Battlefield Earth Part 75

"That bird just waltzed in and wiped out a whole commando of mine," said Snith. "Not too long ago. Attacked them without even a salute, mowed them down. And then stole their bodies and a truckload of trade goods!"

"Where?"

"In the forest, where else?"

This was news! His intelligence said that this creature in the picture had been flying around visiting tribes! Or maybe this was how he visited tribes! That was probably it. Terl knew he himself would visit tribes that way. Ah, well, he knew Staffor would be very, very happy indeed to know that! The animal was not where he was thought to be and he was making war on peaceful tribes. Staffor was a very apt political pupil. Now he would make him a very apt military pupil: in the dumb way that was the only one possible.

But to business. He put the bank note back on the ledge between the bars, withdrew, and Snith retrieved it.

"So we've settled the contract matter and you can negotiate it further," said Terl. "Get settled in and in a very few weeks or even sooner you'll be doing your duty here. Right?"

"Indeed so," said Snith.

"And as a bonus," said Terl, "I'll persuade certain parties to authorize you to kill the animal who wronged you on sight."

That was very, very good. And Snith was driven back to the old city by a dutiful Lars, who endured the stink in the name of spreading the righteous creed of fascism and the great military leader, Hitler.

Chapter 9.

The underground room at the Lake Victoria minesite was chilled. Angus had rigged heavy-duty motor cooling coils along the wall and the humidity in the air dripped from them and made dark pools along the floor.

The metal and mineral a.n.a.lysis machine hummed; its screen cast an eerie green light on everything around it. Five tense faces were turned to that screen: Dr. MacKendrick's, Angus's, Sir Robert's, Dunneldeen's, and Jonnie's.

Ma.s.sive, more than eighteen inches in diameter, the ugly head of the Psychlo corpse lay on the machine's plate. Such a head was mostly bone. It bore considerable resemblance to a human head and could be mistaken for one in bad light, but where a human had hair, eyebrows, fleshy lips, nose, and ears, the Psychlo had bone whose shape was more or less the same as the corresponding human features, and the distribution and s.p.a.cing were similar; the result was a kind of caricature of a human head. Until you touched the features, they did not seem to be bone, but contact proved them hard and unyielding.

The a.n.a.lysis machine was not penetrating the head. Not only were the features bone but the whole top half of the skull was bone. As the parson in his earlier, inexpert autopsy had discovered, the brain was low down and to the back; he had discovered nothing in the brain because he had not opened the brain of the cadavers.

"Bone!" said Angus. "It's almost as hard to penetrate as metal!"

Jonnie could attest to that from the negligible effects of his kill-club on Terl's skull back in the morgue.

Angus was resetting dials. The Psychlo letters were codings for various metals and ores. He swung the intensity dial up five clicks.

"Wait!" said MacKendrick. "Back it up one! I thought I saw something."

Angus backed the intensity of penetration dial back one, then two. It was sitting on "Lime" now.

There was a hazy difference in density on the screen, one little spot. Angus adjusted the beam's "in depth" control, focusing it. The internal bones and fissures of the skull came clear on the screen. Five pairs of eyes watched intensely.

The Scot's fingers took another k.n.o.b, one that swept a second beam to various positions in the subject.

"Wait," said MacKendrick. "Move the beam back to about two inches behind the mouth cavity. There! Now focus it again." Then, "That's it!"

There was something there, something hard and black on the screen that was not pa.s.sing waves at this intensity. Angus touched the recorder of the machine and the whir-flap sound of registry of the images on the paper roll was loud.

"They do have something in their skulls!" said Robert the Fox.

"Not so fast," said MacKendrick. "We jump to no conclusions. It could be some fragment of an old injury, some metal picked up in a mine explosion."

"Naw, naw, naw," said Robert the Fox. "It's very plain!"

Jonnie had pulled out the recording sheets. They had the metal a.n.a.lysis trace squiggling down one side. He had left the Psychlo metal a.n.a.lysis code book, usually used to a.n.a.lyze drone transmissions as they hunted a surface for ore, outside. It was chill and dank and odorous in this room and he didn't care much for this job, vital as it was. He took this opportunity to go out and look it up.

Page after page he compared the squiggle he had with the ill.u.s.trations. It took a long time. He was no expert at this. He couldn't find it. Then he got clever and began to compare composites of two squiggle ill.u.s.trations.

