Battlefield Earth (8 page)

     Terl was all efficiency, great plans bubbling in his cavernous skull.

The old Chinkos had had a sort of zoo outside the compound, and despite the years that had intervened since the Chinkos were terminated here, the cages were still there.

There was one in particular that was just right. It had a dirt floor and a cement pool, and netting of heavy mesh strung all around it. They had had some bears there that they said they were studying, and although the bears had died after a while, they had never escaped.

Terl dumped the new beast into the cage. The thing was still only semiconscious, getting over the shock of breathe-gas most likely. Terl looked at it lying there and then looked around. This had to be just right, all precautions taken.

The cage door had a lock on it. It was open to the sky and there was no netting over the top- what bear could climb a thirty-foot set of bars?

But there was a possibility that this new beast might tamper with the cage door. It wasn’t probable. But the door didn’t have a good lock on it.

Terl had dumped the bags in the cage, having no place else to put them. And the long thong rope he had used was lying on the bag.

He decided it would be wise to tie the beast up. He passed the thong around the neck of the thing and tied it there with a simple rigger knot and tied the other end to a bar.

He stood back and checked things again. It was fine. He went out and closed the cage door. He’d have to put a better lock on it. But it would do just now.

Satisfied with himself, Terl ran the car into the garage and went to his office.

There was not much to do. A few dispatches, just forms, no emergencies. Terl finished up and sat back. What a dull place. Ah, well, he had started wheels rolling to get off it, to get back home.

He decided he had better go out and see how the man-thing was getting along. He picked up his breathe-mask, put a new cartridge into it, and went out through the offices. There were a lot of empty desks these days. There were only three secretarial-type Psychlos there, and they didn’t pay much attention to him.

Outside the compound, he reached the gate of the cage. He stopped, his eyebones rattling.

The thing was clear over to the gate!

He went in with a growl, picked the thing up, and put it into its original place.

It had untied the knot.

Terl looked at it. Plainly it was terrified of him. And why not? It only came up to his belt buckle and was about a tenth of his weight.

Terl put the thong back around its neck. Being a mining company worker, accustomed to rigs and slings, Terl knew his knots. So this time he tied a double-rigger knot. That would hold it!

Cheerful once more, Terl went to the garage and got a water hose and began to wash down the Mark ll. As he worked, he turned over various plans and approaches in his head. They all depended on that man-thing out there.

On a sudden hunch, he went back outside to look into the cage. The thing was standing inside the door!

Terl crossly barged in, carried it back to its original position, and stared at the rope. It had untied a double-rigger knot.

With fast-working paws, Terl fixed that. He put the rope around its neck and tied it with a bucket-hoist knot.

The thing looked at him. It was making some funny noises as if it could talk.

Terl walked out, fastened the door, and got out of sight. He wasn’t a security chief for nothing. From a vantage point behind a building, he levered his face mask glass to telephoto and observed.

The thing, in no time at all, untied the complex bucket-hoist knot!

Terl rumbled back before it could get to the door. He went in, plucked the thing up, and put it back on the far side of the cage.

He wound the rope around and around its neck and then tied it with a double-bucket knot so complex that only a veteran rigger could loosen it.

Once more he went off to an unseen distance.

Again believing itself unobserved, what was the thing doing now?

It reached into a pouch it was wearing, took out something bright, and cut the rope!

Terl rumbled off to the garage and rummaged about through centuries of cast offs and debris until he found a piece of flexirope, a welding torch, a welding power cartridge, and a short strip of metal.

When he got back, the thing was over by the door again, trying to climb the thirty-foot bars.

Terl did a very thorough job. He made a collar out of the metal and welded it hotly around the neck. He welded the flexirope to the collar and welded the other end into a ring, hooking the ring over a bar thirty feet above the dirt floor of the cage.

He stood back. The thing was grimacing and trying to hold the collar away from its neck, for it was still hot.

That’ll hold it, Terl told himself.

But he hadn’t finished. He wasn’t a security chief for nothing. He went back to his office storeroom and broke out two button cameras, checked them, and switched them to the wavelength of his office viewer.

Then he went back to the cage and put one button camera way up in the bars, pointing down, and put the other one out at a distance where it could view the exterior.

The thing was pointing at its mouth and making sounds. Who knew what that meant?

Only now did Terl feel relaxed.

That night he sat smugly in the employee recreation room, responding to no questions, quietly drinking his kerbango in a very self-satisfied way.

     Jonnie Goodboy Tyler stared in despair at his packs across the yard.

The sun was hot.

