Battlefield Earth (35 page)

     Jonnie gazed with horror into the deep canyon. There was a flying drill platform down there, close to the river, and it was in real trouble.

It was the day after their return from Uravan. The storm had blown over, leaving a sparkling, white-coated day. But at these altitudes it was bitterly cold, and the canyon, as ever, was funneling winds into torrents of turbulence.

Two Scots, one of them Dunneldeen, the other a black-haired youth named Andrew, were down on that platform trying to recover the staircase, which had fallen nine hundred feet down into the frozen river. Sixty feet long and built of rods, it had pierced the river ice, leaving an end on the bank.

They had grappled the end with a hook lowered from the flying drill platform and had tried to fly the staircase up and out of the river. It was caught underwater. Now sprays coming up through the broken ice were coating the platform with water that instantly froze, increasing the platform’s weight by the moment.

He knew what they were trying to do. They were trying to look busy for the benefit of the recon drone that would be there in a moment or two. The rest of the shift crew were strung out along the chasm’s edge untangling the masses of cables and drums that had been scrambled by the storm. Dunneldeen and Andrew had gone down there to look busy salvaging the staircase.

Jonnie had been returning in the small passenger plane to work out some new method of getting the gold. He didn’t have a copilot. He had only old Doctor MacDermott, the historian, who had begged a ride so that he could come up to the lode and write the saga of the storm. The ancient Scot, who had considered himself expendable at the recruiting, was a very wise and valued dean of literature, but he was not in the slightest bit trained in their work and frail beyond estimation, with hardly the muscle and skill one needed. There was no time at all to drop down and pick up a trained and agile Scot from the site on the cliff.

They were using local radios. All the items of equipment had them built in, for their range and the range of mine intercoms was only a mile. The transmissions were also masked by the mountains to the east. The radio down there on the platform was evidently open.

“Throw off the reel brakes, Andrew!” Dunneldeen was saying tensely. “The motors are overheating.”

“They wilna disengage. ‘Tis this spray!”

“Andrew! Disengage the hooks to that staircase!”

“They wilna budge, Dunneldeen! And the thing is stuck under the ice!”

The whine of the overloaded motors was also coming through the open mikes.

Jonnie knew what was going to happen. They couldn’t fly the platform free. They couldn’t drop down into the rolling, freezing water. And that platform was going to go up in flames any moment.

Such a platform had rudimentary flying controls, usually covered by a lead glass canopy. But the humans didn’t use the canopies and Dunneldeen was down there in the midst of flying spray that was coating not only himself but also the controls with instant ice.

The recon drone would be by in another second or two. It must see efforts to mine, not disaster. Jonnie could hear its nearing rumble outside his open side port.

Its hypersonic explosion would occur any moment now. The instant it went by he would have to somehow get those two off that platform.

“Doctor Mac,” shouted Jonnie into the rear of the plane. “Get ready. You’re about to be a hero!”

“Oh my goodness,” said Doctor MacDermott.

“Open the side door and throw out two life lines!” shouted Jonnie. “Make sure our ends are secure to this ship.”

The old man scrambled about, grabbing at unfamiliar coils and tangles of cables in the rear. “Hold on!” shouted Jonnie.

He sent the passenger craft plummeting a thousand feet into the racketing, wind-blasting roar of the chasm. The walls flashed by.

Doctor MacDermott’s stomach stayed a thousand feet up. The nearby white and red blur of canyon walls streaked past the open door and he stared at it open-mouthed, barely able to hold on.

Jonnie cracked open the plane’s radio. “Dunneldeen!” he yelled into the mike. “Stand by to abandon that thing!”

There was the crack of the sonic boom. The recon drone had passed.

Dunneldeen’s fur-hooded face was looking up, and Jonnie realized it was not for the passenger plane but for the benefit of the drone so Terl would suppose it was Jonnie there.

Smoke was coming from the platform motor housings, blue smoke, different from the geysers of spray.

The ice-pressured river was taking full advantage of the hole just made to geyser its way to freedom.

