Battlefield Earth (81 page)

There was no response from her. She was totally unconscious. They had to get a forklift in and take her to her room and put her to bed.

Three days later, MacKendrick told Jonnie, “She’s just lying there in a coma. Maybe in time she’ll come out of it. She seems to have had a heavy shock.”

Although he felt bad about it, Jonnie had an idea now of what the silver capsule in the females was. They were not to be taught any Psychlo mathematics ever!

The key to the whole Psychlo empire must be mathematics. And aside from their arithmetic, he couldn’t make head or tail of their equations. It seemed to be a dead end.

     They had just completed the installation of a radio telescope when the courier came in.

Angus, his face red, first from sun at lake level and then from wind and snow up at the summit of nearby Mount Elgon, was very proud of himself. The German and Swedish pilots, with something to do besides train under the relentless Stormalong, had helped find and install the huge reflector bowls and relays from the peaks and down to the minesite.

Now that they had the frequencies, Angus was saying, they would soon be hearing everything those monkeys up there were saying to each other. He’d even have them on the screens!

Jonnie’s ear caught the far-off approach of the plane above the overcast. He thanked Angus and the pilots and said they had done very well, and yes, now maybe they would know more about the intentions of their visitors.

Glencannon had taken over the ferrying of the vital discs from America. A copy was now going to Doctor MacDermott to bury in a deep underground vault and the originals were coming through to Jonnie in Africa.

Glencannon had lots of news. Pattie had been extremely ill for weeks but Chrissie was nursing her and there was hope. And Chrissie sent her love and said she’d found a lovely old house right near Castle Rock, and some of the Chiefs’ wives were helping her find real furniture in old ruins, and she sent her love and when was he coming back?

Castle Rock was now so surrounded with antiaircraft blast cannon it made one fair nervous to fly near it.

Dunneldeen? Oh, he was flying the pants off new recruits but there weren’t as many coming in now. Mostly machine operators were getting trained. Ker was fine and sent him some brand-new air masks he’d made that fit better and said not to turn him in for stealing company materials, ha, ha. And here were some personal letters for Sir Robert. And here was the latest set of you-know- whats.

Jonnie went deep underground and got the discs rolling. They had the place well set up now. Watching the female Psychlos, while not letting them handle anything vital, they had learned the use of some of the office machinery they had earlier ignored, and they could copy discs and make blowups of sections with a fine- line accuracy they had not thought possible. They had cabinets for files and all in all they could make the discs “talk” much better.

Terl! He was sitting there doing force equations, incomprehensible. The equations didn’t balance and didn’t make any sense. He was filling pages and pages with them. Still nothing to do with teleportation.

Jonnie almost skimmed by it. He backtracked. The pictures showed Terl getting up, going over to the cabinet, and opening up another false bottom. He took out a huge sheet of paper, so big it would take three scanners’ views to encompass it. The paper was very old, creased until it nearly fell apart, stained brown and faded.

Terl spread it out, looked at it and then shook his head over it. He traced one claw along the north side of the big dam, way to the southwest of the American minesite. He nodded. Then he wadded the paper up and threw it at the shredder bin. He wrote down some footage figures and some voltage figures and then went back to his equations, and it was just equations for the next two days. And that was all there was in the discs.

It took an hour of patching from three different scanner channels to get it. But Jonnie recovered the huge piece of paper in its entirety and got a half-dozen huge copies of it.

It was entitled, “Defense Installations of Planet Number 203,534.” Jonnie knew already that was the Psychlo name for Earth.

It showed every minesite, every dam, every gun battery, and every     ? A little symbol that trailed around each dam and below each power line from dams to minesites and branch minesites. Jonnie had no idea what that symbol was.

But there was a goody he had never, never dreamed of. Marked clearly was a firing, transshipment platform!

He compared the Psychlo mass of numbered locations with a man-map of ancient times. The second platform was alongside a dam which had once been named “Kariba” in a country which had once been called “Rhodesia” and then “Zimbabwe.”

The platform was marked

“Emergency Defense Armament Receipt Point.” Obviously, if the main minesite were ever knocked out, Psychlo could send in another force or the Psychlo command on the planet could demand troops or at least inform the home office.

Hopes soaring, but a little held down by the age of the map and Terl’s treatment of it, Jonnie had a marine attack plane on the line and Scots piling into it. Robert the Fox boarded hastily. Just as they were about to close the door, MacKendrick piled in with a medical kit. Jonnie sent the plane racing to the south.

It was only about a thousand miles away, and it only took them thirty-five minutes to spot the huge dam and lake and the mammoth installation. Some distance to the south and east of that they saw what had been called “Victoria Falls,” one of the biggest waterfalls on the planet.

Spectacular country!

Because the area had been marked “heavily defended,” Jonnie approached it cautiously. It was another branch mine they hadn’t known the existence of.

They found the compound some distance to the east and landed a platoon with assault rifles and radiation ammunition to make a cautious approach. A half-hour later they had the report on mine radio. The place was deserted and, the platoon officer reported, not much different from the one in the Ituri Forest to the north.

The map had not shown the second platform at the minesite but it was quite close to the huge dam. They took the platoon back aboard and Jonnie began to cruise the area.

Trees, trees, trees. This was a high plateau, but not an open plain. Trees had been knocked down in swathes where elephant herds had passed through.

There were lots of little hills. Everything was masked with undergrowth except a few open places.

Cruising along, elephant and African buffalo looking up at them, Jonnie searched and searched. He had found before that it was one thing to look at a map and quite another to be on the ground, and he was experiencing it again.

