Leverage!
Sitting there in the semidark he thought and thought. And after several days, he knew he had it. Every point in its torturous pattern of events was perfectly channeled, perfectly conceived, and ready to be put in train.
The primary stage was to get himself put in that cage. Good! He would do it.
So it was that a very mild, personable Terl noted one morning that the sentries no longer wore kilts. Gazing out through the revolving panes of the food slot, he carefully concealed his elation. He sized the creature up. It had long pants, strapped boots and a half-wing insignia on its left breast.
Terl might be a top graduate of company schools but he was no linguist: that was part of the arts, and what self-respecting Psychlo had anything to do with those? So an element of luck had to enter in here.
“What,” said Terl in Psychlo through the intercom installed in the door, “does that half-wing stand for?”
The sentry looked a bit startled. Good, thought Terl.
“I should have thought it would have two wings,” said Terl.
“That’s for a full pilot,” said the sentry. “I’m just a student pilot. But I’ll have my full wings someday!”
Terl laid aside his conviction that you couldn’t understand animals. While arrogance demanded nonrecognition of them, necessity demanded he recognize them. This thing was talking Psychlo. Chinko accent, as would be expected, but Psychlo.
“I am sure you will earn wings,” said Terl. “I must say your Psychlo is excellent! You should practice it more, though. Talking to a real Psychlo would help.”
The sentry brightened up. Suddenly he realized that that was perfectly true. And here was a real Psychlo. He had never talked to one before. It was quite a novelty. So he told Terl who he was, that being easy to discuss. He said he was Lars Thorenson, part of the Swedish contingent that had arrived some months ago for pilot training. He did not share the ferocity of some of the Scots against the Psychlos, for his people, way up in the Arctic, hadn’t had any previous contact with Psychlos. He thought maybe the Scots exaggerated things a bit. And by the way, was Terl a flier?
Oh, yes, Terl told him, and it was quite true. Terl was a past master in all types of flight, battle tactics and stunts like flying right down into five-mile-deep mine shafts and picking up an endangered machine.
The sentry had drawn closer. Flight was very dear to him and here was a master. He said that their best flier was Jonnie, and did Terl know him?
Oh, yes, Terl not only knew him, but back in the old days before there had been a misunderstanding, he himself had taught that one a few tricks: it was why he was such a good flier. A very fine creature, actually; Terl had been his firmest friend.
Terl was elated. These were cadet sentries, standing watches in addition to their schooling to ease the considerable load on regular personnel.
For several days, each morning, Lars Thorenson improved his Psychlo and learned the ins and outs of combat flying. From a master and a onetime friend of Jonnie’s. He was quite unaware that if he put some of these “tricks” into use he would lose the most elementary fight in the air, and later others would have to shake the nonsense out of him before he got himself killed. Terl knew well it was a risk to play this trick, but he just couldn’t resist it.
Terl corrected the sentry’s Psychlo up to a point. And then one morning he said he himself would have to exactly clarify certain words and really they should have a dictionary. There were lots of dictionaries, and so the next morning the sentry gave him one.
With considerable glee, Terl went to work with the dictionary when the sentry was off duty. There were a lot of words in the composite language called “Psychlo” that were never actually used by Psychlos. They had leaked into the language from Chinko and other tongues. Psychlos never used them because they could not really grasp their conceptual meaning.
So Terl looked up words and phrases like “atone for wrongs,” “guilt,” “restitution,” “personal fault,” “pity,” “cruelty,” “just,” and “amends.” He knew they existed as words and that alien races used them. It was a very, very hard job, and later he would look on this as the toughest part of his whole project. It was all so foreign, so utterly alien!
Soon Terl was satisfied he was ready to enter his next stage.
“You know,” he said to the sentry one morning, “I feel very guilty about putting your poor Jonnie in a cage. Actually, I have a craving to atone for my wrongs. It was my personal fault that he was subjected to such cruelty. And I wish with all my heart to make amends. I am overwhelmed by guilt and I pity him for what I did. And it would be only just if I made restitution for it all by suffering in a cage like he did.”
It made Terl perspire to get it all out, but that only added to his contrite look.
The sentry had made a habit of recording their conversations, for he studied them later and corrected his own pronunciation, and since he had never heard a lot of these words in Psychlo before, he was glad he had it all on disk. Terl was also glad. It had been an agonizing performance!
The sentry, having the evening free, digested all this. He decided he had better report it to the compound commanding officer.
There was a new compound commander, an Argyll, very well noted for his prowess in raids in earlier days and very experienced—but not in America. The ease with which a radiation bullet could blow up a Psychlo had given him a bit of contempt for them in their current state. And he had a problem of his own.
Literally mobs of people from all over the world got off planes and took tours of the compound. The coordinators showed them around and pointed out where this had happened and that had happened. Many-hued and many-tongued, they were a bit of a nuisance. And almost every one of them wanted to be shown a Psychlo. Most had never seen one, no matter that they had been oppressed by them for ages. Some very important chiefs and dignitaries had enough whip with the council to get special permission. That meant an extra detail of guards the commander did not have; it meant taking people down into the dormitory levels where they should not be; it actually meant a bit of danger to them for some of those Psychlos down there were not reconstructed!
