What had he done before the Tolnep arrived? Let's see. He had loosened the top-plate screws. Psychlos once in a while used screws. Most of the time they just annealed metal with a molecular adhesion/cohesion blade.
But they were a bit unusual.
He now took all the screws out and lifted off the plate. The screws went into a black material that held, on its underside, all the complex components of the console.
The screws. They must connect something to something in addition to holding the cover on. But he couldn't find any switch. They just seemed to be screws. But turning one or another of them had certainly disabled this console.
He put it back together. He looked at another console and found the angle the screws were supposed to be set at. He set the Basher's console screws at the same angle.
It would not start again, no matter what he did.
It must be the screws. When that blade scraper quit, maybe a dirt clod had hit a screw and turned it.
He went through all the motions for the fifth time, trying to align screws.
But that was it. He had a dead-motor Basher tank.
Jonnie finally gave it up.
He went down to the lake and threw rocks at the crocodiles. Then he became ashamed of himself for teasing the beasts.
They were very amiable creatures compared to Terl.
A tri-wheeler came down from Sir Robert who wanted to tell Jonnie it was unwise to be in the open without air cover. The visitors might send somebody down.
“Would you like to shoot a Psychlo?"
Jonnie asked a startled messenger. Damn Terl! Damn all Psychlos!
And it wasn't any comfort to know that thousands of races had been saying the same thing for three hundred and two thousand years.
He'd have to think of something, some plan, no matter how desperate or dangerous, or this planet was finished!
Chapter 2
Winter had come to Denver.
But the cold wind and snow flurries could not dampen the elation of Brown Limper Staffor.
The new bank note had arrived.
A packet of them lay on his desk and four of them were spread out before him. How beautiful! They were bright yellow, printed on one side, and there, right in the middle, was an oval picture of Brown Limper!
What an awful lot of trouble they had had getting that picture. Brown Limper had tried innumerable poses, facing this way and that; he had tried countless expressions, frowning or scowling; but none of these would do.
Lars Thorenson had finally had to give him a hand. Lars had explained that it was the beard that was wrong: Brown Limper had a black mustache and beard, and whereas the mustache was all right, the beard was thin and scraggly. So the thing to do was shave off the beard and trim the mustache until it was a bushy tuft just under the nose; that was the sort of mustache the great military hero Hitler had had and so it must be correct.
Then there had been the problem of a proper costume. Nobody seemed to find anything proper. General Snith came to the rescue. He had heard one of his men report that there was an old graveyard that had air-sealed coffins in it. Several had been dug up, looking for a corpse that had been properly dressed: but after more than a thousand years the fabric wouldn't hold together. The only outcome of all that was a sickness that had hit the Brigantes: two had died and a doctor, passing through, had said it was “formaldehyde poisoning,” whatever that was.
Somebody had finally found a bolt of gray cloth in a basement that didn't tear very much and somebody else had found a pattern that said “chauffeur's uniform” on it and some Brigante women had sewn it up. They had also found a black-visored cap that lasted long enough for the picture.
Snith had a handful of jewelry he'd found– which Brown Limper knew couldn't possibly be rubies or diamonds and was probably colored glass– and they'd put that on the left breast of the coat so he would have “medals.”
The final posing was solved by using a picture Lars had of somebody called “Napoleon,” also a great military hero of ancient man. The pose had the fingers of one hand tucked into the coat edge on the breast.
MacAdam had been a bit difficult. He had asked Brown Limper whether this was what he really wanted by way of a portrait and Brown Limper had been cross about it. After all that trouble. Of course that was what he wanted!
So here was the new bank note at last. It was a hundred-credit note: MacAdam had said he could only print one denomination and it had to be a hundred credits. Brown Limper realized that that made this a far more important bill. It had the bank name on it. It was only printed in English and no other tribal language. And right there, loud and clear, it said “One Hundred American Credits”! And it said “Valid for the payment of public and private debts in America.”
One of the conditions MacAdam had made was that all earlier money in the country be collected up and exchanged for these new bills. It was hard to do because the earlier issue was a one-credit bank note and this American issue was a one-hundred-credit bank note. But the dream of having all Tyler notes gone was so alluring, Brown Limper had made up the differences in exchange out of his own pocket.
This victory was doing much to improve Brown Limper's spirits: they had been very low as of late.
When that Tyler had not only not gone to his booby-trapped home in the meadow but had walked right out of the country, Brown Limper had been so dispirited he had wanted to call off the whole Terl project.
But Lars had talked to him. Lars seemed to have developed a hatred for Tyler. (He did not say it was from the degradation of hiding under scrap metal in the garage and envy over the way Tyler could fly, but the emotion was very well understood by
Brown Limper who considered it natural.)
Lars had said that if they went ahead and actually transshipped, Tyler was certain to reappear.
Terl had talked to him. Terl said that when they fired a shipment to Psychlo, Tyler would be right there, and he had traps for him that even Tyler could not get around.
So Brown Limper had continued with the project.
Other things were going wrong, though. He did not hear much anymore from the tribal chiefs. Lars explained it was natural– they trusted him to run things. No pilgrims came anymore to the minesite. But that was natural– it was winter.
People had been disappearing. First the hotel cook. Then some Swiss shopkeepers. Then another and another until now the hotel was no longer operating and no shops were open at all.
The shoemakers had vanished. The Germans who repaired things were no longer to be found. The llaneros had driven the large herds south– where they would have better winter feed, they said– and then they had vanished.
Brown Limper had taken it up with Snith. Did this have anything to do with Brigantes? Even Terl put the question to him. But Snith swore up and down he and his men had behaved.
The Academy was still there and operating. There seemed to be a vast number of pilot trainees and a vaster number of machine operators. But they stayed down at the Academy and all one saw was an occasional plane doing practice flights.
All his office radios and teleprinters were gone. They broke down and had to be taken away to be repaired and then they never came back. But never mind, Brown Limper couldn't operate them anyway and couldn't really trust anyone else to.
This new bank note was making a world of difference to his morale. He decided he would not pay the pilots in it. He'd get even with them.
People would be hanging him, Brown Limper, on their walls now!
On sudden impulse, he decided he had better mend his political fences with his own tribe– and show them this bill, of course. He called Lars and General Snith and they got into a mine passenger plane Lars kept in the parking lot and took off for the new village he had put his people in.