Before all the “mutiny” precautions, some of the workers he had seen had worn relatively small, compact handguns at their belts. He had supposed they used them for plinking or shooting game. Terl still wore his-a rather bigger one– but the others seemed to have stopped.

Jonnie wondered how far he could trust Ker. The “midget” was definitely Terl's creature. But from some of the tales Ker had chattered on with, he was distinctly criminal: he told how he had rigged certain games of chance, how he had looted ore boxes “as a joke,” how he had gotten a female to believe her father needed money and “relayed it for her.”

One day they were waiting for a machine to be idle so it could be used

in practice and Jonnie decided to make a test. He still had the two discs he had gotten in the Great Village. He knew now that one was a silvery coin and the other a gold coin.

He took the silver coin out of his pocket and began flipping it.

“What's that?” Ker wanted to know. Jonnie gave it to him and Ker scratched it with a talon. “I dug some of these up once in a wrecked town on the southern continent,” said Ker. “You must have gotten this locally, though.”

“Why?” said Jonnie, alert that perhaps Ker could read English letters.

“It’s fake,” said Ker. “An alloy of copper with a nickel-silver plating. A real coin– and I saw some once– is solid silver.” He handed it back, losing interest.

Jonnie took out the yellow coin and started flipping it.

Ker caught it in the air before it could fall back into Jonnie's hand. His interest was sudden and intense. “Hey, where did you get this?” Ker dented the edge with a talon tip and looked at it closely.

“Why?” said Jonnie innocently. “Is it worth something?”

A very sly look came into Ker's eye. The coin he was holding and trying to be casual about was worth four thousand credits! Gold, alloyed just enough to be used in coinage without undue wear. Ker steadied his hand and looked very, very casual. "Where'd you get this?”

“Well,” said Jonnie, “it came from a very dangerous place.”

“There are more of them?” Ker was quivering a little bit. He was holding in his paw three months' pay! All in one little coin. And as an employee he could legally possess it as a “souvenir.” On Psychlo it could buy a wife. He tried to remember how many coins it took for them to cease to be “souvenirs” and become company property. Ten? Thirteen? So long as they were old and obviously mintage, not some fake made by a miner.

“The place is so dangerous one couldn't go there without at least a belt gun.”

Ker looked at him searchingly. “Are you trying to get me to give you a belt gun?”

“Would I do something like that?”

Yes, said Ker. This animal was very, very quick on machines. Quicker in fact than Psychlo trainees.

Ker looked longingly at the gold coin or medallion or whatever it had been. He said nothing. Then he handed it back to Jonnie and just sat there, his amber eyes shadowed in the depths of his breathe-gas dome.

Jonnie took the coin back. "I’m careless with things like this. I can't buy anything, you know. I keep it in a hole just to the right of the cage door as you come in.”

Ker sat there for a while. Then he said, “The next machine is ready.”

But that night, while Terl was making his rounds of the minesite and was distant from his viewing screen, the gold coin disappeared from the hole where Jonnie had put it, and in the morning, when Jonnie dug there, covering the action with his body, a small handgun and spare charges were in the hole instead.

Jonnie had a gun.

A remaining hurdle was knowledge.

The Chinkos were good teachers, and they could stack real learning onto a disc and get it assimilated like lightning flashes. But basically they had been working for Psychlos and trying to teach Psychlos, and they omitted a lot of things that Psychlos either already knew or could not have much interest in. This left gaps.

Jonnie had picked up inferences that there was uranium in the mountains to the west. Mostly he guessed this because no active mining ever seemed to have been undertaken there by the Psychlos. From the accident he had witnessed and for other reasons, he suspected uranium was deadly to the Psychlos. But he didn't know for sure and he didn't know how.

He was utterly dismayed, in studying the text on electronic chemistry, to find there were many, many different atomic formations of uranium.

Sitting at his fire, grinding away at texts and the instruction machine alternately, Jonnie was disturbed by the ground-shake that always preceded Terl. It was simply the monster's nightly rounds.

“What are you studying so hard, animal?” asked Terl, looming over him.

Jonnie decided to plunge, to take a chance. He looked the many feet up to Terl's mask. “It’s the mountains to the west,” said Jonnie.

Terl looked at him suspiciously for a little while.

“There's not much in here about them,” said Jonnie.

Terl was still suspicious. What had this animal guessed?

“I was born and raised there,” said Jonnie. “There's data on mountains everywhere else on the planet but hardly any on those right there.” He pointed to where faint moonlight shone on the bold snowcaps. “The Chinkos took a lot of books out of the library. Man-books. Are they here?”

“Oh,” snorted Terl in relief. “Man-books. Ha.”

Terl was rather more pleased than otherwise. This fitted into his own concentrations. He left and came back shortly with a battered table and a disorderly armload of books that avalanched down on it. They were frail books, very ancient, and some broke their backs or came apart with his mishandling.

“I am nothing but an animal attendant,” said Terl. "If mauling through this gibberish makes you happy, be happy.” He paused at the cage door after he went out and locked it. “Just remember one thing, animal. The junk you'll find in those man-books didn't have anything in them to defeat Psychlos." Then he laughed. “Probably lots of recipes on how to prepare raw rat, though.” He rumbled off to the compound, his laughter fading.

Jonnie touched the books reverently. And then with hope he began to inspect them. They mostly concerned mining. His first find was a text on chemistry. It contained a table of “elements” that gave the atomic formation of every element man had known.

With a sudden puzzlement he grabbed the Psychlo text on electronic chemistry. It too had a table on the atomic formation of elements.

He put them side by side in the flickering firelight.

They were different!

Both tables were apparently based on the “periodic law,” by which the properties of the chemical elements recur periodically when the elements are arranged in increasing order of their atomic numbers. But there were elements on the man-table that did not occur on the Psychlo table. And the Psychlo table had dozens more elements. The Psychlo table also had many more gases listed and did not seem to specialize in oxygen.

Jonnie floundered through it, not too adept at getting the abbreviations related to the substances, more used to reading Psychlo than English.

Yes, the Psychlos listed radium and even gave it an atomic number of eighty-eight, but they noted it as a rare element. And they had dozens of elements numbered and listed above eighty-eight.

Nothing made it plainer than the difference in these tables that he was dealing with an alien planet in an alien universe. Some of the metals were compatible. But on the whole the distribution was different and even atomic formation seemed at variance.

At length he suspected that both tables were imperfect and incomplete and, with a spinning head, gave it up. He was a man of action, not a Chinko!

He turned to his next huge question. Were there uranium mines in the mountains?