So the commander toyed with this idea. He went out and looked at the cage. Evidently it could be wired—in fact it was wired—with plenty of voltage to the bars. If one put up a protector in front so people would not touch the bars and get hurt, he would be relieved of these nonsense tours into the dormitory.
Further, it appealed to him to have a “monkey in a cage.” It would help morale. And it would be an added attraction. He could plainly see that somebody might want to make restitution and do amends. So he mentioned it sketchily to a council meeting. They were very busy and had their minds on other things and he omitted to tell them it was Terl.
Technicians checked to make sure the cage wiring was live and could be shut off easily from the outside where the connections and box had been fastened to a pole, and that a barrier was erected to keep people from electrocuting themselves.
It was a very elated—but carefully downcast—Terl who was then escorted under heavy guard and put in Jonnie’s and the girls’ old cage.
“Ah, the sky again!” said Terl. (He hated the blue sky of Earth like poison gas.) “But I must take no pleasure in it. It is only just that I will be confined here, exposed to public view and ridicule”—he had looked up some new words—“and mocked. It serves me right!”
And so Terl went about his duty very honestly. The crowds came and he looked ferocious and leaped about, glaring at them through his breathe-mask glass and making little children scream and flinch outside the barricade. He had heard of gorillas—beasts over in Africa—beating their chests, so he beat his chest.
He was a real hit. The crowds came, they saw an actual Psychlo, they even threw things at him.
They had heard that he put Jonnie in a collar, and young Lars visited him one day and told him, through the bars, that the crowd wanted to know where his collar was.
/> Terl thought that a great idea. A couple of days later, five guards came in and put a heavy iron collar and chain on Terl and fastened him to the old stake.
The compound commander was quite happy about it. But he told the guards that if Terl showed any sign at all of trying to escape, they were to riddle him.
Terl’s mouthbones wore a private smile as he capered and postured. He rumbled and roared.
His plans were working out perfectly.
2
Jonnie threw the book from him and pushed away his lunch untouched.
The guard at the door looked in through the glass, abruptly alert. Colonel Ivan whirled in an automatic response, combat ready: it had sounded like the thud of a grenade for a moment.
“It makes no sense,” said Jonnie to himself. “It just makes no sense!”
The others, seeing it was no emergency, relaxed. The sentry returned to his usual position and the colonel went on wiping down the white tile.
But Chrissie remained alarmed. It was almost unheard of for Jonnie to be irritable, and for days and days now, ever since he had started to do nothing but study books—Psychlo books they seemed to be, though she could not read—he had been getting worse and worse.
The untouched lunch worried her. It was venison stew with wild herbs cooked especially for him by Aunt Ellen. Weeks ago she had rushed to the old base to give him a glad and relieved greeting and to tell him that though her fears for him had almost come true, here he was alive! She had stood around suffused with delight until she suddenly saw what they were feeding him. The old village was only a few miles away down the pass, and either personally or through a small boy mounted on one of the horses Jonnie had left, Aunt Ellen routinely sent him his favorite dishes to be warmed up and served from the hospital galley. The boy or Aunt Ellen usually waited to take back the utensils, and when Aunt Ellen saw the food had not been touched she would be upset. Chrissie vowed to get the sentry to eat some and maybe gobble a few bites herself. It wouldn’t be polite to send back an untouched venison stew.
Had he been able to walk easily, Jonnie would have gone over and kicked the book. Normally he had vast respect for books, but not this one! It and several similar texts were all on the subject of the “mathematics of teleportation.” They seemed incomprehensible. Psychlo arithmetic was bad enough. Jonnie supposed that because Psychlos had six talons on their right paws and five on their left, they had to go and choose eleven as their base. All their mathematics was structured around the number eleven. Jonnie had been told that human mathematics employed a “decimal system” involving ten as the radix. He wouldn’t know. He only knew Psychlo mathematics. But these mathematics of teleportation soared above normal Psychlo arithmetic. The book he had just thrown down had begun to give him a headache, and these days his headaches had almost vanished. The book was called Elementary Principles of Integral Teleportation Equations. And if that was elementary, give him something complicated! Nothing added up in it at all!
He pushed back from the metal dolly table and rose shakily, supporting himself with his left hand on the bed.
“I,” he said in a determined voice, “am going to get out of here! There is no sense just waiting around for the sky to fall in on us! Where is my shirt?”
This was something new. The colonel went over to help Jonnie stand and Jonnie brushed him away. He could stand by himself.
Chrissie turned around in a flurry and opened three or four wrong bureau drawers. The colonel picked up a handful of assorted canes and sticks that stood in the corner and knocked half of them down. The sentry, ordered to report any unusual happenings to Robert the Fox, got on the radiophone right away.
Jonnie chose a “knobkerrie.” MacKendrick had had him practicing with a lot of different canes. It was difficult because both his right arm and right leg were seemingly useless, and carrying a stick in the left hand and hopping on the left leg didn’t work very well. The knobkerrie had been brought in as a gift from a chief in Africa who didn’t know Jonnie was crippled. The black wooden stick was beautifully carved; they used them as throwing weapons as well as canes. They must be big men down there because it was the right length. It also had a comfortable palm grip.
