up from Germany or Switzerland where they roamed wild. Another “peppermint industry.” “Do we give him anything in return?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Tsung. “We always feed him a tub of fried rice. He loves it! And my son-in-law found a book of colored plates of fish and he made up some fish medallions and we give him one of those each time. He says they’re valuable.”

“And you pay Lin Li,” said Jonnie, wise to the ways of commerce and the Chinese.

“Of course. From your social petty cash.”

The term “petty cash” could be pretty general. The Earth Planetary Bank was paying for Earth’s defense system out of petty cash.

But Mr. Tsung was going on. “That button is a pre-run of prizes they are giving out in their new neighborhood bank program all through the universes—you know, to people who open up accounts. It will in each case be in the local language. You put it on your color tab or a place like that and then you hum a note and as long as you move your mouth, the button will sing. They are gathering up all the folk songs of each local region.”

Jonnie got a kit out of his bag. He had brought it to help the project he was on right now. He took a microannealer and opened the button up and looked at its insides with a microviewer. It was just a molecular-sized set of storage cells with little triggers and relays. A tiny battery charged itself from room heat. An electron vibrating prong set atmosphere molecules in motion to make sound. Simple, rather cheap.

But that wasn’t what Jonnie was looking for. He often suspected the bank acquired information in peculiar ways and he checked vocoders and suchlike to make sure they didn’t contain a radio mike or a recording thread that could be taken back later. He had never found one so far. But that was the world he now lived in.

He microannealed it back together and hung it on his buckskin collar.

“That isn’t a standard one, he said to tell you,” piped Mr. Tsung through his own monotone vocoder. “He collected some old records of American ballads and put them in it. There aren’t very many Americans, so it won’t be manufactured for them.”

Jonnie cleared his throat and moved his mouth. The button hummed a wordless tune. Hadn’t he heard that tune before? Scottish, German? Ah . . . it was called “Jingle Bells.” Then the button sang:

Galactic Bank!
Galactic Bank!
My friend so tried and true.
Oh, what fun it is to have
A neighbor such as you!

And then in a proud voice it said, “I am a customer of the Galactic Bank!”

Well, that certainly wasn’t any “American ballad”! Was Dries having a joke? He never joked, really. A very serious, small gray man.

Jonnie was about to take it off. But his laugh started it up again.

Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the buffalo play . . .

Jonnie remembered you had to keep moving your jaws to make it sing. Saliva pops or muscle tension or something. He started moving his jaws again.

I seldom have heard
A disparaging word . . .

“Mister Tyler!” came through the intercom from the nervous Pierre, “I can see Lake Victoria on the viewscreens through the overcast. It’s totally clouded in ahead. Hadn’t I better go on to Kariba?”

Jonnie went forward and took over the console. It was always overcast at Victoria.

Jonnie opened his mouth to call in for clearance. But the button sang:

And the skies are not cloudy all day!

What a lousy forecast, thought Jonnie, and put the button in his pocket.

4

After glancing over the flying conditions, Jonnie could not much blame Pierre. For a while now they had been flying through the night: a fact which an experienced instrument pilot would not have thought about twice, and indeed, Jonnie had scarcely noticed it.

By looking very hard, and only then with trained pilot’s eyes, one could just barely make out Mount Elgon rising above the black cloud carpet, for there was no moon and such a peak became mainly visible because it blocked out certain stars.

It was the screens which caused Jonnie to forgive Pierre. So thick was the cloud layer below them that the viewscreens, aimed at it, were more snowstorm than image. You would actually have to know the shape of the lake and the compound to have any notion of what you were looking at. A lot of electrostatic disturbance; it must be raining like fury at the compound, rain flicked with lightning.

Pierre, however, was in a state of mind that wasn’t asking for anything but to stand on solid ground. He could not read the screens. He could not see anything but some stars above them and blackness below them, a blackness lashed now and then by some internal flash. He thought they were done for if they tried to go down through that. Who knew what hill they would run into? He would have been petrified had he known that Mount Elgon was higher than they were flying, but mercifully, he did not know that. Nor, even more frightening, that they had passed by a couple of peaks even higher. Magnifying his alarm, Monsieur Tyler had come back to the pilot seat and hummed a strange song. Mon Dieu, one did not sing when one faced certain death. Lunacy!

Victoria gave them permission to land and Jonnie felt his way down through the rain clouds. His screens didn’t clear up, but knowing the area, he could identify the scraps of image he sometimes glimpsed. It was useless to look through the screen: it looked like it had a fire hose being played on it.

Jonnie felt for the ground with his skids, more concerned about a bump affecting his passengers than about where he was. He did it very smoothly and Pierre was again alarmed when Jonnie turned off the motors—he thought they were still in the air!

The rain was actually making it hard to talk in the cab of the plane. Jonnie threw open the door and there was Ker standing there, water cascading off him in the plane lights.

Even allowing for the deluge, Ker was awfully glum-looking. He was usually very glad to see Jonnie.

