Battlefield Earth Part 63

With a glance at the doctor for permission, Dunneldeen helped him turn his head. Jonnie looked through the plane ports.

There were five planes out there, stacked in a long echelon. He turned his eyes and looked out the other port. There were five planes out there in another echelon.

"It's your escort," said Dunneldeen.

"My escort?" whispered Jonnie. "But why? Everybody helped."

"Aye, laddie," said the Chief of Clanfearghus. "But you were the one. You were the bonnie one!"

The doctor disconnected the tube. He felt Jonnie's pulse. He nodded and motioned the others to silence. He had let this go on too long. The plane was not vibrating; the flight was very smooth. He had his patient out of shock. He wished he were in his own operating cave. But the others would not leave this young man there. And he himself, having heard but a small part of it, could share their awe and respect for what he had done.

"If you'll just drink this," said the doctor, "it will make things easier."

They held the cup to Jonnie's mouth.

It was whiskey and it had heavy herbs in it. He managed to drink it. Shortly the pain grew less and he seemed to be floating.

The doctor signaled them all to be quiet. He had a trephine in his hand. The brain was being pressed upon in three places, not two, and the pressure must be relieved.

Dunneldeen went up to the c.o.c.kpit to help Dwight. He glanced at their escort. Most of them were flying with one pilot. They had each smashed their minesites and come hammering back here when he put out the call for a ma.s.sive patrol to the north of Scotland. They all should have gone home, but they wouldn't hear of it when they knew about Jonnie. They'd gone down with a Scot war party and gotten more planes from the Cornwall minesite after shooting the few Psychlos staggering around, and those not ordered back for urgent duty had been sitting, waiting for news about Jonnie. Now they were escorting him home.

"You better tell them he's all right," said Dwight. "They keep calling in every two or three minutes for news. And so does Robert the Fox. Takes one man just to handle the radio!"

"He's not all right," said Dunneldeen. And he looked down the long corridor to where the doctor had begun the operation.

Dwight glanced at Dunneldeen. Was the young prince crying? He felt like it himself.

Chapter 2.

Jonnie had been in a coma for three days.

They had brought him to the ancient underground military base in the Rocky Mountains where salt filters could be dropped into place at once if a counterattack materialized from the planet Psychlo.

The hospital complex was very extensive. It was all white tile, hardly any of it cracked. The Russians had cleaned it all up and the parson had buried the crumbling dead.

Fifteen of the wounded Scots were there, including Thor and Glencannon. They were in a separate series of rooms from Jonnie's, but one could hear them now and then, especially when the pipe major gave them an afternoon concert. Dr. Allen and Dr. MacKendrick had already discharged five of them as reasonably well and certainly too restless and impatient to keep idle when so many things were going on elsewhere.

Chrissie had been in constant attendance at Jonnie's bedside and she rose when Dr. MacKendrick and Angus MacTavish came in. They seemed angry with one another and Chrissie hoped they would go soon. MacKendrick put a hand on Jonnie's forehead and stood there for a moment looking at the ashen pallor. Then he turned to Angus with an expressive hand that seemed to say, "See?" Jonnie's breathing was shallow.

Three days before Jonnie had awakened and whispered to her to send for somebody. There was always a Scot guard at the door, his a.s.sault rifle blocking out would-be visitors, of which there were too many. Chrissie had brought him in and watched worriedly while Jonnie whispered a long message to Robert the Fox, and the guard got it on a picto-recorder mike held close to Jonnie's lips. The message had been to the effect that if another gas drone appeared in the sky they could probably stop it by landing thirty recon drones on it with magnetic skids and racing their engines on reverse coordinates so the gas drone's motors would burn out. Chrissie didn't understand the message but she did understand that it was too tiring to Jonnie. He had relapsed back into a coma, and when the guard came back to say Sir Robert sent his thanks and would do that, Chrissie was quite cross with him.

The same guard was on again when Dr. MacKendrick and Angus were let in, and Chrissie vowed she would reason with him. MacKendrick, yes. Angus, definitely no!

MacKendrick and Angus went out and the guard closed the door behind them.

"Look," said MacKendrick, dragging Angus into one side room after another. "Machines, machines, machines. This was once a very well appointed and outfitted hospital.

Those big things over there- I have seen them in an ancient book- were called 'X-ray machines.' It was a subject called radiology."

"Radiation?" said Angus. "No, man, not on Jonnie! Radiation is for killing Psychlos. You're daft!"

