Battlefield Earth (66 page)

     Debacle!

Cutting in through the chatter of Psychlos in the convoy, but clearly heard because of its high pitch, the piping voice of Bittie said, “There’s nobody left here speaks Russian! Sir Jonnie! There’s nobody to tell the Russians anything!”

“What’s happened?” barked Jonnie.

“Sir Jonnie, the tank shots wiped out the command post here! Sir Robert and Colonel Ivan and the Coordinators are knocked out! I was under a tarpaulin pile. I would have told you sooner but”- a wail-’l couldn’t find my radio!”

Then static and a babble of Psychlo voices on the same wavelength.

Jonnie swung the flying platform north of the ravine and behind it, using it for protection.

Below in the ravine the jammed convoy clogged the road. It couldn’t turn. It couldn’t escape. But neither could they fire into all that ammunition and fuel and breathe-gas without blowing the whole thing a mile high.

There were only a few shots being fired down by the Russian soldiers. Only three of them were on the crest.

The Psychlos must have thought the crest was not held.

There was a battery of commands on the mine radio.

Suddenly the Psychlos unloaded from their vehicles, grabbing blast rifles. They lined up along the bottom of the slope. Breathe-gas masks in place.

More Psychlo commands.

The line of huge bodies surged forward all along the slope bottom. It was four hundred yards or more, very steep yards, up to the crest. They were going to storm the crest!

But no real disaster yet. Dunneldeen was in place up in the sky. It was very obvious that all he had to do was wait for those Psychlos to get halfway up that slope and then set his guns on stun and knock them flat and unconscious.

Then Bittie’s voice again. “The Russians don’t understand! They’re rushing up to the crest!”

Jonnie lifted the platform a little higher to see. Bittie himself seemed confused. There was nothing wrong with the Russians manning that long top of the ravine’s left side. In fact, they’d better.

Yes, the reserve group of about thirty Russians were sprinting from in back of the crest, their assault rifles ready. The upcoming line of Psychlos was about a hundred yards up now and still had three hundred yards of very steep slope to climb.

In just a few moments now, when those Psychlos were far enough up from their trucks, Dunneldeen could make a pass with guns and stun them flat.

Bittie’s voice, “These Russians are awful mad about Colonel Ivan! They think he’s dead! They’re not listening!”

Jonnie slammed the flying platform down behind the Russians and jumped off. He started toward the cliff. The Russians had reached it. Several were firing down at the Psychlos.

“Hold off!” Jonnie yelled at them. “That plane will knock them down!”

Not one Russian face turned in his direction. He looked wildly about for one of their officers. He saw one. But the man was yelling something down the slope at the Psychlos and firing a pistol at them.

The officer roared something at his men. They rose up- good lord! They were going to charge!

Before Dunneldeen could make his firing pass, the downslope was loaded with charging, shouting Russians. They were angry, beserk! They stopped, fired, ran, stopped, fired!

The slope was a roaring sheet of flame going both up and down!

Psychlos tried to stem this avalanche of ferocity. Assault rifles were hammering and flaming.

Blast guns were roaring. Dunneldeen, unable to shoot without killing Russians, hung helplessly in despair. One pass and those Psychlos would be knocked into unconsciousness.

The Russians were in among the Psychlos, firing ceaselessly!

The remaining Psychlos tried to run back to their vehicles. The Russians were right on top of them!

Huge bodies went tumbling down the slope. Isolated groups tried to stand their ground. Assault rifles racketed into solid sheets of sound. Then one last Psychlo almost made it to the cab of a truck. A Russian knelt, sighted, and cut him in two.

A cheer went up from the Russians. The slope went quiet. Jonnie surveyed the ruin.

Over a hundred Psychlo bodies. Three dead Russians.

Smoke drifting up from clothing that still burned.

Disaster! They had been there to capture Psychlos!

Jonnie went plunging down the slope. He found the Russian officer standing there, obviously intending to shoot any Psychlo that twitched.

“Find some alive!” Jonnie shouted at him. “Don’t finish off the wounded. Find some alive!”

The Russian looked at him with battle-glazed eyes. Seeing it was Jonnie, he began to unwind a bit. He fished about for some English. “That show Psychlo! They kill colonel!”

Jonnie finally got it across that he wanted them to find any live ones. Neither the officers nor the rest of the Russians thought this very sensible. They did finally understand it. They went poking among the recumbent Psychlos to find any that were still breathing, a fact that could be determined by a flutter of a breathe-mask valve.

They finally located about four that were shot up but still alive. They couldn’t move the thousand-pound bodies very much but they straightened them out.

MacKendrick put in an appearance, walking, half-sliding down the slope. He looked at the four and shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t know much about Psychlo anatomy but I can stop that green blood oozing out.”

One of them had a different tunic from the rest. An engineer? “Do all you can!” he told MacKendrick and hobbled up the slope toward the ambush point.