The last time Jonnie had been in Africa, he and Ker had spent three nights working the Kariba rig. The planet Fobia had been very elusive: they had no coordinates for it beyond “somewhere around the Psychlo sun,” and for a while it had seemed they would never discover it and Ker would eventually die from having no breathe-gas.

The planet was, however, located: it was doing a squashed ellipse. Fobia’s perihelion (the point in its orbit where it was nearest its sun) was so much closer to its sun than its aphelion (the point in its orbit where it was farthest), and the distance to its sun from these two points was so vastly different, near and far, that anyone trying to live on Fobia would have perished, even a Psychlo.

Fobia went through three states: as it swung away from its sun, its atmosphere chilled and became liquid; as its distance increased, the liquid froze to solidity; as it again approached its sun, the sequence reversed and the atmosphere became gaseous again. But this long period of having a “summer”—and the Fobia year was about eighty-three of Earth’s—permitted moss and other plants to grow and these flourished for a time and then, as the atmosphere liquefied, remained in a state of suspended animation until summer came again.

Although they had an awful time with camera triangulation to estimate its orbit, the end product had been beyond Ker’s wildest dreams. The planet was well into “autumn” and it was no real trick to pump huge cable tanks full of liquid breathe-gas. Not only that but they had brought back about fifty tons of the material needed to make real goo-food. Yes, Ker had been acting like a Psychlo gone to heaven, a most unlikely event, when Jonnie and he had last met.

And here he stood, glum in the rain.

“Hello, Jonnie,” he said woodenly.

“What’s the matter with you?” said Jonnie. “Lost your loaded dice?”

“Oh, it’s not you, Jonnie. I’m always glad to see you. It’s that Maz. He was chief engineer here when the place was operating. One of the wounded ones. I got about seventy ex-prisoners from all over and I’m trying to earn my pay by getting this tungsten mine going again.”

He moved nearer, the rain cascading down his breathe-gas mask, his tunic sodden with the hot rain that battered him. “I’m no engineer!” he suddenly wailed. “I was an operations officer. We ran out of ore body and the next one is just beyond it someplace. That ——— Maz and all those other ——— ——— Psychlos just sit down there on their butts and gloom! Some ——— fool showed them the pictures of Psychlo blowing up and they just won’t do anything!

“I don’t know any ——— ——— ——— math and I can’t calculate the next ore deposits!”

That’s two of us, thought Jonnie. He was glad the girls didn’t speak Psychlo. The ex-underworld midget could really swear. But he almost never did unless he was terribly upset. “That’s why I’m here,” he said.

“Really?” Ker brightened up like a mine charge had gone off in him.

“Has MacKendrick arrived?” said Jonnie.

“Control got a drone report on a plane from Scotland. That MacKendrick? He’d be about three hours behind you.”

Three hours! Jonnie had wanted to get to work right away. Well, there was something else he had to do first anyway—get some Psychlo corpses.

“There’s people in the back. Do me a favor and get them into the compound.”

“Right,” said Ker, cheered up. He had a folded mine tarp on his arm he could use on the others as a rain shield. He sloshed toward the rear door unfolding it.

Pierre had been recovering. But now he was horrified to find that Jonnie was rummaging around in a locker for high-altitude suits. Jonnie threw one at him and began to pull on another one.

Jonnie heard the door slam in back and saw dim figures running toward the compound in the rain. He finished zipping up his suit and checked his fuel. Plenty.

Twenty seconds later they were hurtling into the sky again. Pierre was still struggling into the unfamiliar high-altitude suit. Mon Dieu, life around Monsieur Tyler was hair-raising!

Jonnie was unperturbed about it all. Up above the rain clouds the screens were clean, and by seeing what stars were omitted, he could even eyeball the peaks. He left the plane lights on, heading for the glacial snows where they had left the Psychlo corpses. He needed two, he thought. A workman and an executive.

It did not help Pierre’s frame of mind at all not to be told where they were going, nor why. Charging into the ink at such speeds appalled him. He did not even look at the viewscreens. His eyes were riveted through the now-streaked windscreen.

Very shortly Jonnie was in the right location. He knew they had left a forklift up here. He would use that to guide in. He supposed that after all this time, the corpses would be pretty well covered with snow.

But Pierre, not knowing what was being looked for or where or why, simply looked through the windscreen, his eyes dilated with something that was getting up close to terror.

Suddenly Pierre saw a whiteness. It had puffs blowing off it in the plane lights. With horror he heard the engines wind down for a landing.

“Don’t!” he screamed. “Don’t! Don’t! You’re landing on a cloud!”

Jonnie glanced up through the viewscreen. It did look like a cloud at that, seen from this angle. A high wind was blowing snow about.

Ah, there was the forklift! Up to its seat in snow and ice. The corpses would be lying, covered up, just beyond it.

He had been flying by screens only. They were a long way from the nearest drop-off. He let the ship crunch down into the snow and shut off the motors. The wind was screaming up here; enough to make the plane tremble.

