Jonnie, trying to work his way through this new one, wandered around the compound. He saw Sir Robert had just arrived and showed him on the old map that all minesites had these and that he should probably use them.
Jonnie wandered on, troubled.
Teleportation! The secret of the Psychlos. With it they had controlled universes. Without it he didn't see how he could defend this one planet.
He saw MacKendrick. Yes, the wounded Psychlos were all well now. Except Chirk who just lay there. No, he hadn't figured any way to get those things out of a Psychlo's head-disturbance at that bone structure would kill the monster. Yes, he realized that if they tried to consult Psychlos on technical matters they would attack and kill themselves, or, if female, probably go into a coma like
Chirk.
What MacKendrick was really worried about was the diet of the prisoners. The Psychlos in their manuals didn't consider it valuable information, being Psychlos; the prisoners themselves knew what they ate but didn't know the names for it that applied to this planet, and if he didn't solve it, they'd shortly have no prisoners.
Did Jonnie know they now had three Jambitchows? It was last night. Evidently a scouting party had been sent down to investigate all the new activity that was going on at Kariba, and the Scot officer there, the moment he got word a small craft had detached itself from the Jambitchow cruiser up in orbit, had put into action something dreamed up by the Chinese. They called it a "tiger-net." They put a dummy dressed like a Chinese down near a pool away from the camp and the Jambitchows went right in to grab the dummy and a big net had been tripped up in the trees and they'd been caught. Evil-looking brutes.
MacKendrick wanted to know whether he'd heard what they ate. No? Well, the old woman from the Mountains of the Moon was helping and maybe they could work it out.
Jonnie wandered on. Damn Terl! It was getting too chancy! Somewhere, somehow he should be able to get the information on some other channel.
Once before he had thought of exploring a teleportation motor to see whether he could get some sort of answer out of it. A motor wasn't a transshipment rig, but it did work on space-position change.
He had a motor and console to fool with: the ones from the wrecked tank in the battle of the pass. It had been carted in to the garage repair shop. Maybe if he just tore it apart...a thin hope, for he'd already looked at such rigs. But he got into some work clothes and went down to the repair level.
The Basher was sitting there, badly scarred and with a couple of plates sprung. He got into it, checked the fuel, and started the motor with a “right here” space coordination punched in on the console. It ran! One thing you could say about the
Psychlos, their stuff lasted forever.
He shut the motor off and took a screwdriver to the top screws of the console. He loosened them a half-turn, each one.
Jonnie was distracted by a sentry appearing at the tank port and handing him some ear pads, asking him to put them on. Jonnie stood up and looked out the turret port to find out what was going on.
It was Stormalong and the Tolnep, Double-Ensign Slitheter Pliss, surrounded by guards.
“What's up?” called Jonnie.
They didn't hear him. They all had ear pads on. Then Jonnie saw that the Tolnep patrolcraft had been dollied in here and he could guess the rest of it. Stormalong probably wanted to know how it flew so he could teach pilots how to handle Tolnep craft. Probably
Angus wanted to know the cycles of vibration of that paralysis beam.
Slitheter Pliss seemed quite amiable. He had obviously written himself off as a Tolnep. He saw Jonnie and hissed a greeting.
But if they were going to let the Tolnep near that lethal sound vibrator, they were taking no chances that he would turn it on, paralyze the lot of them, and escape. Jonnie didn't think so for the Tolnep had nowhere to go. But he put the ear pads on anyway.
The Tolnep seemed to find it a bit provoking that the accumulator terminals had been bent. They responded to his dumb-show signs and gave him some tools and he straightened them and rehooked the power cable. The craft promptly began to run and he shut it off. With more dumb-show he pointed the switches out to Stormalong, indicating what they connected to, and Stormalong seemed to find it quite elementary; he nodded to the Tolnep and signaled the guards to take him away.
Once Pliss was away from the craft, Jonnie cautiously removed the ear pads and started to duck down out of the turret to resume his work.
The Tolnep alarmed the guards by pausing and swinging open the side door of the tank. He almost got himself shot. But Jonnie gestured for them to back up. He could shove the screwdriver into the Tolnep's teeth if he tried to bite.
“You people aren't Psychlo-commanded, are you?” said the Tolnep, hanging in the door. Getting no answer– since Jonnie was not going to volunteer information to a potential escapee no matter how remote escape might be– the Tolnep said, “What are you trying to do with that tank motor?”
Jonnie just looked at him for a moment and then it occurred to him that as a Tolnep officer, Pliss might have been trained on these things. “You know how this works?”
“Blast no! And neither does anyone else in any universe that I ever heard of,” said Pliss. “We've never raided this planet but we have raided other Psychlo bases. According to the textbooks, we've brought in thousands of these things just for the experts to look at.” He smiled a rather frightening smile. "I’ll bet my next month's pay, which I’ll never get, that you people are up against the same thing that everybody else is up against.”
Allowing for possible malice, Jonnie looked encouraging.
“We've gotten their textbooks, their mathematics texts even. We've actually captured a transshipment console intact. It said in the text that it worked once and then as soon as they tried to find how it was built, pop, no console.
“The very best Tolnep commanders have interrogated Psychlo engineers,” continued Pliss, “and nothing happened. Some use that is. They chew you up and kill themselves.
Been going on, I read once, for three hundred and two thousand years!”
The Tolnep changed the subject. “You got a metals sample room around here? I’m hungry and maybe I can find something.”
Jonnie told the guards to take him there.
“So good luck,” said the Tolnep with a sarcastic-sounding hiss. They took him away.
Possibly it was just malice, Jonnie thought. But he didn't believe it.
He'd lost track of the sequence of actions he had been involved in when interrupted. So he started all over again. He put the console buttons in “right here” and tapped the power switch to start the tank motor.
Nothing happened. He checked the connections. All usual.
He tried to recall whether the Tolnep had touched anything, and the Tolnep hadn't.
He once more tried to start the motor. Nothing.
What had Ker told him once about consoles? They'd had a blade machine back up. The canopy had been open because Jonnie didn't need breathe-gas and a torrent of dirt had come spraying down on the console and the blade machine wouldn't start afterward. Oh, yes. Ker had said to leave it, that he'd get an engineer on it. Not a mechanic but an engineer! And an engineer had come down and disconnected the console and taken it off to an underground workshop with a small traveling crane.
Jonnie had been more interested in the crane at the time. The cranes had magnetic plates in a circle with springs between them. They didn't have any motors. The arms of the crane moved by applying power to the magnets. Jonnie wished he had watched when they pulled the console out.