Bittie was beckoning to him from the top of a rock, then scrambled down and vanished behind it.

Jonnie came up and surveyed the scene. The command post they had chosen was a hollow in the rocks and it was a mess. The Basher tank had scored a hit just above it.

The gear was all smashed up. Their radio was in bits.

Bittie was kneeling beside Sir Robert, lifting his head. The old veteran’s eyes were blinking. He was coming to.

They were stunned with concussion. Some blood was coming out of their ears and noses. Jonnie walked closer. Probably some broken fingers, lots of bruises. None of it serious.

With water from a canteen on a bandana, he went about the work of bringing them around. Robert the Fox,

Colonel Ivan, two Coordinators, and a Scot radioman.

Jonnie clambered up on a rock and looked down the defile. The convoy was all there. Nothing had blown up so the Russians must have been using plain, not radioactive, slugs. But they hadn’t been after the material. They’d been after live Psychlos.

Three Russians and Angus were getting the lead Basher tank open, a trick to do for it was upside-down, which sealed its hatches. Angus got a side port open with a torch. The Russians looked in. Jonnie cupped his hands. “Any alive in there?”

Angus saw him up there, looked into the tank and back up to Jonnie: Angus shook his head negatively. He called back, “Crushed and suffocated!”

Sir Robert had made his way up to Jonnie, very shaky and white of face.

Jonnie looked at him.

Sir Robert started to speak and Jonnie joined him in chorus.

“The best-planned raid in history!”

     It took them three hard-working days to clean up the mess and occupy the Lake Victoria minesite.

The ore road had gone south to skirt the mountain ranges and turned back north to the minesite itself.

In full view when the overcast parted, to the northwest of the minesite, were the Mountains of the Moon. It was a long range that contained at least seven peaks up to sixteen thousand feet high. Right here on the equator, in all this heat and humidity, one didn’t look for snow and ice, but there it was atop those peaks. There were even glaciers up there; now and then the towering tops were briefly visible, blazingly white.

At one time this range had been the border between two or three countries of ancient times. At the period of the Psychlo invasion or perhaps before, the passes had been mined with nuclear tactical weapons. Needless to say, close as the mountains were to the minesite, the Psychlos never went there. There were several small tribes in the Mountains of the Moon, brown and black and even some whites remaining; they were often starved despite the teeming forests and savannahs full of game below them, and although they could come down now, long tradition kept them from approaching the minesite.

An ancient dam the man-maps said was the “Owens Falls Dam” provided power for the minesite, power so plentiful that the Psychlos just left all lights blazing.

This was an extensive minesite with seven underground levels and many branches working for tungsten and cobalt, and it was plentifully supplied with machinery and equipment. But MacArdle in his original raid had blown up their fuel and ammunition plant and all their dumps.

The four wounded Psychlos were in a sealed-off section of the dormitory and breathe-gas was pumping into it. MacKendrick did not have much hope for them but he was working on it.

The problem of the other bodies they had solved. There was no morgue, and fighting time in this equatorial heat, they had hastily gotten forklifts and ore freighters from the minesite and lofted the Psychlo bodies up through the clouds to the freezing temperatures and crusted ice and snow of a mountain peak once called, the man-maps said, “Elgon.” They were up there now, ninety-seven bodies, around a thousand pounds each, neatly laid out in the frigid zone.

“We may have no diplomas,”

Dunneldean had said when they finished, “but it would seem we are pretty good Psychlo undertakers!” And then he looked down from the dizzy altitude to the plains below and added, “Or is it overtakers?” The Scots scorned his joke, it was so terrible.

They had opened up the road with blade scrapers and righted the Basher tank with a crane and driven the vehicles the rest of the way to the minesite. Despite company regulations they stored the fuel, ammunition, and breathe-gas underground out of the way of attack. They were experts in attacking such dumps.

Thor had come back to help them. He said some of the people in the tribes had seen the flashes of the battle and when they heard the last Psychlos were mopped up they had named the day the Tyler Battle day. Thor had flown a hunting party down to the savannah and they had come back with game and there had been a lot of feasting and dancing. “It is sometimes very gratifying, Jonnie, to be taken for you! But I had to disappear during the battle. You can’t be in two places at once.” Thor had spotted the convoy exit from the forest and had discreetly stood by at two hundred thousand feet to assist if needed. He had full picto-recorder discs of the whole battle and was surprised that nobody wanted to see them.

Tired, glad to be out of the rain, they sat around in the huge chairs of the Psychlo recreation hall. Jonnie was looking through the pilot traffic that still spewed out on the printer. Nothing unusual. He threw it down.

“We better get to work,” said Jonnie.

They had been working. What did you call what they’d been doing if not working? Robert the Fox shook his head. Angus looked at his hands, bruised by wielding heavy torches and twisting open oversized locks. Dunneldeen just stared and thought of the flight hours ferrying dead Psychlos to the snow. Colonel Ivan whispered back of a bandaged hand to the Coordinator who then told him what Jonnie had said, and he looked back frowning. Hadn’t his people been killing every Psychlo in sight and driving trucks and cleaning a minesite and doing everything else?

