Frederik Pohl - O Pioneer!

“That was just an accident—” he began instinctively, but she was still talking.

“Mrs. Brownbenttalon litter-sister of my junior husband here,” she said with pride. “She say you pretty good guy. I also think it; damn Kalkaboos always getting damn feelings hurt. You want see Earth-human dome, sure, Mr. Threewhiteboots here take you, show you where everything located, no problem. But when you are got there, please, you tell him quickly hurry right back.”

The little male took Giyt in a Centaurian cart—no seats, just a sort of pad with grips to hold on to—and when he had delivered Giyt to the human autofactory dome, he didn’t wait to be told to hurry back. He was quickly gone, to whatever intimate moments the couple had been heading toward.

There was a screen and a door, but the door wasn’t open. The human autofactory, of course, was locked.

Giyt could hear rumblings from inside. That meant nothing about whether anyone was there; the nature of an autofactory was that it was automatic. Likely enough anybody who was supposed to be on shift had taken off to watch the opening ceremonies of the six-planet meeting, like everybody else.

He flexed his fingers and sat down at the screen. There were not many combinations or passwords that could keep Evesham Giyt out, and it took only five minutes to establish that this wasn’t one of them.

When he entered the chamber the rumbling sounds were louder. They came from where a cascade of the talking dolls were dropping out of the assembly machine onto a moving belt, to be picked up by the packing members and stowed in shipping cartons. Several dozen filled cartons were already stacked against a wall, waiting for shipment.

And none of that was of any interest to Giyt.

He looked around and found locked storerooms. These looked more promising. Their locks, too, were only a small inconvenience. But while he was working out the combination, his screen buzzed and half a dozen legends appeared on it. The one in English read: Earth human Evesham Giyt has wandered away from his party. If you see him please inform Central Command of his whereabouts so he can be returned.

He scowled and picked up his pace; the communications would not remain so polite. One after another the locked doors opened. Behind the nearest one, surprisingly in this warehouse where no one but humans ever went, was a store of Kalkaboo dawn-bangers—big, bomb-shaped firecrackers, of the size that required detonators. Behind the other doors—

Behind the other doors was worse.

There was no reason for any Earth human to possess Kalkaboo firecrackers, even little ones, to say nothing of these monsters. But the other things in the locked storerooms simply had no business existing on Tupelo at all. They were Earthside weapons, and there were hundreds of them. Handguns. Minicarbines. Assault rifles. Grenades. Mortars. Even shoulder-launched missiles, the kind that rocketed to an enemy’s position and then exploded with a shower of high-velocity shrapnel. And when he looked more closely at the missiles he saw the answer to two puzzles.

The missiles bore sniffer vents. They would follow the airborne odor of a target and explode over the target’s head, and that explained why there had been that almost forgotten data file on the scents of the eetie races on Tupelo.

And to make them work required high-tech computation . . . and that explained something, too. That had to be where the missing chiplets had gone.

The thought came too late to be useful, but if he had thought of it in time it would have been no trouble at all, Giyt told himself, to have brought a microcam along. He could be photographing the whole thing. That would be enough evidence to convince anybody, and then he could be taking it to the people at the six-species conference, there to blow the whistle on whatever foretaste of hell Hagbarth and his buddies were planning for Tupelo.

But he had no camera. What then?

There was plenty of physical evidence here, and that would do as well as pictures. The trouble was that the physical evidence was all too big to carry. He needed something small enough to hide on his person. There was no way he was going to get onto the return rocket—past Hoak Hagbarth—if he was carrying a shoulder-launcher or a carbine, much less one of the Kalkaboo bombs.

Thoughtfully he pocketed a Kalkaboo detonator, but that wouldn’t prove anything; there were multitudes of them on sale in the Kalkaboo store in the town. What else? There was no ammunition visible for the minicarbines, but the assault guns were loaded; he slipped a clip out of one of them and stowed it away.

Then he tackled one of the buses. If he could take one of them apart to get its chiplet out, that would remove all doubt. On Earth there were plenty of experts who would be able to read the programming on the chiplet, and that would show just what the thing had been built to do.

Figuring out what had to be done was easy. The execution was a lot harder. The damn buses weren’t meant to be disassembled by amateurs. Worse, he had no tools. There probably were tools somewhere around, maybe in the same place as the ammunition for the minicarbines, but he didn’t know where that was. So he had to do it the hard way. It would have to be a simple smash and pry operation—with the added worry at every step that if he hammered a tad too hard he might detonate the explosives and fuel in the bus. Time was a problem that couldn’t be ignored, either. Sooner or later Hagbarth and the others would be checking the factory in their search for him. By then he had to be elsewhere, and ready to give them some kind of lying apology for going off on his own . . . and hope they bought it . . . and then—assuming that somehow, against all the odds, he had been lucky enough to get away with that much—somehow manage to get back on the suborbital rocket’s return flight with his booty intact.

He didn’t quite see how he. was going to manage any of that, but meanwhile he had the present job.

Wonderfully he managed to get two of the buses open enough to fish out the chiplets, all the while rehearsing—and rejecting—the things that he might say to Hagbarth. Not that there was anything he could say that would make a difference if Hagbarth had the animal cunning to check out his secret arms cache for himself, because anyone who looked at the two buses would see they had been tampered with. For what good it might do, he put them at the back of the stack. Then he locked all the storeroom doors, erased his programs from the screen, let himself out, relocked the door, and started back down the hall.

He didn’t get far before he heard the whir of an approaching cart, and of course it was Hagbarth.

Hagbarth wasn’t alone. Tschopp and that other man from the fire company—Maury Kettner?—jammed the cart beside him. They all leaped out as soon as the cart had stopped, scowling angrily at Evesham Giyt.