O Pioneer!

XXVI

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.

But he had no camera. What then?

There was plenty of physical evidence here, and that would do as well as pictures. The trouble was that the physical evidence was all too big to carry. He needed something small enough to hide on his person. There was no way he was going to get onto the return rocket—past Hoak Hagbarth—if he was carrying a shoulder-launcher or a carbine, much less one of the Kalkaboo bombs.

Thoughtfully he pocketed a Kalkaboo detonator, but that wouldn’t prove anything; there were multitudes of them on sale in the Kalkaboo store in the town. What else? There was no ammunition visible for the minicarbines, but the assault guns were loaded; he slipped a clip out of one of them and stowed it away.

Then he tackled one of the buses. If he could take one of them apart to get its chiplet out, that would remove all doubt. On Earth there were plenty of experts who would be able to read the programming on the chiplet, and that would show just what the thing had been built to do.

Figuring out what had to be done was easy. The execution was a lot harder. The damn buses weren’t meant to be disassembled by amateurs. Worse, he had no tools. There probably were tools somewhere around, maybe in the same place as the ammunition for the minicarbines, but he didn’t know where that was. So he had to do it the hard way. It would have to be a simple smash and pry operation—with the added worry at every step that if he hammered a tad too hard he might detonate the explosives and fuel in the bus. Time was a problem that couldn’t be ignored, either. Sooner or later Hagbarth and the others would be checking the factory in their search for him. By then he had to be elsewhere, and ready to give them some kind of lying apology for going off on his own . . . and hope they bought it . . . and then—assuming that somehow, against all the odds, he had been lucky enough to get away with that much—somehow manage to get back on the suborbital rocket’s return flight with his booty intact.

He didn’t quite see how he. was going to manage any of that, but meanwhile he had the present job.

Wonderfully he managed to get two of the buses open enough to fish out the chiplets, all the while rehearsing—and rejecting—the things that he might say to Hagbarth. Not that there was anything he could say that would make a difference if Hagbarth had the animal cunning to check out his secret arms cache for himself, because anyone who looked at the two buses would see they had been tampered with. For what good it might do, he put them at the back of the stack. Then he locked all the storeroom doors, erased his programs from the screen, let himself out, relocked the door, and started back down the hall.

He didn’t get far before he heard the whir of an approaching cart, and of course it was Hagbarth.

Hagbarth wasn’t alone. Tschopp and that other man from the fire company—Maury Kettner?—jammed the cart beside him. They all leaped out as soon as the cart had stopped, scowling angrily at Evesham Giyt.

It was time for the lying to start. “Jesus,” Giyt cried enthusiastically, “am I glad to see you guys! This place is wild. I finally did find the factory, but the damn thing’s locked up.”

Hagbarth studied him thoughtfully without speaking. He gave Maury Kettner a nod; the man turned and walked away as Hagbarth said, “So you were just wandering around, is that what you’re saying?”

“Trying to find the factory,” Giyt agreed, doing his best to see where Kettner was going; afraid he knew the answer in advance, but seeing no choice but to tough it out. “This is a very confusing place, Hoak.”

“Of course it is. Why didn’t you wait for us?”

“Well, you took so long,” Giyt improvised, looking over his shoulder. Kettner had opened the factory door and disappeared inside. He was taking a long time in there, though. Had Giyt left some sign of his entrance? “Anyway,” he added, “I ran into a couple of eeties, and they gave me directions.”

“But when you got there it was locked.”

“Locked, right,” Giyt agreed.

Hagbarth nodded, poker-faced, “Was there any special part you wanted to see?”

“Oh,” Giyt said, shrugging vaguely, “just to get a general idea, you know? So I’ll know what I’m talking about when I see Dr. Patroosh.”

“She’s a busy woman, Giyt. You don’t want to bother her with a lot of unimportant stuff.”

“No, of course not,” Giyt agreed. “It’s just that—”

But his voice trailed off. The factory door opened. Maury Kettner came out, and his expression was cold. Worse than that, he was carrying one of the carbines from the store, and Giyt observed unhappily that Kettner, at least, had known just where to go to find its ammunition clip.

He was staring at Giyt, but it was to the others that he spoke. “He was into the stash, all right,” he said. “The seals were broken.”

Hagbarth exhaled a sigh. “Ah, Giyt,” he said reproachfully, “what did you do that for? More important, what are we going to do with you now?”

It was a rhetorical question. If aimed at anybody, it was at Evesham Giyt; but it was Wili Tschopp who answered it. “There’s always the Heckslider way,” he mentioned.

It took a moment for Giyt to make the connection, and then Tschopp spelled it out for him. “You know about Harry Heckslider, don’t you? The one who fell out of the chopper on the Way to Energy Island. See, he got curious, and he just wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Hagbarth said good-naturedly. “Why do you think Evesham here would be like that? You don’t have any special love for our alien brothers, do you, Evesham?”

Hagbarth’s tone was friendly enough—no, Giyt decided, a lot too friendly. The man was putting him on. He said, temporizing, “I’ve got nothing against them.”

“Really? Not even the Kalks?”

“Well, I thought they gave me a lot harder time than was called for—”

“Damn right they did! I really hated to see them working you over like that, Evesham. Not that the others are all that much better. Can’t ever trust any of the freaks, that’s what I say. You know they’ve all been scouting Earth for years, don’t you?”

Giyt was honestly surprised. “Scouting Earth?”

“You bet! They’ve got their ships orbiting the Sun, watching us, learning everything about our capabilities—how do you think they got that portal to Earth so fast?”

“Why, I guess I never thought—”

“No,” Hagbarth agreed bitterly. “You never did. Most people don’t, but there they are, and you know what kind of weapons they’ve got, because your Centaurian friend told you all about their old wars.” He was breathing heavily. He collected himself and spoke more reasonably. “Anyway, Evesham, you’re a patriotic guy, aren’t you?”

I am? Giyt asked, but not out loud. Actually he didn’t know the answer. He had never given much thought to patriotism, but now. . .

Hagbarth was going right on: “I mean, you know what the score is. The freaks would do us in in a minute if they had the chance. What do you think the Kalks have all those big explosives for? And the Delts have those harpoons—think they don’t think of using them on the rest of us now and then? They’ve got all the weapons they need to wipe us all out, they just don’t call them weapons. And what do we have?”

“Well,” Giyt said, pretending to think it over, “I guess we have those water cannons.”

Hagbarth grinned at him, then turned to the others. “See? I told you he wasn’t so dumb. But that’s just piss-ant stuff, the water cannons. They couldn’t really save us if the freaks tried a coup. Which they could do at any time. So that’s what we need the other stuff for, right?”

Giyt gave another imitation of a man trying to work a hard question out. “Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “One thing that kind of puzzles me—”

“Yeah?”

“When you got me to try to get some weapons imported. Was that just so no one would think you already had some here?”

Hagbarth grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “Smart,” he said admiringly. “So how about it, Evesham? You won’t say anything to anybody about what you saw, will you?”

“I guess not.”

Hagbarth patted his shoulder again approvingly. “That’s good, Giyt. Glad to have you aboard. Just to make sure, you won’t mind if we search you, will you?”

Giyt let out a long breath. He was not a violent man, and there were three of them. There was no way he could stop them if they wanted to search.

“Oh,” he said, reaching inside his tunic. “You mean you’d be looking for something like this?” And he took out the Kalkaboo detonator and displayed it, wondering if they were too far from the bombs for it to work.

“Hey!” Tschopp yelled. “Careful with that thing!”

Giyt was careful. He pressed the button firmly and with care; and as it turned out, they weren’t too far away at all.