Terl took it closer to a cage light.

What was this thing? He couldn't read any of the characters on it. “I doubt you can even read this!” he challenged.

“Oh yes, I did,” said Snith. He couldn't read either, but somebody had read it to him. “It do say it is one credit and is legal for payment of all debts. And around the picture it says, 'Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, The Conqueror of the Psychlos.' " That was what disturbed him really, that the Psychlos were said to have been conquered.

Terl thought fast. "Indeed it is a counterfeit and a lie as well!”

“I thought so,” said Snith. They always tried to trick you. His ancestors had known that very firmly. Trick before you are tricked, they used to say about all dealings.

“But I’ll tell you what I will do,” said Terl into the mine radio. “Just so you know who you are really working for, you accept this and say nothing, and when we get to the Galactic Bank, I will redeem it in cold, hard cash!”

That was fair. Now he knew who he was really working for. Made a lot of sense, quite proper. Paid by one group but working for another. This Psychlo was straight after all.

“That's fine,” said Snith. “By the way, I know that man in the picture.”

Terl looked closer. The light had been bad. By crap, it look like his animal! He tried to remember whether he had ever heard its name. Yes, he dimly recalled the strange words. Yes, it was the damned animal!

“That bird just waltzed in and wiped out a whole commando of mine,” said Snith. “Not too long ago. Attacked them without even a salute, mowed them down. And then stole their bodies and a truckload of trade goods!”

“Where?”

"In the forest, where else?”

This was news! His intelligence said that this creature in the picture had been flying around visiting tribes! Or maybe this was how he visited tribes! That was probably it. Terl knew he himself would visit tribes that way. Ah, well, he knew Staffor would be very, very happy indeed to know that! The animal was not where he was thought to be and he was making war on peaceful tribes. Staffor was a very apt political pupil. Now he would make him a very apt military pupil: in the dumb way that was the only one possible.

But to business. He put the bank note back on the ledge between the bars, withdrew, and Snith retrieved it.

“So we've settled the contract matter and you can negotiate it further,” said Terl. “Get settled in and in a very few weeks or even sooner you'll be doing your duty here. Right?”

"Indeed so,” said Snith.

“And as a bonus,” said Terl, "I’ll persuade certain parties to authorize you to kill the animal who wronged you on sight.”

That was very, very good. And Snith was driven back to the old city by a dutiful Lars, who endured the stink in the name of spreading the righteous creed of fascism and the great military leader, Hitler.

The underground room at the Lake Victoria minesite was chilled. Angus had rigged heavy-duty motor cooling coils along the wall and the humidity in the air dripped from them and made dark pools along the floor.

The metal and mineral analysis machine hummed; its screen cast an eerie green light on everything around it. Five tense faces were

turned to that screen: Dr. MacKendrick's, Angus's, Sir Robert's, Dunneldeen's, and Jonnie's.

Massive, more than eighteen inches in diameter, the ugly head of the Psychlo corpse lay on the machine's plate. Such a head was mostly bone. It bore considerable resemblance to a human head and could be mistaken for one in bad light, but where a human had hair, eyebrows, fleshy lips, nose, and ears, the Psychlo had bone whose shape was more or less the same as the corresponding human features, and the distribution and spacing were similar; the result was a kind of caricature of a human head. Until you touched the features, they did not seem to be bone, but contact proved them hard and unyielding.

The analysis machine was not penetrating the head. Not only were the features bone but the whole top half of the skull was bone. As the parson in his earlier, inexpert autopsy had discovered, the brain was low down and to the back; he had discovered nothing in the brain because he had not opened the brain of the cadavers.

“Bone!” said Angus. “It’s almost as hard to penetrate as metal!”

Jonnie could attest to that from the negligible effects of his kill-club on Terl's skull back in the morgue.

Angus was resetting dials. The Psychlo letters were codings for various metals and ores. He swung the intensity dial up five clicks.

“Wait!” said MacKendrick. “Back it up one! I thought I saw something.”

Angus backed the intensity of penetration dial back one, then two. It was sitting on “Lime” now.

There was a hazy difference in density on the screen, one little spot. Angus adjusted the beam's “in depth” control, focusing it. The internal bones and fissures of the skull came clear on the screen. Five pairs of eyes watched intensely.

The Scot's fingers took another knob, one that swept a second beam to various positions in the subject.

“Wait,” said MacKendrick. “Move the beam back to about two inches behind the mouth cavity. There! Now focus it again.” Then, “That's it!”

There was something there, something hard and black on the screen that was not passing waves at this intensity. Angus touched the recorder of the machine and the whir-flap sound of registry of the images on the paper roll was loud.

“They do have something in their skulls!” said Robert the Fox.

“Not so fast,” said MacKendrick. “We jump to no conclusions. It could be some fragment of an old injury, some metal picked up in a mine explosion.”

"Naw, naw, naw," said Robert the Fox. “It’s very plain!”

Jonnie had pulled out the recording sheets. They had the metal analysis trace squiggling down one side. He had left the Psychlo metal analysis code book, usually used to analyze drone transmissions as they hunted a surface for ore, outside. It was chill and dank and odorous in this room and he didn't care much for this job, vital as it was. He took this opportunity to go out and look it up.

Page after page he compared the squiggle he had with the illustrations. It took a long time. He was no expert at this. He couldn't find it. Then he got clever and began to compare composites of two squiggle illustrations.

The Psychlo engineers who would do this sort of thing could probably have told him with no code book. He cursed the anger of the Russians who, believing they were avenging their colonel, had slaughtered the Psychlos. The four in the guarded room of the dormitory were in very bad condition. Two of them were ordinary miners, one was an executive by his clothes and papers, and the other was an engineer. MacKendrick was very doubtful that they would make it. He had extracted bullets and sewn them up but they were all still unconscious or appeared so, and they lay there in the breathe-gas ventilated room, chained to their beds, breathing shallowly. There wasn't even a first-aid handbook for Psychlos that Jonnie had ever seen. He didn't think there was one issued. The company might require all bodies to be returned but it didn't require that anybody keep them alive– a fact that tended to confirm that the sole reason for returning dead Psychlo bodies was to prevent examination by alien eyes-there was no sentiment involved. There were never even any hospital sections in these compounds, and mine accidents were very frequent.

Hold it. One of these squiggles in the book almost matched: copper! Now if he could find the little tail squiggle somewhere– here it was: tin! He overlaid the two squiggles. They seemed to match better. Copper and tin? Not quite. There was a tiny squiggle remaining. He searched for it. He found it: lead!