Andrew was pounding on the encrusted winch with a sledge. Then he dropped the sledge and seized a bottle of burning gas and tried to open its controls in order to burn the cable in two. The bottle was thick with ice and would not open.

The passenger plane came down to twenty-five feet from the top of the platform, Jonnie madly punching control buttons to hold it there. Smoke from the burning motors of the platform swirled, chokingly, into the plane above.

“Doctor Mac!” shouted Jonnie. “Throw out those life lines!”

The old man fumbled with the coils. He could not tell one cable from another. Then he found an end. He pitched it out the door.

Scrambling, he let about fifty feet uncoil and then fastened the cable to a clamp in the plane as best he could. Jonnie maneuvered the cable end over the spray-battered platform.

“I cannot find another cable end!” wailed Doctor MacDermott.

Jonnie shouted into the mike, “Grab that rope!”

“You, Andrew!” shouted Dunneldeen.

Twenty feet of cable from the plane coiled down on the platform and was promptly covered with spray that instantly turned to ice.

Andrew took a turn of cable around his arm.

“Don’t put it around your arm!” shouted Jonnie. If Dunneldeen were below him the tightening of the rope would break or sever Andrew’s arm. “Put it around that sledge hammer!”

Tongues of flame were coming from the motor housing of the platform.

Andrew managed to break the sledge loose from the ice. He took two turns of cable around the head of it.

“Grab hold!” yelled Jonnie.

Andrew grabbed the slippery sledge handle with his mittened hands.

Jonnie jumped the passenger plane up twenty feet, pulling Andrew up and leaving the end of the cable dangling over Dunneldeen.

“The captain abandons ship!” said Dunneldeen and grabbed the cable end.

Jonnie put the passenger plane up slowly. It would not do to whip-snap the two men off into the roiling river to be swept under the ice.

Andrew was hanging to the sledge twenty feet below the passenger plane. Dunneldeen was dangling forty feet below on the same rope.

“I think this clamp is slipping!” wailed Doctor MacDermott in the back.

The iced mittens of the men below were certainly slipping. It was impossible to raise them a thousand feet to the top of the gorge. Jonnie looked wildly at the river.

The flying platform below exploded in a violence of orange flame.

The passenger plane bucked in the concussion.

Jonnie looked down at the men. The flames had hit Dunneldeen. His leggings were on fire!

Jonnie swept the plane downriver. With frantically racing fingers he brought it to forty-five feet above the snow-coated ice of the stream. Was that ice thick enough?

He dipped the plane. Dunneldeen struck the deep snow. Jonnie dragged him a hundred feet through the drifts on the river to put the fire out.

He saw a shelf beside the river, narrow and snow-covered.

Bringing the plane within feet of the canyon wall, he lowered Dunneldeen onto it and then dropped further.

Andrew’s gloves, which had been slipping down the sledge handle inch by inch, let go, and he fell the last ten feet. He almost went off the ledge. Dunneldeen grabbed him.

Jonnie, battling the wind, turned the plane around and brought the open door to the ledge.

The two men scrambled in, helped by Doctor MacDermott.

Andrew reeled in the cable and got the side door shut. Jonnie vaulted the plane two thousand feet up and maneuvered to land at the pad on the top.

Doctor MacDermott was stammering with apologies to the two men. “I could not find a second rope.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Dunneldeen. “I even got a sleigh ride out of it!”

Doctor MacDermott was clucking over his charred leggings, terribly relieved to find Dunneldeen was just singed and not badly burned.

“I had my chance to be a hero,” said Doctor MacDermott “and I muffed it!”

“You did just fine,” said Andrew. “Just fine.”

Jonnie got out of the plane and walked over to the canyon edge. They followed him. The shift crew was also staring down, their faces shiny from the perspiration of strain. It had been a wild thing to watch.

Shaking his head, Jonnie looked down a thousand feet to where the edge of the staircase was imbedded in the bank. The flying platform had vanished under the ice. The snow around the place was pockmarked with the impacts of broken bits and blackened from the explosion.