The collar on his burned neck hurt.

His throat was parched with thirst. And he felt hungry.

In those packs, just inside the cage door, there was a pig bladder of water. There was some cooked pork, if it hadn’t spoiled. And there were hides he could rig for shade.

At first he had just been trying to get out.

The very idea of being caged made him feel ill. Sicker even than the lack of water and food.

It was all so unknown. The last he really remembered was starting to charge the insect and being blown into the air. Then this. No, wait. There was something after he was first stunned.

He had started to come to, lying on something soft and smooth. He had seemed to be inside the insect. He had seen a huge something next to him. And then there was a sensation like breathing fire straight into his lungs that pulled every nerve short and threw him into a convulsion.

There was another glimpse of an occurrence. He had flickeringly regained consciousness for a few moments. He seemed to be tied to the top of the insect speeding across the plain. And then the back of his head bumped and the next he knew he was in here- in this cage!

He put it together. He had hurt the insect, but not fatally. It had eaten him, but then spit him up. It had carried him on its back to its lair.

But the real shock was the monster.

It was true, he knew now, that he had always been “too smart.” He had doubted his elders. He had doubted the Great Village and there it had been. He had doubted the monsters and here one was.

When he had come to and found himself looking up at that thing, his head had reeled. He felt himself literally bending the bars behind him to get away. A monster!

Eight or nine feet tall, maybe more. About three and a half feet wide. Two arms. Two legs. A shiny substance for a face and a long tube from the chin down to the chest. Glowing amber eyes behind the shiny front plate.

The ground shook as it approached. A thousand pounds? Maybe more.

Huge booted feet dented the earth.

And it had furry paws and long talons.

He had been certain it was going to eat him right then. But it hadn’t. It had tied him up like a dog.

There was something strange about this monster’s perceptions. Every time he had tried to get untied and out of the cage, the monster had shown up again. As though it could see when it wasn’t around to see.

Possibly those little spheres had had something to do with it. The monster held them in its paws like small detachable eyes. One was up there now, glittering, way up in the corner of the cage. Like a little eye. The other one was out there stuck onto a nearby building side.

But the monster had caught him trying to get out before it planted those eyes.

What was this place? There was a constant rumble from somewhere, a muted roar similar to the one the insect had made. The thought of more of those insects chilled him.

There was a big stone basin in the middle of the cage, a few feet deep with steps up one side. Lots of sand was in the bottom of it. A grave? A place to roast meat? No, there were no charred sticks or ashes in it.

So there were monsters. When he stood in front of it, his face was just above the level of its belt buckle. Belt buckle? Yes, a shiny thing that held a belt together. It suddenly dawned on Jonnie that the monster was wearing a covering that wasn’t its own skin. A slippery, shiny purple substance. It wasn’t its own hide. Like clothes you’d cut out of a hide. Pants. A coat. A collar. It wore clothes.

Ornaments on the collar. And a device of some sort on the belt buckle. That device was stamped on his mind’s eye, right now. It was a picture of ground on which stood small square blocks. Vertical shafts were going up from the square blocks. Out of the shafts seemed to be coming clouds of smoke, and smoke in curls lay all over the top of the picture. The idea of clouds of smoke stirred some memory in him, but he was too hungry and too thirsty and too hot to wrestle with it.

The ground under him began to shake in measured tread. He knew what this was.

The monster came to the door. It was carrying something. It came in and loomed over him. It threw down into the dirt some soft, gooey sticks of something. Then it just stood there.

Jonnie looked at the sticks. They weren’t like anything he had ever seen.

The monster made motions, pointing from the sticks to his face. That failing, the monster took up a stick and squashed it against Jonnie’s mouth, saying something in a rumbling roaring voice. A command.

Jonnie got it. This was supposed to be food.

He worked a bit of it around in his mouth and then swallowed it.

Abruptly and immediately he was violently ill. He felt like his whole stomach was going to rush back out of his mouth. Before he could control them, his limbs went into the beginning of a convulsion.

He spat. Too thirsty to have much saliva, he tried to get rid of the stuff, all of it, every bit of it, every tiny piece of the acid taste of it.

The monster just backed up and stood there staring at him.

“Water,” pleaded Jonnie, getting control of his shaking limbs and voice. “Please. Water.” Anything to wash this horrible stuff out.

He pointed to his mouth. “Water.”

The monster just went on standing there. The eyes back of the faceplate were slitted, glowing with an eerie fire.

Jonnie composed himself stoically. It was wrong to look weak and beg. There was such a thing as pride. He drew his face into stillness.

