Resuming his task, Leeming twisted the nail one way and then the other, stamping on it with his boot from time to time. The task was tedious but at least it gave him something to do. He persevered until he had drilled a neat hole two-thirds of the way through the wood.
Next, he took his half-length of wire, broke it into two unequal parts, shaped the shorter piece to form a neat loop with two legs each three or four inches long. He tried to make the loop as near to a perfect circle as possible. The larger piece he wound tightly around the loop so that it formed a close-fitting coil with legs matching the others.
Propping his bench against the wall, he climbed it to the window and examined his handiwork in the glow from outside floodlights, made a few minor adjustments and felt satisfied. He replaced the bench and used the nail to make on its edge two small nicks representing the exact diameter of the loop. Lastly he counted the number of turns to the coil. There were twenty-seven.
It was important to remember these details because in all likelihood he would have to make a second gadget as nearly identical as possible. That very similarity would help to bother the enemy. When a plotter makes two mysterious objects to all intents and purposes the same it is hard to resist the notion that he knows what he is doing and has a sinister purpose.
To complete his preparations he coaxed the nail back into the place where it belonged. Sometime he’d need it again as a valuable tool. They’d never find it and deprive him of it because, to the searcher’s mind, anything visibly not disturbed is not suspect.
Carefully he forced the four legs of the coiled loop into the hole that he’d drilled, thus making the square of wood function as a supporting base. He now had a gadget, a thingumbob, a means to an end. He was the original inventor and sole proprietor of the Leeming-Finagle something-or-other.
Certain chemical reactions take place only in the presence of a catalyst, like marriages legalised by the presence of an official. Some equations can be solved only by the inclusion of an unknown quantity called X. If you haven’t enough to obtain a desired result you’ve got to add what’s needed. If you require outside help that doesn’t exist you must invent it.
Whenever Man had found himself unable to master his environment with his bare hands, thought Leeming, the said environment had be coerced or bullied into submission by Man plus X. That had been so since the beginning of time: Man plus a tool or a weapon.
But X did not have to be anything concrete or solid, it did not have to be lethal or even visible. It could be as intangible and unprovable as the threat of hellfire or the promise of heaven. It could be a dream, an illusion, a whacking great thundering lie-just anything.
There was only one positive test: whether it worked.
If it did, it was efficient.
Now to see.
There was no sense in using the Terran language except perhaps as an incantation when one was necessary. Nobody here understood Terran, to them it was just an alien gabble. Besides, his delaying tactic of pretending to be slow to learn the local tongue was no longer effective. They knew that he could speak it almost as well as they could themselves.
Holding the loop assembly in his left hand he went to the door, applied his ear to the closed spyhole, listened for the sound of patrolling feet. It was twenty minutes before heavy boots came clumping towards him.
“Are you there?” he called, not too loudly but enough to be heard. “Are you there?”
Backing off fast, he lay on his belly on the floor and stood the loop six inches in front of his face. “Are you there?”
The spyhole clicked open, the light came on, a sour eye looked through.
Completely ignoring the watcher and behaving with the air of one far too absorbed in his task to notice that he was being observed, Leeming spoke through the coiled loop.
“Are you there?”
“What are you doing?” demanded the guard.
Recognising the other’s voice, Leeming decided that for once luck must be turning his way. This character, a chump named Marsin, knew enough to point a gun and fire it, or, if unable to do so, yell for help. In all other matters he was not of the elite. In fact Marsin would have to think twice to pass muster as a half-wit.
“What are you doing?” insisted Marsin, raising his voice.
“Calling,” said Leeming, apparently just waking up to the other’s existence.
“Calling? Calling what or where?”
“Mind your own quilpole business,” Leeming ordered, giving a nice display of impatience. Concentrating attention upon the loop, he turned it round a couple of degrees. “Are you there?”
“It is forbidden,” insisted Marsin.
“Letting go the loud sigh of one compelled to bear fools gladly, Leeming said, “What is forbidden?”
“To call.”
“Don’t display your ignorance. My species is always allowed to call. Where would we be if we couldn’t, enk?”
That got Marsin badly tangled. He knew nothing about Earthmen or what peculiar privileges they considered essential to life, Neither could he give a guess as to where they’d be without them.
Moreover, he dared not enter the cell and put a stop to whatever was going on. An armed guard was strictly prohibited from going into a cell by himself and that rule had been rigid ever since a fed-up Rigellian had slugged one, snatched his gun and killed six people while trying to make a break.
If he wanted to interfere he’d have to go and see the sergeant of the guard and demand that something be done to stop pink-skinned aliens making noises through loops. The sergeant was an unlovely character with a tendency to shout the most intimate details of personal histories all over the landscape. It was the witching hour between midnight and dawn, a time when the sergeant’s liver malfunctioned most audibly. And lastly he, Marsin, had proved himself a misbegotten faplap far too often.
“You will cease calling and go to sleep,” ordered Marsin with a touch of desperation, “or in the morning I shall re-port your insubordination to the officer of the day.”
“Go ride a camel,” Leeming invited. He rotated the loop in manner of one making careful adjustment. “Are you there?”
“I have warned you,” Marsin persisted, his only visible eye popping at the loop.
“Fibble off!” roared Leeming. Marsin shut the spyhole and fibbled off.
As was inevitable after being up most of the night, Leeming overslept. His awakening was abrupt and rude. The door burst open with a loud crash; three guards plunged in followed by an officer.
Without ceremony the prisoner was jerked off the bench, stripped and shoved into the corridor stark naked. The guards then searched through the clothing while the officer minced around watching them. He was, decided Leeming, definitely a fairy.
Finding nothing in the clothes they started examining the cell. Right off one of them discovered the loop-assembly and gave it to the officer who held it gingerly as if it were a bouquet suspected of being a bomb.
Another guard trod on the second piece of wood, kicked it aside and ignored it. They tapped the floor and walls, seeking hollow sounds. Dragging the bench away from the wall, they looked over the other side of it but failed to turn it upside-down and see anything underneath. However, they handled the bench so much that it got an Leeming’s nerves and he decided that now was the time to take a walk. He started along the corridor, a picture of nonchalant nudity.
The officer let go a howl of outrage and pointed. The guards erupted from the cell, bawled orders to halt. A fourth guard, attracted by the noise, came sound the bend of the corridor, aimed his gun threateningly. Leeming turned around and ambled back.