Battlefield Earth Part 135

Very different from a firing rig. Very different indeed.

Chapter 7.

Back in his room, old Soth was tired and coughing a bit from having overexerted himself this day. Jonnie sat on an improvised bench and waited for him to get his breath.

Eventually Soth said, "I can't dismantle or put together a teleportation shipping rig; only Terl could do that. And I surely can't build one either. So maybe I shouldn't take this contract." He held it up between a couple of claws, looked at it longingly, and then handed it to Jonnie.

Jonnie couldn't help but wonder how this race might have been if it hadn't been for the catrists messing up their brains.

"No, no," said Jonnie, pushing it back at him. "You've done fine. In fact, the key you have given me to routine Psychlo mathematics has probably unlocked the door to a parade of inventions Intergalactic was sitting on. You may have helped bring prosperity to many, many worlds."

"Really?" said Soth. He thought it over. "That's nice. Yes, that's very nice." He was pondering something.

"You know," Soth said after a while, "you have something of a security problem too. An awful lot of people of an awful lot of races would do anything to get their hands on Psychlo mathematics and some developments they stole. You know, don't you, that Professor En who developed teleportation was a Boxnard? No? Well he was. Yes, people will be trying to get this data. But I think I can help."

He thought for quite a while. "Yes, I think I can do it." He smiled. "Like any hobbyist, I like to fiddle around, and about fifty years ago- I was on a dreadful planet, not even a tree-l set myself the problem of putting Psychlo higher math into a computer. The company and the government would have had fits had it been reported. But I remember the circuits I devised. It would work all right but I'd need some facilities and components."

A computer! Jonnie had been dreading solving hundreds of thousands of formulas to get whatever inventions they'd found into use. If he had a computer, anyone on his staff could rattle them off!

"If you do that," said Jonnie, "I'll give you a million credits out of my own pocket."

"A million credits?" gawped Soth. "There isn't that much money!" He was fumbling around through his litter of paper. Jonnie thought he was trying to find some reference but then saw he was trying to locate a kerbango saucepan. Soth obviously felt he needed a stimulant! The saucepan was empty and Jonnie got a package of kerbango from his pocket and put it in the pan.

Soth chewed a small bit of it thankfully, remembered his manners, and offered Jonnie some, which was, of course, declined.

"You startled me," said Soth. "But that wasn't all I was going to tell you."

He chewed for a bit, got his heart beating again to his satisfaction. "I have been fooling about converting simpler Psychlo arithmetic to the decimal system." He went into the litter of papers again, found what he wanted on the floor, and showed it to Jonnie. "It's quite an amazing system. Children and people learn it quite easily. The Psychlo Empire actually held onto the eleven system just so others could get more mixed up."

"They mixed me up," said Jonnie.

"Well, I should think they did, but that was all part of the security program. Anyway, all the basic arithmetic functions and the lesser formulas can be converted over to the decimal system. Then maybe they'll even put money into the decimal system- as I see the Galactic Bank's new issue remains in the eleven system. Now here is the good part: "The decimal system will go into general use. n.o.body will want anything to do with the clumsy eleven system and it will go into disuse!"

He sat back triumphantly. "You'll have your computer. The eleven system will phase out. People will consider it some old curiosity and forget it. And that in itself is a kind of security precaution."

Jonnie had found a piece of paper and was writing on it rapidly.

"A second contract!" said Soth, reading it upside-down.

"In addition to the first contract," said Jonnie. "Two million credits if you make the computer and another million if you convert basic Psychlo math to the decimal system."

"Oh, dear," said Soth. "I could collect a warehouse full of mathematics texts with that! Ten warehouses. Fifty! Quick, don't change your mind. Let me sign it!"

When they had finalized it, Soth looked at it for a while. "You know, on Psychlo, that would make me very rich. One would have a dozen females, raise a huge family, become almost a n.o.ble dynasty. But it's all finished."

"There are still some Psychlos here," said Jonnie. "There are several females. The race isn't finished."

"Ah," said Soth. "You don't know." He sagged. "The catrists long ago pulled back the only Psychlo colonies that had begun. They convinced the throne that colonies on other planets might mutate, be able to live in other atmospheres, and const.i.tute a threat to the crown. So they insisted that all babies born be born only on Psychlo."

Where they could put capsules in their heads, thought Jonnie.

"Occasionally, very rarely," continued Soth, "a royal n.o.ble could take his own females to other planets but only with a whole catrist team along. All female employees of the company, by long-standing order from the catrists, had to be permanently sterilized before being shipped away from the home planet."

