“You ever stop to wonder why the Intergalactic Mining Company always shipped bodies home? They don't want dead Pyschlos lying about.”
“The parson,” said Thor, “cut up the pair we found in the plane.”
“He wasn't looking for what I’m looking for,” said Jonnie.
Dr. MacKendrick smiled. “Autopsies on dead Psychlos. Jonnie, it wouldn't be a full day unless you astonished me with something.” He was referring to an incident a week ago when he was sewing up Jonnie's cheek: the needle had been a little dull, and Jonnie in reflex had reached up with his right hand and gripped his wrist to make him ease off.
MacKendrick had felt a bit contrite about the arm and leg; he had feared that he might have injured something when he operated. But the sudden movement of the arm and hand had told him that it was a matter of getting back into communication rather than physical damage: Jonnie had tried to do it again voluntarily and couldn't. “Must be like learning to wiggle your ears,” Jonnie had said. “All you have to do is find the right muscles to pull, and how.” MacKendrick supposed he really should stay around and help Jonnie recover.
“Well,” said MacKendrick, motivated more by the possibility of being able to help Jonnie's arm and leg than by any real interest in autopsies on dead Psychlos, “I guess I could go along. But why Africa?”
Jonnie smiled and beckoned Thor nearer. “There's a live, operating, untouched Psychlo mine there!”
Thor gasped. “We missed?”
“It isn't a full-fledged minesite. It is a branch mine of the central minesite near what used to be called 'Lake
Victoria.' Here.” And he showed them on the map. “Over to the west of there, way deep in jungle, there was-and is– a tungsten mine. The Psychlos are mad for tungsten.” He circled an area. “All this is jungle. On the pictures it looks like tall, tall trees, making a total umbrella. Thousands of years of growth. A recon drone doesn't even penetrate into that vast area of swamp.
“We chose our targets from recon drone maps. And yes, we missed. It 's my bet they're still sitting there listening to the strange chatter on the pilot planetary, keeping their furry Psychlo heads down and waiting for a chance to break out.
Thor smiled. “That's sort of grim, Jonnie. We go down and shoot them just to get some dead bodies.”
“I don't want just dead bodies, I also want some live ones. There's a graduate engineer or six at every minesite."
“And what,” asked MacKendrick, “are these autopsies supposed to show?”
“I don't know,” said Jonnie. “So will you gather up your scalpels and come along?”
“You're not telling me everything,” said Dr. MacKendrick.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Jonnie, "I’m not. This is very secret. We will state we are going to make a tour of some tribes. And if you go, Thor, you can even visit some, and pretend to be me the way you used to at the lode.”
“This sounds very hush-hush,” said MacKendrick.
“It is,” said Jonnie.
Jonnie had not liked the way things were going with the Council. It was passing lots of laws– one couldn't keep up– and he wasn't invited there anymore.
“And you're trying to solve-?” said MacKendrick.
“Why the Chamcos committed suicide,” said Jonnie. And why he was making no progress trying to untangle the mathematics of teleportation. For a week now he had been going round and round and getting nowhere. He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, but it had to be there whatever it was.
“So Africa?” said Jonnie.
“Africa,” said Thor.
“Well, Africa,” said Dr. MacKendrick.
Chapter 4
The big battle plane lanced through the skies over the Atlantic. It was a type used for company marines and had seats for fifty Psychlos with space and lift capacity for tons of weaponry and gear. Jonnie in the pilot's seat flew easily and relaxed, flying with his left hand, straight on course.
Big as the plane was, they had had trouble keeping it from getting overloaded. It was all secret and would remain so. There would be no leaks. But friends and a small amount of activity attracted attention to them.