“Well,” said Jonnie, “I hate to have to tell you that we aren’t here to do all

that.”

All right. But then what-

“We’re here,” said Jonnie, “to find out why the Chamco brothers committed suicide.”

The devil with the Chamcos. They were just Psychlos and they’d tried to kill Jonnie-

So Jonnie made a speech. He paused now and then to let the Coordinator catch up for the Russians present.

He told them that they did not know whether or not Psychlo was still there as a functioning planet. He told them about the Galactic Bank note and all the races listed on it, and he remembered he had one and passed it around.

They realized what he was saying. Earth was wide open to counterattack. If the Psychlo planet were still there, it would eventually counterattack with new gas drones. And these other races possibly had means of reaching Earth swiftly. And when they found there were no Psychlo defenses here, they could slaughter the place if they had a mind to.

The only way to find out was to rebuild the teleportation shipment rig and get it cracking. But the Psychlos put on the project had attacked him when he questioned them on that subject. They got it. They also got the fact that no other group or organization was working to handle these problems or the defenses of the planet.

“Which elects us,” Jonnie said.

They agreed.

“So, Angus, I want you to set up that machine they said you used on me to feel that steel splinter. And we’re going to set it up and start looking in Psychlo heads! If we find something and if one of those Psychlos that are still alive can be operated on, we will have somebody we can make rebuild the teleportation rig and we’re in! We can cast picto-recorders out and look at Psychlo and we can look at these other civilizations and then we’ll know where we are. Right now we’re listing in the cloud layers with no direction but down. Without knowing, I think we’re dead men.”

“We have all their mathematics and texts on teleportation,” said Angus.

“I’ve seen them, man. I’ve even held them in my hands!”

“But you haven’t made any sense out of them,” said Jonnie. “I tried for weeks to unravel them. I’m no mathematician but there’s something wrong with those mathematics. They just don’t work out! So we need a Psychlo who won’t commit suicide if we ask him.”

“Tell me, Jonnie,” said Dr. MacKendrick, “I see no evidence of anything in their heads. You can’t X-ray, or whatever you call it, thoughts!”

“When I was lying around trying to get back the use of my hand and arm,” said Jonnie, “I got hold of a lot of man-books on the subject of the brain. And you know what I found?”

They didn’t know.

“Way back when man had hospitals and lots of surgeons and engineers,” said Jonnie, “clear back, maybe twelve hundred years ago, they were experimenting with planting electric capsules in the heads of babies to regulate their behavior. To make them laugh or cry and get hungry just by pressing a button.”

“What a disgusting experiment,” said Robert the Fox.

“They had an idea,” said Jonnie, “that they could control the whole population if they put electric capsules in their heads.”

The Coordinator translated for Colonel Ivan. He said there was a myth that that had been tried- controlling whole populations- in Russia, and nobody liked it.

“I don’t know they ever succeeded,” said Jonnie. “But when I looked this Chamco thing over, I had a clue about it. Why should two hitherto cooperative renegades, happily signed up on good contracts, suddenly attack me when I said certain words? I have reviewed the discs somebody cut. I was pressing them to rebuild the teleportation transshipment rig and they started to get upset and then I said these words: ‘If you will explain to me…’ and they both went crazy and attacked.”

“Maybe they were just withholding information,” said Robert the Fox.

“They-”

“They committed suicide two days later,” said Jonnie. “After that I asked Ker whether he had ever heard of Psychlos committing suicide and he said yes, one did, an engineer on a planet he’d served on. They used an alien race there and the Psychlo engineer had gone out drinking one night, killed an alien, and then two days later committed suicide. That was the only one he ever heard of. “Also,” he added impressively, “they return all corpses to Psychlo. There must be something in them they don’t want found.”

The group buzzed to each other and got their wits around it.

“So I am guessing that Psychlos, when they are babies,” said Jonnie, “get something put in their heads to protect their technology!”

MacKendrick and Angus were very interested now.

“So that’s what we’ve been doing,” said Robert the Fox.

Angus went to their ship to assemble the device. MacKendrick went to a dormitory section to set up tables. Dunneldeen and Thor went off to the mountain peak to bring down a couple of corpses, Dunneldeen calling himself and Thor “the gruesome twosome.”

If Jonnie was right or Jonnie was wrong, they would know more very shortly.

The planet was wide open to counterattack.

Robert the Fox went out and got an antiplane battery manned and arranged for twenty-four-hour alert and pilot scrambles. This tiny group, under half a hundred, only four or five pilots, and an antiplane battery that had already failed to shoot down one of the minesite attack craft, to defend a whole planet? Ridiculous! But he went through the motions. At least for local defense.