Battlefield Earth (123 page)

Jonnie, when he got into the compound, put Pattie down and went looking for MacKendrick. He found him in the hospital.

“Where’s the epidemic?” demanded MacKendrick. “I got your call in the middle of a medical lecture. I brought a whole medical team! And when I get here, I find you’ve taken off-’

“This time,” said Jonnie, “we’re going to do it!”

“Oh,” said MacKendrick. “You mean the capsules. Jonnie, I have tried every way I can think of and there’s no getting in those skulls. Too much bone! I thought I showed you!”

The doctor went over to where he’d last left the huge Psychlo skull. He knocked his knuckles on it. “It’s just plain, solid bone! The brain is clear down under the lower back plate. If I drill out enough bone to get to it, you’ll just have a dead Psychlo.

“Ah,” said Jonnie. “You used the word ‘drill.’ I didn’t.”

He walked over to the skull and picked it up, all half a hundred pounds of it.

MacKendrick had wired on the joints and Jonnie opened the jaw. “Now watch the earbones.” He got a better grip and held it up to the light, an action something like juggling a medicine ball. “Watch.” He opened the jaw again.

The hinge, not the place a Psychlo heard through, but the place where the earbone met the back jawline, opened to show a hole about a thirty-second of an inch in diameter.

“You showed me this once,” said Jonnie, “and explained you couldn’t get an instrument through it. But it leads right to the spots where the capsules are embedded in the brain.”

MacKendrick was skeptical. “Jonnie, I got a whole team in there cleaning the place up for a possible operation. I thought something serious had occurred. But as it’s no emergency, why don’t we just get some sleep-’

Jonnie took the skull over to the table they had used before for dissection and put it down. “It may look like no emergency to you. But the truth is that we don’t know how to make a Psychlo motor and we don’t know how to work their math. If we don’t know those things we could come unstuck. We must have hundreds of planes right this minute that are inoperative. We need consumer products out in the planets and the Psychlo motors are tops. It ’s an emergency that’ll do for now. But watch!”

Jonnie took a thin insulated wire from his pocket and inserted it in the tiny skull hole. He took the other end of the wire and pushed it through the tiny hole on the other side.

“What are you doing?” demanded MacKendrick.

“Now the question you must answer is, will these wires, pushed in, tear up any jaw or ear muscles?”

“Oh, they might hit some tissue, but the main muscles aren’t there. That hole occurs because the jawbone, when extended to the extreme lower position, would have to leave a hole: otherwise there would have to be two additional bone plates and lord knows, there’s enough already! I don’t think-’

Jonnie reached for the kit he had hastily packed. He drew out a molecular plating gun. “This thing pours a stream of molecules from a rod onto a surface.”

MacKendrick was at sea. “You can’t get a gun like that in a head!”

“The gun unit goes outside.” He dug out an electrical terminal plate. “Where is one of those capsules we removed?”

MacKendrick got one of the two half-circles of bronze.

Jonnie snipped off some lengths of insulated wire. He took the molecular

plating gun and connected a length to the electrode that ordinarily fed current to the rod of spray metal. Then he laid the other end on the bit of bronze. He took a second piece of wire and laid it from the bronze to the electrical terminal plate. Then he connected the back of the terminal plate with a long wire to the current input terminal of the gun. He was simply going to substitute the bit of bronze for the gun’s usual spray rod and then bypass the spraying component but instead make the molecules flow on a wire to a receiving plate. And just to make sure electrolysis would occur, he was completing the circuit back to the gun.

He pressed the trigger.

The terminal plate began to be plated in bronze.

A tiny hole appeared in the capsule taken from a Psychlo head.

No electrician, MacKendrick said, “It’s disappearing!”

“We’re flowing the metal molecules up the wire to the plate. I think it’s called ‘electrolysis.’ We’re just not letting the metal molecules spray. We’re flowing them onto a plate.”

He adjusted the wires to the bit of bronze so that an inflow hit a different spot and the outflow occurred from a new place.

MacKendrick gawped. “That piece of metal is disappearing!”

“It’s reappearing over on the terminal plate,” said Jonnie. “But that will be outside the head!”

He picked up a new bit of wire and with a small torch melted the end of it round. “If we take the sharp point off, can you wiggle this wire in through that hinge hole, around the various nerves, and touch the bronze bit in the skull? And then do the same thing from the other side?”

This was something MacKendrick knew about. The corded nerves of a Psychlo brain were easy to push around. The cortex, or covering of the brain, could probably be pierced in a couple of tiny places without much damage.