"You mean...?" Jonnie gestured to the rest of the compound area.

"Yes," said Soth. "All these females are sterilized. They cannot have any pups."

He sat for a while, pensive. "You might think I hold it against you for destroying that planet. I don't, you know. From the moment the catrists began to gain power, the race started to go bad.

"The way I look at it," he continued, "their program of degrading everyone, suppressing any group who sought a new morality, calling everybody animals, turned Psychlo into a beast. People all over the universes, all through the ages, prayed for the end of that empire. It was hated! hated!"

He looked at Jonnie. "Sooner or later someone was bound to rid the galaxies of Psychlo. Whole races have dreamed that dream.

"You," and he pointed a talon at Jonnie, "may think you did it. You didn't. That whole civilization was doomed the moment the catrists began to influence it. It wasn't you. It was they who destroyed Psychlo and the whole empire.

"Terl was their product and I believe he had a hand in their destruction in some way. You know, I've heard he used to sit around in the recreation hall and tell people that man was an endangered species.

"Because of the catrists, the Psychlos have been an endangered species for millennia. And now they're not just endangered. They're extinct!"

He sighed and looked at his litter of papers. "Well, maybe I can help make up for some of the crimes they have done."

Then he looked at Jonnie. "As for you, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, have no qualms about it. When you destroyed Psychlo you gave all the galaxies a chance to return to better ways. I didn't need these contracts. You have offered them and I will keep them. But it is a privilege to help you and I thank you for the chance."

Epilogue.

A few months later, Jonnie heard that the government in Scotland was going to introduce taxation in order to rebuild Edinburgh. He knew that taxation had been unknown in the earliest days of the Scottish nation-the king had just paid for everything way back then. And he doubted Scotland had the resources to do it. Also he felt a taxation, as a government way of life, was a sort of silly business: couldn't a government earn its keep? Why did it have to go around robbing people?

So he talked to Dunneldeen and got him to sell the idea to the Chief of Clanfearghus that Edinburgh would be rebuilt by "contributions." To foster the illusion that the Scottish people were paying for it, he and Dunneldeen put little red boxes along trails where Scots could drop in small coins and they even emptied some of them.

But what really happened was that Jonnie paid for it. He sent in his Chatovarian construction company, Buildstrong, Inc. They had finished all the industrial requirements at Luxembourg and banking requirements at Zurich anyway.

The Chatovarians, being Chatovarians, sent a research team all around Scotland and the government to find out what people wanted at Edinburgh and then went on and did what they thought was right, regardless.

They decided Edinburgh would be in three businesses: planetary government, extraterrestrial training, and Scottish handicraft. It was a real headache to them to reconcile such divergent actions into architecture, which they always maintained must be (a) indigenous and (b) suitable for the purpose.

The city itself, their research team found, had once been nicknamed 'Auld Reekie' because it smelled so bad. They also found no Scot had lived in it for eleven hundred years. This gave them a totally free hand: they rammed down everything except Castle Rock; they got several Highland hydroelectric plants back in operation rapidly and then called in their companion company, Desperation Defense, and had them make their installations and emplacements; they then put in sewer systems and filtration plants; and then they rubbed their hands and really got to work.

They put the northern section of the town into industrial- for business and handicrafts- and gave it the overall look and landscaping of stone cottages such as the Scots were used to in the Highlands. They sweepingly planned out a large number of specialty schools: outside they were all Scotch baronial with the little projecting turrets, castles right out of the old fairy tale books, but the whole of the interiors were adapted to extraterrestrial living. They spread these all over the terrain with big parks.

Castle Rock itself they saved for government. It had been so battered and fractured they had to get early engravings of it to see how to shape it; shaping and armoring rock was no problem to the Chatovarians but what it had been like a couple thousand years ago was. They got an indication that a castle of an early Scottish king, Duncan, who apparently had been killed by Macbeth, had stood there-where they got this was a mystery. Somebody said an old play they had found in the wreckage of the British Museum.

They rea.s.sembled the Rock, rebuilt its interior shelters, covered the whole thing with blue It alian marble, got it all armor hard and glowing, and then put Duncan's castle on it in gleaming white. They found a cathedral they liked in an ancient city called Rheims that they said agreed with the architecture of the castle and put it up on the rock in shimmering scarlet and called it "Saint Giles" again.

The Scots were enraptured with the result of what they had "financed."

