Jonnie studied the record. Soth, after graduating from mine school, had been an under-professor of “ore theory.” It all seemed quite usual right up to the age of fifty when abruptly he had been assigned as an assistant mine manager to a very remote planet. And for the next one hundred thirty years he had been shifted continually, always retaining the same rank.
It was an oddity. Jonnie went through the reams of records on him. And finally found one of the same date as his original transfer from Psychlo. It said, “Unsuitable for teaching profession. Fla, Chief Catrist, Gru Clinic, Psychlo.”
That little slip of paper had condemned a being to obvious exile for a hundred thirty years! No other black marks evident. Always seemed to have done his work, nothing negative otherwise.
Instead of going straight to Soth, Jonnie instead made a test with Maz. This Psychlo, at whom Ker was mad, was one of the biggest Jonnie had ever seen. He had been the local planning engineer.
Remembering the Chamco brothers, Jonnie loaded up a hand blast gun just in case, positioned himself in a room where he had lots of space to back up, and had Maz brought in.
Maz’s teeth were gleaming behind his faceplate. He sat down easily enough. He was a bit surly.
“I hear that Ker clown has been saying I won’t work,” began Maz with no preliminary. “Contract or no contract, if you think you can put a midget operations officer over the head of a planning engineer, you think trouble!”
“He just wants to get the tungsten mine going,” said Jonnie.
“What’s the point? You can’t ship it to Psychlo. You finished that!”
Jonnie thought he might as well dive in now rather than drag it out. “If you’ll give me the mathematics to compute the location of the next ore body, I’ll work it out.”
Maz scowled. Jonnie prepared to draw.
“Somehow,” said Maz, and his scowl deepened, “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk mathematics with an alien.” He thought it over. He lifted a back strap of his breathe-mask and scratched under it.
A considerable time passed.
“I can’t think where I got that idea. Mine school? Yes, mine school. Say, this is funny. I got a picture of somebody holding a whirling spiral in front of me. . . .” He yawned. He thought a while. “Hey!” he said explosively. “That’s the catrist in charge of our group. You know, I haven’t thought of him for years. Funny old ———. He used to spend hours with the youngest males—when he wasn’t down in the sex shops of the old town. Yeah, it was him. What were we talking about?”
“Showing me how to do mathematics,” said Jonnie.
Maz shrugged. “Why bother? Take a lot less time for me to do the calculations myself. What’s he going to do with the ore?”
“Cross-fire it to other planets,” said Jonnie.
“That’s kind of illegal. How much bonus? For me, I mean.”
“The usual,” said Jonnie.
“Tell you what. You tell that Ker he ain’t no boss of mine and mind his manners and you double my planning bonus per ton and I’ll calculate the ore body.” He laughed. “There’s a lot more tungsten there than I ever told the company! Is it a deal?”
Jonnie said that it was and Maz left. It was an inconclusive test. But he hadn’t been attacked. He waited for two days for Maz to commit suicide. But he didn’t. He just went out and started giving Ker a hard time, but in the process he broke out his analyzers and instruments and stakes and shortly was shooting “glow-stripes” into the earth to give workers lines along which to dig.
Jonnie used the time otherwise as well. He went down to Salisbury and, with Thor to back off the elephants and black mambas, dug into the man-books trying to find anything about “whirling spirals” being held in front of people’s faces.
He found one reference to it in a booklet named Hypnotism for the Millions. Seemed kind of silly. He made one and, with Thor holding a small deer, spun it in front of its face and all the deer did was stare at it. Thor said to try it on him and he did, but Thor just went into gales of laughter.
According to the book, you put people to sleep and told them things and then the people would do them afterward without knowing it was an order. Jonnie guessed Psychlos must be different if it worked on them. Anyway, he had an idea of what the “catrist” had been attempting with Maz. There had been some effect but not enough without the capsule.
