That night the recreation hall saw nothing of Terl. And he also forgot to see whether the animal danced. He was too busy with his tapes.

Working with an expertise only a trained security chief cherished, Terl was editing tapes, slicing out single words and even phrases and juggling them about.

By his readjusting of word positions and scrapping of whole paragraphs, employees began to say things on the reels that were building up that could hang them.

A typical answer would become, “I intend to advocate mutiny. In any mutiny it would be safe to vaporize executives.” It was painstaking work. And the reels built up.

Finally he copied them onto new, clean discs that would show no sign of editing or splicing, and with the east graying he sat back, finished.

Yawning, he puttered around, cleaning up, destroying the originals and the scraps, waiting for breakfast time. He realized he had forgotten to keep an eye on the animal to see whether it danced.

Terl decided he needed sleep more than breakfast and laid himself down for a short nap. His appointment with Numph was not until after lunch.

Later he was to tell himself that it was because he had missed both breakfast and lunch that he made the blunder.

The interview began well enough. Numph was sitting at his upholstered desk sucking at an after-lunch saucepan of kerbango. He was his usual bumbling self.

“I have the results of the investigation you requested,” Terl began.

“What?”

“I interviewed a lot of local employees.”

“About what?”

“Mutiny.”

Numph was immediately alert.

Terl put the disc player on Numph's desk and made ready to play the “Interviews,” saying, “These are all very secret, of course. The employees were told that no one would hear about it and they did not know the interviews were recorded.”

“Wise. Wise,” said Numph. He had laid the saucepan aside and was all attention.

Terl let the discs spin one after another. The effect was everything he had hoped for. Numph looked grayer and grayer. When the discs were finished Numph poured himself a saucepan full of kerbango and sucked it down in one whoosh. Then he just sat there.

If ever he had seen guilt, Terl decided, he was seeing it now. Numph's eyes were hunted.

“Therefore,” said Terl, “I advise that we keep all this secret. We must not let them know what each is actually thinking, for it would lead them to conspire and actually mutiny.”

“Yes!” said Numph.

“Good,” said Terl. “I have prepared certain papers and orders about this.” He put the sheaf on Numph's desk. “The first one is an order to me to take what measures I deem necessary to handle this matter.”

“Yes!” said Numph and signed it.

“The second one is to strip all arsenals of all minesites and keep all weapons under lock and key.”

“Yes!” said Numph and signed it.

“This next one is to retrieve any battle planes from other minesites and localize them under seals, except those I might need.”

“Yes,” said Numph and signed it.

Terl removed that which had been signed and left Numph staring at the next one.

“What's this?” said Numph.

“Authority to round up and train man-animals on machine operation so that company ore shipments can be kept rolling in event of deaths of company employees or refusals to work.”

“I don't think it's possible,” said Numph.

“It’s only a threat to force employees back to work. You know and I know it is not really feasible.”

Numph signed it doubtfully and only because it said: “Emergency plan, strategic alternative ploy. Objective: employee dissuasion from strike.”

And then Terl made his blunder. He took the signed authorization and added it to the rest. “It permits us to handle forced reduction of employees,” he commented.

Afterward he realized he need not have said a thing.

Oh? said Numph.

“And I am sure,” Terl had gone on, confirming his blunder, “I am very certain that your nephew Nipe would heartily approve of it.”

“Approve of what?”

“Reduction of employee numbers,”

Terl rattled on.

And then Terl saw it. There was a relieved look on Numph's face– a knowing look– a look of realization that gave Numph great satisfaction.

Numph gave Terl an almost amused glance. Relief seemed to soak into him. Confidence took the place of fear.

Terl knew he had messed it up. He had had only a hint of the leverage connected to Nipe. And right now he had been guilty of exposing that he was only pretending he knew. Numph knew that Terl really didn't know. And Terl never had really known what Numph was up to. A real blunder.

“Well,” said Numph, suddenly expansive, “you just run along now and do your job. I’m sure everything will work out just fine.”

Terl stopped outside the door. What the blast was the leverage? What was the real story behind it? Numph was no longer afraid. Terl could hear him chuckling.

The security chief threw off the black cloud that threatened. He moved off. At least he had the animals and he could carry on. And when he had finished with them he could vaporize them. He wished he could also vaporize

Numph!

Leverage, leverage. He had none on Numph. And he had none at all on the animal.

Terl would have to get busy.

The transshipment air was a loud clatter of hurtling shapes under the spring sun. A freighter had just roared in and the ore it spilled was racketing onto the field. The blade machines were nudging about, hurrying the ore to the conveyors. The giant buckets clanked and rattled, halting jerkily to spill their contents on the conveyor belt. Huge fans roared to blast dust in the air. A fall of ore flowed onto the transshipment platform.

Jonnie sat amid the din, chained to the controls of the dust analyzer, sprayed with fanned dirt and half-deafened from the clamor.

What he was doing was cross-testing the consecutive loads on the belt for uranium. The fans beat a fog of ore particles into the air at this point in the progressive steps. It was Jonnie's job to throw a lever that sent beams

through the whirlwind, check the panel to see whether a purple or a red light went on, and throw levers that sent the ore on for transshipment (purple), or dumped it to the side and sounded an alarm (red). When the red came on, it was urgent to dump.

He was not operating independently. He was closely supervised by Ker, the assistant operations officer of the minesite. Ker was protected by domed headgear. Jonnie was catching the hurricane of dust and din full in the eyes and face. He did not even have goggles. Ker walloped him on the shoulder to indicate that this bucketful could be sent on, and Jonnie thrust at the levers.

Ker had been carefully chosen by the security chief as the very fellow to instruct the animal in the operation of minesite machinery. And Terl had his reasons.

A midget for a Psychlo, Ker was only seven feet tall. He was a "geysermouth," as they called it, since he chattered incessantly; nobody bothered to listen to him. He had no friends but tried to make them. He was reputedly dim-witted even though he knew his machines well. If these reasons were not enough, Terl had leverage: he had caught Ker in a compromising situation involving two female Psychlo clerks in an out-of-bounds operations office. Terl had picto-recorded but not reported it, and Ker and the females had been very grateful. There were other things: Ker was a habitual criminal who had taken employment on Earth one jump ahead of arrest, and Terl had fixed up a name change. Before the animal idea had occurred to Terl, he had tried to work out something involving Ker, but it would have been impossible for a Psychlo to go into those mountains, and he had been forced to abandon taking Ker into his confidence.