Jonnie faced Dunneldeen and the crew. “That,” said Jonnie, “is that!”

The shift boss and Dunneldeen said, almost in chorus, “But we can’t quit!”

“No more of these acrobatics in thin air,” said Jonnie. “No more hanging over this edge with our hearts in our throats. Come with me.”

They followed him back to the pad. He pointed straight down. “Below us,” said Jonnie, “that vein is extending into the cliff. It ’s a pocket vein. Pockets of gold probably occur every few hundred feet. We’re going to put a shaft down to that vein. Then we’re going to drift along that vein underground to the cliff edge and try to recover that gold from behind!”

They were silent. “But that fissure out there…we can’t blast: it would knock the face of the cliff off.”

“We’re just going to have to use drills.

Point drills to go in with parallel holes. Then vibrating spades to literally cut the rock. It will take time. We can work hard and maybe get there.”

Underground? It dawned on them it was a great idea.

The shift boss and Dunneldeen started making plans to fly in drilling machinery and scrapers and bucket conveyors. Waves of relief began to spread. The shift change crew flew in and when they heard about it they cheered. They had hated hanging by their heels in greedy space with little return to show.

“Get it set up and rolling before the next pass-over of the drone,” said Jonnie. “Terl’s gone crazy but he’s a miner. He’ll see what we’re doing and hold off. It ’s like taking rock out with teaspoons, so we’ll work this all three shifts around the clock. It’ll be easier to work underground in this weather anyway. We’ll use the dig-out to enlarge this flat space. Now where’s a transit so we can get the exact direction down and over for the dig?”

The sound of the plane revved up. Dunneldeen was going back for pilots and equipment.

We might make it yet, thought Jonnie.

     A worried Zzt watched Terl and a swarm of mechanics working over the old bomber drone.

The huge underground garages and hangars resounded with the whine of drills and clang of hammers.

Since the last semiannual personnel intake, Zzt had gotten his mechanics back; aside from exchanging recon drones for refueling every three days (a drone he considered useless), his work was not backlogged. Terl had left the transport chief and section alone until now. Terl himself had serviced the twenty battle planes in the outside field. So aside from this present unexpected project, Zzt had little about which to complain.

But this idiocy! The bomber drone? He knew he had better speak.

Terl was in the huge plane’s control room working with presets of buttons. He was covered with grease and sweat. He had a small remote keyboard in his hand, and he was punching settings into the main panels of the ship.

“Scotland…Sweden,” Terl was saying, consulting his tables and notes and pushing ship buttons. There were no seats in the place for it would never be piloted, and Terl was hunched uncomfortably on a balance motor housing.

“…Russia…Alps…Italy…China…no. Alps…India…China…Italy…Africa…”

“Terl,” said Zzt timidly.

“Shut up,” snapped Terl, not even looking up.

“…Amazon…Andes…Mexico…Rocky Mountains! Rocky Mountains one, two, and three!”

“Terl,” repeated Zzt. “This bomber drone has not been flown in a thousand years. It ’s a wreck.”

“We’re rebuilding it, aren’t we?” snarled Terl, finishing his presets and standing up.

“Terl, maybe you don’t know that this was the original conquest drone. It was the one that gassed this planet before our takeover.”

“Well, I’m loading it with gas canisters, ain’t I?”

“But Terl, we’ve already conquered this planet a thousand or more years ago. You release kill gas now, even in just a few places, and it might hit our own minesites.”

“They use breathe-gas,” snapped Terl, shouldering by Zzt and walking back into the huge plane. Workmen were trundling up big gas canisters from deep underground storage. They had to burnish them gingerly to get the crud of ages off them. Terl energetically directed the workers hooking them in place. “Fifteen canisters! You’ve only brought fourteen. Get another one!” Some workmen rushed off and Terl was hooking wires up to the canister release valves, muttering to himself, checking color coding.

