There was no flat surface there where one could set down a ship. There was no space where one could operate a lowered drilling platform. It was all pinnacles and clefts.
Jonnie saw something else and called for vertical shots down the cliff face. The cliff was not vertical. It fell away inward. Anything lowered from above would hang fifteen to twenty feet away from the face of the cliff. How could one hope to rig ore nets?
They went directly above it and Jonnie saw something else. “Shoot more verticals of that top!” he called.
Yes, he saw it plainly now. There was a crack inset about thirty feet from the top edge of the cliff, parallel to it. Another such crack had caused the fall of rock that bared the lode. But here was a second one. Just waiting for another earthquake. The whole lode would pitch into the gorge.
They went up two thousand feet and the picto-recorder operators had to be content with general scenery. It was impressive enough in its gigantic beauty.
“By your leave, MacTyler," said Dunneldeen, “if it's home we're going now, I’ll exchange with Thor."
Jonnie nodded, and a near-duplicate of him, who was nicknamed Thor due to his Swedish background slid over the seat top, matched his motions to Dunneldeen's, and took over.
Dunneldeen dragged himself back to the rear. “It’s a reel a bit fast for the piper,” he said. “Are we going to have to operate in that?”
The core in Jonnie's hand was part white quartz and part gold. It was a very pretty thing. This was a lure that had wooed Terl, that had given them their chance. He wondered how many lives it would take.
“Head for home,” he told Thor.
They were very quiet on the way back.
Chapter 8
Jonnie was very edgy as he walked Windsplitter around the minesite as casually as he could. What he was doing was dangerous, but one could not have told it from the easy way he sat his horse. It was a semiannual firing day and the personnel at the minesite were hurried, snappish, and preoccupied.
Jonnie had a picto-recorder hidden in a tree that overlooked the site and he had a remote control hidden in his pouch. He had gotten a long-play disc into the recorder, but that would not permit it to run for hours untended. He had to get all the data he could. Robert the Fox would not have approved, for this was a scout pure and simple. And if Terl spotted the picto-recorder or detected the remote, there could be repercussions.
Jonnie had delayed reporting to Terl, taking advantage of the “week or so” order. He had heard by accident of this semiannual firing from Ker the chatterer.
Ker had come over at Jonnie's request to inspect the personnel carrier motor. Jonnie needed the data. If it was faulty that was one thing, but if it was only underpowered for the job at the lode that was another.
So Ker had come to the base, growling a bit about it: he was an operations officer, not a mechanic. But Terl had sent him.
The midget Psychlo's temper was sweetened, however, by Jonnie's handing him a small gold ring a scout had found on the “finger” of a corpse long gone to dust.
“Why give me this?” said Ker, suspiciously.
“Souvenir,” said Jonnie. “Not very valuable.”
It was valuable. It was a month's pay.
Ker dented it slightly with a fang. Pure gold.
“You want something, don't you,” Ker decided.
“No,” said Jonnie. "I’ve got two so I gave you one. We've been shaftmates quite a while now.” This was a Psychlo mining term for a pal who pulled one out of a cave-in or a fight.
“We have, haven't we,” said Ker.
“Besides, I might want somebody killed,” Jonnie added.
This sent Ker off into a gale of laughter. He appreciated a good joke. He put the ring in his pocket and got busy on the motor.
Half an hour later he came over to where Jonnie lolled in the shade. “Nothing wrong with that motor. If it got hot, it was just being overdriven. You want to watch it, though. You keep running one that hard and it will go up in smoke.”
Jonnie thanked him. Ker hunkered down in the building's shade. They talked, mostly Ker chattering. Ker got on the subject of being pushed by schedules and Jonnie eased in casually with his question. “What happens on Day 91 of the new year?”
"Where'd you get that?” “Saw it posted at the minesite."
Ker scratched his greasy neck fur. “You must have read wrong. It would be Day 92. That's a semiannual firing date. One's happening in just seven days, you know. What a lot of bother.”
“Something different about it?”
“Aw, you must have seen a couple when you were in the cage down there. You know, semiannual firing.”
Jonnie may have seen it, but at that time he didn't know what he was looking at. He put on a stupid look.
“It’s a slow firing,” said Ker. “No ore. Personnel incoming and outgoing, including the dead ones.”
“Dead ones?”
“Yeah, we're shipping dead Psychlos home. They want them accounted for because of pay and they don't want them looked into by aliens, I guess. Nutty company rules. Lot of trouble. They put them in coffins and hold them down in the morgue and then...crap, Jonnie. You've seen the morgue. Why am I telling you?”
“Better than working,” said Jonnie.
Ker barked a laugh. “Yep, that's true. Anyway, a slow firing means a three-minute build-up and then zip. On a semiannual day, the home planet sends in the personnel and then they hold a tension between here and home planet, and a couple of hours later we fire off returning personnel and dead bodies.
“You know,” he continued, “you don't want to fool around on ordinary transshipments. I see you around on that horse sometimes. Ordinary firing is all right for dispatches and ore, but a live body would get ripped up in the transition. You'd come apart. On a slow firing the bodies come through great, live or dead. If you're trying to get to Psychlo, Jonnie, don't do it with the ore!” He laughed and thought it very funny. A human, breathing air and built for light gravity, wouldn't live two minutes on Psychlo.
Jonnie laughed with him. He had no intention of ever going to Psychlo. “They really bury those dead bodies on Psychlo?”
“Sure enough. Names, markers, and everything. It 's in the employee contract. Of course the cemetery is way out of town in an old slag heap, and nobody ever goes there. But it's in the contract. Silly, ain't it?”
Jonnie agreed it was.
Ker left in very good spirits. “Remember to tell me who you want killed.” And he went into howls of laughter and drove off in his old truck.
Jonnie looked up to the window above him where Robert the Fox had been running a recorder out of sight. “Turn it off.”
“Off,” said Robert the Fox, leaning out and looking down at Jonnie.
“I think I know how Terl is going to ship the gold to Psychlo. In coffins!”
Robert the Fox nodded. “Aye, it all fits. He'll load them here, and then most likely when he goes home he will just dig them up some dark Psychlo night with nobody the wiser. What a ghoul!”
And so Jonnie, sitting Windsplitter at the firing site, was making very sure he had all the data on a semiannual just in case it was needed.
The incoming load had not arrived and Terl was rumbling around getting things organized. He had medical personnel and administrative clerks waiting to receive the incoming employees. He was very sure that there would be quite a few, for Numph was in pocket for every new worker and he had said he was bringing in lots of employees.
The network of wires around the staging area was being checked out by technicians. A white light went on. Jonnie, sitting Windsplitter up the slope, touched his remote to start his concealed picto-recorder.