Dunneldeen had shown up with five Scots– just happened by that day from their regular run to Scotland. Colonel Ivan, whose total force was about eighty valiant-red-army Cossacks, had to be persuaded to leave half of them taking care of the base. Angus, just an hour before departure from the heliport, had casually plunked about a hundred pounds of tools into the back and quietly sat down, uninvited. A rather fearful stack of weapons and explosives had magically appeared in the hands of four of the original Scots led by Dwight. Dr. MacKendrick seemed to have brought anything he thought he ever might need in any practice.
There had been a bit of a flap just before take-off. Pattie, it seemed, had found the true love of her life in Bittie MacLeod and they wouldn't have known Bittie was also aboard except that Pattie came rushing down the stairs to the heliport to kiss him a childishly tearful goodbye. Chrissie had said nothing, feeling bad. But suddenly an old woman had come up with Chrissie's possessions and taken her in tow, and it turned out Robert the Fox was putting them on a regular run to Scotland. His family wanted to meet Chrissie, he explained. And then Pattie had to be packed up and sent with them. Then they were just closing the door when they had to open it again to take in Robert the Fox, complete with cloak and claymore.
Then just as they were passing the eastern coast of what had been the United States, two battle planes had shown up, and it turned out to be
Glencannon and three other pilots. “Just finished with our regular ferrying runs, and where are you going, we have enough ammunition and fuel,” on the local command radio channel.
They also had a Coordinator who was an expert on Africa and spoke French.
It was not, Robert the Fox said reprovingly in Jonnie's ear, walking up the wide aisle from the back, the best planned raid he had ever participated in. And where was Jonnie going?
The Coordinator was a young lad called David Fawkes. He had recovered from having a Russian drag him out of bed before dawn, jumble his possessions into a bundle and his reference books into a pack, and spirit him to the plane. Sitting with the copilot and next to Jonnie, the Coordinator was babbling away happily.
“We have an operation going in that part of Africa. I think it used to be called the 'rain forest.' So if this is all hush-hush, you better stay clear of the Federation unit operating there. We didn't know there was a minesite up north of there.”
“You're lucky you didn't get your heads blown off,” said Robert the Fox, leaning over the back of the copilot seat.
“Well, you see,” said David Fawkes, “we're not really a war unit. We don't operate like that. This is the first time we've felt a need for such hardware, as you raiders call it.”
“You mean you were going to fight Psychlos?" said Sir Robert.
“Oh, no, no,” was the quick response. “The Brigantes. Usually tribes are so happy to see us they're delirious but-”
“What's a Brigante?" said Robert the Fox. This certainly wasn't a well-researched, well-planned raid. He didn't even know their target or purpose.
Well, it turned out that the "Brigantes," as they called themselves, were a pretty strange lot. A Coordinator had been dropped into a ruined city in that area to see whether anybody was alive and he'd almost gotten blown to bits with a grenade.
“Grenade?” said Robert the Fox. "Psychlos don't use grenades.”
Well, they knew that. This was a pooler grenade. Smoking powder, bright orange flash. And then the Coordinator was about to do battle with a club while bellowing into his radio for help when a very old man crawled out of a wrecked basement and apologized in French.
He was a very tattered old man, on his last pins. He'd been left to die by his squad because he was old now and couldn't keep up. Turned out he called himself a Brigante. He thought the Coordinator was a Psychlo at first glimpse. Then he saw he was human and now
thought the Coordinator was part of a relief team sent by the bank.
“The what?” from both Thor and Sir Robert.
Well, seems like they had some kind of legend that they would be relieved by somebody, and they'd held onto it for over a thousand years. Incredible they could keep a tradition going that long-
“What exactly,” demanded Sir Robert, liking his information a little more crisp, “is a Brigante?"
“Well, that's what's making it so hard to really get in solid contact with them, and right this minute they have three Coordinators in there in hopes of doing that. Oh, what's a Brigante? Well, it seems like at the time of the disaster– this is all according to this abandoned old man, of course– not confirmed– some big international bank wanted to overthrow one of those African countries that had gotten its freedom from some people called colonialists, and then it borrowed a lot of money and had a military coup and wouldn't pay the bank back or something like that.
