Part 35 (1/2)

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 transs.h.i.+pments. 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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+p 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 n.o.body 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.

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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.signments of the personnel people, not resisting, not helping.

To Jonnie on the knoll this ma.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 transs.h.i.+pment.

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 transs.h.i.+pment area while those wires were humming and building up, it would mess up the firing due to overly disturbed local s.p.a.ce.

Jonnie knew he was now watching a holding between the s.p.a.ce of Psychlo and the s.p.a.ce 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 flas.h.i.+ng. 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 pa.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps of its s.p.a.ce right in front of him, linked to the s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.body 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.