That Giyt did not propose to do.
He looked swiftly around to orient himself. He knew that the Earth dome, as the latest built, was part of a necklace of three other domes, the Centaurians’ and the Petty-Primes’. Since the factory plenum belonged to everybody, the wall readouts were in a wild variety of notations and languages. Giyt recognized the dancing dots and slashes of Petty-Prime script on one door and ducked into it. He hurried down the broad hall on the other side until he was almost run over by a pair of forklifts, one with a human driver and the other slaved to the first one—on the way, no doubt, to offload cargo from the rocket. “Excuse me,” he called over the grinding whine of the forklifts. “I’m Evesham Giyt—the mayor, you know.”
The driver was muffled in cold-weather gear, but his face mask was hanging loose from his helmet. “Really?” he said in surprise. “Still?”
Giyt disregarded it. “Am I going right for the human factory dome?”
The driver took his time about answering. “Shouldn’t you be with somebody?” he asked.
“Of course not. I’m the mayor.”
The driver brooded over that for a moment. “Well,” he said, “most of the guys have taken some personal time. To watch the opening ceremonies of the conference, you know.” He thought for a moment longer, then added doubtfully that he didn’t personally get to the factory very often, but if Giyt wanted to keep going to the Centaurian control room there was a female there, stuck with the duty like himself, who might know the way. And who liked to gab. And since the whole operation was of course automated, didn’t have much else to do.
Giyt didn’t hesitate. It wouldn’t take Hagbarth and Tschopp much longer to make themselves presentable, and he didn’t want to waste his best chance to get rid of them.
He found the Centaurian control room easily enough, and at least part of what the forklift driver had said was true. The Centaurian shift manager was curled up on a pad in front of the controls, lying on her side with her paws relaxed and displayed: three of her paws were white, the other the dun color of her fur. A wall screen was displaying the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, but she wasn’t attending to it. She was murmuring softly to the husband who was nestled in the soft fur under her chin.
They did not look as though they wanted to be interrupted. But the male was peering at Giyt with bright eyes, and when he whispered something to his mate she turned her snout toward the door. “What person are you?” she demanded.
“I’m Evesham Giyt. I’m looking for the Earth-human factory dome.”
“You got visiting permission pass? No? You got no chance going that place alone, Large Male. You go away or I call—wait one.” Her husband was whispering to her. Then she looked at Giyt in a different way. “Oh,” she said. “You Mayor Large Male Evesham Giyt. You guy bitched up stinky Kalkaboo guy, right? Why had not spoken so right away?”
“That was just an accident—” he began instinctively, but she was still talking.
“Mrs. Brownbenttalon litter-sister of my junior husband here,” she said with pride. “She say you pretty good guy. I also think it; damn Kalkaboos always getting damn feelings hurt. You want see Earth-human dome, sure, Mr. Threewhiteboots here take you, show you where everything located, no problem. But when you are got there, please, you tell him quickly hurry right back.”
The little male took Giyt in a Centaurian cart—no seats, just a sort of pad with grips to hold on to—and when he had delivered Giyt to the human autofactory dome, he didn’t wait to be told to hurry back. He was quickly gone, to whatever intimate moments the couple had been heading toward.
There was a screen and a door, but the door wasn’t open. The human autofactory, of course, was locked.
Giyt could hear rumblings from inside. That meant nothing about whether anyone was there; the nature of an autofactory was that it was automatic. Likely enough anybody who was supposed to be on shift had taken off to watch the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, like everybody else.
He flexed his fingers and sat down at the screen. There were not many combinations or passwords that could keep Evesham Giyt out, and it took only five minutes to establish that this wasn’t one of them.
When he entered the chamber the rumbling sounds were louder. They came from where a cascade of the talking dolls were dropping out of the assembly machine onto a moving belt, to be picked up by the packing members and stowed in shipping cartons. Several dozen filled cartons were already stacked against a wall, waiting for shipment.
And none of that was of any interest to Giyt.
He looked around and found locked storerooms. These looked more promising. Their locks, too, were only a small inconvenience. But while he was working out the combination, his screen buzzed and half a dozen legends appeared on it. The one in English read: Earth human Evesham Giyt has wandered away from his party. If you see him please inform Central Command of his whereabouts so he can be returned.
He scowled and picked up his pace; the communications would not remain so polite. One after another the locked doors opened. Behind the nearest one, surprisingly in this warehouse where no one but humans ever went, was a store of Kalkaboo dawn-bangers—big, bomb-shaped firecrackers, of the size that required detonators. Behind the other doors—
Behind the other doors was worse.
There was no reason for any Earth human to possess Kalkaboo firecrackers, even little ones, to say nothing of these monsters. But the other things in the locked storerooms simply had no business existing on Tupelo at all. They were Earthside weapons, and there were hundreds of them. Handguns. Minicarbines. Assault rifles. Grenades. Mortars. Even shoulder-launched missiles, the kind that rocketed to an enemy’s position and then exploded with a shower of high-velocity shrapnel. And when he looked more closely at the missiles he saw the answer to two puzzles.
The missiles bore sniffer vents. They would follow the airborne odor of a target and explode over the target’s head, and that explained why there had been that almost forgotten data file on the scents of the eetie races on Tupelo.
And to make them work required high-tech computation . . . and that explained something, too. That had to be where the missing chiplets had gone.
XXVI
The story of human warfare can be told as the evolution of handheld-weapons. As the English longbow spelled the end of armored knights at Agincourt, the machine gun marked the final defeat of the cavalry charge in World War I. World War II produced a temporary reversal, as the major weapons became the airplane and the tank, while the foot soldier could do little more than exploit the breakthroughs that air and armor made for him. But then came the handheld antitank rifle, the flamethrower, and most deadly of all, the shoulder-launched bus. This was a missile that could carry any sort of weaponry—shrapnel, chemical agents, even mini-nukes. It would be programmed to explode at a given point or on detection of enemy troops, given away by their body heat, their sounds, or even the aroma of their bodies. It could fire around corners and from concealment; it made the foot soldier the equal of a tank.
The thought came too late to be useful, but if he had thought of it in time it would have been no trouble at all, Giyt told himself, to have brought a microcam along. He could be photographing the whole thing. That would be enough evidence to convince anybody, and then he could be taking it to the people at the six-species conference, there to blow the whistle on whatever foretaste of hell Hagbarth and his buddies were planning for Tupelo.