What a weird world those Psychlos had lived in! Imagine putting a whole population under a mental cloud! But the idea wasn’t solely Psychlo’s, for there it had been among the spider webs of the old man-library! And it had been a man-book which had led him on to the capsules.
How could any being consider itself so right as to think it should make all other beings into robots to do its bidding? He thought of Lars. Had Hitler been doing things like that?
As Maz, according to a call to Victoria, was still going strong, Jonnie went back to tackle Soth. If anyone knew math, he should.
Jonnie was determined to get motors into production. And after all this time of getting trouble from Psychlo mathematics he was feeling quite willful about it. This had to be revealed. There were no two ways about it. Terl and his condemned equations that wouldn’t balance, that never made any sense! Why, if something happened with a console, he’d never know what was wrong with the circuit. He couldn’t figure one out. Not with Psychlo math.
Suddenly he remembered the Voraz letter. Hundreds of thousands of inventions and the formulas all in Psychlo math. To really get the crashed arms companies converted over to consumer products, those hundreds of thousands of inventions—even though accumulated for millennia and probably stolen by the Psychlos from now defunct races—could very well spell the difference between booming prosperity across the galaxies and having to face a new conference of emissaries howling for his blood. Nobody would be able to figure them out unless he could pry the secret of Psychlo math out of these ex-company employees. Mr. Tsung had been right. It could become a “diplomatic” matter. It could even become war.
4
Soth, Jonnie found, did not live in the dormitories. Apparently he coughed at night and kept other Psychlos awake, and they had insisted he be berthed in a small former storage room that was hooked into the breathe-gas circulating system. And that was where Jonnie found him.
The room wasn’t too bad. The old Psychlo had cut down the original storage shelves and fabricated some bookcases and tables from them; the cases were utterly jammed with books and the tables covered with a litter of paper.
Soth was sitting on a high stool as Jonnie entered. His fur was splotchy with blue hairs, sign of an aged Psychlo. The amber eyes were a bit blurry with white matter at the corners. He was dressed in a wraparound robe and he had a small cap on his head.
He peered near-sightedly at Jonnie, evidently seeking to see who it was. Then he remarked the belt gun.
“So you have come to ship me on,” said Soth. “I was wondering when someone would notice.”
“You seem to have a lot of books here,” said Jonnie, seeking to change the subject.
“I was fortunate,” said Soth. “When that attack first came on the compound, I was in my office and I heard the fire gongs going. I knew there’d be a lot of water, so I ran down to my room and put everything I had into waterproof ore bags. Then when we were to leave for here, I asked a nice young human if I could go get them and bring them. And he permitted it.”
Jonnie was looking at the titles. He couldn’t read most of them. They were in scripts he had never seen before.
“They usually let me keep my books,” said Soth. “In cross-firing, they don’t much care what weight or cubic space there is for there’s nothing else going. Will you let me keep them when you cross-fire me this time?”
Jonnie was afraid for a moment that this old Psychlo must be in his dotage. Then he realized they wouldn’t really know that there were no other Psychlos alive; they might think there were other captives elsewhere.
“I’m not here to cross-fire you
. We’re sure there are no Psychlos on other planets now.”
Soth digested this. Then he let out a little snort. “Funny way to end a hundred thirty years of exile. But it’s not ended. I’m still exiled even if I stay here.”
Jonnie had him talking. He had better keep him talking. “How did it start?”
Soth shrugged. “The way it always starts. Being impolite to a catrist. Isn’t it in my record?” As Jonnie shook his head, Soth went on. “You might as well know. Lately I have had this strange feeling that I should be more honest. And I do appreciate your fixing my fangs for me. Two were quite painful. Anyway, we had this young Psychlo in school and he got confused about his lessons and wanted a better explanation—”
“About mathematics?” said Jonnie.