Jonnie settled his air mask on tighter. “Get out and give me a hand!”

Pierre was in a total confusion. He had clearly seen them land on a cloud and he could not understand what was holding the ship up. He knew from their earlier course that they must be close to, if not on, the earth’s equator, and recent studies had told him that the equator was very hot. So snow was the furthest thing from his imagination.

His small tribe had been under the domination of Jesuit priests and they had controlled by instilling a heavy fear of heaven and hell, mostly the latter. The reputation of Monsieur Tyler was itself a matter of growing superstition and awe. It surprised him less that they had landed on a cloud than it did to be told to get out.

Pierre looked at the puffs of white in the ship’s light. Yes, a cloud! He fingered the image of a crucified Christ that hung about his neck; he felt he was too young to be a martyr. But there was a solution. He snatched the jet backpack from the compartment behind the seat and hastily shrugged into it. Monsieur Tyler quite probably was able to walk on clouds but that didn’t include Madame Solens’s son Pierre.

It took a lot of courage to open the door but he did so. He closed his eyes tightly and sprang out, hand on the backpack firing trigger. It was about eight feet down from a seat of such a plane to the ground. But Pierre had been nerved up to fall twelve thousand. When he hit the ground, despite snow, he almost broke his legs. Pierre fell backward in total confusion and lay propped on his elbows in the snow. He could not understand why he had not fallen through the cloud.

Jonnie, intent on his project, was oblivious of all this confusion. He had taken a mine crowbar from the plane’s tool kit and was prospecting through the snow for the corpses. They certainly were covered up.

The tip of the iron bar found one. He knelt and brushed away some snow, the particles flying away in the wind. He uncovered the tip of a breathe-gas mask and then the ornament of a cap. Yep, an executive!

He felt around under the monstrous shoulders to see where he had to insert the flat end of the crowbar to pry the monster loose from the adhesions of ice. One of these Psychlos weighed about a thousand pounds, more in all this snow and ice.

Jonnie inserted the crowbar deeper and heaved down on it. The monster was so stuck that the top end of the bar slipped and tore open his high-altitude jacket fastenings.

He tried again, this time giving it all the strength he had. With a creaking, low-pitched sound, the monster moved upward.

But the sound must have been close to that of clearing one’s throat. The bank’s singing button in his pocket gave out a ballad line with a baritone voice:

Ghost riders in the sky . . .

Pierre, already badly shaken, beheld a demon rising from out of the cloud. And not only that, it was singing in a sepulchral voice.

It was a lot too much. With a low moan, he fainted dead away.

5

Jonnie loosened a workman’s corpse with the bar and then went to the forklift and knocked the ice out of its cogs and ratchets. He was about to start it up when he noticed the absence of Pierre. He had expected him to open the loading doors of the plane at least.

He spotted the man, lying in a shadow made by a balance motor. The snow was already blowing over him. A bit anxiously he checked to see if he was injured, puzzled by the presence of the jet backpack, wondering why he was lying there unconscious. Well, this was no place for even first aid.

Jonnie got the forklift moving and scooped up Pierre. He ran the machine down the length of the ship to the doors and, standing on the seat, got them open.

But the wind, coming from the tail of the plane, was trying to bang the door closed. Jonnie jumped up to the fuselage flooring in hopes of finding something to block the door and stopped in his tracks.

Pattie! She was still in the plane. They must have overlooked her in their scramble to get through the rain. She made so little sound and motion these days she easily went unnoticed.

She must be freezing. Jonnie opened an equipment locker and dragged out a blanket and threw it around her. She hardly even looked up.

All he could find to block the door open was the stick from a map roller and he tried to make it do by butting it against a floor equipment ring and pushing it against a hinge.

He got down and operated the forklift to boost the inert body of Pierre into the plane. He had almost made it when a powerful gust of wind banged the door shut. Once more he climbed into the plane to try to make the stick prop the door. But this time the frail wood splintered.

A soft voice sounded behind him. “I will hold it open for you.”

Pattie, gripping the blanket to her with one hand, put the other on the door and braced it open.

This was the first time he had seen her volunteer anything for months.

Jonnie jumped down onto the forklift and raised Pierre up and dumped him on the floor plates. He got into the plane once more and began tugging the man over to the side out of the way and was a bit amazed to see Pattie pulling on the body to help.

So, with Pattie to hold the door open, Jonnie was able to fork the two monstrous bodies out of the snow and dump them into the plane. Pattie was watching him and what he was doing intently.

Shortly he parked the forklift, closed up the plane, and got into the cab out of the cutting wind. He phoned the compound to have a flatbed and forklift waiting and then, checking to see if Pattie was strapped in, shot the plane up into the sky.

He had been prepared to feel his way down through the overcast with half-blind screens and was very happy to see that the worst of the storm and all of its electrical interference had passed by.

