“you can peel that pretty uniform. You’re going to work, right now. You and I are going to be partners — and if you so much as begin to drag your feet I’ll slap your face clear around onto the back of your neck. Let’s go!”
They went. They picked up a drill — which weighed all of three hundred pounds — and lugged it across the rough rock floor to the foot of the face; which, translated from the vernacular, means the lower edge of the expanse of high-grade ore that was being worked.
It was a beautiful thing, that face; a startlingly high and wide expanse of the glossly, lustrous, submetallic pitch black of uraninite; slashed and spattered and shot through at random with the characteristic violent yellows of autunite and carnotite and the variant greens of torbernite.
But Seaton was not particularly interested in beauty at the moment. What he hoped was that he could keep from giving away the fact that this was the first time he had ever handled a mining machine of any kind or type. He thought he could, however, and he did.
For, after all, there are only so many ways in which holes can be made in solid rock.
Second, since the hardrock men who operate the machinery to make those holes are never the greatest intellects of any world, such machinery must be essentially simple.
And third, the Brain’s visualizations had been very complete and Richard Seaton was, as he had admitted to Prenk, an exceptionally smart man.
Wherefore, although Seaton unobtrusively let the ex-overseer take the lead, the two men worked very well together and the native did not once drag his feet. They set up the heavy drill and locked it in place against the face. They slipped the shortest “twelve-inch” steel into the chuck and rammed it home. They turned on the air and put their shoulders to the stabilizing pads — and that monstrous machine, bellowing and thundering under the terrific urge of two hundred pounds to the square inch of compressed air, drove that heavy bit resistlessly into the ore.
And the rest of the miners, fired by Seaton’s example as well as by his “shot in the arm,” worked as they had not worked in months; to such good purpose that when the shift ended at midnight the crew had sent out almost twice as much high-grade ore as they had delivered the night before.
It need hardly be mentioned, perhaps, that Seaton was enjoying himself very much.
Although he was not, in truth, the “big, muscle-bound ape — especially between the ears” he was wont to describe himself as, there was certainly a pleasure in being up against the sort of problem that muscle and skill could settle. For a time he was concerned about the fact that events elsewhere might be proceeding at a pace he could not control; but there was not a minute spent on the surface of this planet that was not a net gain in terms of the automatic repair of the Valeron. That great ship had been hurt.
Since there was at the moment very little that Seaton could do effectively about DuQuesne, or directly about the Chlorans, or the Fenachrone — and was a great deal he could do here on the surface of Ray-See-Nee — he put the other matters out of his mind and did what had to be done.
And enjoyed it enormously!
Seaton went “home” to the empty and solitary house that was his temporary residence and raised the oversize ring to his lips. “Dottie,” he said.
“Oh, Dick!” a tiny scream came from the ring. “I wish you wouldn’t take such horrible chances! I thought I’d die! Won’t you, tomorrow morning, just shoot the louse out of hand? Please?”
“I wasn’t taking any chances, Dot; a man with half my training could have done it. I had to do something spectacular to snap these people out of it; they’re dead from the belt-buckle up, down, and back. But I’ve done enough, I think, so I won’t have any more trouble at all. It’ll get around — and how! — and strictly on the Q and T. All those other apes will need is a mere touch of fist.”
“You hope. Me, too, for that matter. Just a sec, here’s Martin. He wants to talk to you about that machinery business,” and Crane’s voice replaced Dorothy’s.
“I certainly do, Dick. You say you want two-hundred-fifty-pound Sullivan Sluggers, complete with variable-height mounts and inch-and-a-quarter — that’s English, remember — bits. You want Ingersoll-Rand compressors and Westinghouse generators and Wilfley tables and so on, each item by name and no item resembling any of their own machinery in any particular. Since you are supposed to be repairing their own machinery, wouldn’t it be better to have the Brain do just that, while you look on, make wise motions, and learn?”
“It might be better, at that,” Seaton admitted, after a moment’s thought. “My thought was that since nobody now working in the mine knows anything much about either mining or machinery it wouldn’t make any difference, as long as the stuff was good and rusty on the outside, and I know how our stuff works. But I can learn theirs and it will save a lot of handling and we’ll have the time. They’re working only two shifts in only one stope, you know. Lack of people. But nine-tenths of their equipment is as dead as King Tut and the rest of it starts falling apart every time anybody gives any of it a stern look — I was scared spitless all shift that we’d be running out of air or power, or both, any minute. So we’ll have to do one generator and at least one compressor tonight; so you might as well start getting the stuff ready for me.”
“It’s ready. I’ll send it down as soon as it gets good and dark. In the meantime, how about Brother Rat? Have you anyone watching him?”
“No, I didn’t think it was necessary. But it might be, at that. From up there, would you say?”
“Definitely. And Shiro and Lotus haven’t much to do at the moment. I’ll make arrangements.”
“Do that, guy, and so long ’till dark.”
“Just a sec, Dick,” Dorothy said then. “I’m not done with you yet. You remembered the no-neighbors bit, I think?”
“I sure did, Honey-Chile. No neighbors within half a mile, So, any dark of the moon, slip down here in one of the fifteen-footers and all will be well.”
“You big, nice man,” Dorothy purred. “Comes dark, comes me! an’ you can lay to that.”
Countless parsecs away, DuQuesne made proper entry into the Solar System, put his Capital D into a parking orbit around Earth, and began to pick up his tremendous order of machine tools and supplies. It went well; Brookings had done his job. There was, however, one job DuQuesne had to do for himself. During the loading, accordingly, he went in person to Washington, D.C., to the Rare Metals Laboratory, and to Room 1631.
That room’s door was open. He tapped lightly on it as he entered the room. He closed the door gently behind him.
“Park it,” a well-remembered contralto voice said. “Be with you in a moment.”
“No rush.” DuQuesne sat down, crossed his legs, lighted a cigarette, and gazed at the woman seated at her electronics panel. Both her eyes were buried in the light-shield of a binocular eyepiece; both her hands were manipulating vernier knobs in tiny arcs.
“Oh! Hi, Blackie! Be with you in half a moment.”
“No sweat, Hunkie. Finish your obs.”
“Natch.” Her attention had not wavered for an instant from her instruments; it did not waver then.
In a minute or so she pressed a button, her panel went dark, and she rose to her feet.
“It’s been a long time, Blackie,” she said, stepping toward him and extending her hand.
“It has indeed.” He took her hand and began an encircling action with his left — a maneuver which she countered, neatly but still smilingly, by grasping his left hand and holding it firmly.
“Tsk, tsk,” she tsked. “The merchandise is on display, Blackie, but it is not to be handled. Remember?”
“I remember. Still untouchable,” he said.
“That’s right. You’re a hard-nosed, possessive brute, Blackie — any man to interest me very much would have to be, I suppose — but no man born is ever going to tell me what I can or can’t do. Selah. But let’s skip that.” She released his hands, waved him to a chair, sat down, crossed her legs, accepted the lighted cigarette he handed her, and went on, “Thanks. The gossip was that you were all washed up and had, as Ferdy put it, “taken it on the lam.” I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. I’ve been wanting to tell you; you’re a good enough man so that whatever you’re really after, you’ll get.”