“Laddie,” said Dunneldeen, “that thump you just heard was me hitting the bottom of the shaft!”

“Don't be lonely down there,” said Jonnie. “I hit it every time I get tangled up in this. But the point is, what is he up to? This is not a transshipment rig component!”

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 Dunneldeen had no trouble with the traces. It was beryllium, copper, and nickel, sort of rough for it had not been polished.

On the disc Terl took some shears and cut expertly. Then he folded some edges. He annealed the edges shut by molecular bind. Then he had a top which fit very well. He put a little knob on the top for lifting it. Then he cut a hole in the bottom of the box and made a screw-in access plate. He had begun to laugh so it was easy to divine that this was something quite nasty.

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?

Jonnie tore through some books. Sodium, magnesium, sulphur, and phosphorus had one thing in common. They were of use, one way or another, in explosives. Knowing Terl, that was the first thing Jonnie looked up. But this combination he didn't think would explode, because there they lay, right on the table in an earlier frame, right together and they didn't explode. Iron and silicon? It seemed that they were very common indeed in the composition of the Earth's crust and core.

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. Jonnie backtracked on the disc.

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.

Jonnie knew something about radiation and elements after their early battle. He knew that all you had to do was stimulate atoms to get a chain reaction going.

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 Dunneldeen. “His name was Terl."

Since Terl seemed to be working on other things than teleportation, which was the key to this entire dilemma, Jonnie, for the time being, turned his attention to other things.

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 Jonnie one evening in his underground African surgery, “and one can't get through the intricate skull structure to the items without severely damaging it. Every Psychlo cadaver I have worked with so far plainly shows that critical skull bone joints would be very damaged and vital brain nerves would be severed. Those things were put into the soft skull of a newborn pup, and even within a few months the skull would have been hardened to a point where they could not be removed. I will go on working with Psychlo cadavers but I cannot hold out any real hope.”

Jonnie wandered off from the conference, trying to think of some solution to that problem. It seemed these days he had a lot more problems than he had solutions. He felt that if he didn't come up with some solutions fairly soon, the human race might well be a write-off.

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.

"Jonnie," said Chirk, “I just want to thank you for saving us.”

Jonnie realized somebody had been talking to the Psychlos, maybe Dunneldeen.

“When I think of what that awful Terl planned to do– murder us all, you know– my fur crackles! I always thought you were kind of cute, Jonnie. You know that. So I know you saved our lives.”