A red light over the operations dome began to flash. A horn wailed. A bullhorn roared, “Stand clear!”
The wires started to hum. Jonnie glanced at a Psychlo watch, big as a turnip on his wrist. He marked the time.
There was a building roar. Trees began to quiver from ground vibration. An electrical pulse beat in the air.
All employees had withdrawn from the platform. All machines and motors were off. There was nothing but that growing roar.
A huge purple light over the dome flashed on.
The platform area wavered like heat waves. Then three hundred Psychlos materialized on it.
They stood in a disorderly mass with their baggage. Breathe-gas helmets were on their heads. They staggered a trifle, looking around. One of them dropped to his knees. An intermittent white light began to pulse.
“Coordinates holding!” the bullhorn roared.
Minesite medical rushed in with a stretcher for the one who had collapsed. Baggage carriers converged on the platform. Administrative personnel rushed the newcomers into a solid mass on a field and then got them into a snake line.
Terl took a list from an incoming executive and began to pat down uniforms for weapons and contraband, working fast. A detector in his hand played on baggage. Terl occasionally extracted an item and tossed it to a growing pile of forbidden articles. He was working very fast, like a huge tank battering away at the line, dislodging odd bits from it.
Personnel people were sorting new employees toward freighters or toward the berthing section of the compound. The newcomers looked like half-asleep giants, accustomed to this sort of thing, paying little heed, not even protesting when Terl took things away from them, not challenging any of the assignments of the personnel people, not resisting, not helping.
To Jonnie on the knoll this mass of creatures were in discreditable contrast to the Scots who were interested in things and alive.
Then Jonnie came alert. Terl was about two-thirds down the line. He had stopped. He was looking at a new arrival. Terl backed up and then suddenly gave a wave for the rest of the line to pass on and didn't inspect any more. He let everybody through.
A few minutes later the newcomers were in compound barracks or sitting in waiting personnel carriers to go to other minesites.
The bullhorn roared, “Coordinates holding and linked in second stage.” The white light on the dome began to flash intermittently. The personnel transports started up and took off.
Jonnie realized that interference was being held down on the coordinate frequency. Knowing what he did now about teleportation, he realized that motors could not run during a firing. It was an important point. Teleportation motors interfered with the teleportation in transshipment.
That was why the Psychlos didn't locally teleport ore on the planet from one point to another but used freighters. A small motor was one thing, but teleportation of ore was reserved for transport between planets and universes.
Apparently if any motor were running around the transshipment area while those wires were humming and building up, it would mess up the firing due to overly disturbed local space.
Jonnie knew he was now watching a holding between the space of Psychlo and the space of this planet. A secondary holding was just keeping coordinates punched in, and he could visualize the operators in that control tower punching consoles with staccato paws to keep this planet and Psychlo lined up for the second firing.
It was the second one Jonnie was interested in. It apparently would not take place for a while. He turned off his picto-recorder remote.
After a wait– he timed it and found it was one hour and thirteen minutes-the white light on the dome began a very rapid flashing. The bullhorn bawled, “Stand by for return firing to Psychlo!"
A semiannual seemed to use up far more electricity. Technicians had auxiliary bus bars closed on the high poles. There was still a faint hum in the air.
Sweepers rolled and whirred over the firing platform, cleaning it, getting rid of scraps the new personnel may have dropped.
Jonnie noticed that the conveyor belt detectors were not manned and all the ore apparatus was standing still, neglected. He had hoped to pass by the ore duster with the sample from the lode in his pocket and see whether the ore duster registered any uranium mixed in with the gold. But he couldn't. The thing wasn't running.
Terl came rumbling down toward the morgue. Jonnie turned on his picto-recorder. Psychlos were getting busy again around the firing platform. The bullhorn bawled: “Coordinates holding and linked in second stage.” They were still lined up with Psychlo.
Jonnie envisioned that far-off planet, universes away, purple and heavy like a huge discolored boil, infecting and paining the universes. He knew there were scraps of its space right in front of him, linked to the space of Earth. Psychlo: a parasite larger than the host. Voracious, pitiless, without even a word for “cruelty.”
Terl was now opening up the morgue. Small lift trucks dashed by him and into it. Terl stood there watching, a list in his hand. The first lift truck came out. Terl looked at the closed coffin number and checked his list. The truck with the huge coffin borne in its claws sped to the firing platform and dumped its burden with a thud. The coffin teetered and then fell flat.
A second truck came out of the morgue with another coffin. Terl read the number and checked it off, and that coffin was carried up and dumped on the firing platform. Then rapidly a third and a fourth truck repeated the action. The first truck was bringing another coffin out.
Jonnie watched while sixteen coffins were piled, this way and that, carelessly, on the platform.
A line of returning personnel were dropped off a flatbed ground truck with their baggage near Terl at the morgue. He went through their clothing and glanced into their effects. There were twelve of them. As they finished, the lift trucks moved them and their baggage to the firing platform.
The white light went steady. “Coordinates on first stage!” bawled the bullhorn. “Motors off!"
The twelve departing Psychlos stood there or sat on their mounds of baggage. The sixteen coffins were mixed up with the baggage.
It suddenly struck Jonnie that nobody waved or said goodbye. It meant nothing to anyone here that these creatures were going home. Or maybe it did, he thought, looking more closely. The machine operators around seemed to be moving with more savage jerks; one couldn't see well into their helmets, or at this distance, but Jonnie felt they resented the homegoers.
A red light over the operations area began to flash. A horn wailed. The bullhorn bawled, “Stand clear!”
The wires began to hum. Jonnie glanced at his watch.
The tree leaves quivered. The ground vibrated. The hum of the wires gradually and slowly built to a roar.
Two minutes went by. On went the purple light.
A wavering haze appeared over the platform.
The personnel and coffins were gone.
Then Jonnie noticed an undulating wave of sound and a quiver in the wires. It was almost like a recoil.
A different horn went off. A white light flashed. The bullhorn bawled, “Firing completed. Start motors and resume normal actions.”
Terl was locking the morgue. He came rumbling up the slope. Jonnie turned off his picto-recorder remote and started to move off. Terl seemed to be very distracted but the movement caught his eye.
“Don't hang around here!” snapped Terl.
Jonnie guided the horse toward him. In a low guttural, Terl said, “You must not be seen around here anymore. Now clear out.”
“What about the girls?”
"I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it.”