One thought of a squeal — if you ever get one mili-meter out of line, and you’ll be under surveillance every second of every day — you’ll die a long, slow, tough death. And I mean tough!”
He turned to the miners; studied them narrowly. His “shot in the arm” had done them a lot of good. Excitement was still high; none of them had relapsed into the apathy that had affected them all such a short time before. In fact, one close-clustered group of men was eyeing Seaton and the overseer in a fashion that made it perfectly clear that, had it not been for Seaton’s mien and the gun and the whip, there would have been a lynching then and there.
“Take it easy, people,” Seaton told them. “I know you all want to tear this ape apart, but what good would it do? None. Not a bit. So I won’t let you do it, if I have to use the whip and even the gun to keep you from it. But I don’t intend to use either whip or gun and I don’t think I’ll have to, because this is the first bite of a fresh kettle of fish for every civilized human being of this world. I won’t go into much detail, but I represent a group of human beings, as human as yourselves, called HUMANITY TRIUMPHANT. I’m a fore-runner. I’m here to bring you a message; to tell you that humanity has never been conquered permanently and never will be so conquered. Humanity has triumphed and will continue to triumph over all the vermin infesting all the planets of all the solar systems of all the galaxies of all surveyed space.
“HUMANITY TRIUMPHANT’s plans have been made in full and are being put out into effect. Humanity will win here, and in not too long a time. Every Chloran in every solar system in this region of space will die. That’s a promise.
“Nor do we need your help. All we ask you is that you produce the full quota of ore every week, so that no Chloran warship will come here too soon. And that production will be no problem very shortly, since I can repair your machinery and will have it all back in working order by one week from today. So in a very few weeks you women can go back to keeping house for your families; you youngsters can go back to school; and half of you men will be able to make quota in half a shift and spend the other half of it playing penny-ante. And you, Brother Rat—” he turned back to the deposed overseer—
“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?”