Battlefield Earth (36 page)

     Jonnie was going home.

In a canyon above the village meadow, they unloaded four horses and a pack from the freight plane. The breath of the horses hung about them in small, thin puffs. The horses, very recently wild, had not liked the ride and stamped about and snorted when their blindfolds were removed. The air was clear and frosty at this altitude.

Snow from the recent storm covered the world and silenced it.

Angus MacTavish and Parson MacGilvy were with Jonnie. A pilot had come along so that the plane could be moved in case the visit lasted longer than a day. The recon drone had already gone by when they took off from the base and the plane should not be there when it passed again.

A week ago Jonnie had awakened in the night with the sudden realization that he might know where some uranium was. His own village! He had no great hope for it, but the signs were there in the illness of his people. Possibly there was no great amount, but also possibly there was more than that single rock from Uravan. He felt a trifle guilty for having to have an ulterior motive to go home, for there were other reasons. His people should be moved, both because of their continuous exposure to radiation and also because they should not be exposed in any future bombing.

Jonnie and his men had scoured the mountains for another possible home, and only yesterday had they found one. It was an old mining town on the western slope, lower in altitude, open through a narrow pass to a western plain. A brook ran down the street in the town center. Many of the buildings and houses still retained glass. Wild cattle and game were plentiful. But even better there was a large, half-mile-long tunnel behind the town that could serve as refuge. A coal deposit was on the hill nearby. The place was beautiful. It had no trace of uranium in it.

Jonnie did not think the people of the village would move. He had tried before as a youth and even his father had thought he was just being restless. But he had to try again.

Angus and the parson had insisted on coming with him. He had explained the dangers of exposure to radiation to them and had not wanted to put them at risk. But Angus simply waved a breathe-gas bottle and promised to check it out ahead of them and not be foolish about it, and the parson, being a wise and experienced member of the clergy, knew Jonnie might need help.

They knew better than to simply fly a plane into the meadow. The people had seen recon drones all their lives, but a plane close up might terrify them.

     “Wake up, Jonnie! Wake up! It flashed!”

Jonnie pried himself awake. It was still dark, though dawn was late at this season of the year. It was disorienting to find himself in his own room with Angus shaking him and a miner’s light burning on the table.

Suddenly he grasped the import of what Angus was saying and got up and began to get into his buckskins.

Angus had awakened very early and had been thirsty, and Aunt Ellen had heard him clattering around the buckets. There had been no water and Angus didn’t like eating snow, so Aunt Ellen had said she would go get some water. But Angus said no, he’d get the water if she showed him where it was, and she pointed out the spring where everybody got their water on the edge of the village, and he took a hide bucket and went. Because he’d promised Jonnie not to go anywhere without testing, he’d taken a vial of breathe-gas and the remote, and he had been tossing the breathe-gas bottle thirty feet ahead of him and turning it on and off and WHAM, it flashed!

Hopping about with excitement, Angus was handing Jonnie bits of clothing to rush him on. He pushed Jonnie out the door and they walked toward the spring at the village edge.

Angus stopped him. He triggered the remote.

WHAM!

There was a flash and thud of breathe-gas exploding.

The parson, awakened by the commotion, joined them. Angus did it again for his benefit.

A sudden chill came over Jonnie, and not from the morning cold. That flash was right alongside the path where the villagers went two and three times a day for water. And more. As a little boy he had been a mutineer on a subject of what work he would do. He was a man, he had said-illogically since he had begun this soon after he could walk- and he would hunt, but he would not sweep floors or bring water. And he never had fetched water from that spring. He had even watered his horses at another spring way up the slope. The chill came from his certainty that he himself was not immune to radiation. He had simply never gone to that spring. By a fluke he had escaped contamination. All because hide buckets slopped on him.

But the villagers, particularly the children and women and older people who did draw water, were daily being hit with radiation. He felt a deeper chill for his people.

Angus wanted to dash up and dig under the snow. Jonnie, aided by the parson, held him back.

“We’ve no protective shields,” said Jonnie. “We need lead, lead glass, something. But let’s mark this out so it becomes a prohibited zone, and then let’s look further.”

They found by cautious sallies that the radiation from that spot extended, with enough force to explode breathe-gas, about thirty feet in all directions. Angus apparently had hit it dead center. They marked the ring with ashes taken from an abandoned cabin hearth, and with an axe Jonnie collected some stakes and drove them in to form a circle. Jonnie took some plaited rope and wound it around the stakes.

Jimson, along with some others attracted by the explosions, wanted to know what they were doing. Jonnie left it to the parson. As he worked he heard fragments of the parson’s explanation. Something about spirits. But whatever it was Jimson shortly began to route people around the spot in a businesslike way. Jonnie was sure it would become taboo to walk within that circle. It was only a few steps further to avoid it altogether.