"Those machines let you look inside the body and find out what is wrong. They were invaluable."

"Those machines," said Angus, angrily, "were run by electricity! Why do you think we light this place with mine lamps?"

"You must get them running!" said MacKendrick.

"Even if I did, I see by that one they have tubes. The gas in those tubes is over a thousand years old. We can't get any more of it and couldn't get it into the tubes if we had any! You're daft, man."

MacKendrick glared at him. "There is something pressing on his brain! I can't just go plunging into it with a scalpel. I can't guess. Not with Jonnie MacTyler!

People would slaughter me!"

"You want to see inside his head," said Angus. "Well, why didn't you say so?" Angus went off muttering about electricity.

He told a standby pilot at the heliport that he needed to get to the compound fast. The pilots were very few and they were being run ragged. They were zipping off to all parts of the world; they had a sort of international airline going that was beginning to visit every remaining pocket of men on the planet at least once a week. They were ferrying World Federation Coordinators and chiefs and tribal leaders as fast as they could. More pilots were in training, but right now they only had thirty plus the two in hospital. So a casual request, even from a Scot, even from a member of the original combat force, was not likely to get much heed. Travel from the underground base to the compound was usually by ground car.

Angus told him it had to do with Jonnie, and the pilot said why hadn't he said so and pushed him into a plane and said he would wait for him to come back.

With grim purpose, Angus went to the compound section where they kept the captive Psychlos. A small area of the old dormitory level had been rigged to circulate breathe-gas and "unreconstructed" Psychlos were there under heavy guard. They numbered about sixty now, for occasional ones were brought here from distant minesites when they surrendered peacefully. Terl was captive elsewhere.

Angus got an air mask and the Scot guard let him in. The place was very dim and the huge Psychlos sat around in att.i.tudes of despair. One didn't walk in the place without being covered by the guard. The prisoners expected a Psychlo counterattack and were not too cooperative.

The Scot engineer located Ker and dug him out of his apathy. He demanded of Ker to tell him whether he knew of any mining equipment that would let one look through solid objects. Ker shrugged. Angus told him who it was for and Ker sat there for a while, his amber eyes thoughtful.

Then suddenly he wanted to be rea.s.sured as to who this was for, and Angus told him it was for Jonnie. Ker was turning a tiny gold band around in his claws. Suddenly he sprang up and demanded that Angus give him an escort and a breathe-mask.

Ker went down to the shops and in a storeroom there dug up a strange machine. He explained it was used to a.n.a.lyze the internal structure of mineral samples and to find crystalline cracks inside metals. He showed Angus how to work it. You put the emanation tube under the object to be examined and you read the results on the top screen. There was also a trace paper reader that showed metals in alloys or rocks. It worked on some wavelength he called sub-proton field emanation, and this was intensified by the lower tube, and the influence went through the sample and you read it on the top screen. Being Psychlo, it was quite ma.s.sive, and Ker carried it for him to the waiting plane. A guard took Ker back and Angus returned to the military base.

They tried it with some cats they had that were cleaning the rat population out, and the cats afterward seemed cheerful enough. The screen showed the skull outline very nicely. They tried it on one of the wounded Scots who volunteered and they found a piece of stone in his hand from a mine injury, and he too seemed fine afterward.

About 4:00 that afternoon they used it on Jonnie. By 4:30 they had a three-dimensional picture and the trace paper.

A very relieved Dr. MacKendrick pointed it out to Angus. "A piece of metal! See it? A sliver just below one of the trephine holes. Well! We'll just get him ready and I can have that out with a scalpel soon enough!"

"Metal?" said Angus. "Scalpel? On Jonnie? No you don't! Don't you dare touch him! I'll be right back!"

With the metal trace paper flying behind him, Angus fifteen minutes later charged in on the Chamco brothers. They worked in a separate breathe-gas dome at the compound, industriously trying to a.s.sist Robert the Fox to put things back together.

Angus shoved the trace under their pug nosebones: "What metal is this?"

The Chamcos examined the trace squiggles. "Ferrous daminite," they said. "A very strong support alloy."

"Is it magnetic?" demanded Angus. And they said yes, of course it was.

By six o'clock Angus was back in the hospital. He had a heavy electrocoil he had just made. It had handgrips on it.

Angus showed MacKendrick how to guide it and MacKendrick worked out the best path to bring the sliver out with the least damage to tissue.

A few minutes later they had the broad sliver in their hands, withdrawn by the magnet.

