Battlefield Earth Part 80

Ker said he'd deliver it and rushed away.

Jonnie and Angus stretched out to unwind. So far it was okay. They had a ways to go.

Chapter 2.

A bit lost in Char's twelve-foot bed, a bit tense in this echoing, empty compound, Jonnie was waiting for Ker's return. It was getting very late and he was wondering what the delay might be. But to pa.s.s the time he was reading.

Char, in packing, had tossed out odds and ends that he hadn't cared to take back to Psychlo with him, and one of them was a Psychlo infant's "History of Psychlo," maybe from Char's own early schooling, for it said under the coverleaf, in an immature scrawl, "Char's Book. You Stole it so give it back!" and then below that, "Or I'll claw you!" Well, Char wouldn't claw anybody now: he was dead, by Terl's thrust, quite a time now.

Because Ker had mentioned underground mines, Jonnie was mildly interested to learn that the whole of the imperial City on Psychlo and all the surrounding area was a maze of deep and abandoned shafts and drifts. As long as three hundred thousand years ago, Psychlo had exhausted surface minerals and had developed semicore techniques. Some of the shafts went down as far as eighty-three miles and in some cases that was within half a mile of the liquid core. How awfully hot those mines must have been! They could only be worked by machines, not living beings.

The labyrinth was so extensive that it caused some buildings on the surface to sag from time to time.

He was just reading about the "First interplanetary War to End Mineral Starvation" when Ker came back.

Ker looked a bit grave, even through his face mask. "Dunneldeen's been arrested," he said.

Dunneldeen, related Ker, had arrived in a battle plane just at sunset and had gone to find quarters and supper. As he came out of the mess hall, two men in monkey skins with crossbelts stepped out of the shadows and told him he was under arrest. A squad of several more were at a distance.

They had taken Dunneldeen in a ground car driven by Lars up to the big capital building, the one with the painted dome up in the ruined city. They pushed him into the "courtroom" and the Senior Mayor Planet started to charge him with a whole lot of crimes like interrupting Council projects and committing war and had then looked at him more closely and said, "You're not Tyler!" And had called for the guard captain and there'd been a row. Then this Senior Mayor made Dunneldeen promise not to incite a war with Scotland over this and had let him go.

Dunneldeen was back at the Academy after taking Lars' car away from him and he was all right. Ker had had to wait to give him the message and Dunneldeen said to warn Jonnie.

"It means," concluded Ker, "that they expected you to come in and they've got their eyes out all over the place. We got to work fast, be careful, and get you out of here as soon as we can."

Jonnie and Angus ate a bit of the food Ker had brought and then went to sleep for four hours. Ker had turned in his old room, sleeping in a breathe-mask for there was no breathe-gas circulation in the general compound.

They were at it again before dawn, working fast. Ker had another disc recording of hammering and pounding and he put it on. The kind of work they were doing didn't sound at all like duct work.

What they had to do now was plant "eyes" and picture transmitters so they could not be seen or detected.

They attacked the lead gla.s.s dome and bored "bullet holes" in it in the exact right places; getting around the problem of their being covered by the blinds if drawn. The very top of one of these upper-level domes was much more thickly tinted than the sides, so the detectors ("readers," Ker called them) had to be up pretty high.

The "bullet holes" also had to be starred out, which is to say, given hairline cracks to make it look like they had come in from the outside. For good measure they put some in other domes and didn't repair them so that the condition appeared more general than in just Terl's quarters.

They sank readers and transmitters into the holes. Then they repaired the holes with one-way, see-through "bubble patch." They put more gla.s.s repair sealing roughly on the "cracks."

Each reader had a leaded iris in front of it and was in a little lead box. The result looked like a crudely repaired hole fixed up in slovenly fashion by careless workmen. Each of these was focused on a different part of the work areas in the two rooms.

"He won't fool with that," grinned Ker.

"He'll be afraid he'll let his breathe-gas out and air in!"

It was afternoon by the time they completed the dome readers. They tested them with the probe and receivers. They went blind and undetectable with the probe on and read everything in their path with the scope off.

They took a short lunch break and turned off the disc that had been blasting their ears in. There was suddenly more din outside.

