Battlefield Earth Part 95

They brought the boxes on a flatbed truck and put them in his bedroom.

They gave Terl his copies of the contract and he signed a receipt for those and the money. They all left, and the moment they were out the door, his first act was to shred, burn, and destroy the ashes of his copies. If Psychlo ever got word of it-!

He felt soothed then and he sat and petted the money for a while. Then he realized he couldn't go to bed amid all these boxes.

He got the guards to let him go out to the morgue and get three coffins. It seemed to him that there were fewer coffins there than there used to be. However, he brought the coffins in and put them in the bedroom and got to work putting the money into them, counting it by bundles.

It was late and he still hadn't finished the job so he spread some blankets on one of the coffins and went to sleep.

The next day, still working on packing the money- he had never realized before what an enormous lot of money two billion credits was- he found he was short one coffin. It was going to take four.

Accordingly, he got the guards to let him out and he went to the morgue to get another coffin. On his last visit, there had been one quite close to the door. Now it was no longer there. Somebody was doing something with these coffins.

Only a security chief of Terl's talents and training ever could have gotten to the bottom of it. That he was sure of.

First he questioned guards. Then he questioned a Captunk Arf Moiphy. And he found these Brigantes, these allegedly reliable, trained mercenaries, had been trafficking in coffins with the cadets.

The night duty commando had been selling coffins to the cadets for whiskey. Whiskey was some drink made in Scotland. Intoxicating.

Oh, Terl got the whole story. Late of an evening, some cadet, different ones, would come to the compound with an open pail of whiskey and trade it for a coffin. The guard would simply open the morgue and hand one over and take the whiskey.

It did no good for Captunk Arf Moiphy to show him that the cadets used the lead to make little cast-model s.p.a.ceships and soldiers. Moiphy even had a couple. Terl knew those. They were for a game called klepp. Those cadets were selling game pieces and game boards made out of melted-down lead coffins. Company coffins!

Terl had demanded to see Snith. He ordered him to put a stop to it.

Three days later, Terl had gotten himself escorted down to the metal supply storeroom to get some needed sheets of material when he noticed that the hangar was nearly empty. There were a few ore carriers and a half-dozen battle planes and that was all that was left in those vast hangars. He had promptly gone to the garage, and that, too, was nearly empty. There were just a dozen flatbeds and a couple of Basher tanks left in there.

The place was being stolen blind! He got hold of Lars and raged at him.

Lars said there had been a lot of crashes and the cadets were simply replacing the lost machines from the hangar.

Just as he was about to rip Lars to bits, it suddenly occurred to Terl that company property was no longer his responsibility. So he let it go.

Three days later there was a tearing argument with Ker.

Sometime since, they had begun to clear away the wreckage and fused wires of the old transshipment rig and now that it was gone, Terl wanted to be sure that the points would be at the correct distances on the poles. He went out and he found...

Ker using the most sloppy, inexperienced machine operator trainees he had to dig the trench for the atmosphere armor ionization cable! There was the trench half-dug. But these trainees had been digging all over the place!

And more! There was equipment scattered everywhere. Cranes, blade sc.r.a.pers, you name it. Whenever one of these stupid animal trainees had dug something, he had simply left the machine there. Whenever he lifted something, he left the magnetic crane right there.

What a mess!

Standing on the platform, hating the bright winter sun, half-sick from the rotten-quality breathe-gas that was available, Terl had felt like clawing the midget to bits.

"You know better than this!" raged Terl.

"Can I help it if these animals break machines?" shouted Ker.

"Can't you follow a straight, plain plan?" shouted Terl.

"Can I help it if these animals can't follow a straight, plain line?" shouted Ker.

Terl realized Ker had a point. They weren't going to get anywhere standing here shouting. "Look," said Terl, "it is in your own best interest that I get safely to Psychlo."

"Is it?" said Ker.

Leverage, leverage, Terl told himself.

"I'll tell you what I will do," said Terl. "I will put ten thousand credits to your account in the Galactic Bank. You have a numbered account there with quite a bit in it already. But I will add-'

"Brown Limper Staffor paid me a hundred thousand Earth credits just to dig up that cable for you, that cable right over there. It was no easy job and I considered the pay cut-rate!"

Terl thought fast. "All right, I'll pay you a hundred thousand Galactic credits to help install this firing rig and cooperate."

"I can get double that from this Brown Limper not to do it," said Ker.