The monster leaned over and checked the collar and the flexirope, turned around and went back out, closed the gate with a firm clang, wired it shut and left.

The evening shadows were growing long.

Jonnie looked at his packs by the gate. They might as well be on the top of

Highpeak!

A cloak of misery settled over him. He had to assume Windsplitter was gravely injured or dead. And he had to assume that in a few days he himself probably would die of thirst or hunger.

Twilight came.

And then with a shock he realized

Chrissie’s promise to find him would wind up in her certain death. He caved in.

The little bright eye, up in the corner of the cage, stared down unwinkingly.

     The following day, Terl probed around the disused quarters of the old Chinkos.

It was unpleasant work. The quarters were outside the pressurized Psychlo domes of the minesite and he had to wear a breathe-mask. The Chinkos were air-breathers. And while the quarters had been sealed off, a few hundred years of neglect and weather leaks had left their marks.

There were rows and rows of bookcases. Lines and lines of filing cabinets full of notes. Old scarred desks, rickety and frail to begin with, collapsing into themselves. Piles of junk in lockers. And everything filmed over with white dust. Good thing he didn’t have to breathe it.

What funny beings the Chinkos had been. They were the Intergalactic

Mining Company’s answer to some protests by more warlike and able worlds that mining was wrecking planetary ecologies. And, the company being plush and profitable at that time, some knothead of a director in Intergalactic’s main office had created the culture and ethnology department, or C and E. Maybe it was originally named the ecological department, but Chinkos could paint, and some Intergalactic director’s wear-the-claws wife had begun to make a private fortune selling Chinko work on other planets and got the name changed. There was very little that didn’t show up in the secret files of the security department.

It was the strike the Chinkos had invented, not the corruption, that caused the final wipeout. Corruption at director level was very paws-off for security. A strike was not.

But the Chinkos here had been gone long before that, and this place looked it. What, after all, was worth culturing on this planet? There weren’t enough indigenous populations left to bother with. And who had cared anyway? But like any bureaucracy, the Chinkos had been busy. Look at those hundreds of yards of cabinets and books.

Terl was looking for a manual on the feeding habits of man. Surely these busy Chinkos had studied that.

He pawed and pawed. He opened and flipped hundreds of indexes. He got down and poked into lockers. And while he got a very good idea of what there was in these rambling offices and lockers, he couldn’t find one single thing about what man ate. He found what bears ate. He found what mountain goats ate. He even found a treatise, scholarly composed, printed and reeking with wasted expense, on what some beast known as a “whale” ate, a treatise that ended up laughably enough with the fact that the beast was totally extinct.

Terl stood in the middle of the place, disgusted. No wonder the company had phased out C and E on Earth. Imagine roaring around, burning up fuel, keeping a whole book-manufacturing plant steaming like a digger shovel, wearing out eyesight…

It wasn’t all in vain, though. He had learned from the aged and yellowed map he now gripped in his hand that there were a few other groups of men left on this planet. At least there had been a few hundred years ago.

Some were in a place the Chinkos called “Alps.” Several dozen, in fact. There had been about fifteen up in the ice belt the Chinkos called “North

Pole” and “Canada.” There had been an unestimated number at a place called “Scotland” and there had been some in “Scandinavia.” And also in a place called “Colorado.”

This was the first time he had seen the Chinko name for this central minesite area. “Colorado.” He looked at the map with some amusement. “Rocky Mountains.” “Pike’s Peak.” Funny Chinko names. The Chinkos always did their work in painfully severe Psychlo, faithful to their ore. But they had had funny imaginations.

This was getting him no place, however, although it was good to know, for the sake of his planning, that there had been a few more men around.

He would have to rely on what he should have relied on in the first place- security. The techniques of security. He would put them to work.

He walked out and closed the door behind him and stared around at this non-Psychlo alien world. The old

Chinko offices, barracks, and zoo were up on the high hill back of the minesite. Close by but higher. The arrogant bastards. One could see all around from this place. One could see the ore transshipment platform as well as the freighter assembly field; the place didn’t look very busy down there. Intergalactic would be sending some sizzlers down the line unless quotas were met. He hoped he wouldn’t have too many investigations ordered by the home office.

Blue sky. Yellow sun. Green trees. And the wind that tugged at him full of air.

How he hated this place.

The thought of staying made him grit his fangs.

Well, what do you expect in an alien world?

He’d finish that investigation ordered about a lost tractor and then put his tried-and-true security technology to work on that man-thing.

That was the only way out of this hellhole.