Soth looked at him for quite a while. “Why do you ask that?” he said finally. A sort of a cloud had passed over him and gone away. Then, as Jonnie didn’t reply, he went on. “Well, yes, it was about mathematics in a way, I suppose. It was how you calculate ore bodies in semicore mining.” He sighed. “Somebody must have reported him because the catrist of that school wing came in and started shouting at him and then started shouting at the whole class. It was very disruptive. There’s no excuse for what I did really, but for years I used to think it was because my mother was a member of an underground church group. They believed that sentient creatures had souls and they felt very strongly about it.
“It wasn’t that she was caught or anything. But some of it must have rubbed off on me to make me do what I did. This catrist was standing there screaming at the class that they were all animals and they better remember they were animals. And he was making so much noise I must have gotten confused. I did want him to quiet down because I had a class to teach. And it just slipped out.”
He sat for a long time. “It’s sort of painful to talk about this. I never do. If word of this got back to the—” Then he let out a slight gasp. “I just realized. They’re all dead. It’s all right if I talk about it!” Then he looked closely at Jonnie. “It is all right, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” said Jonnie. “I don’t even know what a ‘catrist’ is.”
“You know,” said Soth, “I’ve come to believe I don’t either, really. But because of what it did to my life, I pieced a lot of it together. There’s lots of books on lots of planets. Two hundred fifty thousand years ago, Psychlos were really a different people. They didn’t even have the name ‘Psychlo.’ I think sometime or other they must have gotten frightened of somebody invading them or something.
“As near as I could piece together, there was this group of carnival performers—you know, mountebanks, frauds. They were the original Psychlos. They used to hypnotize people on the stage and make them do funny things to get the audience to laugh at them. Just trash. Actually, just criminals.
“When this panic came on, they went to the emperor and told him something or other because the next thing anyone knew, they were in charge of the schools and medical centers. The race before that had been called after the current emperor according to books on other planets. Well, right at that time, they began to be called Psychlos. That was the name of these carnival performers. So instead of being called after the ruler, the race was now called after the Psychlos. It means ‘brain,’ according to some old dictionaries. Another form of the word also means ‘property of.’ Everyone became the property of the Psychlos.
“Anyway, members of this mob of cutthroats began to call themselves ‘catrist.’ That means ‘mental doctor.’ So the people became ‘Psychlos’ or ‘brains’ and the ‘catrist’ or ‘mental doctor’ was the real, hidden government. They taught all the children. They inspected every citizen. They suppressed religion. They told people how to think.
“Oh, I was stupid. There’s no excuse for what I did.” He fell silent. “But this catrist was raising so much row! I should not blame my mother. I should never have blamed her.” He paused again and drew a long breath. “It just blurted out. I said, ‘They are not animals!’”
He shuddered and after a while said, “So that began my exile. Now you know.”
What Jonnie now knew was that that mob of frauds was stark staring insane.
“Well,” said Soth, coming out of his despondency, “if that isn’t why you’re here, why are you? An old ruin like me has nothing to offer.”
Jonnie decided to dive in. “You obviously know mathematics.”
Suspicion clouded Soth’s already rheumy gaze. “How did you know my hobby was mathematics? It isn’t in my record. I paid a female clerk five hundred credits once to see it and I know.” The mystery of it threw him. Then he solved it. “Ah!” he swept his paw down the bookshelves. “My books!” Then he clouded over again. “But they’re mostly outer-language books and very few people can read them. A lot of the races are even dead! Come,” he pleaded, “tell me why you’re here!”
“I want you to teach me about Psychlo mathematics,” said Jonnie.
There was a sudden tension in Soth. He seemed to become confused. Then it seemed to clear away. “Nobody has asked me to teach them anything for a hundred thirty years. You’re an alien race, but what does it matter? There are hardly any Psychlos left. What do you want to know?”
The tension slid out of Jonnie. He’d made it!
5
“In the first place,” said Soth, after he had made himself more comfortable and taken a small bite of the kerbango Jonnie had produced, “there are an awful lot of different kinds of mathematics—different races, you know. I sort of kept my interest in life by collecting them.
