Battlefield Earth (19 page)

     The transshipment air was a loud clatter of hurtling shapes under the spring sun. A freighter had just roared in and the ore it spilled was racketing onto the field. The blade machines were nudging about, hurrying the ore to the conveyors. The giant buckets clanked and rattled, halting jerkily to spill their contents on the conveyor belt. Huge fans roared to blast dust in the air. A fall of ore flowed onto the transshipment platform.

Jonnie sat amid the din, chained to the controls of the dust analyzer, sprayed with fanned dirt and half-deafened from the clamor.

What he was doing was cross-testing the consecutive loads on the belt for uranium. The fans beat a fog of ore particles into the air at this point in the progressive steps. It was Jonnie’s job to throw a lever that sent beams

through the whirlwind, check the panel to see whether a purple or a red light went on, and throw levers that sent the ore on for transshipment (purple), or dumped it to the side and sounded an alarm (red). When the red came on, it was urgent to dump.

He was not operating independently. He was closely supervised by Ker, the assistant operations officer of the minesite. Ker was protected by domed headgear. Jonnie was catching the hurricane of dust and din full in the eyes and face. He did not even have goggles. Ker walloped him on the shoulder to indicate that this bucketful could be sent on, and Jonnie thrust at the levers.

Ker had been carefully chosen by the security chief as the very fellow to instruct the animal in the operation of minesite machinery. And Terl had his reasons.

A midget for a Psychlo, Ker was only seven feet tall. He was a “geysermouth,” as they called it, since he chattered incessantly; nobody bothered to listen to him. He had no friends but tried to make them. He was reputedly dim-witted even though he knew his machines well. If these reasons were not enough, Terl had leverage: he had caught Ker in a compromising situation involving two female Psychlo clerks in an out-of-bounds operations office. Terl had picto-recorded but not reported it, and Ker and the females had been very grateful. There were other things: Ker was a habitual criminal who had taken employment on Earth one jump ahead of arrest, and Terl had fixed up a name change. Before the animal idea had occurred to Terl, he had tried to work out something involving Ker, but it would have been impossible for a Psychlo to go into those mountains, and he had been forced to abandon taking Ker into his confidence.

But Ker had his uses. He was chattering away now, voice dimmed by the helmet he wore and by the din. “You have to be sure to detect every scrap of radiation dust. Not one isotope must get through to the platform.”

“What would it cause?” shouted Jonnie. “There’d be a spark-flash on the home planet, like I told you. The teleportation platform there would get disrupted and we’d catch blazes. It ’s just the dust. You have to make sure there’s none in the dust. No uranium!”

“Has it ever happened?” shouted Jonnie.

“Blast no!” roared Ker. “And it never will.”

“Just dust.” said Jonnie.

“Just dust.”

“What about a solid piece of uranium?”

“You won’t detect that.”

“Would anything detect it?”

“We never ship it!”

They got along pretty well. At first

Ker had thought the animal was a peculiar thing. But it seemed friendly and Ker didn’t have any friends. And the animal asked questions constantly and Ker loved to talk. Better an animal audience than none at all. Besides, it was a favor to Terl and staved off possible disclosures.

Terl brought the man-thing down each morning, tied it up to the machine it would operate, and picked it up each night. Ker, much cautioned and threatened with the consequences if Jonnie got loose, had the right to untie the animal and put it on another machine.

The regular operator this morning was glad of a break. The post was extremely dangerous and had killed several Psychlos in past decades. One usually got danger pay for it, but that was now suspended with the economy wave.

The freighter load was handled. The last bucketful went by on the conveyor belt position and the whole area drifted down to momentary idleness. The regular operator came back, looking suspiciously at his equipment.

“Did it break anything?” said the regular operator with a talon jerk at Jonnie.

“It hasn’t broke anything around here yet,” said Ker defensively.

“I heard it blew up a blade scraper.”

“Oh, that scraper was one that had already blown up,” said Ker. “You know the one a few months ago that got Waler.”