Ker went to the door and unbarred it. Lars got a whiff of breathe-gas and backed up. He demanded Ker to come out and talk to him right now.

"You're interrupting our work," said Ker. But he went out in the hall.

"You've got your nerve!" said Lars, quivering with rage. "You gave me a handful of junk that had radioactive dust on it! You got me in trouble! When I showed it to Terl this morning, it started to explode when it got near his breathe-mask. You knew it would! He almost bit me!"

"All right, all right, all right!" said Ker. "We will clean up everything in here before we turn on any big amount of breathe-gas."

"Those were radioactive bullets!" shouted Lars.

"All right!" said Ker. "They came in through the dome. We'll find them all. Don't get so excited!"

"Trying to get me in trouble," said Lars.

"You stay out of here," said Ker. "It rots human bones, you know."

Lars didn't know. He backed up. He left.

Angus said, when Ker had come back in and barred the door, "Were they really radioactive bullets?"

Ker laughed and began to shove goo-food in his mask. Jonnie marveled. Ker was the only Psychlo he had ever seen that could chew kerbango with a mask on and now he was eating goo-food and talking with a mask on.

"It was flitter," said Ker, laughing. "It's a compound that throws off blue sparks when sunlight hits it. I dusted some of it on the bullets. Harmless. A kid's toy." He was laughing even harder. Then he sighed. "We had to explain the bullet holes, so we had to 'find' some bullets. But that Terl-he is so clever that he sometimes can be awful dumb!"

Jonnie and Angus laughed with him. They could imagine Terl seeing the sparks when Lars held out the "finds" Ker had given him and the sunlight setting off the blue sparks. Terl's conviction that the world was after him must have driven him halfway through the back wall of the cage! He would have thought his own breathe-mask exhaust was setting off uranium!

They were into the duct work now and they really did start hammering and pounding. The trick was to inset lead-irised readers into the duct vent intakes and exhausts around the room so that they could not be seen and yet, peering out of the dark depths of the vents, could read an exact portion of the workrooms. The ducts actually required some very fancy work of their own. Although Ker was a midget, he could bend sheet iron with his paws like it was paper.

Ker fixed it so the ducts, as they entered and left the room, were rickety. If you touched them they appeared to be in danger of coming apart and falling out. But in actual fact the final fittings were armor-welded.

They set the readers into these, made sure the irises worked, put the ducts in place, and began on the circulator pumps. It was late evening by this time, but they worked straight on through. By about one in the morning they had completed a usable circulator system that would go on working.

They felt they were running behind in time so they didn't stop. They had the problem now of centralizing the transmissions of all the readers and getting them clear over to the Academy, miles away.

None of these readers could be powered and picked up from more than a few hundred feet away. They all had different frequencies to keep them apart and this meant a bulky feeder system.

Jonnie worked on the probe some more and put an on/off remote in it that would turn off and on the multichanneled feeder box. That was the easiest part. One mustn't have radio waves flying about with a probe on.

The tough part of it was getting the transmission through to the Academy. They solved it by using ground waves. Ground waves differ from air waves in that they can travel only through the ground. The "aerial" to send is a rod driven in the earth and the "aerial" to receive is simply another. It takes a different wavelength band so there was no danger of anything detecting it. Since ground waves were not in general use by the Earth Psychlos it required a feverish fabrication of components, converting normal radio to ground wave.

It was the fall of the year and it was still dark when Angus and Ker went screeching off to the Academy to install the receivers and recorders, one unit in a toilet, one in an unused telephone box, and the third under a loose tile in front of the altar in the chapel.

Jonnie meanwhile buried the feeder outside the dome in the ground. He had the pretext ready of "looking for power cables" but he didn't need it. The world slept. He shoved in fuel cartridges to run it for half a year or more, wrapped it in waterproofing, buried it in the hole, pounded in the ground aerial, and restored the turf. n.o.body could detect the gra.s.s had even been touched- a hunter's skill in making deadfalls came in handy. Inside again, he checked. Every lead iris was working flawlessly. The readers were powered. They went on and off at the feeder. He let them run to give Angus and Ker a signal to set their recorders to, over at the Academy.

Jonnie busied himself with placing and armor-welding the desks and drawing board in place. No molecular cutter would ever dent those welds!

