They were roaring.
Jonnie stumbled backward. The cane was in the road of a draw. He threw it at the nearer Chamco, a weak throw; he was never left-handed.
He saw an enormous paw blurring in the air, coming at him.
He knelt and did a left-handed draw. Talons raked the side of his face.
Jonnie fired.
The recoil threw him back against the door and he tried to push into the atmosphere lock. It seemed jammed, frozen.
Flat on his back, a boot stamping down to crush his ribs, he fired up from the floor.
The boot blurred away.
A furry pair of paws were coming at his throat!
The roars were berserk.
Jonnie fired at the paws and then at a huge chest. He punched blast after blast into them, driving them back.
Somehow he got to his knee. The two gigantic bodies were falling back, falling down. Jonnie fired again at one and then the other.
Both of them were flat on the floor.
The smaller Chamco brother was thoroughly stunned. But just beyond him the bigger one was fighting with a desk drawer. He got it open and pulled out something.
It was all happening too fast. Jonnie could not see what he had due to the angle of the desk. He moved sideways to get a clearer shot.
The bigger Chamco had a small blast gun. But he wasn't trying to aim it at Jonnie. He was aiming it at his own head.
He was trying to commit suicide!
The howling maelstrom of action had passed. Jonnie coolly aimed and blew the gun out of the bigger Chamco's hand. It didn't explode. Part of the blast had hit the Psychlo and he flopped back, knocked out.
Damn, not having a right hand and arm! He couldn't at once recover his cane. He hopped sideways and leaned against the canopy wall.
Smoke was thick in the room, curling around the breathe-gas exhaust vents. He was half-deaf from all the roaring and snarling and the blasts of the gun in this confined space.
Whew! What was that all about? There they lay. But why the attack?
The atmosphere lock door revolved and Colonel Ivan and a sentry burst through.
“Don't fire those rifles!” warned Jonnie. “This is breathe-gas and radiation will blow us to bits. Get some shackles!”
“We couldn't find air masks!” howled the guard, hysterical. Then he tore out to find shackles.
Colonel Ivan adjusted his own air mask a hitch to better look at the two Psychlos sprawled on the floor. They looked like they were out, but Jonnie still had a blast gun on them.
He gestured at the breathe-masks of the Psychlos, which were hanging on a coat tree. Colonel Ivan grabbed them and put them on the unconscious Chamcos. Jonnie gestured at the breathe-gas circulator controls and Colonel Ivan went to them and shut them off, and then with a lot of battering with huge strength he got the atmosphere lock folded back on itself, flooding air into the place.
Sentries finally could rush in, chains and shackles rattling and clanging, and get them onto the Chamcos.
Jonnie hobbled outside. Only then did he realize the crowd had been there and had seen all this through the canopy glass. Some were pointing at his face and he realized for the first time that he was bleeding.
He hobbled to Windsplitter and mounted.
The crowd was talking to one another. Guards were trying to work. “Why did he attack those Psychlos?" “They attacked him.” “Why did they fight?” “Look out, here comes a flatbed and forklift, please stand aside.” “I don't blame Jonnie for shooting Psychlos.”
“Could we have some help here with these bodies?” “Why did they let him go in there?” “How come they attacked him?” “I have heard that these Psychlos..." “But I saw him; he was being very pleasant and they charged him. Why would they do that?”
Jonnie didn't have a bandana or a scrap of buckskin to staunch the blood dropping down on his hunting shirt. Some mechanic handed him a wad of waste and he held it to his cheek.
“They were supposed to be tame Psychlos! Why did they attack him?” More crowd talk.
Jonnie surely wished he knew. What had he said? He had a sudden thought. He called out, “Did anybody get a recording of that? The conversation must have been coming through the intercom.”
Well, there had been about fifteen picto-recorders using up discs ever since he had stepped off the plane. An Argyll rushed up waving one. “Can somebody copy that for me?” asked Jonnie. “I have to know what was said that made them do it.”
Oh, yes, sir, right away! And they had copies of it before he hoisted himself off Windsplitter and into the plane. He was going to study these.
“Wave,” said Robert the Fox.
Jonnie waved. The crowd was looking at him, some faces quite white, even a black face a bit gray. “Please stand back,” from the guards. “Clear the field, please.”
Back at the base that night, just after dinner, Colonel Ivan got a Coordinator in. The Coordinator said, “He wants me to tell you that you live too dangerously.”
There might have been more, but Jonnie cut him off. “Tell him, perhaps at heart I’m just a Cossack!”
The Russians laughed about that, repeating it for days and days thereafter.
It had been a rather energetic first day out.
There was a repercussion. Three days later he received a confidential written message from the Council. He did not think much about it at the time, not being unduly sensitive.
Later he would look back on it as a turning point and criticize himself for not realizing how ominous it was.
The message was very correct, very polite, passed by a slim majority. It was brief:
By Council Resolution, in the interest of his personal safety and to curtail any embarrassment, realizing his value to the State, it is decreed that Jonnie Goodboy Tyler not again visit the Compound located in this place until such prohibition is formally rescinded by constituted authority.
Duly passed on voice vote and certified as legal.
Oscar Khamermann, Chief of the Tribe of British Columbia, Secretary to the Council.
Jonnie read it, shrugged, and tossed it in the wastebasket.
Part XVII
Chapter 1
Brown Limper Staffor came away from the compound utterly ill with envy– he called it “righteousness.”
What a horrible, vulgar spectacle!
All those people crowding about, cheering even, touching his moccasins, absolutely fawning. It was more than a normal sane man like Brown Limper could tolerate.
He had felt he was losing ground lately, and he beat his head to think of ways and means, even criminal, to correct this gross mistake people were making about that Tyler!
Since Jonnie Goodboy Tyler had come to the village last year, prancing about, bribing people with gifts– while really only trying to do them out of their lands and houses– and since Brown Limper had realized that Tyler was not only not properly dead but apparently moving in a larger world and moving far too successfully-Brown Limper had been lying in wait.
When he recalled how he had been put upon and scorned and held up to ridicule by Tyler ever since they were children, he seethed. He had to be careful not to dwell on it too much, for then he would lie awake in bed and roll and toss and grit his teeth and bring on a fever. That the instances of Tyler's doing those things could not be directly recalled or isolated as actual incidents only made it grindingly worse. They must have happened or Brown Limper wouldn't feel this way, would he? It proved itself.
When he heard that Tyler was crippled and likely to die, a flood of relief had poured through Brown Limper. But here he was today, limping maybe but certainly making a nauseating spectacle of himself with those Psychlos.