“We’ll see!” said MacKendrick, giving up all thought of waiting for morning.

The Psychlo bodies were lying on two mine carts outside the door. Pierre seemed to have vanished. MacKendrick called in two nurses and another doctor and they wheeled the workman Psychlo into the dissection room. It was about five times as much body as they were used to handling, but with everyone helping, they got it on a table.

“It’s probably still frozen inside,” said Jonnie.

“No problem,” said MacKendrick. “You forgot we’ve been through this before. A couple of times I was all hopeful we could even operate.” He took a stack of microwave emanating pads and plopped them on either side of the head to thaw it out with a quick defreeze.

The room seemed awfully populated. Mr. Tsung was giving Jonnie a white coat and a pair of lens less glasses. Jonnie wondered what they were for and put them in his pocket. He was about to order a repositioning of the body when the singing button started up. It sang:

Gone are the days,

When my heart was young and gay.

Gone are the days…

The medical team was startled and a bit shocked. The scene was macabre enough without somebody singing a doleful dirge!

Jonnie pushed the button at Mr. Tsung. “Get rid of this thing!”

Pulling other bits out of his kit, Jonnie got to work making a more easily handled setup. Dr. MacKendrick was getting the metal analyzer they used for an X-ray machine in place. He put the head of the corpse on it and tuned the dials so that he had a sharp, clean picture of the bronze capsule. He was testing the jaws of the corpse to see if they were flexible and, finding they were, propped them open with a metal expansion tool.

The other doctor was mopping up water that had run off the cadaver’s head and was getting the lower wave-emanation plate wet.

A nurse leaned over to Jonnie and whispered, “I don’t think this little girl should be in here during all this.”

Jonnie turned and there was Pattie.

She must have followed him in. She was looking with interest at the bleached skull.

This was the first day in all these months he had seen Pattie noticing her environment. He was not going to suppress her by telling her to get out. “Let her stay,” he whispered to the nurse. The woman was a bit disapproving but she did not push it.

Jonnie had his rig ready. MacKendrick was looking at some sketches he had made of Psychlo brain nerves. He laid the drawings down, took the offered wires, and got to work.

Watching the viewplate and checking the sketches he began to work a blunted wire end in. He finally, with a few minor detours, got it to the embedded bronze. Then he got the other wire through to the other side of the metal.

Jonnie verified they were ready and threw the switch.

The exterior terminal plate began to turn bronze.

MacKendrick worked very delicately, feeding in electricity to one side of the plate and taking it from the other. It was, looking at the viewplate, sort of like cleaning up a blot.

The bronze in the skull became less and less. MacKendrick steered the wires around. After about half an hour, he could find no further shadows or traces of the bronze in the skull. He carefully withdrew the wires. “Now to see if we burned nerves,” he said.

The team went into immediate action. They broke out aprons and gloves and a set of instruments including a spinning-disc bone saw.

The nurse leaned over to Jonnie again and whispered “I do really think that little girl ought to go. This is too much for anyone that young. How old is she? Ten?”

Pattie was sitting on a stool, overlooking the proceedings. She was very interested.

Nothing could have made Jonnie banish her. “Leave her alone,” he whispered back.

They removed the viewers and put down pans and cloths. And in a moment the bone saw was whining and screeching into the skull. Shortly, green blood began to flow and the team mopped it up.

MacKendrick had done this so often that it seemed only minutes before they were looking at the place where the bronze had been. MacKendrick mopped up a bit more blood and got out a glass and inspected the nerves.

“The tiniest amount of burn,” he said.

“I’ll reduce the amperage,” said Jonnie. He got busy installing a rheostat in the circuit.

The team was throwing the bits of the dead Psychlo back together. They heaved him off the table and back onto the mine cart and shoved him out in the hall. Two minutes later they had the former executive on the table.

They repeated the molecular flow operation on the bronze and got rid of it.

Jonnie did a test on a silver capsule they already had from times past. MacKendrick consulted his drawings again.

The doctor pulled the wires back and fished them in again on the silver capsule in the cadaver’s brain.

It went along all right until they got to the fuse in it. It was so tiny and so quickly melted that it took quite some time to pick up all the bits. The wires, manipulated around, were more likely to touch each other than the scraps left.

Eventually that was gone too. Once more the gloves and saws, and presently the brain interior- mopped of green blood- was exposed. MacKendrick went over it with the greatest attention. Then he stood up.

MacKendrick was looking at Jonnie with awe. The lad had invented a new way to operate! MacKendrick was thinking of the bullets and metal bits that could be removed with this, and without making huge incisions or holes. Electrolytic surgery!

