Battlefield Earth (79 page)

     Their heads were bent together in the dull green reflection of the viewers. They were in a small, converted, lead-lined storage room in the lowest level of the African minesite. Jonnie was getting his first look at the fruits of earlier work.

There were ten days’ worth of discs and it was a considerable pile. Dunneldeen had explained that he couldn’t come earlier: there were lots of pilots graduating and needing their final check-out flights and it would have been suspicious to leave America at a busy peak. He had also brought fourteen new pilots to Africa and Jonnie and Stormalong could nurse them through their advanced combat here. They were good lads- Swedes and Germans. Ker was going full blast training machine operators; every tribe seemed to want a blade scraper and flatbeds for buses. Brown Limper was selling the tribes equipment even from their own nearby minesites and they had to have operators. Ore carriers were busy lugging machinery over the globe and they had to have pilots. Angus had come back with Dunneldeen for he was finding it too hard not to shoot Lars Thorenson on sight.

There was also the matter of page one.

Jonnie skimmed through the beginnings of Terl’s reoccupancy. It was enough to know that that crucial hour after he had left had really been pay dirt. They’d planted thirty-two false bugs and even feeders and recorders, and there was Terl big as life dumping them on his desk, convinced. When he saw that Terl was apparently using a mine radio to detect feeder channels to the recorders, he had a moment’s qualm, but then he realized their main feeder was a ground wave.

A false bottom to the cabinets! He hadn’t suspected that, for they simply looked armored. And this huge, thick book he was bringing out…about three feet wide and two feet high and seven inches thick and on the thinnest paper he had ever seen. Thousands of pages!

Each page was divided into about forty vertical columns. Over at the left, the widest column gave the name of a system, and below it the names of planets in that system. From left to right in the columns followed every movement of the system such as its speed of travel and direction, precession, torque, and the weight and quality of the sun or suns if double or treble.

In the columns beside every planet of that system were noted that planet’s own weight, rotation period, atmosphere, surface temperatures, races, city coordinates, relative mineral estimate by symbols and value in Galactic credits, and the location of its minesites, if any.

All speeds and directions of travel were based on the zero center of that universe and three-dimensional compass coordinates, using the inevitable Psychlo numeral eleven, and parts of eleven and powers of eleven.

Terl had sat there, day after day, turning pages of it, one by one, running a claw down one particular column. He had gone through the whole book. They had every page!

“Except page one,” said Dunneldeen. “I don’t understand several of these symbols because they’re so abbreviated. Look at how tiny these figures are. We reviewed it and found we didn’t have page one. We figured that would be the symbol key code and Terl knew it all so well that he never referred to it. But look at the last disc there.”

Jonnie was a bit dazzled. He had had no idea there were that many populated systems, much less planets. Thousands and thousands and thousands. It would take somebody a month or two just to count them! Sixteen universes! And these were only the ones the Psychlos had an interest in. This accumulated knowledge must have taken several millennia to compile. He looked very closely at the writing. He could swear it was Chinko. He came out of it a bit. “I don’t understand some of these symbols,” he said.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That was part of the delay. I didn’t want to put you in the frying pan waiting for the key to the symbols. So we did the waiting. Look at the last disc.”

Jonnie did so. Terl had thrown the whole book down and the ventilator had blown up the cover by accident and there was page one! All the symbols listed and what they meant.

“We’ve got all the positions and firing coordinates of sixteen universes!” said Jonnie. Then he sobered. “What was he looking for?”

Terl had thrown the book down in disgust, that was plain. Jonnie played the disc a little more. The sound on it, which was not of much use, was very colorful Psychlo cursing.

For those whole two days a blank piece of paper had been lying there with not a mark on it. Now Terl almost ruined his pen as he wrote a figure on it.

Jonnie went back to an earlier disc and looking more critically at what column Terl’s claw was moving down. By the symbol at the top of it, the column was “Transshipment firing times to/at Psychlo.” Jonnie understood it. Terl was trying to find an open period at Psychlo so that nothing he shipped would collide with something some other planet was shipping. Jonnie recalled from his machine training days that the Psychlos never changed these tables for decades on end. Looking at the number of planets sending and receiving, the Psychlo platform must run constantly, day and night. He also had gotten the impression that one planet couldn’t have two platforms operating for it made interference. The nearest second platform for transshipment had to be about fifty thousand miles away, and since the diameter of Psychlo was only about twenty-five thousand miles, they only had one platform.

So, if Terl didn’t want to collide with somebody else’s ore arriving or smelted metal going out to some buyers or maybe military hardware, he had to be careful to find an open period.

If one fired ore or machinery one could be quick about it. But live personnel required a longer time period or it shook them up. Terl was taking no chances with his own neck.

The figure he so disgustedly wrote, almost breaking his pen, was “Day 92”!

He had been forced to choose a time more than five months from now. It was quite evident from the amount of kerbango he then consumed that the thought of spending all that additional time on “this accursed planet,” as the sonic recorded him saying, was upsetting.

He had had to choose Earth’s next scheduled semiannual. And finally, by the next day, he had reconciled himself to it.

Expecting the next discs would show the beginning calculations and circuits of a transshipment console, Jonnie was amazed not to find it.

Terl had gone to another cabinet and opened up its back. Using both paws he removed a package. It appeared to be a bit heavy.

He opened up the wrappings and then got a big pair of tongs, big enough to lift a huge boulder. He screwed the gap down to about a quarter of an inch and reached into the package.

The picture didn’t show what he was lifting out at first. Then he dropped it and it hit the floor. Terl’s curse was very sharp.

