Eyes on the sky of an evening, noting the slow yearly wheel of the constellations, Jonnie knew he would have to escape.

In about three weeks the year would be up. He had a horrible vision of Chrissie coming into the plains and, if she survived there, blundering onto the minesite.

There were many obstacles. It would be almost insurmountably difficult, given the search tools of the Psychlos. But he set about planning his road to freedom with stubborn relentlessness.

Complicating his plans was the self-set goal of an Earth free of Psychlos and the resurrection of the human race.

Lying awake, he saw the cage revealed in all its ugliness by a rising moon, and he almost ridiculed himself for his own timidity.

Here he was, collared like a dog, chained up, locked behind bars, subject to swift detection and swifter pursuit. Yet he knew that even if he died trying he would more than try.

First he must escape.

A key to possible freedom came to him only two days later. Freedom, at last, from his collar.

For some reason Terl had insisted that he be trained in electronic repair. The explanation Terl gave was thin: sometimes the controls of a machine broke, sometimes the remote control systems went awry, and the operator had to handle it. That Terl had done the explaining was enough to disqualify the reason. But more than that, in all the time Jonnie had been training on machines, he had never seen an operator touch electronic repair. When something went wrong somebody came screeching in on a tri-wheeled cart from the electronics section and fixed it fast. That Terl insisted that Jonnie know how to do it-Ker had not objected for an instant– was one more piece of the puzzle that was Terl. Whatever Terl wanted of him eventually would happen somewhere where there were no electronics repairmen.

So Jonnie sat, dwarfed on a bench, learning circuits and diagrams and components. They didn't give him too much trouble. The electrons went here, got changed there, and wound up doing something else over at this place. The little wires and components and pieces of binding metal all made pretty good sense.

It was the tools that mystified him at first. There was a thing like a little knife that had a big handle– big to Jonnie, small to a Psychlo-that did the most remarkable thing. When you turned a switch to the proper number in its heel and put the blade down on a piece of wire, the wire fell apart. And when you reversed it and touched it to the wires you were now holding together, they became one piece once more. It only happened when you were splitting or binding the same type of metal. You had to use a binding substance when handling two different types of metal that you wanted to join.

When Ker wandered off for one of his frequent snacks and Jonnie was tied up alone for the moment in the electronics shop, he tested the tool against the frayed end of the leash.

It came apart, cleanly cut.

Jonnie reversed the switch, held the cut pieces together, and touched the tool to it.

They went back together with no trace of the cut.

Jonnie knew without trying it that it would do the same thing to his metal collar.

He looked at the door to make sure Ker was not coming back and no one else coming in, and then he swept his eyes over the rest of the room. There was a tool cupboard at the far end. He knew better than to have the knife he was using vanish. Jonnie parted his leash, raced to the tool cupboard, and opened it. It was a messy pile of parts, wires, and tools. He rummaged in it frantically. Seconds sped by. Then he saw what he was looking for at the bottom– an old tool of the same kind.

From far off he could feel the rumble of returning feet.

He rushed back to his bench and with the newly found tool put his leash ends back together again. It worked!

Ker returned, lazy and disinterested. Jonnie had already slid the tool down into the cuff of his moccasin.

“You're doing pretty good,” said Ker, looking at his work.

“Yes, I’m doing pretty good,” said Jonnie.

Terl was deep into the puzzle of Numph. Somehow and some way Terl knew he had gotten onto something, and then somehow and some way, he had messed it up.

The thing kept him awake nights and gave him a headache.

For some of the things he was now going to be seen doing, he had to have the insurance of big leverage on Numph.

He had lazied along with the fake “mutiny” measures. They weren't important anyway. He had caused the few battle planes on the other minesites to be flown in and parked. He had picked up their arsenals and had them under seal. He had taken over control of the single remaining recon drone. On its last pass over the high mountains he had gloated.

The beautiful vein was still there, naked to view, exposed a hundred feet down a two-thousand-foot cliff. Pure white quartz studded with wires and knobs of gleaming yellow gold! A fortuitous earthquake had caused the cliff face to shear off and fall into the dark depths of the canyon, exposing the fortune. The ancient volcano higher up must have spewed out a geyser of pure liquid gold in some ancient eruption and then covered it shallowly. A stream had cut the canyon through the ages and now the slide.

The site had a few disadvantages. The approaches to it showed uranium in some form or another, which put it out of bounds for a Psychlo. It rested in a cliff face so sheer that it could only be mined from a lowered platform. The rest of two thousand feet would gape dizzyingly below and the canyon winds would batter at the mining stage. Room for machinery at the top of the cliff was minimal and precarious. Several miners' lives would be expendable at such a site.

Terl only wanted the cream of it. No mining in depth down to the next pocket. Just that pocket right there, the one that was exposed. There must be a ton of gold in sight.

At Psychlo prices– where very scarce gold ran at very high prices– it was worth nearly a hundred million credits.

Credits that could bribe and buy and open the doors to unlimited personal power.

He knew how to get it out. He had even worked out how to transship it to home planet and get it to arrive there undetected and recoverable.

He looked at the recon drone photos again and then falsified their date and place markings with a clever bit of forgery and hid them deep in otherwise innocuous, boring files.

To guarantee it, he needed leverage on Numph. Then in the event of any slip or mishap he would be protected.

There was also the matter of getting his ten-year sentence– he thought of it as a sentence– contracted down to just another year on this cursed planet.

Whatever Numph had going involved Nipe and Nipe's home-planet post in accounting. Terl had gotten that far. He sat hunched over his desk thinking.

He needed leverage on the animal, and it would have to be big– big enough to force the animal to dig without supervision and, not only that, to deliver. Well, the animal's learning was going well and plans for other animals were all in place. He would come up with something; Terl believed in his own luck. The animals somehow would do it and then he would vaporize them and get the gold to home planet.

The unknown was Numph. With a single order he could dismiss the animals or have them killed. He could simply withdraw permission to use the machinery. And soon the bumbling old fool, seeing no mutiny, would withdraw the blanket authorizations. The “mutiny” was too thin.

Terl looked at the clock. It was within two hours of transshipment time.