Jonnie hobbled over to the bureau and half-sat on it and got rid of the military hospital robe. Chrissie had found three buckskin shirts and some perverseness made him select the oldest and greasiest one. He got it over his head and let her lace the thongs across the front of it. He got into some buckskin pants and Chrissie helped him with a pair of moccasins.
He struggled with a drawer and got it open. One of the shoemakers had made him a left-handed holster and had more properly fitted the old gold belt buckle to a wide belt. He put them on over the shirt.
The holster had a .457 magnum Smith and Wesson on it with radiation slugs, and he lifted it out and laid it back in the drawer and got out a small blast gun, made sure it was charged, and dropped it in the holster. At the colonel’s odd look, Jonnie said, “I’m not going to kill any Psychlos today.”
He was engaged in stuffing his right hand into the belt to get it out of the way—that arm tended to dangle—when an uproar broke out in the passageway.
Jonnie was intent on leaving so he gave it little heed. It would be just Robert the Fox or the parson rushing over to fuss at him about council business.
But it wasn’t. The door burst open and the base officer of the day, a big middle-aged Scot in kilts and claymore, a man named Captain MacDuff, rushed in.
“Jonnie sir!” said MacDuff.
Jonnie had the definite impression they were objecting to his leaving, and he was about to be impolite when the captain sputtered the rest of the message: “Jonnie sir, did you send for a Psychlo?”
Jonnie was looking for a fur cap to wear. They had shaved his hair off for those operations and he felt like a singed puma bareheaded. Then the import of the question hit him. He got the knobkerrie and unsteadily hitched forward and peered out the door.
There stood Ker!
And in the glaring mine lamps out there he was a very bedraggled creature. Ker’s fur was matted with the filth clinging to it; his fangs seen through the faceplate were yellow and stained; his tunic was all ripped down one side and he had on only one boot, no cap. Even his earbones looked messed up.
They had put four chains on him with a soldier at the far end of each one. It looked so overdone on the midget Psychlo.
“Poor Ker,” said Jonnie.
“Did you send for him, Jonnie sir?” demanded Captain MacDuff.
“Bring him in here,” said Jonnie, leaning back against the bureau. He felt amusement mingling with pity.
“Do you think that’s wise?” said MacDuff. But he waved them forward.
Jonnie told the soldiers to drop the ends of the chains and leave. Four more soldiers he hadn’t noticed backed up, assault rifles trained on Ker. He told them all to leave. The colonel was flabbergasted.
Chrissie wrinkled her nose. What a stink! She’d have to clean and air the whole place!
No one wanted to go. Jonnie saw the pleading look through Ker’s breathe-mask. He waved them all out, and it was with enormous reluctance that they closed the door.
“I had to tell the lie,” said Ker. “I just had to see you, Jonnie.”
“You sure haven’t put a comb to yourself lately,” said Jonnie.
“It’s a devil’s cauldron they’ve got me in,” said Ker. “I’m half-crazy these days. I dropped from ‘His Planetship’ down to gooey dirt, Jonnie. I got only one shaftmate and that’s you, Jonnie.”
“I don’t know how or why you got yourself here, but—”
“It’s this!” Ker dove a dirty paw inside his torn shirt, oblivious of the fact that a more nervous Jonnie might have shot him. Jonnie could draw, if a trifle slowly, with his left hand. But Jonnie knew Ker.
Held before Jonnie’s eyes was a bank note.
He took it with some curiosity. He had only seen these at a distance in the hands of Psychlos paying
off wagers and he had never held one before. He knew they were a basic symbol of exchange and greatly valued.
It was about six inches wide and a foot long. The paper felt a bit rough but it seemed to glow. One side of it was printed in blue and the other side in orange. It had a nebula pattern and bright starburst on it. But the remarkable thing was that it was worded in what must be thirty languages: thirty numeral systems, thirty different types of lettering—ah, one of them was Psychlo. Jonnie could read that.
He read: “The Galactic Bank” and “One Hundred Galactic Credits” and “Guaranteed Legal Tender for All Transactions” and “Counterfeiters Will Be Vaporized” and “Certified Exchangeable at the Galactic Bank on Presentation.”
It had a picture of somebody or something on the blue side. It looked like a humanoid, or maybe a Tolnep somebody had mistaken Dunneldeen for, or maybe . . . who knew? The face was very dignified, the very portrait of integrity. On the reverse it had a similar-sized picture of an imposing building with innumerable arches.
All very interesting, but Jonnie had determined to do other things today. He gave it back to Ker and started to fish out his own cap again. He felt sort of embarrassed with such a shaved head.
Ker looked a bit let down. “That’s a hundred credits!” said Ker. “It isn’t a Psychlo bank. The Psychlos and everybody else use those. It’s not counterfeit. I can tell. See how it glows? And these little fine lines here around the signature—”
“You trying to bribe me or something?” said Jonnie, discarding the cap he’d found and looking for a colored bandana instead.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 53