It was no longer raining at the compound and they had every pole spotlight on. Quite a crowd had gathered around the waiting vehicles to see the plane come in. The last time Jonnie had seen some of these ex-marines and ex-spacemen had been through gunsights, and it was a trifle strange beholding Jambitchows and Hawvins and such standing around, but they seemed inoffensive enough. Three Chatovarian engineers in bright orange work suits that had “Desperation Defense” written on their chests were in the crowd, probably there doing preparatory surveys to convert this minesite protection over to the new system.

A new plane was there with nobody around it and Jonnie realized that MacKendrick must have arrived. He called Pattie forward and with her under one arm jumped down from the plane.

Ker was sitting on a forklift. “The copilot is in there. He is breathing but he must be injured or something,” said Jonnie. “Get him and the two Psychlos down to the hospital.”

Jonnie, still carrying Pattie, rushed into the compound to find MacKendrick.

Ker promptly got busy with the forklift and, with an expertise only Ker could achieve with a machine, scooped all three bodies off the floor of the marine-attack plane and swooshed them over to the flatbed.

The driver, a newly trained Jambitchow, looked on in wide-eyed shock as he saw two huge Psychlo bodies plump down on the truck with a small human body dropping on top of them.

The first impulse of the crowd, seeing Psychlos, was to retreat, and fast! All the snow and ice had melted off them and to all appearances they might be alive.

The driver was about to get off the truck and put distance between himself and anything that had to do with Psychlos that might suddenly come to life.

Ker withdrew the forks and realized he was in the middle of a commotion and was about to have no driver. “No, no,” he shouted. “They’re dead!”

Timidly the Jambitchow got back on the flatbed seat. Cautiously the crowd crept forward to get a closer look. Eyes went questioningly to Ker.

“Didn’t you hear what Jonnie told me?” said Ker.

No, they hadn’t. Too far away.

“Those Psychlos,” said Ker, “have been hiding out in the jungle. They rushed out of cover and started to claw the copilot to bits. And it made Jonnie so mad he charged them. He grabbed the throats of both of them at the same time and just plain strangled them to death!”

Mouths were open and eyes were popped. The evidence was right there before them.

After a moment a Hawvin ex-officer said, “No wonder we lost this war.”

“Yes,” said Ker. “When you get to know Jonnie better, you’ll realize that when he gets mad, he gets mad!”

He signaled the flatbed to follow and drove off in the forklift. He just couldn’t resist doing what he’d done. But the hardest part was to keep from guffawing in their faces.

6

Jonnie, when he got into the compound, put Pattie down and went looking for MacKendrick. He found him in the hospital.

“Where’s the epidemic?” demanded MacKendrick. “I got your call in the middle of a medical lecture. I brought a whole medical team! And when I get here, I find you’ve taken off—”

“This time,” said Jonnie, “we’re going to do it!”

“Oh,” said MacKendrick. “You mean the capsules. Jonnie, I have tried every way I can think of and there’s no getting in those skulls. Too much bone! I thought I showed you!”

The doctor went over to where he’d last left the huge Psychlo skull. He knocked his knuckles on it. “It’s just plain, solid bone! The brain is clear down under the lower back plate. If I drill out enough bone to get to it, you’ll just have a dead Psychlo.”

“Ah,” said Jonnie. “You used the word ‘drill.’ I didn’t.”

He walked over to the skull and picked it up, all half a hundred pounds of it. MacKendrick had wired on the joints and Jonnie opened the jaw. “Now watch the earbones.” He got a better grip and held it up to the light, an action something like juggling a medicine ball. “Watch.” He opened the jaw again.

The hinge, not the place a Psychlo heard through, but the place where the earbone met the back jawline, opened to show a hole about a thirty-second of an inch in diameter.

“You showed me this once,” said Jonnie, “and explained you couldn’t get an instrument through it. But it leads right to the spots where the capsules are embedded in the brain.”

MacKendrick was skeptical. “Jonnie, I got a whole team in there cleaning the place up for a possible operation. I thought something serious had occurred. But as it’s no emergency, why don’t we just get some sleep—”

Jonnie took the skull over to the table they had used before for dissection and put it down. “It may look like no emergency to you. But the truth is that we don’t know how to make a Psychlo motor and we don’t know how to work their math. If we don’t know those things we could come unstuck. We must have hundreds of planes right this minute that are inoperative. We need consumer products out in the planets and the Psychlo motors are tops. It’s an emergency that’ll do for now. But watch!”

Jonnie took a thin insulated wire from his pocket and inserted it in the tiny skull hole. He took the other end of the wire and pushed it through the tiny hole on the other side.

“What are you doing?” demanded MacKendrick.

“Now the question you must answer is, will these wires, pushed in, tear up any jaw or ear muscles?”

“Oh, they might hit some tissue, but the main muscles aren’t there. That hole occurs because the jawbone, when extended to the extreme lower position, would have to leave a hole: otherwise there would have to be two additional bone plates, and Lord knows, there’s enough already! I don’t think—”

Jonnie reached for the kit he had hastily packed. He drew out a molecular plating gun. “This thing pours a stream of molecules from a rod onto a surface.”

