Battlefield Earth (127 page)

     Back in his room, old Soth was tired and coughing a bit from having overexerted himself this day. Jonnie sat on an improvised bench and waited for him to get his breath.

Eventually Soth said, “I can’t dismantle or put together a teleportation shipping rig; only Terl could do that. And I surely can’t build one either. So maybe I shouldn’t take this contract.” He held it up between a couple of claws, looked at it longingly, and then handed it to Jonnie.

Jonnie couldn’t help but wonder how this race might have been if it hadn’t been for the catrists messing up their brains.

“No, no,” said Jonnie, pushing it back at him. “You’ve done fine. In fact, the key you have given me to routine Psychlo mathematics has probably unlocked the door to a parade of inventions Intergalactic was sitting on. You may have helped bring prosperity to many, many worlds.”

“Really?” said Soth. He thought it over. “That’s nice. Yes, that’s very nice.” He was pondering something.

“You know,” Soth said after a while, “you have something of a security problem too. An awful lot of people of an awful lot of races would do anything to get their hands on Psychlo mathematics and some developments they stole. You know, don’t you, that Professor En who developed teleportation was a Boxnard? No? Well he was. Yes, people will be trying to get this data. But I think I can help.”

He thought for quite a while. “Yes, I think I can do it.” He smiled. “Like any hobbyist, I like to fiddle around, and about fifty years ago- I was on a dreadful planet, not even a tree-l set myself the problem of putting Psychlo higher math into a computer. The company and the government would have had fits had it been reported. But I remember the circuits I devised. It would work all right but I’d need some facilities and components.”

A computer! Jonnie had been dreading solving hundreds of thousands of formulas to get whatever inventions they’d found into use. If he had a computer, anyone on his staff could rattle them off!

“If you do that,” said Jonnie, “I’ll give you a million credits out of my own pocket.”

“A million credits?” gawped Soth. “There isn’t that much money!” He was fumbling around through his litter of paper. Jonnie thought he was trying to find some reference but then saw he was trying to locate a kerbango saucepan. Soth obviously felt he needed a stimulant! The saucepan was empty and Jonnie got a package of kerbango from his pocket and put it in the pan.

Soth chewed a small bit of it thankfully, remembered his manners, and offered Jonnie some, which was, of course, declined.

“You startled me,” said Soth. “But that wasn’t all I was going to tell you.”

He chewed for a bit, got his heart beating again to his satisfaction. “I have been fooling about converting simpler Psychlo arithmetic to the decimal system.” He went into the litter of papers again, found what he wanted on the floor, and showed it to Jonnie. “It’s quite an amazing system. Children and people learn it quite easily. The Psychlo Empire actually held onto the eleven system just so others could get more mixed up.”

“They mixed me up,” said Jonnie.

“Well, I should think they did, but that was all part of the security program. Anyway, all the basic arithmetic functions and the lesser formulas can be converted over to the decimal system. Then maybe they’ll even put money into the decimal system- as I see the Galactic Bank’s new issue remains in the eleven system. Now here is the good part:

“The decimal system will go into general use. Nobody will want anything to do with the clumsy eleven system and it will go into disuse!”

He sat back triumphantly. “You’ll have your computer. The eleven system will phase out. People will consider it some old curiosity and forget it. And that in itself is a kind of security precaution.”

Jonnie had found a piece of paper and was writing on it rapidly.

“A second contract!” said Soth, reading it upside-down.

“In addition to the first contract,” said Jonnie. “Two million credits if you make the computer and another million if you convert basic Psychlo math to the decimal system.”

“Oh, dear,” said Soth. “I could collect a warehouse full of mathematics texts with that! Ten warehouses. Fifty! Quick, don’t change your mind. Let me sign it!”

When they had finalized it, Soth looked at it for a while. “You know, on Psychlo, that would make me very rich. One would have a dozen females, raise a huge family, become almost a noble dynasty. But it’s all finished.”

“There are still some Psychlos here,” said Jonnie. “There are several females. The race isn’t finished.”

“Ah,” said Soth. “You don’t know.” He sagged. “The catrists long ago pulled back the only Psychlo colonies that had begun. They convinced the throne that colonies on other planets might mutate, be able to live in other atmospheres, and constitute a threat to the crown. So they insisted that all babies born be born only on Psychlo.”

Where they could put capsules in their heads, thought Jonnie.

“Occasionally, very rarely,” continued Soth, “a royal noble could take his own females to other planets but only with a whole catrist team along. All female employees of the company, by long-standing order from the catrists, had to be permanently sterilized before being shipped away from the home planet.”

“You mean…?” Jonnie gestured to the rest of the compound area.

“Yes,” said Soth. “All these females are sterilized. They cannot have any pups.”

He sat for a while, pensive. “You might think I hold it against you for destroying that planet. I don’t, you know. From the moment the catrists began to gain power, the race started to go bad.

“The way I look at it,” he continued, “their program of degrading everyone, suppressing any group who sought a new morality, calling everybody animals, turned Psychlo into a beast. People all over the universes, all through the ages, prayed for the end of that empire. It was hated!”

He looked at Jonnie. “Sooner or later someone was bound to rid the galaxies of Psychlo. Whole races have dreamed that dream.

“You,” and he pointed a talon at Jonnie, “may think you did it. You didn’t. That whole civilization was doomed the moment the catrists began to influence it. It wasn’t you. It was they who destroyed Psychlo and the whole empire.

“Terl was their product and I believe he had a hand in their destruction in some way. You know, I’ve heard he used to sit around in the recreation hall and tell people that man was an endangered species.

“Because of the catrists, the Psychlos have been an endangered species for millennia. And now they’re not just endangered. They’re extinct!”