“Oh, that one. The one that got a hairline crack in its canopy?”

“Yeah,” said Ker. “That one.”

“I thought this animal blew it up.”

“That’s just that Zzt making excuses for lack of maintenance.”

Nevertheless the regular operator carefully checked over his uranium detection station.

“Why are you so nervous about it?” said Jonnie.

“Hey,” said the regular operator, “it talks Psychlo!”

“He could have a leak in his helmet,” explained Ker to Jonnie. “Or you could have left some dust on the controls.”

Jonnie looked at the regular operator. “You ever have a helmet blow up?”

“Blazes, no! I’m still alive, ain’t l? And I ain’t going to have any breathe-gas blow up around me. Get off my machine. Another freighter is coming in.”

Ker untied the animal and led it over to the shade of a power pylon. “That about completes you on the transshipment machinery. Tomorrow I’m going to start you on actual mining.”

Jonnie looked around. “What’s that little house over there?”

Ker looked. It was a small domed structure with a bunch of cooling coils on the back of it. “Oh, the morgue. Company orders require all dead Psychlos to get returned to home planet.”

Jonnie was interested. “Sentiment? Families?”

“Oh, no. Blazes, no. Nothing silly like that. They got some dumb idea that if an alien race had dead Psychlos to fool around with they could work out the metabolism and get up to mischief. Also, it’s a sort of nose count. They don’t want names riding on a payroll after a guy is dead- somebody else could collect the pay. It used to be done.”

“What happens with them- the corpses?”

“Oh, we let them collect and then schedule their teleportation back, just like any other package. When they get them home they bury them. The company has its own cemetery on Psychlo.”

“Must be quite a planet.”

Ker glowed with a smile. “You can say that! None of these damned helmets or canopies. Unlimited breathe-gas! The whole atmosphere is breathe-gas. Wonderful. Good gravity, not thin like this. Everything a gorgeous purple. And females aplenty! When I get out of here- maybe- if Terl fixes it so I can-I’m going to have ten wives and just sit all day chomping kerbango and rolling the females.”

“Don’t they have to import all the breathe-gas here?”

“Yes, indeed. You can’t make it on other planets. It takes certain elements that seldom exist off Psychlo.”

“I should think the home planet would run out of atmosphere.”

“Oh, no!” said Ker. “The elements are in the rocks and even the core and it just makes more and more. See those drums over there?”

Jonnie looked at a pyramid of drums that had evidently just come in on reverse teleportation from Psychlo. Trucks with lifts were loading them. And just as he looked, a truck was shifting some barrels aboard the last freighter in.

“Those drums are going back overseas,” said Ker.

“How many minesites are there?” said Jonnie.

Ker scratched where his dome met his collar. “Sixteen, I think.”

“Where are they located?” said

Jonnie, being very casual.

Ker started to shrug and then had a happy thought. He reached into a rear pocket and brought out a sheaf of papers. He had used the back of a map to make some work assignment notes on. He unfolded it. Although it was covered with creases and dirt it was quite plain. It was the first time Jonnie had seen a map of the whole planet.

With a searching talon, Ker counted.

“Yep. Sixteen with two substations. That’s the lot.”

“What’s a substation?”

Ker pointed up at the pylon. Other pylons marched southwest into the distance until they were dwindling specks. “That power line comes in from a hydroelectric installation several hundred miles from here. It ’s an ancient dam. The company changed all the machinery in it and it gives us all our power here for transshipment. It ’s a substation.”

“Any workers there?”

“Oh, no. All automatic. There’s another substation on the overseas south continent. It ’s not manned either.”

Jonnie looked at the map. He was excited but showed none of it. He counted five continents. Every minesite was precisely marked.

He reached over and took a pen out of Ker’s breast pocket. “How many machines do I still have to be checked out on?” asked Jonnie.