Jonnie thought it looked pretty good, too. But it did produce a problem. The Chatovarians, being overpopulated at home, always overhired and as this job had been "rush" and "for the boss himself," they had acc.u.mulated a very huge crew. They also had a policy that you never fired anybody ever. It left him with a swollen city-building team almost the size of Earth's entire population. So he put them to work rebuilding the cities the "visitors" had burned.

This, too, gave the Chatovarians a problem. What were the cities for? n.o.body had lived in a city for eleven hundred years. So their research teams had to figure out what future use the cities might be put to, based on resources, proximity to rivers and the sea, what crops grew in that climate, who they might some day trade with, how many people would have to be housed for what industry. It was very complex and quite difficult.

Establishing the indigenous architecture was easy in Asia, fairly easy in Europe, impossible in America: this last continent had gone madly modern and the Chatovarians couldn't abide it. So they just had to take the most interesting landmark sort of buildings they found on the sites, duplicate those, and make lots and lots of parks. The parent company in Chatovaria had overbought zip monorails on another job so they shipped those in and internally connected the cities up high so their parks wouldn't be spoiled with roads.

They had to get a Hawvin company in to clean up the radiation around Denver- they did it with flying magnetic sweeps. Then the Chatovarians rebuilt that whole area, including even Jonnie's village.

There were no populations, so when they would finish a city, they would just seal up the doors and windows, put a caretaker crew in, and leave it.

Oh, well, Jonnie thought, when he saw all these empty cities going up, maybe somebody would live in them someday.

Ker took charge of the mine school in Edinburgh and the Psychlos that were left alive moved there and gave lectures and demonstrations. Absolute hordes of extraterrestrials were pouring in to learn how to mine their own planets and get the metals moving again. Ker pictographed all the lectures so the technology wouldn't be lost. He used Cornwall and Victoria for practical training and it kept him pretty busy, tearing around with Chirk who had the job of building up the libraries. Ker had a trick of wearing breathe-masks with the face of the race he was training painted on it. It made for friendlier relations, he said.

There was an awful lot of ex-Psychlo planets that had slave populations or people withdrawn to mountains, and the Coordinators were very busy running their Coordinator College in Edinburgh, showing former subject races how to get organized and prosper. Their enrollment was greatly a.s.sisted by the fact that the Galactic Bank gave much more favorable interest rates to such planets when they had Coordinators trained in Edinburgh.

The new Earth government claimed that Chief of Clanfearghus was King, probably due to the influence of Mr. Tsung's brother. This made Dunneldeen the Crown Prince, but from all Jonnie could see, neither the Chief nor Dunneldeen took his elevation very seriously. The government was very reluctant to pa.s.s laws and generally left things up to tribal chiefs in their own areas, intervening only when there was no other way to end a dispute among them. They were very popular.

Colonel Ivan, with the t.i.tle of "The Democratic Valiant-red-army People's Colonel," ruled Russia. Jonnie's village people helped him, and then some of the younger ones went back to America to try to get it started again.

Chief Chong-won and the North Chinese tribe made an alliance and began to build up China. Handicraft and silk for export handled their economic needs. They also had a cooking school that became widely attended, for the Selachees, spread all over the galaxies even farther due to their "neighborhood banks," swore it was the best cooking anywhere, particularly for fish dishes, and were quick to finance any extraterrestrial who wanted to start a Chinese restaurant in his area providing he sent some cook trainees to learn how. There were usually more cook trainees in China than Chinese. They not only had to learn to cook but also had to learn how to grow much of the food. The extra labor and machinery boomed Chinese agriculture and fisheries, and, as Chief Chong-won remarked every time he saw Jonnie, which was often, starvation was no longer the main product of the Chinese. Jonnie often wondered how an extraterrestrial, who ate quite another diet, could learn to cook food he would never eat. But the power of the bank and the appet.i.tes of the Selachees were similarly wonderful.

Pursuant to wide galactic conversion to the decimal system, the bank distributed new issues of money. These upset Chrissie considerably: the coins and bank notes looked even less like Jonnie. She went on for some days about how they looked even more like a Selachee and even less like Jonnie. But Jonnie didn't tell her he had carefully maneuvered things in that direction: these days he could walk right down a street and hardly anybody pointed. A couple more issues and no stranger would know him on sight at all.

The bank in Snautch never did return their gold. When they built the huge new bank complex there, they put the gold behind armor gla.s.s in the main lobby with a multilanguage sign on it: "This gold was mined personally by Jonnie Goodboy Tyler and some Scots. He has left it with us because he TRUSTS us. So can you. If you start your new account today, you can reach through a slot and touch it!"