He got down with the tongs and lifted a gray something about the size of a pea. For an instant the spot on the floor showed. Jonnie still-framed it. The metal floor was dented, deeply.

Terl managed to pick up the small object again with the tongs, a hard job because it had sunk in the floor. He lifted it back up to lay on the side of the table. Jonnie did a very quick calculation. He knew how strong Terl was within rough limits. The amount of effort, when you subtracted those big tongs, made that little pea-sized piece of metal weigh about seventy-five pounds at a wild guess.

Jonnie got busy. He called Angus and had him set up the mineral analyzer that should transfer traces from the disc and enlarge them. He went and got the trace code books.

For the next three hours they tried to find that trace. It wasn’t there! The Psychlos didn’t list it or any composite trace of it in any of their code books. They were dealing with a metal the Psychlos had but didn’t list.

Jonnie tried to estimate by weight and volume and periodic tables what its atomic number was.

The Earth tables were of no value at all. This thing would be way off the bottom of them.

He looked over the Psychlo periodic tables, so different from the old Earth ones. There were a lot of elements that would have atomic numbers as high as this one, maybe even higher, but if they didn’t have its name…?

Jonnie suddenly realized it probably wasn’t on the Psychlo table either if it wasn’t in their analysis books.

“I wish I were some good at this,” said Jonnie.

“But, laddie,” said Dunneldeen, “I think you’re a plain wizard. I fell in the mine shaft about two hours ago and haven’t been heard of since!”

Jonnie said, “These are atomic numbers. An atom is supposedly composed of a core with energy particles in it, some of them positively charged, some of them not charged at all. The number of positively charged particles is what they call the ‘atomic number,’ and these particles, together with the uncharged particles, make up the ‘atomic weight.’ Also, around the core are negatively charged particles that circle the core in what they call ‘rings’ or ’shells,’ but they’re not; they’re more like envelopes. Anyway, the core and the negatively charged particles around it gives one the different elements. That’s about all there is to a periodic table, to oversimplify it.

“But ancient man here on Earth constructed his tables on oxygen and carbon, I think, because those were important to him. He is a carbon-oxygen engine. But a Psychlo has a different metabolism and burns different elements for energy so the

Psychlo table is different. Also, Psychlos had a lot more universes to work in and they had metals and gases Earth’s old scientists never heard of.

“The ancients here on Earth also omitted distances of spacing between the core and the ring and between ring and ring, as a variable. So they didn’t realize that one core and one ring at one spacing could be quite something else when the spacing changed. Got it?”

“Laddie,” said Dunneldeen, “that thump you just heard was me hitting the bottom of the shaft!”

“Don’t be lonely down there,” said Jonnie. “I hit it every time I get tangled up in this. But the point is, what is he up to? This is not a transshipment rig component!”

They looked at other discs. Terl considered metal like a man would consider paper- easily worked with.

He had bullied Lars into getting him a sheet of a beryllium alloy and it almost hurt their ears when Lars couldn’t find it anywhere in the compound and Terl told him the stuff was what they used for panel metal in vehicles and to go down to the garages and get into Zzt’s repair supplies and get him a sheet of the stuff!

Lars trotted back shortly, his panting clear on the disc sonic, bringing a sheet of beryllium alloy that rumbled as it was waved about. Terl kicked him out and locked the door.

They did a quick analysis of the metal and even Dunneldeen had no trouble with the traces. It was beryllium, copper, and nickel, sort of rough for it had not been polished.

On the disc Terl took some shears and cut expertly. Then he folded some edges. He annealed the edges shut by molecular bind. Then he had a top which fit very well. He put a little knob on the top for lifting it. Then he cut a hole in the bottom of the box and made a screw-in access plate. He had begun to laugh so it was easy to divine that this was something quite nasty.

It was a pretty box when he finished. He polished it up and buffed it and it looked like jewelry, a gold color.

Pretty. It was hexagonal, each one of the six sides and corners geometrically precise. Quite a work of art. The top came off easily. The bottom hole access plate was left unscrewed. It was about a foot across and about five inches high.

The next day he went to work on the inside. He made some very precisely hinged rods, quite intricate. He fitted them into the box and tested them. There was a hinged rod in each of the six corners and it was fastened to the lid. When you raised the lid, these rods pushed sockets, empty as yet, to the center of the box. He tested it several times and laughed louder as he gazed up into it from the access hole in the bottom. The cover came off very smoothly; each of the six rods pushed an empty socket to the center.

Then he chased Lars all around finding different, common substances and eventually he had three different metals and three different nonmetals in a pile. They were just ordinary elements, the analyzer said: iron, silicon, sodium, magnesium, sulphur, and phosphorus.

Why? To what end?

Jonnie tore through some books. Sodium, magnesium, sulphur, and phosphorus had one thing in common. They were of use, one way or another, in explosives. Knowing Terl, that was the first thing Jonnie looked up. But this combination he didn’t think would explode, because there they lay, right on the table in an earlier frame, right together and they didn’t explode. Iron and silicon? It seemed that they were very common indeed in the composition of the Earth’s crust and core.

He looked at a later frame, quite apprehensive. What if Terl made something and then hid it outside and they couldn’t find it? What was this devil up to? Ah! Terl might have jumbled up the six elements but the strange pea-sized mineral had vanished. Jonnie backtracked on the disc.

Terl had taken the heavy bit of strange metal and measured it and then had wrapped it all up and put it back in the false cabinet. The place where it had lain now had a dent!

He made a braced basket to hold the pea in the center. But he didn’t put it in for it was now back in the cabinet. Then he put the six common elements, each one, in the slots on the rods.