Jonnie whirled to the roll bar behind him. The flexirope was wrapped around and around it. Pressing the rope against the metal he attacked it with the flint. He had tried it before with no success. But on the verge of being yanked, in flames, two hundred feet down, hope was all he had left.
His back was getting scorched. He turned to face front. The instrument panel was beginning to glow red hot.
The machine inched closer to the edge.
Small explosions sounded as instruments burst. The searing metal of the panel’s upper edge was glowing with heat.
Jonnie grabbed what slack he had on the flexirope and held it against the red-hot metal edge. The rope began to melt!
It took all his willpower to hold his hands there. The flexirope dripped molten drops.
The machine teetered. At any moment the blade was going to go into vacant space to shoot the machine into thin air.
The flexirope parted!
Jonnie went off the machine in a long dive and rolled.
With a shuddering groan, the last support of the blade snapped. Flames geysered. As though shot from a catapult, the machine leaped into empty space.
It struck far below on the slope, bounced, plunged to a stop, and was consumed in fire.
Jonnie pressed his burned hands into the cooling snow.
7
Terl was looking for Zzt.
When the machine finally went over, Terl had looked around in sudden suspicion. But Zzt wasn’t there.
The crowd had laughed. Especially at the last part of it when the machine went. And their laughter was like daggers in Terl’s ears.
Numph just stood there, shaking his head. He seemed almost cheerful when he commented to Terl, “Well, just shows you what animals can do.” Only then had he laughed. “They pee on the floor!”
They had drifted back to their offices and Terl was now searching the transport compound. In the underground floors, he walked past rows and rows of out-of-use vehicles, battle planes, trucks, blade scrapers . . . yes, and ground cars, some of them quite posh. It had not struck him before how villainous was Zzt’s pawing off on him of that old wreck of a Mark II.
He searched fruitlessly for half an hour and then decided to try the repair room again.
Seething, he stomped into it and stared around.
His earbones picked up a tiny whisper of metal on metal.
He knew that sound. It was the safety slide being pulled back on a blaster.
“Stand right there,” said Zzt. “Keep your paws well away from your belt gun.”
Terl turned. Zzt had been standing just inside a dark tool locker.
Terl was boiling. “You installed a remote control when you ‘fixed’ that motor!”
“Why not?” said Zzt. “And a remote destruct charge as well.”
Terl was incredulous. “You admit it!”
“No witnesses here. Your word, my word. Means nothing.”
“But it was your own machine!”
“Written off. Plenty of machines.”
“But why did you do it?”
“I thought it was pretty clever, actually.” He stepped forward, holding the long-barreled blast gun in one hand.
“But why?”
“You let our pay and bonuses be cut. If you didn’t do it, you let it be done.”
“But look, if I could make animal operators, profits would come back.”
“That’s your idea.”
“It’s a good idea!” snapped Terl.
“All right. I’ll be frank. You ever try to keep machines going without mechanics? Your animal operators would have just messed up equipment. One just did, didn’t it?”
“You messed that up,” said Terl. “You realize that if this occurred on your report, you’d be out of work.”
“It won’t occur on my report. There are no witnesses. Numph even saw me walk off before the thing went wild. He would never forward the report. Besides, they all thought it was funny.”
“Lots of things can be funny,” said Terl.
Zzt motioned with the blaster barrel. “Why don’t you just walk out of here and have a nice crap.”
Leverage. Leverage, thought Terl. He was fresh out of it.
He left the garage.
8
Jonnie was a mound of misery in the cage.
The monster had pitched him in there before going off.
It was cold but Jonnie could not hold a flint in his hands to start a fire. His fingers were a mass of blisters. And somehow, right then, he didn’t want much to do with fire.
His face was scorched, eyebrows and beard singed away. Some of his hair was gone. The old Chinko uniform cloth must have been fireproof—it had not ignited or melted, thus saving body burns.
Bless the Chinkos. Poor devils. With their polite phrases and brightness, they had yet been exterminated.
That was one lesson to be learned. Anyone who befriended or sought to cooperate with the Psychlos was doomed from the beginning.
Terl had not made one motion in the direction of that burning vehicle to salvage him, knowing he was tied to it. Compassion and decency were no part of the Psychlo character. Terl had even had a gun and could have shot the flexirope in half.
Jonnie felt the ground rumble. The monster was in the cage. A boot toe turned him over. Slitted, amber eyes appraised him.
“You’ll live,” grunted Terl indifferently. “How long will it take you to get well?”
Jonnie said nothing. He just looked up at Terl.
“You’re stupid,” said Terl. “You don’t know anything about remote controls.”
“And what could I have done, tied to the seat?” said Jonnie.
“Zzt, the bastard, put a remote control under the hood. And a firebomb.”
“How was I supposed to see that?”
“You could have inspected.”
Jonnie smiled thinly. “Tied to the cab?”
“You know now. When we do it again I’ll—”
“There won’t be any ‘again,’” said Jonnie.
Terl loomed over him, looking down.
“Not under these conditions,” said Jonnie.
“Shut up, animal!”