The Psychlo engineers who would do this sort of thing could probably have told him with no code book. He cursed the anger of the Russians who, believing they were avenging their colonel, had slaughtered the Psychlos. The four in the guarded room of the dormitory were in very bad condition. Two of them were ordinary miners, one was an executive by his clothes and papers, and the other was an engineer. MacKendrick was very doubtful that they would make it. He had extracted bullets and sewn them up but they were all still unconscious or appeared so, and they lay there in the breathe-gas ventilated room, chained to their beds, breathing shallowly. There wasn't even a first-aid handbook for Psychlos that Jonnie had ever seen. He didn't think there was one issued. The company might require all bodies to be returned but it didn't require that anybody keep them alive- a fact that tended to confirm that the sole reason for returning dead Psychlo bodies was to prevent examination by alien eyes-there was no sentiment involved. There were never even any hospital sections in these compounds, and mine accidents were very frequent.

Hold it. One of these squiggles in the book almost matched: copper! Now if he could find the little tail squiggle somewhere- here it was: tin! He overlaid the two squiggles. They seemed to match better. Copper and tin? Not quite. There was a tiny squiggle remaining. He searched for it. He found it: lead!

Mainly copper, some tin, and a little bit of lead! He put the patterns one on top of the other. They matched now.

There was another code book, very thick, called "Composite Ore Bodies for Drone Scan a.n.a.lysis," and because it had about ten thousand characters in it he had shunned it. But this one he had just done made a look-up easy. He looked under "Copper Deposits," and then its subheading, "Tin Deposits," and then its sub-subheading, "Lead Deposits," and he found his squiggle. Not only that, he found, by comparing it to variations, that the a.n.a.lysis of "per-elevens" (Psychlos used the eleven integer) was five copper, four tin, and two lead.

He went further and looked this up in a man-book and it said "Bronze" for such a combination. Apparently it was a very durable alloy that lasted for centuries and there had even been a "Bronze Age" where implements were mainly "bronze." Great. But it struck him as funny that an advanced technical race should be using ancient bronze in a skull. Amusing.

He went back inside with his findings to discover that MacKendrick, with a hammer and chisel-like instrument, had been taking the head apart. Jonnie was just as glad not to have been around to watch that.

"We searched all through the rest of the skull with the machine," said Angus. "That's the only odd thing in there."

"I went through its pockets," said Robert the Fox. "He is the lowest-cla.s.s miner. His ident.i.ty card says his name was Cla and he had forty-one years' service and three wives back on Psychlo."

"The company paid them benefits?" said Dunneldeen.

"No," said Robert the Fox, showing him the crumpled record, "it says here the company paid him also for the female earnings in a company 'house,' whatever that is."

"The economics of Psychlo husbandry," said Dunneldeen, "are a credit to their morality."

"Don't joke," said Jonnie. "The object in his head is an alloy called 'bronze.' It is not magnetic, worse luck. It would have to be operated out. It can't be pulled out with a magnet."

Dr. MacKendrick now had the brain laid bare. With a surgeon's skill, he was parting things that looked like cords.

And there it was!

It was shaped like two half-circles back to back and the circles were slightly closed, each one around a separate cord.

"I think these are nerves," said MacKendrick. "We will know shortly." He was delicately pulling the objects off the cords. He wiped the green blood off it and put it on the table.

"Don't touch any of this," said MacKendrick. "Autopsies can be deadly."

Jonnie looked at the thing. It was a dull yellow. It was about half an inch across at its widest point.

Angus picked it up with a tweezer and put it on the a.n.a.lysis machine plate. "It's not hollow," he said. "It's just solid. Just a piece of metal."

MacKendrick had a little box with wires and clips on it. It had a small fuel cartridge in it to generate electricity. But before he connected anything with his gloved hands he was distracted by the character of these cords in the head. It was a brain, but it was vastly different from a human brain.

He cut off a small cord end and a slice of skin from the cadaver's paw and went over to an old makeshift microscope. He made a slide from a thin specimen and looked into the eyepiece.

MacKendrick whistled in surprise. "A Psychlo isn't made of cells. I don't know their metabolism but their structure isn't cellular. Viral! Yes. Viral!" He turned to Jonnie. "You know, big as a Psychlo is, his basic structure seems to be clumps of viruses." He saw Jonnie looking at him askance and added, "Purely academic interest. It does mean, however, that their bodies probably hold together much tighter and have a greater density. Probably of no interest to you. Well, let's get to work on these cords."

He attached one clip to the end of a cord in the brain and grounded the other on an arm and, watching a meter, measured the resistance of the cord to electrical flow. When he had determined that, he stood back and touched a b.u.t.ton to send electricity through the cord. The others felt their hair rise.

The Psychlo cadaver moved its left foot.

"Good," said MacKendrick. "Nerves. There is no rigor mortis in these bodies and they're still flexible. I have found the nerve that relays walk commands." He put a little tag on the nerve. He had marked the places from which they had removed the metal with a spot of dye on each of the two nerves involved with it. But he wasn't checking those yet.