Time after time, he studied the map while Stormalong in the copilot’s seat kept them cruising above the treetops. Jonnie finally got out some dividers and very carefully measured the distance from the dam edge and then, taking the plane to that point and cruising it at the speed a horse walks, finally got them in the center of what must have been the point. Stormalong threw out a smoke flare to mark it and a couple of big elephants took off. It was a bowl in the ground, the edges of which rose about two hundred feet above the middle. It was like a crater, possibly even made with a bomb blast. It was about a thousand feet in diameter.

The bowl itself was so overgrown one could not see what was in it. But as the white smoke spired up, the truth hit Jonnie.

For centuries, perhaps, the company security officers of this planet had paid no attention to maintaining the elaborate planetary company defenses which once existed. No wonder Terl had thrown the map away. He looked so disappointed that Sir Robert tried to cheer him up. “We won’t really know until we look closer.” But it certainly was wilderness, receiving no care for centuries.

Jonnie put them down on the upper edge of the crater, and with riflemen ready to handle any hostile game, others got axes and began to hack their way down.

“Be careful around here,” said Dr. MacKendrick. “This area had an insect called the tsetse fly that brought on sleeping sickness. Also the water had a worm in it that gets into the blood stream. I don’t have much in the way of medicines but wear nets and stay out of the water.”

“Great,” said Jonnie. That was all they needed.

They cut their way down to the center of the bowl. They passed one of the transshipment poles three times before they spotted it. They paced out in various directions and located another two. The fourth was easy.

Jonnie took a shovel and started down through the humus. He was hoping the company maxim of “never salvage anything” would hold true. Two feet of dead leaves and humus down, he hit the platform.

Axes ringing, they were getting trees and brush out of the way. They found the concrete base of the operations firing dome and then finally the dome itself, upside-down and some distance away.

No console!

Wires were eventually uncovered within the concrete base. Typically Psychlo, they were still well insulated when you scraped the mold off.

Jonnie was struck by the absence of the power lines. There should be power lines coming in from the dam.

There was a power channel marked on the map and also that old squiggle he couldn’t identify.

Light was failing and they would have kept on but MacKendrick made them get up to high ground. They spent the night listening to elephants trumpeting, lions roaring, and all the other cacophony of a very live jungle. But the night was quite cool since this plateau had a fairly high altitude.

In the morning they dug a crosscut trench and found the power line, being careful not to cut into it. They cut another trench and found the same line went on underground to the distant minesite.

And there was another cable they couldn’t identify that went along with the power line.

Flogging their way through the brush, they went over to the huge dam. It was a real soaring monster of a dam. It seemed intact. The spillways were running. There were signs that Psychlos had landed near it and gone in and out the access door to the powerhouse in some recent time.

Jonnie had never been inside one of these dams before. They vibrated with sheer, raw power. The thunder of the water and the high whine of generators made it impossible to be heard.

It was the usual Psychlo conversion, he supposed. It was very, very old and some bits of the original man-equipment that had been cast aside were very much older.

Angus found the switchboard and bus bars- a vast, towering affair in a separate control room. Only two of the handles were clean and it didn’t need a little tuft of fur caught in one of them to tell that Psychlos had come here to shut power on and off.

But what were all these other bus bars? They got some mine sacks and tried to wipe the panel down without causing short circuits. There were Psychlo letters inset into it. A whole row said, “Force Stage One, Force Stage Two, Force Stage Three.” A second row said, “Transshipment One, Transshipment Two, Transshipment Three.”

Jonnie gingerly rubbed some more with a mine sack, careful of closing any gap. “They’re color-coded.” He tried to tell Angus this but there was no talking in this place. They went back out.

“Terl,” said Jonnie to Angus and Sir Robert, “is working on force equations. There is something on the north side of the American dam I think he must want. The squiggles on this map must have to do with force.” He sent Angus back into the power control house and placed some Scots along the underground line of squiggles and connected every one up with mine radios.

“Close Force Stage One!” he radioed to Angus.

The effect was far more drastic and dramatic than anything they expected.

All inferno broke loose!

Along the squiggle line of the map, all around the crater, trees erupted, splintered, soared, crashed.

It was as if a bomb had exploded.

Trunks and leaves and branches were falling for over a minute afterward.

Sir Robert was running to find out what had happened to their spotters. Were they all killed? Their radios had gone silent!

It took them an hour to dig the Scots out. One had been knocked unconscious, the rest were bruised and slightly cut. Six had been involved.

MacKendrick collected them and assessed the damages and began applying the antiseptics and tape. Jonnie made his way over to them from the dam. It looked like a first-aid station after a battle. The one who had been knocked out had come to now. He had been blown in the air.

Jonnie apologized to them.

The Scot that had been knocked out was grinning. “A little thing like that isn’t likely to ruin a Scot!” he said. “What was it?”

Yes, indeed. What was it?

“Did I do something wrong?” Angus’s voice came over the radio.

The Scots were all taking it as a joke so Jonnie said, “I think you did something right!” They were out of the area now. “Close that switch again!”

A bit of the tree wreckage stirred and moved and then was still. Jonnie cautiously moved toward the bowl. And couldn’t leave the dam area!

He walked straight ahead and then he couldn’t go any further. He could not walk through the air before him!

He threw a rock at it. The rock bounced! He tried again, throwing harder. Same result.

He had Angus open the bus bar again. No barrier! Closed. Barrier!

For the next two hours, by opening and closing the first and second row of bus bars and throwing rocks, they found that the dam itself was surrounded by a protective screen. The bowl had a screen all around its top and was completely enclosed!

Riflemen even fired shots at it and they glanced off.