"You can?" said Terl, suddenly alert. He thought hard. Yes, that Brown Limper had been acting furtively lately, like he was hiding something.

"He wants a certain party!" said Ker.

"He doesn't care if you get to Psychlo or not!"

"But doesn't he know I have to record the deeds?"

"He's only interested in getting one man!" said Ker.

"Look," said Terl, "I will put half a million credits in your account if you cooperate in getting me to Psychlo."

Ker thought about it. Then he said, "If you will get me new papers and destroy my old company records and deposit seven hundred fifty thousand credits to my account, I'll see all goes smoothly."

Terl was about to say he agreed when Ker spoke again: "You will have to make it all right with this Brown Limper Staffor also. Tell me how you intend to trap this man so I can rea.s.sure this Staffor. He controls these workers. So add that, and it's a deal."

Terl looked at Ker. He knew how money-hungry he was. "All right. I'm going to string five hundred Brigantes around outside that atmosphere armor, armed with poisoned arrows. Arrows won't make a concussion if fired and they can shoot that animal to bits if he comes! You whisper that to Staffor and he'll also cooperate with you. It 's a deal then?"

Ker smiled.

Terl went back inside, glad to get his breathe-mask off. He got some kerbango to soothe his nerves.

He reviewed this strange scene. It Staffor. That was the one who was going to mess this plan up. Terl would take care of the animal: he hadn't told Ker he also intended to have Snith and a squad on the platform armed with poisoned arrows or that he had a beautiful beryllium box to hand Staffor. The box would destroy all the evidence, the contract copies, everything.

And Ker, too!

He would have a hostage to handle the animal.

He felt quite satisfied about everything until three nights later when he noticed there were no guards in view. He went out and there they were, sprawled around the morgue, dead drunk.

It was obvious that Snith had used the information just to get a commission in whiskey.

Well, he could handle Snith when the time came.

The one to keep an eye on was this Staffor. His suspicions were right. It was Staffor that was plotting, plotting, plotting. Sneaky rat! It was plain he would try to steal this money back.

Warned, Terl was confident he could outsmart them all.

He went in and checked the money coffins, sealed them, marked them "radiation killed" so n.o.body on Psychlo would want to open them, and put his private "X" on the bottom of each one.

He would be a wealthy tyc.o.o.n on Psychlo!

He spread his bedding out on top of the coffins and slept a beautiful sleep with beautiful dreams where royalty bowed when they met The Great Terl on the street. And all evidence and this planet would have been totally destroyed behind him.

Chapter 6.

Deep in the African minesite, bent over the viewscreens in the half-lit dark, Jonnie was taking a loss.

Day 92 was coming up on them like a whirlwind.

At first he had hoped that he could get a separate console built using Terl's plans and install it down at Kariba. Such would bypa.s.s any real necessity for a hopeless attack in America to seize that one. It looked as if it remained their best chance but it was hardly any chance at all. He would have had to stop Terl from using that strange bomb but he could not do that without the almost foolhardy risks of letting it go right on up to firing time on Day 92 and trying to attack the platform and grab that console at the last moment.

Other news was not good. There had been two more raids by the visitors in different places and casualties had been suffered. An ore plane, returning empty from a ferrying trip, had been swooped down upon by the Hawvins and blasted out of the sky with the loss of both pilot and copilot. A hunting party from the Russian base had been gunned from above and three Siberians and a Sherpa had been killed before their air cover had shot down the intruder.

Also the Edinburgh defense planning had gone wrong. Sir Robert had wanted to bring in a couple of miles of atmosphere cable and surround Castle Rock with it. The power dams in Scotland of long ago were not in shape or converted to Psychlo power. The Cornwall minesite power supply was a tidal dam at Bristol in the Bristol Channel, and while it worked well on the ebb and flow of those gigantic tides, it was not possible to run a line clear up to Edinburgh- and that line would have been open to attack in any case. The hauling of that much cable, itself, was a formidable block, for it would have had to be flown in sections to Scotland. No other means than antiaircraft fire was available to protect Edinburgh. And the Scots, having regained it, were not going to abandon it. It was the center of the most ancient Scottish nationalism. Moving the whole remaining population down to Cornwall, as proposed by Jonnie, had not been approved, and it was true it would be pretty crowded. Jonnie knew Edinburgh was going to catch it.