“What's a Brigante? Well, I’m telling you. So this international bank collected up a lot of what they called mercenaries, soldiers for hire, and put together a thousand-man unit, and they were going to use nerve gas and wipe out this government and all these mercenaries were equipped with gas masks like our air masks only they filter outside air.
“Yes, I’m getting to it. These were also called 'soldiers of fortune' in ancient times. So they were just about to make their attack on the government of this new country and were lying out in some mines in the desert– old salt mines– and the Psychlos hit the planet. Well, they had these gas masks-'
“Salt,” said Jonnie, “neutralizes Psychlo gas.”
“Oh, well, fine. So anyway there they were in Africa, fully armed and ready to go, and their target was wiped out for them! A mixed-up lot: Belgians, French, Senegalese, English, American, all nationalities, anybody the bank could hire. But a full, skilled military unit. They didn't have any other name so sometime, then or later, they started calling themselves Brigantes."
“Well, thank you at last,” said Robert the Fox.
“Wait, that isn't all of it. The natives in that area were mostly dead from the kill-gas, so this unit drifted south. The tall trees and jungles seem to have kept them masked from observation from recons and so on. They picked up women from missions and villages, white and black, and kept going.
“And that isn't all. This is why they're so hard to contact: after a couple of
hundred years, they got into a working arrangement with the Psychlos. First you've heard of that? Well, us too. And it makes them edgy.
“Apparently what they used to do was capture people and deliver them to the Psychlos to shoot or torture or something. They never really went too close to the Psychlos but the Psychlos couldn't operate in those swamps: bodies too heavy to walk, ground too soggy for tanks, trees too tall to fly into. So these Brigantes somehow got into a working arrangement: they'd tie up some people and leave them near a compound and the Psychlos would come out and take the people for whatever-”
“Torture,” said Jonnie. “They enjoy it.”
“-and the Psychlos would leave some knickknacks like cloth or something on a log. A kind of trading arrangement. Well, all that was centuries ago and they ran out of people. But the Psychlos never hunted them down-swampy ground, tall trees and so on, like I told you.”
“Sounds like pretty crazy people for unarmed Coordinators to be fooling around with,” said Robert the Fox.
“Well, not really. We're pretty good on diplomacy and so on. But we got this order from the Council just a few days ago to be sure and contact them and bring them in, and we are just doing our job.
“To tell the truth, the Brigantes are a bit strange. They keep their numbers down to a thousand men, leave their old ones to die, don't marry but just use women. They seem to have a high mortality rate among children. Also probably from hunting elephants with grenades...
“Oh, well yes, the grenades. They know how to make crude black powder– you know, charcoal and saltpeter from dung heaps and sulphur from a mine. And they put it into a baked clay receptacle that is studded with stones and stick a fuse in it and light it with a cigar. They have to get right up to an elephant to use one and I suppose that's part of the reason for the mortality rate.
“Rescue? Oh, yes. Well, it seems their ancestors once had a firm promise from the international bank to 'pull them out,' and they haven't a clue to what's going on in the outside world. Well, yes, of course; the Coordinators in there can use that. We'll get them out.”
“And that's near this minesite?" asked Robert the Fox.
“To the south, to the south,” said David Fawkes. “Just thought you had better know. From what I gather here your target is a branch mine compound with just ordinary Psychlos in it.”
“Ordinary Psychlos,” snorted Thor. “You got a handgun? No? You'll need it. Here's a spare. And don't try to find the tribal history of a Psychlo before you shoot. Got it?”
David Fawkes took the gun like it would bite.
They flew onward to Africa.
Chapter 5
Jonnie lay behind a tree trunk, saturated with rain, perspiring from the heat, looking at the compound through infrared glasses that did not do much good.
