“We may have no diplomas,”
Dunneldean had said when they finished, “but it would seem we are pretty good Psychlo undertakers!” And then he looked down from the dizzy altitude to the plains below and added, “Or is it overtakers?" The Scots scorned his joke, it was so terrible.
They had opened up the road with blade scrapers and righted the Basher tank with a crane and driven the vehicles the rest of the way to the minesite. Despite company regulations they stored the fuel, ammunition, and breathe-gas underground out of the way of attack. They were experts in attacking such dumps.
Thor had come back to help them. He said some of the people in the tribes had seen the flashes of the battle and when they heard the last Psychlos were mopped up they had named the day the Tyler Battle day. Thor had flown a hunting party down to the savannah and they had come back with game and there had been a lot of feasting and dancing. “It is sometimes very gratifying, Jonnie, to be taken for you! But I had to disappear during the battle. You can't be in two places at once.” Thor had spotted the convoy exit from the forest and had discreetly stood by at two hundred thousand feet to assist if needed. He had full picto-recorder discs of the whole battle and was surprised that nobody wanted to see them.
Tired, glad to be out of the rain, they sat around in the huge chairs of the Psychlo recreation hall. Jonnie was looking through the pilot traffic that still spewed out on the printer. Nothing unusual. He threw it down.
“We better get to work,” said Jonnie.
They had been working. What did you call what they'd been doing if not working? Robert the Fox shook his head. Angus looked at his hands, bruised by wielding heavy torches and twisting open oversized locks. Dunneldeen just stared and thought of the flight hours ferrying dead Psychlos to the snow. Colonel Ivan whispered back of a bandaged hand to the Coordinator who then told him what Jonnie had said, and he looked back frowning. Hadn't his people been killing every Psychlo in sight and driving trucks and cleaning a minesite and doing everything else?
“Well,” said Jonnie, “I hate to have to tell you that we aren't here to do all
that.”
All right. But then what-
“We're here,” said Jonnie, “to find out why the Chamco brothers committed suicide.”
The devil with the Chamcos. They were just Psychlos and they'd tried to kill Jonnie-
So Jonnie made a speech. He paused now and then to let the Coordinator catch up for the Russians present.
He told them that they did not know whether or not Psychlo was still there as a functioning planet. He told them about the Galactic Bank note and all the races listed on it, and he remembered he had one and passed it around.
They realized what he was saying. Earth was wide open to counterattack. If the Psychlo planet were still there, it would eventually counterattack with new gas drones. And these other races possibly had means of reaching Earth swiftly. And when they found there were no Psychlo defenses here, they could slaughter the place if they had a mind to.
The only way to find out was to rebuild the teleportation shipment rig and get it cracking. But the Psychlos put on the project had attacked him when he questioned them on that subject. They got it. They also got the fact that no other group or organization was working to handle these problems or the defenses of the planet.
“Which elects us,” Jonnie said.
They agreed.
“So, Angus, I want you to set up that machine they said you used on me to feel that steel splinter. And we're going to set it up and start looking in Psychlo heads! If we find something and if one of those Psychlos that are still alive can be operated on, we will have somebody we can make rebuild the teleportation rig and we're in! We can cast picto-recorders out and look at Psychlo and we can look at these other civilizations and then we'll know where we are. Right now we're listing in the cloud layers with no direction but down. Without knowing, I think we're dead men.”
“We have all their mathematics and texts on teleportation," said Angus.
"I’ve seen them, man. I’ve even held them in my hands!”
“But you haven't made any sense out of them,” said Jonnie. “I tried for weeks to unravel them. I’m no mathematician but there's something wrong with those mathematics. They just don't work out! So we need a Psychlo who won't commit suicide if we ask him.”
“Tell me, Jonnie,” said Dr. MacKendrick, “I see no evidence of anything in their heads. You can't X-ray, or whatever you call it, thoughts!”
“When I was lying around trying to get back the use of my hand and arm,” said Jonnie, “I got hold of a lot of man-books on the subject of the brain. And you know what I found?”
They didn't know.
“Way back when man had hospitals and lots of surgeons and engineers,” said Jonnie, “clear back, maybe twelve hundred years ago, they were experimenting with planting electric capsules in the heads of babies to regulate their behavior. To make them laugh or cry and get hungry just by pressing a button.”
“What a disgusting experiment,” said Robert the Fox.
“They had an idea,” said Jonnie, “that they could control the whole population if they put electric capsules in their heads.”
The Coordinator translated for Colonel Ivan. He said there was a myth that that had been tried– controlling whole populations– in Russia, and nobody liked it.
“I don't know they ever succeeded,” said Jonnie. “But when I looked this Chamco thing over, I had a clue about it. Why should two hitherto cooperative renegades, happily signed up on good contracts, suddenly attack me when I said certain words? I have reviewed the discs somebody cut. I was pressing them to rebuild the teleportation transshipment rig and they started to get upset and then I said these words: 'If you will explain to me...' and they both went crazy and attacked.”
“Maybe they were just withholding information,” said Robert the Fox.
“They-”
“They committed suicide two days later,” said Jonnie. “After that I asked Ker whether he had ever heard of Psychlos committing suicide and he said yes, one did, an engineer on a planet he'd served on. They used an alien race there and the Psychlo engineer had gone out drinking one night, killed an alien, and then two days later committed suicide. That was the only one he ever heard of. “Also,” he added impressively, “they return all corpses to Psychlo. There must be something in them they don't want found.”
The group buzzed to each other and got their wits around it.
“So I am guessing that Psychlos, when they are babies,” said Jonnie, “get something put in their heads to protect their technology!”
MacKendrick and Angus were very interested now.
“So that's what we've been doing,” said Robert the Fox.
Angus went to their ship to assemble the device. MacKendrick went to a dormitory section to set up tables. Dunneldeen and Thor went off to the mountain peak to bring down a couple of corpses, Dunneldeen calling himself and Thor “the gruesome twosome.”
If Jonnie was right or Jonnie was wrong, they would know more very shortly.
The planet was wide open to counterattack.
Robert the Fox went out and got an antiplane battery manned and arranged for twenty-four-hour alert and pilot scrambles. This tiny group, under half a hundred, only four or five pilots, and an antiplane battery that had already failed to shoot down one of the minesite attack craft, to defend a whole planet? Ridiculous! But he went through the motions. At least for local defense.