When Jonnie wanted some gold to plate the inaugural display model of a new teleport car Desperation Defense was now converting to build in Chatovaria, Dwight had to go to the Andes with a team of the old crew and open up a mine there to get it.

After the surveys on what people wanted were done by the bank as Jonnie suggested, the conversion of ex-arms companies to consumer products went very swiftly. Few of the Intergalactic patents were in any demand for a while. They found the people on civilized planets wanted pots and pans and such like, all of which were easily made and quite profitable.

The original emissaries were now becoming very wealthy and powerful and backed Jonnie's measures to the limit, even guiding their countries toward social democracy. Jonnie seldom attended their conferences, but they often rushed dispatch boxes to him to get his opinion on something. As they often told each other, antiwar was the most profitable venture they had ever heard of.

The Hawvin Commercial Intelligence Service circulated a secret report on the twenty-eight platforms without knowing it had been planted on them by the Galactic Bank. They had been chosen for the "leak" because they were the most infiltrated intelligence service in any universe. The report was rapidly and secretly relayed all over the galaxies.

It alleged that the original twenty-eight had been increased to fifty-three to allow for new nations and that the platforms were actually located in the seventeenth universe.

The report created a new flurry of antiwar. But it also created astrographic turmoil as it upset the stable datum that, as the number four when squared made sixteen, there could only be sixteen universes.

Immediate action resulted. Several scientific bodies began searching, not necessarily to find the firing platforms but to see whether there was a seventeenth universe.

The Democratic Royal Inst.i.tute of Chatovaria did find an additional universe, but since it was just forming and had no evidence of sentient life in it, and since there was no trace of anything to put platforms on, it concluded it must be the eighteenth universe.

The seventeenth universe, containing the platforms, remains undiscovered to this day. And as Jonnie sometimes told himself, this was not hard to understand. It was in his head. He never built the platforms.

MacAdam had told Jonnie that quite a few of the old Intergalactic Mining Company reserve planets, even though habitable and currently uninhabited, were a drag on the market. So Jonnie, by special Selachee couriers from his own staff, secretly informed the original emissaries of different groups of planets on the list. They promptly made deals with the company and then rushed the planets into the real estate market with the slogan, "Enjoy peaceful, untargeted, suburban living," and they made even vaster fortunes for themselves and their friends. They swore by Jonnie. Peace was one of the most profitable discoveries ever made!

During that period the only sour bit of news that came Jonnie's way was brought to him by his accounts staff. It had increased to two hundred Selachees to keep track of his income. They told him that the Earth division of Buildstrong, Inc., was now the only company he had that was running in the red. All the rest were way up in the black. Jonnie said he'd have a word with its general manager and he did. He found that they had added to their payroll another two hundred thousand Chatovarian workers. The general manager explained they were not just building the burned Earth cities now but had branched out and were rebuilding all the others and had a two-hundred-year construction program they had all planned out and didn't want interrupted. Jonnie told him- and his six a.s.sistant general managers- that he was building cities for which no populations existed nor would exist in the next several centuries, and that they better start figuring out how to show a profit. They said they would. But in return, he insisted they keep on with their program. No, they didn't have any plans to settle Earth with Chatovarians; they knew that would engulf Man. It was just that when they got going doing some thing they built up an awfully big momentum. Jonnie thought it didn't much matter anyway so he forgot about it.

Sometime after that Stormalong got bored with demonstrating the new teleportation-motored atmosphere transports Desperation Defense was selling all over the galaxies and training pilots for, and he talked Jonnie into letting him rehabilitate an old company orbit miner with cranes and fly to the moon. Jonnie talked Stormalong into first getting some pressure suits and then getting three other pilots as crazy as Stormalong, refitting four orbit miners and doing it right.

Stormalong had the excuse that he wanted to go see whether he could find some more of that heavy metal.

He figured that flights of meteorites had now hit the moon. It took them two months to get ready and to make the trip and return.

They found the meteorites with heavy metal traces, all right, and mined them and brought back about two hundred tons of ore to process. But Stormalong brought back startling news: "There's footprints up there," he told Jonnie. "And tire treads!"

This being in the world of tracking, Jonnie was very interested. They speculated on the possibility they had invaders. But the Desperation Defense people pooh-poohed it: nothing could get through their defenses. They then wondered if it might not have been the visitors putting down there during the war.

