Battlefield Earth (29 page)

     Jonnie awoke in the middle of the night to the abrupt realization that he knew where a uranium detector existed. The ore duster at the transshipment area! He had even spent apprentice time on it.

So, despite Robert the Fox’s prohibition against his scouting, Jonnie was on a scout, dangerous or not.

Every few days he saw Chrissie. Each time he did, he made it a habit to ride around the minesite idly just to accustom the Psychlos to his being there. He would sit Windsplitter and wander around.

Today Chrissie and Pattie looked very forlorn. Jonnie had brought fresh meat and more deerskin for them to tan and sew. He had cut plenty of firewood- one of the Scots had unearthed a stainless steel axe from a village ruin, and it made such work remarkably fast.

He placed all this outside the wooden barrier to be taken in when Terl was “not busy” and could come out.

It was frustrating to talk through the wooden barrier and the cage bars. Chrissie and Pattie held up some buckskin shirts and breeches for him to admire and then repackaged them for him to take. He called to them that they looked fine. Pattie exhibited a new arrangement for their pitiful shelter- they could fasten nothing to the bars- and he said it looked much better.

What was he doing, they wanted to know. He said he was working. And was he all right? Yes, he was fine. And were things going well? Just fine. Difficult to carry on a conversation across a space of forty feet through two screening barricades and under the surveillance of at least two button cameras. Difficult to be calm and reassuring when what he really wanted to do was blow the place up and get them out of there.

He had a picto-recorder on a strap around his neck. With a couple of buckskin thongs he had steadied it to his chest so that with a slight motion of his hand he could start and stop it without raising it to his eye. He had practiced doing that and had gotten pretty accurate at pointing it without looking through the finder. He requisitioned a dozen of the things and plenty of miniature discs. As he talked he took pictures of the girls and the cage from several angles, pictures of the switch box and wires. It was a risk, he knew.

He told Chrissie and Pattie he would be back and rode casually to a high point above the Chinko quarters. Seemingly idle, he took broad panoramas, both wide-angle and telephoto, of the minesite. He took pictures of the twenty battle planes lined up in the field, the distant cartridge fuel dump, and, beyond that, the breathe-gas storage dump. He took pictures of the morgue a hundred yards beyond the transshipment area. And he covered the freighter landing area and ramps and conveyor belt and control tower.

Then luck! He saw a freighter on its way in with a load of ore. He idled down off the knoll. As he passed the cage, he felt a sudden need for cautiousness. He dismounted and slipped the discs he had already taken into the waiting pack, making it appear that he was just putting in some flowers.

Remounted, he wandered on down to the ore-dusting area. He let Windsplitter pause near tasty clumps of grass and at last came to the dust-coated area of transshipment.

The freighter had not unloaded yet. Employees were coming out and getting onto their machines. He rode up to the ore-dusting machine. The operator was not there. A hook was swinging from a crane and he pretended to duck it. But in actual fact he leaned over and pulled out a wire from the back of the machine’s controls. He did not know its circuit, but with luck he would very soon.

The operator knew him slightly from his apprentice days but glanced at him with normal Psychlo disdain. “You better get that horse out of here! Ore coming in.”

Jonnie backed Windsplitter off.

The freighter discharged with a dusty roar. The blade machines raced about neatening up the pile. The first load was ready for the buckets on the conveyor belt.

A red light flared. A horn went off.

The ore duster operator cursed and banged at his controls.

All activity stopped.

The air around the operator’s dome and mask might well have turned blue from his cursing.

Char came rumbling like a tank out of the dome of the transshipment control office, shouting as he came.

Far off was the faint moan of another freighter coming in from an overseas minesite.

It was not a transshipment firing day, but schedules were about to ball up on freighter discharge.

Char was shouting for electronics repair, and somebody in the dome, on the loudspeaker system, was demanding to know where the duty electronics was.

Jonnie could have told them where duty electronics was. He’d seen the employee walking toward the compound fifteen minutes ago.

Char was raving at the operator on the ore duster. The operator was hammering paws on the control panel.

Jonnie slid off his horse and went to them. “I can fix it.”

With a roar that had concussion in it, Char told him to get the out of there!

“No, I can fix it,” said Jonnie.

A voice coming closer said, “Let him fix it. I trained him.” It was Ker.

Char was distracted by the new interruption. He whirled to storm abuse at the midget Psychlo.

Picto-recorder running, Jonnie slid up to the front of the ore duster control panel. He snapped it open. He stood at right angles to the layout of components and pretended to study it. Then he reached in and touched a couple of points, doing nothing to them. Given pictures of this, he could build it!

He closed the box.

He rapidly connected the wire he had earlier loosened.

Char turned back to him after chomping on Ker.

“It’s fixed,” said Jonnie. “It was just a loose wire.”

Ker yelled to the operator, “Try it now!”

The operator did and the ore duster purred.

“See?” said Ker. “I trained him myself.”

Jonnie got back on Windsplitter, using the motion to turn off his picto-recorder.

“It’s working now,” said the operator. Char looked venom at Jonnie. “You keep that horse out of this area. If this was a firing time he’d land in Psychlo!” He went off muttering something about damned animals.

