Battlefield Earth (88 page)

He put it back together. He looked at another console and found the angle the screws were supposed to be set at. He set the Basher’s console screws at the same angle.

It would not start again, no matter what he did.

It must be the screws. When that blade scraper quit, maybe a dirt clod had hit a screw and turned it.

He went through all the motions for the fifth time, trying to align screws.

But that was it. He had a dead-motor Basher tank.

Jonnie finally gave it up.

He went down to the lake and threw rocks at the crocodiles. Then he became ashamed of himself for teasing the beasts.

They were very amiable creatures compared to Terl.

A tri-wheeler came down from Sir Robert who wanted to tell Jonnie it was unwise to be in the open without air cover. The visitors might send somebody down.

“Would you like to shoot a Psychlo?”

Jonnie asked a startled messenger. Damn Terl! Damn all Psychlos!

And it wasn’t any comfort to know that thousands of races had been saying the same thing for three hundred and two thousand years.

He’d have to think of something, some plan, no matter how desperate or dangerous, or this planet was finished!

     Winter had come to Denver.

But the cold wind and snow flurries could not dampen the elation of Brown Limper Staffor.

The new bank note had arrived.

A packet of them lay on his desk and four of them were spread out before him. How beautiful! They were bright yellow, printed on one side, and there, right in the middle, was an oval picture of Brown Limper!

What an awful lot of trouble they had had getting that picture. Brown Limper had tried innumerable poses, facing this way and that; he had tried countless expressions, frowning or scowling; but none of these would do.

Lars Thorenson had finally had to give him a hand. Lars had explained that it was the beard that was wrong: Brown Limper had a black mustache and beard, and whereas the mustache was all right, the beard was thin and scraggly. So the thing to do was shave off the beard and trim the mustache until it was a bushy tuft just under the nose; that was the sort of mustache the great military hero Hitler had had and so it must be correct.

Then there had been the problem of a proper costume. Nobody seemed to find anything proper. General Snith came to the rescue. He had heard one of his men report that there was an old graveyard that had air-sealed coffins in it. Several had been dug up, looking for a corpse that had been properly dressed: but after more than a thousand years the fabric wouldn’t hold together. The only outcome of all that was a sickness that had hit the Brigantes: two had died and a doctor, passing through, had said it was “formaldehyde poisoning,” whatever that was.

Somebody had finally found a bolt of gray cloth in a basement that didn’t tear very much and somebody else had found a pattern that said “chauffeur’s uniform” on it and some Brigante women had sewn it up. They had also found a black-visored cap that lasted long enough for the picture.

Snith had a handful of jewelry he’d found- which Brown Limper knew couldn’t possibly be rubies or diamonds and was probably colored glass- and they’d put that on the left breast of the coat so he would have “medals.”

The final posing was solved by using a picture Lars had of somebody called “Napoleon,” also a great military hero of ancient man. The pose had the fingers of one hand tucked into the coat edge on the breast.

MacAdam had been a bit difficult. He had asked Brown Limper whether this was what he really wanted by way of a portrait and Brown Limper had been cross about it. After all that trouble. Of course that was what he wanted!

So here was the new bank note at last. It was a hundred-credit note: MacAdam had said he could only print one denomination and it had to be a hundred credits. Brown Limper realized that that made this a far more important bill. It had the bank name on it. It was only printed in English and no other tribal language. And right there, loud and clear, it said “One Hundred American Credits”! And it said “Valid for the payment of public and private debts in America.”

One of the conditions MacAdam had made was that all earlier money in the country be collected up and exchanged for these new bills. It was hard to do because the earlier issue was a one-credit bank note and this American issue was a one-hundred-credit bank note. But the dream of having all Tyler notes gone was so alluring, Brown Limper had made up the differences in exchange out of his own pocket.

This victory was doing much to improve Brown Limper’s spirits: they had been very low as of late.

When that Tyler had not only not gone to his booby-trapped home in the meadow but had walked right out of the country, Brown Limper had been so dispirited he had wanted to call off the whole Terl project.

But Lars had talked to him. Lars seemed to have developed a hatred for Tyler. (He did not say it was from the degradation of hiding under scrap metal in the garage and envy over the way Tyler could fly, but the emotion was very well understood by

Brown Limper who considered it natural.)

Lars had said that if they went ahead and actually transshipped, Tyler was certain to reappear.

Terl had talked to him. Terl said that when they fired a shipment to Psychlo, Tyler would be right there, and he had traps for him that even Tyler could not get around.

So Brown Limper had continued with the project.

Other things were going wrong, though. He did not hear much anymore from the tribal chiefs. Lars explained it was natural- they trusted him to run things. No pilgrims came anymore to the minesite. But that was natural- it was winter.

People had been disappearing. First the hotel cook. Then some Swiss shopkeepers. Then another and another until now the hotel was no longer operating and no shops were open at all.

