Battlefield Earth Part 128

"Oh, Jonnie, Jonnie, please forgive us. It is plain you don't know." He began to open up some doc.u.ments.

"When you never mentioned it," said the baron, "we thought you didn't want it known."

MacAdam was holding out the information announcement of the charter of the bank. "The Earth Planetary Bank was chartered by the original, valid, thirty-Chief Council. This was the information sheet that was released about it." He took the second doc.u.ment he held and opened it. "But this is the actual charter as pa.s.sed. The actual charter is the only one valid under law and the baron and I have wondered many times why they were different. But do you remember who was sometimes acting as secretary of the original Council?"

The information sheet on the charter mentioned only MacAdam and Baron von Roth. The baron and MacAdam looked at each other and in chorus said, "Brown Limper Staffor!"

"For reasons of his own," said MacAdam, "he miscopied the resolution for public release. We stupidly thought you didn't want it disclosed."

He opened up the original charter and there at the top, ahead of the names of Baron von Roth and Andrew MacAdam, was the name, bright and clear: Jonnie Goodboy Tyler!

"Haven't you ever noticed we always try to ask your opinion of any big deals?" pleaded the baron, very contrite.

"You were doing so many things more important that we just carried on," said MacAdam. "But Sir Robert! This lad is the owner of a third part of the Earth Planetary Bank. By charter!"

The baron said to Sir Robert, "Jonnie now owns two-ninths or about twenty-two percent of the Galactic Bank and a third of Intergalactic Mining Company." He turned to MacAdam. "Maybe we should make it more."

MacAdam looked at Sir Robert. "Did you think we would leave the poor lad, as you call him, out in the cold? He also owns part of that ton of gold. And all together you'd need a computer to add up his money. It 's in the quintillions! He's the richest poor lad these sixteen universes have ever seen, including the late Emperor of Psychlo!"

Sir Robert let go of Jonnie and suddenly began to laugh. He punched Jonnie in the shoulder. "Get along with you, you church mouse in disguise." He looked at the others. "Aye, gentlemen, I'll let it be and say enough's enough. Just barely, mind, just barely! Say," he added, "maybe you should go out there and buy him half a dozen of those fancy lords for his gillies!"

"He already bought them," said MacAdam. "Down to the last bauble in their boots!"

All but Jonnie boomed out laughter. His head was going round. Quintillions? The number was unreal. Maybe he could buy one of those woven leather lead ropes for Windsplitter. Or buy some new furniture if Chrissie had lost all hers....

The thought of Chrissie hit him. He had been keeping it suppressed so he could keep on going.

MacAdam and the baron collected up their things again and walked out shaking their heads and muttering, "Brown Limper!" And, "Made trouble clear to the end!"

A wailing, petulant voice cut into the room and Sir Robert looked up. Stormalong was behind two Russians at the room entrance who were stolidly blocking him out of it. "Sir Robert! Please come out here! I've had a dispatch that's been waiting for you for hours and hours and hours!"

Sir Robert pushed past the Russian guards and vanished.

Jonnie sat there, a little bit spent, trying to get oriented to what the rush of events added up to, trying to decide what he should do now. He made up his mind. Nothing was holding him here. He would go out and get a plane and get to Scotland to help. He grabbed his helmet off the floor. The two Russians at the door parted to let him through.

He collided with Sir Robert. The old Scot was standing there, a written message in his hand. He was crying and laughing all at the same time.

Sir Robert pushed the dispatch into Jonnie's hand. "Ah, weel! 'Tis quite a mess. But Jonnie, Jonnie, th'auld Rock protected them a!"

Edinburgh! They had gotten through the last tunnel at dawn today. They were half-starved, some injured, all in a state of greater or lesser shock, but they had gotten them out! All twenty-one hundred of them.

Jonnie felt dazed with relief. There were no specific names mentioned in the radio dispatch. He stumbled out into the bowl, meaning to go to ops.

There was someone across the bowl, someone covered with dust but wearing the domed helmet they used in high-speed flying. It was Thor!

Thor was beckoning to him gladly. Thor shouted, "Look who we got here for you, Jonnie!"

Somebody was rushing toward him. She threw her arms about him, crying his name.

It was Chrissie! Gaunt and pale, her black eyes flooding with tears.

"Oh, Jonnie! Jonnie!" she was saying. "I'm never going to leave you again! Never! Hold me, Jonnie!"

