Battlefield Earth (80 page)

When one opened the lid, the rods pushed them all in to the center. They would go into contact with each other and with the pea.

Jonnie knew something about radiation and elements after their early battle. He knew that all you had to do was stimulate atoms to get a chain reaction going.

But Terl was not working with uranium radiation. He couldn’t. Not with the overstimulation radiation gave to breathe-gas!

So that pea thing must be some higher order of stimulation.

Knowing Terl, it would be deadly. He was sure that when that heavy, heavy pea-sized piece of metal was in the center and somebody opened the lid and all those metals pushed together and against it, something ghastly was going to happen.

Terl locked the pretty box away, cleaned up things, and opened a mathematics text entitled “Force Equations,” which had nothing to do with teleportation! What was he up to now?

And that was as far as the discs went.

Their own clock had moved up to noon as they had gone nonstop, no sleep, no food.

“Now I know who made Satan,” said Dunneldeen. “His name was Terl.”

     Since Terl seemed to be working on other things than teleportation, which was the key to this entire dilemma, Jonnie, for the time being, turned his attention to other things.

He had not entirely lost hope of unraveling the Psychlo technology through the restoration and possible cooperation of the remaining Psychlos. If he could get the two pieces of metal out of the head of a trained Psychlo engineer, there was a possibility that some of these mysteries would be solved, and solved they would leave them in better control of the planet’s future.

Dr. MacKendrick had returned. One or two of the African base people had come down with a touch of what MacKendrick said was “malaria,” carried by mosquitoes. MacKendrick had procured “chinchona bark” from

South America and had made them mop up standing pools of water in the base and put nets over the air intake vents and all that seemed to be under control.

MacKendrick’s three remaining Psychlo patients, two of whom were rated engineers, were not, however, so easily handled as the malaria. They were not getting well. They remained barely alive.

The thirty-three live Psychlos from the American compound arrived in Africa without incident and were put in a prepared dorm section. They had been duly reported as “lost at sea in a plane crash.”

But the doctor did not have much hope for it. “I have tried every way I can think of,” he told Jonnie one evening in his underground African surgery, “and one can’t get through the intricate skull structure to the items without severely damaging it. Every Psychlo cadaver I have worked with so far plainly shows that critical skull bone joints would be very damaged and vital brain nerves would be severed. Those things were put into the soft skull of a newborn pup, and even within a few months the skull would have been hardened to a point where they could not be removed. I will go on working with Psychlo cadavers but I cannot hold out any real hope.”

Jonnie wandered off from the conference, trying to think of some solution to that problem. It seemed these days he had a lot more problems than he had solutions. He felt that if he didn’t come up with some solutions fairly soon, the human race might well be a write-off.

He heard his name called. He was passing by one of the doors that housed the new Psychlo arrivals and he stopped and went over. There was a small view port and an intercom inset into the door panel.

It was Chirk!

He had never had anything against Chirk. A rattlebrain and dedicated to wrong conclusions though she might be, the times when he had seen her they had not fought.

“Jonnie,” said Chirk, “I just want to thank you for saving us.”

Jonnie realized somebody had been talking to the Psychlos, maybe Dunneldeen.

“When I think of what that awful Terl planned to do- murder us all, you know- my fur crackles! I always thought you were kind of cute, Jonnie. You know that. So I know you saved our lives.”

Jonnie said, “You’re welcome. Can I do anything for you?” She looked pretty forlorn, really. No clothes but a wraparound, fur all matted.

“No,” said Chirk. “Just thank you.”

Jonnie walked off and was halfway down the passage before the weirdness of it struck him. A Psychlo being thankful? Expressing appreciation? Not wanting something? impossible! He had never had much to do with female Psychlos. They were not numerous in the company. But a grateful Psychlo? Never!

He acted fast. Ten minutes later they had a mineral analyzer rigged and Chirk’s head in it. Twenty minutes of investigation and they had an answer.

Chirk did not have any bronze object in her head. She did have a silver capsule, but it was of different shape and size.