Dawn was there. They had to work fast to be out of there before midday, and there might be other spots. The recon drone passed near here and lately was overflying around noon. He wanted no pictures of this operation on Terl’s screens. A circle of rope was nothing; it would look like a stock corral. Tracks were nothing. People and horses and dogs wandered around. But the plane up the canyon and three differently garbed people were something else.

While they chewed some breakfast Aunt Ellen brought them, Jonnie looked out across the expansive meadow. What a lot of ground to cover!

He made up his mind. It was a risk, but very brief exposures, according to toxicology texts, could be tolerated.

He got an air mask and bottles out of the gear Angus had brought. He filled his pockets with breathe-gas flasks. He got a bucket of ashes. He got on one of their horses.

“I am going to crisscross this meadow at a dead run,” he told Angus and the parson. “Back and forth and back and forth on paths thirty feet apart. I’ll be holding a breathe-gas vial in my hand, turned slightly on. Every time it flashes, I’ll throw down a handful of ashes and then hold up my arm. Now, parson, I want you to stand on that knoll and make a sketch of this valley, and you, Angus, tell him each time I hold up my hand. Got it?”

They got it. The parson went up to the knoll with a pad and pen and Angus following him.

The three young men who had voted to move wanted to know whether they could help. Jonnie told them yes, they could have fresh horses ready.

Jonnie looked around. All was ready. The red-gold sun made the snow glisten. He made sure his air mask was tight, opened the breathe-gas vial, and put a heel to the horse.

Only a minute later the vial in his hand flashed. He threw down ashes, raised his arm, and sped on at a dead run. Angus’s yell floated to him on the still air. The parson was marking it on his sketch.

Back and forth, back and forth across the meadow. A flash, a handful of ashes, a raised hand, the echo of Angus’s yell and the thud of the flying hoofs.

He took a new horse, opened a new bottle, and was off again.

Villagers gazed dully on the scene. Jonnie Goodboy had often done strange things. Yes, he was quite a horseman. Everybody knew that. It was a bit of a mystery why he kept lighting a torch every now and then. But old Jimson had some explanation from the clergyman who had come with Jonnie-a real clergyman from some village named Scotland. They hadn’t known there was any nearby village. Oh, yes, there had been. It was a long time ago. It was a couple of ridges over. Well, in all this snow one didn’t get a chance to get about much. But Jonnie Goodboy sure could ride couldn’t he? Look at the snow fly!

Two hours, four lathered horses, sixteen vials of breathe-gas, and a tired Jonnie later, they got ready to take their leave. They were a bit pressed for time, too pressed to evaluate the map.

They had decided to leave the horses as a gift and would have to walk to the plane.

The parson was explaining to Jimson that people must stay well away from those ash marks, and Jimson respectfully said he would see to it even if Brown Limper was skeptical.

Aunt Ellen was looking frightened. “You’re leaving again, Jonnie.” She was trying to work out how to tell him that he was the only family she had.

“Would you like to come with me?” said Jonnie.

Well no. This was their home, Jonnie. He should come back. Going to wild places was in his blood, she guessed.

He promised to try to come back and then gave her some gifts he had saved until last: a great big stainless steel kettle and three knives and a fur robe with sleeves in it!

She pretended to like that very much, but she was crying when he turned back at the edge of the upper path and waved. She had a horrible feeling she would never see him again.

     It was an intense hum of intent men in the room of the old mining town near the lode. Several groups were hard at work.

It had amused the Scots very much to take over the offices of the “Empire Dauntless Mining Corporation.” The building had been almost intact and when cleaned up made an acceptable operations room.

Jonnie half-suspected that somebody had rebuilt the town after the lead lode mine had played out. It was too unlike other towns. He tried to figure out why anyone would reconstruct a town after its ore was gone, but evidence certainly showed someone had. Next door was a place called the “Bucket of Blood Saloon” that the parson had gravely put “off limits.” It still had its glasses and mirrors intact, and paintings of nearly nude dancing girls and cupids could dimly be made out. Across the street was an office labeled “Wells Fargo” and another one labeled “Jail.”

They all lived in the “London Palace Elite Hotel,” which had labeled suites named after men who must have been famous in mining. Three of the old widows queened it over a coal-burning galley Angus had explained to them. It had running water- luxury!

The “Empire Dauntless” offices contained what must have been working models of the mine, and they had found “history pamphlets” in it that talked about the good old wild days of a boom camp and “bad men.” Also curious little leaflets that said “Tour Schedules” and had a daily time and place scheduled for a “bank hold-up.” Paintings of prospectors and mine discoverers and “bad men” had been cleaned off and put back on the walls.