Ker thought about it. “There’s drillers…hoists…”

Jonnie reached over and took the map and folded it so there was a fresh blank space on the back. He began to list the machines as Ker called them out.

When the list was finished, Jonnie gave Ker his pen but casually put the map in his pouch.

Jonnie stood up and stretched. He hunkered back down and said, “Tell me some more about Psychlo. Sure must be an interesting place.”

The assistant operations officer chattered on. Jonnie listened intently. The data was a valuable flood and the map in his pouch crackled comfortingly.

When just one man was taking on the whole empire of the Psychlos in the hope of freeing his people, every scrap of information had value beyond price.

The engulfing roar of company operations thundered around them in enormous power.

- Part V -

Eyes on the sky of an evening, noting the slow yearly wheel of the constellations, Jonnie knew he would have to escape.

In about three weeks the year would be up. He had a horrible vision of Chrissie coming into the plains and, if she survived there, blundering onto the minesite.

There were many obstacles. It would be almost insurmountably difficult, given the search tools of the Psychlos. But he set about planning his road to freedom with stubborn relentlessness.

Complicating his plans was the self-set goal of an Earth free of Psychlos and the resurrection of the human race.

Lying awake, he saw the cage revealed in all its ugliness by a rising moon, and he almost ridiculed himself for his own timidity.

Here he was, collared like a dog, chained up, locked behind bars, subject to swift detection and swifter pursuit. Yet he knew that even if he died trying he would more than try.

First he must escape.

A key to possible freedom came to him only two days later. Freedom, at last, from his collar.

For some reason Terl had insisted that he be trained in electronic repair. The explanation Terl gave was thin: sometimes the controls of a machine broke, sometimes the remote control systems went awry, and the operator had to handle it. That Terl had done the explaining was enough to disqualify the reason. But more than that, in all the time Jonnie had been training on machines, he had never seen an operator touch electronic repair. When something went wrong somebody came screeching in on a tri-wheeled cart from the electronics section and fixed it fast. That Terl insisted that Jonnie know how to do it-Ker had not objected for an instant- was one more piece of the puzzle that was Terl. Whatever Terl wanted of him eventually would happen somewhere where there were no electronics repairmen.

So Jonnie sat, dwarfed on a bench, learning circuits and diagrams and components. They didn’t give him too much trouble. The electrons went here, got changed there, and wound up doing something else over at this place. The little wires and components and pieces of binding metal all made pretty good sense.

It was the tools that mystified him at first. There was a thing like a little knife that had a big handle- big to Jonnie, small to a Psychlo-that did the most remarkable thing. When you turned a switch to the proper number in its heel and put the blade down on a piece of wire, the wire fell apart. And when you reversed it and touched it to the wires you were now holding together, they became one piece once more. It only happened when you were splitting or binding the same type of metal. You had to use a binding substance when handling two different types of metal that you wanted to join.

When Ker wandered off for one of his frequent snacks and Jonnie was tied up alone for the moment in the electronics shop, he tested the tool against the frayed end of the leash.

It came apart, cleanly cut.

Jonnie reversed the switch, held the cut pieces together, and touched the tool to it.

They went back together with no trace of the cut.

Jonnie knew without trying it that it would do the same thing to his metal collar.

He looked at the door to make sure Ker was not coming back and no one else coming in, and then he swept his eyes over the rest of the room. There was a tool cupboard at the far end. He knew better than to have the knife he was using vanish. Jonnie parted his leash, raced to the tool cupboard, and opened it. It was a messy pile of parts, wires, and tools. He rummaged in it frantically. Seconds sped by. Then he saw what he was looking for at the bottom- an old tool of the same kind.

From far off he could feel the rumble of returning feet.

He rushed back to his bench and with the newly found tool put his leash ends back together again. It worked!

Ker returned, lazy and disinterested. Jonnie had already slid the tool down into the cuff of his moccasin.

“You’re doing pretty good,” said Ker, looking at his work.

“Yes, I’m doing pretty good,” said Jonnie.