Jonnie did. He just stood there, almost crushing her ribs. He held her for a long time. He couldn't talk.

- Part x.x.xI -

Chapter 1.

Jonnie was riding Windsplitter along the banks of the Alzette River in Luxembourg. He was leisurely wending his way home.

It was a lovely summer day: the sunlight spattered down through the leafy trees along the trail, making patterns of green and gold that shifted gently and seemed to slowly echo the soft music of the purling stream.

Windsplitter snorted and tried to rear. It was the bear. The same bear they had seen there several times during the three months they had been in Luxembourg, using this same trail from the old minesite to Jonnie's house. The bear was fishing. He stopped now and tested the environment with his nose and saw them. He was a pretty big bear, brown, about six and a half feet tall as he stood up.

It's just the bear, you old fraud," said Jonnie.

Windsplitter sort of laughed and settled down. He did what he could to make life more exciting. And ever since the horses had been flown down from Russia they had been getting fat from idleness. Jonnie always rode him down to the minesite mornings and left him to poke around the strange doings there until Jonnie rode home. Just now he would have been far happier with a good old flat-out run through these interesting, summer-dressed woods. But he stood still, obedient to a heel command.

Jonnie sat and idly watched the bear. It had resumed its fishing, seeing no menace in the horse and rider on the other bank of the shallow stream. Jonnie bet if he had been a Psychlo, that bear would have left the country!

And would have still been running all the next day. Jonnie indifferently wanted to see if the bear would catch any of the big trout with which the stream abounded.

For all this beautiful day, Jonnie had a small feeling of disappointment. He had awakened that morning with the odd conviction that this new day was going to bring something really eventful, some piece of good news. And all day he had been antic.i.p.ating it.

He reviewed what had happened so far to see if any bright event had been missed by him.

He had gone, pretty much as usual, down to the old minesite to find the routine bedlam in progress. Three months ago he had bought the old Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the Intergalactic holdings. The Psychlos had had an iron mine there which they had worked in a lackadaisical fashion. They had also built a small steel mill and a forge which they used to turn out hooks, ore buckets and such for their mines on Earth.

The invaders had not touched the place, already well defended, and the deep underground levels had been ideal for doing the final setup of consoles. Angus MacTavish and Tom Smiley Townsen worked there, behind vault doors. They had streamlined a.s.sembly so all they had to do was implant the pattern of the circuit on the insulating board, a.s.semble the console, and shove it into a shipping case. Everything else was preconstructed practically out in the open since it gave away nothing.

In fact n.o.body but Jonnie, Angus, Tom Smiley, and Sir Robert knew that the consoles were completed at Luxembourg. The prea.s.sembly even included boxing. People who did it thought Angus and Tom Smiley were just inspectors. But these two, working only a couple of hours a day, using designed patterns and tools, withdrew the "preconstructed" console out of the case, finished it, sealed it, and then lined it up in the rows of them.

A heavily guarded convoy of trucks then drove them an incredible distance down to an ancient tunnel, once called Saint Gottard, about nine miles long. There the boxes were unloaded onto mine platform cars and sent on the ancient rails to the tunnel center. An automatic machine stamped them "completed" as they were pa.s.sed through a blocked chamber and put them onto a new set of mine platform cars.

A brand-new set of trucks, much more heavily guarded, then rushed them to the new firing platform that was now located in a mountain bowl outside Zurich. There, they were routed and shipped.

As Jonnie, Angus, and Tom Smiley had set up the tunnel and as it was heavily gunned and guarded, n.o.body knew who did the final a.s.sembly. Some thought there were special personnel or gnomes or something that lived in that tunnel and did the work.

They were batting out about two hundred consoles a day. The prea.s.sembly people were making the whole platform and poles and wiring since none of that was secret, and they were being shipped right along with the consoles.

No, mused Jonnie. There was nothing startlingly new in all that today. It was last week when Tom Smiley had told him Margarita was going to have a baby.

The bear had gotten his first trout. He batted it way up on the bank, looked around, and then went back to fishing. Windsplitter had found some young gra.s.s and was noisily pulling it up and eating it.

There had been nothing new with the Chatovarians. The bank had informed Sir Robert the moment all arms and related firms had crashed but good in the Chatovarian Empire and Sir Robert and Angus and half a dozen Selachees had sped there.