“Terl, they only kept this drone as a curiosity piece. These things are dangerous. It ’s one thing to remote-guide a recon drone with its small motors- they don’t override the controls! But this thing has motors like a dozen ore freighters. The signals it sends back to a remote get overridden by its own motors. It could charge around and release gas almost anyplace. They’re too erratic for competent use. And once you start them you can’t stop them. Like transshipment firing, they’re irreversible.”

“Shut up,” said Terl.

“In the regulations,” persisted Zzt, “it says these things only get used in ‘most extreme emergency!’ There is no emergency, Terl.”

“Shut up,” said Terl, going on with his wire matching.

“And you’ve ordered it permanently parked in front of the automatic firing bay. We need that for servicing ore freighters. This is a war drone, and they only use them for primary attack on a planet and never use them afterward except in a withdrawal. There is no war, and we’re not withdrawing from this planet.”

Terl had had enough. He threw down his notes and loomed over Zzt. “lam the best judge of these things. Where there is no war department on a planet, the security chief has that post. My orders are final. This drone gets parked at the hangar firing door and don’t you move it! As to control,” he shook the small one-foot-square box in front of Zzt’s face, “all it needs is the date setting and fire buttons pushed in and there’s nothing erratic after that! This drone will go and do what it’s supposed to do! And it stays on standby!”

Zzt backed up. Dollies were moving the huge old relic over to the firing door where it would be in the way of everything and leave no other door to service freighters.

“Those were awfully funny locations you were punching in,” Zzt said faintly.

Terl was holding a big wrench. He walked closer to Zzt. “They’re man-names for planet locations. They’re the places where mar.-animals were left.”

“That little handful?” ventured Zzt.

Terl screamed something and threw the wrench at him. Zzt ducked and it went clanging across the hangar floor, making workers dodge.

“You’re acting kind of insane, Terl,” said Zzt.

“Only alien races ever go insane!” screamed Terl.

Zzt stood aside as they dollied the ancient drone to the firing door.

“It’s going to stay right there,” yelled Terl at nobody in particular. “It’ll get fired anytime in the next four months.” And for sure on Day 93, he smiled to himself.

Zzt wondered for a moment whether he ought to shoot Terl when they were in some quiet place. Terl had restored weapons to the employees, refilled the weapon racks in compound halls, let them wear belt guns again. Then he remembered that Terl had an envelope parked somewhere “in case of death.”

Later, Zzt mentioned it privately to Numph. Zzt liked to hunt and the bomber drone would wipe out most of the game again. Numph had also liked to hunt once.

But Numph just sat there and looked woodenly at him.

The bomber drone, the one originally shipped in to gas and conquer the planet, remained standing at the firing door, in everybody’s way, filled with lethal gas, preset, just requiring a few punches of the remote Terl kept in his own possession.

Zzt shuddered every time he passed it. Terl had obviously gone stark raving mad.

That night in his quarters Terl did feel spinny. Another day and he had gotten absolutely no clue as to what Jayed was up to, what the agent was looking for.

Terl followed the recon drone photos. The animals were burrowing underground now, which was smart. They might possibly make it, and if they didn’t he had his answers.

He looked in on the females every evening, throwing wood and meat at them. Sometimes he found packages outside the cage door- he chose not to think about how they got there-and threw them in too. He’d fixed the water, but so it overflowed. The bigger one was sitting up again. He never saw them without being nagged by the puzzle of “psychic powers”; he wondered which one of them sent out the impulses and whether they could be read on a scope. Oh, well, as long as the animals up in the mountains worked, he’d keep these females alive. It was good leverage.

But on Day 93, ha! He could not count on the animals not talking. He could not count on the company or government not catching up with him. The animals had to go, and this time all of them.

Terl fell asleep floundering around in a half-conceived possibility. Jayed was denying him gold. It was Jayed’s fault.

But how did one commit the perfect murder of a top agent of the I.B.I.? It made one’s head spin to try to work it out. Meantime he would be the model of efficiency. He had to look like the greatest, most cautious and alert security chief the company had ever known.

Was he crazy, really? No. Just clever.