His spectators were quite horrified to see, as MacKendrick identified nerves with tags, a Psychlo cadaver that moved its claws, clenched the remains of its jaw, moved an ear, and lolled out its tongue, one after the other as various nerves were given an electrical jolt.

MacKendrick saw their reaction. "Nothing new in this. Just electrical impulses approximating brain commands. Some man-scientist did this maybe thirteen hundred years ago and thought he'd found the secret of all thought and made up a cult about it called 'psychology.' Forgotten now. It wasn't the secret of thought; it was just the mechanics of bodies. They started with frogs. I'm cataloging this body's communication channels, that's all."

But it was very weird. The depths of superst.i.tion stirred in them as they saw a corpse move and breathe and saw, for a couple of pumps, its heart beat.

MacKendrick's gloved hands were slimy with green blood but he moved in a very efficient and businesslike fashion until he had more than fifty little tags clipped to the nerve cords.

"Now for the answer!" said MacKendrick. He sent pulses through the two nerves to which the bronze item had been attached.

It was difficult work. The room was cold. The corpse stank, having gone even mustier than the common, rank smell of a Psychlo.

MacKendrick stood up, a little tired. "I'm sorry to say that I don't think that piece of metal would cause any of these monsters to commit suicide.

But I can make a pretty good guess now as to what it does do."

He pointed to his tags. "Taste and s.e.xual impulses branch off from that one as near as I can tell. Emotion and action branch off from the other one there.

"This metal clip was installed when it was an infant. See the faint, ancient scars in this side of the skull. At that time the bones would be soft and would heal fast."

"And what does it do?" said Angus.

"My guess," said MacKendrick, "is that it short-circuits pleasure with action. Maybe they did it to make a Psychlo happy only when he was working. But- and I can't tell fully unless I dissect a lot of these nerves further down- I think its actual effect was to make a Psychlo enjoy cruel action."

Suddenly Jonnie recalled an expression of Terl's. He had seen him do something cruel and heard him mutter, "Delicious!"

"The effort," said MacKendrick, "to make them industrious I think was miscalculated by their ancient metal specialists, and they made a race of true monsters."

Everyone agreed with that.

"That wouldn't make them commit suicide to protect technology!" said Robert the Fox. "You got another corpse here. He was an a.s.sistant mine manager by his papers and got twice the pay of the one you just did. Get him on the table, man."

MacKendrick got another table. He would have to picto-record and sketch the work he had just done.

They put the mammoth head of the second one on the machine. They had the setting now. And they looked into the dead brain of one who had been called Blow.

And Jonnie, who had been getting despondent, gruesome as this job was, suddenly smiled.

There were two metal pieces in this one's head!

The whir-flap of the machine took the recording and he rushed out to tear through the a.n.a.lysis code books.

There it was, bright and clear: silver!

When he reentered the room, MacKendrick, being practiced now, had the brain stripped down. He was spot-dyeing the connections of the second bit of metal before he took it out.

It was about three-quarters of an inch long. The lack of oxygen in a Psychlo blood stream had left it gleamingly bright. It was a cylinder. The nubs on each end were insulated from the silver.

Angus put it on the machine and it was hollow.

Jonnie made him adjust the equipment even more finely. There was a filament of some sort inside that cylinder.

They surmised they would find them in other executive corpses, so when MacKendrick had sterilized it, Jonnie cut it in half very delicately.

The inside of it resembled a component in remote controls but it was not a radio.

"I haven't identified these nerves," said MacKendrick, "because I can't tell exactly what they go to right now. But I'll work on it."

"Could it be a thought wavelength vibrator?" asked Jonnie.

"A difference measurer?" said Angus. "Like difference of thought waves of another race?"

Jonnie would let them go on working on it, but he had a very good idea it was designed to release an impulse under certain conditions and that that impulse could cause attack and suicide.

"There's only one thing wrong," said MacKendrick. "It was put in an infant. Getting it out of the head of a live, adult Psychlo, through all these bones, would be a task one could never guarantee the success of." Then he saw the look of disappointment on their faces. "But I'll try, I'll try!" He didn't think it could be done. And he only had four Psychlos-and they looked like they were dying.

- Part XIX -

Chapter 1.

Brown Limper Staffor chaired the Council meeting in a black mood.

There they sat before the raised platform in the capital room, wrangling, wrangling, wrangling. Disputing him him, the senior Councilman of the planet. Objecting to his measures.

That black fellow from Africa! That yellow creature from Asia! That tan idiot from South America! That dull, bullheaded brute from Europe! Ugh, ugh, ugh, and UGH!

Didn't they realize he was doing the very best things that could be done for man? And wasn't he, Brown Limper Staffor, now representing five tribes since the Brigantes had come and he was indeed Senior Mayor America?