“There have been existing systems for lots of different whole numbers. There’s the ‘binary system’ like the Chatovarians use: it has only two numerals in it, one and zero; that’s so they can use them in computers, in which the electric current pulse, or the direction of magnetization of an element, has one of two values. One value corresponds to the numeral zero; the other to numeral one. Any number in any system can be translated to the binary system using only zero and one. Unwieldy for beings, but understandable for the computers.
“Then there’s a system based on the integer three, an entirely different one based on four, another on five, another on six, another on seven, still another on eight, yet another on nine and so on. There’s even been one on twenty and one on sixty.
“For paper computation the best system is called the ‘decimal’ system, based on ten.” (Jonnie knew about this from man-books.) “Psychlo mathematics are based on eleven; some people call this the ‘undenary’ system. It’s difficult so I won’t try to teach you that.”
“Oh, I would love to know about the ‘undenary’ system!” said Jonnie. His use of the words ‘love to know’ gave him a twinge of conscience. He hated this confused mess!
“I can teach you the ‘decimal’ system much more easily,” said Soth. “Whenever they discover it on some planet they engrave the discoverer’s name among the heroes.” He saw Jonnie wouldn’t buy it and sighed. “All right,” he said. He got a sheet of somewhat crumpled paper. “I will write down the ‘undenary’ numerals for you.”
Jonnie said he already knew the Psychlo numerals but Soth shook his head.
“No, no,” said Soth. “I doubt very much if you do. To really understand a symbol, you have to know what it came from. Now all numerals as symbols were originally, either the first letter of the word that spelled them or a number of dots or lines. Or they were pictographs that then became stylized until they were only a part of the original picture or a shorthand version of it.
“Now Psychlo numerals were originally pictographs. And then as time went on, they were written in a more and more simplified form until they now are what you see as the eleven separate Psychlo numerals. They were once called ‘the road to happiness.’”
Jonnie had not known that. He saw these numbers, these symbols, every time he flew. He began to get interested.
Soth was writing the numerals as pictographs, little pictures. “Zero is an empty mouth; see th
e teeth? One is a claw; just one talon. Two is a being and a pick. Three is a being, a shovel and a rock. Four is a mine cart; see the four corners? Five is what we call the ‘off’ paw, the one with five claws. Six is what we call the ‘on’ paw, the one with six claws. Seven is an ore chute. Eight is a pot smelter; see the smokestack and the smoke? Nine is a pile of metal ingots made like a pyramid; nine of them originally, but now just the pyramid. Ten is a lightning bolt; symbol of power, now just a slash. Eleven is two paws clasped; that represents contentment.
“It’s a little moral lesson, you see. If you dig and smelt ore, it lifts you from starvation to power and contentment.” He laughed. “Very few people know this. All they know is what time and haste boiled them down to.” And above his pictures, he rapidly wrote the eleven Psychlo numeral symbols as they commonly appeared. They still bore the traces of the pictographs.
“I’m very glad to know that,” said Jonnie. And he was amused by it. The Psychlos had been miners from the start! “I can do a little arithmetic in this system.” He decided to really push it. “Where I get hung up is the Psychlo force equations.” And that was no lie. They gave him headaches. Nothing ever balanced.
Soth was looking at him very keenly. “I think you are digging for the teleportation formulas.”
Jonnie shrugged. “We have a rig running. We are making rigs.”
“Yes, I heard that,” said Soth. “That’s where all the new breathe-gas and goo-food came from. I heard there was a planet, Fobia, nobody could live on.” He was plainly puzzled. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “One of your scientists reevolved it in some other mathematics and you are trying to verify it against Psychlo equations.” He laughed and laughed.
Jonnie gave him another bite of kerbango.
“Ah, well. Not that it will do you much good. But it’s small wonder you can’t work it out.” He laughed again. “You’d have to be a native of Psychlo!”†
________
† For the earth and several other editions of this book, translation liberties have been taken throughout, but especially with the explanation that follows, due mainly to the temporary unavailability of print fonts which include Psychlo numbers and letters. —Translator
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 118