The shoemakers had vanished. The Germans who repaired things were no longer to be found. The llaneros had driven the large herds south- where they would have better winter feed, they said- and then they had vanished.

Brown Limper had taken it up with Snith. Did this have anything to do with Brigantes? Even Terl put the question to him. But Snith swore up and down he and his men had behaved.

The Academy was still there and operating. There seemed to be a vast number of pilot trainees and a vaster number of machine operators. But they stayed down at the Academy and all one saw was an occasional plane doing practice flights.

All his office radios and teleprinters were gone. They broke down and had to be taken away to be repaired and then they never came back. But never mind, Brown Limper couldn’t operate them anyway and couldn’t really trust anyone else to.

This new bank note was making a world of difference to his morale. He decided he would not pay the pilots in it. He’d get even with them.

People would be hanging him, Brown Limper, on their walls now!

On sudden impulse, he decided he had better mend his political fences with his own tribe- and show them this bill, of course. He called Lars and General Snith and they got into a mine passenger plane Lars kept in the parking lot and took off for the new village he had put his people in.

Brown Limper was still admiring one of the bank notes he held in his hand. The thought of showing it off to the village people warmed him. He did not even mind the harrowing way that Lars Thorenson flew.

Narrowly missing snow-covered peaks that were not even on their route, Lars set them down near the old mining town.

But it all seemed deserted.

Not a single plume of smoke rose from a fire. Not even the smell of it remained.

Carrying a Thompson, Snith scouted the place. Empty! Not even a trace of belongings. Nothing.

Brown Limper searched, looking for a clue, dragging his clubfoot through the smooth snow from building to building. Finally he found where they must have had a meeting. There were some torn scraps of paper lying about. And then, under a table where it might have fallen off a pile of papers unnoticed, he found a letter.

It was from Tom Smiley Townsen.

Brown Limper looked at it and went into an immediate rage. Not at what it said, but at Tom Smiley’s having the effrontery to know how to write. What arrogance! But then he saw it was not really written, it was printed, and rather crudely at that. Even the signature was printed. So he decided to be tolerant and read it.

The letter went on and on about how nice some area known as “Tashkent” was. Big mountains, endless plains of wild wheat, lots of sheep. And a mild winter climate. And how he had gotten married to some…? Some Latin! Disgraceful. No blood purity there.

Brown Limper threw the letter down.

Well, maybe the village people had gone back to their old home. They had not wanted to move. But he was surprised that the Indians and the people from the Sierra Nevadas and the other British Columbian fellow had not remained here for they hadn’t cared for the old village- too cold and too heavy a prospect of starving every winter.

They flew to the old village. Lars had trouble setting down and almost landed in the middle of one of those uranium circles. When he could let go his grip on the seat, Brown Limper looked around.

No smoke here, either.

Brown Limper poked into some of the houses. When they had moved at such short notice people had had to leave most of their personal possessions behind and Brown Limper thought they must still be there. But no. Every house was empty. Not ransacked the way Brigantes left places. Just neatly empty.

With a bit of fear- because it had been booby-trapped- he approached the old Tyler house. It was still standing. Maybe the booby traps hadn’t gone off.

Then he saw that some of the roof was bulged and he went around to the other side to where the front door had been. The door had been blown off. Lars and Snith were poking at something in the snow.

It was the remains of two Brigantes. What hadn’t been burned had been torn apart by wolves. It was obvious they had tripped the booby traps and quite a while ago.

General Snith poked at the scraps of money, skin, and bones with the muzzle of the submachine gun. “Mus hab come oop here browling fer loot!” said Snith. “Waste of good meat!”

Brown Limper wanted to be alone. He dragged his foot up the slope to the place they once had buried people. He turned at the top and gazed down at the empty village, falling apart and now abandoned forever.

Something had been nagging at him and now it hit him.

He was a tribal leader without a tribe.

From five tribes he had descended to one- the Brigantes! And they were not native to America.

Numbly he realized he had better keep this awfully quiet. It undermined his whole position.

Something caught his eye. A monument? A small stone shaft sticking up out of the ground. He moved around it. It had an inscription:

     TIMOTHY BRAVE TYLER

A good father Erected in Respectful

Memory By his loving son

     J.G.T.

     Brown Limper screamed! He tried to kick the monument down. It was too firmly planted and he only bruised his foot. He stood and screamed and screamed, tearing the echoes of the valley apart.

Then he stopped. It was all Jonnie Goodboy Tyler’s fault. Everything that had befallen Brown Limper all his life was totally and wholly Tyler’s fault!

So Tyler would come again, would he? Terl might have his plans and they might be all right. But Brown Limper was going to make very, very sure.

If Tyler ever hit that firing platform again he was a dead man.

Brown Limper went down to the waiting plane. He said to Lars and Snith-they mustn’t know what he really intended-’For our mutual protection, I think you should teach me how to use a Thompson submachine gun.”

They agreed it would be wise.