There were twelve females from the American compound, and after a great deal of hustle and bustle and assembly line treatment, they had established that none of the females had a bronze object in their brains but they did have silver ones of the same pattern as Chirk’s.

Two pilots took off for the morgue in the clouds, accompanied by a fur-wrapped MacKendrick, and they soon established, working in the icy blast of a keen wind, that they had three females in that lot.

That night MacKendrick held out the different capsule to Jonnie and Angus. He had removed it from the female corpse that had been brought back.

Careful examination showed it to have a less complex internal filament but that was all they could tell.

“I don’t think that could be cut out either,” said Dr. MacKendrick. “The structure of the female skull is even more complicated than the male’s. All I can contribute is that it probably puts out a different message when activated.”

That seemed to be pretty well that.

However, the bronze cruelty factor was missing in a female, so the following morning Jonnie had another talk with Chirk.

“How would you like a job?” said Jonnie.

Well, that would be wonderful. It just showed he was cute. Because she couldn’t go back to Psychlo now. Terl had ruined her company record and they would never reemploy her with the black marks of disobedience all over the file. And if he promised not to send her back to Psychlo and paid her usual wage of two hundred Galactic credits a month, a job would be a very good thing for she was going mad from inactivity and no cosmetics.

For a long time now they had been taking Galactic credits out of company payroll offices, out of the wallets of dead Psychlos, out of canteen cash drawers, and they had a couple of million credits kicking around. So it was feasible. They struck a bargain.

Loosed with a breathe-mask and a sentry, Chirk promptly found a few yards of cloth in supply, was escorted down to the lake, and, oblivious of crocodiles, took a bath. She then demanded access to the minerals sample room of the compound. She got some white gypsum, put it in a mortar and finely pulverized it, and put it in a sample bag. She threw some copper in a retort, added some acid, boiled it all away, washed the residue, and mixed it with some clear motor grease. She put it in a can. She got some tractor paint out of the storeroom, deepened its color to a brilliant purple by boiling it and added simple stain dye, and then poured in a pungent thinner. She put the last in a bottle.

Then she went to the tailor shop and slashed and annealed dress uniform cloth. She took some seat covering and cut it and annealed it into a pair of flare-topped boots and demanded to be taken back to her room.

Shortly there emerged the most stylish female a Psychlo street had ever seen. Although the breathe-mask hid the face makeup, one supposed that it was there for morale. And if you looked closely through the leaded faceplate you could see that she had brilliant green lipbones, a glaring white nosebone, and white and green circles around her eyebones. Her claws were a glaring shade of purple. The white dress uniform cloth was topped with a flaring gold collar and bound about by a gold-colored belt, and her boots were gold with purple sole lines.

Chirk then demanded access to another room where the other females were kept, and thereafter the current base commander was beseiged with demands for more contracts at two hundred Galactic credits a month and clothes!

Although Jonnie had not really expected much help from that quarter, he got it unexpectedly. Shortly he would get trouble, but to begin with it was revelatory.

Chirk made a trip out to find some mud. In that area there was lots of mud but she was looking for a certain kind of mud. She chattered away at Angus as they tramped about. She was carrying a two-hundred-pound scope under her arm like it was a handbag. Jonnie saw them walking around the edge of a swamp, Angus dwarfed by the eight-hundred-pound female, two sentries following, mostly in case of wild beasts.

Jonnie went over to them. She was looking for mud. She would stick in a paddle and put a dab on the scope plate and shake her head and walk on. She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Jonnie noticed something odd in animal behavior. When he went out, the game ignored him. But Chirk? You couldn’t see game as far as you could look. Not an elephant, not a lion, no deer, nothing! He reasoned it must be the smell of a Psychlo. Where once animals fled at the smell of a man, over the centuries they had transferred their survival instincts. They wouldn’t let a Psychlo within miles of them. Still, this area hadn’t been hunted out and neither had any other area.