“It works on a corpse,” said Jonnie. He glanced at his watch. “It’s near midnight now. Tomorrow let’s see if it works on a live one!”

     At seven the following morning, MacKendrick’s team began to set up an entirely different room for operating. “We don’t know enough about Psychlo diseases,” he told Jonnie, “and their cadavers might be very infective to them when decayed. They are built of viruses and there may be a virus smaller than viruses. So change your clothes and get brand-new wires and equipment.”

Jonnie did, and when he came back-having given Mr. Tsung the problem of digging up another white coat- and was laying out new wires, he was astonished to hear MacKendrick tell his nurse to go get Chirk.

“She’s almost dead,” said MacKendrick. “Psychlo females have been feeding her for months with a stomach tube. The brain structure is similar and the hole in the jaw is bigger. She’s already in a coma and we won’t have to give her much methane. That’s the anesthetic that knocks them out.”

“I better go get her,” said Jonnie.

He took a mine cart and an air mask and went down to the rooms which were always circulated with breathe-gas.

Two Psychlo females came over at once when he pushed the cart toward

Chirk’s bed.

There she lay, eyes shut, unmoving. But she was thin, almost skeletal. Poor Chirk. The two hefty females had no trouble at all laying her on the mine cart. Jonnie thought he might have been able to do it himself. Her bones almost rattled.

“Give me a breathe-gas mask for her,” said Jonnie.

The two females looked at him blankly. “Why?” one said.

“So she can breathe!” said Jonnie impatiently.

The other female said, “It won’t do any good to try to torture her first. In her state, she won’t feel it.”

Jonnie was trying to wrap his wits around this, and seeing his confusion, the first one explained, “We have been waiting for someone to come down to kill her. They always do. We wondered and wondered why you waited months.”

“That’s the only treatment the catrists ever permitted for lapsin.”

What were these words? Well, “catrist” was the medical scientist cult that really ran Psychlo. Didn’t he know that? And “lapsin” was a common disease which child females sometimes got, and although it was rare for one of Chirk’s age- she’s thirty, you know- to get it, it was undeniable that she had lapsin. And, naturally, sooner or later, she had to be killed.

“I’m not going to kill her!” said Jonnie, indignant. “I’m going to try to cure her!”

They didn’t believe him. In the first place it was against the law to cure lapsin. It was also against the law for an unauthorized person to trifle with the mind. So it followed that he was lying to them just like a catrist would. But it still wouldn’t do any good to try to torture her before she was vaporized as she wouldn’t feel it and he wouldn’t enjoy it.

Jonnie had to get the breathe-mask himself, put it on Chirk, and wheel her through the atmosphere lock. Behind him the two females were telling each other, “Torture, I told you so.”

Even getting his toe back into the “civilization” named Psychlo had upset Jonnie. But he soon had Chirk in the improvised operating room. Thin as she was, it still took three of them to get her on the table.

MacKendrick had drilled all this out long ago and his team was quite efficient. The new doctor lifted the mask enough to slip an expander into the mouth. A nurse slipped a methane tube under the mask edge and then stood with a stethoscope on Chirk’s heart to detect beating changes. The heart evidently slowed down enough to suit her and she nodded to MacKendrick.

The jaw holes were outside the mask edge and MacKendrick soon had the wires inserted through the tissue and into the brain. He positioned the head on the viewscreen very carefully. Jonnie regulated the gun trigger for him. The nurse listened carefully to the heart and regulated the methane- breathe-gas mix.

The capsule in her head got less and less. The metal on the plate terminal got more and more.

One hour and forty-five minutes later, MacKendrick stood back, the extracted wires in his hands. A trickle of green on each side of the head was staunched by a nurse. The methane tube was taken away. The expander was removed from the mouth. The nurse turned up the breathe-gas valve to maximum on the mask vial.

“We tried this on a workman a few months ago without operating,” said MacKendrick. “It will take her about four hours to come out of it. If she does.”

Jonnie was going to make sure nothing got in the road of her doing just that. He pushed the mine cart and its burden out of the room and back to the lower atmosphere lock.

The two Psychlo females were still inside and very surprised to see him. They gave him a hand putting her back onto the bed. As Jonnie was taking off her breathe-gas mask, one of the females said, “I suppose you brought her back here to order us to kill her.”

That did it. Jonnie kicked them both out. He got a chair and sat down outside the atmosphere lock. He was going to sit there all four hours and make very, very sure nobody else got any odd Psychlo ideas! At the end of that time, he hoped Chirk would come to. But in any event he was prepared to wait until she did.