He sighed and looked at his litter of papers. “Well, maybe I can help make up for some of the crimes they have done.”

Then he looked at Jonnie. “As for you, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, have no qualms about it. When you destroyed Psychlo you gave all the galaxies a chance to return to better ways. I didn’t need these contracts. You have offered them and I will keep them. But it is a privilege to help you and I thank you for the chance.”

Epilogue

A few months later, Jonnie heard that the government in Scotland was going to introduce taxation in order to rebuild Edinburgh. He knew that taxation had been unknown in the earliest days of the Scottish nation-the king had just paid for everything way back then. And he doubted Scotland had the resources to do it. Also he felt a taxation, as a government way of life, was a sort of silly business: couldn’t a government earn its keep? Why did it have to go around robbing people?

So he talked to Dunneldeen and got him to sell the idea to the Chief of

Clanfearghus that Edinburgh would be rebuilt by “contributions.” To foster the illusion that the Scottish people were paying for it, he and Dunneldeen put little red boxes along trails where Scots could drop in small coins and they even emptied some of them.

But what really happened was that Jonnie paid for it. He sent in his Chatovarian construction company, Buildstrong, Inc. They had finished all the industrial requirements at Luxembourg and banking requirements at Zurich anyway.

The Chatovarians, being Chatovarians, sent a research team all around Scotland and the government to find out what people wanted at Edinburgh and then went on and did what they thought was right, regardless.

They decided Edinburgh would be in three businesses: planetary government, extraterrestrial training, and Scottish handicraft. It was a real headache to them to reconcile such divergent actions into architecture, which they always maintained must be (a) indigenous and (b) suitable for the purpose.

The city itself, their research team found, had once been nicknamed ‘Auld Reekie’ because it smelled so bad. They also found no Scot had lived in it for eleven hundred years. This gave them a totally free hand: they rammed down everything except Castle Rock; they got several Highland hydroelectric plants back in operation rapidly and then called in their companion company, Desperation Defense, and had them make their installations and emplacements; they then put in sewer systems and filtration plants; and then they rubbed their hands and really got to work.

They put the northern section of the town into industrial- for business and handicrafts- and gave it the overall look and landscaping of stone cottages such as the Scots were used to in the Highlands. They sweepingly planned out a large number of specialty schools: outside they were all Scotch baronial with the little projecting turrets, castles right out of the old fairy tale books, but the whole of the interiors were adapted to extraterrestrial living. They spread these all over the terrain with big parks.

Castle Rock itself they saved for government. It had been so battered and fractured they had to get early engravings of it to see how to shape it; shaping and armoring rock was no problem to the Chatovarians but what it had been like a couple thousand years ago was. They got an indication that a castle of an early Scottish king, Duncan, who apparently had been killed by Macbeth, had stood there-where they got this was a mystery. Somebody said an old play they had found in the wreckage of the British Museum.

They reassembled the Rock, rebuilt its interior shelters, covered the whole thing with blue It alian marble, got it all armor hard and glowing, and then put Duncan’s castle on it in gleaming white. They found a cathedral they liked in an ancient city called Rheims that they said agreed with the architecture of the castle and put it up on the rock in shimmering scarlet and called it “Saint Giles” again.

The Scots were enraptured with the result of what they had “financed.”

Jonnie thought it looked pretty good, too. But it did produce a problem. The Chatovarians, being overpopulated at home, always overhired and as this job had been “rush” and “for the boss himself,” they had accumulated a very huge crew. They also had a policy that you never fired anybody ever. It left him with a swollen city-building team almost the size of Earth’s entire population. So he put them to work rebuilding the cities the “visitors” had burned.

This, too, gave the Chatovarians a problem. What were the cities for? Nobody had lived in a city for eleven hundred years. So their research teams had to figure out what future use the cities might be put to, based on resources, proximity to rivers and the sea, what crops grew in that climate, who they might some day trade with, how many people would have to be housed for what industry. It was very complex and quite difficult.

Establishing the indigenous architecture was easy in Asia, fairly easy in Europe, impossible in America: this last continent had gone madly modern and the Chatovarians couldn’t abide it. So they just had to take the most interesting landmark sort of buildings they found on the sites, duplicate those, and make lots and lots of parks. The parent company in Chatovaria had overbought zip monorails on another job so they shipped those in and internally connected the cities up high so their parks wouldn’t be spoiled with roads.

They had to get a Hawvin company in to clean up the radiation around Denver- they did it with flying magnetic sweeps. Then the Chatovarians rebuilt that whole area, including even Jonnie’s village.

There were no populations, so when they would finish a city, they would just seal up the doors and windows, put a caretaker crew in, and leave it.

Oh, well, Jonnie thought, when he saw all these empty cities going up, maybe somebody would live in them someday.

Ker took charge of the mine school in Edinburgh and the Psychlos that were left alive moved there and gave lectures and demonstrations. Absolute hordes of extraterrestrials were pouring in to learn how to mine their own planets and get the metals moving again. Ker pictographed all the lectures so the technology wouldn’t be lost. He used Cornwall and Victoria for practical training and it kept him pretty busy, tearing around with Chirk who had the job of building up the libraries. Ker had a trick of wearing breathe-masks with the face of the race he was training painted on it. It made for friendlier relations, he said.

There was an awful lot of ex-Psychlo planets that had slave populations or people withdrawn to mountains, and the Coordinators were very busy running their Coordinator College in Edinburgh, showing former subject races how to get organized and prosper. Their enrollment was greatly assisted by the fact that the Galactic Bank gave much more favorable interest rates to such planets when they had Coordinators trained in Edinburgh.