automated digging equipment, but that didn’t matter; he owned plenty of hard-working Toms and one good hollow-core shaft drill. And plenty of time.
“Aw come on, Gus,” his foreman Jack Haller yelled above the noise of the drill. “We know you’re not digging for any library. I mean, you got absolutely nobody foiled, so drop it.” He glared meaningfully at his employer.
“It says ‘library’ on the map.” Gus waved the worn and crinkled document in Jack’s general direction. It was true, though; Gus did not really believe that before the war the UN military had buried such a thing as a library here on his plantation. That was a code word for—something else.
It seemed so near that he could virtually taste it; his body ached for it.
“That map’s Army, isn’t it?” Haller demanded.
“And that’s against occupation law, to dig up anything military. So you had to keep up this noise about libraries.”
Gus said, grinning, “It’s fifty thousand UN soldiers all armed with C-head rapid fire weapons. Waiting for the day to come when they reconquer the whole goddam planet.”
“And you’re going to expose them?” Jack Haller stared at him. “And bugger up the whole enterprise?” His stare became fixed with outrage. “Where’s your patriotism?”
“I was only joking.”
“What, then?”
“Girls. Fifty thousand virgins. Gus winked. Disgusted, his foreman stalked off to resume supervision of Toms and the digging rig.
To himself, so that Haller and no one else could hear, Gus murmured, “I told you and you didn’t believe me. So don’t believe me; tough.” Because what he had said was true.
The UN had, in the final days of the war, selected by computer a quantity of the finest womanhood— genetically speaking—from all the races of the planet, had introduced them to a homeostatic subsurface totally sealed-off chamber . and then had gone to infinite trouble to destroy all records pertaining to the existence and location of the self-sustaining underground chamber—all this in case the invaders, now conquerors, had it in mind to abolish the human race in toto like the wriggly, slimy worms they were. However, the Ganymedians had no such plans; in point of fact, they had come in to occupy conquered Earth in the most deft, humane and circumspect manner—at least if their policies up to now constituted an index. So, Gus Swenesgard reasoned, this colony of first class females served no purpose, and, since undoubtedly life was miserable underground, he would be doing them a favor by liberating them. They would be grateful. They would honor him. All in all it looked pretty good.
And he had plans. In exchange for releasing them—he did not know for certain how many women he would find, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred—he wanted reciprocity. As his lawyer, Ike Blitzen, might put it.
Several of the really big plantation Burgers, like Chuck Pepitone and Jesus Flores, just to name the two closest, had whole colonies of wives, both colored and white—although the colored ones technically, by Tennessee law, comprised “consorts,” not wives. In fact this made up the essence of Burger- hood; in this lay the ultimate criterion. He knew that. Everybody knew that. Because women had become expensive. They sold, in the bales of the South, for much more than Toms; one could pick up a good brawny buck Tom for, say, fifty UN dollars, but a woman well, that drew six times this price, assuming she came undamaged.
This, what he had here, this trove of girls—this constituted currency. Because the old pre-war UN money had become rapidly worthless as the Gany occupation authorities redeemed it or withdrew it or whatever they did, and the junk they issued no sane mortal would touch, it was so obviously phony; as for instance whose pictures appeared on it? President Johnson? Stalin? No; the Gany had dipped into
history and come up with full-face steel-engraved portaits of such freaks as Kant and Socrates and Hume and old-time non-heroes like that. For instance, the ten dollar General Douglas Mac Arthur bill; in another month it would be gone entirely. And in its place somebody named Li Po, some sort of antique Chinese poet. It made a man blurk just to think about it.
So, anyhow, the occupation currency had become a racket by which the Ganys appropriated Terran valuables in exchange for worthless scrip. And everybody knew that, even up North where the worm-kissers, wiks for short, ran everything. that is, ran everything at the beck and call of the Gany military commanders, that being the nature of wiks.
Well, maybe his plantation was virtually the smallest in the whole bale of Tennessee; so what? It didn’t matter, not after his drilling rig burst through into the mammoth sealed subsurface living-chamber designed to last a century and jam-packed with pristine womanhood in its choicest flower, safe from the Gany worms—or snakes, however you thought of them, whichever you liked least. Snakes were wriggly and had fangs and injected poison. And worms; well, worms were blind. If not worse. Having raised sheep he had seen parasitic worms he had seen the bott fly. So to him the Ganys resembled worms, which was a lot worse than snakes.
“The hollow-core shaft,” Haller called to him suddenly. “It’s bringing up fragments of metal. It seems to be drilling into what looks like chrome steel.”
“How far down?” Gus asked.
“Exactly what you predicted: seven thousand feet.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding, “Use the fat shaft, the one we can descend in. I want to go down there. Me first; I’ll tell you when you can follow.”
Shortly, in a harness suit, greased with a smelly plastic slime so that he would not become stuck, he found himself being lowered, cautiously, a lantern dangling below him to reveal the way. Directly behind him, just to make sure, followed a Tom with a dart pistol. In his left hand Gus gripped a rapid-fire phosphorus-cartridge revolver; in his right a fistful of documents identifying him as the legal Burger of the Fifteenth Plantation of the bale of Tennessee so they would not mistake him for an invading Gany wik. Plus newspaper accounts published since Capitulation Day which recounted the lenient policies of the Ganys especially as regards the continuation of the human race: accounts which gave the lie to wartime scare stories of sterilization plans and so forth.
He felt confident, even cheerful, and as he descended he hummed a jazzy tune, then wondered how it had happened to come into his head. Of course; he must have gotten it somehow from that girl Joan Hiashi whom he had met earlier in the day at his Olympus Hotel. And he wondered, idly, if she had managed to reach the unpacified hills and if so had Percy X’s trigger-nutty zealots massacred her. If so that would be too bad; he had had plans for her.
At seven thousand feet his dangling lantern flashed broadly, into a cavern whose size could not be distin guished. And, as he swung downward, eager to reach the horizontal plane, he saw—
Electronic equipment, of some strange design such as he had never come across before. There seemed to be tons of components, wires and printed circuitry and helium batteries and transistors and peculiar crystalline objects of unguessable use glinting in the lantern light.
As he came to rest numbly on the floor of the cavern, he thought, Then that about the girls, that was just to lure us into digging. In case had become barbaric and didn't care about science. They conned us, those UN psychologists. They —
His neck stung. An anti-personnel homotropic dart. He prayed, as his consciousness abruptly ebbed away and he stumbled to his knees, that it was just a stunner, not a metabolic toxin arranged for cardiac arrest. He managed to turn his head far enough to make out the Tom who had descended behind him. Why didn’t the Tom do something? Then he realized the truth. It was the Tom who had fired the dart. Gus thought, he must be working for Percy X!
In Gus’ earphones Haller’s voice dinned in an anxious squeak, “Hey, Gus; how come your dead-man’s throttle’s registering? What’s wrong?”
It’s registering, Gus thought dimly, because I’m dead.
A moment later Haller came hurtling down the shaft, spinning and twisting like a rag doll, and screaming.
IV