The Chatovarians had the reputation of being the best defense builders. It was their boast that no Psychlo attack had ever broken through in the entire seven-hundred-planet empire. They had even shot down gas drones. So, for that and other reasons, the new teleportation company- now called "The Rig industry" after Jonnie rejected using his name on it- had done business with the Chatovarians. The Selachees had helped Angus find the right companies and had helped Sir Robert do the purchasing and they now owned eleven Chatovarian firms, each one specialized in what they needed. There had been no dearth of firms for sale and no lack of engineers and workers in that heavily overpopulated empire- forty-nine trillion!

They had left the main offices in Chatovaria and only working sections were here.

No, there'd been no new good news about all that! Rather, a bit of bad news. The main offices of those firms were costly to maintain as they couldn't fire key staff there. And the problem of what they should now manufacture at home was coming up.

Their technology and ability were good. Jonnie had a little trouble with their math- they used a binary system as everything they had ran on computers and circuits. But everything they built was just great. With one exception.

Jonnie could not abide reaction engines. Flying one was a drag. And they required special runways and pads to land. They were fine out in s.p.a.ce but not for atmosphere transport. You couldn't even stunt them really.

The Chatovarians themselves were all over the place at Luxembourg. They were nice people. They stood about five feet tall, had somewhat flat heads and big buck teeth. They were a bright orange-tan. Their hands were a trifle webbed but very nimble. And they were strong. Jonnie had found that out when he was fooling around wrestling with one of their engineers. Jonnie had come within an ace of not being able to throw him. And they were always going fast. Work, work, work!

They ate wood. And the first thing they did when their crews arrived was plant about fifteen thousand acres of a.s.sorted trees, planted with the speed of machine guns into what they called "catalyst pots." This was so they could have something to eat.

They had a bit of conflict with the three Chinese engineers that were here. The Chinese like to build out of wood and the Chatovarians thought that was an awful waste of good food.

The Chatovarians loved to work with stone: they had small beam tools, like swords, and they cut stone with splice-notches so it would hang together with no mortar. Then they annealed the stone and made it join molecularly so it was armor-hard. And the whole grain of the stone came out in bright, glossy colors. Very pretty. They taught the Chinese how to do it and the Chinese taught them how to weave silk, so all was forgiven and it came out with smiles, but it was touchy for a while.

Going to a Chatovarian dinner was like walking into a lumber yard. Jonnie had to make them promise not to gnaw down all the trees in sight.

The Chatovarians tended to overstaff. And unless Jonnie dreamed up some consumer product for the home offices to build, the red ink on their balance sheets would splash into blood.

He wanted to get them building teleportation motor cars and planes. But he didn't know how to make a teleportation motor and all efforts to work it out failed. Those blasted Psychlo mathematics! Nothing ever balanced.

The thought made him restless. The bear had caught another fish. The sunlight played over Jonnie's buckskin shirt.

He had been sure something nice would happen today. Well, the day wasn't over.

He touched Windsplitter's shoulder and the horse decided it was a signal to run, which it wasn't, and went tearing up the trail for home.

Chapter 2.

They burst out of the forest and rushed toward the palace and then Windsplitter made a huge show of how hard it was to stop- it wasn't- and reared and pawed the air.

"Show-off," Jonnie accused him.

It hadn't been all that much of a run-only half a mile. But Windsplitter was content. The row that was going on in the middle of the ten-acre lawn attracted him.

Stormy, the lame Blodgett's colt- he looked just like Windsplitter even with his much-too-long legs- and a huge tan dog that had recently trotted out of the forest and adopted Chrissie, were romping and plunging and racing away and pretending to stomp and bite, always missing. Blodgett was looking on without much concern and Windsplitter walked over to her.

Jonnie slid off and raised his hand to the Russian in the control turret hidden in the right-hand tower. A flick of a white sleeve as the guard waved back.

This place had really changed. The only trouble with it was, it looked too new and shiny and it certainly now would never age. The Chinese engineers had understood, but the Chatovarians just couldn't grasp that a place should show a little age.

Jonnie remembered when Chrissie had first spotted the place. They were in a small plane and Jonnie, having just bought the duchy, was trying to get some idea of its layout. Chrissie had all of a sudden leaned out the window and shouted, "There! There! There!" and nothing would do but that he land and let her look at the place. She had still been gaunt and he couldn't refuse her much.

