Why? To what end?
Jonnie tore through some books. Sodium, magnesium, sulphur, and phosphorus had one thing in common. They were of use, one way or another, in explosives. Knowing Terl, that was the first thing Jonnie looked up. But this combination he didn't think would explode, because there they lay, right on the table in an earlier frame, right together and they didn't explode. Iron and silicon? It seemed that they were very common indeed in the composition of the Earth's crust and core.
He looked at a later frame, quite apprehensive. What if Terl made something and then hid it outside and they couldn't find it? What was this devil up to? Ah! Terl might have jumbled up the six elements but the strange pea-sized mineral had vanished. Jonnie backtracked on the disc.
Terl had taken the heavy bit of strange metal and measured it and then had wrapped it all up and put it back in the false cabinet. The place where it had lain now had a dent!
He made a braced basket to hold the pea in the center. But he didn't put it in for it was now back in the cabinet. Then he put the six common elements, each one, in the slots on the rods.
When one opened the lid, the rods pushed them all in to the center. They would go into contact with each other and with the pea.
Jonnie knew something about radiation and elements after their early battle. He knew that all you had to do was stimulate atoms to get a chain reaction going.
But Terl was not working with uranium radiation. He couldn't. Not with the overstimulation radiation gave to breathe-gas!
So that pea thing must be some higher order of stimulation.
Knowing Terl, it would be deadly. He was sure that when that heavy, heavy pea-sized piece of metal was in the center and somebody opened the lid and all those metals pushed together and against it, something ghastly was going to happen.
Terl locked the pretty box away, cleaned up things, and opened a mathematics text entitled “Force Equations,” which had nothing to do with teleportation! What was he up to now?
And that was as far as the discs went.
Their own clock had moved up to noon as they had gone nonstop, no sleep, no food.
“Now I know who made Satan,” said Dunneldeen. “His name was Terl."
Chapter 6
Since Terl seemed to be working on other things than teleportation, which was the key to this entire dilemma, Jonnie, for the time being, turned his attention to other things.
He had not entirely lost hope of unraveling the Psychlo technology through the restoration and possible cooperation of the remaining Psychlos. If he could get the two pieces of metal out of the head of a trained Psychlo engineer, there was a possibility that some of these mysteries would be solved, and solved they would leave them in better control of the planet's future.
Dr. MacKendrick had returned. One or two of the African base people had come down with a touch of what MacKendrick said was “malaria,” carried by mosquitoes. MacKendrick had procured "chinchona bark” from
South America and had made them mop up standing pools of water in the base and put nets over the air intake vents and all that seemed to be under control.
MacKendrick's three remaining Psychlo patients, two of whom were rated engineers, were not, however, so easily handled as the malaria. They were not getting well. They remained barely alive.
The thirty-three live Psychlos from the American compound arrived in Africa without incident and were put in a prepared dorm section. They had been duly reported as “lost at sea in a plane crash.”
But the doctor did not have much hope for it. “I have tried every way I can think of,” he told Jonnie one evening in his underground African surgery, “and one can't get through the intricate skull structure to the items without severely damaging it. Every Psychlo cadaver I have worked with so far plainly shows that critical skull bone joints would be very damaged and vital brain nerves would be severed. Those things were put into the soft skull of a newborn pup, and even within a few months the skull would have been hardened to a point where they could not be removed. I will go on working with Psychlo cadavers but I cannot hold out any real hope.”
Jonnie wandered off from the conference, trying to think of some solution to that problem. It seemed these days he had a lot more problems than he had solutions. He felt that if he didn't come up with some solutions fairly soon, the human race might well be a write-off.
He heard his name called. He was passing by one of the doors that housed the new Psychlo arrivals and he stopped and went over. There was a small view port and an intercom inset into the door panel.
It was Chirk!
He had never had anything against Chirk. A rattlebrain and dedicated to wrong conclusions though she might be, the times when he had seen her they had not fought.
"Jonnie," said Chirk, “I just want to thank you for saving us.”
Jonnie realized somebody had been talking to the Psychlos, maybe Dunneldeen.
“When I think of what that awful Terl planned to do– murder us all, you know– my fur crackles! I always thought you were kind of cute, Jonnie. You know that. So I know you saved our lives.”
Jonnie said, “You're welcome. Can I do anything for you?” She looked pretty forlorn, really. No clothes but a wraparound, fur all matted.
“No,” said Chirk. “Just thank you.”
Jonnie walked off and was halfway down the passage before the weirdness of it struck him. A Psychlo being thankful? Expressing appreciation? Not wanting something? impossible! He had never had much to do with female Psychlos. They were not numerous in the company. But a grateful Psychlo? Never!
He acted fast. Ten minutes later they had a mineral analyzer rigged and Chirk's head in it. Twenty minutes of investigation and they had an answer.
Chirk did not have any bronze object in her head. She did have a silver capsule, but it was of different shape and size.
There were twelve females from the American compound, and after a great deal of hustle and bustle and assembly line treatment, they had established that none of the females had a bronze object in their brains but they did have silver ones of the same pattern as Chirk's.
Two pilots took off for the morgue in the clouds, accompanied by a fur-wrapped MacKendrick, and they soon established, working in the icy blast of a keen wind, that they had three females in that lot.
That night MacKendrick held out the different capsule to Jonnie and Angus. He had removed it from the female corpse that had been brought back.
Careful examination showed it to have a less complex internal filament but that was all they could tell.
“I don't think that could be cut out either,” said Dr. MacKendrick. “The structure of the female skull is even more complicated than the male's. All I can contribute is that it probably puts out a different message when activated.”
That seemed to be pretty well that.
However, the bronze cruelty factor was missing in a female, so the following morning Jonnie had another talk with Chirk.
“How would you like a job?” said Jonnie.
Well, that would be wonderful. It just showed he was cute. Because she couldn't go back to Psychlo now. Terl had ruined her company record and they would never reemploy her with the black marks of disobedience all over the file. And if he promised not to send her back to Psychlo and paid her usual wage of two hundred Galactic credits a month, a job would be a very good thing for she was going mad from inactivity and no cosmetics.
For a long time now they had been taking Galactic credits out of company payroll offices, out of the wallets of dead Psychlos, out of canteen cash drawers, and they had a couple of million credits kicking around. So it was feasible. They struck a bargain.