Robert the Fox and two pilots were studiously going over possible plans to hijack an ore freighter. They had no craft that could possibly fly to Scotland or Europe, for their mine equipment could only go a few hundred miles. They had been going around and around this problem ever since the night the demon had told them about “bomber drones.” They felt they had a responsibility to alert not only the Scots but other peoples they might find traces of. They dared not alert the Psychlos they were up to anything. To intercept in the air, leaving the Psychlos to believe the freighter had gone down over the sea, was the only thing they kept coming up with. But to silence the Psychlo pilot radio, to board a freighter plane to plane in midair, were some of the things they couldn’t work out.

Another group- two of the leaders who were off shift, with Thor and Dunneldeen and some of the miners-were going over mining progress.

They had gotten down to the lode and were drifting along it inch by inch toward the cliff. The quartz they were taking out was pure and beautiful, but it had no gold in it. Jonnie had explained to them, from references, that it was a lode with pockets. Wire gold veins only had pockets of gold every few hundred feet. It was not continuous valuable ore. They were getting tired of mining pure white quartz with no gold to show for it. They were trying to figure out how close they were to the fissure in the cliff. It had widened a tiny amount, which worried them.

The historian, Doctor MacDermott, was off by himself, chair tilted against a wall, reading industriously from things his scout had lately brought in from a collapsed school library in a little mining town.

Jonnie, Angus, the parson, and the schoolmaster were clustered over the parson’s sketch of the valley.

The positions of the live radiation points were in a line. At first Jonnie had thought it might be a vein of uranite popping to the surface at intervals. But the points were too regular.

“They are roughly one hundred feet apart,” said Jonnie. “In a straight line.”

They were staring at the map, thinking, when Doctor MacDermott came over.

“It’s something funny I’ve got here, MacTyler,” said the historian, shaking his book. “The Chinko guidebook was mistaken about the Air Force Academy.”

Jonnie shrugged. “They often said things just to please the Psychlos.”

“But they called the Academy a primary defense base.”

“I know,” said Jonnie. “They wanted it to sound big because it was the last battle fought on the planet.”

“But there was a ‘primary defense base,’ ” said the historian, shaking the book he held.

Jonnie looked at it. It was “Regulations Regarding and Governing the Evacuation of School Children in Event of Atomic War, Department of Civil Defense.”

“Apparently,” said the historian, “the children were to be kept in school until the town mayor was flown out of the city…no…ah, here it is: ‘and that all orders thereafter shall be issued from the primary defense base.’ “

“But we don’t know where that was,” said Jonnie.

The old man scuttled back to his pile of books. “Yes, we do!” He came back with a volume concerning congressional hearings into cost overruns of military budgets. MacDermott opened the volume to where he had marked it. He read, ” ‘Question by Senator Aldrich: The Secretary of Defense then freely admits that the overrun of one point six billion dollars in the construction of the primary defense base in the Rocky Mountains was incurred without congressional authority. Is that correct, Mr. Secretary?’ ” MacDermott showed Jonnie and slapped the book shut. “So the Chinkos were wrong while they were being right. There was a ‘primary defense base’ and it was in the Rocky Mountains.” He smiled primly and started back to his chair.

Jonnie went very still. The tomb!

The iron doors, the dead troops on the stairs.

     The tomb!

     “Doctor Mac,” Jonnie called. “Come back here.”

He showed him the sketch. “You told us a story once about a line of nuclear mines laid by the Queen’s Own Highlanders from Dumbarton to Falkirk.”

The historian nodded. He was looking at the sketch. “Did you find some wrecked remains of Psychlo tanks?” he said.

“No,” said Jonnie. “But look. This line goes exactly across the exit from the pass from the lower plains. They’re exactly spaced. They’re in an exact straight line.”

“But with no tanks-’ said the parson.

“They never exploded!” said Jonnie. “Time has just made them fall apart.”

“How did you guess this?” said the historian.

Jonnie smiled. It was a little bit hard to speak. He indicated the sketch to cover his surge of emotion. After a moment he said, “That pass leads up from the western plain to the meadow. And behind that meadow there is a canyon that goes up into the mountains, and way up that canyon is the primary defense base of the ancient government of man!” He filled in the rest of the sketch.

Other groups had sensed something was happening. They began drifting over.

Jonnie felt like crying. He swallowed hard.

“I wondered where they sent all the uranium they’d mined. I knew it must be somewhere….”

The parson touched his arm, not wanting him to run into a future failure with a crash. “They would not have it in the base, laddie.”

“But the base records will tell us where it is!” said Jonnie. “It would have maps, wires of communication…I know we’ll crack this there!”

Angus had been staring at the sketch. “Ooh!” he was saying to himself. “Land mines! And I was just going to burrow in!”

Robert the Fox was already gathering up those in charge to begin their expedition to the tomb.

The historian was diving for references that would tell them the perils of entering tombs.

“Don’t fret, laddie,” said the parson to Jonnie, who was just sitting there staring. “Dawning will tell us if it’s true.”

- Part X -