MacKendrick was at sea. “You can’t get a gun like that in a head!”

“The gun unit goes outside.” He dug out an electrical terminal plate. “Where is one of those capsules we removed?”

MacKendrick got one of the two half-circles of bronze.

Jonnie snipped off some lengths of insulated wire. He took the molecular plating gun and connected a length to the electrode that ordinarily fed current to the rod of spray metal. Then he laid the other end on the bit of bronze. He took a second piece of wire and laid it from the bronze to the electrical terminal plate. Then he connected the back of the terminal plate with a long wire to the current input terminal of the gun. He was simply going to substitute the bit of bronze for the gun’s usual spray rod and then bypass the spraying component, but instead make the molecules flow on a wire to a receiving plate. And just to make sure electrolysis would occur, he was completing the circuit back to the gun.

He pressed the trigger.

The terminal plate began to be plated in bronze.

A tiny hole appeared in the capsule taken from a Psychlo head.

No electrician, MacKendrick said, “It’s disappearing!”

“We’re flowing the metal molecules up the wire to the plate. I think it’s called ‘electrolysis.’ We’re just not letting the metal molecules spray. We’re flowing them onto a plate.”

He adjusted the wires to the bit of bronze so that an inflow hit a different spot and the outflow occurred from a new place.

MacKendrick gawped. “That piece of metal is disappearing!”

“It’s reappearing over on the terminal plate,” said Jonnie. “But that will be outside the head!”

He picked up a new bit of wire and with a small torch melted the end of it round. “If we take the sharp point off, can you wiggle this wire in through that hinge hole, around the various nerves, and touch the bronze bit in the skull? And then do the same thing from the other side?”

This was something MacKendrick knew about. The corded nerves of a Psychlo brain were easy to push around. The cortex, or covering of the brain, could probably be pierced in a couple of tiny places without much damage.

“We’ll see!” said MacKendrick, giving up all thought of waiting for morning.

The Psychlo bodies were lying on two mine carts outside the door. Pierre seemed to have vanished. MacKendrick called in two nurses and another doctor and they wheeled the workman Psychlo into the dissection room. It was about five times as much body as they were used to handling, but with everyone helping, they got it on a table.

“It’s probably still frozen inside,” said Jonnie.

“No problem,” said MacKendrick. “You forgot we’ve been through this before. A couple of times I was all hopeful we could even operate.” He took a stack of microwave emanating pads and plopped them on either side of the head to thaw it out with a quick defreeze.

The room seemed awfully populated. Mr. Tsung was giving Jonnie a white coat and a pair of lensless glasses. Jonnie wondered what they were for and put them in his pocket. He was about to order a repositioning of the body when the singing button started up. It sang:

Gone are the days,
When my heart was young and gay.
Gone are the days . . .

The medical team was startled and a bit shocked. The scene was macabre enough without somebody singing a doleful dirge!

Jonnie pushed the button at Mr. Tsung. “Get rid of this thing!”

Pulling other bits out of his kit, Jonnie got to work making a more easily handled setup. Dr. MacKendrick was getting the metal analyzer they used for an X-ray machine in place. He put the head of the corpse on it and tuned the dials so that he had a sharp, clean picture of the bronze capsule. He was testing the jaws of the corpse to see if they were flexible and, finding they were, propped them open with a metal expansion tool.

The other doctor was mopping up water that had run off the cadaver’s head and was getting the lower wave-emanation plate wet.

A nurse leaned over to Jonnie and whispered, “I don’t think this little girl should be in here during all this.”

Jonnie turned and there was Pattie. She must have followed him in. She was looking with interest at the bleached skull.

This was the first day in all these months he had seen Pattie noticing her environment. He was not going to suppress her by telling her to get out. “Let her stay,” he whispered to the nurse. The woman was a bit disapproving, but she did not push it.

Jonnie had his rig ready. MacKendrick was looking at some sketches he had made of Psychlo brain nerves. He laid the drawings down, took the offered wires, and got to work.

Watching the viewplate and checking the sketches he began to work a blunted wire end in. He finally, with a few minor detours, got it to the embedded bronze. Then he got the other wire through to the other side of the metal.

Jonnie verified they were ready and threw the switch.

The exterior terminal plate began to turn bronze.

MacKendrick worked very delicately, feeding in electricity to one side of the plate and taking it from the other. It was, looking at the viewplate, sort of like cleaning up a blot.

The bronze in the skull became less and less. MacKendrick steered the wires around. After about half an hour, he could find no further shadows or traces of the bronze in the skull. He carefully withdrew the wires. “Now to see if we burned nerves,” he said.

The team went into immediate action. They broke out aprons and gloves and a set of instruments including a spinning-disk bone saw.

The nurse leaned over to Jonnie again and whispered, “I do really think that little girl ought to go. This is too much for anyone that young. How old is she? Ten?”