At eight o'clock Angus and Ker sauntered in as though just arriving for the day. They bolted the door and both turned huge grins on Jonnie.

"It works!" said Angus. "We watched you laboring away and even read the serial number of your welding torch.

We got all fifteen readers on the screen!" He thrust out his hand. "And here's the discs!"

They replayed them. They could even see the grain in material, much less read numbers!

They heaved a sigh of relief.

Then Angus took Jonnie by the shoulder and pointed to the door. "We needed your skill and ideas up to now.

But from here on, it's just putting cream on the oatmeal to convince Terl. Every minute you stay here is a minute too long."

Ker was already putting the rigged probe back in exactly the same place, arranging the cabinet just as it had been. "When I took on this job and suspected you'd be coming," he said as he worked, "I fueled a plane. It 's the one exactly opposite the hangar door- 93 is the last of its serial numbers. All waiting for you. They don't want us, they want you!"

"It will take us only forty-five minutes or an hour to rig the rest," said Angus. "You get out of here and that's an order from Sir Robert- to get you gone the moment you can leave."

Ker now had relocked the door of the cabinet and was prying at the corner with a jimmy to make it appear it had been unsuccessfully tampered with without being opened. "Goodbye!" he said emphatically.

Yes, it was true. They could handle the rest and were in no danger. But it was also true that it had to be completed. He would get ready and stand by in the plane. "Come down and tell me when it's all done," he said.

"You got it!" said Angus.

Jonnie gave them a salute, and went out. They locked the door behind him. He went down the pa.s.sage to Char's room to get his kit. It was 8:23 in the morning. Already two hours too late.

Chapter 3.

By five o'clock that morning, Brown Limper Staffor knew he had found Tyler.

For days now he had been unable to sleep, to even sit down quietly or eat. Forgotten were all other cares of state, forgotten were all other tasks that ordinarily occupied his time. With a wild, intent glare in his eyes, for nearly twenty-four hours a day, he had concentrated only upon closing the trap which had been set. Crime must be punished! A malefactor must be brought to book. The safety and integrity of the state must be given priority. Almost every text he had studied on government, all advice he had been given, proved to him only one thing: he had to get Tyler!

Victory had begun to beckon with a drone picture he took off the machine at 3:00 A.M. He had trouble with these machines. Ever since these recorders had been moved to the capital, he had been irritated by their incomprehensible complexity, and he often hit them when they failed to spit out what was wanted. It made him feel martyred having to do all this work with so little help. But he had been scanning the tray of drone takes that were rolling out from Scotland. The pilot who handled drone control and these machines was not here at this time of day. A nuisance.

And there was Tyler! Dancing one of those insane prances the Highlanders did. By bonfire with half a dozen others. Although the pictures were silent, a pain went through his ears as he imagined the crazy pipe music that must have been playing. Yes! Hunting shirt and all, it was Tyler.

The machine gave him a lot of trouble trying to backtrack its trace. He never could tell one Psychlo number from another. But he managed it and got a blown-up view.

It wasn't Tyler! He realized then he was not being logical. Tyler would not be dancing and flinging his arms about. The last time he had seen him down at the compound, Tyler had been limping heavily on a cane and had no use of his right arm.

But at 4:48 A.M. a picture from another drone, then overflying the Lake Victoria area, spewed out and showed a man by the lake throwing rocks in the water. A man with a hunting shirt, same hair, same beard. Tyler! But it couldn't be Tyler because he was using his right arm to throw and as he drew back it was obvious he had no limp.

He had no more than thrown the picture down on the floor when Lars Th.o.r.enson rushed in as though he had news. Brown Limper let him have it but . What were two Tylers doing visible on two different drones in such a short time apart, yet so widely separated on the Earth's surface?

"That's what I am trying to say," cried Lars. "There are three Scots who look like Tyler. But that isn't it. You know what Terl told us to look for? Scars on Tyler's neck from the collar he wore so long. I couldn't understand why Stormalong was wearing his scarf so high around his neck. He never did before. And just five minutes ago I woke up with the whole thing plain as daylight! He's hiding those scars! Tyler is down in that compound right now posing as Stam Stavenger! Stormalong!"

