Battlefield Earth Part 14

At first Terl wasn't going to answer.

Then his s.a.d.i.s.tic streak got the better of him.

"That's blood." "It isn't red."

"Psychlo blood isn't red; it's real blood and it's a proper color- green. Now shut up, animal. I'm going to tell you how-'

"What's all this charred stuff around the edges of this big circle?" And Jonnie pointed to the edges where the canopy had once been.

Terl hit him. Jonnie almost flew off the huge high seat where he had been standing. But with some agility he caught hold of a roll bar and didn't fall.

"I have to know," said Jonnie when he caught his breath. "How can I be sure somebody didn't press the wrong b.u.t.ton and blow this thing up?"

Terl sighed. The arms of the man-thing weren't long enough to reach the controls and he'd have to stand up on the floor plates to run it. "They didn't push any wrong b.u.t.ton. It just blew up."

"But how? Something must have made it blow up." Then he realized that this was the vehicle that had killed a Psychlo down on the landing field. He himself had heard it explode.

Jonnie pushed away some snow and sat down on the seat and looked the other way.

"All right!" snarled Terl. "When these vehicles are run by Psychlo operators they have a transparent hood over them. That is needed for breathe-gas. You won't be using any canopy or breathe-gas, animal, so it won't blow "Yes, but why did it blow up? I have to know if I'm going to run the thing."

Terl sighed, long and shudderingly. Exasperation made his fangs grate. The animal was sitting there looking the other way.

"Breathe-gas," said Terl, "was under the canopy. They were loading gold ore and it must have had a trace of uranium in it. There must have been a leak in the canopy or a crack and the breathe-gas touched the uranium and exploded."

"Uranium? Ur Uranium?"

"You're p.r.o.nouncing it wrong. It's uranium uranium"

"How do you say it in English?"

That was enough. "How the c.r.a.p nebula would I know?" snapped Terl.

Jonnie carefully didn't smile. Uranium, uranium, he said to himself. It blew up breathe-gas!

And he had incidentally learned that Terl could not speak English.

"Which controls are which?" said Jonnie.

Terl was mollified a trifle. At least the animal wasn't looking the other way. "This b.u.t.ton stops it. Learn that b.u.t.ton good, and if anything else goes wrong, push it. This bar turns it to the left, that one to the right. This lever lifts the front blade, that one tilts it, the next one angles it. The red b.u.t.ton backs it up."

Jonnie stood on the floor plates. He made the front blade lift, tilt, and angle, peering over the hood each time to see what was happening. Then he made the blade lift well up. "See that grove of trees over there?" said Terl. "Start it toward them, dead slow."

Terl walked beside the vehicle. "Now stop it." Jonnie did. "Now back it up." Jonnie did. "Now go forward in a circle." Jonnie did.

Although Terl seemed to think this was a small vehicle, the seat was fifteen feet off the ground. The blade was twenty feet wide. And when it started up it shook not only itself but the ground, such was its heavy power.

"Now start pus.h.i.+ng snow," said Terl. "Just a couple of inches off the top."

It was very difficult at first getting the blade to bite in varying degrees while the machine rolled forward.

Terl watched. It was cold. He had had no sleep. His fangs ached where Zzt had landed a good one. He clambered up on the vehicle and took Jonnie's rope and wrapped it around a roll bar, tying it at a distance where Jonnie wouldn't be able to get to it.

Jonnie stopped the vehicle, ready for a breather.

"Why didn't Numph hear me speaking?" asked Jonnie.

"Shut up, animal."

"But I have to know. Maybe my accent is too bad."

"Your accent is awful but that isn't the reason. You had a face mask on and Numph is a bit deaf." This was a plain, outright security chief lie.

Numph had been able to hear all right and the animal's face mask had not m.u.f.fled his speech a bit. Numph had been distracted by something else. Something Terl didn't know. And the reason Terl had had no sleep was that he had spent the entire night rummaging through dispatches, records, and Numph's files trying to get to the bottom of it. Leverage. Leverage. That's what Terl needed. He had found nothing of importance, nothing at all. But there was something.

Terl felt dead on his feet. He was going in to take a nap. "I have some reports to write," said Terl. "You just keep this thing going around and practice with it. I'll be out soon."

Terl took a b.u.t.ton camera out of his pocket and stuck it on the after roll bar, out of the animal's reach. "Don't get any ideas. This vehicle only goes at a walk." And he left.

But the nap, aided by a heavy shot of kerbango, was a bit longer than he intended, and it was nearly dark when he came lumbering hurriedly back.

He stopped and stared. The practice field was all chewed up. But that wasn't the amazing thing. The animal had neatly knocked down half a dozen trees and pushed them all the way up the hill to the cage where they were now stacked. More- he had used the blade drop to slice up the trees into sections a few feet long and slit them.

The animal was sitting on the seat now, hunkered down out of the keening wind that had sprung up.

Terl untied the rope and Jonnie stood up.

"What's that all about?" said Terl, pointing at the chopped-up trees.

"Firewood," said Jonnie. "Now that I'm untied I will carry some into the cage."

"Firewood?"

"Let's say I'm tired of a diet of raw rat, my friend."

That night, having eaten his first cooked food in months and thawing the winter chill from his bones before the pleasant fire on the cage floor, Jonnie heaved a sigh of relief.

The new clothes were hung up on sticks to dry. He sat cross-legged, digging into his pouch.

He drew out the gold metal disc and then he reached for the gold belt buckle he had just acquired. He studied them.

The bird with the arrows was essentially the same on each one. And now he could read the squiggles.