“Oh, Psychlo men don’t mass hunt,” said Chirk, busy with her paddle and scope. “The silly things find just one animal and follow it and then they sit around in a circle and take three days to kill it little by little. So they don’t often get three days off. Not in this company. Silly things, males.”

Jonnie did not enlighten her as to what made them “silly.”

After a while she found her mud. She filled a mine bucket with it and easily carried the two-hundred-pound scope and the four hundred pounds of mud back to the compound.

She put the mud in glass bottles and added some green liquid goo-food and then rinsed the mud out. She handed the bottles to MacKendrick who gazed at them in mystery.

Chirk said, “Put that in the wounds, you foolish creature. How can you expect them to heal up if you don’t use a counter-virus! Any child knows that!”

MacKendrick got it. His treatments were all aimed at bacterial control on beings who were basically virus-structured. Within the next three days all his Psychlo patients began to get well, their festering wounds closed, and it appeared they were going to have three completely cured ones soon.

Chirk got to work on the library. It shocked her that the volumes were so strewn about and for two days she did nothing but collect Psychlo books into huge piles. The other females helped and also began to clean up large areas of old Psychlo berthings.

Jonnie was working one day in the old Psychlo operations room when Chirk suddenly presented herself. “Your library,” she said, “is in disgraceful condition. According to company regulations, certain booklists must be in every minesite and you can see by this form that the manager here has been negligent and should be given a black mark on his record. But I am working for you now so I must call to your attention Form 2,345,980-A. If you place this order with Psychlo, they will send them out on the next shipment. It is a very serious matter. An incomplete library!”

Chirk might not be in present time about the company but she certainly had filled out the form.

Jonnie hadn’t even known the form existed. And he found himself staring at one item checked as missing: “War Vessel Recognition Tables of Hostile Races.” And another, “Individual Troop Combat Capabilities Catalogued by Alien Races.”

Chirk went back to work putting books in order on shelves, but within minutes, Jonnie had thirty people including two pilots ransacking the place. The “visitors” upstairs could be identified, and some means of defense might exist!

Sir Robert had returned from Scotland that morning and it was he who guessed it. “Jonnie, that group here didn’t know who was attacking. Anyone in command here would have been tearing through those books. Have you looked on the corpses?”

That’s where they were! In a shoulder bag on the body of the former mine manager up in the snow.

Not more than three hours later, comparing his own and Stormalong’s pictures and the texts, he knew he was dealing with Tolneps, Hockners, Bolbods, and Hawvins. And he knew what they looked like and what their capabilities were- all dangerously nasty. There was no listing for the globe-shaped ship with the ring around it or any race of small gray men.

But the following day his luck ran out with Chirk. She had been doing very well. But he made a mistake.

She was sitting, all eight hundred pounds of her, at a desk in the library making some lists. Jonnie was looking at a sheet of figures he had drawn up.

The sheet concerned distances from Earth to various hostile bases nearest to it and the speeds of the types of alien ships. They had different types of drives. For the most part they ran on energy accumulated from suns, but they handled it differently. He was trying to calculate how many months those ships were from their relative bases. Terl’s lists of inhabited planets had now been copied off in sheet form and it was evident they didn’t include all systems or suns but only those in which Psychlo had an interest.

Jonnie had been amazed to find in other texts that there were four hundred billion suns in this galaxy alone and that this universe contained more than a hundred billion galaxies. And he had sixteen universes to look at.

The possible bases of hostile peoples were easier to mentally encompass. From Earth to this galaxy’s center was about thirty thousand light-years. And one light-year was about six trillion miles. All these enemy ships exceeded the speed of light one way or another, but this still made it necessary to compute by how much they exceed it against what base where.

It was an awful lot of Psychlo arithmetic. He was not too patient doing it by hand. Thoughtlessly, he said to Chirk, “Could you help me add these figures up?”

She looked at him, totally blank for about a minute. Then she said, “I don’t know how.”

Jonnie smiled. It s just arithmetic. Here, I’ll show you-’

Chirk’s eyes glazed. She fell forward across the desk.