“It’s the only one I got,” said Jonnie. “And you're sure a driller,” said Ker.
Jonnie neatly repackaged it and put it in his pouch. He was betting that no heat detector could detect through it. If he wore it and kept it from gaping, the spinning scanner would be blind to it. He hoped.
The food problem he had solved. The smoked beef was compact and would keep him from starving if he was running so fast that he had no time to hunt.
He carefully patched up moccasins and made sure he had an extra pair. Terl observed that, too.
“You don't have to wear those, you know,” Terl said one evening as he came out to check the cage locks. " There are old Chinko boots that could be cut down. Didn't they give you any boots with your clothes?”
The following day the compound tailor came out, complaining in his breathe-mask, and measured Jonnie for boots. “I am not a bootmaker!” he protested. But Terl had shown him the blanket requisition, so the tailor also measured Jonnie for a heavy knee-length overcoat and cold-weather cap. “It is coming on to summer,” said the tailor. “It’s not the time of year for winter clothing.” But he had done the measuring anyway and very soon the boots and clothing were delivered to the cage. “Freaky executives,” the tailor had muttered during the final try-on. “Dressing up animals!”
It made Jonnie uneasy that Terl was being obliging. He carefully checked all his preparations over to see whether any could give away his plans to escape. He decided not. Terl seemed very preoccupied these days, indifferent. Or was that a pose?
The thing that was really giving Jonnie a problem was how to get his hands on a gun.
Before all the “mutiny” precautions, some of the workers he had seen had worn relatively small, compact handguns at their belts. He had supposed they used them for plinking or shooting game. Terl still wore his-a rather bigger one– but the others seemed to have stopped.
Jonnie wondered how far he could trust Ker. The “midget” was definitely Terl's creature. But from some of the tales Ker had chattered on with, he was distinctly criminaclass="underline" he told how he had rigged certain games of chance, how he had looted ore boxes “as a joke,” how he had gotten a female to believe her father needed money and “relayed it for her.”
One day they were waiting for a machine to be idle so it could be used
in practice and Jonnie decided to make a test. He still had the two discs he had gotten in the Great Village. He knew now that one was a silvery coin and the other a gold coin.
He took the silver coin out of his pocket and began flipping it.
“What's that?” Ker wanted to know. Jonnie gave it to him and Ker scratched it with a talon. “I dug some of these up once in a wrecked town on the southern continent,” said Ker. “You must have gotten this locally, though.”
“Why?” said Jonnie, alert that perhaps Ker could read English letters.
“It’s fake,” said Ker. “An alloy of copper with a nickel-silver plating. A real coin– and I saw some once– is solid silver.” He handed it back, losing interest.
Jonnie took out the yellow coin and started flipping it.
Ker caught it in the air before it could fall back into Jonnie's hand. His interest was sudden and intense. “Hey, where did you get this?” Ker dented the edge with a talon tip and looked at it closely.
“Why?” said Jonnie innocently. “Is it worth something?”
A very sly look came into Ker's eye. The coin he was holding and trying to be casual about was worth four thousand credits! Gold, alloyed just enough to be used in coinage without undue wear. Ker steadied his hand and looked very, very casual. "Where'd you get this?”
“Well,” said Jonnie, “it came from a very dangerous place.”
“There are more of them?” Ker was quivering a little bit. He was holding in his paw three months' pay! All in one little coin. And as an employee he could legally possess it as a “souvenir.” On Psychlo it could buy a wife. He tried to remember how many coins it took for them to cease to be “souvenirs” and become company property. Ten? Thirteen? So long as they were old and obviously mintage, not some fake made by a miner.
“The place is so dangerous one couldn't go there without at least a belt gun.”
Ker looked at him searchingly. “Are you trying to get me to give you a belt gun?”
“Would I do something like that?”
Yes, said Ker. This animal was very, very quick on machines. Quicker in fact than Psychlo trainees.
Ker looked longingly at the gold coin or medallion or whatever it had been. He said nothing. Then he handed it back to Jonnie and just sat there, his amber eyes shadowed in the depths of his breathe-gas dome.
Jonnie took the coin back. "I’m careless with things like this. I can't buy anything, you know. I keep it in a hole just to the right of the cage door as you come in.”
Ker sat there for a while. Then he said, “The next machine is ready.”
But that night, while Terl was making his rounds of the minesite and was distant from his viewing screen, the gold coin disappeared from the hole where Jonnie had put it, and in the morning, when Jonnie dug there, covering the action with his body, a small handgun and spare charges were in the hole instead.
Jonnie had a gun.
Chapter 4
A remaining hurdle was knowledge.
The Chinkos were good teachers, and they could stack real learning onto a disc and get it assimilated like lightning flashes. But basically they had been working for Psychlos and trying to teach Psychlos, and they omitted a lot of things that Psychlos either already knew or could not have much interest in. This left gaps.
Jonnie had picked up inferences that there was uranium in the mountains to the west. Mostly he guessed this because no active mining ever seemed to have been undertaken there by the Psychlos. From the accident he had witnessed and for other reasons, he suspected uranium was deadly to the Psychlos. But he didn't know for sure and he didn't know how.
He was utterly dismayed, in studying the text on electronic chemistry, to find there were many, many different atomic formations of uranium.
Sitting at his fire, grinding away at texts and the instruction machine alternately, Jonnie was disturbed by the ground-shake that always preceded Terl. It was simply the monster's nightly rounds.
“What are you studying so hard, animal?” asked Terl, looming over him.
Jonnie decided to plunge, to take a chance. He looked the many feet up to Terl's mask. “It’s the mountains to the west,” said Jonnie.
Terl looked at him suspiciously for a little while.
“There's not much in here about them,” said Jonnie.
Terl was still suspicious. What had this animal guessed?
“I was born and raised there,” said Jonnie. “There's data on mountains everywhere else on the planet but hardly any on those right there.” He pointed to where faint moonlight shone on the bold snowcaps. “The Chinkos took a lot of books out of the library. Man-books. Are they here?”
“Oh,” snorted Terl in relief. “Man-books. Ha.”
Terl was rather more pleased than otherwise. This fitted into his own concentrations. He left and came back shortly with a battered table and a disorderly armload of books that avalanched down on it. They were frail books, very ancient, and some broke their backs or came apart with his mishandling.
“I am nothing but an animal attendant,” said Terl. "If mauling through this gibberish makes you happy, be happy.” He paused at the cage door after he went out and locked it. “Just remember one thing, animal. The junk you'll find in those man-books didn't have anything in them to defeat Psychlos." Then he laughed. “Probably lots of recipes on how to prepare raw rat, though.” He rumbled off to the compound, his laughter fading.