The conveyor belt and buckets and machines were roaring away again, making haste to clear the load before the new freighter came in. The old one took off.

Windsplitter wandered down toward the morgue. This building, remarkable for its refrigerator coils, stood well back. Jonnie turned and looked from it back at the compound. It was a straight course from here, across the transshipment platform and up the hill to the cage.

“And what,” said a voice, “are you doing down here with a picto-recorder?”

It was Terl. He had stepped out of the morgue and had a list in his hand. In the dark reaches of the building, coffins were stacked. Terl had been checking Psychlo corpses scheduled for return home at the semiannual firing.

“Practicing,” answered Jonnie. “For what?” growled Terl.

“Sooner or later you’ll want me to take pictures for you up in the-’

“Don’t talk about that around here!”

Terl tossed his list back of him toward the morgue and stepped close to Jonnie. He yanked the picto-recorder off Jonnie’s chest, snapping the holding straps. The thongs bit into Jonnie’s back as they resisted just before they gave.

Turning the machine over, Terl snapped the disc out of it, threw it in the dust, and stamped on it with his boot heel.

He poked sharp talons into Jonnie’s belt and flipped out four more discs.

“They’re just blanks,” said Jonnie.

Terl threw those into the dust and ground them under a heavy toe.

He shoved the picto-recorder back at Jonnie. “It’s a company rule not to record a transshipment area.”

“When you want me to take pictures,” said Jonnie, “I hope you’ll be able to make them out.”

“I better be able to,” snarled Terl illogically and stamped back into the morgue.

Later, when Jonnie was let in to take Chrissie supplies, he had no trouble slipping the earlier discs from his incoming pack to Chrissie’s outgoing pack.

But they weren’t the circuit diagrams that would detect uranium.

Out of plain revenge that night he showed his whole crew the earlier pictures he had taken. He showed them all the locations of the whole transshipment area. He would have to do it again later when proper plans were formed. But for now he wanted to show them pictures of Chrissie and Pattie.

The shots showed the girls, showed the collars, showed the switch box to the bars. But mainly it showed their faces, the faces of a little girl and a beautiful woman.

The Scots watched the pictures, attentive to the geography of the transshipment area, the battle planes, the breathe-gas dump, the fuel dump, the morgue, and the platform. But when they saw the pictures of Chrissie and Pattie they began with pity and ended with rage.

Robert the Fox had to speak again to prevent them from tearing over right then and ripping the place to pieces. The pipers played a mournful lament.

If the Scots had been enthusiastic before, they were deadly determined and angry now.

But Jonnie lay unable to sleep that night. He had had it right in the camera- the circuit of a uranium detector. He had not memorized it. He had counted upon getting the pictures. He blamed himself for depending on machines. Machines were all right but they did not replace man.

There would come a day of reckoning with Terl. He vowed it bitterly.

     In the clear, cold noon they were on their way for a first look at the lode. Jonnie, Robert the Fox, the three who looked similar to Jonnie, and the two Scot mining shift leaders who had been appointed sped along in the small personnel carrier, high above the grandeur of the Rockies.

Terl had come early that morning, threatening and secretive. His ground

car had been spotted some time since by a posted sentry and Jonnie had been warned.

Wrapped in a puma skin against the dawn chill, Jonnie met the ground car as it stopped. Breakfast was just over in the mess hall and a warning had been sent to stay inside. The grounds were nearly deserted and there was nothing to distract Terl’s attention.

He got out, tightening his breathe-mask, and stood there tossing the remote control box idly into the air and catching it in his paw.

“Why,” said Terl, “are you interested in a uranium detector?”

Jonnie frowned and looked mystified- or tried to.

“I heard after you left the other day that you ‘repaired’ the ore duster. With a picto-recorder around your neck? Ha!”

Jonnie decided on a sudden verbal attack. “You expect me to go up into those mountains without knowing what to avoid? You expect me to go tearing around getting myself wrecked-”

“Wrecked?”

“Physically wrecked from uranium contamination-”

“See here, animal, you can’t talk this way to me!”

“-when you know very well that I could be made sick if I didn’t avoid uranium dust! You’ve told me there’s uranium up there! And you expect me-!”

“Wait a minute,” said Terl. “What are you talking about?”

“Mining toxicology!” snapped Jonnie.

The kilted sentry who had called him was standing by the mess hall door, looking daggers and dirks at Terl.

“Sentry!” shouted Jonnie. “Grab a book, any book in English, and bring it here! Fast!”

Jonnie turned back to Terl. The running footsteps of the sentry could be heard inside the building. Terl put the control box back in his pocket so his gun paw could be free just in case.

The sentry rushed out with an ancient volume labeled The Poems of Robert Burns. He had snatched it from the parson who was reading at breakfast. It would have to do.

Jonnie snapped it open. He put his finger on a line that said, “Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie…”

“See there!” he demanded of Terl. “In the presence of uranium, a man’s hair falls out, his teeth fall out, his skin develops red blotches, and his bones crumble! And it happens in just a few weeks of exposure.”

“You don’t explode?” said Terl.