Pattie was sitting on a stool, overlooking the proceedings. She was very interested.

Nothing could have made Jonnie banish her. “Leave her alone,” he whispered back.

They removed the viewers and put down pans and cloths. And in a moment the bone saw was whining and screeching into the skull. Shortly, green blood began to flow and the team mopped it up.

MacKendrick had done this so often that it seemed only minutes before they were looking at the place where the bronze had been. MacKendrick mopped up a bit more blood and got out a glass and inspected the nerves.

“The tiniest amount of burn,” he said.

“I’ll reduce the amperage,” said Jonnie. He got busy installing a rheostat in the circuit.

The team was throwing the bits of the dead Psychlo back together. They heaved him off the table and back onto the mine cart and shoved him out in the hall. Two minutes later they had the former executive on the table.

They repeated the molecular flow operation on the bronze and got rid of it.

Jonnie did a test on a silver capsule they already had from times past. MacKendrick consulted his drawings again.

The doctor pulled the wires back and fished them in again on the silver capsule in the cadaver’s brain.

It went along all right until they got to the fuse in it. It was so tiny and so quickly melted that it took quite some time to pick up all the bits. The wires, manipulated around, were more likely to touch each other than the scraps left.

Eventually that was gone too. Once more the gloves and saws, and presently the brain interior—mopped of green blood—was exposed. MacKendrick went over it with the greatest attention. Then he stood up.

MacKendrick was looking at Jonnie with awe. The lad had invented a new way to operate! MacKendrick was thinking of the bullets and metal bits that could be removed with this, and without making huge incisions or holes. Electrolytic surgery!

“It works on a corpse,” said Jonnie. He glanced at his watch. “It’s near midnight now. Tomorrow let’s see if it works on a live one!”

7

At seven the following morning, MacKendrick’s team began to set up an entirely different room for operating. “We don’t know enough about Psychlo diseases,” he told Jonnie, “and their cadavers might be very infective to them when decayed. They are built of viruses and there may be a virus smaller than viruses. So change your clothes and get brand-new wires and equipment.”

Jonnie did, and when he came back—having given Mr. Tsung the problem of digging up another white coat—and was laying out new wires, he was astonished to hear MacKendrick tell his nurse to go get Chirk.

“She’s almost dead,” said MacKendrick. “Psychlo females have been feeding her for months with a stomach tube. The brain structure is similar and the hole in the jaw is bigger. She’s already in a coma and we won’t have to give her much methane. That’s the anesthetic that knocks them out.”

“I better go get her,” said Jonnie.

He took a mine cart and an air mask and went down to the rooms which were always circulated with breathe-gas.

Two Psychlo females came over at once when he pushed the cart toward Chirk’s bed.

There she lay, eyes shut, unmoving. But she was thin, almost skeletal. Poor Chirk.

The two hefty females had no trouble at all laying her on the mine cart. Jonnie thought he might have been able to do it himself. Her bones almost rattled.

“Give me a breathe-gas mask for her,” said Jonnie.

The two females looked at him blankly. “Why?” one said.

“So she can breathe!” said Jonnie impatiently.

The other female said, “It won’t do any good to try to torture her first. In her state, she won’t feel it.”

Jonnie was trying to wrap his wits around this, and seeing his confusion, the first one explained, “We have been waiting for someone to come down to kill her. They always do. We wondered and wondered why you waited months.”

“That’s the only treatment the catrists ever permitted for lapsin.”

What were these words? Well, “catrist” was the medical scientist cult that really ran Psychlo. Didn’t he know that? And “lapsin” was a common disease which child females sometimes got, and although it was rare for one of Chirk’s age—she’s thirty, you know—to get it, it was undeniable that she had lapsin. And, naturally, sooner or later, she had to be killed.

“I’m not going to kill her!” said Jonnie, indignant. “I’m going to try to cure her!”

They didn’t believe him. In the first place it was against the law to cure lapsin. It was also against the law for an unauthorized person to trifle with the mind. So it followed that he was lying to them just like a catrist would. But it still wouldn’t do any good to try to torture her before she was vaporized as she wouldn’t feel it and he wouldn’t enjoy it.

Jonnie had to get the breathe-mask himself, put it on Chirk, and wheel her through the atmosphere lock. Behind him the two females were telling each other, “Torture, I told you so.”

Even getting his toe back into the “civilization” named Psychlo had upset Jonnie. But he soon had Chirk in the improvised operating room. Thin as she was, it still took three of them to get her on the table.

MacKendrick had drilled all this out long ago and his team was quite efficient. The new doctor lifted the mask enough to slip an expander into the mouth. A nurse slipped a methane tube under the mask edge and then stood with a stethoscope on Chirk’s heart to detect beating changes. The heart evidently slowed down enough to suit her and she nodded to MacKendrick.

The jaw holes were outside the mask edge and MacKendrick soon had the wires inserted through the tissue and into the brain. He positioned the head on the viewscreen very carefully. Jonnie regulated the gun trigger for him. The nurse listened carefully to the heart and regulated the methane/breathe-gas mix.