“Take off this collar. My neck is burned.”
Terl looked at the frayed flexirope. He went out of the cage and came back with a small welding unit and a new coil of rope. It wasn’t flexirope. It was thinner and metallic. He burned off the old rope and welded the new one on, ignoring Jonnie’s effort to twist away from the flame. He fixed the far end of the new rope into a loop and dropped it over a high cage bar out of reach.
With Jonnie’s eyes burning holes in his back, Terl went out of the cage and locked the door.
Jonnie wrapped himself in the dirty fur of a robe and lay in sodden misery beneath the newly fallen snow.
Part 4
1
It had been a very bad winter in the mountains; snowslides had early blocked the passes into the high meadow.
Chrissie sat quietly and forlornly in front of the council in the courthouse. The wind whined and moaned through the gaps in the walls, and the fire that had been built in the center of the room sent harried palls of smoke into the faces of the council.
Parson Staffor lay very ill in a nearby hut. The winter had sapped what little vitality he had and his place was taken by the older Jimson man they were now calling parson. Jimson was flanked by an elder named Clay and by Brown Limper Staffor, who seemed to be acting as a council member even though he was far too young and clubfooted. He had begun to sit in for Parson Staffor when he became ill and had just stayed on, grown into a council member now. The three men sat on an old bench.
Chrissie, across the fire from them, was not paying much attention. She had had a horrible nightmare two nights ago—a nightmare that had yanked her, sweating, out of sleep, and left her trembling ever since. She had dreamed that Jonnie had been consumed in fire. He had been calling her name and it still sounded in her ears.
“It’s just
plain foolishness,” Parson Jimson was saying to her. “There are three young men who want to marry you and you have no right whatever to refuse them. The village population is dwindling in size; only thirty have survived the winter. This is not a time to be thinking only of yourself.”
Chrissie numbly realized he was talking to her. She made an effort to gather the words in: something about population. Two babies had been born that winter and two babies had died. The young men had not driven many cattle up from the plains before the pass closed and the village was half-starved. If Jonnie had been here . . .
“When spring comes,” said Chrissie, “I’m going down on the plains to find Jonnie.”
This was no shock to the council. They had heard her say it several times since Jonnie left.
Brown Limper looked through the smoke at her. He had a faint sneer on his thin lips. The council tolerated him because he didn’t ever say much and because he brought them water and food when meetings were too long. But he couldn’t resist. “We all know Jonnie must be dead. The monsters must have got him.”
Jimson and Clay frowned at him. He had been the one who brought to their attention the fact that Chrissie refused to marry any of the young men. Clay wondered whether Brown Limper didn’t have a personal stake in this.
Chrissie rallied from her misery. “His horses didn’t come home.”
“Maybe the monsters got them, too,” said Brown Limper.
“Jonnie did not believe there were any monsters,” said Chrissie. “He went to find the ‘Great Village’ of the legend.”
“Oh, there are monsters, all right,” said Jimson. “It is blasphemy to doubt the legends.”
“Then,” said Chrissie, “why don’t they come here?”
“The mountains are holy,” said Jimson.
“The snow,” said Brown Limper, “closed the passes before the horses could come home. That is, if the monsters didn’t get them, too.”
The older men looked at him, frowning him to silence.
“Chrissie,” said Parson Jimson, “you are to put aside this foolishness and permit the young men to court you. It is quite obvious that Jonnie Goodboy Tyler is gone.”
“When the year has gone by,” said Chrissie, “I shall go down to the plains.”
“Chrissie,” said Clay, “this is simply a suicidal idea.”
Chrissie looked into the fire. Jonnie’s scream echoed in her ears from the nightmare. It was completely true what they said: she did not want to live if Jonnie was dead. And then the sound of the scream died away and she seemed to hear him whisper her name. She looked up with a trace of defiance.
“He is not dead,” said Chrissie.
The three council members looked at each other. They had not prevailed. They would try again some other day.
They ignored her and fell to discussing the fact that Parson Staffor wanted a funeral when he died. There wouldn’t be much in the way of food and there were problems of digging in the frozen ground. Of course he was entitled to a funeral, for he had been parson and maybe even mayor for many years. But there were problems.
Chrissie realized she was dismissed, and she got up, eyes red with more than smoke, and walked to the courthouse door.
She wrapped the bearskin more tightly about her and looked up at the wintry sky. When the constellation was in that same place in spring she would go. The wind was cutting keen and she pulled the bearskin even tighter. Jonnie had given her the bearskin and she fingered it. She would get busy and make him some new buckskin clothes. She would prepare packs. She would not let them eat the last two horses.
When the time came she would be all ready to go. And she would go.
A blast of wind from Highpeak chilled her, mocked her. Nevertheless, when the time came she would go.
2
Terl was in a furious burst of activity. He hardly slept. He left the kerbango alone. The doom of years of exile on this cursed planet haunted him; each time he slowed his pace he collided with the horrible thought and it jabbed him into even greater efforts.
Leverage, leverage! He conceived himself to be a pauper in leverage.