The disc said, "The United States of America."

The belt buckle said, "The United States Air Force"

So his people long ago had been a nation. And it had had a force of some sort devoted to the air.

The Psychlos wore belt buckles that said they were members of the Intergalactic Mining Company.

With a smile that would have frightened Terl had he seen it, Jonnie supposed that he was as of this minute a member, the only member, of the United States Air Force.

He put the buckle carefully under a piece of robe he used for a pillow and lay for a long time looking at the dancing flames.

Chapter 4.

The mighty planet Psychlo, "king of the galaxies," basked beneath the forceful rays of triple suns.

The courier stood to the side of Intergalactic's transs.h.i.+pment receipt area, waiting. Above him the mauve skies domed the purple hillsides of the horizon. All about him spread the smoke-spewing factories, the power lines, the tense and crackling might of the company. Machines and vehicles boiled in purposeful turmoil throughout the multilayered roads and plains of the vast compound. In the distance lay the pyramidal shapes of the Imperial City. Spotted among the outlying hills were the compounds of many other companies- factories that spewed out their products to whole galaxies.

Who would be elsewhere? thought the courier. He sat astride his small ground-go, momentarily idle in his daily rounds, waiting. Who would want to live and toil on some forgotten light- gravity planet, wearing a mask, working under domes, driving pressurized vehicles, digging in alien soil? Or, drafted, fighting some war on territory n.o.body cared about anyway? Not this Psychlo, that was for sure.

A shrieking whistle pierced the day: the warning signal to get clear of the transs.h.i.+pment receipt platform, chasing away a fleet of blade, brush, and vacuum vehicles that had been clearing it.

The courier automatically checked his own proximity. Good, he was outside the danger area.

The network of lines and cables about the platform hummed. Then they shrieked into a crescendo that ended with a roaring explosion.

Tons of ore materialized on the platform surface, teleported in an instant across the galaxies.

The courier gazed through the momentarily ionized air. Look at that. The incoming ore had a crust of whitish substance overlying it. The courier had seen it before from time to time. Somebody said it was called "snow." Trickles of water took the place of the flakes. Imagine having to work and live on a crazy planet like that.

The all-clear signal sounded and the courier gunned his ground-go forward to the new ore heap. The receipt foreman rumbled out to the new pile of ore.

"Look at that," said the courier.

"Snow."

The receipt foreman had seen it all, knew it all, and held junior couriers in contempt. "It's bauxite, not snow."

"It had some snow on it when it landed."

The receipt foreman scrambled over to the right side of the pile and fished around. He brought up a small dispatch box. Standing on the ore, he noted the box number on his clipboard and then brought it over to the courier.

Blade vehicles were charging in on the new pile. The receipt foreman impatiently handed the clipboard to the courier, who signed. The box was thrown at him. He threw back the clipboard and it caught the receipt foreman on his ma.s.sive chest.

The courier gunned his ground-go and swiftly threaded his way through the incoming machines, speeding toward the Intergalactic Central Administration Compound.

A few minutes later a clerk, carrying the box, walked into the office of Zafin, Junior a.s.sistant to the Deputy Director for Secondary Uninhabited Planets. The office was little more than a cubicle, for s.p.a.ce at Intergalactic Central housed three hundred thousand administrative personnel.

Zafin was a young ambitious executive. "What's that box doing wet?" he said.

The clerk, who was about to set it down among papers, hastily withdrew it, got out a cloth, and dried it. He looked at the label. "It's from Earth; must be raining there."

"Typical," said Zafin. "Where's that?"

The clerk tactfully hit a projector b.u.t.ton and a chart flared on the wall. The clerk s.h.i.+fted the focus, peered, and then put a claw on a small dot.

Zafin wasn't bothering to look. He had opened the dispatch box and was sorting the dispatches to different departments under him, zipping an initial on those that required it. He was almost finished when he held up a dispatch that required some work and couldn't just be initialed. He looked at it with distaste.

"Green flashed urgent," said Zafin. The clerk took it apologetically and read it. It s just a request for information."

"Too high a priority," said Zafin. He took it back. "Here we have three wars in progress and somebody from...where?"

"Earth," said the clerk.

"Who sent it?"

The clerk took the dispatch back and looked. "A security chief named...named Terl."

"What's his record?"

The clerk put his talons on a b.u.t.ton console and a wall slot clattered and then spat out a folder. The clerk handed it over.

"Terl," said Zafin. He frowned, thinking. "Haven't I heard that name before?"

The clerk took back the folder and looked at it. "He requested a transfer about five months ago our time."

"Steel trap brain," said Zafin. "That's me." And he meant it. He took the folder back. "Never forget a name." He leafed through the papers. "Must be a dead, dull place, Earth. And now a dispatch with wrong priority."

The clerk took the folder back.

Zafin frowned. "Well, where's the dispatch?"

"On your desk, Your Honor."

Zafin looked at it. "He wants to know what connections...Numph? Numph?"

The clerk worked the console and a screen flashed. "Intergalactic Director, Earth."

"This Terl wants to know what connections he has in the main office," said Zafin.

The clerk pushed some more b.u.t.tons. The screen flashed. The clerk said, "He's the uncle of Nipe, a.s.sistant Director of Accounting for Secondary Planets."

"Well, write it on the dispatch and send it back."

It's also marked confidential," said the clerk.

"Well, mark it confidential," said Zafin. He sat back, thinking. He turned his chair and looked out the window at the distant city. The breeze was cool and pleasant. It dissipated some of his irritation.

Zafin turned back to his desk. "Well, we won't discipline this what's-his-name..."