Later the Chamco brothers identified it with closer a.n.a.lysis as a piece of a battle plane skid strut "which has to be very strong and very light."

Jonnie had not been conscious enough to tell anyone what he had done on the drone and Chrissie had shooed off the historian when he tried to find out earlier. So it was a bit of a mystery as to how a sliver piece of a strut could have been daggered into Jonnie's head.

But whatever they had done to him, Chrissie was extremely relieved. The fever he had had dropped. His breathing improved and his color got better.

The following morning he came out of the coma and smiled a little at Chrissie and MacKendrick and dropped into a natural sleep.

Planetary radio was not slow in crackling with the news. Their Jonnie was out of danger!

The pipe major paraded his pipes and drums all around the compound on the heels of the crier who was yelling it out to work parties. Bonfires blazed both there and in various other parts of the world, and a Coordinator in the Andes relayed the news that the chiefs of some peoples they had found there had declared this an annual celebration day, and could they come now and pay homage? A pilot standing by with a plane in the Mountains of the Moon in Africa had to get help from both Coordinators and chiefs of that small colony in order to get s.p.a.ce to take off again, so mobbed had the field become with celebrating, jubilant people. The compound radio operators had to double up on s.h.i.+fts to handle the message traffic roaring in on them as a result of the announcement.

Robert the Fox just went around grinning at everybody.

Chapter 3.

As the days wore on into weeks, it became obvious to the Council, originally composed of the parson, the schoolmaster, the historian, and Robert the Fox, and now augmented by several Clanchiefs who left deputies in Scotland, that Jonnie was brooding about something.

He would smile at them from his bed and talk to them when spoken to, but there was something deep in his eyes that was dull and moody.

Chrissie tried not to let them come very often, and when they did she was a bit impatient with them if they overstayed.

Some of the Russians and some Swedes were rebuilding parts of the Academy due to the desperate need for pilots. Until the ancient capital building in Denver could be rebuilt, the Council had a room at the Academy. They could get to both the compound and the underground military base from there, and all their berthing quarters were there.

At this particular meeting Robert the Fox was walking up and down, his kilt flaring out each time he turned, his claymore held snug enough by an ancient officer's belt from the base-which also held a Smith and Wesson-knocking against chairs. "Some thing is bothering him. He is not like the old Jonnie."

"Does he think we are doing something wrong?" said the Chief of Clanfearghus.

"No, no, it isn't that," said Robert the Fox. "There's not a sc.r.a.p of criticism for anyone in his makeup. It 's just he...he seems worried."

The parson cleared his throat, "It just could be his side has something to do with it. He cannot much move his right arm and he cannot walk as yet. He is, after all, used to being about and very briskly as well. After all, the lad had a dreadful time of it, all alone, injured. I can't think how he managed. All that time in a cage, earlier... You're all expecting too much, too fast, gentlemen. He is a brave spirit and I have faith...."

"Could be worry over the possibility of a Psychlo counterattack," said the Chief of Clanargyll.

"We must rea.s.sure him somehow," said the Chief of Clanfearghus. "Heaven knows, we are working hard enough on planetary affairs."

And they were. The World Federation for the Unification of the Human Race had been formed from those Jonnie had not accepted for the group that had come with him to America. Some two hundred young Scots and another fifty oldsters had done their beginning work well. In two dangerous but successful raids, one to the site of an ancient university named Oxford and another to a similar ruin at Cambridge, they had obtained language books and a mound of material on other countries. They had worked out where isolated groups of humans might still be and had formed up a unit for each language they thought might still be in use. Their selection was proving not far off, and ruler-bruised hands attested to the diligence of their study. They called themselves "Coordinators" and they were making a vital contribution all over the world where groups were being found.

The current estimate was that there were nearly thirty-five thousand human beings left on Earth, an astonis.h.i.+ng number that, the Council agreed, was far too great for any one town. The groups were mostly survivors who had withdrawn to mountainous places, natural fortresses their forebears had mined, as in the case of the Rockies. But some were in the frozen north in which the Psychlos had had no interest, and some were simply overlooked strays.

The duty of the Council, as they saw it, was to preserve the tribal and local customs and government and install over all of it a clan system, appointing local leaders as Clanchiefs. The Coordinators spread the news and were extremely welcome and successful.

The hard-worked pilots were ferrying in chiefs and visitors and simply anyone who got on their pa.s.senger planes. If there were too many going or coming they simply told them to wait until next week and that was fine.