Terl was going about his job in a way that seemed backward. He spent a lot of time measuring up poles and stringing outside wire and putting in firing points. Everything he did was being duplicated exactly down at Kariba. They now had the wires up and all the points in, down at that base. Angus, each time they got a new item, would go tearing down to Kariba and install an equivalent in the secondary defense platform there.

It had looked very hopeful for some days. Terl had gotten a lot of metal and had built the console case, a heavy, ma.s.sive thing about a yard square. They had build the same case here and it was sitting down in a locked room, an empty sh.e.l.l, waiting.

But after all this spurt of energy, Terl for the last several days had just been fooling with fuses. He wasn't getting on with construction.

Reams of mathematics had been worked out by Terl. But a lot of good they were. Who understood them?

Now it was just fuses. Jonnie had gotten duplicates out of supply here of all the fuses Terl was working with and tried to figure out what he was doing.

Jonnie had learned one thing: that some of the items in a console that would appear to be different components were fakes. They were not resistors or capacitors. They were actually fuses made up to look like other things.

Terl was doing something Jonnie had not heard of before. With meters and such, he was working with an "underload" type of fuse. The circuit would be connected only so long as current was going through it. When the current ceased to flow, the fuse burned out. It was an odd kind of circuit breaker, made of a filament so tiny and thin it had to be worked under a magnifying scope.

Well, that seemed to be all Terl was doing.

Jonnie's attention was drifting when he suddenly realized that the filament Terl was using looked awfully like the ones in the silver capsule in Psychlo heads.

Forgotten was his stiff neck. He went tearing out and got one they had removed from a corpse. Yes, the same thing!

Abruptly he added it all up and rushed out to find MacKendrick. The doctor was working with a Psychlo skull he had cleaned and whitened. He was trying to find some means of entering it with instruments. He put it down on the table before him where the sockets stared sightlessly at him and composed himself to listen to Jonnie.

"That isn't anything very mysterious!" said Jonnie, pointing excitedly into the silver capsule he held. "It's just a fuse! It doesn't vibrate or put out radio signals or anything. It's just a fuse"

Jonnie grabbed some pictures of one inside a Psychlo brain. "Look! You said the nerves this was fastened between were the primary impulse channels of their thought."

"All right. Mathematics is logical thought! It is the approximation of being sensible! Now even if a Psychlo has a soul and does his thinking with a soul, or even if he doesn't have, mental action works between those two channels.

"So long as a Psychlo is thinking logically, there is a constant current between those two nerves. Even asleep there would be a current, a very slight one.

"Now up comes an alien. The Psychlo knows his whole race and empire depends upon keeping his mathematics a secret. And the alien wants to know about Psychlo mathematics. The Psychlo instantly shuts off thinking about them. Or a surge occurs and then a shutoff. Pop. Blown fuse!"

MacKendrick was quite interested. But he said, "That doesn't explain suicide."

"All right! Look at this picture and look at this fuse. The silver capsule is very close to that bronze item that short-circuits pleasure and pain and action. Look at this fuse filament! When it parts, the ends drop down inside the capsule and you get a short circuit into the bronze item.

"The Psychlo has an instant impulse to kill! If he can't right then, the short circuit between the silver and bronze items acts as an obsession to kill that doesn't let up. He has to kill something and he winds up killing himself!"

MacKendrick thought it over and nodded. "But," he said, "that doesn't explain the females."

Jonnie got that type of capsule and looked at it. "It's another kind of fuse. Since mathematics is logical thought, it would cause a concentration of current to begin. They probably are taught not to teach females mathematics- it's part of their moral code. And the females are noted for being illogical. When they start to think in mathematical terms or even try to, a current gets too heavy and they blow the fuse. They don't have a bronze object and they just go into a coma. Their wits won't connect anymore and they go out of communication with the nervous system."

Jonnie paused. "My explanation may not be complete. But I know these are just fuses and short circuits. And that's how they protected their empire!"

"And why they're so crazy," said MacKendrick. "I am sure you have the explanation and that those things are what you say they are."

MacKendrick turned the Psychlo skull around on the table. It was a huge, ma.s.sive, heavy thing. A complex ma.s.s of bone and joints. "There's only one thing wrong."

Jonnie was all revved up with having gotten that far. He listened.

"We're no closer to getting those things out of their heads than we were," said MacKendrick.

Jonnie laid the pictures and the capsules down on the table beside the skull and walked quietly out of the room.

It was definitely not a hopeful day.

Chapter 7.

Jonnie lanced northwest in the Mark 32 battle plane.