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 N
umph 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.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 12