But there was no really organized forward motion. Local control of the tribes was often slack. Some had retained literacy in their language, some had not. Most of them were poor, half-starved, ragged.

The one incredible fact that after over a thousand years there was freedom from Psychlos, even if possibly temporary, united them in a wave of hope. They had once gazed from their mountains on the ruins of cities they dared not visit; they had looked upon fertile plains and great herds they dared not benefit from; they had seen no hope whatever for their dying race. And then suddenly men from the sky, speaking their language, telling them of the remarkable feats that led to possible freedom, had brought them soaring hope and reburgeoning pride in their race.

The Council's existence they accepted. They joined it and, with radios parked on rocks and in huts, communicated with it.

They all had one question. Was the Jonnie MacTyler of whom the Coordinators spoke a part of this Council? Yes, he was. Good, no more questions.

But the Council well knew that Jonnie was not an active part of the Council now. Completely aside from the political significance of it, every Council member was himself personally concerned for Jonnie.

There were all kinds of things happening over the world, most of the actions taken without even informing the Council. People were moving about. A group of South Americans, with baggy pants and flat leather hats, swinging wide lariats and riding almost as well as Jonnie once did, had suddenly walked off a plane with their women and lariats and saddles and said, through their Spanish-speaking Scot Coordinator, that they were "Llaneros" or "gauchos" and they knew cattle- but would find out what to do with buffalo- and were taking over the management of the vast herds to preserve them and make sure the people at the compound and base were properly fed. Two Italians from the Italian Alps had shown up and taken over the commissary after making peace with the old women. Five Germans from Switzerland had shown up and opened a factory in Denver to salvage and service man-equipment such as knives and tools, you name it, and if you sent it to them they would make it s.h.i.+ny and working and send it back. This put a freight line into an already overburdened pilot zone. Three Basques showed up and simply started making shoes; the difficulty was that Basque as a language had been omitted by the Coordinators, and the shoemakers were learning English and Psychlo while they turned out shoes from the hides the South Americans dedicatedly furnished them. Many others came in.

Everybody wanted to help and simply helped.

"There is no control of it," Robert the Fox told Jonnie one day in the hospital room.

Jonnie simply gave him a small smile and said, "Why control them?"

The historian, except for Jonnie's account of the drone, which was too sketchy to be called history, was getting bogged down in a.s.sembling tribal histories of the last thousand or more years. The Coordinators sent him all kinds of stuff and he couldn't even keep it in order. Some serious-eyed Chinese from a mountain fastness there had shown up to help him, and they were furiously studying English but were not of much help yet.

It seemed at first that language would be an obstacle. But it soon became clear that the future educated person would speak three languages: Psychlo for technical matters; English for arts, humanities, and government; and their own tribal language if not English. The pilots chattered Psychlo at each other: all their equipment was in Psychlo as well as their manuals and navigation and related skills.

There was a lot of protest at speaking the language of the hated Psychlos until the historian learned that Psychlo as a language was really a composite of words and technical developments stolen from other peoples in the universes, and there never had been a basic language called "Psychlo." People were glad of that and thereafter learned it more willingly, but they liked to refer to it as "Techno."

The parson had his own problems. He had about forty different religions on his hands. They had one thing in common: the myths of the conquest a thousand or more years ago. Otherwise they were miles apart. He had witch doctors and medicine men and priests and such flooding his doorstep. He knew very well the wars that can develop out of different faiths, and he was not going to evangelize any one of them. Man wanted peace.

He explained to them that man, being divided and internally at war, had advanced too slowly as a culture and so had been wide open to an invasion from elsewhere. They all agreed man should not be at war with man.

The myths- well, they knew the truth of it now. They were happy to abandon those myths. But on this question of which G.o.ds and which devils were valid...well...

The parson had neatly handled the whole thing for the moment. He would disturb no beliefs at all. Every one of these tribes was demanding to know what was the religion of Jonnie MacTyler? Well, he wasn't really of any religion, the parson told them. He was Jonnie MacTyler. Instantly and without exception, Jonnie MacTyler became part of their religions. And that was that.

But Jonnie was lying a bit wan, trying each day at Chrissie's and MacKendrick's persuasion to walk, to use his arm. And when the parson tried to tell him he was getting woven into the pantheon of about forty religions, he said nothing. He just lay there, not much life or interest showing in the depths of his eyes.

The Council was not having a happy time of it.