Jonnie wasn't going to spend weeks in s.p.a.ce in an orbit miner so he chartered Dries Gloton's s.p.a.ce yacht for a weekend and he and Stormalong were taken up to have another look.

Yessir! Footprints! Tire treads!

Then the sharp, trained eye of Jonnie spotted a paper wrapper that must have been discarded and lay almost covered with dust. It said "Carefree Sugarless Gum, Spearmint, 15 sticks, Life Savers, Inc., New York City."

Stormalong thought it must be some salvage gear from a wreck maybe. But there was no wreck. Dries thought that maybe it was used to repair holes. Gum, you know.

Jonnie wouldn't let them mess up the tracks with their own. He picto-recorded them and then backtracked them and found a cairn with the very faded remains of what might have been a flag. Then, although he had trouble walking with almost no weight, he hiked around and found another cairn with another flag in it, also faded beyond recognition. That was all they found. But Jonnie showed them that the exposed edge of the wrapper was much more faded than the buried part and from that he deducted that these tracks and cairns were hundreds of years old. So they decided it was not an immediate danger and started back home.

The real discovery was made on the way back. Jonnie was admiring Dries' communication gear and Dries showed him the first pictures he had taken of the planet and Jonnie noticed there seemed to be much more cloud cover now.

He did more comparisons. They were flashing down toward Europe, of course, but they could still see northern Africa and the Middle East. The latter was green. And the former had a new sea in the middle of it.

Landed again, even though he was late for Sunday night supper, Jonnie got right onto the Desperation Defense duty officer and wanted to know if he was aware of planetary changes. He was and referred Jonnie to the general manager of Buildstrong.

"You ordered us to show a profit," the general manager said defensively. "So we hired some more Chatovarians and started a Health Subsidiary. We figured 'Buildstrong' could also be interpreted to mean strong bodies."

Jonnie wanted to know what the devil he had done now. And it seemed there was a below-sea-level spot in the dry wasteland of the Sahara Desert so they let the Mediterranean in and made a new sea that would furnish rainfall. And they had machine-gun-planted eighty-five quadrillion trees there, and also in the Middle East where they wouldn't require much water. Good varieties, slow growing, but very tasty. And they'd planted another sixteen quadrillion in the middle west of the American continent...oh, Jonnie hadn't seen that part of the continent? Well, there used to be trees on that huge, central, flat plain; they could prove it by fossil remains. Anyway, he was sorry if it had changed the climate. But it usually did, you know. Cleaned up the air, too.

Jonnie wanted to know how spending that much money and hiring that new army of Chatovarians was going to make a profit. And the general manager showed him the balance sheets now. They were all in the black. They were exporting food trees to food-short Chatovarian planets. Jonnie forgave him, raised his pay, and went home to a very late Sunday dinner.

Another incident worthy of note happened about that time.

Jonnie, wearing an extraterrestrial atmosphere mask to keep from being stopped on the street and gathering crowds, attended a fair in Zurich, and there he saw Pierre Solens. The ex-pilot was in beggar's rags and holding forth to an audience about how he personally, with his own eyes, had seen Jonnie Goodboy Tyler walk on a cloud and, not only that, pull a demon out of it and sing a duet with him. When he had finished his story, he pa.s.sed around a battered cup for offerings. It seemed he made his living this way. When he got to Jonnie, Jonnie pulled his mask down and Pierre nearly fainted again.

There were so many exaggerations and lies going around about Jonnie that he figured he didn't need another one. So he forced Pierre into a plane, took him right down to Africa, and made him get into another plane at Victoria and by himself fly it up to the peak where the Psychlo cadavers still lay in the snow, land, look, fly back down through the overcast, and land. Pierre made it without wrecking himself and Jonnie took him back to Luxembourg. Pierre said "Thank you" and he meant it. He went back to his old job of moving the compound planes around the hangar and in time became an acceptable pilot.

There was a bizarre incident that occurred in Edinburgh. The sarcophagus of Bittie MacLeod had been miraculously preserved in the bombings: three beams of the collapsing cathedral had fallen across it almost protectively; the Chatovarians had repositioned it in the new cathedral crypt in a row of dead war heroes which included Glencannon's recovered remains.

When she was sixteen, Pattie demanded that she be taken to the crypt and married to Bittie MacLeod. Nothing could dissuade her and she stood there beside the sarcophagus in a white wedding dress, holding Bittie's locket with "To my future wife" on it. The parson, who could find no law against it, went through the wedding ceremony. She then changed to widow's weeds and after that called herself Mrs. Pattie MacLeod.