“They do have something in their skulls!” said Robert the Fox.
“Not so fast,” said MacKendrick. “We jump to no conclusions. It could be some fragment of an old injury, some metal picked up in a mine explosion.”
"Naw, naw, naw," said Robert the Fox. “It’s very plain!”
Jonnie had pulled out the recording sheets. They had the metal analysis trace squiggling down one side. He had left the Psychlo metal analysis code book, usually used to analyze drone transmissions as they hunted a surface for ore, outside. It was chill and dank and odorous in this room and he didn't care much for this job, vital as it was. He took this opportunity to go out and look it up.
Page after page he compared the squiggle he had with the illustrations. It took a long time. He was no expert at this. He couldn't find it. Then he got clever and began to compare composites of two squiggle illustrations.
The Psychlo engineers who would do this sort of thing could probably have told him with no code book. He cursed the anger of the Russians who, believing they were avenging their colonel, had slaughtered the Psychlos. The four in the guarded room of the dormitory were in very bad condition. Two of them were ordinary miners, one was an executive by his clothes and papers, and the other was an engineer. MacKendrick was very doubtful that they would make it. He had extracted bullets and sewn them up but they were all still unconscious or appeared so, and they lay there in the breathe-gas ventilated room, chained to their beds, breathing shallowly. There wasn't even a first-aid handbook for Psychlos that Jonnie had ever seen. He didn't think there was one issued. The company might require all bodies to be returned but it didn't require that anybody keep them alive– a fact that tended to confirm that the sole reason for returning dead Psychlo bodies was to prevent examination by alien eyes-there was no sentiment involved. There were never even any hospital sections in these compounds, and mine accidents were very frequent.
Hold it. One of these squiggles in the book almost matched: copper! Now if he could find the little tail squiggle somewhere– here it was: tin! He overlaid the two squiggles. They seemed to match better. Copper and tin? Not quite. There was a tiny squiggle remaining. He searched for it. He found it: lead!
Mainly copper, some tin, and a little bit of lead! He put the patterns one on top of the other. They matched now.
There was another code book, very thick, called “Composite Ore Bodies for Drone Scan Analysis,” and because it had about ten thousand characters in it he had shunned it. But this one he had just done made a look-up easy. He looked under “Copper Deposits,” and then its subheading, “Tin Deposits,” and then its sub-subheading, “Lead Deposits,” and he found his squiggle. Not only that, he found, by comparing it to variations, that the analysis of "per-elevens" (Psychlos used the eleven integer) was five copper, four tin, and two lead.
He went further and looked this up in a man-book and it said “Bronze” for such a combination. Apparently it was a very durable alloy that lasted for centuries and there had even been a “Bronze Age” where implements were mainly “bronze.” Great. But it struck him as funny that an advanced technical race should be using ancient bronze in a skull. Amusing.
He went back inside with his findings to discover that MacKendrick, with a
hammer and chisel-like instrument, had been taking the head apart. Jonnie was just as glad not to have been around to watch that.
“We searched all through the rest of the skull with the machine,” said Angus. “That's the only odd thing in there.”
“I went through its pockets,” said Robert the Fox. “He is the lowest-class miner. His identity card says his name was Cla and he had forty-one years' service and three wives back on Psychlo."
“The company paid them benefits?” said Dunneldeen.
“No,” said Robert the Fox, showing him the crumpled record, “it says here the company paid him also for the female earnings in a company 'house,' whatever that is.”
“The economics of Psychlo husbandry,” said Dunneldeen, “are a credit to their morality.”
“Don't joke,” said Jonnie. “The object in his head is an alloy called 'bronze.' It is not magnetic, worse luck. It would have to be operated out. It can't be pulled out with a magnet.”
Dr. MacKendrick now had the brain laid bare. With a surgeon's skill, he was parting things that looked like cords.
And there it was!
It was shaped like two half-circles back to back and the circles were slightly closed, each one around a separate cord.
“I think these are nerves,” said MacKendrick. “We will know shortly.” He was delicately pulling the objects off the cords. He wiped the green blood off it and put it on the table.
“Don't touch any of this,” said
MacKendrick. “Autopsies can be deadly.”
Jonnie looked at the thing. It was a dull yellow. It was about half an inch across at its widest point.
Angus picked it up with a tweezer and put it on the analysis machine plate. “It’s not hollow,” he said. “It’s just solid. Just a piece of metal.”
MacKendrick had a little box with wires and clips on it. It had a small fuel cartridge in it to generate electricity. But before he connected anything with his gloved hands he was distracted by the character of these cords in the head. It was a brain, but it was vastly different from a human brain.
He cut off a small cord end and a slice of skin from the cadaver's paw and went over to an old makeshift microscope. He made a slide from a thin specimen and looked into the eyepiece.
MacKendrick whistled in surprise. “A Psychlo isn't made of cells. I don't know their metabolism but their structure isn't cellular. Viral! Yes. Viral!” He turned to Jonnie. “You know, big as a Psychlo is, his basic structure seems to be clumps of viruses.” He saw Jonnie looking at him askance and added, “Purely academic interest. It does mean, however, that their bodies probably hold together much tighter and have a greater density. Probably of no interest to you. Well, let's get to work on these cords.”
He attached one clip to the end of a cord in the brain and grounded the other on an arm and, watching a meter, measured the resistance of the cord to electrical flow. When he had determined that, he stood back and touched a button to send electricity through the cord. The others felt their hair rise.
The Psychlo cadaver moved its left foot.
“Good,” said MacKendrick. “Nerves. There is no rigor mortis in these bodies and they're still flexible. I have found the nerve that relays walk commands.” He put a little tag on the nerve. He had marked the places from which they had removed the metal with a spot of dye on each of the two nerves involved with it. But he wasn't checking those yet.
His spectators were quite horrified to see, as MacKendrick identified nerves with tags, a Psychlo cadaver that moved its claws, clenched the remains of its jaw, moved an ear, and lolled out its tongue, one after the other as various nerves were given an electrical jolt.
MacKendrick saw their reaction. “Nothing new in this. Just electrical impulses approximating brain commands. Some man-scientist did this maybe thirteen hundred years ago and thought he'd found the secret of all thought and made up a cult about it called 'psychology.' Forgotten now. It wasn't the secret of thought; it was just the mechanics of bodies. They started with frogs. I’m cataloging this body's communication channels, that's all.”
But it was very weird. The depths of superstition stirred in them as they saw a corpse move and breathe and saw, for a couple of pumps, its heart beat.