For three soaking wet days they had been following a power line, the only sign of civilization. They had landed at the power dam well enough. It was automatic and self-maintaining, and
Psychlo machinery had been superimposed upon the ancient man-works. They had no actual clue as to the position of the minesite beyond its existence, but Jonnie knew this power line, huge cables on metal pylons– themselves ancient– would take them to it eventually. And “eventually” seemed to be the right word.
Usually power lines had trees and brush cleared out, but not this one.
There for countless years, the power line provided no more open sky than any other part of this vast forest.
The old man-maps said this had been a country called "Haut-Zaire" and that this portion of the extinct nation was the “Ituri Forest.”
Here the equatorial sun never reached the ground. It was umbrellaed first by cloud cover and then by the crowns of mighty trees that locked together in a canopy a hundred feet above the ground. Great vines a foot or more in diameter wrapped like gorged serpents around the trunks. Underfoot the thick humus squished at every step.
And the rain came down! It dripped, it rivuleted down the trunks and vines, it poured through slight openings until one felt he was trying to progress through a constant warm waterfall of varying thickness.
It was all twilight.
The game blended in deceptively with the gloom, a dangerous fact. They had seen elephants and forest buffalo and gorillas. A giraffe-like animal, an antelope, and two kinds of cat were routinely started up by them. The snarl of leopards, the roar of crocodiles, the chatter of monkeys and the screech of peacocks– sounds muted by the rain– made Jonnie feel the area was hostile and densely
inhabited.
The old man-maps said there were around twenty thousand square miles of this forest, and that even at the height of man-civilization it had never been completely explored. No wonder a minesite could go overlooked here!
The Ituri Forest was no place for buckskin and moccasins and a limp.
Trying to progress through it was made difficult by the uselessness of trying to overfly it and the need for some secrecy. They dared not use radios. Dropped lines from planes could foul power cables if they reached them at all. Streams infested with crocodiles made the crossings dangerous.
Well, a small party of them were here. Only twenty of their force, scattered out among the trees and ready to call in reserves or the planes if needed.
The compound looked deserted, but then Psychlos never wandered around in the open. It had been built so long ago that it too was overshadowed by the streaming canopy of trees. What had an employee had to do to be assigned to this dismal, gloomy, saturated outpost, Jonnie wondered.
He w
as looking to the left of the compound for signs of truck passageways. There would be no road of tires, but ore truck floating drives would have crushed and killed vegetation. Yes, there was a road over there, headed east through the gloom. Ah, yes, more lights beyond an opening through the trees for the landing of freighters. Did the road go to that? No. Another road. One exit road through the forest and the other to the field.
“Never was there a more unplanned raid,” Robert the Fox was muttering. But a well-planned raid took intelligence scouting first. He never could have imagined any terrain like this existed on the planet!
Now, Jonnie was thinking, what did they really want here? Not dead Psychlos, really. He wanted live Psychlos. That the Psychlos would fight he had no doubt, and that some would be killed was almost certain, but he was far more interested in live ones than in dead ones.
He was reaching to his belt to unfasten the miniature mine radio-to be used first in the hope that they had one on in that compound– when his infrareds strayed over to the right of the compound. There was a defined path and at its end what appeared to be the wreck of a flatbed truck, ages old and mostly overgrown. Hard to see in this twilight at noonday. The rain made it so hard to pick out details even with infrared.
Jonnie gave the glasses to Robert the Fox. “What do you see on that old truck bed?”
Robert the Fox squirmed over into a new position, his cloak as wet as a soaking sock. “Something under a tarpaulin. A new tarpaulin...a barrel? Two barrels?...a package?”
Suddenly Jonnie remembered the rambling story of David Fawkes. The Coordinator was back of them, hunkered down, dripping. Jonnie crawled back a short distance. “What was that about putting things on a log for barter with the Psychlos?"
“Oh, yes. Yes. They put people there for the Psychlos to see and then withdrew, and the Psychlos would come out and leave some trinkets. You mean the Brigantes, don't you?”
“I think I’m looking at an incomplete trade,” said Jonnie. He hissed to a
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