The capsule in her head got less and less. The metal on the plate terminal got more and more.

One hour and forty-five minutes later, MacKendrick stood back, the extracted wires in his hands. A trickle of green on each side of the head was staunched by a nurse. The methane tube was taken away. The expander was removed from the mouth. The nurse turned up the breathe-gas valve to maximum on the mask vial.

“We tried this on a workman a few months ago without operating,” said MacKendrick. “It will take her about four hours to come out of it. If she does.”

Jonnie was going to make sure nothing got in the road of her doing just that. He pushed the mine cart and its burden out of the room and back to the lower atmosphere lock.

The two Psychlo females were still inside and very surprised to see him. They gave him a hand putting her back onto the bed. As Jonnie was taking off her breathe-gas mask, one of the females said, “I suppose you brought her back here to order us to kill her.”

That did it. Jonnie kicked them both out. He got a chair and sat down outside the atmosphere lock. He was going to sit there all four hours and make very, very sure nobody else got any odd Psychlo ideas! At the end of that time, he hoped Chirk would come to. But in any event he was prepared to wait until she did.

8

Unfortunately for Jonnie it proved to be a rather well-traveled passageway—or people found excuses to travel it just so they could see him there.

Chrissie found him. “I’m awfully sorry we overlooked Pattie. I thought you were coming right behind us and had her, and then when I saw she wasn’t there, I ran out again but you had taken off.” Pattie was standing behind her looking at Jonnie.

“But that isn’t what I must talk to you about,” said Chrissie. She produced from behind her an envelope and began to take things out of it. One glimpse of them told Jonnie that Dries had been up to something else. They were the proof sheets, all marked “Specimen, not valid for exchange,” of the new Galactic Bank money. There were four coins of different size and four bills of different size. The coins were different geometric shapes, well stamped. The paper and printing were excellent. Jonnie couldn’t imagine what was wrong with them.

“This eleventh-of-a-credit coin,” said Chrissie, “is not too bad. It’s green and you can’t see it. The three-elevenths coin, this blue one, is not too awful because you can’t see it either. This red metal, five-elevenths coin is barely passing. The yellow, six-elevenths coin just won’t do.”

Hearing Chrissie expound upon money was novel. She had probably never used it in her whole life.

“But the smallest to the largest paper bank notes are what you should be concerned about. I told Dries I was very upset! This is the one-credit note. And this here is what they call the eleven-credit note but it says, ‘ten.’”

“Psychlo number system,” said Jonnie. “It’s based on eleven, not ten. ‘Ten’ means one unit of elevens plus zero units of ones which equals eleven. So an eleven-credit note would be written in numbers as ‘one-zero.’”

“I’ll take your word for it,” sighed Chrissie, “but that’s not what I’m mad about. Here, look at these. This one is . . . the . . . one-zero-zero credit note. It says ‘one hundred’ but it’s the same as a hundred twenty-one one-credit notes. Yes, yes, I know . . . Psychlo numbers.” She showed Jonnie one more. “And this one is the one-three-three-one credit note.”

Jonnie had been looking at them. The coins had larger and larger stamps on them. The bank notes looked startlingly glossy with their shimmer paper. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t see anything wrong with them.”

“It’s the face!” said Chrissie. “Look. On the coins they have your face in profile and you can’t see it on the smaller ones, but you can on the yellow one because it’s big enough. The nose! Your nose isn’t turned up at the end!”

Jonnie took the coins. Yes, it sure was a turned-up nose.

“And these bills. I don’t care,” said Chrissie, “if it is hard to reproduce accurately like Dries said. They made your skin grayish. The eyes have too big a lid. And Jonnie, your ears aren’t like that! These look more like gills!”

Jonnie took the bills. Sure enough, they had changed the portraits! Then he barked a laugh. He still looked enough like himself for no real dispute to rise. But they had shifted it over so he slightly resembled a Selachee.

Great! Less chance of being pointed at in the hills. But Jonnie had learned a lot about diplomacy. “I’m sorry you don’t like them, Chrissie.”

“Oh, it’s not that! It just doesn’t look like you.”

“I’m afraid it would cost an awful lot and make a lot of trouble to change them now,” said Jonnie. “Maybe the next issue!”

That seemed to mollify her and she put them back in the envelope and walked off, noting from the way he seemed to have nailed himself down that he might have to be fed lunch there.

Pattie stayed behind and sat down on the floor. She still seemed very thoughtful, but she was not as dull as she had been.

Ker came up the ramp, followed by about thirty assorted ex-marines—Jambitchows, Drawkins and a couple of Hockners. Ker went on by with a friendly hello. But when the others got abreast of Jonnie they suddenly realized who was sitting there. They recoiled so hard against the far side of the passage that they bounced. They instantly raced up to be in front of Ker.

Jonnie had not missed it. He called out, “Ker!”