Terl had said time and again you didn’t dare shoot off a gun during a transshipment. But who cared about that? Two guns. He would use two guns…. Brown Limper planned how he would do it all the way back to Denver.

     The small gray man sat watching the strange antics of a terrestrial craft several miles above his orbit.

The combined force had learned over a month ago to leave such a craft alone. Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl, already in disgrace over trying to sneak a kidnap and cut them out of the potential loot, had charged his Vulcor-class cruiser, guns blazing, at a ship doing exactly what this one was doing. The strange craft had sidestepped neatly; there reportedly had been a series of clangs against the cruiser’s hull.

Snowl had pulled up, mystified as to what the “clangs” betokened. He had sent crewmen out on lines to inspect his hull and they had been horrified to discover they had about twenty limpet mines on it, held solidly by magnetism to the hull.

The terrestrial craft had apparently mined the orbit they used.

Snowl had been further embarrassed to discover that the mines did not explode. They had atmosphere pressure fuses, which meant that if he brought the Vulcor-class cruiser within a hundred thousand feet of the planet’s surface, the air pressure would explode them there.

Every commander had hastily examined his whole ship to see if he had picked any up. They hadn’t, but it meant to them that if you chased that terrestrial ship it threw a cloud of mines in your path. Very unnerving! So they left it alone.

The ship had a huge door in the side and a lot of cranes. The small gray man was no miner or military expert, but the ship was obviously collecting space debris. It wasn’t using its cranes so it must have a big magnet inside that door.

Apparently it would spot something on its screen- there were a lot of odd bits in orbit just now as a large, strange comet had entered the system lately, evidently from some other system, and bits of it were floating around and occasionally hitting the meteor shielding of most of these ships. Then the terrestrial would go out and pace the object-many of them were moving as fast as nineteen miles a second- and suddenly dart sideways. The apparent magnets inside that door would collect it.

Rather interesting, the small gray man thought. Somewhat like a hummingbird he had once seen, darting about after insects, stopping around a flower, and then zooming off. He needed something to occupy his mind.

There was no word yet. Probably wouldn’t be for another couple of months. No new courier had come to him, which seemed to mean that the one had not been found elsewhere. These were very troubled times.

His indigestion had begun to act up again. About three weeks ago he had gone down to see the old woman- he had run out of peppermint leaves. She had been glad to see him and so had the dog. She had used the vocoder to start up some trade with the Swedes and she had sold them some oats and some butter and she was rolling in money- look, six credits! Enough to buy an acre of ground or another cow! And she had been busy evenings. Cold weather had been coming on and it must be an awful lot colder up there in the sky, and she had knitted him a nice gray sweater.

The small gray man had the sweater on now. It was quite soft and warm. He touched it and felt a little sad.

He had told those military men that it was politically inadvisable to try to operate in the Highlands of Scotland and he thought they had listened. But just a week ago he had gone down to get some more peppermint and the old woman was gone. The house was closed up. The dog was gone. The cow was gone. There seemed to be no sign of violence but then you never knew with these military men: they could be very sneaky and thorough at times. He had dug up a few sprigs of mint from under the snow but was quite troubled. Anything like sentiment was a foreign thing to him. But he had felt troubled nonetheless.

These military men! They were so obsessed with finally smashing up this planet that they were quite restless when asked to wait for his courier.

They got such silly ideas. They had noted that every plane and every installation down there now seemed to have a little creature in an orange-yellow robe. They couldn’t understand the messages now being sent on the planet’s radios. They had tried language machines and none worked. Then they tried all their coding and scrambling machines and none worked. All the messages seemed to begin and end with “Om mani padme om,” like a sort of chant.

That place in southern Africa near the big dam- the one the terrestrials had used to lure in and trap two raiding parties- was being all cleared out and it gave them their first clue. A pagoda-like structure- several in fact- were being erected. They found in some old reference texts that the design was a “religious temple.” So the military men had agreed that the planet had now experienced a new political upheaval. Some religious zealots had taken over. Religions were very dangerous- they inflamed people. Any sensible government and its military should stamp them out. But they were not concerned with politics and religion just now. They would wait.

The small gray man turned his attention from the terrestrial craft to the combined force. It had increased in number now to thirteen. New arrivals. Other races. They had brought the news that there was a hundred-million-credit prize offered now to the ship or ships that discovered the one. Thus they were more eager to raid and collect evidence than they were to gut the planet.

Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl had become quite incensed with this place, obsessed with it in fact. But his military sense was telling him that he was outnumbered by the rest of the combined force, and he had left a couple of weeks ago to return to his planet and bring up additional war vessels. It would get quite crowded in the orbits. His own captain had asked the small gray man whether he could draw off a bit from the rest. This was going to be an awful mess when these military men “found out” and could split the prize and then gut the planet. The small gray man had agreed.

He returned to idly watching the terrestrial ship. It seemed to be finished now, possibly had a full hold. It was slowly going down into the atmosphere, making its way to the African base.