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“Laddie,” said Du
“Don't be lonely down there,” said Jo
They looked at other discs. Terl considered metal like a man would consider paper– easily worked with.
He had bullied Lars into getting him a sheet of a beryllium alloy and it almost hurt their ears when Lars couldn't find it anywhere in the compound and Terl told him the stuff was what they used for panel metal in vehicles and to go down to the garages and get into Zzt's repair supplies and get him a sheet of the stuff!
Lars trotted back shortly, his panting clear on the disc sonic, bringing a sheet of beryllium alloy that rumbled as it was waved about. Terl kicked him out and locked the door.
They did a quick analysis of the metal and even Du
On the disc Terl took some shears and cut expertly. Then he folded some edges. He a
It was a pretty box when he finished. He polished it up and buffed it and it looked like jewelry, a gold color.
Pretty. It was hexagonal, each one of the six sides and corners geometrically precise. Quite a work of art. The top came off easily. The bottom hole access plate was left unscrewed. It was about a foot across and about five inches high.
The next day he went to work on the inside. He made some very precisely hinged rods, quite intricate. He fitted them into the box and tested them. There was a hinged rod in each of the six corners and it was fastened to the lid. When you raised the lid, these rods pushed sockets, empty as yet, to the center of the box. He tested it several times and laughed louder as he gazed up into it from the access hole in the bottom. The cover came off very smoothly; each of the six rods pushed an empty socket to the center.
Then he chased Lars all around finding different, common substances and eventually he had three different metals and three different nonmetals in a pile. They were just ordinary elements, the analyzer said: iron, silicon, sodium, magnesium, sulphur, and phosphorus.
Why? To what end?
Jo
He looked at a later frame, quite apprehensive. What if Terl made something and then hid it outside and they couldn't find it? What was this devil up to? Ah! Terl might have jumbled up the six elements but the strange pea-sized mineral had vanished. Jo
Terl had taken the heavy bit of strange metal and measured it and then had wrapped it all up and put it back in the false cabinet. The place where it had lain now had a dent!
He made a braced basket to hold the pea in the center. But he didn't put it in for it was now back in the cabinet. Then he put the six common elements, each one, in the slots on the rods.
When one opened the lid, the rods pushed them all in to the center. They would go into contact with each other and with the pea.
Jo
But Terl was not working with uranium radiation. He couldn't. Not with the overstimulation radiation gave to breathe-gas!
So that pea thing must be some higher order of stimulation.
Knowing Terl, it would be deadly. He was sure that when that heavy, heavy pea-sized piece of metal was in the center and somebody opened the lid and all those metals pushed together and against it, something ghastly was going to happen.
Terl locked the pretty box away, cleaned up things, and opened a mathematics text entitled “Force Equations,” which had nothing to do with teleportation! What was he up to now?
And that was as far as the discs went.
Their own clock had moved up to noon as they had gone nonstop, no sleep, no food.
“Now I know who made Satan,” said Du
Chapter 6
Since Terl seemed to be working on other things than teleportation, which was the key to this entire dilemma, Jo
He had not entirely lost hope of unraveling the Psychlo technology through the restoration and possible cooperation of the remaining Psychlos. If he could get the two pieces of metal out of the head of a trained Psychlo engineer, there was a possibility that some of these mysteries would be solved, and solved they would leave them in better control of the planet's future.
Dr. MacKendrick had returned. One or two of the African base people had come down with a touch of what MacKendrick said was “malaria,” carried by mosquitoes. MacKendrick had procured "chinchona bark” from
South America and had made them mop up standing pools of water in the base and put nets over the air intake vents and all that seemed to be under control.
MacKendrick's three remaining Psychlo patients, two of whom were rated engineers, were not, however, so easily handled as the malaria. They were not getting well. They remained barely alive.
The thirty-three live Psychlos from the American compound arrived in Africa without incident and were put in a prepared dorm section. They had been duly reported as “lost at sea in a plane crash.”
But the doctor did not have much hope for it. “I have tried every way I can think of,” he told Jo
Jo
He heard his name called. He was passing by one of the doors that housed the new Psychlo arrivals and he stopped and went over. There was a small view port and an intercom inset into the door panel.
It was Chirk!
He had never had anything against Chirk. A rattlebrain and dedicated to wrong conclusions though she might be, the times when he had seen her they had not fought.
"Jo
Jo
“When I think of what that awful Terl pla