“It doesn’t say anything here about explosion, but it says that continuous exposure to uranium dust can be fatal! Read it yourself!”

Terl looked at a line that said something about, “O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!” and said, “So it does. I didn’t know that.”

“You know it now,” said Jonnie. He closed and thumped the book. “I found this by accident. You didn’t tell me. Now are you going to let me have a detector or aren’t you?”

Terl looked thoughtful. “So your bones turn to dust, do they? And it takes a few months?”

“Weeks,” said Jonnie.

Terl began to laugh. His paw dropped from his belt gun and he swatted himself in the chest, catching his breath. “Well,” he said at length, “I guess you’ll just have to take your chances, won’t you?”

It hadn’t worked. But Terl was totally off the scent now. Actually feeling more secure.

“That wasn’t what I came over here for, anyway,” said Terl. “Can we go some place less public?”

Jonnie handed the book back to the sentry with a wink to reassure him. The Scot had enough sense not to grin. But Terl was rummaging around the ground car.

He beckoned Jonnie to follow and took him back of the chapel where there were no windows. He had a big roll of maps and photos and he sat down on the ground. He motioned for Jennie to hunker down.

“Your animals are all trained?” said Terl.

“As well as can be expected.”

“Well, notice you’ve had a couple extra weeks.”

“They’ll do.”

“All right, now. We have to come to the time to be real miners!” He rolled out the map. It was a patch-up of sectional running shots from a recon drone, and it condensed about two thousand square miles of the Rocky Mountains from Denver to the west. “You can read one of these?”

“Yes,” said Jonnie.

Terl snapped the head of a canyon with his talon. “It’s there.” Jonnie could almost feel the surge of greed in Terl. His voice was a conspiratorial mutter. “It’s a lode of white quartz with streamers of pure gold in it. It ’s a freak. Exposed by a landslide in recent years.” And he took a large photograph out of the pack.

There it was, a diagonal slash of white in the red side of a canyon. Terl took a closer shot and showed it. Fingers of pure gold could be seen threading through the quartz.

Jonnie would have spoken but Terl held up his paw to stop him. “You fly over and take a close look at it. When you’ve seen it and gotten it oriented as a mining problem, you come back and see me and I will clarify any questions as to procedure.” He tapped the location on the larger map. “Memorize that spot.” Jonnie noted that the map bore no markings. Clever Terl. No clues if the map went adrift.

He sat there and let Jonnie study the map.

Jonnie knew these mountains, but he had never had a detailed picture of them from this angle: above.

Terl put all his papers away except the map. “Hold on to that.” He stood up.

“How long do we have to get it out?” said Jonnie.

“Day 91 of the coming year. That’s six and a half months away.”

“That’s also winter,” said Jonnie.

Terl shrugged. “It’s always winter up there. Ten months of winter and two months of fall.” He laughed. “Fly over and look at it, animal. Take a week or two to study it out. And then come over and we’ll have a private meeting. And this is confidential, do you hear? Outside of your animals, say nothing.”

Terl had gone off playing catch with the control box. His ground car roared away back to the compound.

A couple of hours later Jonnie’s party was flying high above the Rockies.

“That’s the first time,” said one of the Scots behind Jonnie, “that I knew Robbie Burns was toxic.”

Jonnie turned. He thought the sentry must have gotten aboard. “You speak

Psychlo that well?”

“Of course,” said the Scot and showed the ruler bruises on the back of his hand. He was one of the lads chosen because of his resemblance to Jonnie. “I was putting an ear to a window on the second floor above you. He can’t understand English, can he?”

“One of our very few advantages,” said Jonnie. “I didn’t get the uranium detector.”

“Well,” said Robert the Fox, “it’s a very optimistic man that thinks he can win all the battles. What are all those villages down there?”

It was true. There were old towns here and there throughout this section of the mountains.

“They’re deserted,” said Jonnie. “I’ve been to some of them. No population but rats. Mining ghost towns.”

“‘Tis a sad thing” said Robert the Fox. “All this space and all kinds of food and no people. And over in Scotland there’s little space that will grow anything and hardly any food at all. It ’s a dark chapter in history we’ve been through.”

“We’ll change it,” said a young Scot behind him.

“Aye,” said Robert the Fox. “If we have any luck. All this great broad world full of food and no people! What are the names of those grand peaks down there?”

“I don’t know,” said Jonnie. “If you look on the mine map you’ll see they just give them numbers. I think they had names once but people forgot. That one over there we just call ‘Highpeak.’ “

“Hey!” said a young Scot. “There’s sheep down on that mountainside!” He was using a hand telescope.

“They’re called bighorns,” said Jonnie. “It’s quite a feat to hunt one down. They can stand on a ledge not bigger than your hand and sail off and land on another one not wider than two fingers.”

“And there’s a bear!” said the Scot. “What a big one!”

“The bears will go into hibernation soon,” said Jonnie. “I’m surprised one is out at this altitude.”

“Some wolves are following him,” said the Scot.

“Laddies,” said Robert the Fox, “we are hunting bigger game! Keep your eye out for the canyon.”

Jonnie spotted it shortly before one o’clock.