The midget Psychlo walked back to him, leaving his group standing up the passageway. “Ker,” said Jonnie, “what have you been telling those ex-soldiers?”

“Nothing,” said Ker, amber eyes glowing with innocence back of the faceplate. “They’re just kind of hard to handle sometimes.”

“Well,” said Jonnie, “whatever that ‘nothing’ was, you straighten it out.”

“Of course!” said Ker. He turned and yelled up at the group. “It’s all right! He isn’t mad at you right now!”

They all seemed so relieved, Jonnie gave Ker a very suspicious eye. The midget yelled at the Hockner ex-officer to take them to the garage and get busy washing down machines and then turned back to Jonnie. “You had me scared there for a moment,” he said. “I thought you’d really caught up with me.”

“Something else?” said Jonnie.

Ha. Ha. Well, it wasn’t true that he had been the only one here when everybody including the Mountains of the Moon people had taken off for Edinburgh to help. They’d left their old ones and their kids. And he’d gotten bored just sitting with a blast rifle in his lap up the corridor there and he’d found one of the old ones spoke a funny kind of Dutch—that’s an Earth language, or was. And Ker had found a vocoder in the Chinko bin that had had Dutch in it, so he’d amused himself by telling the old one stories to relay to the kids that were always hanging around.

The children had been pretty shy at first, thinking he was a monster and all, so he’d told them that he was really human. That he had a human mother and father. But his mother had been scared by a Psychlo and so when he was born, he looked this way.

But he’d be honest with Jonnie and level with him because he was a boyhood friend and Ker confessed he was only half-human.

“Not to change the subject,” said Ker, doing it, “but I heard you say something about handling a problem. I can’t wash vehicles forever. When are you going to get busy and nail Maz so I can get this mine going again?”

“I’m working on it right now!” said Jonnie. He looked at his watch. Another hour and a half to go. And then he’d have an idea whether it would fully work or not.

9

Perhaps because she had been so weak, it was five hours and Chirk had not stirred.

Jonnie had moved his chair in to the foot of the bed and sat there with an air mask on. Pattie had tried to come in but Jonnie had blocked her until he could find another mask. Breathe-gas could send one into convulsions. So Pattie now sat with her back to the wall, cross-legged on the floor, watching Chirk.

The Psychlo’s breathing seemed to be less shallow, or was he just being hopeful?

No, he wasn’t! Chirk had moved a paw. Very slight, but she had moved it.

After a long time, Chirk let out a fluttering sigh.

She opened her eyes and looked dully about her.

She finally focused on Jonnie. She simply looked at him for quite a while.

Then abruptly Chirk hitched herself up on her elbows and said with some authority, “Jonnie, did you send that library form in like I told you? The home office is going to be pretty cross if it finds you’ve got an incomplete set of books down here!”

Jonnie heaved a sigh of relief. Part of it was for the practical value of this. Part of it was for Chirk herself.

He was about to answer when she caught sight of her arms. Puzzled, she said, “What am I doing so thin?”

She hitched herself up a little higher. “Why am I so weak?”

“You’ll feel stronger when you’ve had something solid to eat. We have some very good goo-food now. And even some chew-roots.”

Her interest was immediate and then faded. “I’ve been here for some time, haven’t I, Jonnie?”

“A while,” said Jonnie.

She thought about it. Then she stiffened. “I’ve had lapsin! It’s incurable!” She let out a wail.

“It’s cured,” said Jonnie.

She thought about it. Then another upset took her. “But why didn’t they vaporize me? The catrists?”

“I think you’ll get well,” said Jonnie. “In fact, I think you’ll be healthier than before.”

She thought she understood. “You’re sitting there so they won’t come in and vaporize me. Jonnie, that’s brave and I should thank you, but you can’t stop the catrists! They’re the law. They’re beyond any law! They can do anything they please, even to the emperor. Jonnie, you better get out of here before they come.”

Jonnie looked at her for a while. What a world of terror and cruelty these Psychlos had lived in. He said, “I’m sitting here to tell you the news, Chirk. I fired the catrists.” Well, it was true, wasn’t it? Even if he didn’t really know what a catrist was, if they’d been on Psychlo, they were fired. Radioactively.

Chirk sat up higher, shedding the dullness. “Oh, Jonnie, that was awfully nice of you!”

She swung her legs to get off the bed. “Where are my clothes? I better get to work or I’ll have another black mark on my record.” She tried to stand.

“I’d take it easy,” said Jonnie. Then, an inspiration. “It’s your day off.”

She sank down on the bed, shaking with weakness and evidently dizzy. “Oh, that’s lucky. Will it be all right if I come in tomorrow?”

Jonnie assured her that it was. He went out and found the two females, and perhaps because of his reassociation with Ker, he told them he had an order that exempted Chirk from being vaporized and that if they harmed her he’d dock their pay and put black marks all over their records, and they better go get her some goo-food and chew-root and help her take a bath. They did not misunderstand him. Whatever else he said, he had a palm resting on his belt blast gun. They understood that.