He had a few things on employees here and there, but they were minor things: peccadillos with some of the Psychlo female clerks, drunkenness on the job leading to breakage, tapes of mutterings about foremen, personal letters smuggled into the teleportation of ore, but nothing big. This was not the kind of thing personal fortunes were easily built from. Yet here were thousands of Psychlos, and his experience as a security officer told him the odds in favor of finding blackmail material were large. The company did not hire angels. It hired miners and mining administrators, and it hired them tough; in some cases, particularly on a planet like this—no favored spot—the company even winked at taking on ex-criminals. It was a criticism of himself, no less, that he could not get more blackmail than he had.
This Numph. Now there was one. He had potential leverage on Numph, but Terl did not know what it was. He knew it had something to do with the nephew Nipe in home office accounting. But Terl could not dig out what it really was. And so he dared not push it. The risk lay in pretending to be wise to it and then, by some slip, revealing he didn’t have the data. The leverage would go up in smoke, for Numph would know Terl had nothing. So he had to use it so sparingly that it was almost no use at all. Blast!
As the days and weeks of winter went on, a new factor arose. His requests for information from the home planet were not being answered. Only that one scrap about Nipe, that was all. It was a trifle frightening. No answers. He could send green-flash urgents until he wore out his pen and there wasn’t even an acknowledgment.
He had even become sly and reported the discovery of a nonexistent hoard of arms. Actually it was just a couple of muzzle-loading bronze cannon some workman had dug up in a minesite on the overseas continent. But Terl had worded the report in such a way that it was alarming, although it could be retracted with no damage to himself: a routine, essential report. And no acknowledgment had come back. None.
He had investigated furiously to see whether other departmental reports got like treatment—they didn’t. He had considered the possibility that Numph was removing reports from the teleportation box. Numph wasn’t.
Home office knew he existed, that was for sure. They had confirmed the additional ten-year duty stretch, had noted Numph’s commendation affirmative, and had added the clause of company optional extension. So they knew he was alive, and there could not possibly be any action being taken against him or he would have intercepted interrogatories about himself. There had been none.
So, without any hope of home office cooperation, it was obviously up to Terl to dig himself out. The ancient security maxim was ever present in his mind now: where a situation is needed but doesn’t exist, make one.
His pockets bulged with button cameras and his skill in hiding them was expert. Every picto-recorder he could lay his paws on lined the shelves of his office—and he kept his door locked.
Just now he was glued to a scope, observing the garage interior. He was waiting for Zzt to go to lunch. In his belt Terl had the duplicate keys to the garage.
Open beside him was the book of company regulations relating to the conduct of personnel (Security Volume 989), and it was open to Article 34a-IV, “Uniform Code of Penalties.”
The article said: “Wherein and whereas theft viciously affects profits . . .” and there followed five pages of company theft penalties, “. . . and whereas and wherefore company personnel also have rights to their monies, bonuses and possessions . . .” and there followed one page of different aspects of it, “. . . the theft of personal monies from the quarters of employees by employees, when duly evidenced, shall carry the penalty of vaporization.”
That was the key to Terl’s present operation. It didn’t say theft went on record. It didn’t say a word about when it happened as related to when it was to be punished. The key items were “when duly evidenced” and “vaporization.” There was no judicial vaporizati
on chamber on this planet, but that was no barrier. A blast gun could vaporize anyone with great thoroughness.
There were two other clauses in that book that were important: “All company executives of whatever grade shall uphold these regulations”; and “The enforcement of all such regulations shall be vested in the security officers, their assistants, deputies and personnel.” The earlier one included Numph—he could not even squeak. The latter one meant Terl, the sole and only security officer—or deputy or assistant or personnel—on this planet.
Terl had spot-watched Zzt for a couple of days now and he knew where he kept his dirty workcoats and caps.
Aha, Zzt was leaving. Terl waited to make sure the transport chief did not come back because he had forgotten something. Good. He was gone.
With speed, but not to betray himself or alarm anyone by rushing if met in the halls, Terl went to the garage.
He let himself in with a duplicate key and went directly to the washroom. He took down a dirty workcoat and cap. He let himself out and locked the door behind him.
For days now Terl had also watched, with an artfully concealed button camera, the room of the smaller Chamco brother. He had found what he wanted. After work, the smaller Chamco brother habitually changed from his mine clothes in his room and put on a long coat he affected for dinner and an evening’s gambling in the recreation area. More: the smaller Chamco brother always put and kept his cash in the cup of an antique drinking horn that hung on the wall of his room.
Terl now scanned the minesite patiently. He finally spotted the smaller Chamco brother exiting from the compound, finished with lunch, and boarding the bus to the teleportation transshipment area where he worked. Good. Terl also scanned the compound corridors. They were empty in the berthing areas during work time.
Working fast, Terl looked from a stilled picto-recorder frame of Zzt to the mirror before him and began to apply makeup. He thickened his eyebones, added length to his fangs, roughed the fur on his cheeks, and labored to get the resemblance exact. What a master of skills one had to be in security!
Made up, he donned the workcoat and cap.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 14