The building had stood in the middle of a wilderness that might have once been parks. Hard to tell. Hard to tell even that the piled ruin of stone had ever been much but rocks.

Chrissie had raced around, heedless of the briars that plucked at her buckskin leggings, shouting back at him in wild excitement. She pointed to a fifty-acre plot crying, "And that's just just the place for a cattle yard!" And to another place, " the place for a cattle yard!" And to another place, "Ideal for your horses!" And spreading her arms, indicating some pits, " for your horses!" And spreading her arms, indicating some pits, "Perfect for tanning vats!" And then tracing a stream that was bubbling along minding its own business, "And this can be diverted to run right by the kitchen door and we can have running water all the time!" for tanning vats!" And then tracing a stream that was bubbling along minding its own business, "And this can be diverted to run right by the kitchen door and we can have running water all the time!"

She had gone tearing around on the cracked remains of what might have been room floors and pointed to outlines Jonnie could not see, "A fireplace here. And one here! And another there!"

Then she had stood in front of him and said, "Here we will never be hungry, we will never be snowed in, we will never be cold!" And then defiantly, as though he might say no, "This is where we are going to live!" is where we are going to live!"

Jonnie got the Chatovarian chief engineer who had arrived with the two-hundred-Chatovarian first construction contingent and told him to build something modern on the site. He thought he was rid of the problem but the following day he found himself confronted by a very irate Chatovarian architectural team.

When a Chatovarian became incensed he sort of whistled through his teeth, quite distinct from the gurgling sound, like air coming up through a water bottle, when they laughed. The leading architect was whistling his indignation.

It didn't matter whether Jonnie owned the company, but Jonnie was really a Chatovarian, proven by the fact that he had his t.i.tle direct from the Empress Beaz. And he had to be told that he should know better!

Completely at sea, Jonnie was treated to a dissertation on architecture. They had studied Earth forms and many were all right. Cla.s.sic Greek and Roman were known in other systems and, if impractical, were still acceptable. Gothic, neo-Gothic, and Renaissance architecture they actually thought quite novel. They could even strain their artistic sensibilities by going along with Baroque.

But modern? They quit. Send them back to Chatovaria. Send them back even though they would starve there. Some things one just couldn't do!

It was only then that Jonnie found that "modern" had been a type of architecture prevalent on Earth about eleven hundred years ago; that it consisted of plain, straight up-and-down walls on a rectangular base; that it often was a vast expanse of gla.s.s windows; that it had been conceived by somebody dedicated to stamping out all indigenous architecture of an area. In short, "modern" was an architecture that wasn't architecture but just a cheap way to throw rubbish in the air and get paid for it.

The Chatovarian, with a quivering, pointing finger in the direction of the old city of Luxembourg and backed up by the serious nods of five a.s.sistants, wailed that that whole town had been built in modern, and on his artistic soul, no such abominations would be perpetuated while he lived!

Jonnie had apologized. The Chatovarian said maybe it came from having to talk in Psychlo. And Jonnie asked what they recommended.

Five a.s.sistants presented a huge plan instantly.

This building, they said, had been the palace of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg in ancient times. And even though Jonnie did not think so, he didn't say so.

The indigenous architecture, from the castles that lay about, probably had been Gothic and neo-Gothic. And this palace should be like this. Jonnie had delayed long enough to ask Chrissie, but all she gave him were the items she had found that made the place charming, and he had made sure those were included and had told them to go ahead.

Chrissie and he had camped out in the woods, happy to be away from the din, cheerful in a buckskin tent and eating good food cooked on an open fire.

The Chatovarians had cleared the site and erected an armor steel sh.e.l.l. They had then flown down to a couple of marble quarries north of Leghorn in Italy and operated a ferry of ore freighters until they had piles of green and rose and other colored slabs. They had spliced them together into an exterior and interior of polished, armored rock. They had underplated the stream so that it did what it was supposed to do. But they had also installed full plumbing. The fireplaces would burn wood but since this was a waste of good food they also put solar driven infraheaters in them and a simulated flame.

It was a palace all right. And it might be Gothic. But it sure was colorful! Chrissie had been enthralled with it.

Jonnie, as he walked to the arches on the other side of the drawbridge, could hear in the distance the crash and bang of the Chatovarians ripping the old city of Luxembourg into chips. They had gone through it with historical and artifact survey teams and then the rams had been turned loose. That was the one piece of modern that would not survive.