For all the wrong reasons, they had reached the right conclusions.

Brown Limper went into immediate action. Time and time again Lars had told him about this great military hero Hitler and his faultless campaigns. Terl had impressed foresight upon him. He had been ready for this moment.

Two days before, he had finalized the contract with General Snith. One hundred credits a day per man was a lot to pay, but Snith was worth it.

Two commandos had gone by truck to the village in the high meadow. There was no town meeting. The villagers had been swept up regardless of any protest. They had been hastily relocated in the distant village on the other side of the mountain Tyler had once chosen for them. The five youths who might have said something were at the Academy, three of them learning machine operation and how to keep the pa.s.ses open in winter with blade sc.r.a.pers, the other two learning to be pilots. Old people and young children didn't have to be listened to and their pleas that their preparations for the coming winter were now ruined could be ignored. As a concession to political sagacity, they had been told they were being moved so the old tactical mines could be dug up and disposed of. These mines- they knew now that they were explosives buried long ago and Brown Limper had shown them this was just another instance of Tyler's lies- had their own role to play in this clever strategy.

Tyler's old home had then been b.o.o.by-trapped with grenades and blasting caps and Brown Limper had been a.s.sured by the Brigante explosive experts that all Tyler would have to do was open a door and he would be blown to bits.

The story would be that Tyler had gone to his house despite warnings about the old mines and that one had blown up. In this way there could not possibly be any outcry or blame attached to Brown Limper. The Senior Mayor Planet was a bit hazy on whether this had been his own idea or Terl's. But no matter, it was brilliant political thinking. The state and nation must be freed of the scourge, the arch-criminal Tyler, and with a minimum of repercussion to the body politic. Also Brown Limper had read someplace that the end justifies the means and this seemed to be a sound basic policy. Brown Limper realized, when he thought about it, that he was becoming a statesman ranked with the most stellar figures of ancient man.

At 6:00 A.M. he ordered General Snith to begin changing the guard at the compound. The cadets were to be permanently relieved on the grounds they didn't like the duty and it interrupted their studies, and the state now had a proper standing army. Brigantes were to be on guard duty there by 8:00 A.M.

A hasty call had ascertained that the other two with "Stormalong" had left some time ago for the Academy and it was so logged by the duty officer at the compound.

Thompson submachine guns had been issued to the Brigante commando. Somehow a.s.sault rifles were not available but Thompsons were all right for this duty.

Lars had been briefed. He had been given two picked men armed with submachine guns. He was to go to the compound. He was to lie in wait inside until "Stormalong" appeared and then, with a minimum of disturbance, was to take him in custody. Lars was to bring him here to the courtroom. He was not to alarm Tyler into combat. When Tyler had been formally charged, he would be told his case would be tried by the World Court to be formed in a couple of weeks, and then taken to the old village. "House arrest" and "awaiting trial" were terms Brown Limper had looked up. He would inform Tyler that he was under house arrest. Then it was up to Lars to get him to the meadow. There must be no chance taken of alerting cadets or some Russians holding out at the old tomb.

Lars had said, "I think I should grab him while he's still in Terl's office."

Brown Limper said, "No. Terl has a.s.sured me that he can undo any mischief Tyler may get up to if he gets in the office. He has probably remained behind to do something criminal after the others finished. You want to take him alone. The other two might help him. We are after the criminal Tyler. We must get him here smoothly, charge him, and get him up to the meadow. Be polite. Grant any ordinary request. Be smooth. Cause no disturbance. And don't damage the office. That is a request Terl made."

It all seemed a bit muddy and out of sequence to Lars in the briefing, but he got the essential points. He got his two Brigantes, made sure they had their submachine guns, got an executive armored ground car, and left.

Brown Limper told General Snith, "Keep your mercenaries out of sight at the compound, but be alert for trouble this morning. Tell them not to start shooting unless they are attacked."

General Snith got it. His men were ready to earn their pay.

Brown Limper had found the pattern of judicial robes judges used to wear and he had one made for this occasion. He got into it, hopping over to the window and looking out between times, and finally gazed at himself in an old cracked mirror.

The time of reckoning for a lifetime of abuse and insult was at hand!

Chapter 4.